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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
First time with his new fund, AMPPBC. He's here in the waiting room. He's here with us in the TBPN. Man, that How you doing?
Speaker 2:Minds generational run. Yes. Generational
Speaker 3:run. Getting started, guys. No. Generational run is used for people who are retiring.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's true.
Speaker 2:That's true. I think it's I think it's appropriate to rec I think it's important to recognize when you're on a generational run Mhmm. That you realize you have to actually level up even further if you wanna stay on the same trajectory. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because if you just get complacent then
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's important to like count the chickens before they hatch. Like that's what you're saying?
Speaker 3:No. No. No. The
Speaker 2:opposite. Anyways, great great to have you back on the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fun to, but, yeah, catch us up to speed on Yeah.
Speaker 1:On the last. Yeah. When did the fund launch? What you know, what's the strategy? And, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like like like, walk us through, like, the current thesis for how you wanna actually develop the firm.
Speaker 3:No. I think we should talk about something more interesting. Let's talk about eBay. Let's talk about eBay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. What you got? Okay.
Speaker 3:So so here's what I'm and I want you guys to kinda spar with me. Right? Please. I looked at like, you know, Ryan did the CNBC interview, and everybody's, like, pinging me and saying, oh my god. This makes no sense.
Speaker 3:Blah blah. And and so here's my my take on it. Okay? Which is that, like, if if you read the GameStop deck, like, carefully for eBay, most of what's been said about the deal in the last forty eight is basically totally wrong. I I read I was just before jumping on, I was reading Michael Burry's piece on it, which you guys should check out.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he's right that the leverage is pretty tight, but I think he's not answering the the wrong question. And so is Ryan on CNBC where he's know, they keep asking him, like, where's the how are you gonna fund it? Know? Like, 50% cash, 50% stock, 50% like like, I I don't think the question the question isn't can GameStop afford eBay.
Speaker 3:The question is whether the underlying business actually works, and I think it does, but not for the reason I was expecting Ryan to pitch.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So if you if you pull up eBay's 10 k from February Yeah. Fiscal twenty five, and I did not understand this until I regret it, eBay spent 2,400,000,000 on marketing. Mhmm. How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers.
Speaker 3:You understand? 1,000,000.
Speaker 1:Woah. That's
Speaker 3:crazy. The user base went from one a 134,000,000 users to a 135,000,000 users after spending 2,400,000,000 on marketing.
Speaker 2:So and that's basically they're basic you you would have to imagine they're just having to reacquire all their old users, people that have been on the platform before, maybe even lost their account and they're they're they're coming back. I
Speaker 3:don't know. But it's that's $2,400 of marketing per new user on a site that every American already knows exists.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So where is all that money going? Right?
Speaker 2:It's rough.
Speaker 3:So I don't think going as I I don't think he's buying eBay. Like, just watching Ryan, I don't think he's buying eBay because he thinks he's smarter than eBay's product team. I think he's buying eBay because he can see $2,000,000,000 of fat that Wall Street has been pricing as fixed cost. Mhmm. And so he goes, okay.
Speaker 3:Let me cut that. And the interest on the debt just pays for itself.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Interesting. Right? But he doesn't necessarily wanna say that because he could kind of give that idea to
Speaker 3:the man.
Speaker 1:He still has to put the money together. Right? But is your thesis that, like, the deal is coming together, he has investors that he's talking to, but it's too early to say, oh, yeah. I actually do have a fund that's gonna give me another 5 over here. I got seven over here.
Speaker 1:And it will math out, but just give me a week. Or is there something else going on?
Speaker 3:It depends on which investor he's talking to. But if he was pitching me, here's what I would Yeah. Yeah. Underwrite. Right?
Speaker 3:I'd say, okay. That's the floor. The floor is Ryan's gonna cut $2,000,000,000 from this thing of that, put that into treasuries, and we're gonna make more money
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Than it's currently yielding. Okay. So that's the floor. Now the ceiling because I'm a I'm a technology investor. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The opportunity.
Speaker 3:The bulk is. At bulk is. So Amazon's used and collect collectibles business has been flat Mhmm. For six years. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They tried renew. They tried collectibles. They tried trade in. None of it's failed. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:You cannot put a 1962 Mickey Mantle card through the same warehouse as a phone charger. Mhmm. That category that category, right, collectibles is structurally defensible against Amazon.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Amazon is for phone chargers. Mickey Mantle for eBay. Right? Yeah. EBay has the marketplace.
