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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.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 04/22/2026. We are live from the TBPN altar down the Temple Of Technology, the fortress finance, the capital capital. Bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor are partnering up.
Speaker 1:More news out of Images two point o, a bunch of news out of OpenAI. And Mythos, a group of unauthorized users have been using Cloud Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through. There's a whole bunch of timeline.
Speaker 1:We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, AngelList, Ankur, Fast Data, Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this Gong already?
Speaker 2:Is worthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10,000,000,000 breakup fee Yeah. Incredibly incredibly Yeah. It it I think I think it's win win.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a win win. Think it makes sense for
Speaker 1:It's a win no matter. Parties. Well, let's go through the facts first. So SpaceX partners Facts. Just just immediate takes.
Speaker 1:We assume you already know all the industry. Post fact. Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see.
Speaker 1:But let's let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to quote create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. The deal gets Cursor, who's agentic coding model, Composer two basically operates at frontier level performance, access to compute from SpaceX's million h 100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer. And that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer.
Speaker 1:There were some other terms that Elon was throwing on. Fantastic terminology from the x AI team over there. What was the other one? It it was like AI Compute Gigafactory. Compute Gigafactory.
Speaker 1:They're all hilarious and and very good. I like all
Speaker 2:Compute of Compute Compute Compute
Speaker 1:I don't know. The x AI timeline, I was like I was thinking about it and I was like when did this actually start? Like I I because it just sort of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on like the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like now the thing that started as, like, Elon sort of being like, I wanna buy Twitter is now like a NeoLab with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget, they own graphite now or potentially will. And and a social The media app space company.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I'm really I'm I'm I'm genuinely so
Speaker 1:Excited for Merrill. For
Speaker 2:for the Graphite team. Yeah. I'm thrilled for the Cursor team. I'm thrilled I'm
Speaker 1:thrilled for Scott Wu.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Scott Scott Wu is licking his chops.
Speaker 3:He's what
Speaker 2:are you gonna what are you gonna leave out in the record for?
Speaker 1:He really is gonna
Speaker 2:have fun I with I also think we need to we need to take one moment
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and and and just send some thoughts and prayers to SPF who Oh, yeah. Imagine I I don't know how this works
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In in whatever prison he's in. But I imagine, you know, one every few days
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He can go and like talk to the outside world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you can imagine him going, you know, making the call Yeah. And he says, you know, for the last few weeks it's like, you know, sir
Speaker 1:What would the mark be?
Speaker 2:How how is Anthropic doing? How is my how is my baby doing? And he's like, sir Sir, it's traded up north of 800. It's almost a markets and it's it is quite possibly going to north of a trillion. And then he's like, thank you.
Speaker 2:Hangs up. Comes back the next day. I I haven't checked in with Cursor a little bit. How are they doing? Sir Sir?
Speaker 2:You may not wanna hear this, but There's a $50,000,000,000
Speaker 1:acquisition on
Speaker 2:the They've agreed to sell sell for 60,000,000,000. 60. And if they don't sell, they're gonna get 10,000,000,000 of nondilutive capital. Absolutely wild. Anyways.
Speaker 1:What a what a what a wild wild turnover that is. Anyway, let let's go through the timeline because it's it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon in ink over the past just four years when this all started. 04/14/2022. It's April 22 now. So So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter.
Speaker 1:He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want it. It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44,000,000,000 because there this was when the interest rate hike happened and the end of ZERP and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was even Meta sold off like 50% post although that was like an anomaly and they built back up. But the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a, what, a 10,000,000,000 tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like ten years.
Speaker 1:Like it was so far away and the revenue ramp on VR and metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues even if they were still bullish on the idea of Meta winning the VR race, winning the metaverse at some point. It just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6%, instead of 3% or whatever your risk free rate is in your DCF. And so everything sold off. And and Elon had locked in that pre end of ZERP price, and there was a big question about could he get out of it?
Speaker 1:Were they gonna twist his arm? They they there was a little bit arm The arm was a little bit twisted, but Morgan Stanley came on board and bunch of other
Speaker 2:It was almost broken. But
Speaker 1:the people who get who were whose arms are twisted, Morgan Stanley and all the BC backers who came in, they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy. It was it was never bet against Elon. Like, that was the thing.
Speaker 1:It was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44,000,000,000. It's a crazy idea based on the market and where things are, but everything sort of penciled out. So he closed the Twitter acquisition on 10/27/2022, and he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sink day, of course.
Speaker 1:He he comes in with a sink. Something about the what was the joke about the kitchen sink?
Speaker 4:Was like
Speaker 5:Let that sink in.
Speaker 1:Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't it wasn't like I'm doing the whole the whole isn't the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like throw the whole kitchen sink at it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. It's like did that because he threw everything together. Yes. Good job.
Speaker 1:Yaia. Yaia. So x AI came later. He publicly announced xAI on 07/12/2023, and that's only nine months after ChatGPT, maybe eight months after ChatGPT. Google quick followed with Gemini, and it was like it was a very fast following, I think, to get to to x AI off the ground.
