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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Astronomer is back. Astronomer had ramp on the website. Apparently, ramps are happy
Speaker 3:customer. Lost faith.
Speaker 2:Never lost faith. Yeah. So Astronomer, if you weren't following, if you were living under a rock, Apache Airflow as a service managed enterprise SaaS platform on top of Apache Airflow for data analytics, streaming data, that type of stuff. And they had a absolutely chaotic week last week with their CEO being caught at a Coldplay concert. Was that last week or the week before?
Speaker 3:I think it was Might
Speaker 2:have been the
Speaker 3:week before. The week before. But Had to have been.
Speaker 2:CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. Martin called him out on stage and said, oh those people look like they're having an affair.
Speaker 3:Was it was Did he actually say that live?
Speaker 2:He did say that on the video. No way. So they pan around to the different kiss cams and or different just cameras and they spot the CEO of Astronomer hugging the head of HR. Yep. Can't even hug your employees anymore apparently.
Speaker 3:Can't even give your chief people officer a hug in
Speaker 2:this country anymore. And once they see themselves on the screen at the show they recoil in horror and turn around and and the other person in HR who's sitting next to them is like, oh my god. What's going on?
Speaker 1:Well, that's
Speaker 3:why I didn't understand. Was that actually Apparently. People
Speaker 2:people went and dug it up and found out that she works there too.
Speaker 3:I thought that was people just saying, hey, this person looks like this person.
Speaker 4:Oh, I
Speaker 5:don't know.
Speaker 3:It it seems wild that the HR department was hitting the concert with the CEO.
Speaker 2:Was like open secret.
Speaker 3:I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, did not it was not good for Astronomer. Yep. We were discussing this. Lulu was saying CEO's gotta go because he's a hired gun not a founder. And it's just displays very bad character and it reflects poorly on the company.
Speaker 2:We were kind of going back and forth on this as as the like about the idea of like, okay. Yeah. Like the CEO did something bad in his personal life but like do you really wanna find an alternative to your managed Apache Airflow service? Like it's kind of a hassle to rip that out if you're happy with
Speaker 3:the product. We we said that
Speaker 2:It's not a product problem.
Speaker 3:Would be fine. They did need a new CEO Yes. Immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete Yes. Stepped up within days.
Speaker 3:Yes. Pete DeJoy.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. So founders back in the CEO side?
Speaker 5:Back in the seat. Let's go.
Speaker 3:That's the bull that's a real bull case
Speaker 2:for for strong the Ashton Hall sound effect. I wanna hear some good
Speaker 3:news. Is now founder mode everybody.
Speaker 2:Is totally in founder mode.
Speaker 3:They were already delivering the world's data.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:And now they're in founder mode.
Speaker 2:They're in founder mode. I think they're Another billion dollars for Bain Capital. Let's hear it for Bain Capital. They don't get
Speaker 3:enough An index.
Speaker 2:An index. I didn't know that. So
Speaker 3:And I actually I I emailed briefly with Pete DeJoy Yeah. And he said he's a fan of the show. Amazing. We're hoping to get him on. We don't wanna actually talk about any of
Speaker 5:this stuff.
Speaker 2:No. Haven't. I about wanna Apache Airflow. I'm so into Apache Airflow now. I'm so ready.
Speaker 3:But anyways, so late Friday night, the astronomer
Speaker 2:Clearly they didn't want us to on stream so they put it up after we after we logged on.
Speaker 3:Let's pull up the video.
Speaker 2:I wanna watch the full thing.
Speaker 6:You for your interest in Astronomer. Hi. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer a lot of questions over the last few days.
Speaker 6:Seriously? And wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes. Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI pipelines We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we've received Yes.
Speaker 6:There is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September.
Speaker 5:We will now be returning changing
Speaker 3:results. Ex wife? Yes.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Entire thing. It's very funny. It's it's not really like Chris Martin. It's not like getting back at Chris Martin in any sort of weird way. It's just funny that it's like another voice from that universe.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's so they they remain close friends co parents. Okay. In in so many ways like she's like the best spokesperson for this because anyways, you know
Speaker 2:Remarkable how quickly they shot that. Know, they had to like Yeah. Probably like a conference room near her office or like her house or something like that.
Speaker 3:Perfect response. We will You don't need astronomer there at all.
Speaker 2:Six lines. It's really ties
Speaker 3:into the story. It made sense. It wasn't just some random celebrity
Speaker 4:Nope.
Speaker 3:That had some Yeah. Funny tie in.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:And I think it was incredibly well done. Lulu broke it down. She said, laughing at themselves was the right move because humor does four crucial things. Connects with a new audience even for people who don't care about Apache airflow being in in on the joke together forms a connection with astronomer. Diffuse tension by joining the ridicule ridicule.
Speaker 3:They're no longer its subject or its object. Get closure. They said it out loud. The joke is tapped. Everyone can move on.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Signal a fresh start. The CEO and HR lady are gone. It's a new management team and making light of this shows. They're they've consciously uncoupled from the past.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 3:Great breakdown.
Speaker 2:Very well written, Lulu. The the third point is so funny because there's a little bit about like like nothing will kill a joke like independent of all the crazy astronomer Chris Martin Coldplay thing. There's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a series d enterprise SaaS company making the joke. And so if they're making if they're jumping in on the joke it's like well we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so we jumped in. We're playing along and we got the last literally the last laugh. Like like if anyone tried to post something about astronomer CEO Coldplay all like they would immediately be everyone be like, yeah we've moved
Speaker 3:The real question is is the IPO windows open. Should they go public?
Speaker 2:Become a meme stock?
Speaker 3:And actually have Gwyneth step in like kind of like chairman role. Know, really
Speaker 2:expand comps. They need a treasury.
Speaker 3:They do.
Speaker 2:But they need something that that that speaks to the the history of the company. They need to buy some some funny funny asset to put on the balance sheet. I was thinking about the we've moved on from Bitcoin treasuries to like the further out risk curve ones.
Speaker 3:Well, they just saw the Ethereum
Speaker 2:The GameStop treasury which is hilarious. I I think the next generation is just straight up lottery ticket treasury. Just scratchers.
Speaker 3:I thought you were gonna say like they should put some like match group on the balance sheet.
Speaker 2:They should. That would be good. That would be more like tied to this. And I think that makes sense for astronomer. Get a bunch of match group.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Get a bunch
Speaker 2:of match group stock on your balance sheet.
Speaker 3:By the way, we're
Speaker 5:Or
Speaker 2:like Eventbrite maybe or who who who runs like the Coldplay concerts? Like it's like didn't Taylor Swift like sue them? Ticketmaster. Get some Ticketmaster stock on the balance sheet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who knows? That would tie
Speaker 3:It really is way signal like the values of the company.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And
Speaker 3:also some potential Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ups What was that company? There was a biotherapist company that was saying like, we're fighting financial fraud by buying GameStop stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Financial inefficiencies.
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 3:Market manipulation.
Speaker 2:Get some scratchers on the balance sheet for sure. Get some lottery tickets. Everyone's like, yeah. They have they have $50,000 in lottery tickets. But if it hits, this could be $500,000,000 on the balance sheet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it is such a I think a year from now, we'll look back and say like they found a way to actually turn this into a win.
Speaker 4:Oh, Totally.
Speaker 3:Now, some people if if this is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen Yep. In this decade
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 3:But I think if you now have a million millions of people that like have think your company is kind of cool and funny.
Speaker 2:And they're aware of it. They're aware of it.
Speaker 3:And it would It would have cost them. I'm sure this Gwyneth video cost millions of dollars. Yeah. I think it probably would have cost them to try to to try to build that type of brand recognition otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like just just traditionally would have cost multiples of that.
Speaker 2:I only have one note on the video. I mean Autism Capital here says you have to give credit where credit is due. This is 10 out of 10 PR recovery. I think it loses one point because it was hard posted and not restreamed. One livestream 30 destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are.
Speaker 2:They should have restreamed it. Anyway, fantastic comeback. Lulu says next move is for an astronomer competitor to hire Chris Martin to do a video on how their product is the best at helping you gain visibility in any environment and keep your private networking secure. And and somebody in the comments says, the chain is gonna end with Well,
Speaker 3:is the thing. I don't even know Astronomer's competitors are.
Speaker 2:I don't know who their competitors are. But, I don't know. Maybe they should
Speaker 3:That's why this is a win for Astronomer.
Speaker 2:It's a huge win for Astronomer. And yeah, I mean also interesting because this kind of plays into what we were talking about with Paul from Browserbase this idea of like the like Apache Airflow's open source. You would expect that managed Airflow would be something that's you know, totally in AWS's wheelhouse. And yet they were able to scale to a series d company, 300 employees like clearly doing well. And now they have this like breakout moment and they still are probably facing fierce competition from the from the hyperscalers but and from the from the big cloud platforms.
Speaker 2:But they just don't.
Speaker 3:It's so the timing of this is so insane. Insane. Bane led the series d. It was announced on May 1.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 3:So Love it. Just very recently here. That mean they've been putting up some incredible numbers.
Speaker 2:Let's get me around me on the show. Have him talk about it.