Speaker 3:GameStop has GameStop has, like, 1,600 stores that could physically verify Sure. The good. Sure. That's a real goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's worth more in the AI era than the human era. Right. Right? Why? Because my AI agent so I I collect I love collect, like, rare pens.
Speaker 3:Okay? This is a mom blah. Sure. I get
Speaker 2:older pen guy. I love it. I like that.
Speaker 3:I'm a pen guy. Yeah. And and I love old vintage glasses. I don't know you can see my Jacques Marimage box in the back. But Oh, cool.
Speaker 3:Nice. But when I'm out of time, what do I do? I have Claude go look for rare pens and glasses for me online. The biggest problem with used rare asset purposes is fraud. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I often will tell so Claude will be like, Andre, I found this amazing pen, this Montblanc pen. And I say, okay. Can you triple check that it's it's it's real? It's not fake. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's where things go up real because there's no way for him to verify that without messaging the agent and so on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you have 1,600 stores where people who have Mumblr and Pins can go and physically verify those assets at GameStop Sure. Now Claude just says, yeah. I checked. It has the physical verifications stamped from
Speaker 1:Somebody brought it in.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So Yeah. You you can't you need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce. And look. The reason I know this is real is because a few years ago, I think you you guys we talked about this last time, but I sold my last startup to a company called Discord in 2020, peak pandemic.
Speaker 3:So I come on as the head of platform. My my my job is supposed to be, you know, Anj, go build SDKs, APIs, and so on for gaming. Mhmm. We've helped this company called Midjourney get going, AI, you know, generate but twelve months later, suddenly, I find myself running without realizing an ecommerce business because it was the summer of NFTs. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the the board dates are blowing up, and suddenly, we have more than $10,000,000,000 of GMV flowing through Discord buy, sell, pay, channels. Yeah. And Jason and Stan are like, hey, brother. Your job is to, like, capture a piece of that pie. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I go, okay. Homework accepted. So we start doing a deep dive. And we realized, ultimately, the what what these users need and pay for like, so you have liquidity. Right?
Speaker 3:Ultimately, that's what a marketplace like eBay and Discord provide, and so community commerce is liquidity. But you cannot provide liquidity if you don't have physical verification. And for Discord, that was just out of scope. You know, use sneakers And it
Speaker 2:worked you're saying it worked for NFTs because you had the on chain Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't need an e physical. There's nothing physical to verify.
Speaker 2:Owned it, and you can transact. Yep.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And so we had we are bootstrapping the ecommerce platform at Discord with NFTs, but, of course, everyone on the board is like, well, how long are NFTs gonna last? It's a fad. So, Anj, what else is coming? We go look at rare sneakers or a key boards, like, all this stuff that nerds like me love.
Speaker 3:But for those who need physical verification, and once we realize physical verification is out of scope, we nix the product.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna go have the 1,400, like, retail locations where people can drop things off. Yeah. That's that's that's quite that's quite interesting.
Speaker 3:So that's when I realized, okay. EBay is this undervalued asset, and I hope that Ryan has figured it out as well. Because if he hasn't, he's giving me ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you have you tried to walk through what what, you know, given that you're probably more AGI pill than than, I would say, 9090% of of VCs, Have you tried to play out? What is it?
Speaker 2:What how would you how would you build eBay from the ground up today with an agent first approach? Is that even the right question to ask?
Speaker 3:Look. I have not, guys, because right now, I'm in a I'm a computer infrastructure guy. Right? We started AMP at this public benefit corporation whose job is to be an independent system operator of the compute grid. We think about we think we're roughly in, like, 1885 industrial England where the steam engine's been invented.
Speaker 3:Everybody knows that you can make cool new products like, you know, steel and Yeah. And notebooks and pens and cars. And there's this very scratched input called coal that everybody is hoarding. In this case, it's compute. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And when I if you fly over industrial era England, you'll see all these factories getting set up, and everyone's running a generator in their backyard at half capacity. I'm going, this makes no sense. If I'm looking at all my portfolio companies, you know, you these these clusters are running at, like, half utilization. In fact, Elon's Yeah. Like, got 500,000 GB 300 in Memphis at running at 11% MFU and less than 60%, you know, node allocation.