Speaker 2:And that was like Just just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech livestream. Right?
Speaker 1:Yes. I think that was I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah. I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition.
Speaker 1:And I was sort of trying to justify it as a, you know, it it it was it was more about his desire for free speech than anything else. Like, you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock on effects for Elon's strategy. Anyway, so he was, you know, coming out on 07/12/2023 saying, I'm back in the AI horse race.
Speaker 1:I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind still. Remember, that's why he founded OpenAI. He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going to go up against Anthropic, going and go up against OpenAI.
Speaker 1:And so the first major product milestone came just a couple of months later, November 3, that's when they introduced Grok, 11/03/2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on 12/07/2023 when Grok started rolling out inside of X for premium plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It was it's actually crazy.
Speaker 2:Everyone got verified.
Speaker 1:Remember? I mean, the the the that year on Twitter was insane. Like, just product feature product feature, and they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand. Like, I think the community notes idea had been workshopped and even, like, engineered in the pre Elon era. But he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow.
Speaker 1:And, like, there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review and, like, there were other pieces of the puzzle that were, like, not doing so well, and he was just a cut, cut, cut. And so he sort of like put it back in startup mode, and it felt a lot more agile, and it still does. And so that was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X product experience. In early twenty twenty four, xAI started shipping updates quickly.
Speaker 1:03/17/2024, it open sourced GrokOne. 03/26/2024, Grok Access expanded to x premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on 04/12/2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then Grok two, Grok two minutei.
Speaker 1:By the 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, xAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On 02/19/2025, xAI announced Grok three beta. Then 03/28/2025, so over a year ago, for some reason, this feels more recent than that, x AI acquired x in an all stock deal. So 03/28/2025, effectively merging the AI company with a social platform.
Speaker 1:After that, x kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok four fast, Grok 4.1, then came the SpaceX deal. That was 02/02/2026. So the clean sequences that Musk first proposed the Twitter acquisition then founded XAI, then brought Grok into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. And this just makes this just makes it makes so much sense. Right? Cursor needs compute. They need the resources.
Speaker 2:They need the capital to train a frontier coding model.
Speaker 1:They've also never done a pre training, believe, whereas the XAI team has, right? Correct.
Speaker 2:And the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has been through so much. There was some an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces Oh, yeah. Than it had been adopted. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So more people had said like, you cannot use this product in the workplace Mhmm. Than we're actually using it in the workplace. Cursor's a great brand. Right?
Speaker 2:It's a it's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of outside of coding. Right? Yeah. Say in the announcement.
Speaker 1:And you
Speaker 2:Best to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. Yeah. We got everyone on earth building building a box that you can tell to do things and it does things.
Speaker 1:Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist?
Speaker 2:No. No. I don't. I think I think I think the competition I think the competition is great.
Speaker 1:You want the government
Speaker 2:to help. It's bringing out the best in it's bringing out the best
Speaker 1:in It is.
Speaker 2:But I think Cursor is like
Speaker 1:out Dragon fight.
Speaker 2:Cursor's always had a great brand. I saw someone
Speaker 1:else say wait. SPF replied to SpaceX's tweet. It's like, that's me. He did pull up pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely.
Speaker 1:Would that that that, it should be like the first one in the in the timeline. SpaceX and Cursor SpaceXAI is what they're calling it now. Is it not up there? And Cursor, I can find it and and send it in. Let me, let me find this post and send it into the production chat.
Speaker 2:Takravarthy Naveen says, do you think they'll they'll make Elon take his shoes off at the Cursor office?
Speaker 1:Okay. So Richard Wu has some context. Yeah. There we go. Look, SBF is is somehow on Twitter.
Speaker 1:How can you be on Twitter from jail?
Speaker 2:All these people in jail on on X. I don't understand. No. It says it in his bio. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It says it in his bio. It means it says, we can use BOP approved phone calls, emails to tell others what to post on our socials. Okay.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Think it would be a free speech violation to say like, if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity. But it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre internet because it seems like having like a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to like start, you know, kind of like influencing public perception. Right? Think this is Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like she, you know, her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like, you know, maybe maybe she isn't so bad after all, Yeah, yeah, So.
Speaker 1:Well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal. He says the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is, one, XAI is having trouble training a state of the art coding model hence co founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5,000,000,000 training run to compete with Codex and Claude.
Speaker 1:XAI three, XAI says to Cursor, use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state of the art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you. Four, Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for 60,000,000,000 or get 10,000,000,000 that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win win. And I was reflecting on Michael Truell's, I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young, but his aesthetic is is very much in like the Stripe world, I imagine, because he I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with was it Patrick Hollison?
Speaker 1:Is that the one I'm And thinking it's, like, them at the coffee shop, and it's so welcoming and warming. It's, like, that is that is welcome in every corporate entity in America. Right? Like and and to your point about, like, you know, oh, like, if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics? Blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Aani and all this crazy stuff? But if it's just like Michael Trudeau from Cursor, he's so reassuring. Like, I if I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah. Of course. Like, we love Cursor.
