Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 07/02/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome.
Speaker 3:The temple of
Speaker 2:technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Welcome to the show. The current thing has come in off hot off the presses.
Speaker 2:It's Erebor, a new crypto bank. PayPal co founder Peter Thiel and Anderol founder Palmer Luckey are launching Erebor, a digital bank built for crypto and tech startups.
Speaker 1:You know what I'm saying, John? What do The trade of the century was going back and buying up all the all the token domains
Speaker 2:Oh, dot coms. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:You would have become a billionaire yourself if you just bought all the .coms.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of debate over whether not the the the the the Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings naming scheme had kind of run its course. Right? Because people were knocking it off. Non founders fund companies were starting to use the names. Stolen Not gonna say any names.
Speaker 2:Oh, that is that is insane. That is insane. I can't believe no one's ever said that. I'm not gonna dig into that anymore because
Speaker 1:We'll let you dig into it.
Speaker 2:We'll let you interpret that joke. But, we have news from Zach Kukoff on the show yesterday. He's coming back on the show today. He's our Washington correspondent. He says, this is great news about the new the new Erebor.
Speaker 2:Themed bank, Erebor. Zach Kukoff says, this is great news. JPMorgan, HSBC, etcetera, haven't fully filled the gap that SVB and First Republic left. An insider run risk forward tech bank is much needed. Backers include Palmer Luckey, Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, etcetera.
Speaker 2:I think Lux is in this too. I don't know if that's public yet though. We'll have to figure that out. Scoop. But they're obviously the Silicon Valley elite are rallying around
Speaker 1:We love to see it.
Speaker 2:This this new project. So they're calling it the next SVB for hard tech. The filing says s says, Arabor wants to be the most regulated entity conducting and facilitating stablecoin transactions, an unusual boast meant to soothe OCC examiners while still holding stable coins on its own balance sheet. That's right. Who who it serves and why Columbus?
Speaker 2:It start this is this bank's gonna be in Ohio. Target customers are AI, crypto, defense tech, and advanced manufacturing startups. A digital only model will be legally headquartered in Columbus, Ohio with a satellite office in New York to tap Wall
Speaker 1:Street. The capital of capital.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. Very exciting. So, yeah. We'll have to dig into this. We're having Palmer Lucky on the show soon.
Speaker 2:Would love to hear more about the plan here. And I agree. SVB was a special special institution. It was very sad when it went away.
Speaker 1:There's been a gap in the founder dinner market. They were a huge funder of founder dinners.
Speaker 2:That and also mortgages. That's right. Big on the mortgage front. I mean, it really was a crazy failure where you could have like $40,000,000 but illiquid and be making Not get a $200,000,000 mortgage. And you couldn't buy a house.
Speaker 2:And it's just like, okay. And then and then you're strapped with this with this question of like, okay, do you raise your salary and start raising burn just to get a mortgage and stuff? Or do you put it on the balance sheet of the company? That's been done before. There haven't
Speaker 1:even gone Yeah. It's crazy that that within whatever a month, we lost SVB and First Republic. Yep. The two funds Yep. That really served our So Yeah.
Speaker 1:It makes sense to build back. It is funny that that Zach said, we need a risk forward tech bank because
Speaker 2:It was risky.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. What's interesting is
Speaker 2:they did get burned on the on the startup stuff. Yeah. They got burned on treasuries. The least risky thing ever. But, you know, no one was expecting
Speaker 1:a Duration mismatch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The duration Anyway, in other news, Microsoft scales back ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays as the information. And Neo Marghana here is asking Grock, what were what what were they trying to do with their chip ambitions? And Grock says, Microsoft chip ambitions aimed to reduce reliance on suppliers like NVIDIA optimized for performance for Azure AI and Copilot at lower cost. They developed chips like the Azure Maya AI accelerator for AI tasks and Azure Cobalt CPU for cloud workloads.
Speaker 2:However, delays such as the Maya 200 chip postponed to 2026 and design challenges led to scaled back plans. So Google has the TPU. Amazon has Inferentia. Apple has the the m one, m two, m three chip. All the hyperscalers are getting in on the custom silicon action.
Speaker 1:What was the name of the quantum
Speaker 2:chip that Satya was teasing on? Majorana. Majorana. Majorana.
Speaker 1:But that's still in the works.
Speaker 2:That's still in the works, but that's a completely separate thing. And Yeah. That, you know, it it it that that is such a different fork in the tech tree that you're not gonna be writing you're not gonna be like, oh, yeah. We have some CUDA code that's inferencing some, you know, large language model and let's just run it on quanta. It's like you have to rebuild the entire the entire Yeah.
Speaker 2:System to run on quantum and that's very far out. But people are optimistic. People sharp people that I talk to are saying like, quantum is all the companies right now aren't delivering products that are in use, but there's no like, the like, the physics, the science is is solid. It just might be ten or twenty years until this is really in production. So it's all about, you know, TSMC fab capacity right now.
Speaker 2:So Microsoft scales back ambitions for in house AI silicon. Maya a k a Braga chips slip for a full year. Last You hate to see it. We love we love custom silicon here. We want it to arrive as fast as possible.
Speaker 1:And that's when timelines extend.
Speaker 2:I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
Speaker 1:It does happen though.
Speaker 2:I mean, we are big tech we are big tech defenders here and we are very sad to report.
Speaker 1:The delayed part is expected to trail NVIDIA's Blackwell accelerators once it finally ships and undermining Satya's goal of cutting GPU spend.
Speaker 2:And that's gonna be hard because the new Blackwells are gonna come up. They're gonna be amazing. He's gonna need some. You don't wanna be GPU poor right now.
Speaker 1:Not right now.
Speaker 2:You might you be a leaser, you can't be GPU poor.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And so, while Microsoft pauses, Amazon is planning Trainium three for late twenty twenty five, and Google already has its seventh gen TPU in production, leaving Azure the slowest of the big three to deploy second generation custom AI software. And in other Microsoft news, they are reorging this entire company right now. They are announcing that they are cutting 9,000 workers in a second wave of major layoffs. We already reported on this. We we we we talked about this, but they have, 4,712 applications for a Tyler.
Speaker 2:So far.
Speaker 1:How many full time employees does Microsoft have? Isn't it in the hundreds and thousands?
Speaker 2:I like that Tyler's wearing the bezel hat today. It's a good one. Just throw on the team.
Speaker 1:Tyler clearly doesn't have Cluely app. Otherwise, he would No.
Speaker 2:He really should be running that during the show.
Speaker 1:Let me think for a second. Let us
Speaker 4:know too. Two 128,000.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:228,000. So this is what They're cutting
Speaker 1:9,000 employees.
Speaker 2:It's four it's 4% of the 4% of the headcount. This is the second cut in sixty days. The July round follows 6,000 job losses in May and hit sales, gaming, and engineering, flattening the org chart. Management layers are being removed to raise the coder to manager ratio. Love that.
Speaker 2:You know, there I mean, it really is this world where the line between coding and managing is blending and programmers can do a lot more and act like PMs because there's AI tools and they can roll out stuff. So you're you're not in this cycle anymore of like, the manager decided that we need to implement a function, go take a month to build that. Yeah. Go take a week to build that. It's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Built it. Now what's next?
Speaker 1:You got the afternoon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So so that higher throughput engineering should come through in a delayering of the organization.
Speaker 2:And in general, these these big companies, they often get really huge, and then they need to they they need to kind of delayer and and streamline this the the company. Anyway, seems like we have some technical difficulties. We will sort that out while
Speaker 1:I review the next Okay.
Speaker 2:Great. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all trimmed VPs and middle managers this year. Redmond is citing dynamic market conditions rather than performance. Interesting. Anyway, in other news, China hosted the first fully autonomous AI robot soccer game.
Speaker 2:I'm hoping we can pull this video up. Ian Bremmer says they've still a ways to go. I want your review. You haven't seen this video yet, have you?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Okay.
Speaker 2:First time reacting to it live on the stream. China's been working on this for a while. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because there's a story in the journal about China is rapidly eroding America's lead in the global AI race. DeepSeek and Alibaba's open source Quen are now running inside HSBC, Saudi Aramco, and even on AWS and Azure, forcing Western vendors to justify higher closed source pricing. Very interesting development.
Speaker 2:We'll see what happens with the new llama models, whether those can catch up to DeepSeek and Quen unseat them. We're also gonna have the founder of Mistral on the show soon. Anyway, this is the latest robot soccer game out of China. How do you think they did? It's not bad.
Speaker 1:They're not flopping enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They don't understand the
Speaker 1:if if if they
Speaker 3:were not. Oh,
Speaker 1:they know showbiz.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's good TV.
Speaker 1:That's good showbiz.
Speaker 2:So if you watched the beginning of this video, the beginning shows one of the robots falling down. Look at this guy. Oh. Oh. Oh.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. Oh. He's down.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:He's down. He's down.
Speaker 1:Okay. They would've got a whistle for that.
Speaker 2:China knows how to pump up attention on AI. They got the robot marathons. They got a variety of stuff going on to draw attention to AI and it's certainly it's it's it's the hottest industry. They got the hedge fund folks moving over
Speaker 1:They love robots.
Speaker 2:And and and and we're seeing all those displays of drone shows like the drone light show. That is gonna inspire a generation to go wanna work in drones. Right? And so insane to
Speaker 1:killer SPP SPP drones.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe.
Speaker 1:You know, there there is remember when we covered, DJI in detail earlier this year?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:DJI puts on challenges where they people can compete to make killer robots. So they don't even hide the fact that these robots can be used Yep. As death machines.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're gonna see a lot more of this. But, the government is fueling a scale up of AI over there. Beijing is pouring subsidies into cost efficient domain specific AI, while Washington chases AGI widening a practical capability gap despite US chip controls.
Speaker 2:US officials worry Chinese guardrails bake censorship into exported systems. The fractured ecosystem could undercut global security cooperation influence over AI norms. And so, yeah, this is what we've been talking to about Aaron Gin. He'll be on the show tomorrow. We're also talking to Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, tomorrow, and we will dig
Speaker 1:into The US allows millions of humanoid robots controlled by Chinese companies to be sold in to The United States
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Will be a colossal failure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was listening to Dylan Patel's presentation at AI Engineer on YouTube on the drive in today, and the number of h 100 equivalents that Huawei was able to fab at TSMC, like,
Speaker 5:in
Speaker 2:the midst of the chip controls was crazy. He breaks it all down, and it's fascinating. So first off, there was a there was a company that was basically a front for Huawei that was like, yeah, we want a ton of chips, TSMC. And TSMC was like, sure. You're not based in China.
Speaker 2:We'd be happy to sell these to you. But they sold them like a million chips or something like that. So the latest Huawei Ascend is crazy. Then they have a CloudMatrix three eighty four or something like that, which is like 384 chips all network together, specifically instead of so there's two different types of wires that can that can wire the chips together. Basically, there's copper and then there's fiber optic.
Speaker 2:And fiber optic is is NVLink. That's what NVIDIA touts as like when you get a rack of servers and they're talk to each other really, really fast, that allows for better training and and inference too. But it's very important. It's basically like like you're taking a bunch of different chips and you're making them all work as one. So it's super valuable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Apparently, Nvidia tried to do a rack scale. I think it was 64 chips all networked together with with optical cables, and they couldn't get it to work. Like, they couldn't get it out. And Huawei actually figured it out.
Speaker 2:And so even though their chips aren't as solid as NVIDIA, like, the networking side, they're outperforming there according to Dylan Patel. And then the other interesting thing is that like the chip controls don't just affect like TSMC and NVIDIA. Like obviously, you can't just go buy h one hundreds or h two hundreds if you're in China anymore. But you can go to TSMC through a shell company, but then you also need high bandwidth memory and that comes from Hynix, SK Hynix in South Korea. That's also controlled.
Speaker 2:So what they would do is they had another company, they would say like, yeah, like we definitely want like all the best HBM high bandwidth memory in like this device that we're making. Like, just build it for us and install it and then they would ship it and then they would disassemble the device, rip the memory out and then put it on a GPU chip. Yeah. It's crazy. Crazy.
Speaker 2:Crazy. So here's a bunch of good details. We we we can dig into that a little bit more later.
Speaker 1:But DeepSeek was built in a cave with scraps. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Anyway, James Cameron has been talking about AI copyright fears. He says, fears are overblown. Humans aren't original either. A lot of hesitation in Hollywood and entertainment in general are issues of the source material for the training data and copyright protection.
Speaker 2:I think people are looking at it all wrong. Anybody that's a human being is a model. You've got three and a half pound meat computer. That's the brain. Let's hear it for three and a half pound meat computers.
Speaker 2:As a screenwriter, you have a kind of built in ethical filter that says, I know my sources. I know what I liked. I know what I'm emulating.
Speaker 1:I know how I'm hallucinating.
Speaker 2:I also know that I have to move it far enough away that my own, that it's my own independent creation. This is the, you know, great artists steal, you know, instead of copying. What's the difference between stealing an idea and transforming it, turning it into your own, and just copying something derivative? And we'll and we'll go into that in a little bit. So I think the whole thing needs to be managed from a legal perspective is what what's the output?
Speaker 2:Like, is the output transformative? And so the reason I wanna talk about this is because the Wall Street Journal is covering the fact that studios, artists, and tech giants are clashing over copyright in Washington.
Speaker 1:Versus the algos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a big So,
Speaker 1:Meta recently scored a courtroom win. Judge Vince Cabria tossed author's claims but warned, you are dramatically changing, even obliterating the market for that person's work. Signaling more litigation ahead. I don't know if I agree with that, right? I've you've used, maybe you've used chat GBT to summarize the key takeaways from a book.
Speaker 1:Were you really going to buy and and you know, does that stop you from from wanting is it is it how different is that from you know, reviewing you know, reading a book review or things that matter?
Speaker 2:With regard to existing intellectual property, like I have gone to ChadGPT and said, hey, I'm trying to tell a story, a bedtime story to a four year old. Let's throw Mickey Mouse in there and then why don't we mix it up with Batman? Oh, wait. They are owned by two different companies. One's owned by Warner.
Speaker 2:One's owned by Disney. How will ChatGPT handle it? Well, it tells me a story with both of them. It's fine. This could never happen in the real world because of the the IP is owned by different companies.
Speaker 2:But it does it on ChatGPT. But is it is it is it a truly a subs a substitute does it actually just make my four year old beg for more Batman and Mickey Mouse Yeah. Toys? Like I think it's probably net positive You're exactly.
Speaker 1:To the brand.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's probably it's probably net positive. Probably not fully a substitute. We're still buying and
Speaker 1:renting tons of Probably more likely to wanna go to Disneyland.
Speaker 2:I agree. And also Universal Studios and go see the Batman But, the the other interesting thing, I I guess Warner so it'd be six flags. Anyway, correction. Correction. But, the interesting thing is that like, what about new intellectual property?
Speaker 2:Like there are people that are saying, I'm gonna build a new intellectual property on, you know, and I'm gonna use crypto rails like Pudgy Penguins. Like they're gonna try and use that technology to to accelerate the development of a new franchise, new IP that they own. There are also folks who are saying, I'm going to use artificial intelligence to create new IP. We saw this early with little Mikayla. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, we're
Speaker 1:seeing And then there's a community owned IP creation. What is the what is it? The Italian? I don't know. The Italian?
Speaker 1:They somebody
Speaker 2:Oh, you're talking about the Italian slop lords or whatever? The brain rot? Yeah. Yeah. Italian brain rot where like someone probably owns some portion of the IP there and
Speaker 1:I don't even turn that into Feels like a free for all.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, all this stuff is is changing is changing really quickly. But I think at the end of the day, all that matters is that like everyone gets a stake at some point and everyone gets a slice of the Yep. Actual like economic profit and it's somewhat fair. And so that's why the courts exist.
Speaker 2:They will sort this out.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill Yep. A proposed ten year federal ban on state AI laws was stripped from Trump's big beautiful bill after creatives and child safety hawks black blasted it as a big tech giveaway. Mhmm. We heard from Zach Kukoff yesterday that this was a win. Effectively a win for Anthropic Yep.
Speaker 1:Who was, you know, interested in in seeing this get blocked. The issue is that states like California have so much influence that if California passes AI related laws Everyone has they'll likely, you know, lead to widespread compliance.
Speaker 2:So there's pressure from both flanks. Tech lobbyists argue mass scraping is essential to USAI leadership. That makes sense. I mean, DeepSeek is not certainly scraping the entire Chinese Internet and so you're gonna get left And
Speaker 1:the entire Western.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everything. You too. The whole Internet. We'll take the whole thing.
Speaker 2:While Writers Guild and SAG AFTRA are pushing for compulsory licensing and outright data mining bans, leaving studios caught in the middle. Anyway, we will dig into that more in a little bit. There's more news about the trade deals. So Japan is saying we're not gonna do a deal or we're gonna push back. They're calling Trump's bluff.
Speaker 2:We'll see. It's heating up. Trump on Japan, I will write them a letter saying, we thank you very much. We know you can't do the kind of things that we need, and therefore, you'll pay 3030%, 35, or whatever big whatever number that we determine because we also have a very big trade deficit with Japan. Let's go to the video from Donald Trump, the president.
Speaker 5:And those days are gone.
Speaker 6:So what I'm gonna
Speaker 5:do is I'll write him a letter to say we thank you very much. And, we know you can't do the kinda things that we need, and therefore you'll pay a 30%, 35%, or whatever the numbers that we determined because we also have a very big trade deficit with Japan as you know. And it's very unfair to the American people. So they maybe will be happy. They maybe won't be happy.
Speaker 5:But some countries, we won't even allow to trade. But for the most part, we're we're gonna determine a number just very simply. Write them a nice letter, probably one page or a page and a half at the most. And it's gonna be, essentially, congratulations. And it's gonna be an honor to allow you to go and do business in The United States Of America because it really is an honor to be able to do that.
Speaker 5:We never viewed it that way in this country. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's wearing the Gulf Of America hat, you know. Mount Fuji's right there. Might wanna turn it into a different name. It's part of the
Speaker 1:trade Maybe maybe that could be a chip, you know? Yeah. A bargaining chip. Yeah. Naming rights to Mountain Fuji.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can keep the name of your own mountain named Mountain Fuji. So a lot of this is going about cars. Obviously, NSX is the top of mind for everyone in the Acura.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember when remember when
Speaker 2:Sam Also the LSI When they dropped deep research,
Speaker 1:Sam said he he used deep research to find, like, a one of one
Speaker 2:Yeah. NSX. Yeah. Yeah. These are important.
Speaker 2:This is why we have trade
Speaker 1:I like the hat. Yeah. Unclear
Speaker 2:Where this goes.
Speaker 1:Where this goes. And I think I feel like we've just had such a good thing going with Japan. Yeah. I Feel like it's
Speaker 2:They should be a logical humanoid robot partner. You know, got ASMO. Honda's been building robots for two decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was really hoping that something would happen there.
Speaker 1:We never comment on politics but I would I would like to see United States leaning more into that partnership and figuring out how we can make a lot of things together.
Speaker 2:So what else here? Tokyo refuses any pact that preserves Trump's 25% car tariff negotiator. Akizawa fears electoral blowback if Rice and autos are conceded. Trump has threatened fresh duties and rejected deadline extensions, unnerving allies wary of US tariff volatility. It's a patchy scorecard.
Speaker 2:To date, the administration boasts only a limited UK accord, a Vietnam mini deal, and a China truce. Canada, South Korea, and the EU remain stalled amid tariff threats. And so, we're still in that pause. But staying on Capitol Hill, representative Brian Fitzpatrick says, today, I called on the unit on the president to address my serious concern regarding reports that The United States withholding critical defense material pledged to Ukraine. This comes as Russia launches the largest aerial assault since the war began firing over 500 weapons at civilian targets in a single week.
Speaker 2:Ukrainian forces are not only safeguarding their homeland. They are holding the front line of freedom itself. There can be no half measures in the defense of liberty. We must, as we always have, stand for peace through strength. I have formally requested an emergency briefing from the White House and the DOD to clarify these reports, review our nation's weapons and munitions stockpiles, and ensure The United States remains fully committed to providing Ukraine with the use with the resources it urgently needs to defend its people and preserve the cause of freedom.
Speaker 1:High level, what happened here, we basically opened a new front to this, like, broader go global conflict. Right? Mhmm. We had Ukraine, then we added Iran. Yep.
Speaker 1:We didn't and and don't have the munition stockpiles to sustain two proxy wars or in the case of Iran, an actual
Speaker 2:conflict. In the journal
Speaker 1:And remember?
Speaker 2:Day this came like, like, the day Ukraine the Ukraine war broke out, people were saying, like, okay. We are out of javelins. Like, the the shoulder mass
Speaker 1:No. There's people like Druva, Rohendra Yep. From deterrence who we've had on the show at least, I think, a couple times. Yeah. Friend partner.
Speaker 1:And then Aaron Slodov Yeah. Who's talked to? Have been talking on multiple occasions about how some of the some of the weapon systems that that are critical to, The US's overall strategy. We'll have like, yeah, we have like 500 of those. And then you use them
Speaker 2:and then
Speaker 1:they're out and remaking them.
Speaker 2:You're just not ready to be like Yeah, because like in peace time, why would you be like, yes, I need to produce a million drones that are just gonna get blown up. Like, the industrial capacity just isn't there. So Patriot missiles have paused deliveries of Patriot interceptors, air to air missiles, and artillery shells have been redirected to replenish US stocks. Pentagon officials confirm. The shift reflects a re ranking of threats from China and The Middle East above Ukraine despite earlier White House signals of Patriot transfers.
Speaker 2:And Ukrainian officials and US lawmakers say the delay could translate into more civilian casualties as Russia steps up aerial assaults. They're talking about aerial
Speaker 1:Russia is taking advantage of this period where they know that Ukraine doesn't have the supplies Yep. To either get aggressive or defensive. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it makes sense Russia's going back on the offensive because of Operation Spiderweb. There's a very aggressive Ukrainian offensive to destroy a bunch of Russian airborne assets. Now, they're saying, you know, hey, we're we're bringing the fight back to you. And so that continues. In other news, Tesla global deliveries plunge 3.5% in Q two twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2:But I saw a lot of posts on X saying that this was not that big of a decline. So Amit says deliveries were 800 and 384,000 versus 389 expected. Analysts thought it would actually be three fifty. Where's the brand damage, Lowell? This guy's a fan of Tesla obviously.
Speaker 2:But there are some there's some data here. So for the Model three, Model y, they produced 396,000, almost 397,000 and delivered 373,000. And so the consensus was March k, marking the second straight double digit quarterly drop. And so the question is like, how much of this is about just EV cost or
Speaker 1:Yeah. Q1. The cost.