Speaker 3:I mean, this is $12,000,000,000 of computing wasted. So I set up AMP as an AI infrastructure organization where we buy a bunch of compute. We do long term leases. We pull that all those clusters on the grid, we coordinate capacity, drive up utilization. And by the end of this year, I think we'll have, you know, several billion dollars of compute coming online.
Speaker 3:But that's what I've been focused on night and day since, like, I left and recent Horowitz in January. And so, no, I have not had time to look at how to redo eBay, but if Ryan called, I'd probably help him out. But right now, it's more time on compute, guys.
Speaker 1:So yeah. We we we I I I wanna talk about AMP, but I also wanna talk about just last question on the the the combination of eBay and GameStop. Like, I get the thesis, the bull case. GameStop is $10,000,000,000. EBay is, like, 48,000,000,000 right now.
Speaker 1:You put them together, maybe you get to a 100,000,000,000. I'm in for the bull case. The question is, like, how what's going on with, like, the plan? Because it feels like Ryan just doesn't have the capital, but then he announced it. Like, what, like, what what what do you think is happening behind the scenes?
Speaker 1:Because there's one thing where you could throw it out as, like, oh, like, these two companies should work together. Here's a bull case. Let me know if you wanna be on the team that does this. And then there's the other one, which is like, make the offer before the capital's lined up, but I just haven't been through enough of these stories to actually understand, like, why it's playing out this
Speaker 3:either way.
Speaker 2:But to be honest, I think he's sitting there with I think he has $9,000,000,000 of cash. Yep. He's in a $10,000,000,000 company. Yep. I think when he announced this, I think he expected the stock to pop like crazy and he'd be going on CNBC being like, this merger could make sense.
Speaker 2:Sure. And I think that
Speaker 1:We'll issue another 20,000,000,000 of equity and then and then we'll merge or something.
Speaker 2:And I think if you looked at I think if you looked at like how kind of frothy some things in the market could be, you could have imagined that playing out. I mean, the Allbirds thing was I'm sure you appreciated appreciated that from the meme side.
Speaker 1:Direct competitor to
Speaker 2:you. Yeah. Competitor. You gotta be careful. Versus Allbirds will be the new horse race.
Speaker 2:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:Anyways, that that was my that
Speaker 1:was Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was my read because he because they're basic GameStop is basically valued at, like, the brand is and the and all the retail locations and everything is valued at, a billion dollars. Right? Yeah. He's getting no credit for all the cash.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So to be clear, AMP is not a cloud business. We are so I started AMP as a holdings business. Yeah. And I've got infrastructure business and a capital business.
Speaker 3:And the infrastructure business secures compute and passes on at cost to our portfolio companies. We have more than $1,300,000,000 in commits for our first fund. I've been added eight weeks. Interesting. And so we do do venture capital investments.
Speaker 3:We put
Speaker 1:$300,000,000 into Endropic. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. But we we we need to raise another roughly, you know, 6 and a half billion dollars this year, and a lot and and more is getting committed by the day. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But we give away the compute at cost to the independent ecosystem because my belief is that, you know, that the the, like, sort of that the optimal unit of research today is a, like, a focused down team outside of the hyperscalers, know, Anthropic and coding, which was I was the first one of the first I'm certainly I think I'm the first angel investor, if not the first investor in the round.
Speaker 2:They're saying you're the Jason Kalakanis of of Anthropic.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately, JCAL I could never talk JCAL, but, like, if JCAL's intern or something, fine. I'll take the win. You know what? But I I think more importantly, like, I think compute is the strategic asset which I've been yelling about for four years, and it's a primary bottleneck on these teams. And if you're not at the hyperscalers, you just can't get access.
Speaker 3:So we buy up that compute. We give it at cost to the portfolio comp teams, and then we reinvest the profits of carry and fees to buy more compute and so on and so forth. And so I'll take as much capacity as I can get from Allbirds. I love it when new people go into the business because that gives us more supply. So if you're the Allbirds CEO listening to this, please send us your compute.
Speaker 3:We'll take it all.
Speaker 2:That makes that makes a lot of sense. What are you excited to invest in? You're investing in teams that need a lot of compute. You're trying to find things that aren't gonna get steamrolled by Amthropic, who's another big portfolio company. Yep.