Speaker 1:That's great. Like Yeah. Very, like, aesthetics do matter, vibes do matter, and I think makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Matt Slotnick says he loves math. What is the math here? He's talking about Julian. So Julian says at a 30x revenue multiple,
Speaker 1:at
Speaker 2:first glance it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX Mhmm. Given it is expected to go public at more than a 100 x revenue. A 70 term multiple expansion on 2,000,000,000 of revenue adds up. Wow.
Speaker 2:So, yep.
Speaker 1:This is this is a notorious thing in corporate m and a, and, and occasionally, it's gone poorly. But there is, like, an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. And so there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earning stream differently and having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky tricky situation.
Speaker 1:But Will Brown.
Speaker 2:Wow. Cursor just hit a $10,000,000,000 run rate.
Speaker 1:They did. It's guaranteed. Right? There's no way that they won't make 10,000,000,000 this year. That's not even a run rate.
Speaker 1:That's just like it's locked in. Yeah. It's more than contracted.
Speaker 6:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit and then it's, you know, by by itself. Right? Yeah. They can, you know, they they'll be in a position to actually, you know, reinvest that.
Speaker 2:That's like a a nice little neo lab kind of series a Yeah. Basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ken says no. You got to multiply that 10,000,000,000 by 12 because in that month when they get the $10,000,000,000 check from SpaceX, it will be a 120,000,000,000 run rate. They will be the largest AI company in the world that month. And then they just have to figure out.
Speaker 1:They don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise, it's more like 25,000,000,000. Okay. Well, has some other thoughts. Where are you going?
Speaker 2:What is this post from Patrick?
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. Which one? Which one?
Speaker 2:This is I'll see it. He Patrick is quoting Scott Wu.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because despite this does not
Speaker 2:look See without Images two without Images two, we just this this kind of asset. I actually think this
Speaker 7:might be done
Speaker 2:the old fashioned way.
Speaker 1:It's not Nana Banana. This is Nana Banana.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:It's gonna cutting out
Speaker 2:Thank you, watermark.
Speaker 1:Yes. He says, here we go again. Last of Mohicans. Yeah. Scott was the last one standing in this particular category.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, he's licking his chops thinking about who might wanna hop over to Cognition Cursor with Cognition Windsurf Devon, Cursor, Zombie Corp as the as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's territory. What else should we go through with the Cursor the Cursor? The cursor think that's it.
Speaker 2:I'm very happy for everyone involved. Yeah. I'm very happy. Some news from Space News Inc.
Speaker 1:This is very interesting.
Speaker 2:China backs orbital data center startup with 8,400,000,000 in credit lines.
Speaker 1:They're pilled. They're pilled.
Speaker 2:Elon is interested.
Speaker 1:8,400,000,000 in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing based space startup has secured early stage funding. Early stage funding to the tune of 8,400,000,000? What are we doing here?
Speaker 1:And extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space based computing infrastructure. Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously.
Speaker 2:This is a new meta.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is Cursor's real name? AnySphere? This is a pretty good name. I like AnySphere and I like Cursor but it doesn't hold a candle.
Speaker 1:It's a Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. Also known as Orbital Chengguang announced the completion of a pre AI funding pre A1 or is that pre pre A1 funding round April 20. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors including Haysong Capital, CITIC Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital. They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there.
Speaker 1:At the same time, Orbital State said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling 8,400,000,000 from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they gonna build rockets with this? I mean, I don't I I I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not gonna fab the chips and they're not gonna launch the rockets.
Speaker 2:Well, they're gonna put a lot of GPUs in space.
Speaker 1:I guess they're just gonna buy a lot of Huawei chips something? Are they gonna go to Huawei and get some special stuff?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, is pretty interesting because I I feel like, you know, generally, the the main bull case for space data centers is that the, like, regulatory environment in The US is gonna be so hard to build data centers
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, you know Supercomputers, but yeah. Normal land. So oh, yeah. Yeah. Supercomputers.
Speaker 5:So you gotta send supercomputers to space Yeah. Because there's less No.
Speaker 1:We can do data centers in space. We just we we if it's on the ground, it's a supercomputer.
Speaker 5:Okay. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Because because don't want any more data centers on Earth. It's Earth Day, by the way. Congratulations, Earth. You've done fantastically.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But but the whole thing, like, in China is like they you know, you can just like build things there. Right? There's like very little regulatory overhead. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's like what like, I I feel like the the the space data centers Yeah. Makes a lot more sense for The US Yeah. If you're worried about if the if the bull case is regulatory, which seems to be that's like generally consensus, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was laughing about how, you know, how there's all this this fear about like data centers using water in America. But over in China, they have the 3 Gorges Dam, which generates electricity from water. And it technically uses a lot of water. The water is not destroyed or anything.
Speaker 1:It just passes through the dam, generates electricity.