Speaker 3:Last fist the last fiscal year, astronomers saw a 150% year over year ARR growth in world class a 130 net revenue retention and 90% product utilization with customers. I mean, I think they're gonna have a massive end end to the year.
Speaker 2:Speaking of high NPS products, let's tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com.
Speaker 3:And we will be in the great city of New York this week Yeah. For the Figma IPO.
Speaker 2:We will be.
Speaker 3:We will be live from NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what the cool kids call it. NYSE.
Speaker 3:NYSE.
Speaker 2:I always just call it NYSE or like the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:When you're saying it every other word because you're in that world
Speaker 3:When you're big in that world. When you're taking companies public like every other week.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. You gotta gotta use slang. Got it. Kids use.
Speaker 2:Okay. Bull or bear case for Figma. I go to Figma make and I tell it build me a collaborative design tool.
Speaker 3:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes. Recursive, the snake eating its tail. You use Figma to make Figma then you don't need Figma anymore. Is that a bear case? What's going on here?
Speaker 3:Well, I think you're basically still paying Figma to host.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. So they get you
Speaker 3:to host.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's how
Speaker 3:they get you locked in. You're paying.
Speaker 2:And so they
Speaker 3:get you locked You're paying one way or another.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like that though. It's a it's an extension it's an existential risk for all these platforms that allow you to build software vibe
Speaker 3:That's why every SaaS
Speaker 2:First thing I wanna vibe code is a vibe coding platform.
Speaker 3:Well yeah. Every that's why every SaaS company has to have a vibe coding product now.
Speaker 2:Yes. So you can vibe code the product itself. Yep. Yes. The the the tautological vibe code.
Speaker 3:No. That is I mean so the question people have been saying like, At at some point in the future, you'll be able to one shot products.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:I I would say I have really strong conviction that in the next few years, you'll be able to one shot a design tool. Yep. Will you be able to one shot a design tool for that works in the enterprise, that work as like That people you're with. Figma has been like shipping features every single day Yep. For a decade now.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And and even if you knew exactly which features mattered and how they all work together, it would be very difficult to create a one to one clone.
Speaker 2:And then also there's the network of if you hire a designer and you're like, hey.
Speaker 3:I need you to use my vibe.
Speaker 2:Use my vibe code. It's Figma knock off that I vibe Can coded in you just pay or we just use
Speaker 3:bucks a month?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and then So the ecosystem is very very important and also
Speaker 3:And there's a whole app ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:It makes me you know, it it definitely makes me more bullish on companies that have these like developer app ecosystems. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Shopify is the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You can one maybe you could one shot like an e commerce storefront product. But can you are you then gonna one shot the downstream?
Speaker 2:I mean, as soon as as soon as LLMs were writing code and we were talking about like AGI takeoff and super intelligence. I had this like running thought about, okay. So at a certain point, you can go to an LLM or a vibe coding platform and say like build me an e commerce website and it will just say like, okay setting up Shopify. But in the far far future, it could just say, okay applying for a banking license. Applying for a money transfer license.
Speaker 2:I'm going to rebuild Stripe. I'm going to rebuild Shopify. I'm gonna rebuild a database from first principles. I'm going to use just raw Actually you just can't make
Speaker 3:a data center.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna make I'm gonna build If I want
Speaker 3:to build an internet company I
Speaker 2:should have
Speaker 3:at least one data center.
Speaker 2:And it all just does that in one prompt. Yeah. Because one prompt fires off. I mean how many man hours have gone into building Stripe or building any of these companies? It's like you know tens of thousands of employees for most of them for you know decades.
Speaker 2:You add all that together. But, if the LLM can do that, and if the AI system can do that in the data center in just a few minutes, in hyper compression, who knows? Maybe. Logan Bartlett has another take on the astronomer video. He says, the astronomer video is great on its own, but I'm even more impressed that the leadership team and the board were able to come to consensus to make this investment and take this risk absent the CEO they've had for two year for the last two years.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine everyone was on board with this initially. So major kudos to everyone getting there eventually and taking this chance. This bodes well for their future IMO. And I agree. Like even with Gwyneth Paltrow, it it feels so funny but like there's this idea of like let's let's put out not a standard legal statement is it feels risky.
Speaker 2:And it's so easy for someone to step up and say, hey, like let's not take this risk. It's not worth it.
Speaker 3:Well, put out the quick statement that Pete was stepping back into
Speaker 2:the Yeah. They had put out a few statements. But clearly, something something was was clicking What on the
Speaker 3:should Andy Byron, the CEO having the affair? Which
Speaker 2:I think that's the best part about this video is that it doesn't take shots at him. Yeah. It doesn't it doesn't punch down. It doesn't make it like, oh, it doesn't drag that in. It doesn't make it more complicated.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times when when CEOs do get pushed out, there's like lawsuits about comp and was it fair to release people. And so there's like all these things that can come back. Like if you are especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, you should be you should probably not be talking about that that CEO. Because if you come out and say they were not good and that's why I had to step back in, then that could hurt their career prospects and then they could sue you for defamation or something like that. So there's a lot of risk to anything around that.
Speaker 2:All the corporate comms like it is like the lawyers are like annoying but like they do make a good point. Yeah. Like there is financial impact if you get it wrong. So very very good. And then Stays Stays says, I think we're gonna find out that Chris Martin felt bad asked Gwyneth Paltrow to help out and they gave Astronomer an offer to do damage control.
Speaker 2:My guess is that this is entertainment industry magic happening not data tech magic. Logan says
Speaker 3:Chris Martin wants to wants CEOs who are having affairs to feel welcome at his romantic concerts. He's like this could be really bad for business. This could be bad for ticket sales. I have to go into damage control.
Speaker 2:I don't think Chris Martin's behind this. This is a ridiculous theory that this stays say stay sassy or whatever. Logan says totally possible.
Speaker 3:I think there could something here. Mean I
Speaker 2:don't think so. I don't know. Like why why he feels bad that this just happened at his show.
Speaker 3:Martin has the data. He might be like ten percent of people at my concerts are having affairs.
Speaker 1:You think
Speaker 2:he's storing it at Apache Airflow?
Speaker 3:Or yeah. Maybe maybe he just really
Speaker 2:cares All those ticket sales are going through Apache Airflow and he's monitoring it using Astronomer. He's just like, no. My bags. I love this company. He's like actually accidentally an investor as well through some fun.
Speaker 2:Maybe he's Bain Capital LP. Who knows? He might be at
Speaker 5:the level.
Speaker 3:He might be heavily anchor GP.
Speaker 2:Anchor LP in index.
Speaker 3:And being an index.
Speaker 2:And to close out, Lulu said for everyone asking me this wasn't me. I do not work with astronomer but I think it was very well done. Kudos to their team. And it says a lot about Lulu's brand that whenever good PR happens people are like, Lulu's has to be behind this. It's it can only be her.
Speaker 2:It can't
Speaker 3:possibly screamed Lulu.
Speaker 2:It did. It did. It did scream Lulu.
Speaker 3:I didn't I didn't I didn't ask her because I didn't wanna know because like I just like you know
Speaker 2:You like the mystery?
Speaker 3:I like the mystery of it. I feel like if I knew I'd I should probably say something, Yeah. You
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, let's shift gears. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 3:Cheers to Vanta.
Speaker 2:In the other side of PR statements, the t app hack is an absolute disaster. This is
Speaker 3:And their statement was a disaster.
Speaker 2:Their statement was a disaster. It does not
Speaker 3:seem Somebody just informed me Please. A friend of the show Yes. That it was Ryan Reynolds agency that pulled it off.
Speaker 2:No way. Yeah. Ryan Reynolds.
Speaker 3:The bridge between Tech Hollywood Hollywood tech.
Speaker 2:Oh, he's master master of his craft. And I feel like he's done a number of those like solo
Speaker 3:Oh, so it was actually reported. So there's an article. Ryan Reynolds maximum effort ad agency turned astronomals viral moment into marketing gold. Wow. The production company was involved with the latest astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow.
Speaker 3:The ad is being hailed as a master class in crisis PR.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 3:Astronomer, Fortune is saying astronomer got the last laugh.
Speaker 2:They did. They really did.
Speaker 3:Releasing it late on a Friday too is great. Shutting down the work week.
Speaker 2:Well, don't want AWS to trade down too heavily on the news. Know, if you release that during market hours, it could be turmoil. Could trigger an entire market sell off. And last week, we had five back to back all time highs in the S and P 500. That's why we're wearing white suits.
Speaker 3:And we're wearing white suits because we have peace with Europe.
Speaker 2:Peace with Europe. We created a list of top AI researchers. It's called the Metis list and it's available. It's live now at dot com. These are the world's top AI researchers.
Speaker 2:We're of course experts in AI and AI researchers. So we are fully qualified to curate this list but we did have some help from some friends and we pulled some data. We looked at
Speaker 3:It was interesting that many of the people that we asked to do kind of like an Elo style ranking did not wanna be named because nobody wants to be picking favorites
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:On the inside. But I think we put together a great list. It it's honestly some of the most impressive. There's people in the top 10 with no Dwarkesh appearances.
Speaker 2:I don't know how that happens. How they
Speaker 3:do it?