Speaker 2:There's there's, you know
Speaker 1:There's opportunity stuff. There's real opportunity. There's a lot of other different things that need compute. But what do think
Speaker 2:because I feel like I feel like a lot of a lot of VCs are would never say this out loud. But a lot of I get the sense from a lot of VCs that they're kind of like paralyzed, where they're like, they really don't they don't have a clear sort of understanding of where things will be in five years and they feel like they need to be active. And so it's a mix of like doing new neo lab doing some neo neo labs, maybe doing some application layer stuff and just kind of praying. But I would hope that you have a given given your background and how you're approaching this, you have, like, a stronger thesis on on where the opportunity is to invest at the early stages.
Speaker 3:Look. In in some sense, it's it's back to the future. I started my career at Kleiner Perkins when I was 19. My first board seat was as an observer with John Doerr when I was 20. I wasn't old enough to drive technique oh, drink.
Speaker 3:Sorry. I didn't have a I didn't have a driver's license. Wasn't old enough to drink. And and I got the chance to apprentice with, like, the greats, like, you know, Brooke Byers. And and, look, that's the that's the vintage of venture capitalists I grew up admiring, like Arthur Rock.
Speaker 3:And that's my you know, our thesis at AMP on the on the venture capital side. Our business is called the AMP Foundry where we help create co design, you know, new labs one at a time. My current one is called Periodic Labs, and we just decided to lead this series. I led the seed round last year with Liam, who was the cocreative chat GPT, and Doge who was there who led some of the quantum physics teams at DeepMind, and we're trying to find new high temperature superconductors there with physical we have a 30,000 square foot facility in Menlo Park. I spent three days a week there.
Speaker 3:We do a stand up every morning from 8AM to 08:30AM, and then we make our priorities and then go execute. And, you know, basically, we have AIs, predict new materials. We then have robots synthesize the new materials. We then have an x-ray diffraction machine that tests whether the material has the properties that robots the AI set, and then we pipe that verification loop back into the training or, like, as many times as we need for the agents to continue predicting new superconductors. And in the last ninety days, we had more material verification than I think in the last decade in the field.
Speaker 3:And so I'm a huge believer in unblocking frontier progress in domains where it the verification sort of loop is clearly just like, we know it's gonna work, but execution is the bottleneck. And then I like getting these the best the best scientists, the best engineers, the capital to compute, and the commercial help they need. Now I I think that the beauty about having Anthropic around is that it's made this idea of the better lesson and and scaling legible to the capital market. So now instead of me having to call up 22 friends, I'm getting 21 nodes, which was the case with the seed round of Anthropic. Now I I make two calls instead.
Speaker 3:I we get, like, you know, it's like we get three times oversubscribed. So cap capital is no longer the bottleneck, which is phenomenal. You know, again, we've out at eight weeks. I have more than a billion dollars committed from my our first fund. I'm a solo key man GP on the fund.
Speaker 3:There's And lots of institutions, pension funds, sovereign funds who are like, Anj, how much more can you put to work, especially in publics, privates, buyouts? It's a bonanza for people who wanna be true partners, who wanna be the orthodox of this era. I think if you believe in the better lesson, it's not new. It's been around for ages. You and I, the three of us talked about this, like, over a year ago at the last recent Harvard's AGM.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Still bitter.
Speaker 3:I I I'm I'm more zen than I am bitter. How
Speaker 2:are you thinking about building out the team on both sides?
Speaker 3:Trust is the moat. So there's five of us on the team. My full time engineering cofounder is Sebastian Bobo. We were roommates fourteen years ago at Stanford, and then he went on to build a grid
Speaker 1:and joined the great success. Here we go.
Speaker 3:What what was that one?
Speaker 1:Overnight success.
Speaker 3:Overnight success. Thank you. Twelve year overnight success in California.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:So Seb and Midha built the Borg export GQM scheduler, which kept the Google internal capacity pool at more than 95% utilization there. If it was at 94% utilization, that was considered a major outage globally. Wow. Andrew Erskine is my partner on the operations side. He was a partner at ORIC, which was the, you know, outside counsel for Anthropic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he was my GC at Ubiquiti six, which was the company I sold to Discord. And then Rosie, who's my chief of staff, ran comms for me from Edelman when I was at Andreessen Horowitz, you know, when I was a GP there. And so So you got the band back together? It's it's it's it's the Anj's reunion, basically.
Speaker 3:And, you know, we put we called AMP not after my initial. Sometimes people think that. It's not Anjney, the partners, anything like that. It's about energy. It's about amp you know, amperes, the unit of of energy.