Speaker 2:But They're using
Speaker 1:They're using ocean of water. Exactly. The Hoover Dam. That's a nightmare. If you just like like there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable so you can't drink it anymore, but there's another one where you think like water has individual rights and should not be used at all.
Speaker 1:Like it should not be used, it should not flow through a water wheel, it should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. It should be left to its own devices still and just chill. Maybe. Anyway, Orbital has incubated was is incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations.
Speaker 1:The rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So large scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide but further growth faces major obstacles including heavy land use, weird, soaring energy consumption, weird, limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China but maybe they are skating where the puck is going and maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction. So they're planning a dawn dusk orbit about 700, 800 kilometers above the earth aiming to achieve a large scale space data center support space based computing by 2035. Wow.
Speaker 1:Thinking in decades over there. So they're they're they're they're they're going slow. They're getting there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait.
Speaker 1:Why are they talking about last year? We'll focus on core technology changes and a first computing They're manipulating time. The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late twenty twenty five or early twenty six, but it does not appear to have launched. They have they they they have, like, decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money.
Speaker 1:You can just YOLO more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved. Although, I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the 3 Gorges Dam. Anyway, moving on. More images out of ChatGPT Images two, Image Gen two Images Pull these up.
Speaker 1:V two. These are crazy. Has anyone done that rune test of the of the the guy driving the car into the the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I wonder I wonder how I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the Internet and so it it no longer is a challenge.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna have it make it This is a crazy I am a I am a tiny man.
Speaker 1:What is this? MySpace.
Speaker 2:My son was born. This is truly never handed me to him.
Speaker 1:Never forget where you came from. Blink one eighty two. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens.
Speaker 1:Cows are flying. Horses are flying. Yeah. Trampolines are flying.
Speaker 5:The next one by Ethan Hallak has like every image benchmark Yes.
Speaker 1:In in one. You were you were asking about this. You you said explain the history of this.
Speaker 5:So originally, like, when like Dolly first came out, the the like image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon. Yeah. So then it's like, okay, that's like very easy. And then it became
Speaker 1:Well, it's very hard to Photoshop that. It's very hard to go get an actual Because if someone's just like make a picture of a dog and it's photoreal, everyone's just like, oh, who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of of astronauts riding horses on
Speaker 5:the There's people riding horses. Right? Yes. And and so like It
Speaker 1:should be able to process.
Speaker 5:Sense where it's like maybe the it's not like doesn't need to fully understand like everything that's going on because there there's a lot of like references it can pull from.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 5:So then it became can a horse ride an astronaut?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Right? It's like the reverse? Yes. And early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the on Yep.
Speaker 5:The
Speaker 1:because that's more logical Yep.
Speaker 5:General. So so there's a numbers of a number of these things where like if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like, okay, you just think logically like this is how it would look, but there's just like no reference images online. So another another one was like a full wine glass. Yeah. So you think of a full wine glass as like it's still only like technically, you know, halfway, three fourths
Speaker 1:full. I never understood why that one didn't work. I I I saw the whole
Speaker 5:video images online of a full wine glass being like
Speaker 1:Oh, full to the brim because typically fill them halfway Right. And so in the training data. Okay. Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yes. And then there was the, you
Speaker 1:know, What is this image?
Speaker 6:That's the one.
Speaker 1:This is not the one.
Speaker 2:This is not the one.
Speaker 1:This is not the one from the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than than the this is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks weird.
Speaker 2:The only thing is is it would a horse's belly really look like that?
Speaker 1:It is sort of like a humanoid horse.
Speaker 2:It kinda looks like a human that
Speaker 1:But it does have the wine glass completely filled and and then explain
Speaker 5:the clock. Was was Grok, I think.
Speaker 1:Okay. Explain the explain the clock. What's going on with the clock?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That one's just another like understanding thing where like can it if you give it a time, can it do the the clock Yeah. Like, correct time. There there's also one where you do a bunch of clocks on different time zones
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And connect
Speaker 1:And and how they're couldn't do the clock. Has two hour hands.
Speaker 5:Yeah. This one.
Speaker 1:So you know what that means? Removing the goalpost.
Speaker 2:Do it. Do It's time. It's time.
Speaker 1:It's time. It's not complete yet. It's not complete yet.
Speaker 2:Guys have more work to do.
Speaker 1:No. No. Sam was talking about this with Ashley Vance. He was saying that like, you know, he thought he thought job was finished with like chat GPT images because it's really good. And then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do.
Speaker 1:And this is like the car pathy thing about, like, yeah, you get the self driving cars to 99% and then takes another year to get add another nine and then takes another year to add another nine and then another nine and it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding folks. Keep grinding. Anyway, there are a lot of other fun posts.
Speaker 1:Semi Ankur says, I thought this was just a real image of Dorcache taking a selfie and then it was recontextualized via a meme. It is in fact an AI image. And it
Speaker 2:is And this doesn't even look like the new model though.