Speaker 2:How much
Speaker 1:Tyler, what what were what were how much were q one sales down? Because if you do two back to back Yep. Double digit drops
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That's pretty meaningful. Yep. That feels like brand damage. But it's also a very competitive market. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Every major manufacturer now has Yeah. EVs in the market. And again, we've talked about this before. The biggest thing, it's possible one of the biggest drivers here is that the lack of meaningful refreshes of the Model three and the Model y.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the Cybertruck is just selling seemingly well, selling in beautiful Los Angeles. It's a
Speaker 2:new selling
Speaker 1:here. Well.
Speaker 2:But it's hard at that price point to break through to the real truck market. I'm pretty sure the the Ford Maverick, the f one fifty I mean, the number one convertible in the in The United States is a Jeep Wrangler. Tesla doesn't have a convertible. They don't have anything that competes with a Wrangler. Right?
Speaker 2:Tyler, you got some numbers for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it looks like it's down 13.5 sales.
Speaker 2:To this quarter? This quarter.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about q one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. How was q one? So year to date, Tesla's Europe sales are down 28% in May, and then then in China, they sank 7.6%. So there's a whole bunch of different narratives around like like there's a lot of pressure internationally, but that's more about like trade. And then internally, there's people that stop buying them for political reasons.
Speaker 2:But then there's people who started buying
Speaker 1:them
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 1:political
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:think there's a big contingent in Europe that that cares about the politics as well. The China problem is just the fact that you have Xiaomi and all these other players coming in with Yeah. Great cars undercutting the They
Speaker 2:got a taikan knockoff. Got a prosodium. They got a Model S knockoff. Yeah. I mean, they're
Speaker 1:Not exactly innovating on the silhouette. Yep. But they are innovating in the, you know, sort of internal Yeah. System features.
Speaker 2:There's some crazy, crazy Chinese cars out there.
Speaker 3:You got
Speaker 4:something first. Q1 was down 20%.
Speaker 2:20%. Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:So let's pull up saying Where's the brand names?
Speaker 2:Market caps for Tesla and the rest of the
Speaker 1:It's right there.
Speaker 2:Mag seven. I wanna see how they're ranking. Here we go. We have our mag seven leaderboard and Tesla's at the bottom $984,000,000,000 in market cap trading at a 172 price to, price to earnings ratio. So they're seventh.
Speaker 2:But if the cyber
Speaker 1:cap stops most magnificent thing about the company is that the e ratio. Yeah. It's absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 2:So but but if the cyber cap plays out, that is a significant I mean, you look at what is the what is the market for, you know, all the different robo taxi drives. Right? In the tens of billions of dollars that Americans would spend. And so I think I think a lot of people are expecting that to hit and that to work. And that the fact that the cyber cab is at that 30 k price point instead of the 300 k price point for a Waymo being a durable advantage.
Speaker 2:The fact that they can produce I mean, the fact that they even make 400,000 cars in a quarter. It's a 100,000 cars a month, 3,000 cars a day. That's a lot of industrial capacity. And so that has to have some have some some value and some leverage if if the AI catches up and the cybercab comes down.
Speaker 1:The battle between Waymo and Tesla is just getting started.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I And I
Speaker 2:And then a lot people are buying the stock on the promise of humanoid robots. It's like, it is It does feel early. Optimus does not feel ready for your production or ready to buy or ready to go out on the manufacturing line. But what other stock in the Mag seven would you buy to get exposure to humanoid robotics? If you think that's an important thesis, like there's not really that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And even and even in the and even in the smaller like like like mid cap or small cap stocks, there really aren't that many pure play humanoid robotic companies that are out. Yeah. So there's not really anything that's sucking up that demand in the market. Anyway, speaking of the market, Tesla Figma has dropped their s one.
Speaker 2:Numbers are strong. 821,000,000 in the last twelve months revenue, 46% year over year growth, 18% non GAAP operating margin. They turned profitable. $1,500,000,000 in cash, zero debt, 91% gross margins, best in class for SaaS, 132 net dollar retention, sticky AF, says Jason Lemkin. Seven 78% of the Forbes 2,000 use Figma.
Speaker 2:76% use two plus products, platform expansion. From massive losses to 18% operating margins. This is how you prep for an IPO trading under dollar fig on New York Stock Exchange soon. So we're be
Speaker 1:to do. Absolutely incredible. Yes. Obviously, Figma is a sponsor and partner of ours. But this story is really incredible.
Speaker 1:The other thing that Jason missed here that I think is interesting is Figma holds BTC on the balance sheet, which I think that retail is gonna be excited by. There's also a really exciting AI story here. Figma Make launched a
Speaker 2:big almost $70,000,000 in Bitcoin ETFs and was approved to buy 30 more million in BTC. Zach says this is the first company we've seen this cycle that's buying Bitcoin and isn't bad. That's pretty notable. He used a different word. And Tane says Figma has 1,540,000,000.00 in cash on hand, but only raised 749,000,000 in primary capital in its history.
Speaker 2:It will go public with a negative net burn over its lifetime of 791,000,000. Thanks to their efficiency and the $1,000,000,000 breakup fee received from Adobe. Wow. That's remarkable. And then
Speaker 1:Things are working out. Yeah. I remember, I mean, you know, they obviously getting shot down by the Europeans on an acquisition that I think was exciting for everybody involved from from Dylan to Scott to the to the cap table and the team. And, you know, Adobe broadly was I think disappointing for everyone. But I think this is gonna be, you know, in in hindsight, I think people will look back and and say this was this was actually the right thing.
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 1:And I think the markets are gonna love another founder led, you know, company.
Speaker 2:Yep. So Christine had a good post here. I the first thing I appreciate in Figma's s one everyone said the s one was the best designed s one ever, which makes sense.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 2:But it was right at the start of of Dylan's letter. When Evan and I started Figma, too often companies write departed founders out of a company story. Dylan did the opposite, and that says a lot. I love it. Very cool.
Speaker 2:Classy. So you can go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.
Speaker 1:Anddotcom. You can check out Figma make. You can vibe code whatever you want. Tyler is in the midst of vibe coding a new product that we're gonna release a data product, in the next couple weeks for free. And I'm excited to share that.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, I wanted to pull up let's pull up the Polymarket for
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:The reconciliation bill. Zach Kukhoff is gonna be coming on the show later today to give us the update. Things are trending down across the board. The getting it done by July 4 is sitting at a 61% chance, down 6%, over the last twenty four hours. So we will follow this one and I'm excited to get the update.
Speaker 1:It's funny a big bill like this with this deadline of of the July 4 because there is this like overall incentive. I think people would like to enjoy their fourth of July versus, you know, angrily debating a bunch of small details.
Speaker 2:I think the debt ceiling always comes up during the summer. I remember years ago it being a topic during summer. And it feels like a very weird thing that you have, like, this ultra high pressure DC narrative during like the slowest time of the year for every time of the year in France. Yeah. It's very American.
Speaker 2:We grind it out here.
Speaker 1:We grind it out.
Speaker 2:Anyway, you don't need to be grinding on bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. Can go to ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Save both.
Speaker 2:Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, and accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. And we people about sorry.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say our new, ad that we shipped
Speaker 2:for Wander.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Shipped this, thirty five minutes ago.
Speaker 2:We should show
Speaker 1:this off. Live on location at a Wander, and I would encourage people to just go watch it.
Speaker 2:Can we pull it up on the screen?
Speaker 1:Let's pull up a few seconds. Let's give a little a little I
Speaker 2:think we can watch the whole thing.
Speaker 1:We can watch the whole thing? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's only it's only forty five seconds. Let's pull it up.
Speaker 2:Let's pull it up and watch it. We
Speaker 1:went full golden retriever mode for this one folks.
Speaker 2:Can we go full screen on this? Is that possible? Go go full screen. Well, we pull that up. Such a fun shoot.
Speaker 2:If you're a GQ fan, you probably noticed that we were heavily inspired. Maybe even, you could call it a shot for shot remake of the the GQ video with, George Clooney and Brad Pitt. But, I mean, fantastic inspiration from those folks.
Speaker 1:It's pretty funny. We showed a preview of that to a few people and they'd go, is that a wander? Yeah. We're like, yes. Yes, obviously.
Speaker 1:But still the property, this is a property in Malibu that you can rent this summer. Yeah. And it is absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 2:So Anyway, we gotta tell folks about the TBPN derivative works clause. So if you're watching the show, if you're writing about the show, engaging with the show, you should know that we have terms of conditions, terms of conditions, terms of terms of use. We don't ask for much, but there is one rule that we take very very seriously. Our lawyers have been very serious about, which is that if you watch the show, if you engage with the show, if you write about the show Mhmm. And then you go and create a derivative work, so a copycat Yeah.
Speaker 2:Copycat. A livestream, a daily A clone. Technology show. A clone. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A clone. Don't ask for financial compensation. Nothing. We don't ask you to stop doing what you're doing, But you are legally required to drink one glass of municipal tap water.
Speaker 1:Just one. Every time you
Speaker 2:do the show.
Speaker 1:If you were to copy us and do a daily show
Speaker 2:You would have to drink
Speaker 1:one glass of tap water. Municipal tap
Speaker 2:daily. Yes. And so a lot of people have been fighting this. They copy us and then they and then they they they they refuse to drink the tap water.
Speaker 1:We But this is legally
Speaker 2:It's only a matter of time until they tap out. They got a tap out.
Speaker 1:Yep. That's Tapping out.
Speaker 2:Tapping out is when you when you admit that yes, you did copy TVPN and so you're tapping out, you're drinking the tap water and it's legally binding. So Yeah. Just if you're thinking about doing it just be prepared And
Speaker 1:we wanted we wanted this policy to be fair, right? Yeah. It doesn't cost you anything. Yeah. Maybe your health a little bit.
Speaker 1:Maybe. But, yeah. So feel free to copy us long as you tap out.
Speaker 2:As long as you tap out.
Speaker 1:Always tap out. And we'll be we'll be, you know, if you launch a derivative work, copycat, clone, whatever, we'll remind you
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the comments.
Speaker 2:Everyone to make sure you Yeah. A lot of people say like, oh, how how will I know if if if what I'm doing is truly derivative? Like, you know, is this or is there a definition? It's like, don't worry. You'll know.
Speaker 2:You'll know. You will definitely know if you have to drink the tap water. Like, we're going to make it apparent. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously.
Speaker 2:Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 1:I was talking with Buddy yesterday. He was walking by one of our billboards in New York. He sent it to me and he said that he signed up for Vanta on Friday because he signed a massive logo that I can't say for a startup.
Speaker 2:They
Speaker 1:said They do.
Speaker 2:SOC two compliance?
Speaker 1:You're gonna need SOC two before we can dance.
Speaker 2:Wow. So it's
Speaker 1:on Vanta now.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:And I'd love to see it. So shout out to to Vant. Sorry. Shout out to Grant and Vanta. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Grant. For for Let's
Speaker 2:go a little bit deeper into Erebor. This is certainly the hottest story in our world today. It appears the Financial Times. I think what happened here is that they found the like a filing and then put the story together. So this is there's a lot of no comments in here, but there's still some interesting facts that we'll go through.
Speaker 2:So Peter Thiel joins tech billionaires backing new lender, Erebor, to rival Silicon Valley Bank. And people have been talking about this new bank and the name and stuff. And so it it had been out there, but it had not been
Speaker 1:The startup named after the Dragon's Mountain, Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 2:So, a group of tech billionaires led by Palmer Lucky, co founder of military contractor, Anderil, is preparing to launch a US bank intended to fill the gap left by Silicon Valley Bank serving startups including cryptocurrency businesses. To be named Erebor, the bank would be backed by high profile tech investors including Joe Lonsdale from ABC and he's a co founder of Palantir according to people familiar with the matter. Thiel's venture capital firm, founder's fund would also be among the investors according to two people. Like Anderol and Palantir, Erebor's name is a reference to J. R.
Speaker 2:R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Erebor is the lonely mountain whose treasures are reclaimed from the dragon smog. Lucky and Lonsdale, who were big donors to Donald Trump in the twenty twenty four US president election, want the bit want the bank to take over the niche once occupied by SVB as the go to lender for riskier companies and cryptocurrency players that traditional banks might reject. We were talking a lot about, like, founder liquidity, but there really was an a a time when you raise $10,000,000 series a, and SVB would almost always underwrite that if it was with a tier one to the tune of, like, a $2,000,000,000 $2,000,000 debt line.
Speaker 2:You could just get an extra 20% as venture debt and use that to fund CapEx or or or an inventory
Speaker 1:Yeah. Venture debt would always get a lot of heat.
Speaker 2:Well, was because they were used poorly. Yeah. And there were a lot of aggressive lenders, but SVB was kind of one of the cleaner ones, I thought. Yeah. Arabor has applied for a national bank charter in The United States, a license that allows a financial institution to operate as a bank.
Speaker 2:The bank will be a national bank providing traditional banking products, as well as virtual currency related products and services for businesses and individuals according to the application which was made public this week. Target market would be businesses that were part of The US innovation economy. In particular, tech companies focused on virtual currencies, artificial intelligence, defense and manufacturing. We'd also serve individuals who work for or invest in these companies. It's also planned to work with non US companies seeking access to The US banking system.
Speaker 2:Erebor's cofounders first discussed launching a bank after the collapse of SVB in 2023 according to a person familiar with the matter. SVB has been the main bank for US startups and their venture capital backers. Its assets were first sold to its first citizens.
Speaker 1:SVP is still operational
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Ineffectively name only. It's owned by First Citizens.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is that it it is it is like owned, like the brand is owned and the corporate structure changed hands. But different pieces of the of the firm Got
Speaker 6:sold off.
Speaker 2:Split off. I'm pretty sure like Morgan Stanley wound up with like the Venture Debt Group or something like that. Like different desks went to different places and they kind of parceled stuff up. Some of it was sold, Some of it was just like, hey, this person, know, would rather be doing x y or z at a different firm. And so maybe Goldman or Morgan Stanley is trying to get into a particular market and they're like, hey, SVB has some great guys over there.
Speaker 2:It was kind of like a a free for all for a little bit. So there's not too much in here. There's a little bit about who's running this company. So Lucky and Lonsdale were not expected to be involved in the day to day management of the bank according to people familiar with their plans. It will be run by co CEOs Jacob Hirschman, who previously worked as an adviser at Crypto Group Circle and Owen Rappaport, cofounder and CEO of digital asset software, AIR Compliance.
Speaker 2:Mike Hagedorn, former senior executive vice president at New Jersey based Valley National
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for senior executive vice presidents.
Speaker 2:For sure. We'll be the bank's vice we'll be the bank's president. And so they're gonna have co CEOs and a president on day one. A stacked Yeah. PT Incredible.
Speaker 2:Palmer Lucky, Lonsdale in the boardroom. And then, you got co CEOs and a president. This is a stacked lineup. I think we're working on a graphic. I've been pitching it.
Speaker 2:The the starting lineup for this new team
Speaker 1:is looking That's the beauty of business.
Speaker 2:It can
Speaker 1:it can feel like sports but there's not the same kind of rules. Right? Yeah. You know, you can put as many people on your team as you want.
Speaker 2:There's no salary caps.
Speaker 1:That's right. Most importantly. Jawan was Jawan was was posting. He was like, we're gonna see salary caps Yeah. And I hope not because that would imply
Speaker 2:Well, Mamdani's trying to do that. Right? He wants the salary cap to be like $999,000,000. Like he wants billionaires. Bernie too also wants salary caps in in business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and Net worth caps. Net worth caps. Yeah. Much like a salary cap.
Speaker 2:Imagine there was a net worth cap in the NBA. It's like, yeah. Like, okay. You've you've made enough money. Like, you can't You have to play for free now.
Speaker 2:Its head office will be in Columbus, Ohio, which we talked about. Part of the application was submitted confidentially and has not been made public, such as details related to its shareholders, equity structure, and business plan. Lucky did not respond for request for comment. Lonsdale confirmed he was a financial backer, but declined to comment further and the other folks did not reply. Anyway, I'm sure they're gonna be building some projects and you know what they're gonna need.
Speaker 2:They're gonna need linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. XAI, Greg Yang, great poster. Someone DJ Kao says another great account.
Speaker 2:Says visiting the XA office really really humbled me, and it's just tons of tents around a around desktops. Is this actually the XA office? I'm so confused. And then Greg Yang, who actually works at XA, says that's not our office. We have way more tents.
Speaker 2:So I have no idea where these original pictures came from, but it does look like a lot of tents in a inside of a
Speaker 1:The Internet's a tough place these days. You never know what's real. Right? They could have just
Speaker 2:made Or did you
Speaker 1:put up tents in a tech office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Could have a prompt.
Speaker 6:Could have
Speaker 1:been a prompt but I do know that the x AI team, I have it on good authority that they did there are tents in the office. Well They sleep in the office. Okay. Not necessarily reporting. Every day.
Speaker 1:Someone else was giving them a little was chirping at them because they were saying, if you if you stay up coding until three, 4AM
Speaker 2:but then you'll
Speaker 1:sleep in.
Speaker 2:It doesn't really count. You're just nocturnal. It's like, what's impressive is like, actually working really hard for like twelve hours, taking a break, having some rest time, and then getting a full eight hours of sleep. And it doesn't really matter what cycle that happens on. I guess the benefit of like the nocturnal programmer is that there's just less going on in the world.
Speaker 2:So there's less distractions.
Speaker 1:Knowing that you're grinding while your competitors are sleeping. I guess. That's priceless.
Speaker 2:I guess. But I mean, truly truly there is like email is quieter during the night. Right? Like news is quieter. So you know, it's like there's just less opportunity to get distracted by like the the Elon Trump blow up that happened when they were sleeping.
Speaker 2:Apparently. So like yeah. They woke up and they were like, okay. I guess something happened with our boss and and the president but you know the story is kind of over. So let's get to work.
Speaker 2:Anyway, if you work at XAI, you're gonna have to sell this to big companies. You're gonna need Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company in the next level. Get started for free. Anyway, we can go deeper into Microsoft.
Speaker 2:They are scaling back their ambitions for AI chips to overcome delays. The Microsoft is focusing on less ambitious chip designs through 2028. They hope by scaling back some of the designs and pushing out the schedule for other AI chips it's already working on, it can develop them more easily. The hope is that when these chips are released over the next three years, they will still remain competitive with NVIDIA's AI chips. The decision follows delays in in house chip development.
Speaker 2:This is from a report in the information. Microsoft wants to reduce reliance on NVIDIA for AI computing. But if we pull up the mag seven chart, NVIDIA doesn't seem to be affected. They're still at the top of that baby at 3,800,000,000,000.0. But Microsoft's coming for them at 3,600,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:And so it's neck and neck. If Microsoft can fab their own chips, TSMC, design their own chips, rip out Nvidia. That might be enough for flipping.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, on poly market.
Speaker 1:Matt Matthew from Cloudflare yesterday said, every time we've seen this type of scale up on the silicon side
Speaker 2:It's glut.
Speaker 1:There's been ended up being a glut. So we'll see. Praying that this time it's different. Yep. Would hate would hate love bubbles.
Speaker 1:Hate the hate the crash.
Speaker 2:Well, we have a funny post here from Zach quote tweeting someone says, you attract what you fear. And Zach says, ah, I'm so scared of $3,000,000,000 and drunk cigarettes with her. Love that you thought of saying it.
Speaker 1:Zach's been on a roll.
Speaker 2:Anyway, if you're selling anything, including cigarettes, you're gonna need to pay sales tax. And you're gonna need Numeral. Go to numeralhq.com. Also, don't sell cigarettes. It's bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less
Speaker 1:than five Says the nicotine sales nicotine sales rep. Very different process. No. It is very different.
Speaker 2:Is very is Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We use sell It
Speaker 1:is the sales tax automation tool of choice for Ridge, Groons, Graza. The list goes on. Go check it
Speaker 6:out.
Speaker 1:It's great. We have a post here from
Speaker 2:Someone put us in the truth zone.
Speaker 1:Andy. Yeah. 2¢. We we gotta have him on some time to talk about his his have you seen the screenshot
Speaker 6:putting
Speaker 1:Can you
Speaker 2:imagine that this would result in a social network around your net worth? He's like no.
Speaker 1:It's the magic of building infrastructure.
Speaker 2:I just wanted to make things a little bit smoother.
Speaker 1:Anyways, he was putting Kylie in the Kylie Robinson from Wired in the True Zone. It says claims to be wired wearing AirPods question mark.
Speaker 2:It's a good question, Kylie. You gotta answer some stuff. I'm This is big.
Speaker 1:I am a firm believer in wired headphones. Try
Speaker 6:them out.
Speaker 2:I thought you were gonna say wired the the newspaper or the magazine.
Speaker 1:If I it's it's terrible to say, but if I could only have one, I would take wired headphones.
Speaker 2:Yep. Oh, well. Well, she should get wired headphones because that would be very that would be very on brand for wired. Anyway, we have we have announcement. We're using FinAI now for customer support.
Speaker 2:We've gotten a lot questions coming into our customer support line. People asking, you know, are you guys normal heights? And Fin can just immediately chime in. Of course, these both of them
Speaker 1:are you talking about? No. We need to set up a a support at TBPN dot com
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Running on Finn
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:To answer these pressing
Speaker 2:These pressing questions. There aren't enough ads. Can I get a bespoke ad? And it will just automatically generate an ad for you.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That would be what
Speaker 1:Is Jordy really five one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's Do you guys really would you really take a bullet for big tech? It's like, absolutely. It's like, Finn, we were joking about Relax. No.
Speaker 1:We'll have to
Speaker 2:Finn is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in ranking on g two. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. Go to finn.ai to check it out. In other news, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 workers. This is a short article, but we we we've already covered this, but it's interesting to track.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is, like, is is Microsoft the only one that's doing these big rifts right now? It feels
Speaker 1:like, normally, is what this is what this is what scares me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What does Satya know?
Speaker 1:Satya There's there's so many top signals Yeah. Right now. Just everywhere you look. Top signal, top signal, top signal. I wanna believe that this time it's different.
Speaker 1:Industry goes through cycles naturally. Satya is a seasoned operator. He has incredible traction in generative AI. He's getting 20% off the top of whatever OpenAI makes. You would think that he was going would be going on a spending frenzy
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yet he's conducting routine layoffs. He's giving up, you know, data centers. Yep. He's he's saying, yep. You know, you guys, you know, I I don't need it.
Speaker 1:Yep. Even though, yes, they're, you know, I I So I just think he's being He's playing it, he's simultaneously being He was being really aggressive Yep. Like two years ago and now he's starting to play it a little bit safer. Yep. And I think in some ways, some of these rifts are just practical.
Speaker 1:Right? He's realizing, yes, AI is making us more efficient. Mhmm. So we should need less people to do more work. People were putting Benioff in the truth zone Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Last week because he was saying AI is now doing 30 to 40% of the work at Salesforce, and yet his head count has just been ticking up And so so yeah, this Satya getting hyper practical Yep. Scares me.