Speaker 2:You gotta get on Dwarkesh. Yeah. We we we try to have some fun with this. We pulled some Google citations, some Google research citations, looked at some of the previous companies. This was of course based on the list which apparently has been going around Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:Mark Zuckerberg has been you know using this to recruit top AI researchers. We've been following the the trade war as Jordy put it earlier.
Speaker 3:We should have put a we should have put a buy it now price on here for for Zuck so you could just add to cart.
Speaker 2:Add to cart. Yeah. Just just create the super intelligence team directly on metaslist.com. Maybe that's how to monetize this thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was good to see Alan Turing make the list.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Yeah. Underrated. George Boole not doing so well. Inventor of boolean logic but he didn't make the list.
Speaker 2:But I think he's sitting in the eighties not doing too well. Tyler, tell us more about the list. What do you think stands out? What'd you learn from the process? What was your methodology?
Speaker 2:How'd you build this thing?
Speaker 5:Yes. This is a lot of fun. I I scraped most of Google Scholar like the top 5,000 people maybe. Mhmm. And then with some friends from from the big labs, I I kind of narrowed it down.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. You can see like a lot of the papers they've written interest stuff like that. Think another gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's let's see he's ranked number Six.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People love touring. I mean we passed his test and how long did his test stand? What sixty eighty years? Not bad.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 2:That's longer than most benchmarks in evals. Right? I feel like during
Speaker 3:Alan Turing versus goalpost.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who wins? Yeah. Yeah. Wait.
Speaker 2:What were you about to say?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, it's the longest enduring benchmark I think ever.
Speaker 2:For sure. Eighty years. Yeah. Must be. But who knows?
Speaker 2:RKGIV three might be around for eighty years. We might be here in
Speaker 5:'20
Speaker 2:in in 2034 or something. Wait. No. 02/2020, I guess, would be like the the the Alan Turing test benchmark. We got John Schulman.
Speaker 2:Who else? Jurgen Schmid Huber's on here. Jeff Dean, one of the greatest to ever do it over at Google. He's been in Google for a long time. Still, no.
Speaker 2:Yes, a Dwarf Kesh appearance. Let's go.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 2:It's good. Built MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow. Yan Lagoon's in here. You got all the different countries. Really wide representation Canada, UK, Australia, Russia, China.
Speaker 2:There's all sorts of people from all over coming together. A couple people without photos have been able to stay anonymous but most people we got their photo. Shalto Douglas. Good to see him on here. So this should be fun.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, Shalto ranked 56 but three Dwark hash appearances.
Speaker 3:There we go. How are you? Were you waiting? Were you waiting podcast appearances properly, Tyler? Yeah.
Speaker 2:He should be at the top with that.
Speaker 5:He wants to get score.
Speaker 2:Putting up numbers like that for sure. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He's gonna be coming for Elliot's spot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this is a lot of fun. There's a there's an email sign up. You can you can drop your email at the top to learn about the next drop whatever we send out.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Whenever we whenever we go live with stuff we will let you know first.
Speaker 3:And we're getting big into email soon by the way. Yes. Yes. Stay tuned for that.
Speaker 2:Very excited about that. And yeah. Hopefully this speeds up our trading card generation because be able to screenshot this and say this person's just got traded because it's moving fast and furious and we can't spend that much time handcrafting each of those trade deal trading card images. That's too quickly. Indeed.
Speaker 2:Indeed. There's there's a lot of stuff going on. Well, interesting related to Zuck. Did you know that the one of the kids at the IMO that was competing against OpenAI and DeepMind was named Alexander Wang?
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 2:Great nominative determinism. Yeah. Future Alex Future. And speaking of iOS Yeah.
Speaker 3:People are calling him the the The Alexander Wang. Wang. Next Next in line.
Speaker 2:He does have an e. It's not a a it's not a l x e n d e. It's d e r instead of d r. So slightly different. But still, Alex Wang nonetheless.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank thanks
Speaker 3:Our humble New York temple of technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give us the update. What's the news today? Break it down for us.
Speaker 3:Great jacket,
Speaker 2:by way. Yeah. You look
Speaker 3:so You got little touches of yellow in there.
Speaker 2:It's not It's not yellow enough for my but there is a little bit of yellow.
Speaker 3:By the way, our tailor designed these to celebrate and and really symbolize saving time and money. Yes. So I think they did the job. I think they did the job.
Speaker 2:I am I am overwhelmed. I
Speaker 3:do think get you we'll you one too.
Speaker 2:We'll definitely get
Speaker 5:you one. We
Speaker 1:gotta do this.
Speaker 2:We gotta go man on the street in in like Times Square. What do you do for a living? What what business do you run? Do you wanna save time and money? Let's get you on Ramp right now.
Speaker 2:We'll introduce you to CEO.
Speaker 3:Ramp.com. Phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But break it down for us. What happened today?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, first, I mean, we we might need a bigger gong.
Speaker 5:I know. We're all We're traveling.
Speaker 3:You have no idea. We're we're we're going to the ends of America to to get an American made gong and we're looking for something that will actually be floor to ceiling. Yeah. You know, it'll be, you know, something like 20 by 20. So working on that.
Speaker 3:I look forward to hitting it for for the next Yeah. One. Next The series e three.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Break it down.
Speaker 5:Is But
Speaker 1:this is phenomenal. Guys, thanks thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Of
Speaker 1:course. Here in New York, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 3:It really is.
Speaker 1:Technology here here at TVPN. Now it's we raised 500,000,000 at a 22 and a half billion dollar
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 3:Valuation. There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:It's got a nice ring to it. I'm
Speaker 3:really And and I'm losing track, but it seems like Ramp has not been able to get a fundraise public without it leaking, you know, five days previously to the press. But, this is official. I'm glad to make it official here.
Speaker 1:It it is official. It's the right valuation and look, I I I Early on in my my career, the I got this advice that the biggest battle a startup faces is people not giving a shit, people not caring. And so, you know what? We're happy that people care if things come out a couple days before. Yep.
Speaker 1:But we feel super lucky. And so that that's the the big news of the day. But, you know, I I I think so much what we focused on today especially in the raise is is what we're gonna do with the capital. Yep. Between the the last raise which we were proud to hit the gong for Six
Speaker 3:weeks ago?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Six weeks ago. Some of it actually came from from actually from the product. We launched our first AI agent Yep. For controllers and the data was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So that catalyzed this?
Speaker 1:A 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I yeah. That's my big question. Yep. Like, why e two?
Speaker 2:Why not f? And then also, it feels like you're like the king of like a bunch of fundraisers in a short amount of time. Yeah. Because like, there's clearly some benefits to that. But why not
Speaker 3:I gotta give some credit to the business, John. Mean, Eric's Eric's a great CEO. But the business is really, you know Well,
Speaker 1:I I we haven't talked about this before like we'll we'll share it. Like right now, July is pacing we're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume Wow. In July than June. Like it's it's been one month like like the business is growing extraordinarily quickly.
Speaker 3:What's that what's that meme with the guy on Hot Ones where he's
Speaker 5:No. No. Guys, don't don't talk. We need
Speaker 1:to it's a half Celsius but No. No. That that That's insane. The business itself is
Speaker 3:I remember I'm sure in back in 2020 you'd be happily sending you know investors like a you know, we grew 20% month over month you know but on like you know whatever 1% of the scale. Yeah. So so really wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I guess like the bigger like meta question is just like like there's a world where you stack a bunch of these wins into the mega deck and then just do like one massive fund raise every 18. There's this meme of, like, fund raising is a distraction. The CEO should be out there working with customers, improving the product. Obviously, you're doing that.
Speaker 2:But how do you how do you do these back to back fund raise without them being distracting? I know you have a big team now. But like, what goes into the the the decision to do, like, it I don't know if they're even smaller, but just like Yeah. More frequent fundraisers. Because that feels like a like something that's unique to your company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So so one, it's sort of a funny thing, but people I actually didn't understand this before in the start up world like, what is a series a or a b or an e two really?
Speaker 2:Somebody who did a $55,000,000 seed round. Yeah. And then and then you'll tell
Speaker 3:them we we pressed them. We were like, is this for marketing?
Speaker 4:Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, you're still gonna get the expect like the expectation will be that you perform at like the at the series b
Speaker 2:the company, it's gonna feel like a series b company.
Speaker 1:I I almost think like calling things by letters is totally silly. All all it actually meant was we had a set of documents that we use whenever financing happened. There's hundreds of pages of documents that go back and forth between company and investor. Yeah. Calling it an e two just meant that we use the exact same documents.
Speaker 3:Save time and money.
Speaker 1:We Save money on No. It was really just that. And so so look, it it it was very efficient to get financing done. Yeah. And I also believe a lot in this concept of of marking to market
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:Of in real time what are companies ultimately worth. Yeah. And, you know, when when you look at the fundraise from about a month month and a half ago, I think it was when it was announced, done done earlier, you know, we raised, I think in exchange for about $200,000,000, 1% more shares came onto the cap table.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:So it was a very small amount of dilution. Yep. With this raise of 500,000,000 at 22 and a half, it's like two ish percent. Yeah. See, these are not that dilutive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's not reflecting restructuring the company Right. But but but it's giving you a more modern mark.