Speaker 1:Hi. I'm Dorkesh. I grew up all over The US and now SF based and always down to nerd out about AI science and history. A little about me. I host the Dorkesh podcast.
Speaker 1:Study at UT Austin, just published a book on the history of AI AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer. Because of course this is a a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of new people that have been hired and moved to
Speaker 2:the other thing I've noticed with images too
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is that I think it has fully the new model has actually has taste.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:agree. And it has fully democratized like high quality lifestyle and product imagery. Yep. And I'm shedding a a tear just a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Because you used to be able to tell like the kind of somebody who's working on a CPG company. You could kind of clock their ability
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:As a founder Yep. Based on the quality of their images. Yep. Right? Because maybe they're not super creative themselves.
Speaker 2:Maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money. But if they're scrappy, can meet the right photographer. They can put stuff together. Yeah. And now it's like everyone just has a great product photography.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I saw it this morning with there's that Andreessenbach company that does like electric scooters. Oh, yeah. They were just like ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent tens of thousands of dollars doing them, but they're clearly like images too. Which is cool.
Speaker 2:It's just like funny that we've entered a world where
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seen I've seen some people. I I I think that the the end result will be, like, you will see more opinionated and creative and and more people like like, there will be a collapsing around, like, everyone will copy Apple or linear. But then on the flip side, you will see people that are that are doing things that are really unexpected. And those things will be copied.
Speaker 1:But if the if the brand can run through and actually establish itself as like, it has this unique aesthetic, It won't matter that somebody can can recreate it. Because plenty of people did that with the red antler stuff. It was like that like there were brands that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic and then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked this. I was reflecting on the fact that like for a long time, Midjourney felt like it had a very unique aesthetic like ArtStation and like Painterly and SciFi really well. And then ChatGPT Images v one and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography.
Speaker 1:And now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with ChatGPT that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic. And it can do more of like the sci fi stuff. Although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photorealism. I think you gotta get kinda crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract because I was taking some mid journey prompts and I was putting them into ChattypuTi images. And I was noticing that, like, it was just putting out stuff that was like it was like like, well, the prompt was like, make a video game of like a car racing and it just looked exactly like a video game because it just looks like a screenshot instead of like the idea of a video game.
Speaker 2:Okay. Last one we're gonna pull up and then we have our first guest. Yes. Post from Ben Hallak.
Speaker 1:Twenty second.
Speaker 2:Says nightmare blunt rotation.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It can do
Speaker 2:I didn't
Speaker 1:know if images. It can do three sixty images, which is really cool.
Speaker 2:You got Sam, Johnson.
Speaker 1:So it generates a full equirectangular image which is something you could view in VR and then and then you can load that into a panoramic, you know, stereoscopic image generator. I wonder I wonder when three d images will come. And also, I mean, the the the big question is, like, people are gonna wanna animate these. What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point?
Speaker 1:We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it, and it should should help with, like, front end and, you know, and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on on on design and layouts and all this stuff. Well, we have a perfect person to talk about AI imagery, AI generative AI, creative tooling, and more because we are joined by Anil from Adobe where he is the president. So let's bring in Aneel.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me on. Great to be back on TBPN, and congrats on your acquisition. Great to
Speaker 1:see you.
Speaker 2:Thank you. It's great to see you.
Speaker 1:Great to see you again. I would love to just get a general update on what has changed with Adobe. What has what have you been working on since the last time we spoke?
Speaker 3:Well, look, I'm coming to you from Adobe Summit. We are here in Las Vegas, you know, big show, 14,000 people. You were just talking about Jensen. Jensen was here on Monday. And really talking about how NVIDIA and Adobe are working together.
Speaker 3:And you were just talking about three d. I caught the tail end of your comments there. That's actually one of the big things we announced is how do you have digital twins so that you can take the digital twin and carry it all the way from product design into marketing and customer experience. So, you know, with HP, for example
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They have 15,000 new, SKUs every, every year with with all the products they have, They're working with us and with Nvidia to bring it together into marketing. So we are super excited about what we call customer experience orchestration, which is how do you use AI, how do you use all the software you have to deliver personalized experiences? How do you bring the right content, the right data about the customer, and then put that into the channel that they care about and, and and really get the most out of the customer life cycle, build loyalty. That's what we're Yeah. That's the big topic of the conference here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Walk walk me through that HP example because if if if they have a SKU, I imagine that there's a CAD file at some point, and then they might want to instantiate that in in text or imagery or video or the three d rendering and they might want to go over to one of your three d products or bridge to another. How how important is Adobe at the center of, like, asset management and actually creating some sort of abstraction on top of what the actual core item is versus just translating from one sort of output to the next in the way that someone might take a PNG from Photoshop and drop it into Premiere Pro?
Speaker 3:No. That's exactly right. So they start with the the three d image that they have or the three d render, as you said, a CAD file.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:From that, what we do is we create the digital twin.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And then we apply the brand intelligence on their behalf. Mhmm. So in HP's case, example, if it's a new PC that they're releasing, they have all kinds of things on what they want when the when the let's say it's a it's a laptop and the laptop is open. What's the kind of image they want on the laptop? What's the kind of lighting they want on the laptop?