Speaker 2:I mean, he's I I'm pretty sure he he joined Microsoft in the nineties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So he's been there. Been through
Speaker 2:his not like he's it's not like he just lived through the dot com crash and the global financial crisis. He worked at the same company and saw how Microsoft handled those two, crises. I think Microsoft handled both of them pretty well, but he can totally pattern match. Maybe he's wrong. But if he's still if he's wrong and there's no pullback, there's no glut of chips, there like, the AI continues to progress, he's still set up pretty well for it.
Speaker 2:Right? He is like Yeah. He's still, you know, major CapEx, serious hyperscaler, huge, huge bet on, like, the best horse in the race, basically, the best independent horse hitch to OpenAI. Even as that relationship gets more and more complicated, it feels like he has a deeper connection to OpenAI than, say, Google does with another startup in the Foundation Model Lab or Amazon or, you know, any of these companies. Because they've got all kind of like like, Anthropic has deals with Amazon and Google.
Speaker 2:And, like, they're they're starting to kind of warm up to being dance partners, but they're not Google's not getting 20% of Anthropix top line. You know? It's not it's just not that neat. The the deals aren't structured that way. So he has not only the leading lab, but the most dominant stake of all of any hyperscaler in a lab period.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So incredibly well set up. So we will continue to track it. But whether you think it's a top signal or a bottom signal, you gotta head over public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 1:And they have a triple
Speaker 2:IRA match. 3%.
Speaker 1:1%. 1%.
Speaker 2:Check it out. In other news, the talent wars continue to rage on. Sam Altman slams Meta AI's talent poaching spree. Missionaries will beat mercenaries. He says, quote, what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems, said Sam Altman in leaked memo sent to OpenAI researchers.
Speaker 2:So big, big question. Paula says, with all the AI labs in SF being in the mission, who called them members of technical staff and not missionaries? It's funny. Oh, wow. This is an old post, yeah, from, from over six months ago.
Speaker 2:And there's a bunch of other new details emerging from, the new Meta Superintelligence team. Didi, who's coming on the show, right, in, like, three minutes. Okay. I was thinking, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We we've highlighted a lot of his posts. Every single one of the 11 meta meta superintelligence hires has an is an immigrant who did their undergrad abroad. Seven from China, one from India, one from Australia, one from UK, one from South Africa. Eight are PhDs or PhD dropouts in The US. Immigration is key to US AI innovation.
Speaker 2:Jeff Beff Jasos has a hilarious post here. The foreshadowing here was insane. And it's Sam Altman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark Zuckerberg says, the thing that I think Facebook has done exceptionally well is hiring. This is an this is an incredible series, the startup school series that Sam did while he was at YC.
Speaker 2:He interviewed Zuck, Elon, a ton of really interesting folks and got these really definitive interviews from the top tech leaders of the next generation, like, right as they were kind of on the on the biggest moment in their come up. Why are you laughing?
Speaker 1:It's just I love I love this business.
Speaker 2:You're like tearing up looking at how happy how happy you are.
Speaker 1:No. It's just it's watching this great power conflict play out in real time is is wildly entertaining.
Speaker 2:It's entertaining.
Speaker 1:And the consumer is going to be the net winner.
Speaker 2:I was about to say that. And also America. Yeah. It's extremely This is a pressure cooker of the highest. It's it's so competitive.
Speaker 2:But the good thing is that at the end, don't like, they we aren't playing this game where someone goes to jail or someone gets, you know, like, goes to the gulag if they don't perform or they get locked up. Like, this is this is, you know, the difference between being a having $10,000,000,000 or a $100,000,000,000. It's like, it's kind of all fake, but it's all it's all, like it's super high stakes, but it's still capitalism, and it's still like, the consolation prize is still being able to build something cool even if you get beaten. But the end result is that we have this hypercompetitive race to build the best thing with, like, kind of a safety cushion so that you're not you're you're it's not like the government's
Speaker 1:putting a gun in It's global, right? It's greatest minds from all over the world coming to compete in this market. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In
Speaker 1:this town
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:And many of them are getting maxed out contracts.
Speaker 2:I'm sure both Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are losing sleep right now over the talent wars. They gotta get on Eight Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com/tvpn. Get a new Pod five Ultra. Sam, get a new Pod five Ultra.
Speaker 2:Mark, They got a five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns and free shipping. So go check it out.
Speaker 1:I'm back in the game today. I got an 89. I got massively dinged on my consistency, has just been all over the place. Ninety minutes of deep sleep, two and a half hours of REM sleep.
Speaker 2:Mean, you won by by default because I You don't have your sleep in Malibu. I'm moving the the Eight Sleep after work. So I don't have anything to act because I was
Speaker 1:Size gong for me. Size gong for Congratulations,
Speaker 2:Jordy. You deserve it. You deserve it.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, without further ado, let's bring in Didi. Hey, guys. How you doing? What's going on?
Speaker 7:Hey, guys. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Great to have you on the show finally. I feel like we've reacted to almost every one of your posts. You're very, very helpful in terms of contextualizing and just, summarizing everything that's going on, giving breakdowns. It really helped the show, honestly. So thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:Totally. Thank you for being a core contributor.
Speaker 7:Big fan of the show. I've seen all of your episodes, I think.
Speaker 2:Wow. So
Speaker 7:you guys are great. You guys are great. I'm so happy for what you guys are doing.
Speaker 2:Thanks, man. I I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1:And did you join all in? What what's this in the background? Are you you
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:This this message has really been overloaded since the podcast, but, no, that's just our our venture, message. I mean, this is what Menlo, Menlo's
Speaker 2:slogan is. You were using that slogan before 2020?
Speaker 7:It was.
Speaker 6:It was.
Speaker 2:They mocked you. They stole your they stole your line. They just steamrolled you. This has happened a few times. What what was it?
Speaker 2:Oh, Gemini. I thought I thought of it for years as the Winklevoss back crypto trading app.
Speaker 1:Exchange.
Speaker 2:Now Google comes out and they're like, we'd like that brand actually over here. And so now Gemini, I think of as the Google product.
Speaker 1:They went from Bard.
Speaker 2:Yep. They had to They barded up. They barded up. No one was no one was competing for Bard. Bard was clean space but but they had to go Gemini and so good luck to the Winklevoss twins.
Speaker 2:Anyway, why why did you kick us off with like a little bit of background and kind of what what you do just to kind of get everyone familiar?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Well, my my background I'm in venture now, but my background has been somewhat nontraditional for venture. I spent most of my career as an engineer and a product person.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. So four years. I If you
Speaker 2:nontraditional, I expect warlord.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 2:guys expect
Speaker 8:black water?
Speaker 1:Arms I expect
Speaker 2:kite surfer or like someone who's
Speaker 1:like Wait.
Speaker 2:Wingsurfing or rock climbing.
Speaker 1:I actually thought I actually thought you're joking for a second because I thought you're gonna say my, know, nontraditional background adventure. I went to HBS.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:I was a product manager.
Speaker 1:Well You know, just found my way.
Speaker 2:We're not letting you get away with that, man.
Speaker 7:You would be hard pressed to find an actual person who's done engineering at a big company and and a startup from the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:But not like your strategy and ops role for two
Speaker 2:years. Okay.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. In venture, I actually don't know that many people like that. I do know it's a meme
Speaker 1:though. You were in the trenches. You were in the trenches. You were
Speaker 6:in the
Speaker 2:technology trenches. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. We'll give it
Speaker 6:to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, what what how do you how do you land at Menlo? Were you doing in were you doing investing before angel investing? What what did that look like?
Speaker 7:No. I actually had no business being an inventor. I never wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to to build stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But after Glean, I thought you know, I was exploring building something new, and then I was talking to a bunch of these venture firms just to get the get their thoughts on it. And and I was kind of roped in. I thought, hey. It's kinda strange that there's not as many people who are technical and really care about engineering stuff in venture. And it would be nice to have that.
Speaker 7:Because whenever I would speak to people, they'd be like, look, man. Like, I don't really understand this technical stuff, but is this a big market? You know? Like, is this gonna actually work as an idea? And that's kind of the ethos of why I wanted to join a venture firm in the first place.
Speaker 7:Like like, I think it'd be valuable for technical people to talk to other people who really care and nerd out about the actual idea.
Speaker 2:So I've
Speaker 7:been doing that for a year and a half, and it's been it's been more fun than you think. You know, venture has a lot of, connotations on what the job involves, whether it's a sexy job or not. And, I don't know. It's just very diff different for very different people, I'd like to believe.
Speaker 1:What's been your strategy the last year and a half? Has it been trying to find and lead deals yourself, support, a mix of both? What what is the Write
Speaker 2:a check. Fire the CEO. Take Unfortunately, no. Everyone's founder friendly now. You gotta differentiate by being A round unfriendly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Very founder unfriendly. If you're Yeah. If you're nontechnical, then you're gonna have problems. Yeah.
Speaker 9:No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 7:Yeah. No. There's two things we do. I've I have led deals and and also co led deals with some of my partners here. We've done about four.
Speaker 7:Three of them are announced. One is not in terms of series a's. But mostly, like, I got brought in to help lead the Anthology Fund, which is our, $100,000,000 fund with Anthropic. And that's been a lot of fun because it gives you a lot of leeway on the kind of deal structures that you can have. Not your traditional, like, hey.
Speaker 7:High ownership necessarily series a's and b's and c's. It's more early, more, hey. How do
Speaker 9:we help the ecosystem? How do
Speaker 7:we just get into ideas, very, very early and just meet founders so you don't have a two week process where you're trying to fall in love with the founder for the first time.
Speaker 1:So Interesting. That's other thing I'm I'm sure it's been massively helpful because one of one of the challenge, if you go from operating and then you join a fund and you can you're only able to do a few deals a year, it's like how do you build up that those the frameworks? How do you really learn the craft of investing and learn Yeah. What not to do? And It's cool.
Speaker 1:I I I think one of the one of, you know, there there's plenty of stories in the valley of people that our friend Justin Maris, I think like his first two companies he ever in Angel invested in were were unicorns and there's a bunch of other stories like that. From my personal experience, the the like the the average deal that I've done has just gotten better and better across the 60 plus companies that I've invested in. And so that that that can be a really big challenge if you're thrown into a big firm. You're having to write make big investments and then you're only able to exercise the actual check writing a couple times a year. How how is it how's the anthology fund going?
Speaker 1:Are you are you guys you you you must
Speaker 2:Specifically, I wanna talk about, you said like non traditional deal structures. And when I think of that, I think you can come to someone who will say, hey, we'll do a $10,000,000 series a, but we'll also give you $10,000,000 in credits. We've seen NVIDIA do some of these deals. We've seen, obviously, the Microsoft or the Microsoft OpenAI deal was kind of structured as some sort of cloud credits and all this different stuff, and that can be really valuable. Is that what we're talking about here, or is there something else?
Speaker 2:Or are are cloud credits even relevant in, like, traditional deal structures these days for AI companies that are building on top of foundation models?
Speaker 7:But we do we do offer a bunch of cloud credits, so we go up to, like, 30 to 100 k in cloud credits. I honestly don't think that's the main draw. It's, like, a nice to have for
Speaker 2:these
Speaker 7:early companies. All these good companies can figure out how to get credits or how to spend money on this. I think what's more interesting is, you know, even when I was, like, angel investing prior to being in venture, that's a different art. Like, it's much easier to get into deals as you guys probably know when you're angel investing because you just know the person. You're like, hey, man.
Speaker 7:I'm gonna throw in 10. Can I get a 10 allocation? They're like, yeah. You seem like a good guy. You can be helpful.
Speaker 7:Here's here's
Speaker 1:the thing. Bar is just so much lower.
Speaker 7:The bar is very low. And then you then you go to a venture firm in the same companies and you tell them, hey. I wanna lead you around. And they're like, hey. Good luck, buddy.
Speaker 7:Like, here's the line. Get to the back of it. So that's that's what becomes really challenging. But to the the the question of anthology, specifically, I think probably the biggest draw from what the founders tell us is, hey. We just love to know what the labs are up to, how to work with them, how to plan for the future because we have no visibility into that.
Speaker 7:And for us, it really helps because you can find form a relationship with people and actually figure out, hey. You're an awesome founder, and I don't know that because you've more than just the three week process that you've pitched to me, I know that for a a good six to eight months now. So we've, you know, we've deployed about 30 odd checks to Anthology. Would say in the beginning, it was a little bit of calibration needed to figure out, hey. What was the right kinda company?
Speaker 7:And we don't only do early. We do some, like, mid stage companies that are interesting to us for a future round as well. And the the two of them have graduated into full series a leads. So that's, you know, what was with our success metric going in, which is are these actually good deals that will graduate to real ownership checks or not? And so we had Goodfire and then OpenRouter sort of be those companies that graduated.
Speaker 7:Very different companies. Yeah. Alex is the But fantastic company.
Speaker 1:We had we had Alex on from Open Router and neither of us I guess realized that they were announcing like his massive series b. Yeah. Yeah. So we had him on for like a full fifteen minutes on the
Speaker 2:day his Yeah. He was my wife's batch. I know his I I know what OpenSea and I know how good OpenRouter is but I didn't realize it was like somehow the news got lost that it was like, oh wow. It's like a massive massive fundraising day. I'm interested to know more about corporations or or large scale ups partnering with venture firms.
Speaker 2:We've seen a bunch of different I mean, going back to like the Slack fund. I remember Slack was investing in startups and there's this question of like, for a lot of founders, it can be fun to have, you know, on balance sheet investment vehicle. A lot of founders have are scouts of VC firms or they invest off their own balance sheet. Why would a big company come to Menlo to do the fund, like, the although it seems like you're offering, like, a lot of the work. And and is that the right model?
Speaker 2:Like, should we see more of that versus the fully in house effort that's staffed? I think Stripe's done some stuff in house. Perplexity has a fund now. And I'm wondering if you have an opinion on, like, best practices or what works or what doesn't or when something would work on balance sheet or directly within the org versus outside.
Speaker 1:I think it's
Speaker 7:just have some opinions on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think I mean, personal opinion is
Speaker 2:Jordan has lots you
Speaker 1:fortress balance sheet and you probably should be like a public company to be making balance sheet investments purely because of the duration.
Speaker 2:You mean like Google Ventures basically?
Speaker 1:If you lead or participate in a series a and then don't see a return, you're not gonna see a return from that for maybe Yeah. A decade. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, Bloomberg beta has some other stuff like that. There's just so many fascinating different paths to it. And then it also is this
Speaker 1:weird dynamic where like But I like this romantic because it's like, hey, this is non core to what we're doing, but it's important to the ecosystem we're building. Let's make it so that it's not our job to deploy this capital, but we still get a lot of the benefits. Totally.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I mean, give us your on
Speaker 1:take on
Speaker 7:a little I I think of look. You we did a lot of analysis on what a corporate fund structures look like and what kind of investments they do in the past. And these are all gross generalizations. But, generally, if you run a corporate fund, a, you're not compensated on carry, really. So the incentives are not really aligned to deliver returns.
Speaker 7:The incentives are pure ecosystem bets. So if you look at a bunch of the investments that Slack Fund have made, look at their Slack apps, a lot of them, and that's good for the ecosystem. But are they real companies? Are they real businesses? Mhmm.
Speaker 7:A lot of them aren't. And when the more you look at corporate venture, like, they don't spend a whole bunch of time out on the road sourcing really, like, you know, balls to the walls, going to all of these people and trying to figure out what the good companies are. The reason we wanted the structure was, a, so we didn't have that incentive problem. We could focus on real returns while also investing in companies that benefit the ecosystem, but not purely that. So a lot of the Anthology companies, they don't even necessarily only use Anthropic or use Anthropic at all or necessarily even call LLMs.
Speaker 7:They are generally companies that are beneficial for the AI ecosystem. That's one. And then number two, I think the the the bigger thing is most companies have no business running a venture firm. This is just not like you said, it's not their core business. It's not their forte.
Speaker 7:It's not what they do. It's not something they care about. So it's really nice where you're like, okay. You guys care about it. We care about the ecosystem benefits.
Speaker 7:Why don't you help us run this fund, and then it works for everybody? And I think the one exception case to that is probably OpenAI. OpenAI startup fund has done very well, but, you know, not in not in small part due to Sam being
Speaker 2:Sam's kind of a good player. So Potentially, a generational VC if he was doing that full time. Yeah. Yeah. What about the competitive dynamic?
Speaker 2:Like, like, would GV I mean, Google Ventures is kind of spun out so much, but, like, it would be it would be crazy to think about, like, GV investing in perplexity or Bloomberg beta investing in perplexity. Even if it's not actually that much of a threat and they're and the and the CEO's confident, like, hey. I'm not gonna get disrupted by this. It's like, you have a portfolio CEO who's out there tweeting every single day, like, I'm coming for you, Bloomberg. Let's look at how much money they make.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna disrupt you. Like, that just might be, like, awkward. And so has there been any dynamic around that where you where you have, like, either a mandate to, like, hey, let's stay away from pre from companies that do pre training because that's on Anthropix roadmap or, like, even with the clogged code cursor thing, like, you wanna stay away from coding agents because, Anthropix really really, really pro that. Like, how do you think about like, you wanna be close enough that there's a benefit, but not too close where your competitors. Is that is that a real dynamic, or how do you think
Speaker 6:about that?
Speaker 7:Dave, very rarely has happened. I mean, Dario's actually exceptionally missionary. I mean, I I don't know how else to say it. Like, he really does care about what these companies are doing. I mean, look at Goodfire.
Speaker 7:Like, they have an interpretability lab. They're like, look. Another one is good for the world. We'll we'll do it. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So there have been certain cases where companies, you know, some of them haven't been announced yet, but one of these companies has alternate approaches to doing a a bunch of different model stuff. And we asked Arriel. We're like, hey. Is this bad? Like, are you okay with this?
Speaker 7:And he's like, completely cool with it. I if if it's not something that we have a very strong bet on, that they're going extremely head on and have a bunch of capital to go head on right now, it's just not something we'd care about. So we do try to tread carefully. Obviously, you don't wanna bite that hand, but it's not been an issue at all so far. We've we've never run into a conflict.
Speaker 1:How are you broadly advising companies that are working with labs, but also fear that they might end up competing with them at the product layer over time. And I know I know you you were at Glean, the founding team there and that that feels like something that in long run obviously, know, someone like an OpenAI might might wanna compete there. So I'm curious how how you think about that dynamic.
Speaker 7:I mean, I think the reality is look. Like, it's a free market and competition's gonna happen one way or the other. Whether or not Anthropic backs or Anthology backs you and then and and Anthropic decides to compete at a future point. I don't think anybody
Speaker 1:I'm not even talking, I'm not talking about Anthology as much as just generally Oh. You know, portfolio companies. Let's say you're doing, you know, code gen or something like that and and you're working with a lab and you know, we had Sarah Guo was on the show probably a month and a half ago at this point talking about like, it's not impossible to figure out what's important to each of the labs and and the things that they might do over time and you should as a founder be under you should be well aware but that what you're doing might be on on the path at some point.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think that's a it's a question we get all the time and I think the reality is I my guidance usually has been and and this was how we thought about it at Glean too is what is something that is a pie that is very valuable to you, but not at the scale that it's valuable to any of these big companies? Until it is. You know? Like, you you're really the bet you're making is, hey.
Speaker 7:This pie is maybe $50,000,000 in revenue, and nobody no big company will care about that. But once you capture that pie, it's actually way bigger than that. And if you do, then you can you can reach breakout escape velocity before anybody else is at at your heels. And, hopefully, you've built off enough of a you know? No.
Speaker 7:I I hesitate to say moat, but you've built enough tech that it's not easy to replicate overnight. And if you have a little bit of that, there are odds that you could have a breakout business. And I think today's climate is actually way better than a year or two before because the truth is labs have a huge revenue pressure. So they're not gonna be investing in in random crap. Like, they're gonna be investing in stuff where they're like, okay.
Speaker 7:That's a billion dollars in revenue. That's $500,000,000 in revenue. I'm not going after this $10,000,000 opportunity.
Speaker 3:It's just
Speaker 1:not Yeah. Anthropic anthropic 1 to $4,000,000,000 run rate in the first half of this year to to justify a lot more resources. You have to be able to make a dent in that somehow or or show that you can make a dent.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's kinda like the Google problem with like but at one order of magnitude smaller. Where like if you're running a business at Google that's making $500,000,000, it's like, okay. Time to wrap it up. Let's move on to something bigger. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is not really relevant. And you're like, this could be a public company.
Speaker 7:This is not a
Speaker 2:It's not a entire person's lead.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I don't know if you guys know this, but No.
Speaker 2:No. Please. Started,
Speaker 7:Google had Google Cloud Search. And the reason we weren't worried about it is because we knew the team there, and we're like, this doesn't make a dent on cloud. Yep. And the the fact is, like, Google Cloud doesn't care about this. And and now, you know, sort of they sort of changed their mind, and they care about it again.
Speaker 7:Yep. But that's kinda what the sweet spot. You wanna do something boring and seemingly small enough that nobody else cares.
Speaker 2:Can you can you talk to me more about Glean? There's been some reporting about, like, the data wars. This question of what sir how how sharp elbowed will Salesforce be or Google? If I'm a business owner, I've you know, we just started TBPN as a as a company, and it's a it's a greenfield. So you're like, this time I'm gonna get it right.
Speaker 2:This time I'll just have I'll just I'll I'll just have one suite of tools that'll all work together. And then and then, you know, three weeks later, it's like, okay. I have Slack and Gmail and a bunch of other services, and they're not really talking to each other the way I want. And as a as a business owner, I'm very strong about, like, that's my data. You have to let me have my data and not through this export button that takes two weeks to go.
Speaker 2:And I I want an API that I can immediately send over to to OpenAI or Anthropic or Glean, but the the companies always find a way to kind of, like, have sharp elbows. And we saw this during the during the the rise of Google and Facebook. There was a pitch. John Patel, the the the founder of Wired was arguing that, Google you should be able to go to Google and say, give my Google search results to Facebook. And Facebook, should say, give my social graph data to Google just so I get better ads.
Speaker 2:And both companies hated that idea, and they would not let you do that. It's a little bit different in the b to b context, but how do you see the data wars playing out? How do you see the the the the competitive pressure where a lot of the b to b SaaS providers also wanna offer some sort of enterprise search experience?
Speaker 7:Well, there's there's a couple ways to look at this. I think number one is, yeah, the reliance on or Glean's reliance on just Salesforce is Mhmm. Is a small percentage of the the many, many connectors we offer and the many, many other things that we end up having to integrate with for especially Fortune 500 clients. They often don't even use a lot of the SaaS tools that are household names in in the Valley. Sure.
Speaker 7:So the the net impact is is somewhat limited because of that. But I think the more important point here is the reason why it seems like the reason why people like Salesforce want to cut off connector access is, like what you said, to sell a competing product. In practice, I think it's actually a pretty synergistic relationship otherwise. That's why we work together so well for so long because you don't sell less seats because people use Glean. You actually sell more seats because people use Glean because now there are people who weren't on Slack, weren't on Salesforce, who are now discovering that information and going there and then reading the reading the content.