Speaker 3:And adding to the war chest.
Speaker 1:Adding to the war chest. And I think it's a good thing because one, you know, allows people to invest at the at the right point in time. But two, because you're you're not raising far ahead of where metrics are, it means that the company is not that distracted. Yeah. You know, for for the actual organization Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, we've just been obsessed with going.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And You're not in a you're not in
Speaker 2:a position where everyone's like, oh, like, at this valuation, like, Ramp doesn't just need an act two, but they need an act three, four, and five. Like, they gotta, you know, create super intelligence and all this crazy stuff because, like, like, it's, like, based on the actual progress of the company.
Speaker 1:A 100% right.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. A 100%. I wanna talk about the product. I wanna talk about the AI thing. The the the interesting my experience with the ramp was that it was, in many ways, an AI agent before AI agents was a buzzword.
Speaker 2:And I know that, obviously, when you scan a receipt, it goes through an OCR process and the data, the text is extracted from the image. Yes. And then, I I I would assume that you were an early adopter of LLMs to help clean that up. And that was, in many ways, a more, like a super magical AI agent experience, I'm not prompting it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just something that's happening in the background. Invisible. Yep. Ramp. It's invisible.
Speaker 2:And you're using some, you know, deterministic code, some probabilistic code, some older machine algorithms for OCR, some newer LLMs to clean up the data and tag things and say, this is a restaurant, that's a flight, and and, you know, do all the magic that helps categorize expenses. The question is, like, it feels like a big shift to put the the the the agent in the hands of the user. Mhmm. And so, you said that you're seeing, like, incredible adoption. What are people actually using it for?
Speaker 2:What's the feedback? And and, I I mean, like, yeah, what else are the learnings of, like, where that goes? Do people want that or do people ultimately want to be able to prompt a few times and then have things baked into the core behind the scenes workflows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I I I feel like so so let's talk a little bit about it like what are like AI assistants?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:What are AI agents? Yep. What's the distinction? Because I actually think people are like pretty pretty sloppy with with And the
Speaker 3:so I feel like Well, to be clear, if you wanna raise money right now, you just build SaaS and call it an agent. Boom.
Speaker 1:But but let's talk.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 1:a lot of people who are building, who who are listening to this podcast. So so I I think first for, you know, assistance or co pilots, the idea is a person prompts, the co pilot will review it, will make a recommendation, but then ultimately it's on the human to go do the work. Mhmm. I get a recommendation, recommendation. I I input it back and forth.
Speaker 1:This is maybe similar to experience that you might have on a chat GBT Yep. Or or or that kind of a thing. An agent is a bit different.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What you do is you give it instructions and access to tools and you say, under certain conditions, if you see an outcome that I've instructed you to drive, just go do it. Right? And
Speaker 2:Forever, essentially.
Speaker 1:Forever. And and you know, I'm gonna modify things from But time to it's a little bit more similar to like, let's say you hire an intern or a new hire, you teach them how to do the job, you watch it
Speaker 4:a bunch of times.
Speaker 2:On ongoing basis.
Speaker 1:And then then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the the distinction. Yep. And and and one of the if you if you think about what we're actually optimizing for Yep. One of the core metrics is we look at what was the amount of work that a ramp customer was able to do in a single let's say in an hour or in a minute.
Speaker 1:Yep. Right? And so as we look over over the years, that's gone up a lot. And if if you joined in 2023, you know, mathematically, we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the the the metric is as you did just two years ago for every minute you're spending on the site. So it's all to say, like, every minute is counting for three times more.
Speaker 1:I think that ratio should be 30 times more. Yeah. And if you look at what happened, so we launched the we made this announcement about three, four weeks ago for this first AI agent and we had early adopters, Notion, Webflow, Quora. The stats just absolutely shocked us when we looked at this. Functionally, these companies were able to get 15 times more work done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Transactions categorized. Yeah. But the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day like they know the expense policy better than any manager at the company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it was 99% accurate. Yeah. It got a lot more tasks done. Yeah. And suddenly, like for many people who've worked at large companies, you spend like an hour just reviewing expenses and you're like, why am I spending an hour reviewing like someone's Uber Exactly.
Speaker 1:Or or their purchase and that's just gone. Yeah. And you're focusing on actually interesting exceptions. Yeah. And so where where where I think this kind of adds up to is for a lot of years, people had to be forced forced to like learn how does software work and how do I think like software?
Speaker 1:How do I learn to use Salesforce? How do I learn to use Google? How do I learn to use Excel? Mhmm. Now, we're teaching these software programs to think like people And that means you can teach software functionally the same way you would an intern
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To go and figure out what expenses are in and out of policy and that very avid software that doesn't take breaks, doesn't take holidays, that is obsessed over every deal of your expense policy can catch when your policy
Speaker 3:If if you need to talk to it at at a you're on a on a work trip and you need a yeah. Or you have therapy but I was gonna say like Yeah. You don't if you can avoid messaging somebody on the weekend to ask if something's in or out of policy, It's like it it benefits everybody.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. No. And and and I think you're right up like another another point of like a lot of work is sort of if this and that. Like if you get a if you get a like a you wanna buy a new piece of software and that vendor sends you like a quote Yeah. Then procurement negotiates it.
Speaker 1:Once procurement negotiate it, then legal takes a look at it. Once legal says it's fine, then, you know, finances, is there an invoice and we go and pay it out and then it goes accounting. But if you have lots of digital agents functionally all the time online and responsive, these things can occur simultaneously. Yep. And so it means actually instead of waiting days to go and onboard a new vendor, it can be done in in in minutes.
Speaker 1:And so it just means it's much easier to do work. And I think the big picture of like, why are we here at all? It's actually just to save time and money to make it easier for more companies to operate and and that's what this stuff adds up to.
Speaker 3:It's really nice when you don't have to update your your mission statement. I know. You know, as new techno I mean, this is we we've talked about, you know, Google's original mission statement which is loosely like, you know, organize and and make the world's information like valuable. Right? And it's like, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, generative AI like does that very efficiently. AgenTic workflows applied to finance Yep. Saves people time and money. Yeah. It's the same same mission.
Speaker 2:I wanna take a post about a post from Keith Raboy. He said five out of six board meetings he had in the last couple months were about how to design a company's organization Yeah. For AI. I'm interested in and we've been debating this in the context of Meta Super Intelligence. Is artificial intelligence an app like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp?
Speaker 2:Or is it like their finance team? Like their infrastructure team? Like their database team that sits across all of the apps as like a service layer? And I'm interested to know, like, you have a product now. And I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product, and that product has AI in the name.
Speaker 2:Yep. But then, I imagine that every single person from designers to engineers to, you know, the the ops people are using artificial intelligence in their day to day. Mhmm. And I'm wondering if if you're seeing a new, like, cross functional team develop or how you're thinking through that that trade off of, like, horizontal versus vertical, maybe both teams in just terms of running a high performance organization.
Speaker 1:It it I I love his post. And I think it's actually, like I'll I'll put it this way, like, I don't think most people have really come to terms with the reality that like computers can like see and hear and like think now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:crazy. It's so different and like if you're like just going and repeating the same organizational structure that like was in place when anything were possible like it's a little bit of like, are are are you are you awake? Like like you you get this actually is the right question and one I think people should be spending a lot more time in earnest
Speaker 3:We need more business. We need some new business, you know, management textbooks. It's true. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 3:It's a joke. But there's no there's no like enduring.
Speaker 2:And so if you don't if you have a whole piece of your org chart that doesn't have any AI on it, like, you're gonna ship that in the product and then people are gonna be like, wait, this part this piece of the product feels very manual and like web one point o almost.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The the create I mean, one one thing that happened yesterday was Zuck saying, like, basically saying you can now use code AI in your coding interviews.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Which sounds insane. Like, wouldn't you wanna still hire for people that that might just just naturally be good at engineering and then get better? But he he's basically making the statement of, no, we're so committed to this new paradigm that, yeah, you should use every tool you have available to do the best possible work.
Speaker 1:I and I think it's totally right and I I'll I'll admit something even for people who, you know, are interviewing soon, there are some job functions at Ramp where it is actually not possible to pass it like an interview or coding interview without using an LLM. Wow. And that's intentional. Yeah. It's actually intentional to figure out like, are you curious about that?
Speaker 1:Are you using these tools or not? It it it's not a question of IQ. I think there's brilliant people who, you know, don't need an LLM to think but I think that the capabilities of being able to access an extraordinary amount of compute as well as specialized, you know Yeah. Knowledge. Why why wouldn't you?
Speaker 1:And and Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like just because Scott Wu could do a problem in his head doesn't mean he shouldn't use a calculator.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny putting it. Old one of old like coding challenges was this thing called fizz buzz where
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You try and write out numbers from zero to one. And if it's if it's odd or if it's divisible by three, you write fizz. If it's divisible by seven, you write buzz. And then if it's divisible by both, write fizz buzz. And it's like a very basic coding challenge, but it always assumes that you have access to Python.