Speaker 3:And we we wanna amp things up because we think we're in entering, like, the great renaissance in technology. And, you know, if you can have a small team that trust each other across context, you know, compute capital, sports teams, buyouts, leverage technology, all of this stuff is these are all buckets and categories that we've all put you know, traditional capital allocators have put around these asset classes that shouldn't exist. And I think if you have the flexibility to go back to first principles with a small team that you trust, you can execute, you know, with with orders of magnitude less less a size of a team as a firm in this new era with the right tools. I don't know if if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:No. Totally. You you mentioned, taking positions in public companies. The fund structure is a PBC. Are you also an RIA?
Speaker 1:Like, how are you thinking about navigating both of those asset classes since that's a
Speaker 3:little bit process. Okay. Yes. We are in process of get becoming an RIA because, you know, we founded the firm barely Yeah. Yeah, ninety days ago.
Speaker 3:But I'm used to that cadence because Andreessen Horowitz was a RIA. I was a general partner in the AI infrastructure fund for several years, as you guys know, and we were an RIA. I'm used to the compliance, the regulatory sort of guardrails we gotta follow, and I think LP's process to, you know, have that cadence from day one. And so we're we're gonna make sure that we you know, Zach, if you remember this this like, you know, twelve years ago, Zach went on TB to say, move fast and break things, and then you have to update the thing and be like, move fast with stable infrastructure. Infrastructure.
Speaker 3:And And and I think we move fast with state with stable infrastructure from day one, essentially, because we are an AI infrastructure team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to the PBC. Like, if I'm playing back, like well, what year were you referencing? 1850 or something like that?
Speaker 3:1885.
Speaker 1:1885. So if I go back to 1885 and I think about the financiers that, you know, created the industrial build out Yes. They were not public benefit corporations. They were They
Speaker 2:were personal benefit. Corporations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, I mean, there was a lot of good that was created. We got railroads and trains and, you know, machinery and cars and all sorts of things out of the industrial revolution. There were also things that were rough, and there was unionization and battles and back and forth. Like, what is the PBC in service of solving?
Speaker 1:What what what what why PBC?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Great question. So there's the I'll tell you the substantive answer and then the Vibes answer. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:So from a substantive perspective, you if we we do two things. Right? We have a venture capital business, and we have an infrastructure business. Both things have this very unique property called positive externalities. When implemented correctly, venture capital can unlock massive positive externalities for the ecosystem and for the world because you end up funding innovation when done correctly.
Speaker 3:And then infrastructure, the same. Right? When you have compute that's used by small focused down dense teams like Anthropic that's able to produce 10 times more soda capabilities than, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:DeepMind, which is, you know, 60,000 or a 160,000 people, then you're generating positive externalities for the world by being much more efficient per unit of input with the output they create. And so I was like, Well, what happens when, as an economist, you look at positive externalities? Usually, you have market failure. You have under consumption of that good. Well, how do you correct the market failure?
Speaker 3:Usually, you get the government to intervene. But if you don't have the government intervening in time, what do you do? You become a private sector participant. And then if you look at the arc of 1885, you know, private sector businesses that ended up correcting market failure by by producing public benefits, they ended up getting regulated as utilities. That's what AMP is.
Speaker 3:AMP is a self regulated utility event that provides venture capital and infrastructure to the world's leading scientific teams. The next Dario, the next, you know, Guillaume at Mistral who created LAMA, next Robin who creates stop stable diffusion. These are the my generation's smartest minds. I'm not smart enough to be, you know, them, but I can be their intern. And instead of waiting for the rest of the space to come up with standards and institutions to enforce this, we're like, dude, let's just do it ourselves and show the world you can have fun while doing it with a small team.
Speaker 3:You don't need to be, you know, some something called a you know, with, like, these words like RIA, multistage asset class firm, doesn't matter. Just let's skip ahead to the part the good part and and, like, you know, use all the proceeds that we get from management fees and carry to keep the space, like, innovating at the pace that we were promised, you know, twelve, thirteen years ago. And instead, we got tweets and not flying cars. You know, when I was at Stanford, I got the chance as an undergrad, I had the chance to take Peter Thiel's class, the zero to one. And he was you know, his whole moniker was we wanted flying cars and we got, you know,
Speaker 1:a 100 and 40 characters.
Speaker 3:What? 240 characters. Thank you. And now I'm back at Stanford teaching CS one fifty three, which is the largest class on campus. It's called AI Coachella.
Speaker 3:We've got thousands of people following along.