Speaker 3:And then they release it all over the world. So there's pictures of people They always want to show a business professional
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:In the laptop. That's the that along with the laptop. They want them showing them using the laptop to do something. So they have all kinds of brand guidelines, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But then there's a lot of tribal knowledge on makes an ad successful. And it's not only for them, then they have to get all of that traveling through the entire marketing campaign. Because one of the big problems has been, you know, in the in the current world, they use the three d CAD files for everything in manufacturing and so on, but the marketing, the content starts with a photo shoot. They're not actually using the three d CAD file that they have, source of truth, and that's what we're enabling them to do. Use the source of truth so that the images are completely high fidelity, they're brand preserving.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But then you can generate everything around that. You can generate the background, you can generate the foreground, you can generate the users. And then, of course, you can do what we call transcreation, which is the translation into different languages. All of that can be generated Yeah.
Speaker 3:Based on their brand guidelines and what works for their brand.
Speaker 1:So is your relationship with NVIDIA that you want to marshal enough compute that you can be delivering inference to a customer? Because I remember using Content Aware Fill back in the day. It ran locally on my device. As the models get more compute intensive, they eventually won't run on device. They'll run-in the cloud.
Speaker 1:I know you have API partnerships, but it is their vision to deliver inference to the customer all in one go.
Speaker 3:Exactly. It depends on the campaign. Let's say HP is running a back to school campaign Mhmm. Then they want a set of imagery. They want a set of things that they can transfer over to their channel partners
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Along with accurate product data. Mhmm. Or if they're running, for example, a holiday campaign, a different set of imagery Mhmm. And so on and so forth. So depending on the campaign, depending on the geography, depending on the customer segment Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Making sure that they have the right campaign, that is obviously the content. Mhmm. But it's also the product data, making sure that that's super accurate because it's got to match what exactly the customer's buying. And then anything that's relevant for the particular channel partner. It could be through their own direct channels, but it could equally be through CDW or through other channels, and they want to make sure that the entire thing carries over.
Speaker 3:So that's what we're doing for them is not getting the workflow right Mhmm. Getting the Adobe brand intelligence, which is one of the big things that we announced, this week at Summit. Getting all of that together so that they can have a single seamless marketing workflow and get the benefit of both AI and the three d technology together.
Speaker 2:Jordy? You guys announced a big buyback this week and and that that's been exciting. But what do you think you need to do from a result standpoint to show that you guys are an AI beneficiary versus a versus a victim? Right? Because if narrative is obviously against you, Yeah.
Speaker 2:The market has has spoken. But at the same time, AI is a powerful creative tool. Yeah. You guys have massive distribution into, you know, millions of individuals and businesses. And so I think people are waiting to actually see see the story in the numbers, and there's like only so much you can say Yeah.
Speaker 2:To kind of like give people confidence. But how are you thinking about it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. As you said, we announced a $25,000,000,000 buyback. That is a a signal of our confidence of, you know, this is going to continue to be a very profitable business for years to come, and we wanted to make sure that everybody in the market knew that. And, you know, look, I think to your point, first step for us is adoption and making sure that AI is delivering real value, whether it's to individuals and real value to users or to enterprise customers like we were just talking about.
Speaker 3:And for us, what that means is how do you really embed it into the tooling so seamlessly? Mhmm. Whether you are a marketer, whether you are a creative, or whether you're a business professional using Acrobat, that AI works for you flawlessly, and it does what you want. I I love the example from the last show that you had, which is sometimes you do want the horse riding the astronaut. That was an interesting concept.
Speaker 3:But, you know, that may be but we have a lot of customers like Home Depot that just want sawdust and nails, and that's what makes their campaigns authentic. Sure. So depending on what the customer wants, depending on what the user wants, making sure that AI is helping them get value, not AI is getting in the way. Mhmm. That's our focus right now, is just making sure that customers, whether they're enterprises, individuals, small businesses, students, understand that AI is critical to the next generation of of creative platforms and marketing platforms and tools.
Speaker 3:But it's in the context of what they're using, it brings the UI, the agentic the agents and the reasoning, the models, the data all together to work for them. So that's I think we've made a we've made a lot a lot of strides on that front here at Summit and over the last couple of years. I think as as the results show, one thing for us is I think from where we are in the market, for the market even to see us continuing to the performance that we've had. We're a double digit grower. You know, we have very healthy margins.
Speaker 3:Even continuing to see that for the next couple of years Yeah. I think will change a lot of minds. Mhmm. And then I think we also see the opportunity through customer experience orchestration Sure. To reach a real inflection point.
Speaker 3:So that's that's what we're looking to do.
Speaker 1:Jordy, you
Speaker 2:can Yeah. Was gonna ask how how are you what what's your m and a outlook? It seems like there's a ton of really talented teams building building creative tools that could could fit into to Adobe. Sure. Hopefully, you know, you're spending a lot on the buyback, but hopefully there's still some dry powder for some talented teams.