Speaker 7:So your daily active users actually increase, not decrease
Speaker 8:Interesting.
Speaker 7:When they use Glean. In fact, like, if you don't have licenses on Salesforce to a certain set of users, they don't even see Salesforce results. So it's not like you can also sell 10 licenses, connect to Glean, and then have the thousand people in the company view those Salesforce date that Salesforce data. We don't do that. We don't even offer that as an option Interesting.
Speaker 7:Because we wanna stay true to the permissions of the source data source. So, you know, net net, I think this is a situation that, you know, Glean will have to work out with all of these partners, but I think there's a good out. I mean, I don't think there's a reason other than them wanting to offer a competitive product that we that they care about this access. And the companies too, like you said, like, if you were running TPPN and you wanna connect to Glean, you should own your data. You should own your Slack and Salesforce data.
Speaker 7:They don't shouldn't own it. So you have every right to give away that API access, but, you know, that's gonna be, a conversation that Glean's gonna have to have with a with a bunch of the partners.
Speaker 1:Where are you most excited about agents right now in terms of actual products in market delivering value for customers outside of coding?
Speaker 7:Okay. So this is the one I talk to all my friends about. It's not like a venture venture thing. It's just really a product I just have fallen in love with in the past week or so. You guys all use It's called and and I'm not a paid shill.
Speaker 7:This is, like, just me loving a product. It's 19 pine.ai. It's super elegantly designed, simple chat interface, your typical stuff. But what it does is it just goes and makes phone calls for you but can coordinate very interesting things. So for example, just just the other day, I was like, man, my my insurance on my car is just way too high.
Speaker 7:I need to get this down. Can you figure out how to get it down? And it goes in it. Like, these are note phone calls nobody wants to make. Goes and makes a phone call to my insurance, stays on hold for three hours, and then gets them on the phone, calls GEICO, calls State Farm, gets quotes, comes back, and goes and negotiates, and then it brings my insurance down.
Speaker 7:I did nothing. Wow. And the payment model is so, so nice because you don't pay a subscription for this. You pay a percentage of what you save, which is a payable to everybody. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Of course. And so Yeah. You would
Speaker 1:do that deal all day long with, like a yeah. Just call this person for me. If you save me like a thousand dollars, like I'll give you like a few $100. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm looking. I have the website pulled up. They gotta get a better domain name. This is this is absolutely brutal.
Speaker 2:What's domain name?
Speaker 1:1919pine.ai. But if they can call the IRS for you, cancel your AT and T plan, talk to the DMV, get a refund from an airline.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna use this. I literally have an old Internet line in our old office that I need to cancel, and I can only call during business hours. And I just happen to be live on TV during business hours every day. So I just haven't done it, and I'm just getting billed for Spectrum every month, and it's so annoying. So 19 pints coming for you, Spectrum.
Speaker 2:You're on notice. I wanna
Speaker 1:get your No. But but any any other like, this feels awesome as a consumer agent that is solving real problems and they they have the economic model that people have been excited about of like selling selling results? Any anything else in the in in the enterprise like sales agents, any anything like that that that you're seeing that is actually working?
Speaker 7:Well, there's a bunch of interesting companies and the revenue is inflecting but, know, that's just not like it's good. Like, these good businesses that are working. I think the things that that excite me more at a more meta level is the the technology powering what agents can do. And, like, I think the elephant in the room is all of these all of the new custom RL stacks that are helping agents use custom software is actually gonna be a huge unlock. You know, like, computer use hasn't really worked yet.
Speaker 7:It's not a thing that people use, but there is a world where, you know, just like 19 pine, you could genuinely automate the work of people if you give computers access to your computer in a fast way. And I don't think we've seen that yet because the models aren't capable of doing that. We've seen early versions of that with Claude code, which is, hey. What happens if take a model and then RL it to be very good at agentic work and call a bunch of tools well? O three is similar.
Speaker 7:What if you apply that to very specific domains of, like, hey, man. Like, I have a gazillion enterprise SaaS apps that I don't even wanna use, and I don't even know how to use or touch. Figure out how to use them so we can just throw these agents at the stuff that a human was doing because a lot of the glue work is still not solved by by agents. Like, a lot of the glue work is humans in the loop. Go click this button.
Speaker 7:Go review this text. If we wanna fully cross the chasm of, like, 95% of the work to a 100% of the work, I think that's super exciting on a meta level. And all of these little agent agent apps, and sometimes big agent apps, are are gonna benefit from things like that. So that's one of the the broader themes I'm super, super excited about.
Speaker 2:I wanna get your reaction to, how the AI talent wars are affecting venture specifically. Will Menidas, friend of the show, has a post here. He says Citadel's Law, any any industry with sufficiently high stakes will end up mirroring the culture of hedge funds, massive cash comp for the top performers, bid away dynamics where entire teams walk together, extreme litigation of noncompetes, hard at work twenty four seven culture. But then he says, he ends with this at the margin, I think, makes the capital environment for funding independent big AI things much worse. Not worth underwriting a team if you know they can do r and d on your dollar and then walk.
Speaker 2:In the same way, my sense is fund staking terms got worse, not better post pod shop. So he's talking about how in in yeah. Like like, if you are betting on a founder and then they get some massive massive aqua hire offer, is that going to distort the early stage venture market?
Speaker 7:Oh, I mean, I think, like, absolutely. I've read that post. I love that post. Great great commentary. I think the thing I would say is this isn't new.
Speaker 7:I mean, there were always startups never paid well. Right? Like, you're still getting paid, like, $1.70, 200 k on average, and, you know, Google and Facebook are right there to pay you, like, a 500 k salary. So it's not like it's new that big companies can can, you know, throw out their wallets and give you more money. Usually, even at at Gleam, we had this policy where we're like, look.
Speaker 7:We're just not going to negotiate somebody who only cares about comp. If we lose that person, that's because they're a mercenary, and that's okay. We're not judgmental. Just you do what you think is best for you. We really want people as missionary as you can be about, like, b to b SaaS, but we want people who are, you know, more missionary missionary.
Speaker 7:Incentivized to do the thing that we're doing here. So but does $10,000,000 a year paychecks affect that? A 100%. Thankfully, it's just a few people who are privy to that. But if if there's more of that happening, it becomes a risk.
Speaker 7:I mean, absolutely. The one Mhmm. Thing that I do the most when I do diligence is aside from the typical venture stuff is I really need to have confidence that this founder, no matter what, wants to work on this problem for the next five years. Mhmm. And to the extent that you can get that confidence, that's what I'm looking for, but you can't solve for it.
Speaker 7:It's definitely worse. People are always on the spectrum for missionary and mercenary. And if the dollars go up, the spectrum shifts, so there's fewer people who can afford to be missionary if you're getting paid 10,000,000 a year.
Speaker 2:Yep. Last question from me, and then we'll let you go. Do you think the AI talent wars spill over into the rest of the Mag seven? I'm you know, Mark Zuckerberg is founder mode CEO with a massive business throwing off billions of dollars in cash. He took you know, he's spending $20,000,000,000 on the metaverse, was able to slide some of that over, put some crazy offers on the table.
Speaker 2:We we we keep joking that some of these meta AI super intelligence offers are more than Tim Cook's annual salary. So that might be a culture clash even if Apple says, hey, we want our own super intelligence team, and we've earmarked $5,000,000,000 to do it, because they could. Meta or Apple has produced almost a trillion dollars in dividends or like free cash for their investors over the past decade or something like that, thirteen years. And so the logical thing would be, okay, maybe we will see similar bidding wars, talent wars continue at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, But maybe there's
Speaker 1:Or it just forces Yeah. Apple to effectively outsource the r and d by paying OpenAI Yeah. Anthropics That's totally possible. Billions of dollars.
Speaker 2:So yeah. How do you think that shakes up?
Speaker 7:I I don't think more firms, more max seven companies are going to compete like that. I think Zuck has a particular style, and he always has. I mean, if you look at, like you said, like, Oculus, yeah, he's very happy to pour billions and billions of dollars into something with the hope that it will one day work. Mhmm. Most other of a max seven companies don't usually operate like that, and they can get talent in many cases for for for way cheaper.
Speaker 7:I just don't think it's it's also not Apple might be able to it on their balance sheet, but it's not just something that everybody can afford to do. It causes a lot of cultural rift within the company. If you talk to you know, the other day, I was I was scrolling metas blind for for through a friend. I mean, people are upset. You know?
Speaker 7:Like, people get upset when you you just hear that you can recruit somebody as an engineer and pay them $25,000,000 a year. That's not a good thing for the culture of the company. They also check out mentally inside because they're like, what is the point? Why am I doing this? And so I think Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's one frame where it's like, oh, wow. We hired a 100 x engineer. And there's another one which is like, so I'm a one one hundred x engineer? Maybe I should do one one hundred Yeah.
Speaker 1:The work. Yeah. Mean, if you're, you know, the right way to look look at that, you have some, you know, top 25
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:AI researcher in the world joins your firm. You should be excited because Yeah. You're already compensated really well and it will probably increase the value of the company in the fullness of time which directly benefits you. But of course, if you're making if you're only making 80 k a month, you know, not even not even not even hitting that, you know, 7 figure mark Yeah. That could be a little bit a little bit frustrating.
Speaker 7:Anyway, this is fantastic. Making 80 k a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. Well, thank you so much for hopping
Speaker 1:they could be in that.
Speaker 2:The fact that you know the MRR numbers like the back of your hand is hilarious. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:This is super fun.
Speaker 10:Thanks for joining.
Speaker 6:Let's do
Speaker 1:it again soon.
Speaker 9:And John, you're welcome for having me. Love it.
Speaker 7:See you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to
Speaker 1:you later.
Speaker 3:Take care.
Speaker 2:Cheers. You might have seen our billboards are tearing up New York City. We have our New York City correspondent joining right now. But if you wanna run a billboard in New York City, get on adquick.com. Out of
Speaker 3:home advertising
Speaker 2:made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only combines technology.
Speaker 1:Out of home We went from the West Coast to the East Coast. Emily Yes. Should should take over the West I
Speaker 2:wanna see the people in LA. We will ask her to take But first, we have to sing her a song.
Speaker 1:Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday you. Happy birthday dear Emily. We're hitting the size gone for you. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:It was yesterday.
Speaker 2:It was yesterday. But
Speaker 1:it's July 1.
Speaker 2:She didn't come on the show yesterday. So welcome.
Speaker 6:I would have come on yesterday if
Speaker 9:you asked.
Speaker 2:We should have. We should have.
Speaker 1:We could have had a cake. We could have had a cake.
Speaker 2:What did you do
Speaker 1:for your birthday? I
Speaker 6:had a few meetings. I went to the YMCA. It was empty which was nice. Mhmm. And then my husband took me to dinner.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's nice. YMCA underrated. You're you're Nice.
Speaker 6:New York weather, it's one of the only places blasting that air conditioning so
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:What is the gym tier list look like in New York today? You know, Equinox had a moment.
Speaker 1:Lifetime's making moves.
Speaker 6:Lifetime's making moves. I so I kind of do a high low thing. I live in Park Slope, so the the YMCA makes a lot of sense for me, but I'm also a member at a club called Casa Cipriani with Okay.
Speaker 1:Very small members club. Yep.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's fun.
Speaker 1:The high low. The the high low. John John's in favor of that too. We just started going to a new gym, but John is like actively wants to be kicked out so he can go back to Gold's Gym. I'm like, no we're We
Speaker 6:can't do this. Aren't There don't seem to be as many YMCAs on the West Coast.
Speaker 2:No. No. Not not that many. Lots of twenty four hour fitness. Lots of gyms.
Speaker 2:I mean, Gold's Gym, it's the it's a staple of Venice. It's where works out. You know, RFK is out there. It's a good crew.
Speaker 1:John John thought Equinox was like a $75 a month actively going there for a brief period. Yeah. And I just loved how out of touch you are. You were
Speaker 2:It felt like premium, you know. Yeah. Ultra premium. It's not
Speaker 6:It's big range. It's not
Speaker 2:the best is all in tequila level.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The location matters a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What else is new in your world?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us a give us a a handsome update. People were
Speaker 2:I assume no one's in the city right now.
Speaker 6:Well, look. Yeah. I I got out here this morning. I don't wanna brag. I recently inherited a car from my late grandfather to 2006 Camry.
Speaker 2:Okay. There
Speaker 1:it is. Iconic era of really great vintage. Very reliable.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Awesome. So I drove out here today. It's crowded. It's really crowded.
Speaker 6:I'm hoping that this sort of, level of crowds is due to the holiday weekend, but it might be a mistake that I I rented a house out here. But we'll see. What else is new since two weeks ago?
Speaker 2:Is there Well, the handsome broadly
Speaker 1:Yeah. People a month ago were saying that rentals were down massively year over year. Does it feel that way?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I don't know how much of that was because of weather or or or people's finances. I think some people were less motivated to, like, make the move on booking a house because we had really bad weather the past few months in New York. It was really rainy and gross,
Speaker 3:and it
Speaker 2:was
Speaker 6:sort of a late start to summer. Mhmm. But I'm sure people's financial situation
Speaker 1:There was also a trade war that's still ongoing. That's right. And if your portfolio is down tremendously, you're not exactly saying, yeah, I'd love to spend Yes. You know, you know, a 100 k for two weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I had a friend who was dating a Wall Street, like hedge fund guy and she was like, yeah it's going so great like it's amazing and then like a couple weeks later she's like, yeah he's just like really weird like I don't think it's gonna work out and I was like showing her the stock market chart and being like, so his emotions perfectly map to the 10% sell off that we just saw. You're telling me that this guy, his entire his entire personality is derived from The
Speaker 1:state of the market.
Speaker 2:The state of the market. And she was like, oh, this makes so much more sense now. Okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of women who went through similar situations as her.
Speaker 2:I'm sure the kangaroo market's not good for the dating scene. Is is that is that crazy white party going on? Is that that's a Hamptons thing. Is that a is that a July 4 thing, or is that canceled? I thought Michael Rubin was, like, pulling back from that because it was, like, maybe too flashy.
Speaker 2:Is there an update there?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I I I will see. That supposed to be July 4? I think that's She's,
Speaker 1:like, wearing she's, like, a white party, like
Speaker 2:What are talking
Speaker 6:about? Was like,
Speaker 1:you can't comment.
Speaker 2:No. No. Yeah. Yeah. I think that might have been a factor in in pulling back from that.
Speaker 2:But but but I always see, like, everyone's, like, spying the watches, spying, like, you know, what cars people showed up in, all
Speaker 6:these stuff. There's a lot of paparazzi. There's a lot of TikTokers.
Speaker 2:So we
Speaker 6:see everything happening in real time.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 6:Nobody can really, like, leave with another man's wife anymore. Like, there's so much, coverage of these events now. It really takes away
Speaker 2:The mystique. The mystique.
Speaker 1:Somebody might What's up with, what's up this with this place, Drugstore? You were covering it. Let's try
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. This is awful. Bloomberg broke news yesterday that there's a new movie Smoothie. Smoothie pop up chain from, like, a Jay Z invested celebrity chef.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:And he's these these, like, very Instagrammable smoothies, which obviously Arrowon started, but now there's a lot of places that are kind of hopping on the bandwagon of treating, like, smoothies as a billboard. Like, brands can collab with them, and then whoever's serving these smoothies is, like, making extra money from an advertising business, which is crazy. Like, I think to get an Erwan smoothie for your brand, it's, like, 200 k for a month or something. Have to
Speaker 2:do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're we we we did
Speaker 2:not have to this. Say that's
Speaker 6:crazy. Don't have to
Speaker 2:worth every penny for the TBPN feed me Erwan smoothie. You're telling me we could get a lot out.
Speaker 6:We're gonna make do a drink at, the US Open or something. Like, get don't do the smoothie.
Speaker 2:Don't do the smoothie. It's actually played out?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's played it's played Oh, it's played out.
Speaker 6:Okay. Didn't didn't Airline
Speaker 2:have a collab with like Volkswagen or something or some really funny like car company they did?
Speaker 6:You're right. They did do a car comp. I think they they also do like beauty brands, like sunscreen and stuff. Like, it's not
Speaker 2:Yeah. Chevrolet. They did a Chevrolet drink collab. And what the worst part is that I wouldn't have had a problem if they did the z r one, like, the really crazy Chevy sports car, but they did the 2025 Equinox EV.
Speaker 6:You're driving movie.
Speaker 2:According to the manufacturer, the collaboration between, it combines Chevy's commitment to emission free vehicles and Erijuan's mission to promote sustainability as a merchant of organic foods and wellness products. The drink called the electric juice consists of, ChuChu? ChoCho? I don't even know what this is, which is the most protein rich plant source and blue spirulina, the super few food that matches the Equinox's EV's blue color. The drinks ingredients are designed to energize and recharge consumers according
Speaker 1:to several The winner here was the ad agency that got paid For sure. Half a million dollars sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. I don't know. I feel like I feel like everyone's getting the Hailey Bieber smoothie. I'm about to rock the Equinox EV smoothie. I think it has a certain badge value.
Speaker 6:Like Yeah. They're like 70 grams of sugar. It's like four Cokes.
Speaker 1:I'm long I'm long sugar though. Four Cokes is a lot.
Speaker 2:That is a lot. That is
Speaker 1:a But I'm going long I'm going long sugar from I did I did an experiment. My Yeah. My wife is very afraid of
Speaker 2:It's worst experiment you ever I continue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But anyways, people people are very afraid of sugar. I to prove a point, I drank a soda Yeah. Every single day. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I drank a Coke every single day for six months straight. I know that's something
Speaker 2:young and you work out every day and like Yeah. There's like a million ways to offset that.
Speaker 6:It wouldn't be good.
Speaker 1:No. A lot of a lot of people think that.
Speaker 2:No. Agree. It it is over For sugars. People think like a single Coca Cola was terrible. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course. Course. Everything's in the the dose is the poison with all of this stuff.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Right. You drink a
Speaker 1:full gallon milk. So this week on our side, we've been covering the AI talent wars. How basically AI researchers are being comped almost like pro athletes and sort of like, you know, these sort of $9.09 figure massive offers. The reason I bring it up is because you obviously cover a lot of the, media landscape and we had Derek Thompson on who left Atlantic. I imagine that he's already like run rating well well beyond.
Speaker 1:I I don't know Interesting. What what his metrics are.
Speaker 6:But I would imagine he's already Substack. He's catching up to me.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's a problem.
Speaker 1:Go subscribe to subscribe to Feed Me right now and help help win the race. But Well, he's not winning the It feels like if if legacy media companies, I won't call anyone out, want to want real attention. Not just the sort of attention that comes from their logo to some degree in the prestige but like actually quality content. At some point, they'll have to like kind of reevaluate their comp structures. I think the Atlantic was like 300 was being reported as like the kind of range.
Speaker 1:And when you can go on Substack as a superstar writer and immediately be making somewhere in the seven figure range at some point or another, it just becomes really difficult.
Speaker 6:I see, traditional media companies more likely to start doing like handshakes with sub writers than starting to completely restructure how they're paying their staff.
Speaker 1:I don't see So, like, syndic syndication, basically.
Speaker 6:Or, like I mean, I've talked to so many editors from traditional magazines and papers who are, like, trying to figure out how they can work with Feed Me. Is it, like, a copublishing thing? Is it, like, creating a podcast together? And it's it's been very interesting to experience firsthand to, like, talk to these people because I don't I don't really need that. Like, Derek doesn't need the Atlantic because the people who are reading him are reading him for him, not the whole surrounding
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, just to set the table for the folks who might be listening, when Emily comes to the show, we pay her a 100,000 for her appearance. So Yeah. Just just to say kind of set the bar just so
Speaker 1:And it ramps up
Speaker 2:over Yeah. Yeah. It obviously ramps up. But but yes, I am interested in like the dynamic of like you can still go and publish in in traditional media. Is that just like freelance?
Speaker 2:What is the difference between
Speaker 6:What do you mean like when I write for GQ?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Are are you a columnist?
Speaker 6:That I'm doing that besides that I
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 6:Adore my editor there, and I I think that it's just like it's a it's working like a different part of my brain. Like, I don't it it's like a gift to get to be edited by GQ's editors.
Speaker 2:That's cool. Yeah. Do you, so are are you a columnist over there, or are you a contributor? Like, how does with the actual shape, Do you get assigned things? Like, I've had reporters reach out to me and be like, I was assigned a story on nicotine, so I need to talk to you as an expert or whatever.
Speaker 6:So with GQ specifically, my editor Dan, when I wrote the Zinn story and when I wrote the story about members clubs last year, both were because I I'd written about both of those topics in my newsletter. And Got like, I think it would be interesting for you to expand upon this in, like, a larger feature in a in a print issue. And that's how that's happened. I I don't really but, like, I'm at the point now where if I have an idea of a great story that I wanna write, like, it doesn't make sense for me to pitch it to the Times or to New York Magazine because it I can get it done faster on Feed Me. Sure.
Speaker 6:I can outsource an editor if I need that. I can outsource legal services if I need that. And it it's better for me to get to be, like, breaking those sorts of stories. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I just have, a good thing going in GQ. It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2:That's cool. I wanna bounce an idea off you. There is this narrative that, like, when you go direct, when you're on Substack, like, it has a different texture, a different different vibe, different maybe more objective, maybe more pro tech or pro, you know, creator or pro whatever the topic is being covered. I think that it's less about the personalities or the views of the people and maybe just more about the economics that essentially, when you're in legacy media, you basically have a salary cap. And when you're outside of it, you have no salary cap.
Speaker 2:And that actually defines the economic terms shape this the type of content more than than anything else. Do you think that's reasonable? Do you disagree? How how would you wrestle with that?
Speaker 6:Can you can you keep, like, expanding on that? I I want it
Speaker 2:so I think that there's there's something where if you if you're working at a at a particular outlet and there's some sort of, like, salary cap. It's like, imagine if there were two NBA teams playing against each other and one had a salary cap of $300,000 per player and the other had no salary cap. Like, who would you expect to produce better basketball? Who would you expect to produce better content when you have when you have one that where a person can make 10,000,000 or Joe Rogan can make a 100,000,000? Like, you're just going to attract the absolute top because that's where the Yeah.
Speaker 6:That's right. Ambitious.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And they're extremely incentivized to just work extra hard because if they work if they work a little bit harder and they compound a little bit more and get that extra guest and write that extra piece, it could not it it doesn't mean, oh, here, you got a $5,000 Christmas bonus. It means Yeah. Spotify signed you to a $100,000,000 contract. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's the difference between, like, when LeBron James shows up at midnight to shoot more three free free, free throws. Like, that could be the difference between, like, a $50,000,000 contract and a $100,000,000 contract. So I think with extra things
Speaker 6:And I think
Speaker 2:like, better content.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's really interesting to see so many traditional journalists, you know, give Substack a shot and, like, they just plateau.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:But I'm like I'm an animal. Like, when my eyes are open, I'm working. Like, this letter goes out every day. It's I'm marketing it. I'm editing it.