Speaker 2:Like, and it's not saying, okay, you have to go and like fab your own semiconductor to do it. And so, it makes sense that like, you know, we are in the age of LLMs. Like, that's gonna be a tool that
Speaker 3:Don't give Eric ideas. The Kareem. Kareem might Kareem might start requiring the engineering team. You're gonna have to be able to set up your own semi fab in order to
Speaker 2:Write write it out in binary with a pen and paper.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's, you know, engineering with your own silicon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one interesting thing. We've talked a lot about this like Move 37 concept. Lee Sedol, the Google DeepMind challenge. They beat Lee Sedol.
Speaker 2:And in Move 37, it was like this moment of like true inspiration where AlphaGo put a piece on the board that was so unexpected. Lisa all stood up, went outside, smoked a cigarette, and was like, that is mind blown. Right? And we've had moments like that. Maybe the Studio Ghibli moment is this, like, we've had passing the touring test.
Speaker 2:But there's also been plenty of areas that feel more intractable in terms of artificial intelligence. And it feels like if you are, like Mhmm. With the latest IMO, problem six was this combinatorics problem that I don't understand, but neither does OpenAI or Google apparently. So, you know, we're basically the same. But my but my question is, like, is, like, with the AI agent's product, are there are there things that you see CFOs, modern CFOs do?
Speaker 2:Like, what is the the humanity's last exam, the intractable problem, the most elegant beautiful thing that a CFO can do that feels like, oh, this is gonna be something that's happening and requires like the human touch for a very, very long time?
Speaker 3:I think I think my my my immediate thought is to give you give you some time to think is it feels like AI today is really good at doing the work that like a management consultant could do. So you can like tell them like, run this type of business. Like, make me marketing plan or come up with five ideas for marketing, you know, strategies in Yep. Q four. And it will create like a a great report.
Speaker 3:It'll look great. It'll have some maybe some decent ideas. And yet it still feels like to do truly exceptional work. Yeah. Like we like Monday, like the three of us spent like couple hours talking about Yeah.
Speaker 3:Some some campaign and like debating it and all these different points and it's like we could have had AI in the mix there but you could imagine to be tossing in ideas Yeah. That Yeah. Were kind of maybe random and and maybe something helpful but it was still like you just like people needed to just like sit there and just like hash it out and it feels like that's that's like Yeah. You know, do the work to like do analysis, create reports, know, when it when it comes to like actual knowledge work.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But anyways, I don't know what your thought is.
Speaker 1:I I love this line of questioning and I think it's gonna get super interesting. Especially as in AI is going from a primarily academic tool and and also in some ways I feel like it's it's it's jumped into software engineering in part because, you know, software engineers know what it is to to code and Yeah. You know, they're working with AI and and so they have good taste and there's these great feedback loops. Yeah. And so it's happening there sooner but it's starting to make it into general business logic, finance, everything.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:You know, I I think a good place to start if you you just wanna decompose the problem is like, is the job of finance actually?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What is it? And and I I I think if you were to just really simplifying it down, it's in my view some subset of you're gonna define a set of rules that govern who is able to spend what, under what circumstances, what are the controls you have in place. Once activity has occurred, you've spent money, things are coming in, how do you record that activity accurately?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Close your books. And then based on what occurred, how do you goal seek to more profitability, profitability, more growth, more cash flow, whatever thing you're gonna go try to go do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's about it. Yeah. And if you really kinda simplify it, it's just a set of rules and algorithms. Yeah. These systems, one, they're incredibly complicated to do each of those things and so I I actually think like brilliant people have over the last fifty hundred years been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases like tabulators just calculating things or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over or matching the receipts and doing like very low level task and only doing a little bit, you know, after
Speaker 3:you example is like when any any like like TV show about business. Yeah. It's like like you look at like The Office. All of this was any real work done? Like you did it
Speaker 1:Was there ever yeah. You don't
Speaker 3:you don't really do you remember a time when they were maybe once or twice they called a customer or they did a customer meeting? But outside of that, it's like thousands of hours of just like Yeah. Doing they they're doing business but they're not like, are they really getting anything done? And so I think I think the point you're making is like, how much of the work that we do is should should be the work that we're doing.
Speaker 1:You nailed it. Like I I think so much of work is very mechanical and it's, you know, we want finance to be forward thinking and strategic, but the reality of a lot of finance is looking backward.
Speaker 2:I think that's Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that the strategic thing is really key. Like like, Tyler Cowen would say that, like, relationships are are very Lindy and gonna stick around for a long time. Trust building, that type of stuff.
Speaker 2:But Ben Thompson dumped some sort of, you know, 10 Q into ChatGPT and said like, make me a Ben Thompson style article. Yeah. It did some some of it, but it didn't have Uncanny. Yeah. It didn't have, like, the actual strategic insights and the storytelling that can actually, like, marshal the proper resources.
Speaker 2:And I feel like that's, in many ways, the the job of CFO. It's risk taking. It's deciding the right strategy for situation. And it seems like the the the frontier models are not quite there yet.
Speaker 1:You you nailed it. And I think that when I think about the next set of years, we we with the fundraise, we tried to lay out of like Mhmm. We're seeing glimmers of like this whole industry is gonna get rewritten.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What do we think the industry looks like over the next three to five years? What does the org like look like? And we laid that out in the post. But I think the biggest transformation is like really really, I think most of the finance function today, unfortunately, is very backward looking. Sure.
Speaker 1:But I think as automation, agentic workflows are coming to the forefront and platforms like Ramp, actually more people can be looking forward
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can be spending time
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, on like for Ben Thompson, like what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better. And when I think of like what is that last exam ultimately for a finance organization is, you know, I I think there are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies that I think about is Amazon. In its early days, they're so so they were very early and they would send email follow ups to customers. You just bought this.
Speaker 1:And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write, like if you seen like the Trader Joe's newsletter where someone writes like these poetic things about the new ingredients and cool stuff, come try this and whatever. Amazon did that in the nineties. There was an editorial team talking about the great new products that were coming online on amazon.com and then there was this personalization team. It's like, I don't know, p 12 n or or whatever it is. And they said, we're gonna a b test it.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:This personalization team, you're gonna get 10% of the send volume and your job is to just go and try to find these weird connections. These move 30 sevens of like, you just bought this, you may be interested in this product. And for a long time, humans crushed the personalization team. There was something kind of in the example of how these marketers thought that was better. It get better and better and better till one day the personalization team, the volume started winning.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:And it kept winning. Yep. And there is no team
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is sending like newsletters around. And so, you know, it turns out algorithmically on single products, you might be able to go and have a better algorithmic recommendations. I still think for quite a while Yeah. There was a role for creative CFOs and thinking about these unexpected strategies. It it's sort of in some ways like, I don't know, it about you guys for a second.
Speaker 1:The media industry has been at it for a long time, you know. There's live streaming.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, TV has been around for for a while. No one saw this and suddenly like this is one of the most I think important things happening
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, in in broadcasting. It's it's your show.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:You guys saw it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think there's room for people of great taste, are great marketers, who are great leaders, CFOs, and and so No. I'm I'm I'm bullish actually when you have time to think about the interesting work.
Speaker 2:A 100%. Yeah. Like, there's one world where you see the expense policy as like a a set of if statements statements, and and there's there's a a different different world world where where you you start thinking about expenses as like bets and risk taking and actual, like, what is the net present value of buying that particular thing? Will this pay off for the business? Does this actually increase shareholder value when you buy even just the those pencils versus those pens?
Speaker 2:Like, that's really
Speaker 3:Also, I mean I mean, yeah. There there's so much, you know, finance historically is, you know, looking backwards and you can make decisions based on that and be like, woah, we spent this on this. We shouldn't do that again. But there's also so much you can bring in of like even helping understand projecting out. Did you know if you adopted this tool and then you grow head count 20% or or 30% or a 100%, you know, this is gonna be in a year if you keep this existing, you know, plan contract, you're gonna be spending, you know, some crazy multiple of what you're paying today.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. And there's so much. So
Speaker 2:What's next for the company? Is the job finished?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Everybody everybody in the chat is asking job finished.
Speaker 2:Is the job finished?
Speaker 1:The job is not finished guys. I'm still we're we're still we can't believe it.
Speaker 3:Job not finished confirmed.
Speaker 1:No, guys. This this is
Speaker 3:I love this thing.
Speaker 1:No. It's like it's like we're we're we're we're pleased. We're we're happy but like this is the crazy thing about our industry is that any business that spends money could be a ramp customer. Sure. And we've come a long way.
Speaker 1:They
Speaker 2:will They will be. They must be.
Speaker 1:They must be.
Speaker 2:Shoulds and musts.
Speaker 1:No. I don't know. We're we're working hard on it. But but guys, most people, you know, pour pour one out for for our friends like expenses, closing the books. It is the worst hour of of their month.
Speaker 1:Yep. It doesn't have to be. Yep. We're gonna change that.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Incredible.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks a ton.
Speaker 1:A ton
Speaker 4:of fun.
Speaker 3:Later, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see you
Speaker 5:later.
Speaker 1:And please recommend your tailor to me. I gotta get
Speaker 3:one of these things. Now, we'll our our we'll we'll put you in touch.
Speaker 2:Let's read through Ben Thompson's analysis of the Figma s one, the Figma OS, and Figma's AI potential Finally. In Manhattan for Figma's IPO tomorrow. We're very excited about that.