Speaker 1:Coachella is
Speaker 3:a good one. And it's got Frontier Systems because it's all possible now. We're literally in our lifetime, we're gonna have flying cars. We're gonna have room temperature superconductors. We are going to solve cancer.
Speaker 3:We just wanna do it in a way that's stable, predictable. We wanna skip all the boom and bust cycles, and the way to do that is to lead by example and say, hey, guys. The public benefit, you know, is to provide goods and services that are utilities and make sure that we we don't like, let's be the adults in the room and not do the stuff where we try to be robber bands and monopolists and got greedy along the way. And so that's the substantive answer. The Vibes answer is, look.
Speaker 3:I don't wanna get sued by shareholders for whom it's not legible why I'm giving away billions of dollars of compute at cost with all your companies. Right? Because we that's what we're doing, and that shareholder that's you could argue that shareholder value that we're destroying, but I would argue in the long term, we're actually creating orders of magnitude more value. And if you look at Ben and Jerry's, you look at REI, they've become stable enduring businesses in categories that are fairly crowded. And eventually, I do think technology and AI will get crowded.
Speaker 3:It will get commoditized because technology is never the mode. Trust is. Community is a mode. Culture is a mode. Execution is a mode.
Speaker 3:And so we're trying to skip ahead to that part, but it takes time for people to get aligned. So until then, we'll What we see
Speaker 2:what we see in AMP joint venture with private equity to help distribute diffusion. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If we can, yeah, you know, if you go to our website, it's called amppublic.com because I do think if you look back to the, like, vulture era of private equity, you remember, like, RGR, Nabisco, and what what the barbarians of the gate, we should just learn from from their mistakes and go, can we do private equity but done right in an aligned way? Let's not rush to, like, lay off, you know, hundreds of thousands of people and then not reeducate them and prepare them for their new opportunities. I I'm an optimist, as you guys know. I came from Andreessen Horowitz. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I I I'm a sort of a rational optimist. I believe the transition can be done in a positive way. Is that me getting kicked off? There's, a bell ringing, but that might be here. No.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:No. I'm I'm looking at the bell we have is this. But, no, we're We got plenty of sounds for you. Continue. Continue.
Speaker 1:Well, I that's
Speaker 3:something that everything we do is governed by a public benefit charter. So if we do private equity, you'll be governed in the public benefit. If we do education stuff, that'll be in the public benefit. Yeah. Look.
Speaker 3:I've made more money than I know what to do in life. I'm 34, and I'm just getting started. So my goal is I'll be remembered for having been a net positive influence in the space. I just got tired of telling people I told you so because after a while, they start looking at my returns and going, why didn't you give me a call? And I said, I did.
Speaker 3:Look at your email. I introduced you to Entropic and the series a and the series b and the series c. And so at some point, I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna go direct, talk to the LPs, set up a platform Mhmm. Build infrastructure, and hopefully be known as a generally, like, sane common sense rational point of view on stuff that can often be is not legible to people from different parts of the stack, and that's what the class is about.
Speaker 3:So c s one fifty three dot stanford dot e d u. I would recommend anybody watching, go check it out. The the lectures are all online, and the first one went on on Stanford's official page on Thursday.
Speaker 1:Was that with Scott Nolan?
Speaker 3:So Scott no. Actually, Scott is lecture eight. I put up lecture we put up lecture one, which is mine, as a kind of the opening act because, you know, Scott is one of the mainliners, the headliners of AI Coachella. Scott's will be up soon as well, and then Jensen was last week. So I think he followed Scott.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Last question for me. Do you think the world is prepared for it not to be a bubble?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. The world if the world prepared not for it to be a bubble oh, yeah. Yeah. Inertia is guys, inertia is a powerful thing. Most of world still has no idea what AI is.
Speaker 3:It is crazy. You know, I've been flying to places where I thought there would be diffusion of AI by now, and they just aren't barely using Quad, ChatGPT. I mean, these things are still alien to most of the world. And so if if if we stop capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is early. Very cool. Well, great to catch up. Congratulations on a a very impressive fundraise and and a very unique approach, and looking forward to the next conversation.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Congrats
Speaker 3:to you guys on a generational run, and I hope the acquisition does nothing but give you guys more steroids and more fuel for the fire. We need more of you every day.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We'll talk to
Speaker 3:you soon. Congrats.
Speaker 1:A good one.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Bye. Cheers.