Speaker 3:We we do. We we have plenty of dry powder. We we haven't overextended ourselves. In fact, we are really pleased. We just announced that we have received all the regulatory approvals for SEMRush.
Speaker 3:Okay. We are in the in the waiting period to close it. So in the next few weeks, we'll be closing SEMRush. And we're super excited about that because SEMRush, along with our portfolio, solves a real problem for marketers. You know, marketers, I mean, we heard a lot from customers at Summit.
Speaker 3:Every brand is like, how do I show up in the right way through OpenAI, through chat through chat GPD, obviously, but through Claude and Gemini and Perplexity and Grok. How do I don't even know how consumer they know consumers are going there in droves. Yeah. What they don't know is, what are they even prompting for that I should be I should know about? So if I'm a brand in the cosmetics world
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:How are they what are they actually prompting? Yeah. And I don't even know what they're prompting for that I should be aware of. Then how should I make sure what do I need to do to make sure that I am included in the response? And then what do I need to do to make sure that I'm included in the response in an accurate manner?
Speaker 3:And then how do I get that traffic coming to me? Yeah. Or how do I close the sale right there if I if if it's something that I can close right there? This is a new world for marketers. They have Marketers have no idea how this whole thing works.
Speaker 3:I mean, they they don't know, for example, what happens when you put in a prompt into chat GPD. What is the queries that get kicked off? Where does it get kicked off to? How is that information assembled? How does it impact their brand?
Speaker 3:They don't know the first thing about it is what they're telling us. And they're saying Yeah. I I'm
Speaker 2:I'm interested to see how how this category plays out because there's obviously a bunch of companies doing, they call it answer engine optimization Mhmm. AEO or or GEO, whatever they're calling it. But the big question was always, this feels like a very natural thing for someone like a SEMRush to enter in a big way. They already have the distribution, so it'll be an interesting battle between SEMRush and some of the upstarts like Profound Yeah. And some other players.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the battle will be over pretty soon according to me.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:I think James I think James is Profound. We should have you guys both on and go and
Speaker 1:go at it. That's great. I I I wanna talk about video. So I mean, we saw OpenAI pulled back from Sora. There are some really amazing models that are happening.
Speaker 1:Some of them are in China. There's a whole bunch of IP stuff. But what I'm interested in is that Photoshop continues to be an important tool even in a Gen AI world because there's so many fine details. Having Gen AI is just one possible tool is valuable. The models are getting better.
Speaker 1:We're three years into this boom, but video is moving slower. It's more inference demand. And I'm wondering about how you're taking lessons learned and strategies that you applied to the evolution of Photoshop, how that integrates with different model providers, different tools, different in house solutions, and how you're planning to bring that to After Effects and and Premiere because this feels like a place where you would need even more opinionated editing. Like, we're nowhere near text box editing, like, you know, two like, forty hours of video into a movie. Like, that's just not like, we're so far from that.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So look, this is where I I believe Adobe brand intelligence will be a huge differentiator because that's what then Okay. Gives us the right information to pass on to the creatives to say, this is how this is the kind of how you use Adobe Creative Agent, and this is how where you want to let the AI be take over, and this is where you wanna be opinionated. Mhmm. I mean, what we have done is provided that flexibility.
Speaker 3:We know we we announced over 30 integrations now, you know, whether it's Runway or Flux and Yeah. Obviously Google with both VIO and Yeah. And Nano Banana, etcetera. So we've we've been very open, and we're very open to integrating any other models that come up as well. The key though is the creative themselves, if you're working for a brand, I mean, you're working for I mentioned Home Depot earlier, if you mentioned working for Coca Cola and so on, They don't have enough information by themselves unless they really get a really super detailed creative brief on what exactly to where they need to take control, where they can let the AI run.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We believe we can automate that and provide the right information at the right time to the creative. They can bring the brand idea. They can bring the hero asset. They can bring the creative idea, and then you can apply the intelligence and exactly to your point, you can be a lot more opinionated in what you produce.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is very fascinating that we got like fully generated video before we got a tool that puppeteers Premiere Pro in a way that can sync up music and edit to beat and make cuts just on normal non AI generated footage. But that's just the nature of, computer use and whatnot. So, I'm sure it's an exciting time.
Speaker 1:Lots to build, lots to work on. Congratulations on all the progress.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to get the update.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:Good to see you.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:We'll talk Cheers. To Have a good one. Thank you. Goodbye. Up next week.
Speaker 2:One like quick quick thought. I think I like right right now, like, already Yeah. The great image models, the nano bananas, the Yeah. Yeah. The Images two imagery.
Speaker 2:It is like you're just talking to somebody who is a digital guy or girl who is very good at Photoshop. Yep. Like that is the experience today. Yep. And it was not that way twelve months ago.