Speaker 3:Will be from New NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Yes. Cannot wait. So, Bloomberg has a story here. Figma's initial public offering is approaching 40 times over subscribed according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 3:Is that good?
Speaker 2:That's fine. And collaboration software. We'll have to we'll have to ask everyone tomorrow if it's good.
Speaker 3:Should they get the same revenue multiple oversubscribed they are?
Speaker 2:Could be the year the year's most in demand listing. The company is guiding prospective investors, at its IPO, which could raise as much as 1,200,000,000.0, is expected to price above the marked, the marketed range. The people said, the San Francisco based firm and some investors are offering 36,900,000.0 shares at 30 to $32 per share after increasing the range Monday from 25 to $28 each. Orders taking is expected to end at noon on Tuesday in New York. Bloomberg News has reported oversubscription refers to when the number of orders for shares in the IPO exceeds shares that were originally offered.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 3:Lot of demand for Figma shares, which makes sense. Exactly. It has been one of the most in demand secondary It helps you think bigger and
Speaker 2:build faster.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:It helps design and development teams build great products together. What's not
Speaker 3:to like? Nothing like mixing and add into at least this is Ben Thompson's analysis. This is Right? So Ben Thompson is not sponsored by Figma.
Speaker 4:No. He's We
Speaker 2:had a friend of the show come on and break down the s one when the when the numbers dropped. It was kind of like the dream case for for SaaS. Right?
Speaker 3:For SaaS. Coming out and immediately being the top, you know, for from a purely metrics based look, the top SaaS company Yep. In public SaaS company
Speaker 2:in world. And, of course, a lot of people point to the rule of 40. You add the growth rate to the burn rate, how much money you're losing. If you're losing a lot of money, you're growing really fast, that's fine. If you're if you're making a ton of money but growing slower, either way, they should add up to at least 40%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Higher, the better. And if you add Figma's up, they're they're in the 70%. So well beyond 4040% according to the rule of 40, which is, of course, exciting to the venture capitalists who popularize the rule of 40.
Speaker 3:They basically created profitability.
Speaker 2:So he says, I think you can make the case that an $18,000,000,000 valuation is in fact too low. Indeed, I think you can make the company make the case that the company is worth more than 20,000,000,000. Adobe agreed to buy it for 20,000,000,000 back in 2022. That, of course, is despite the rise of generative AI, which at first glance appear to be a threat to Figma because you just go to ChatGPT and say, hey, build me a collaborative software tool. And maybe it just
Speaker 3:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes. But he says, I would go in the other direction, generative generative AI and the opportunity it resents represents is exactly why Figma should go public as field strongly suggests and get ready to be acquisitive.
Speaker 3:Get ready to get get ready to get bought.
Speaker 2:Do some deals. We love we love a Dylan Field deal.
Speaker 3:The Figma OS, Ben says the reason why I'm optimistic about Figma comes from my belief that Figma is not simply design software rather it's something much more fundamental and valuable and operating system with a collaboration built in. Here is how I explained Figma back when Adobe tried to acquire them. Forgive the long excerpt he says, but it really is the point as far as my optimism about Figma is concerned. He says, here it is important to note that Figma's most prominent victim to date has not been Adobe, but rather Sketch. The explosion in apps led to a growing market for product and design.
Speaker 3:Product design and development as designers needed to lay out a whole host of different app views and developers needed to know what exactly the designers wanted them to build. Photoshop and Illustrator which were primarily focused on the creation and editing of single files, were the completely wrong tools for the job. Sketch, was released in 2010 as a Mac OS app and is still Mac OS only, although it now includes the ability to view files on the web, completely took the category by storm. Adobe Adobe eventually responded with Adobe XD, but not until 2015. And the product is still in third place.
Speaker 3:Sketch though is now only in second.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Continue, Jordy.
Speaker 3:Chris, the CEO of AdQuick is in New York as well. We're gonna try to meet up with him in a little bit. Sketch was not a disruptive product. It was like Adobe's products, a desktop app. It just delivered a solution to an emerging product category that Adobe was slow to respond to and that was like the designing of web and and mobile products.
Speaker 3:Yep. Figma though was something completely new. The company which was founded in 2012 made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building v one of the product. This included which is just so funny because normally if you talk to a founder building a software company and they said, yeah. I've I'm I'm three years in and I haven't shipped an MVP.
Speaker 3:You would just immediately write the company off because like, you know, why haven't you shipped? Yeah. In this case, it was necessary. They
Speaker 2:quit your job, raise $10,000,000, Vibrio launch video, slop like product in two seconds. Like that's the that's the flow and then a and then and then sort it out and then maybe it works. But it's a Don't
Speaker 3:worry about securing personally identifiable information at all. Just get to the top of the charts and figure it out later. Yeah. So this included writing the editor in c plus plus cross compiling it to JavaScript using the asm dot js subset that let it achieve desktop like control memory and performance and building its own rendering engine from scratch using web GL which had only been released in 2011. Web GL was the Yeah.
Speaker 3:The why now for the business and Dylan was very early to recognizing that. It was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector which in this case was collaboration.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And you know, anybody anybody under the age of 25 like probably doesn't remember the pre pre Figma era but like having different files and sending them back and forth and like sending comments by email. It's just like it it, even even personally I I only briefly was was working without having access to, Figma. So Yeah. Ben says, think about my brief description for this product design and development segment. Multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project, a designer and a developer.
Speaker 3:In reality, the huge number of views and increased functionality in apps meant that there was an increasingly large teams on both sides. Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on the app together. Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got collaboration for free from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is a crazy screen shot. I don't know if we can show this but on on Figma's website, the company compares itself to Adobe XD. But I use Photoshop and Illustrator. Don't stop.
Speaker 2:We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you're photo editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you're doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no brainer. But if you're looking for the best tool for UX design, Figma is here for you. Plus, you can easily import images and SVG code into Figma and have your cake and eat it too.
Speaker 2:And so, putting the competitors products right there. So And recommending it. Eventually Photoshop and Adobe did launch a competitor called XD. And XD wound up is getting killed by Figma but no one ever subscribed to Creative Cloud for XD. You just used it because it was here, says Ben Thompson.
Speaker 2:Here's the problem though. To the extent that Adobe's products were being used as part of Figma's workflow was the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long term relevance. Figma could, for example, start investing much more heavily into its photo editing or illustration capabilities rendering Adobe's products increasingly unnecessary. What is more threatening is Figma's cross platform capabilities. Third party developers can build plug ins for Figma that make it possible to easily add the sort of editing capabilities.
Speaker 2:So, regulators blocked the Adobe deal. And Ben Thompson says he thinks it was correct. The regulators got it correct that time. And based on the run that Figma's been on ever since, it seems like it could be a win for them as well. Yep.
Speaker 2:And and it's interesting because a lot
Speaker 3:Sane roller coaster for the team. Yeah. And and Figma, I think, during the acquisition process, clearly didn't have the insane urgency to launch new products Yep. Because they thought they were going to, you know, Adobe and and would be part of an organization with a bunch of different Yeah. Individual apps and and watching how they reacted after it was blocked and then came Yep.
Speaker 3:And just started shipping Yeah. Like crazy.
Speaker 2:And so the FTC is gone after some some mergers that have made no sense. Like, they I believe they blocked
Speaker 3:Like Roomba.
Speaker 2:The Roomba one yeah. That one didn't make sense. The worst example I can think of is Meta bought a VR fitness app, and they said that Meta was trying to create a monopoly in the VR fitness market, which is just not a market at all. It doesn't even exist, and I don't know anyone that does VR fitness, and it's very rare. And so it totally makes sense to let that team get an exit and go hang out at Meta and try and work on this until
Speaker 3:Creating the market for VR.
Speaker 2:Creating the market. And then as soon as it takes off, there's gonna be a ton of competitors immediately. And so it seems like totally fine to let that one go through. And then there are there are other sides where where, like, truly, are, like, two players and they're merging, there's gonna be a lot of a lot of competitive dynamics that come from that. Anyway, let me tell you about bezel.
Speaker 2:Pre owned luxury watches, authenticated in house bezel is the top marketplace in the world for authenticated luxury watches.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And again, just more context. So Amazon Amazon's acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba, was blocked due to antitrust concerns, was primarily from the European Commission.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:They're worried about It was it was Europe. A monopoly in home robotics, I guess. And the CEO ended up just resigning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is, like, the the the robotic vacuum market is extremely competitive because of a lot of the Chinese companies. Like, Oofee and there's a few others. Like, it is definitely not as much of like a it's it feels like a lot less of a sticky prod product. Because, yes, it maps your home and it's supposed to learn.
Speaker 2:But, really, if you move to a new place and you get a different robot vacuum cleaner, like, you're pretty much good after a day. You're not like, oh, I can't get out of the Roomba ecosystem. Yeah. Whereas, Sonos is stickier than that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, I I I never had a problem
Speaker 3:with that. And iRobot shares are down 95% What? Over the last looking We over the
Speaker 2:But we'd actually got blocked and then they just got cooked.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They actually went public 07/31/2020. No way. Stock popped to a $133 a share by early twenty twenty one. It's now sitting at $4 and 28
Speaker 2:What's market cap?