Speaker 6:I'm pitching stories. But I've always had a really high tolerance for being told no. Like, when I was getting paid 60 k at a job and when I'm making, like, 10 times that now. Right? Like so I think that Substack and these sorts of platforms, even what you guys are doing, also attract personality types that are had less boundaries and rules in the ways that they work.
Speaker 6:And then when people who who don't think like that think that they can find the same success, like, get disappointed or confused or think that it's rigged or something like that.
Speaker 2:When really they're just getting out of control.
Speaker 6:Going going above and beyond for a job where the cap might be like, what did that New York Magazine story say about the Atlantic? 300 k? That's what they're paying their journalists? Like okay. So, like, you're you're gonna go as hard as you can to make 300 k and get those benefits and whatever.
Speaker 6:But the other thing that I'll say, like, is you have to be willing to not have insurance. You have to be willing to Mhmm. You know, have have months where you're you're not having, like, the support of a team. And it's just, like, a very specific type of personality. But I think you're totally onto something.
Speaker 6:Like, I think I'm playing a different game than my peers who are working in an office at a at a magazine or a newspaper.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Also, the the insurance thing is real, but it's also a problem that is very quickly overcome and you can quit your job and say, I'm gonna pay out of pocket for insurance for two years and if this doesn't work out
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then I'll I'll get a roll back. I'm curious, you you were commenting on Vogue partnering with Nutrigrain bars and I'm curious if you think as people are so used to influencer creator led advertising. Like if if you were to partner with a brand and people are like, wait like what? Like why did she partner like that makes no sense like that's clearly a cash grab. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that feels like it seems like legacy media could get away with that kind of thing for a long time even though we're saying, you know, why is
Speaker 2:Nutrigrain needs better marketing because the first thing I think about Nutrigrain I
Speaker 6:think we can shut Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I I always think about the the the I I think that Nature Valley meme where it's like effing crumbs everywhere.
Speaker 6:I don't know if you've
Speaker 2:seen that one. But that's not Nutrigrain. No. And so my biggest association with
Speaker 6:Nutrigrain fig Newton.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta work on that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's is it a Fig Newton or is it the Krumbs one?
Speaker 2:Like, I just know it's not good, so they gotta step it up. But, yeah, the Vogue audience I mean, why why do you think that there was ever a pitch where it's like, okay. We're gonna go after the moms that read Vogue and get them to buy it for the kids. And so it's some sort of, like, bank shot strategy. For
Speaker 6:me, what stopped me in my tracks is it wasn't a banner ad in a newsletter. It wasn't like one of those it wasn't like somebody writing about their wellness routine sponsored by Nutrigrain. It was a produced video of a stylist sort of, like, gallivanting through the streets of New York City, and I really like this girl, Michelle.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:When I saw her post it, and I saw that it was between Vogue and Nutrigrain, like, there was two I who was in the room? Who sold this ad, and how much was it for, and how much did Michelle get, and how much did Vogue get?
Speaker 2:Like was big.
Speaker 6:Very confusing to me because there were there are other ways that that could have been executed and made a lot more sense. And they probably didn't think that somebody would screenshot it and start that conversation, but,
Speaker 1:unfortunately was started. Yes.
Speaker 6:Yeah. There's so many media reporters. If I didn't pick up on it, somebody else would have. But I think that Conde Nast overall right now is on life support. Like, we had this conversation when Vanity Fair is looking for their next editor.
Speaker 6:Unfortunately, like, it's happening immediately right after that with this new this new Vogue editor. Mhmm. It's a lot of it's a lot of pressure for, like, I don't know what. Like, a few more years of running this magazine, it just doesn't really seem like how it doesn't Vogue doesn't seem I don't know what I would look to Vogue for right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It kinda goes back to that idea of, like, the the independent media creator versus the legacy media creator. Like, we just released an ad for Wander that they we said they asked us. They barely even asked us to make it, and we just wrote it, shot it, directed it, like edited it.
Speaker 2:We just did everything. We sent them the final thing and they were like, yeah. Cool. And so The brand carried through.
Speaker 1:There was like a second that they asked for a tweak.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They were like, actually our font is this one instead of that one. And that was And so and so like, that is the type of, like, you know, entrepreneurial energy that I'm sure the particular partner that worked on, who actually starred in the commercial, would bring to a partnership and select and and coordinate with a brand that was actually aligned. But there were just, like, too many spreadsheet monkeys in the office that day, and so it just went on what cooled their eye.
Speaker 6:I was like, why wouldn't you just hand these to the hungover girls at Barstool and, like, have them talk about, like, how this is, like, the bar like, the hangover snack? Like, that, I think, would have moved the needle more than Totally. I don't know. But
Speaker 2:are the when I when I think of logical vote partnerships, I think of, like, luxury brands. Are luxury brands pulling back from that type of partnership? Like, have you seen anything there? Like, what are what what are the innovative things that you're seeing from, like, the really top tier brands out there? Have you seen anything cool?
Speaker 6:You know what I saw today? Do you know those David bars? Like, the metallic Yeah.
Speaker 2:We had them on the show.
Speaker 6:I love them. Yeah. I saw that Balenciaga at their show this week. Somebody posted a photo of, like, Balenciaga bars. Like Oh, there we go.
Speaker 6:The same sort of metallic
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:Metallic label. I took a photo of it. I'll send it to you guys after this.
Speaker 2:That's very cool.
Speaker 6:So I mean, like, is that going to move their their hoodies? I don't know. But, like, that's those sort of fun, weird moments are more exciting to me if we're talking about nutrition bars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it certainly shows that, like, Balenciaga is still on the, you know, hip or just aware because, like, Peter Ruholl, he's kind of, you know, known in consumer packaged goods world and a little bit intact. And some people know the story of r of RxBarr and then David Barr with the revenue ramp. Like, the business is doing well, but it's still, like, a complete insider industry story. Like, the average person on the street doesn't know that.
Speaker 2:So Balenciaga is kinda signaling a little bit to that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like, hey. We're cool with the new business community. And I'm sure that that took them, like, a couple thousand bucks, like, put together. Like, you know, it's not difficult.
Speaker 6:As far as what what luxury brands are doing, I think it's a lot of events now. Like, they're putting a lot of money into events. Like, I was just at a Chanel event. They do a lot of programming with Tribeca Film Festival, which is cool because everybody's in the city anyway. So they they throw events and make sure that people show up to that.
Speaker 6:I think that a lot of my social calendar in New York right now is dominated by brand events. It just seems to be what's moving the needle because people go and they get photos of themselves and they post it, and it's like, the brand is the background. So you end up being like, New York just feels like a billboard every time you go out now because everything is a brand It's dominating how people are organizing their social calendars.
Speaker 2:I don't go to events. I don't go outside. I just stream. What makes for a good brand event? Like, this just a happy hour?
Speaker 2:Is that what we're talking about? Is there a dance?
Speaker 6:A bad brand event?
Speaker 1:It's actually interesting that the thing I'll say, we were talking about SVB
Speaker 2:Oh, glad they threw dinners.
Speaker 1:Earlier. They they would they would throw dinners that Sure. Like like there's an entire founder dinner industrial complex that are just like financial or you know, companies that that throw these dinners. The funny thing is that within tech Yeah. The company has historically failed to make them social moments.
Speaker 1:So it'd be like, it'll say the name, it'll say SVB on the menu. Yeah. Aren't like taking a picture of the menu as much as they're just like taking pictures. So I think what the luxury brands do well is you're saying, hey.
Speaker 2:Gonna invite Step and repeat.
Speaker 1:200 people into this space professional photographer. And you're not gonna be able if you post any photos at all, we're gonna be your brand. Getting exposure.
Speaker 6:We're gonna have a moment. Yeah. I I threw a brand dinner or a feed me dinner with my friend Paul from the infatuation last year, and Andrew Ross Sorkin was sitting next to me, and I gave him a feed me keychain. That was my brand moment.
Speaker 1:That's a great moment.
Speaker 6:So that's another thing. Like, at the those dinners are How
Speaker 2:are brands being creative? Are we seeing, like, ice sculptures or step and repeats? Like like, how how can brands stand out with one of those?
Speaker 6:Like, the worst possible brand event is a DJ and free drinks. Like, just people standing in front of, like, a 22 year old DJ with, like, free drinks. And then more innovative things are, like I think when you give people an activity to do, like, you are doing, like, bowling or and making it, like, glamorous or, like, you know, now brands are are if they're doing a collab with, like, an athletic brand, they'll they'll take a bunch of women to, like, tennis courts or a golf club in Connecticut, and, like, that's a photo op for everybody involved. So, like, these mini expeditions. Or Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, J. Crew last year took a bunch of people on a gorgeous sailboat in the Hudson River off of, like, the seaport in
Speaker 1:the It's basically like take your customers on a date.
Speaker 7:Right.
Speaker 6:Like an extravagant Give them adventurous photo. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then if you level up, then you're you're gonna start talking about, like, brand trips.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like Hermes took people to Aspen last summer and True.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, a ton of VC firms do that all the time. Come with us, and we'll do a track day or movie night, or we'll go out to, you know, the the some you know Ranch. Beautiful place, some ranch and like shoot shotguns and have dinners and it's a whole weekend.
Speaker 6:Where's my call? I wanna do that.
Speaker 2:They should get you on the calls. We'll we'll introduce you folks.
Speaker 1:Post mortem on the democratic primary Mhmm. But just on the marketing, right? There was a lot of coverage of Zoran's basically film, you know, vertical video making abilities that seems to have played a key role in the campaign. I'm curious.
Speaker 2:So are you talking to any, like, TikTokers or content creators that are like, I want to build a business around this for politicians? That would be interesting.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I had a friend who I used, actually used to work with at Conde Nast who worked in the White House for Biden, and I think that she helped out with Zoran's campaign. Like Oh, wait a people who know I think, like, you have to be excellent at that job if you're working Yep. For a political political campaign, especially in the White House because the turnaround times are insane and the levels of approvals that they need to go through are crazy as they should be. So I think there's like a mini network.
Speaker 6:I mean, there's there are a lot of people that worked in the White House under Biden who used to work at Instagram. Like, they were recruited straight from Meta. So that's definitely a thing. But I think that organizing is a tremendous amount of work and, like, part of that is digitally now like and and Zoran did that really well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to think about how the presidential election felt like the podcast election Yep. And then the the this primary felt like the short form election, and that sort of it makes sense especially as you're trying to just appeal to younger and younger voters.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, his team invited me to start covering his campaign back in February. Like, I was I was at a party, I think, in March for him, but he's he also went on, like, throwing fits and a few other podcasts, and he did, like, a q and a with me for Feed Me. So he his team knew where to where to activate.
Speaker 2:That's good. We've been talking a ton about the AI talent wars. There's a lot of people in Silicon Valley making a $100,000,000 for in signing bonuses. Silicon Valley notoriously bad at spending money. New York famously good at spending money.
Speaker 2:What are some recommendations that you can give to these PhD researchers that have a $100,000,000 burning a hole in their pocket? They wanna get in the game. They wanna step up their fashion, their cars, their houses. What would you recommend?
Speaker 6:It's it's funny that you go to fashion and cars because I think there's a real, a Louis Mangione situation on our hands here with this kind of job. So I feel like you need a security guard.
Speaker 2:Like, awesome security guard.
Speaker 1:For sure. Yep.
Speaker 6:Plain clothes security guard which means like those tight Lacoste polos, you know?
Speaker 2:Okay. Maybe they should be carrying too. Maybe they should, you know, if you if you got the you gotta be everyday carry now if you're making a $100,000,000.
Speaker 1:It's gotten more lenient. Yep.
Speaker 6:So I I feel like you have to staff up in a in a position like this. Like, you want a driver who's trustworthy and isn't gonna, like, leak your information, a personal trainer
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:Who's trustworthy, a Feed Me subscription.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 6:There we go. And then I think it's, like, removing friction from areas of your life with, like, staffing up like that. Mhmm. I recently learned that, this neighborhood in the Hamptons called Sagaponic is a a microclimate, and I'm I feel like that's a good place to invest your money. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Wait. Break that down a little bit a little bit more. It's just it's just on an average day, it's nicer there?
Speaker 6:I think it's From a water nicer. I think it might be like wetter and more humid than other areas. Like, I am in a different neighborhood than that. And if you were there right now, it would feel different than here even though it's not that far away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like like, you can be like, Long Island as a whole is hot today, but Sagaponic could could have a different weather report because it's this micro subclimate
Speaker 6:Because of the dunes and the tides and the trees. And
Speaker 2:There's different parts of LA that have the same kind of dynamic as
Speaker 6:well. I mean, isn't San Francisco like that too?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Famously. That's why in the summer, it'll still be it'll still be foggy and stuff. But then it's really warm later in the year.
Speaker 6:So Right. Yeah. So I I feel like investing in a climate is a good way to spend your that just sounds wise. Yep. They're not making
Speaker 1:any more of them. They're not
Speaker 6:And then I I think that you need to use your money to start taking some some experts to dinner because you can't just start buying watches and clothes. There's a really high chance that you'll miss and go for, like, trendy items. So I would try to hang out with, like do you guys know the watch dealer, Mike Nouveau? Like, somebody like him or, you know, like, take him out dinner, talk to him, and and get some advice. I bought a watch from him last year, and he seems like he knows his stuff.
Speaker 2:What'd you pick up?
Speaker 6:I got my husband a nice watch.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's go. Let's go for the husband.
Speaker 9:Congratulations. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Two size gongs. One interview. That's how you know it's a good one.
Speaker 2:A birthday and a gift.
Speaker 6:And maybe like befriend Chris Black or like another stylish guy and get him to advise consult on the closet.
Speaker 1:Can you get us can you get us Chris Black on the show because I the only podcast merch I've ever bought was their merch that they released Yeah. Where it was a cease and desist from the New York Times. Got it. Because they like copied the cover art printed made a shirt, sold it. That's great.
Speaker 1:It was a was a work of art.
Speaker 6:Chris would definitely come on. I'll connect you guys. That'd awesome. Yeah. I think the the biggest mistake that people who come into a lot of money quickly make is just, you know, doing that automatic Apple Pay on on while they're shopping, and then you end up with stuff that doesn't fit you or looks horrible or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So stylists, tech
Speaker 6:Stylists, but we're just, like, paid friends. You know? Friends. Take take people out to dinner, host parties, like keep them around. You know?
Speaker 2:Do do do you think it's good to surround yourself with yes men?
Speaker 6:What do you what's how do you
Speaker 2:So if you surround yourself with yes men, then whatever ideas you have, all your yes men will just tell you, yes. That's the best idea ever. A lot of people say, don't do it. But maybe it's
Speaker 6:I would not do that.
Speaker 2:Everyone around me has been saying that it's a good idea.
Speaker 6:No. I would not. That's not good.
Speaker 2:Okay. So stay away from the yes men.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You want yes people on your team where you say, I wanna do the impossible and they just say Yes. Yes. We're gonna do it. But, there's there's a line, you know, you don't you don't wanna cross it.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic.
Speaker 6:Thanks, guys. See soon. Checkup.
Speaker 2:So send us the invoice for the 100 k appearance fee, and, we'll look forward
Speaker 6:to doing
Speaker 1:it soon. Send the next few or two.
Speaker 6:Happy fourth of July.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Happy fourth. Fourth of July. Have fun. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Up next, have Murt from Helios here to talk about stable coins, talk about crypto, talk about NFT
Speaker 1:We're doing it all this show.
Speaker 2:Doing it all this show. Very excited to talk to Murt. He put on an absolute clinic during the last show. He might be having some technical difficulties. So let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 2:Daniel, growing Daniel says, OpenAI is super nice for giving everyone the week off for interviews at Meta. And Elon Musk is crying emoji laughing. Absolutely brutal. You saw the Wander ad, but you can still find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning.
Speaker 2:$24.07 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Vittorio says, I used to pray for the day nerds would be treated like athletes. The day is finally here and it's glorious and it's our post put up by Tyler Cosgrove, the intern. Tyler got 25,000 likes.
Speaker 2:Vitorio, quote tweeted it, get 50 k. You'll love to see it. Anyway, we have Murt in the studio. Welcome to
Speaker 1:the stream.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Can we put over
Speaker 10:I am having some technical difficulties. Can you hear me?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You look good. The only thing is maybe rotate the camera if you're on your phone so we can go horizontal. But, other than that, that looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Looking good.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for taking the time. I know you're, really, you know, a jet setter at heart all over the world. But very excited to talk to you. There's a ton of stuff going on in the crypto world that we wanted to talk about. Should we start with the idea of of private companies on chain?
Speaker 2:Is that a good place to start?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Sure. So there's a there's a few versions of this that that have just been announced. One by Republic and one by Robinhood. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Do you wanna just go over both? Or
Speaker 1:Yeah. I Yeah. Let's start there. And then I I basically wanna cover public and privates, but we can start with privates.
Speaker 10:Sure. Yeah. I mean, so the details on these, are a little fuzzy just because, I think, at least, the name of the game for some of them seems to be regulatory arbitrage. But so for example, in the case of Robinhood, they just announced that they're going to have it. Yep.
Speaker 10:And they didn't really give any specific details other than it would be on their own optimized chain blockchain for RWAs. For Republic, they basically said and by the way, people thought this was for trading these private equity, these private shares, but they're actually just for buying them and then holding them. Then you actually get in in in Republic's case, you you you're locked up for about a year. And and I believe the maximum size you can do is actually only $5,000. So I think they're basically just trying to test the waters and and and see how the regulars will react is my reading of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The five k limit is interesting. The lack of immediate liquidity is interesting too. It's I mean, it's clearly a product for retail. The the other thing that I was thinking about is, you know, if you if you just released, you know, SpaceX shares on chain, there's almost gonna be infinite demand for them.
Speaker 1:And so, the limit could also just be, hey, we want as many people to to be able to access these as possible. Or it just gets, you know, bid up and bid up. But it sounds like it'll be fixed price. Any any reaction to Robinhood setting up their own chain to do this? And then it's also Europe only from what I could tell?
Speaker 10:Right. And and by the way, just on the the Republic, private shares thing, it's actually, I looked into this. It's, it's a mirrored asset, so it's it's purely mimicking the performance of the of the price of the shares. And then it's a note on, the upside in the event of a liquidity event. So, it's it's not like you're you're actually owning the the stock by any means, obviously.
Speaker 10:For for Robinhood, yeah. I mean, they it see so it seems like they decided to launch on Arbitrum, the the l two to start with with the eventual understanding that they will launch it on their own optimized chain. I think, you know, Robinhood has always been has always been, like, a vertically integrated company that wants full control over the design, The U user experience, the abstractions. And so I think building your own chain for this, makes sense because, I mean, they obviously already have the liquidity of the users and the distribution. So so I think it makes sense provided that, you know, they can hire you know, Vlad can go full ZUC mode and hire some, crypto talent to to run the Blockchain because that's hard work.
Speaker 1:Run the Blockchain. Break down the, what's hap I've seen enough screenshots this week so far. I think you were sharing some of them of people swapping something an esteemed asset like Fartcoin for some Tesla shares. What is actually happening there? Are they Is it just a Is it Is there act Are are the the the ex Tesla or whatever these are, are they tied to any real underlying asset?
Speaker 1:Is it entirely vibes? What's actually going on?
Speaker 10:Yes. So as sophisticated investors, we we've been swapping Farpoint into the Tesla and Nvidia stock and and even Meta now. And so these shares actually are backed won by fully backed by the the custodian. It's quite fascinating how it works actually. And and these are only available in Europe, by the way, both in the case of Robinhood and, Kraken and and this company called Batch that's actually doing the regulatory stuff.
Speaker 10:So what happens is there's some KYC at the beginning of the process where you actually have to buy from the primary market. But then once it's withdrawn to the the the blockchain, it's basically there's, like, this loophole where they're trio like certificates. Mhmm. And and so you can as long as, you know, you say that these aren't supposed to be allowed for USA investors, as long as you basically just say that and, you know, you put the fine print there. Once you do that, they're just treated like digital assets.
Speaker 10:And so when you do trade, you know, you know, ShareCoin 3,000 into Nvidia stock, it actually is like, you're you're getting something that's a bat one one to one. However, it's the same with the the private stocks where there's, like, a pretty big limitation on the liquidity. Mhmm. Like, I think, you know, a 100,000,000 is, like, the max that can be issued, at this point, and they're doing, like, several tens of millions, in volume. So nothing crazy yet.
Speaker 10:But
Speaker 1:How are they trading? Like Are they are they trade do are are are they're not stable. Right?
Speaker 10:No. No. Yeah. So there's a
Speaker 1:So they can trade at a premium?
Speaker 10:Yeah. No. They're not this isn't, it's it's, not like a micro strategy play. We can talk about the treasury, companies as well, but, the prices are supposed to be indexed, one to one. And what's interesting is, like, you can now, obviously compose this with other applications in DeFi.
Speaker 10:Right? So you can literally, buy Tesla stock and then take out a loan against it, and then maybe a Farpoint at that point. So, like, you can do all sorts of different things. And you can just, like, hold it in your wallet. It's pretty cool, but, like, it's just it's very, very early, so I wouldn't make any
Speaker 1:But how but how monumental But it feels pretty monumental. Right? Is this not what what people have been excited about for the for the last decade?
Speaker 2:Two decades. And was saying that he wanted a cryptocurrency that was backed by a basket of every financial asset. And, like, we're on the cusp of it. It feels like that you could have, like, a token that owns a slice of the S and P, a slice of physical gold, a slice of real estate, and it'd be kind of, like, the most stable asset, even more stable than the dollar potentially. That was, like, the original thesis.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 3:guess That was actually, by
Speaker 10:the way, that video
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. You actually surfaced that video. That video is predicted in 1999.
Speaker 9:It's awesome.
Speaker 10:But, yeah, I mean, it is huge. Right? Like, it's gotten a lot of attention, and and it's very exciting that you can just basically start to, like, actually modernize the financial rails. Pat Patrick Collison from Stripe had a really good way of describing stablecoins, which was like, these are this is like dollars on, like, superconductor rails, right, where there's now no friction, and you can just compose with any other financial instruments, obviously, that's on the blockchain. And it's it's just it's got it's taken so much work to actually get here and clear all these regulatory hurdles.
Speaker 10:But, you know, it's it's it's it's really just beginning. I think there's gonna be once Robinhood gets in and everybody else starts getting I think Coinbase will also start pretty soon. Right? They also have their own blockchain. So I think it's gonna start getting very competitive.
Speaker 2:Okay. I was talking to a retail investor who would be, like, so excited about 150
Speaker 1:IQ? Interesting.
Speaker 2:Alright. So so it would be so excited to be able to buy private company shares on chain, be able to buy all sorts of stuff on chain. I but he was particularly very upset and still held a grudge from the GameStop rally where there was no buy button. There was only a sell button, and he felt like betrayed by the platform. Now when I dug into it, it seemed like the the situation with Robinhood was much more nuanced than that, and there was actually some liquidity constraints and there were a lot of reasons why they chose the whole narrative of like, oh, they Ken Griffin called them and told them to, you know, save some hedge fund.
Speaker 2:I didn't really buy into that. But anyway, the I think the more important question is when you put something on chain, the idea is like the the code is decentralized. No one has the button to turn something off. But the the downside of that is that you could maybe get into some situation where the like, if there's if there's a, you know, reinforcing feedback loop of sell pressure or buy pressure, you could really, really distort the market. And so I'm wondering, like, you know, I'm thinking about the Terra Luna situation or any of these situations where there was like this perfect perpetual motion machine but then the fact that it was actually the that someone couldn't step in and just put pump the brakes was actually bug not a feature at that moment in time.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if there are potential risks to having real world assets on chain that that that where where everything is is is in code. Does that make any sense? Am I asking any sort of reasonable question here? Can you just nail on that a little bit?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's it's certainly a very valid point, and it's also why the Genius Act for stablecoins was pretty monumental. Mhmm. Because, like, you know, Terra Luna also had, some very, funky concepts around their stablecoins and their, you know, not actually being backed by anything. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And and with the new stablecoin act, which, like, puts very or, you know, much more clear, framework on, like, how how often should these things be audited, how should they be backed, who can do this, whatever. And with this new regulatory approach, consumers and users actually have, like, way better benefits and way better guarantees. Right? And and it's also right. Like, we it's obviously decentralized finance, but it's also programmable finance.
Speaker 10:Right? So Mhmm. In the case of an l two, for example, you know, Robinhood can add, again, the same types of rules that that to enact some sort of control and and, like, maybe freeze something. USCC can already do this today, by the way. Right?
Speaker 10:USCC can actually freeze the USCC per on a wallet on a per wallet basis. And, even on Solana, you can do this. Right? The smart contracts have certain hooks, depending on how the issuer of the token actually encodes these. So you can actually still program these, to to get, like, the compliance, you know, flavor that you want.
Speaker 10:The difference is that it's it's it's, extremely transparent. Right? You can read the code, you can be like, okay. This is what can happen in this situation, and this is what they did. And so you can actually audit it, and and it's very verifiable.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I have a question about Arabor. This story kinda leaked out today in the Financial Times about Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel, and some other folks, Joe Lonsdale, working on something that sounds like a stablecoin bank. I would love to hear about the problems that crypto companies run into with banks. What might they solve if they if you were imagining the list of to dos?
Speaker 2:And then is are there any I mean, there's been a few crypto friendly banks, but if I have it correct, like, Robinhood isn't a bank, Coinbase isn't a bank, Circle's not a bank, Stripe isn't a bank, or or maybe you can correct me there, but just kind of take me through the the the problem that banks solve and then like, in the current in the current structure, and then what problems are do stablecoin companies still face with the traditional banking system?
Speaker 10:Right. Yeah. So, I think, actually, Mike, from Pirate Wires and Nick Carter, did a really good job on Operation Chokepoint where where they kinda go in detail into the debanking of of of of these industries. Mhmm. I have, like, a much more trivial example, which is my cofounder.
Speaker 10:He's a he's a he's Canadian, unfortunately, just like me. And he he went to get a mortgage for his for his new house. And at first, I I think they, like, approved him, and then they they looked at where he worked, which is Healius, company that we run. And then they actually rescinded the mortgage. And they said it was you're in crypto even though we don't have, like, a token.
Speaker 10:We're basically a cloud provider. And they said it's too high risk of an industry, and they actually, he couldn't get a mortgage. Wow. Well and, like, this is Canada. And, so, like, in terms of problems, you know, there's a lot of maybe there's two dimensions to this.
Speaker 10:One is just the interoperability. Right? Like, being able to off ramp, on ramp, compose. Like, if you're earning money, USCC on chain, how exactly are you transferring that? How are you doing payroll?
Speaker 10:All sorts of things, like, the tech side of it. And then just, like, being able to get access, has been historic quote. Especially I think this is changing, especially with, you know, the the president of the free world and, actually, the first lady both being the the founders of various shitcoins. I I think it's certainly changing. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. We saw that.
Speaker 2:What what
Speaker 1:what was the the announcement
Speaker 2:last week? The the social media founder? The founder of Truth Social? He because he has a coin.
Speaker 1:Right? Unicorn. People don't give
Speaker 2:him enough credit. It's very rare that a that a founder of a social media company as big as Truth Social has a side hustle as demanding as being the president of The United States. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there was a lot
Speaker 10:of There
Speaker 1:was there was also the news that I'm forgetting the governing body but they were advising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start looking at crypto assets Mhmm. In the mortgage process.
Speaker 10:The federal housing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So there's progress.
Speaker 10:Right. Yeah. So yeah, that so that one's super interesting, where you can actually, I believe the exact rule is something like the assets that you have on a centralized exchange like a Coinbase Mhmm. And and soon to be, I guess, Robinhood, you you can actually take out a mortgage using those assets as collateral. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And and I believe they actually I don't know if this was real news. I didn't look too too into it, but, like, I believe they were actually looking at, like, if Farcoin is viable to use as mortgage collateral. Because, like, it obviously needs to have some certain properties. But, yeah, that that can be very interesting. I I'm not sure how it'll go.
Speaker 10:You know, the devil's always in the details for these things, but there's a lot of progress. Right? Like, two years ago with Gary Gensler at, let's say, being the eye of Sauron, you could not even like, you could not even think this. You you you would he would arrest you in your sleep. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So and then everybody left The States as a result, and now they're coming back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the Eye of Sauron is closed, and the Mountain Of Erebor is born. So Well, we'll have to have you back on soon to talk more. This is fantastic. Thanks so much for calling in.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's late wherever you are and we really appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to catch up.
Speaker 2:We'll talk
Speaker 1:to soon. You always catch
Speaker 2:me up. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:So many zingers.
Speaker 2:The the the crypto vernacular is just undefeated. But you heard Emily Sundberg tell it mention it earlier. She bought her husband a watch. You can buy your husband or wife a watch on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com.
Speaker 2:Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And our next guest has an absolute hitter. I saw him in DC wearing a JLC Reverso.
Speaker 6:Is. Not
Speaker 2:to dox your watch but it's a fantastic Rockstarch.
Speaker 1:Great. Great. Now he's got a Always a pleasure.
Speaker 6:And by the
Speaker 8:way, look at this.
Speaker 2:Oh, he's
Speaker 6:got it.
Speaker 2:I love the Let's go. Urno. The Urno Reverso. Beautiful. It's a beautiful watch.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic. It is a great story.
Speaker 8:Beautiful Great story. It was actually it was a gift from my wife for my, thirtieth birthday. So beautiful watch for my family for my thirtieth birthday, so I'm thrilled to have it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, if I remember the story correctly, it was different time zones for a while.
Speaker 8:That's right.
Speaker 1:So the That's right.
Speaker 2:No no better watch than the Reverso to represent That's right. Where you are physically and where your future wife is.
Speaker 8:Fantastic. Right. JLC sponsor the pod. We're ready.
Speaker 2:Really? We are so ready. So ready. Until then, get bezel.com.
Speaker 1:Was lovely having you on yesterday. Yes. A lot tends to happen in twenty four hours these days. Yes. What, what's new?
Speaker 2:Give us the update.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's a big twenty four hours. First of all, has anyone ever done the two day in a row GTN?
Speaker 2:Delian Delian did once kind of by accident. He came on. Wow. He was scheduled, every other Thursday, and he happened to stop by our YC demo day stream for a very different thing. We hit him with the confetti cannon.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 8:That's alright. Alright. We love Deli and that's fine. Big twenty four hours in Washington. In fact, it started right after I hung up with you guys.
Speaker 8:I don't know if you saw this. In the background of my shot yesterday, you had this beautiful vista over Downtown DC. And as we were talking, there was a huge storm cloud starting to come in and completely raining on top of all of DC. So you guys know this. I think people probably know.
Speaker 8:In congress, there is no remote voting. You are either voting in person, or if you are not there, you do not get a say in what happens. And right now, the big beautiful bill, which is in the hands of the house, is on the precipice. It could go either way. It might pass.
Speaker 8:It may not pass, but every single vote is necessary. And I kid you not, there was a ground stop in the morning at DCA, and there were multiple members who were stopped, prevented from coming back into town to vote because of the huge storm in Washington last night. So just to give you a sense of how quickly things move.
Speaker 2:It's a biblical metaphor for sure. A flood
Speaker 8:It is it is biblical. I don't always see divine providence in politics. In fact, I just about never see it, but it's pretty hard to argue with a, a full grand stuff in DC.
Speaker 2:So so does this make, JD Vance's vote more important, less important? What what what's the read on Vance's role here?
Speaker 8:So Vance is the president of the senate. When there's a fifty fifty tie in the senate, which is what happened yesterday, his vote is the most crucial vote. And that's why, by the way, if you are any dem, governor Shapiro, AOC, whomever running in 2028, it is now a phenomenal gift to you that you can go and badger Davey Vance about his vote yesterday. But the bill is in the house today, so there's no Vance vote. There's no tiebreaker.
Speaker 8:There is no in fact, the the GOP basically has eight votes or I'm sorry, four votes they could lose. There were eight people who didn't show up this morning. There are four votes they could lose and still get the vote passed. And so all day, there's been this series starting in the morning of procedural votes as a way of checking just who from the conference is even in town to begin with before they get to the actual vote itself. This is, literally It's
Speaker 6:like a
Speaker 1:roll it's a roll call.
Speaker 8:It is literally a roll call. My mom was a teacher for a while. My grandmother was a teacher her whole career. There is zero difference between my grandmother teaching a special ed class doing roll call and what's happening today in congress. Maybe a slight difference, but basically no difference.
Speaker 8:Alright. So there's a couple of factions. You guys talked about yesterday the menu of different people within the GOP.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:The big challenge today is picking up votes where the GOP can, where the Republican Party can in the menu of factions. The two big ones to keep an eye on are the House Republican moderates and the House Freedom Caucus, which are the sort of more extreme, further ideologically opposed folks. If you're a moderate, you don't like it for one simple reason, which is it says a bunch of Medicaid cuts. In fact, there are far more Medicaid cuts in the senate version of the bill, which is what you're being asked to vote on, and the house version of the bill that you passed a couple weeks ago. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And you don't wanna hang that around your neck when you go back home. Remember, if you're in the house, you are always in campaign mode. You're running every two years. That's why you were out of town to begin with because anytime there's a weekend, you're flying home to your district to go pick up a couple extra dollars. Right?
Speaker 8:So the moderates don't like it because of the Medicaid cuts, huge Medicaid cuts. The conservatives don't like it. The far conservatives and the freedom caucus don't like it because it actually blows up a framework, a balanced budget or close to balanced budget framework that they passed in the house last time. So they got to a basically a compromise agreement with spending cuts and with tax cuts that the senate completely ignored. So that's much harder for them.
Speaker 8:And part of Trump's success, if this bill gets passed, will be because he convinces people from the Freedom Caucus in particular to flip and become supporters of the big beautiful bill.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So wrapping up on JD Vance
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If if the vote goes through in the house, then people will hang on on him. What happens if the bill passes? Does the other bill automatically die? Is there some sort of trigger there?
Speaker 8:So if the house passes the bill today, the house is looking at the senate's version of the bill. Yeah. The house passes that bill today, it goes right to the president's desk for signature. That is the plan a scenario.
Speaker 6:If
Speaker 8:you're the admin, what you're hoping happens
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:Is it gets passed, it goes through. Plan b or plan c even is the house says, we wanna reopen the bill and add a bunch of different amendments because we don't like the Medicaid cuts or we don't like the deficit expansion or whatever. And then it goes back to the senate where, by the way, the Republican party may or may not have the votes to get it done, and suddenly JD Vance gets into that spotlight again.
Speaker 2:Got it. Okay. So the so, yeah, so the house can't change anything in the senate bill right now. They just have to decide yay or nay.
Speaker 8:That's exactly right. They if they if they reopen, if they make any changes, which, by the way, a lot of people in the house want them to do, then the senate has to go through the entire procedure of passing it again, which is a huge risk factor for them.
Speaker 2:Yep. Is there any chance
Speaker 1:that the house tries to add back in that that AI, state level AI legislation ban, or is that even
Speaker 8:not in the conversation? I think it's fairly unlikely. Right? Given the overwhelming I mean, listen. Given it was a 99 to one, repudiation of a rebuke rebuke of the AI moratorium, I think it's unlikely the house added it back in because that's a signal from the senate saying, look.
Speaker 8:If you put this back into the bill, all that's gonna happen is we're gonna lose even more procedural time getting it out of the bill again when it comes back to us the next number of days. Yeah. But the only way this passes before the July 4 deadline, in my view, is if the house basically swallows the senate version as is today.
Speaker 2:Yep. So you you kind of define some of the the attack lines on the right with the moderates going after the Medicaid cuts and the, and the farther right Freedom Caucus. Is that right? Saying Yeah. That, they want more of a balanced bill.
Speaker 2:Have any particular attack lines been opened on the left that you've seen?
Speaker 8:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the left looks at this. This is Christmas if you're on the left. Right?
Speaker 8:You get basically to say, wow. The Republicans voted to take away your Medicaid, which is a huge bludgeon. You guys remember back in the OGT party, all those signs, keep your government hands off my Medicare, keep your government hands off my Medicaid. Right? This is a horseshoe issue.
Speaker 8:Our people on the left and on the right are equally impacted by it, and the net result of that is that it's a great campaign line no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So here's an example. North Carolina, we talked yesterday about senator Tillis from North Carolina who's not running for reelection and who ultimately voted against the big beautiful bill passage. Tillis has a group of folks in the house who are predominantly from his state delegation, who he has some influence, some relationship with. Right?
Speaker 8:Many of whom have signaled more many of them are moderates, and many of whom have signaled, I have some reluctance to vote for the bill. Part of the reluctance is because the Democratic governor of North Carolina wrote a letter where he basically said, look. If you vote for the bill, I am going to make sure that these Medicaid cuts become a big issue in the next campaign because they massively impact his state budget. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania did the same thing where he said, look. If you vote for the bill, you should know that you will be impacting the Medicaid of Pennsylvanians, and I will use that politically against you.
Speaker 8:The last part is implied.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. This has been really, really helpful. I've genuinely learned a lot. So thank you for stopping by.
Speaker 6:This is great.
Speaker 1:You may not have been the first person to go back to back, but I have a feeling you'll be the first
Speaker 2:To go back to back to back. Back to back to back breaking it down for us.
Speaker 8:So Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah. We'll always have you back on the Chiron? Yeah.
Speaker 8:Exactly. I can't see the Chiron, but I'm hoping it says Washington correspondent.
Speaker 2:That'll make my note. We we will definitely update it tomorrow. Thank you so much. President of Washington.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Great. I'll see
Speaker 2:you guys tomorrow. Sure.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Cheers, Zach. Cheers. Thank
Speaker 2:you. Up next, have our lightning round beginning with John from Parraform. Welcome to the stream, John. How are you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:What's happening?
Speaker 9:Good, guys. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:What's the latest? Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? Jordy's getting the hammer ready. What's the latest news? Do you have any good numbers for us?
Speaker 2:We love big numbers, hopefully with lots of zeros.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Hey, everyone. Yeah. Great to meet you guys. I'm one of the founders and CEO of a company called Periphorm.
Speaker 9:We just announced our 20,000,000 series a led by Felicis and an incredible group of founders.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. I like when Jordy does it because he goes in the camera feed. That's great.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Yeah. $20,000,000. That's amazing. Tell us what the company does, the inciting concept, concept, the idea, how big you are, the scale of the business right now, that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:Let me guess. You're gonna hire one fifth of an AI researcher. Use of funds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We're getting one day a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fractional.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fractional. Fractional AI researcher.
Speaker 9:Oh, I saw that. And also, like, the founding engineer who, you know, is four four different companies. I think his name was So Hong. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:No. Yeah. But for for those of you who don't know, Paraform is a marketplace where we help the world's most important companies hire top talent
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:By connecting them with expert recruiters who actually act more like sports agents than talent sourcers. And, you know, I've actually seen your your post recently about the Meta Superintelligence team. Like, you guys framed it as, like, traded. Yep. Internally, we've been talking about this for over a year, and it's really cool to see that sort of trend sort of playing out live, but, also, it's happening a lot sooner than we thought.
Speaker 9:So really interesting to, like, dive deeper into, like, the trend of, like, just recruiting in general. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been we've been talking about this a lot because it's good content. It's interesting. And I think what what's the surprising thing that we learned this week, I think, is that we put up that traded graphic for the Meta AI researcher, and it got millions of views, like millions of views.
Speaker 2:And it's funny, and there's an element that can go broader, but it really does speak to the fact that tech has gone mainstream. The question that we've been mulling is where does this go next? Because when you look at the GOAT debate between LeBron James and Michael Jordan, you're looking at points per game. You're looking at lifetime career points, number of MVPs won, number of championships won. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What metrics are you interested in looking at? Is LinkedIn still relevant? Is GitHub still relevant? Are you quantifying these things? What are you doing to try and match these folks together?
Speaker 2:You imagine that AI can be very useful. There's a whole bunch of different ways that I could imagine this working, but you probably have to do some filtering on both sides to understand who's a good recruiter and who's a good who who's good talent.
Speaker 9:For sure. Yeah. I think, like, you know, the the trend that you guys picked up, it's like you're onto something, and it's, like, very similar to what we think. It's like, I don't think that important tech company hiring, let's say, the best marketing person will be too dissimilar to the Lakers announcing that, you know, LeBron joined or the Dodgers getting Ohtani. I think how we think about it is as AI sort of, you know, rapidly advances and it automates a lot of the mundane work, I think humans sort of focus on more, like, higher order functions.
Speaker 9:Right? And one person will be able to do a lot more. Obviously, the GDP will accelerate, so the average salaries will go up. We've always internally talked about how the age of, like, a 7 figure salary is rapidly approaching. It already is for certain industries, but I think it will be a lot more mainstream.
Speaker 9:So, yeah, I think, like, there's gonna be more scarcity towards good talent. It's gonna get even more competitive. And when there's that scarcity, usually, the value of a broker goes up. And we actually see recruiters, you know, kind of turning into almost one of the most important roles in tech where, essentially, they're, like, brokering this human capital between the most important companies and making sure they represent the best talent. In terms of metrics, I think very similar to maybe, like, the MBA or the MLB.
Speaker 9:Like, obviously, they'll measure the company's performance. I think a lot of people commented on how, like, it's ridiculous to pay a $100,000,000 or whatever. But, really, these companies, they're smart. Like, they're doing that because the return on that is greater. Right?
Speaker 9:Like, I mean, solving AGI, I think, is, like, a important enough problem where where you do that. Right? So I think, you know, that's one thing that you're gonna measure. Right? Like, how well our company is going to perform and achieve their objectives.
Speaker 9:I think there's other, like, key KPIs. Like, you know, I'd imagine it's just like the North Star metrics for different teams. I wonder if there's gonna be universal things like points assists and, you know, minutes played. But, yeah, I think it's something interesting to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we kind of already do this at a little at, like, a smaller level when someone says, like, I was early at Stripe. What that really means is that, like Okay. You were there for the creation of, like, the first 50,000,000,000 of market cap or something.
Speaker 2:And so if you were one of 20 on that team, yeah, we might give you, you know, $50,000,000 in points, you're right, essentially. So, yeah, what what else is going on with the top of funnel? Where where where are candidates percolating up into the Paraform system these days?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So one of the fastest growing, roles we see are forward deployed engineers. Like, obviously, Palantir, they're one of our customers too. They they coined this term and really, do a good job of
Speaker 2:Sankar, the OG. First ever do it. You're the first, forward deployed engineer. He's been on the show.
Speaker 9:Exactly. Yeah. I think, you know, obviously, you know, you guys know this too, but, I think the biggest bottleneck in AI is quickly becoming implementation, right, where, you know, we already have very good LMs. We have already very good technology. It's just a matter of getting them into the hands of everyday people and the broader industry.
Speaker 9:And I think, you know, go to market motions are evolving to, like, actually fit this board deployed engineer role where, basically, you have to, like, customize your AI solutions to, you know, everyday everyday customers. So I think forward deployed engineers is where a lot of really good talent will converge. And at Periphorm, what we're seeing is not only companies like Palantir, but also, you know, companies you know, traditional companies like, you know, you know, that they're also, like, looking to hire for deployed engineers. So that's one trend we see emerging very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Any commentary? You mentioned Soham Parekh, the Indian engineer who works at three to four startups at the same time. He Yeah. Suhail says he's been preying on YC companies. Multiple people are hitting the timeline now saying that they fired this guy.
Speaker 2:That feels like something where we need almost like an inverse LinkedIn because clearly, he can pull jobs off of his LinkedIn and say he just worked at one place at a time. But do we need some sort of reputation score? Could that be abused? How does that evolve? Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I think it's also interesting interesting to think about, like, the kind of remote work versus in person. Like, this obviously wouldn't have happened if it was in person and you have to, like, validate things. But I think there's a really a lot of interesting things there. For example, you know, I think with AI like, I think AI can be incredibly helpful in the recruiting process, making it more efficient, but there's also gonna be a lot more spam. There's a lot like, recruiting is always driven by, like, this power law where, unfortunately, there's only a small amount of very good people and a large amount of you know, sort of it's like a long tail.
Speaker 9:Right? And I think with AI, I think that trend will, like, even accelerate. So I actually think that having a human in the loop to vet these things out, and not only just these things, but, like, think think about, like, culture fit, interpersonal dynamics. Do I like you? Like, these kind of things are actually, like, very much, like, what recruiters are effective at.
Speaker 9:So I think, you know, I think Paraform can help, you know, basically prevent these situations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. One one question just getting into I'm I'm sure this question came up in in various pitch meetings and throughout building the whole company. There's back in the early internet days, the .com era, every CEO said, hey, we're gonna need way less people and people are saying that again right now.
Speaker 1:How how would you answer that question? You're obviously building a a talent platform is like, you know and I'm sure people, you know, might say, well, what what happens in a year if the hiring market gets gets wrecked? How is that gonna impact your your business? Yeah. But I'm I'm curious how you, you know, see that market evolving.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I think fundamentally in terms of value creation, if you think about it from that perspective, like, I remember seeing a story where when Cursor, Windsurf, these tools became so mainstream, you know, like, these Fortune five hundreds, you know, they were asked, hey. Are you gonna hire less engineers? Because, you know, can one person do more? And they actually said no.
Speaker 9:Because of these tools, we're gonna hire even more engineers who can use this to be even more effective. Right? I think at the end of the day, like, there is a ton of value to be created. There's a lot more innovation to, you know, continue to happen. So I think that, actually, we're always going to need people.