Speaker 3:A 130,000,000.
Speaker 2:130,000,000.
Speaker 3:So a little bit of value destruction from the European.
Speaker 5:Imagine how
Speaker 2:frustrating that would be. You're like, I think I'm getting out to, like, the most logical acquirer possible. So Figma's position and the AI potential. Consider the position Figma has in the software design process. First, Figma enables collaboration, their original differentiator from Adobe and Sketch.
Speaker 2:Second, Figma creates one canvas for app creation, everything based on the same URL instead of files that are passed around with increasingly absurd file name appendages, you know, final final final v three v four v one final final. Third, Figma serves as a source of truth for an apps design. These capabilities seamlessly translate into AI enabled workflows. And so
Speaker 3:And these capabilities seamlessly translate to AI enabled workflows. Collaboration today between a host of humans could very well mean coordination and orchestration of AI. Critically, Figma isn't assuming or relying on an AI doing everything. Granted, that is a theoretical threat to the company, but the problem with AI only development processes is that they're extremely difficult to debug or decompose. Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ben Thompson kind of closes out talking about Figma as the OS of design being important. What operating systems have is coordination and orchestration abilities, one canvas where all the work happens.
Speaker 3:So the source of truth.
Speaker 2:And then, for now for now, Figma gets its nascent AI cap gates the capabilities behind a full seat license, I e, the most expensive plans. They also have usage based model. But they Ben Thompson is advocating for Figma to move towards some sort of usage based or task based monetization model. This is what
Speaker 3:Selling work. Salesforce.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Salesforce is
Speaker 3:Selling the end product.
Speaker 2:Exactly. As opposed to And seat so that will be a business model transition. And he says that the transition will be tricky, and it's arguably the best argument against Figma going public because if all of a sudden you shift to, hey, we don't charge per seat. We charge per finished design or finished website or shipped website, then all of a sudden, you could see that you wind up with a much better business model four quarters out, but you have two rough quarters, and the public markets don't like that. And people always talk about that being one of the reasons one of the drawbacks of being public is that is that you have a lot of investors that are a little more short term oriented.
Speaker 2:But he says, I think, however, that it that it is notable that Field mentioned m and a dur in his argument for going public. Figma would do well to start acquiring AI companies to plug into every aspect of its stack, particularly now when AI capability is nascent and not yet a threat to Figma as a whole. Above, I was skeptical about AI replacing Figma, but that is a skepticism that is relevant for the short term. Figma's task is to replace itself before anyone else has the chance in the long term.
Speaker 3:Looks like we have our first Let's
Speaker 2:bring him in.
Speaker 5:We have Andrew
Speaker 3:Reed come in. Andrew Reed.
Speaker 4:In a beautiful suit.
Speaker 3:Looking good. Somebody somebody confused me.
Speaker 2:Guys do look earlier.
Speaker 3:I said, hey. You're Andrew. Right? I said, am not, but he is close by. What's going on?
Speaker 2:Andrew, welcome to the stream. You're live. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:You are live. Here's my friend. New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having us.
Speaker 4:Guys look like you were made to be here.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Very happy to
Speaker 4:be to
Speaker 2:put on the suits six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this.
Speaker 4:Is this my microphone? That's your microphone. Wonderful.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you?
Speaker 4:Let's see. Well, first off, congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 5:It's very
Speaker 4:exciting. Today has been it's been a good day. You know, you open Yeah. Dylan rang the bell at 09:30, and it's 02:11PM eastern right now. Sure.
Speaker 4:So we've been milling around for many hours. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's a little exhausting.
Speaker 4:It opened and, yeah, it's amazing seeing the team here. Yeah. And just the excitement of everyone chanting Figma and seeing all the traders in their swagged out Figma jackets.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, yeah, the jackets are they're not gonna go into market, you know, bidding jackets because those are we're on the second The thing that stood out to me is all the little like, they really made they really made NICEE their home. Like, every like, every single place you look, there's something Figma and it's just so so incredibly well done.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And this one of my one of the experiences I've had with Figma, you know, dating back to when we first invested seven years ago was it's a company Over next success. Over next success. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 4:It's a company that's always had extraordinary attention to detail. Yeah. And, you know, it shows up when you do an all hands at their office. Yeah. And the way The s you one.
Speaker 4:The board sides the s one, config the conference. Yeah. And how they apply that attention to detail to the NIZI is incredible because, you know, there's applying the attention to detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground and the party outside. Like, they just said an unbelievable job.
Speaker 3:They have to be doing things that haven't been done before.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think the the takeover outside was breathtaking. And I'm obviously very biased because people look like they're very excited. But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like
Speaker 2:Did you see the roadshow? Did you go to any of the roadshow? I heard there was like a long product demo there
Speaker 5:which is
Speaker 4:kind of uncommon. Yeah. So I think it's I think this is true for, you know, many CEOs, but especially for Dylan. Like, cares a lot about the product. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what fig not just what figment stands for in design and creativity and all the things you see Yep. But really how the product works. And it was not a five minute flyby, you know, look at the cool, you know, shiny features.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The product demo was, you know, they were in the weeds. It was, yeah, I was I in fact uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed. But
Speaker 2:it was good.
Speaker 4:I think it's important. Again, like, part of, you know, that's who Dylan is. Right? He, like, actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and Yeah. And every single feature and then that shows through.
Speaker 3:How early did you actually meet Dylan? Sarah Sarah Guo was posting earlier that prelaunch they were burning $800,000 a month, which just sounds like that's the most nerve wracking scenario for any you know, a lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special foundry was?
Speaker 4:Well, Dylan and Evan, by the way Yeah. I think just think it's it's a nice moment to take a pause and just give a shout out to Evan Wallace. Dylan. Like an absolute legend. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Think the stories that people here tell about Evan are just, you know, they'll go on. Yep. Chris, who's gonna come on next, you know, is the thing with CTO. He'll, I think, have a lot of he'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base, but allegedly, it's insane.
Speaker 4:That's great.
Speaker 3:And no. Well well and and and just going like, taking another step back, people have like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your products. And I think most like, almost always when I hear a founder say, well, Figma took four years. I go, well, you're not Evan Wallace in the field. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you're not, like, fundamentally changing, you know, the way that, like, software works online. Yeah. You you you're just you're you're building enterprise workflow workflows. You should probably ship, like, next month.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The other thing about the you know, you can take take as long as you need, you know. You know, Figma there's this there's a something that Roloff talks a lot about for our business, is the red queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And I think in a world of accelerating technology change, like, in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more.
Speaker 4:And, obviously, like, AI is allowing companies to do a lot more.
Speaker 2:Isn't the red queen race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, that's just the truth of technology, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is the truth of venture capital and the truth of enterprise software Yeah. Business to business software.
Speaker 4:How, you know, when Figma went from four products to eight products like Config Yeah. Right, like, the pace and I think everyone who uses the product feels it.
Speaker 2:Like, the
Speaker 4:pace is just picking up.
Speaker 3:Know? We got a little preview of Config and and I I messaged Nairi. I was like, wait. All you're you're announcing all of this at config? Like, all all four of these?
Speaker 2:Like, it
Speaker 3:was, four major Yeah. Insane. Announcements, and and that's what that's what picking up the pace looks like Yeah. And, like, finding that new gear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about. There's taking, you know, designers and giving them the ability to ship code. They're kind of this flip from going from a zero x engineer, a designer to a one x engineer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that gain can sometimes be better than taking a 10 x engineer and making them a little bit better. Yeah. Just unlock this new capability. How are you thinking about companies just broadly thinking about AI as a as a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company?
Speaker 2:What what what are you hearing? What are seeing?
Speaker 4:I've been thinking about that question a lot. Yeah. And the way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored in a meeting. I think similarly, all of us are gonna be capable of creating something on the Internet.
Speaker 2:It's actually interactive. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Exactly. And I think that has been happening for a while. Sure. I think it's picking up steam in an incredible pace.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think this role of creative technologist, I think, you know, in big companies, you'll still probably have siloed engineering product design Sure. You know, marketing teams. I think in our small companies, the founding the founding engineers, founding teams, people are wearing a lot of hats. Yep. Right?
Speaker 4:And using tools like Figma to do everything from ideation to prompt something to iterate, get in the hands of users, and to actually, you know, publish code. I think that the small companies, my
Speaker 3:buddy at Andreessen said that when I was first pitching them, we we weren't, like, actually raising it. I didn't have a deck. And so I just was in Figma screen sharing, showing them the the product and showing them all the different ways that we were gonna take it and things like that. And it it it just and and again, that that that's just like evidence of Figma not being for designers. No.
Speaker 3:I never thought I thought it was a tool for building things.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One dynamic Ben Thompson has been talking about is that as a public company, sometimes it can be easier to do m and a. Have you ever run into that in your career just broadly of a company that where that is an important factor in kind of their long term strategy? I've always generally, the meme has been, like, stay private as long as possible, but, you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits, but what what what are the what is the M and A dynamic in public and private markets right now?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think the you know, there's what you learn when you start out at Goldman Sachs. And it's, know, it's you have access to the capital markets. Sure. So you can need a public currency for M and A, you know, blah blah blah.