Speaker 9:It's just that each person will be more effective. So I think we actually have a very optimistic view when it comes to, like, the human and AI collaboration. And I think another thing is, yeah, like, we talked about, like, the sports agent analogy. I think each talent will, you know, become more and more valuable. So, you know, maybe the frequency of hire may decrease, but the value of each hire increases.
Speaker 9:And when it comes to sort of, like, a success based model like Paraform, I think the value we capture is sort of actually increasing even more with this trend. So, yeah, I guess, like, not too worried there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk to yeah. Talk to us about where the value is occurring and where, where it's landed historically and where it's going forward. Like, when I've hired engineers through recruiting agencies, typically, the company pays, like, one month or two months of salary. So it's like a percentage, and then there's some sort of clawback if they don't make it after three three months.
Speaker 2:Sarah Guo was talking about how some folks are helping AI researchers negotiate, they're taking a cut of the pay. And it seems like they're taking it from the researcher because if I can get you 5% more, that could be millions of dollars. You're fine paying me $1,000,000 for that negotiation. Then there's platforms. So do you see that economic equation shifting from Yeah.
Speaker 2:The company paying to the employee paying to platform getting comped? How how is that evolving?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's our example is also, like, exactly, like, what's that's what sports agents and even in the music industry, I think that's what they kind of do. But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:To answer your question, I think where we are creating value is actually while keeping quality, you know, consistent and maybe even better, we're actually reducing the time to hire significantly. So, you know, like, every customer cares. The number one thing they care about is, you know, the best candidate's fast. Right? So the metric we look at is time to hire.
Speaker 9:And Perraform is making revenue by filling the most difficult world roles in the world. And we our average time to hire is under one month. And I think when it comes to efficiency, I think what what happens is at every step of the procurement process or the recruiting funnel, we're making it really, really efficient. I think we're basically decreasing downtime. For example, if you wanna work with a recruiting agency, you're relying on word-of-mouth.
Speaker 9:You never know whether they're good or not before you work with them, and there's a ton of these little things that waste your time and and, obviously, cost. But at Paraform, based on what our customers are looking for, we're able to match them with the best possible recruiters based on their track record, their candidate network. We have so much data on them that we're able to do, like, an instant good match of, like, best recruiter for the best role. So that already saves, like, weeks. And most customers find the candidate that they want they high end up hiring within the first week or two of posting on Paraform.
Speaker 9:And these are, like, director of engineering at, you know, high touch. Like, these are, like, very, very difficult roles. So I think that's where we create value. It's, you know, reducing the time to hire while maintaining and improving quality. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:I think we I think we had a I I'm it's coming back to me. Think we had a call maybe in 2023 early on. So it's amazing amazing amazing to see your progress and congratulations on the new round. Excited to excited to follow along.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Rest of your day. Really quickly, let me tell you about graphite. Graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. We have $2,000,000 series b from none other
Speaker 5:That's long time.
Speaker 2:Anthropics anthology fund with Menlo Ventures.
Speaker 1:We breakfast with a friend of the show Bailey Barrow this morning and he he honestly wouldn't stop talking about graphite. He's absolutely obsessed. He really was. Did say graphite fanboy.
Speaker 2:He said he's running the TBPN stack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's got all of our stuff graphite goes down the list but It's all good stuff. Harvey, Asana, Ramp, Replit. They basically they got every logo.
Speaker 2:They got every logo.
Speaker 1:They got every logo. But head over to graphite.dev and check it out yourself. Who do we got next?
Speaker 2:Well, we have some more timeline posts. So Mike Newpe, he's been on the show before talking about Arc AGI. Arc AGI three was just announced, the AI benchmark from Francois Cholet and Mike Newpe. And this came as unexpected. What?
Speaker 1:Aren't people still
Speaker 2:They're still struggling with arguing with AGI two. That's right. But the goal for ARC v two was to endure twelve to eighteen months. The goal for the b three is over three years. And so you he's talked about this before.
Speaker 2:When you design a benchmark, you you have to assume that, hey, that like if the current models are scoring 50% right now on your benchmark, are going to solve it in weeks. Like, it's not even it's gonna be days. Don't even People won't even bother with it. We were talking about this IMO Yeah. With with some folks from Cognition.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like the IMO is so close to being solved that people aren't even really focused on it more anymore because they're like, of course we can do that. Yeah. Let's not bother with it. And so the team was saying when you're designing a benchmark, you need to target not only will it get 1%, it'll get 0% in you need to imagine a benchmark that in a year, the AI will still be scoring, like, negative a 100%. Like, it will get every question, like, so wrong that it yeah.
Speaker 2:That it's that it's
Speaker 1:actually deducting even more points than you Like,
Speaker 2:you need to you need to really think through the philosophy of what makes a really really hard benchmark. And they've done it at Arc AGI and we're we're really happy to support the team over there. So if you're building a foundation model, head over and give it your best shot. And if you're human, go try and solve one of these prizes. They're pretty fun.
Speaker 1:They're pretty fun. More breaking news. Quentin Farmer, one of the co founders of Tollens has announced a series a led by Riboi over at Coastal Ventures.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 1:They launched just a few months ago. They have 3,000,000 downloads, $12,000,000 run rate and now adding this $20,000,000 series a.
Speaker 2:Wait, is this that?
Speaker 1:This is the one they're using
Speaker 2:Fun like, it's like Tamagotchi Like gets
Speaker 1:like purple Right. Purple dino things. No. Purple aliens.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alien best friend.
Speaker 1:Yep. So Brilliant. Absolutely ripping. Seven
Speaker 2:seventy six thousand reviews on the iOS app store 4.8. Wow. An alien best friend. Very cool. And and somehow less dystopian than the AI boyfriend
Speaker 1:guy has an article today that just came out. What could a healthy AI companion look So, you're looking for a healthy AI companion.
Speaker 2:I love it. Why don't you ring the gong for them and then we'll bring in our next guest.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Hit that gong Jordy for To land. Congratulations to the team over there. You're welcome to come on the show and and you're welcome to send one of your alien friends over to the show to do the interview
Speaker 6:for you.
Speaker 1:Send him on.
Speaker 2:Him on. Anyway, we have our next guest Amit from Luma AI coming on the stream. How are you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 3:Doing very well. Great to meet you as well and thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Of course. Welcome to the stream. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, any breaking news for us?
Speaker 3:Awesome. So my name is Amit. I'm one of the cofounders and CEO of Luma. At Luma, we are building basically what what we consider to be the future of multimodal intelligence. That includes what comes after LLMs, building multimodal models that learn from audio, video, language, image altogether.
Speaker 3:Our first product is video generation models, models that are able to generate video, audio altogether. And and currently, are working with with Hollywood. We are working with advertising agencies. We are working with also a lot of individual creators. And and we have about, like, know, tens of multiple tens of millions of users.
Speaker 3:We just don't talk about the exact number of users.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:Sure. What
Speaker 2:explain to me multimodal models. Like Yep. Are you trying to tokenize everything into some sort of standard format so that a an image, a video, code, text, it all appears as as tokens in the same kind of stream, or are you creating a system that can kind of shift gears between one and the next?
Speaker 3:That's that's a great question. And this is basically the core differentiation. So right now, most people are doing the latter. Most of the AI labs that have large language models, they're using those as backbones and trying to, like, you know, teach them how to read image and video as token. But the problem with that approach is that, like, you know, the output is very, very subpar.
Speaker 3:And and even on the most basic tasks, second generation deep learning models, which are your convolution networks, outperform on most VLM tasks. This is the first approach, which is you create a joint latent space where all of this information is in the same representation. And then when you learn on it, it is quite analogous to how brain learns, human brain, right? Audio, video, image, they're not really terribly different for us. These are all the signals.
Speaker 3:And when we think of an event, let's say dropping a glass, right? We can hear it in our head, we can see in our head, and we can predict, oh, if it's a piece of glass, it might break. So currently, this disparate approach of training a language model and a video model and an image model, things like that, this is going to get old very quickly. Because On image and video model side, even the models we make today are kind of dumb. They're basically translators.
Speaker 3:They take text or prompt and translate them into video, which is interesting. But that doesn't solve someone's problem. And the problem being, hey, explain to me how something works. Or tell me the story. Or here's a script, make me the whole thing.
Speaker 3:That needs a level of reasoning and understanding that these models don't have. So when you combine them all together, then one, you solve the data problem. And because, you know, just immense amount of image, audio, video data in the world. And two, you are able to build intelligence that goes beyond what LMs are able to do today.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about images in ChatGPT. Do you think that there are multiple layers going on there? I was shocked by the quality of text and then the quality of the Studio Ghibli moment. The it feels like style transfer on steroids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I was particularly surprised they could do both. And it felt like it felt almost like two different layers running. And I was trying to do some tests where I would have generate some text and then have a snake weave through in front and behind the text. Mhmm. And it was kinda struggling with that, and it was making me feel like maybe there was, like, a second pass here.
Speaker 2:Is that a reasonable theory? And also, I'm not saying that is like a knock on anything because if I went to a human and asked how a human would would design a a birthday card with a, you know, a dinosaur in the background and then happy birthday text on top, they would draw the dinosaur, and then they would use typesetting or they would draw the text on top. And so I don't I don't necessarily think that it's, like, the wrong path. I'm not knocking the strategy. I'm just curious about what is actually going on in that model because it was remarkable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but it raised a bunch of questions for me.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So the best of our understanding, basically, they're doing, like, autoregressive image generation as the first pass.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? That produces a blurry low resolution image or or somewhat high resolution image, but, like, you know, you're missing sort of sort of high frequency details. And then you do a diffusion pass on it to get to a decent quality, you know, image representation. Now there's so text is one thing, but I I believe text actually text rendering in image models, especially like the latest image models, and then what we're seeing in our next photon two model, that's actually getting very good. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So that is not the problem. You know what's really interesting, though, is structure. Mhmm. So when you do image rendering with just a diffusion model, like stable diffusion or name your pick. There's really you rely on the text encoder of model to, like, you know, kinda tell you about the semantics of what the person is asking about.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And then you just rely on the diffusion model to do all the intelligence and, like, you know let's say you're asking it, hey. What is two plus two? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:If there's nothing in front of it like an LLM that is able to say, oh, user's asking two plus two, so let me draw equals to four. If you don't have that, then these models have ridiculously zero understanding of whatever you're trying to say. Right? It will just render two plus two equals two and stop doing it. Right?
Speaker 3:This is that's what I mean, zero understanding. But when you have an LLM in generating it or or a thing that has good understanding of language and it's it's unified, they call it the four o omni. Right? Then in language space, especially within the model, you can reason about Yeah. That, like, o two plus two should be four, and let me render that.
Speaker 3:Now to what I believe, though, GPT four o is is still a system rather than just a model.
Speaker 6:Sure.
Speaker 3:Right? So be when you type something, it still goes through GPT. They do all the prompt enhancement and reasoning about it in language space. And then give it to the model, and it does a very good job of rendering it. But when you ask for complex layouts, then I think that that strength starts to show.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But, of course, you gave an example of, like, you know, the snake coming in and out. So this is, again, the question of prompt alignment. And and while it is good, it's not perfect yet.
Speaker 2:Do you have any reaction to in the Wall Street Journal today, there's Hollywood wants AI protection. There's a lot of back and forth there. I was particularly shocked that, there's been a number
Speaker 1:Save us. Save us.
Speaker 2:I mean, there there there's been a number of interesting moments in, AI imagery and AI video. Obviously, like, the narrative, the general narrative is, like, the technologists are like, this is amazing. We've created this amazing algorithm, and I agree with that. And then the backlash is like, we don't want all the, you know, the the photographers to be put out of business. But the more interesting, stories that have emerged are like v o three and Google seem to be able to generate Disney IP with perfect accuracy, no problems, and maybe that's because they have some deal with YouTube.
Speaker 2:And then when the Ghibli moment happened, I was like, wait. Like like like, GPT Images and ChatGPT would reject different things for for safety reasons, but also for intellectual property reasons, but not Studio Ghibli, which is a style, but it's also intellectual property. And it's not exactly, the cleanest thing, so but maybe there's a deal behind the scene. So how do you think how do you think, like, the the, like, the the the interplay between the the startups and the technologists and the legacy media, Hollywood, Washington DC? Like, what stories are you tracking?
Speaker 2:How is that evolving?
Speaker 3:Right. So there's two axes that that you're talking about. One is basically the adoption and job losses and things like that, right, taking of that as a narrative. Yeah. And the second is the IP itself and and how do you think about that.
Speaker 3:Right? So on the first one, the the there's like it's actually at this point a foregone conclusion that unless Hollywood and and and the traditional way of producing media changes, they are on a path to extinction. There is really no two ways about it. And and, of course, there are arguments like, oh, but it can't do this. It can't do this.
Speaker 3:It can't do this. The thing is, we spent last year, 2024, building out this infrastructure for training these really large, really capable models, and it trains on petabytes and petabytes of data, and and much more complex than LLMs, because LLMs, of course, they're complicated to train, but you still have very little data. The amount of engineering that is required to train multimodal models is insane. Anyway, now that the infrastructure exists, the rate of progress is very, very fast. We saw the same thing in language.
Speaker 3:Initially, everyone had to build from zero to one, but once you have zero to one, turning out models takes a quarter, sometimes less. So anything that they think, oh, it can't do today, yet, you know what, can't do four k? Well, tomorrow it's gonna we already do four k. Oh, it's not able to let me control exactly the pose I do. We launched this thing called modify video where you can give it your camera feed as a prompt.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 3:And you can control exactly any camera movement, any pose, anything that you want. Right? So we work with some of our great partners in Hollywood, And, like, know, some of them are very forward, some of them are very much not there today. But when you think about what a studio is, right, like a studio is two parts. A financial institution that is responsible for, like, you know, green lighting things and managing like, okay, this area we do go, this area we don't go, all these kind of things.
Speaker 3:And a production part. The production part largely works by contracting other smaller production houses, but generally, that's the structure. AI, especially generative media, changes the economics so wildly, from a $100,000 a minute and to sometimes a million dollars a minute, all the way down to $10 a minute, $100 a When that is the level of economic change and you follow the money, there's just no scenario in which you can don't come out thinking that, like, okay. The old way of doing is not going to work.
Speaker 1:So An an interesting thing I've been thinking about is is if the cost of production drops by an order of magnitude just by Yeah. Being able to shoot some maybe you're shooting some scenes with regular actors and cameras and union crews, but then you're able to create certain scenes or moments. If the caught that they seems like they're the the Internet has this insatiable demand for content and it feels like when you look at some parts of the sort of entertainment production stack, Writer like, great writers might be more in demand than ever because like they'll have to write more like but but
Speaker 3:sort of like Stories would be more in demand.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, you can imagine a world where HBO is putting out, you know, an iconic, know, potentially iconic new property or franchise or like shipping them monthly. Right? When historically That's right. Maybe they only had one big, you know, one or two massive releases a year like a Game of Thrones. Sure.
Speaker 1:And so, I actually think that if the the consumer is gonna win and the industry, the people that adapt within the industry and say I'm gonna lean into using Exactly. Tools so I can write better. I can I can produce or even even the idea that I I I'm sure you're I'm I'm curious if if scripts are now certain scripts are now being encouraged like, bring your script with kind of an idea of what this world looks and feels like so that it's not just like this static, you know Yep? Text based concept. Right?
Speaker 1:Show me, give me the pilot because Exactly. It's top of mind because today we we released an ad that we handmade farm to table content for one of our partners Wander. And there's like a few scenes in there that we probably could have AI generated, we didn't. But they cost us real money. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, that that we could have potentially stripped out. And it feels like feels like we're so close.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So here's the over and under on that actually. The the demand for video is absolutely absurd. You're right. Like, you know, so average person is watching about three and a half hours of video on their phones every day.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's good, but it's a big number. We're certainly, we're, you know, might be contributing to that.
Speaker 3:But it's true. And and the the the thinking about that is very simple, that like people don't like to read. If they could watch an explanation, watch how to do something, watch a piece of news, whatever have you, they would do that over reading it or reading about it. Right? Like all day, all night.
Speaker 3:So that means for entertainment, yes. Like, generally entertainment, we think about it. Okay. You make it once and then millions of people will watch it again and again, all these kind of things. But when you think about like news, and you think about question and answer, and you think about explanations and all these kind of things, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, you you can't generate a video for every explanation for every scenario on every planet. It has to be done dynamically, it has to be done automatically, and it has to be done with AI. Now, the number I track is, okay, for every person on the planet, out of that three point five hours that they watch, if we can generate at least an hour of video a day, that is what the success metric looks like for us. So that is looks like about six billion hours of video per day generated.
Speaker 3:One, there's no human capacity that can actually generate that that kind of video. Right? Editors can't do that. And two, there's no computer in the universe at the moment to be able to actually do that. So but that is what to track towards, because video is now the substrate of information on the Internet.
Speaker 3:There's two things happening to the Internet. Right? One, it's becoming zero click, which is like, you know, you you don't hunt around in the websites and try to let go of this, that, and so this, and so. No. You just ask an LLM or now Google also has AI mode if you're in the labs experiment, then you just get the get the damn answer.
Speaker 3:And second thing that is happening is the substrate of information is changing from text to video. This is what people do. So if you just extrapolate from this trend, video production has to change. Entertainment has to change, and people who don't come along, like, know, it's gonna be a very hard journey for that. Advertising on the other we can talk about advertising for about an hour.
Speaker 3:And like, you know, Ken was very illuminating for me in that way about how people are thinking about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna get the full update from Con. Is this your first time going? Break us down Yes. Like what
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. The the
Speaker 2:This is the Con Film Festival.
Speaker 1:Right? I mean, the the Yeah. One of one of the exciting things about what you're doing is when you look at the cost structures of consumer brands which we both have exposure to so much. Often times consumer brands are held back because they don't have net new ad creative. And so not only is it a cost, it just takes a long time to produce.
Speaker 1:And so you have these gaps where a brand will see lower performance, you know, slowing growth etcetera. And it's really just because they don't have access to net new ad creative that can drive new demand. And so that's an entire area that I don't think that's Yeah. Being fully priced in yet. How the the great brands will actually be able to grow faster because of just being able to day by day generate net new ad creative.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give us a full con recap. Sorry. Answer that question and then I want the con recap.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the answer to that question and can is almost the same. So, yes, it was it was my first time. Beautiful place, to be honest with you. But really interesting, like, know, one, everybody I mean, it's not an AI event, it's not an AI conference.
Speaker 3:But literally, every conversation was about AI. Every conversation. But what's really interesting is that maybe 1% of the people knew what the hell they were talking about. I
Speaker 1:I Nobody knows, but everybody's excited.
Speaker 3:Yes. But I got blisters in my ears hearing the word agent. All these, like, you
Speaker 1:know Agent's really? Yeah.
Speaker 3:All these agency people pitching. Right? Like, oh, we have AI agents to do this, and we have AI agents. We are building this to do this. In fact, like, you know, Adobe was there, and and their salespeople were trying to pitch nonexistent AI agents to people and trying to lock them into three year contracts.
Speaker 3:Right? It was palpable, the level of desperation.
Speaker 1:Shots fired. Shots fired. It's insane.
Speaker 3:And and and when you go and ask, like, okay, what do you mean? Right? We we talk to you. Talk to everyone. And and and what is it?
Speaker 3:It's a prompt box where you can select a bunch of models. That's it. That is not an AI agent. That doesn't do anything. Right?
Speaker 1:Like Senator, that's SaaS.
Speaker 3:That is SaaS. Exactly. And the issue is that basically, you know, a lot of people are thinking like, okay, well, developing this is basically like nothing, and we'll just like produce the models and it's gonna happen. Developing model, developing agents in creative space, in visual space, is very difficult work. Right?
Speaker 3:You need new kinds of models, the kinds we are training. Because think about it. Gemini is the best VLM that is out there right now, and it is barely able to meet about 3% of our benchmark of visual iteration. Let's say you're talking about brands. So we met quite a few, including our partners like Coca Cola and others.
Speaker 3:You want to make an ad, and then let's not think about a Super Bowl ad. If you just wanna make creatives, say 100 ads for different markets, getting them to be right, getting them to be on brand, getting them to look exactly how they should look like, that's a hard job. The current image and video models, as I was telling you, are dumb. They will just make whatever. They have no idea.
Speaker 3:And then when you use VLMs to critique them, the outputs are barely any good. So you new kinds of you need the next thing after LLMs, the next kind of models that are able to understand visual information, instructions, and what makes something engaging. That level of information is what you need. LMs are getting there, right, for stories. When you write text, LMs are now making things that are very engaging.
Speaker 3:Now we need that next jump in models. So that was my overall impression in Canada. The second thing, felt like by next year, this place is going to look very, very different. Fortunes are going to change significantly, because when you talk to some of the most senior folks in various agencies, whatever have you, the writing's on the wall for them. They employ hundreds of thousands of artists and people, and they are asking us, oh, how do we actually do this more efficiently?
Speaker 3:And and the thing is, like, that that's that's incorrect way of thinking about it. So long story short, like, it was not an AI conference, but it ended up being an AI conference where nobody knew what the hell actually the AI is and consequently nobody knew what is coming.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What areas do you think are safe from disruption? We talked to a photographer who does stuff in CPG and he was saying, there actually could be a situation where if you're McDonald's, you can't generate AI images of your burger because it could be
Speaker 2:There are already FTC rules around you have to use the real burger because there were all these, like, the false advertising lawsuits where they show the perfect cinematography burger that was perfectly made and looked amazing. And then you'd go expectation versus reality. And those those memes went viral enough and the the flat disgusting burger Yeah. Bubbled up. And eventually, I guess there was a lawsuit.
Speaker 2:And so now, you know and and even in if you're selling a phone, you have to say screen images simulated. Or if you're driving on a truck, you have to say close course, professional driver. That's for safety reasons, obviously. Drink responsibly if it's an alcoholic. So the FTC has a bunch of rules.
Speaker 2:Do we think there'll be anything there on the AI side?
Speaker 3:I think those rules will change too. Yeah. Basically. So currently, like, the burger example, right? The problem is you are overrepresenting the product you're selling.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Right? It is not the problem of the tooling you used to make it with. You could have made it how the thing actually is. I mean, that would look very disappointing in the ads. But you could have made it closer to how the thing actually is, such that people aren't misleading thinking like, oh, I'm gonna get this big giant thing, which is very fluffy.
Speaker 3:Then you when you get in like, oof, this is the thing. So it's really not about the tool you used, it is about the intention of what you have behind it. You clearly wanted to mislead. So I think the FTC rule is right. But the rule should not be, oh, they should not be created with CGI or with AI or whatever have you.
Speaker 3:The rule should be, don't misrepresent your product. And for me, basically, the singular thing to think about is follow the money. Right? So when actually in advertising, the point you were making is really, really salient, which is advertising is all about steps. Right?
Speaker 3:And and how like, something that performs well, something doesn't perform well, it's very hard to predict. How quickly can you replace the thing that is not performing well? And in the gradient of the things that are performing well, that will lead to the best output. Today, that cannot be done automatically at all in any visual form of advertising. That is done for text advertising, it has been algorithmic for a very long time now, and that results in very, very good outputs.
Speaker 3:So when companies actually are faced with the idea like, okay, well, like our other products where we can do this, it performs so well. And on on these products, no. The regulations, they will lobby for the regulations to change all this kind of thing. And I think the regulation should be, don't misrepresent your product. No.
Speaker 3:Don't don't use AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question for me. What about more narrow AI use cases in Hollywood? I'm interested in, like, just just, like, in the VFX pipeline, there are, one second. Good.
Speaker 2:Let's do sorry. I'm scheduling some. Let's do tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We're doing it live. The showbiz.
Speaker 2:So question. Now we're we're gonna cut this, so it doesn't matter. My question is, more narrow v VFX use cases. Like, is there a single company that's just doing amazing green screen rotoscoping? I've seen Runway do that in, like, kind of the prosumer arena, but there's so many different pieces of the pipeline that I think artists would be much less jostled by if it's just, hey.
Speaker 2:I I have to track a camera all the time in three d. You know, there's there there are services that do this using traditional, like, CPU based pipelines and solvers. There's IMUs that measure the movement of the camera. No one really cares about that particular role. It's kinda just a hassle that they have to deal with.
Speaker 2:Right. And and and so all sorts of different more minor vertical AI use cases. Those feel like point solutions that could be deployed right now. People could go and get a foothold. Maybe they expand to, oh, prompt to movie.
Speaker 2:It is in the meantime, like, how about we just speed up the rotoscoping?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, why not? Right? So so for instance, like, you know, we released this thing. It's called reframe.
Speaker 3:So what it does is you give it video in any aspect ratio, and it's able to generate, like, you know, any aspect ratio out of it without cropping. So, like, it will generate, like, you know if you're if you're if you give it a 16 is to nine vertical video, and now you wanna share it on on YouTube, for instance, where, like, vertical videos don't perform well, you want something like, you know, that is horizontal, 16 is to or or 16 is to nine ideally, You can generate any of these variants, any number of these variants all you want, and it's now a point solution. Doesn't matter how the original video was made. You could have totally created that clip using any traditional methods or whatever have you. So I think this is So here's something interesting, right?
Speaker 3:This is not what you asked me. I promise I'll lead to the answer you're talking So at least in my life, since I've been conscious about this, there's been two really big changes before AI. One was mobile. And mobile was a very large consumer side change, right? People changed their behaviors drastically.
Speaker 3:Not overnight, obviously, but it looked like overnight, be honest with Yep. And then the second one happened about a few years later, which was cloud. And cloud Consumers didn't really it didn't affect them too much. Right? Or maybe maybe enterprises, yeah.
Speaker 3:But it affected companies. And companies were done inside out. Things they used to do on paper, things they used to do on prem, things they used to do like these were two very radical transformations, but they happened to different segments of the world. AI is for the first time, at least in my memory, a transformation that is happening on consumer and enterprise levels. It's basically rewiring companies from the inside, and it is changing consumer behavior like nothing else before.
Speaker 3:So coming back to your point now, you can take the slow route. You can say, okay, well, let's do rotoscoping. But the the tiny studio down the street that used to probably just create frames for you up until last year is now gonna start releasing stuff that looks kinda as good as yours. And now what they can do at a fast clip, and they're releasing weekly episodes and then iterating on it. And how long will it take before their IP is actually bigger than yours?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right. That's a good question. We we we have seen this happen on YouTube again and again and again and again. Cocomelon. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, it started from nothing, and look at this now. So bigger than a lot of Disney IPs. Right? And Disney I think Disney bought them.
Speaker 3:Disney tried to buy them. Something happened there. Yeah. So this is basically the the difference. You can do, like, you know and and there's nothing wrong with it.
Speaker 3:You should do the small things. But if you are in the business of producing content, if you are in the business of of thinking about advertising, if you're in the business of touching pixels, the world is not the same as it was two years ago. And not in a small way, in a very, very deep way. Val, it might not solve the whole thing for you at the moment, but you have to start really thinking about what would the economics look like a year from now, two years from now, and five years from now. And what what should the business be like exactly?
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been great. We would love to have you back on to Right. There's so many different topics we can cover. So and I I appreciate how freely that you're willing to speak on on so many different on so many different topics. So
Speaker 3:That's the only way?
Speaker 1:That's the only way. You just gotta be yourself. Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, man. Cheers.
Speaker 3:See you guys.
Speaker 2:And we have some breaking news from TBPN. Let's go to the printer cam, which I believe
Speaker 1:The timeline.
Speaker 2:King is in. Printer cam's ready.
Speaker 1:Terminal.
Speaker 2:I see it spinning up. We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news. What is this?
Speaker 1:Got He's wanting The timeline is in turmoil. Special segment starting now.
Speaker 2:I love this because it's
Speaker 1:Soham Parikh just became famous It's funny because the last few hours. Not for the reasons that he would necessarily want to be famous. No.
Speaker 2:No. Is this a real picture of him? Do we know?
Speaker 6:Or is
Speaker 2:a flying picture? But this is from Var Epsilon. It says breaking meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have signed Soham Parekh as fractional chief AI officer. Obviously, a joke, but he's been on the timeline all day because apparently he's been working at multiple y c companies, multiple companies at the same time. What's funny is that we were we were working on a, during the show, we were working on a post.
Speaker 2:We couldn't decide how to frame the trade deal of SOHAM and But some fan just did it for us.
Speaker 1:This guy nailed it and got a thousand links. Fully sent it. So Matt Parker from Anti Metal was actually Soham was their first engineering hire in 2022. Mhmm. Really smart and likable, enjoyed working with him.
Speaker 1:We realized pretty quickly that he was working at multiple companies and we let him go. I can't imagine the amount of equity he's left on the table. Matt says hiring Soham is a new rite of passage, TBH. Any great company should go through it. So Suhail was the first person to call this out.
Speaker 1:He said this morning or actually it was last night. This has been building. PSA, there's a guy named Soham Parikh in India who works at three or four startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more. Gary is not gonna be happy about this.
Speaker 1:You do not, you don't wanna put up the bat. You don't want Gary People to put up the Gary sign.
Speaker 2:Nope. You don't wanna go up against
Speaker 1:these crazy companies. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying, scamming people.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is fascinating. Did you see this from Pratika Mehta? Tyler put this in You wanna read this one first?
Speaker 1:He's been all over the place. Roy said I interviewed this guy yesterday.
Speaker 2:No way. That's amazing. Tyler, break it down for us. What does Pratika have to
Speaker 4:say? Okay. So apparently, I mean, this is still unconfirmed. I've I've actually I've sent him an email. Okay.
Speaker 4:I've I've I've obtained his email. I'm not sure if it's the real one. We'll see. But she says, the dude clears interviews. He's good with that.
Speaker 4:After clearing, he has junior people doing all the work.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And he has around 20 employees and interns. Basically, a small dev shop.
Speaker 2:Wow. So he's just figured out the economics of, hey. If I'm making 200 k or 300 k
Speaker 1:He's basically signing people to a 20 k a month retainer. He knows he's gonna have some churn. Yep. But it doesn't matter. He's picking up some equity.
Speaker 2:This is fascinating.
Speaker 1:Equity comp as well. Yes. I wonder if he's vest.
Speaker 3:I wonder
Speaker 2:if he's He must have The
Speaker 1:US wonder if he's
Speaker 2:vested in on the balance sheet.
Speaker 1:At at at any of these companies. This is crazy. Ken Watana says, Soham Parikh is the Bonnie Blue of YC. Very vulgar.
Speaker 2:Don't like it.
Speaker 1:Sar says, all recruiting must stop until we get Soham on TBPN to figure out what is going Well,
Speaker 2:open invite to Soham. We'll we'll
Speaker 1:talk Santiago says, Soham on TBPN when. Daniel, Growing Daniel says, Microsoft just laid out Here we go. Laid off 9,000 workers. All of them Soham If
Speaker 2:you
Speaker 1:see I wonder if
Speaker 2:he doesn't have Soham Perique. In their inbox, it's time to start polishing your resume because he hasn't reached out. It means he's not bullish on you.
Speaker 1:Austin Allred says, must suck being an unemployed software engineer and realizing that Soham Parikh has been hired 79 times in the past four years.
Speaker 2:This guy
Speaker 1:is And then Matthew Berman says, are you think AI is killing software jobs? Tell that to Soham Parikh. Signal says, not now honey. There is a Soham gate happening on x. It is really funny.
Speaker 1:It's basically say, I'm gonna build a dev shop but it's gonna be my name and I'm, you know, he he probably, no. He probably could've had a just very successful dev shop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But So But but there's a stigma around hiring dev shops. You wanna hire founding engineers. Like, you know, the title matters.
Speaker 2:And the idea is like, okay, we have a full time employee. We got somebody who's delivering. They're a high performer. Our team is cracked. We don't have to outsource.
Speaker 2:The whole thing with Uber. Remember Uber's initial build out was all outsourced, and it was like it was like a mark on the company. Obviously, it didn't affect them. They went on a generational run. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:But there's this there's this idea of like, if you're building a startup, you need the the founders need to be coding. The employees need to be coding. It needs to be handcrafted. You can't outsource. True.
Speaker 2:You know, he's proven us all wrong, I guess.
Speaker 1:True. So we're working on getting him live. We got another post here from Growing Daniel.
Speaker 2:Has he gotten back to you, Tyler, on email? It it seems like he might not come on today, but maybe we can pitch him and try to get him on.
Speaker 4:Hasn't got back. I sent it twenty minutes ago.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:He doesn't have a next account. He needs to come out and say he's sorry. Yeah. And he needs to say this is the right time to launch
Speaker 2:His dev shop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It should be called the dev shop of Soham Parikh.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because I mean, I don't know maybe he's delivering but
Speaker 1:Growing Daniel has a post here chief of staff brings list of applicants really likes this one Indian guy asked if it's a rune or a Soham she doesn't understand. Pull out illustrated diagram explaining the difference between runes and soham. She laughs and says, it's a good engineer, sir.
Speaker 3:It's a
Speaker 2:soham. Oh, that's a wild pest. That's great. Oh, this is great. Anyway, anything else that we need to cover from the news today?
Speaker 2:Apparently, crumble cookies have 62% of your daily calorie allowance, Nick Carter says.
Speaker 1:Staying on Soham Okay. Gabby Goldberg says, I'm at the intersection of Soham Parikh and Worker 17. Oh, yeah. Worker 17. Oh, we got another one.
Speaker 1:Growing Daniel's going on an absolute terror. We're just gonna keep these coming. Pull this up in the chat.
Speaker 2:Posting. Soham Parikh, new CS grads. Yes. Soham Parikh's really soaking up the the job.
Speaker 1:Job market.
Speaker 2:It's the
Speaker 1:power He'd been sitting over this post being like, the job market is actually fine. You guys are just bad at interviewing. Yeah. Jacob Postal says introducing our newest product, SOHAM, the AI coding agent that can work for anyone, any code base twenty four seven. We've been testing in stealth for a while and results are looking excellent.
Speaker 1:Please reach out.
Speaker 2:I wonder yeah. I wonder if he's a cursor user or what what he's got. Maybe he's got Devin under the hood. Maybe he's got, Claude Code. Who knows?
Speaker 2:We gotta I we definitely need to know Soham's tech stack for sure. That is interesting.
Speaker 1:Ryan Peterson says Soham never even applied to Flexport. Sad face emoji. Ryan Ryan would have caught him.
Speaker 2:Delete that. Don't say that, Ellen.
Speaker 1:Wow. Adam over at Warp, CTO has a few. He got to a round two. Soham got to a round two over at Warp. Sounds like he didn't make a hire.
Speaker 1:So It's fascinating. Daniel says worker seventeen's name, Soham Parikh. Antonio says he was marked safe from Soham Parikh today.
Speaker 2:He did tear up the valley today completely. Completely. Anything else we should cover in the timeline? We have a someone in the house of representatives is coming out against car headlights. They're saying they're too bright, and I'm gonna do something about this.
Speaker 2:Brightness has doubled in the in the last decade, but manufacturing standards haven't budged in forty years. Drivers and oncoming traffic deserve visibility. It matters for seniors in rural roads. Are you anti bright lights? I am.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:we could tone them down a bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really?
Speaker 1:I think we down a bit. Interesting. I don't drive at night much. Okay. But when I do, I'm reminded Yeah.
Speaker 1:That lights kind of peaked probably in the early two thousands. Yeah. They were solid. Yeah. We didn't have to keep improving
Speaker 2:They also got bluer because they went to LED.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it will lead to Tungsten. Widespread Yeah. Blindness.
Speaker 2:I would say if you're driving a car just just light a candle and hold out a hold out a
Speaker 1:A lantern.
Speaker 2:A lantern like you're
Speaker 1:Like on a fishing rod almost in front of your car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. No. Just just just while you're driving like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just hold out the candle the candle lantern. That's great. We gotta we gotta highlight Signal before we head out. Signal Labs is unapologetically a rapper company.
Speaker 2:We use state of the art models made by others and give credit where credit's due. Our first product is so simple. When you see it, you'll probably say, wait, that's it? That's really the point. That's our ideal reaction.
Speaker 2:I've been using it for two weeks and genuinely can't imagine life without it at this point. We don't have any evals, no real QA other than our own intuition, but it surprises you and makes you feel something. Hopefully, everyone enjoys it as much as I do. So very excited for Signal. Signal's launch.
Speaker 1:Get us an invite.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Send it. Send the invite. We'd love to we'd love to test drive it. And we'd love to have you on the show when you launch.
Speaker 2:Can't wait. Anything else worth covering before we hop off?
Speaker 6:I mean,
Speaker 1:there's so much news. There's so much news, John. This this Flo actually hired
Speaker 2:Flo Crevelli?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He hired him a week ago, fired him this morning after seeing Sue Hale's post. It's just funny that the guy wouldn't kind of mix up the name, you know. It's a small industry. Stuff's gonna get around.
Speaker 1:But anyway
Speaker 2:It is crazy. Yeah. You think you think different names, different GitHub profiles, different link LinkedIns, like, that wouldn't be that hard. It would the actually actually, like, the best way to to run this, like, scheme would be to set up a number of different folks. And and instead of having one person with 20 junior devs underneath, have five people each with three underneath.
Speaker 2:So you're still doing the subcontracting, but there's only one face per client, essentially. And this is basically We
Speaker 1:don't wanna give them too many ideas, John.
Speaker 2:This is basically what what what market like, you go to, like, RGA or Wyden, they'll be like, here's your here's your killer, you know, Don Draper. Like, this is your account representative. They'll be coming up with the ideas. And they come in once a quarter, give you a presentation on you should do the Super Bowl ad. Like and investment banks do the same thing.
Speaker 2:Hey, we, you know, we'd love to do a private placement. We'd love to take you public. Here's this, you know, 200 page deck on why your business is is amazing and how much money we can get for it. Who built that deck? A bunch of analysts working a hundred hour weeks.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Well, the next twenty four hours matter a lot for Soham Parikh. We will be watching. We'll hopefully get him on the show tomorrow. But Do
Speaker 2:you think he's gonna raise money?
Speaker 1:He might. He I I definitely saw somebody joking around saying that he raised the series a from some friends of ours.
Speaker 2:Tier one? Tier one. Yeah. It's totally possible. But but but do you think
Speaker 1:It would the the greatest irony Is there greatest irony would be is he's like, sorry guys. I've, you know, what that guy was joking about a few minutes ago of saying like, I've I've actually been building a coding agent. I named it after myself. This was the best way to test if it if it works. It's not as good as a one x engineer right now but it's good enough to keep a job for a few months.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so anyways, we will be watching
Speaker 2:his Big news violation on Soham. It it is really dominating the timeline.
Speaker 1:I'm Soham.
Speaker 2:Special time oh, yeah. You posted it. Timeline in turmoil. Buy markets in turmoil, sell timeline in turmoil. Then I'm seeing pictures from our billboard.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. It's funny. You just refresh and you just get More so so Everyone's having fun. I love a I love a good I love a good current thing. You know, we started the show with the current thing.
Speaker 2:It was Erebor, the new crypto bank. We ended the show. We lived through it. We experienced the transition. The the old current thing is out, the new current thing is Soham Parikh.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. I wonder we we we gotta get his tech stack, and I wanna know how much he's actually pulling in. How much do you think he is?
Speaker 1:I I would expect it. I would expect if if people are triangulating now that he was maybe had three to four jobs at once. Mhmm. I'm gonna make the bold bet that he's actually has, like, I can see him having twenty, thirty.
Speaker 2:You think so?
Speaker 1:Just imagining a really hard working
Speaker 6:A lot
Speaker 2:of companies aren't dev shop. And a lot
Speaker 1:of companies aren't public. Totally. And he could be just finding some random SaaS company in the middle of nowhere. Yep. Not a lot of management oversight.
Speaker 1:Yep. Companies aren't in founder mode. Yep. He ships, you know, few PRs a day. Yep.
Speaker 1:And so you just chugging along. The challenge for
Speaker 2:him is line, 2,000,000.
Speaker 1:I'm going over. Over. Wow. Over. The challenge would be daily stand ups.
Speaker 1:Right? Yep. It's like
Speaker 2:You gotta see him. But then again
Speaker 1:But but but he's kind of on the press he's kind of on the precipice of of this, you know, video AI models. He could have other versions of himself, voice modulation and Yeah. AI generated images. So can have his
Speaker 2:Well, thing you can do is you can puppeteer the image. So you have a different person. A real human's joining. Real real human. He
Speaker 1:just needs a video that he loops and and it plays at the right time. It says nothing from my end.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Somebody's gonna post that. That's definitely a banger like so humpereek when he when he says nothing from my end. Thanks.
Speaker 2:This is the this we're gonna go through all of the current all the current thing memes. The the honey, how did you get how did our family get so rich? Oh, my your father Your
Speaker 1:father.
Speaker 2:Worked at seven different jobs with a team of junior engineers.
Speaker 1:This was kinda I mean, this was happening more in 2021 where somebody would have a big tech job but and they were kind of bored, they were kind of just they weren't working too hard Mhmm. And they would get they would just start moonlighting at a startup.
Speaker 2:That was a common thing during And I
Speaker 1:and I expected a company to start that actually enabled anonymous work
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Right? Didn't didn't It it was very much like It it's typically a a top signal when people start moonlighting too hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Probably. You've been on it. You've been you've been you've been close to calling the top, toying with it.
Speaker 1:I've been toying with calling the top.
Speaker 2:We'll see. After Soham saga, pretty sure every few pretty sure very few YC companies will hire remote Indians. Classic case of one guy exploiting a high trust society, which leads to downfall of the others around him, says Varunam Guresh from Warp. I think you already read this, but Gary Tan chimed in. He said, if this is true, it would be sad.
Speaker 2:The SoHom saga doesn't seem widespread to me. He seems like a five standard deviation above the mean kind fraud. Decent startup idea in here though. There's probably a space for remote employee certification. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was thinking about it like the the you should be able to have an AI that that looks over the GitHub the GitHub. When when I first heard about this, I thought he was directly moonlighting. Like, it was like from from, you know, you get a job on the East Coast, you get a job in Chicago, you get a job in Denver, and you get a job in in San Francisco. And then, yeah, you're just going from one stand up to the next, and then you work three hours at one job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job, three hours at the next job.
Speaker 2:And I thought it was just him. I didn't realize that he had teams under him. But in that in that scenario
Speaker 1:You would think this was something see.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, like, all the all the pull requests come in at the same time every day, and he's not doing, like he's he's not sending Slack messages randomly throughout the day. He sends them only in this two hour block. But that's not true if he's sending, like no. There's actually two or three people that are dedicated to your account, basically, like, all day long. Right?
Speaker 2:So I I don't know how you I don't know how you would do remote certification. You need to have like the camera on. We need WorldCoin. This is a WorldCoin application.
Speaker 1:Atlas says breaking. Soham Parikh closes a $15,000,000 round led by a 16 z. 2,000 likes.
Speaker 2:Reid Hoffman says
Speaker 1:Reid Hoffman's chiming in?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So do you think Soham Parikh's LinkedIn what do you think Soham Parikh's LinkedIn header is? This is hilarious. The founder of LinkedIn chiming in. It's great.
Speaker 2:Opens timeline, it's all so hot. This is Beth. The timelines and terminal baby.
Speaker 1:I You would think that this would be something that Bookface would have solved. Right? Of one of the issues here is that when people make a poor hire, they don't exactly wanna go tell a bunch of other people that they messed up. Yeah. And so you can imagine people just experiencing this and not wanting to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Now Mhmm. Now it's becoming a meme to talk about it. There's a guy, I think this account was just created.
Speaker 2:This is Soham.
Speaker 1:Soham. Well, was created in February. He says, I think he's just joking around. He must
Speaker 8:have just
Speaker 1:changed the name.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 1:fired from being a founding engineer, principal engineer, back end engineer and front end engineer today. If anyone is hiring for all four of those things.
Speaker 2:This is crazy.
Speaker 1:And then this is clearly a fake account. Says, I make more than 99% of YC startups. This is the real reason they're mad.
Speaker 2:This is really funny. Everyone asks, where is SoHompReek? Nobody asks, how is SoHompReek? I'm glad we found this account. Whoever's ready is great.
Speaker 2:Elon can work at nine startups. Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies. But when you do it, it's scam. Oh, this is gonna be a good account to follow. Everyone should follow this.
Speaker 2:Phantom thread underscore d. This is definitely not him. I mean, if this is actually him and he's a great poster too, that's a quadruple threat, quintuple threat. We'd love to see it.
Speaker 1:Aiden over at OpenAI says, hey sorry, was out this morning who's Soham Parikh must be pretty popular name because I think my accountant and front end contractor have the same name.
Speaker 2:Wild.
Speaker 1:I think I think I think the next move from here prediction clearly gives Soham a maxed out contract.
Speaker 2:For sure. Within the next twenty four hours. It's too good of a meme.
Speaker 1:Trade deal in the works.
Speaker 2:Get him to America.
Speaker 1:Why would
Speaker 2:do it? Shoot shoot a viral video. This is a no brainer. There's gotta be there's gotta be a viral video in here somewhere. We are actively monitoring the situation for sure.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:We are yeah. Bobby says, looking back through our engineering applicants SOHAM never applied. Chat, am I cooked?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone should search their email right now for SOHAM.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Okay. Anyways, I think that's a good place to wrap. Has been a fun show today. Hopefully more breaking news on SOHAM.
Speaker 1:If you find him
Speaker 2:Send him
Speaker 1:our way.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Have great a day.