Speaker 4:You tell your story. For me, the the the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago and just like feeling the energy. You guys were there and felt the energy amongst the community. Yeah. Like the incredible community surrounding Figma.
Speaker 4:And then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the the broader world. Yeah. You know, the s one we reported, I think 13,000,000 monthly active users, two thirds of which are not designers. Yeah. And,
Speaker 3:you know, they got Did you you know did you did you was that was that your guess early on? Did you did you did you fully see that the that the TAM for this was not, like, how many designers are there and just, like, add it up and multiply it? Did did you I imagine you believe that it could be used across
Speaker 2:The TAM expanded.
Speaker 4:It's it's it's similar to what I was saying with the, you know, I think the creative technologist archetype who's gonna do a lot of things and eventually in ten years the way that companies run their product engineering things will probably look very different. I think similarly, like, their worst there were even, you know, predating our investment. There were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the Figma way, collaborative way of building products. And you had, you know, full product engineering design teams at small companies or even at mid sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio, and we talked to them before we invested.
Speaker 4:And they were, you know, early at
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Pioneering this. You know, we're getting off of the Dropbox links being sent around. We're, you know, we're going all in on on, you know, working in Figma. And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly. And therefore, the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think similarly, some small companies are gonna pioneer new ways of doing things. They're gonna move really fast. It's gonna be obvious that there's like a new archetype emerging. I think many of those people are gonna live in Figma.
Speaker 4:I think the most creative community on the Internet today already exists in Figma.
Speaker 3:I I always it it it felt even I remember using it as a, like, a social app. Like, in the sense that, like, I would get I would it'd be late at night. I would open my laptop, and I'd be like, oh, Brandon's up.
Speaker 2:And I'd
Speaker 3:go over to wherever he was designing. I'd be like, hey. What's up, dude?
Speaker 2:I would type a comment. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it was like this, like it was, like, almost like Chatting. A lot of people built these in these, these, like, virtual offices, but, like, Venmo was our virtual office.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Where I'd just be like, hey. What's up? Or I'd just, start you know, I'd just mess with them and, like, move change the button colors.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The only thing I'm really excited about with the new products is, you know, they're both raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in Figma, you know, like with like, the Madraw for instance. Right? Like the ability to do like really interesting artistic creative work inside of Figma files and also massively raising the floor for those of us who are, you know, more Excel inclined Sure. In our, you know, creative abilities.
Speaker 3:Excel coded.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's so rare to find like technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Usually, there's a trade off.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And Yeah. It's really exciting.
Speaker 2:I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose,
Speaker 4:but Totally.
Speaker 2:Decades ago. Right?
Speaker 4:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and it's and similarly to the idea of, you know, Figma slides came out of this intuition or not intuition, just the reality that many people were torquing Figma files in slide decks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I had a a I I I had a file called deck formatting. Yeah. I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of like, this is how I build decks. Yeah.
Speaker 5:This is
Speaker 3:how I build fundraising decks. Here's like, you know, 50 examples for each page and I would just send it out to everyone. They could just copy it and start working off of it.
Speaker 4:Okay. I mean, that sounds good. Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 3:I I I We don't we don't have to make many decks at
Speaker 2:We really does. No. We we should make one.
Speaker 3:We should start making more decks just for each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Should. Yeah. It'd be great. Last question.
Speaker 2:Think we'll let you go. I I wanna talk about the culture and and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that. How do you describe the culture of, like, someone who's a good fit to become a fig mate?
Speaker 4:Oh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting
Speaker 3:As the series c lead. Yeah.
Speaker 4:When I was reflecting on what I was going to tweet today Yeah. You know, because there's always a fine balance. Right? Like how do I tweet something to say congrats Yes. Without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing event, you know?
Speaker 4:Yes. Yes. I kinda went into a very paranoid headspace of how do I get, you know, not end up in the
Speaker 2:Just I just wrong button. Just go too far. Just you're welcome, everyone. You We have
Speaker 3:a to the incredible Figma team, the most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of people. I'm just so happy for all of your success.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 3:And I was I almost responded, our success. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So those those four adjectives, I think they are Okay. Yeah. They are creative. Yeah. I think I I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at config about how everybody everybody who was at config would be a good tattoo artist for my my Oh, face painting artist for my daughter and my brother said that was that analogy did not lay
Speaker 3:out. They're they're
Speaker 4:very creative. I think they're extremely determined. Yeah. I think, like, this is a company that, you know, when
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The early days of burning however much money they were burning a month and not having product market fit and grinding your way to product market fit and all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really started their Ascent.
Speaker 2:But you still have like the hardcore WebGL crew. Yeah. And it And that's like all it's not like quite like foundation model level AI research, but it's like serious engineering.
Speaker 4:It's a company that does hard things. They are not afraid of doing really hard things.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:I think they're imaginative. I think that's like, you know, the make believe billboard you see in San Francisco. It's a company that really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology. And they're positive.
Speaker 4:Like, they are just good human beings. And, you know, looking at obviously, the reaction to the Yeah. To the IPO is just I look around, like, are awesome people who are so cool. The valedictorian of my high school works at Figma.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 4:Her name's Katie Zito. She's Amazing.
Speaker 3:A
Speaker 4:budge. A PM here. She's Yeah. Literally, the smartest person I knew in high school and
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:Know, how she builds product to Figma and That's cool. Anyway. I'm just so happy with that. Really am happy for their success and your success.
Speaker 3:Yes. We
Speaker 2:had we had a
Speaker 3:few of those. I didn't put it out, but yesterday we did the we did it meme with Ramp. It was like every every person
Speaker 2:involved. I sent you that.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That was
Speaker 3:great. And now we're
Speaker 4:But now Ramp's congratulating Figma with the big billboard today or the
Speaker 3:big I was in ballboard. So you know they had that idea Monday.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 3:On the phone with them, they're like, yeah. We think we might get a banner and, like, hang because we're our office is right across the street from Figma's New York office. We should just hang it out. And it's, like, this, like, forty
Speaker 4:Forty foot. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 3:It's it's looks like I didn't
Speaker 2:even know you can get some of this.
Speaker 4:I will say the the ramp thinking Figma with TPP and the New York Stock Exchange today is a big day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Today is big day for us. It's a
Speaker 5:big day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's awesome. Well, it's lovely to
Speaker 4:you on here. Enjoy talking to everyone else. And, obviously
Speaker 2:I see you later.
Speaker 4:Hope to see you later.
Speaker 3:Let's be Congratulations on your success. Congratulations. Let's give a little bit of coverage of updates on on the Figma IPO. Oh, yeah. Of course, there was a funny post in here from Jawan.
Speaker 3:Okay. Jawan apparently got a offer back in 2019. Okay. Oh.
Speaker 2:Series C territory.
Speaker 3:And he was gonna get a base of 165 k a year and 300,000 in Figma RSUs.
Speaker 2:300,000 shares.
Speaker 3:And I guess by his calculation, it would have turned into 30,000,000. Okay. But the important thing, Jawan is now getting the the ability to spend his time automating finance. Yes. And certainly didn't pick a bad company to join on Gary that Tan says, if you stick around in tech and you're good, sooner or later you start collecting these stories.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think you remember Gary designed the Palantir logo back in the day. Crazy. And I wonder if he held on. Yeah. It's a trillion dollar company.
Speaker 3:More Sikhi ran some numbers. Sikhi Chen said there's 10x returners, there's fund returners, and there's Figma. Figma alone returned 10x the entire fund of not one, not two, but three VC funds. So he pulls up Index Ventures which made their initial investment out of a seed fund. The it was a $4,000,000 investment or 3,900,000.0 out of a $400,000,000 fund and it is a 1,850 x multiple.
Speaker 3:They're they're current multiple of fund on that? The fund multiple is 18 x. Greylock That's so crazy. Greylock, who's did the series a, is sitting on 11 x fund. They did the series a out of a $600,000,000 fund.
Speaker 3:KP, which did the series b, is, sitting on a 10 x fund out of a $700,000,000 fund, which is just wild. And then Sequoia will will have returned one and a half x on a 2 and a half billion dollar fund. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Just from that one deal.
Speaker 3:And then there's other stuff important. Gary chimes in, says, grand slam home run business. Yep. Yep. It's not just a home run business.
Speaker 3:It's a grand slam home run business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is good advice for all the VCs out there. And Just get just get one figment
Speaker 3:in your face. I noted this on the timeline yesterday but we are retiring the gong that we had at Nicey yesterday. It's a game hit gong, by none other than Dylan Fields. So we still need to get him to, sign it, and date it, of course. But, pretty pretty pretty wild.
Speaker 3:Deleon says, greatest capital markets on earth, greatest country on earth and throws up not one but three American flags quoting signals. Signals post he said nothing hits like an IPO in America. It's the most iconic cultural moment that's relatively infrequent. The most beautiful part about it is that not only here does a company going public trigger a national feedback loop of inspiration. Kids watch it, builders feel it, and the next gen catches fire.
Speaker 3:Nowhere else turns liquidity into legacy. Signal is such a funny posting style. Very very unique. Good job. And, yeah.
Speaker 3:Pretty pretty insane.