Speaker 2:Yep. It is that way now. Yep. I no longer need Photoshop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't need to go to Fiverr Yeah. To say like, hey, I need somebody that's good at Photoshop. Yep. I don't need to text like Ben and be like, hey, can you help me Photoshop this? And you can just actually just prompt your way.
Speaker 2:You do not need any UI anymore.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true. But
Speaker 2:for the average for the average
Speaker 1:For for yeah. I mean, we're we're
Speaker 2:we're And I'm just saying that's gonna get that's gonna get there with video where you just have a timeline
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And you can click on a scene or a second.
Speaker 1:Really, really important here. Like like, if you if there's one word that's wrong on image and you need to regenerate it, you're gonna wait forty five seconds, and it will be faster to to have done that in just a, you traditional workflow. Now, it's getting faster.
Speaker 2:It's so fast now.
Speaker 1:It's it's very fast.
Speaker 2:It's so fast.
Speaker 1:But if you were
Speaker 2:I was just I was
Speaker 1:you're writing a two hour podcast and you say, oh, I want you to cut to Jordy in minute forty five and it has to go regenerate the entire thing like that is slow. You're going puppeteer the tools. Gonna need tool use in here. I I think. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Just because Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was just shocked because I was I was playing around with like generating product photography and you're able to say like, put the text here, you know, turn it around, put it at a different angle, more shadow, less shadow. Yeah. All this stuff. Yeah. And it's wild what you can do without any UI.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Without further ado.
Speaker 1:We have Naveen from Build Forever. He's the former Patrese CPO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for
Speaker 4:having me. I the bomber, Jordy. Nice piece.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. It's a one of one
Speaker 1:New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 6:Stock exchange.
Speaker 4:Oh, NYSE.
Speaker 1:What day was the New York Stock Exchange founded?
Speaker 2:You tell me.
Speaker 1:1792. 11 Wall Street. Wow. That is a very old
Speaker 2:Great address. Great great year to get into business.
Speaker 1:Great year to get into business. Best day to get into business.
Speaker 2:But it's great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. First time on
Speaker 4:the show. Pleased to
Speaker 1:introduce yourself and the company a little bit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. So my name is Naveen Gavini. I'm the co founder and CEO of Build Forever. And honestly, we're just a group of engineers and designers and people that love building products that people love to use.
Speaker 4:And we've worked, as you said, I was early at Pinterest and we worked on a number of consumer products that people use around the world today. But our focus has been on a product that we launched yesterday called Extra. And it's really a reimagination of email as your life's inbox. And so for many of us, we spend all day kind of working, sending email. And when we have time to get to our personal email, it often feels overrun, overwhelming, and just like, I don't know, I personally gave up on my personal email.
Speaker 4:I had over 250,000 unread emails. And so we were just kind of looking for a solution of just making email more manageable, more fun, and delightful. And so with Extra, it keeps track of what's important for you, so you never have to miss something.
Speaker 7:It helps you clean up
Speaker 4:your email, organize it around your life, and it does things proactively for you in the background and helps you get stuff done. And so this endless to do list feels not so overwhelming, and it just feels delightful and joyful to open up your email every day.
Speaker 1:Is it a for you page for email?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Essentially. Yeah. That's how you could think of it. That's a good that's a good analogy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So everything that's important in your life
Speaker 8:We turn
Speaker 2:every email that you have into a short vertical looping video.
Speaker 1:It's not quite that, but Joe wasn't No.
Speaker 2:I know I know what you're saying. It's basically like, yeah, just actually picking and choose, you know, I it's always been so silly that inboxes, it it were were primarily based around who messaged you last, not based around what was actually important or actionable or anything like that. Yeah. I feel like we're we we need to move like, the idea the whole idea of inbox zero Yeah. Is just such a pre a AI idea where you are just getting flooded with more and more and more and more and more spam.
Speaker 2:And I think products that can help, here are great. Also, it feels like you can kind of just yeah. I'm curious. So you're built on top of Gmail. I don't know if you're supporting other email providers.
Speaker 2:Google is, like, aware that AI can be powerful in email. They're working on a lot of features, but I feel like this is one of those things that is gonna require, like, really, really rapid iteration. And so I feel like you probably have this beautiful window of, maybe three to four years where they're kind of just slow to figure out some of this stuff and and you can probably build a cool business in the meantime. But where do you wanna where where does this go? How how does this how do you know you know, how are you thinking about this as a venture scale opportunity?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. Well well, I mean, like, maybe starting where you kinda left off, I think one of the challenges in email is historically for the past twenty years, like all of the innovation in email, if you think about it, has gone into the enterprise and it's gone into really sending emails faster, right? So that's like kind of all the email clients that you've seen have been like, let's help you get $10 here and send faster. And when in reality, like our different take on emails that when you think about your personal email, not your work email, the amount of emails you send is actually very little relative to the amount you receive.
Speaker 4:And so the entire experience actually needs to be rethought of from information consumption, not as a communication tool. And I think that's the big pivot with email to think about on the personal side is that it's more around information consumption delivering to you the right information at the right time. And then from there, there's an entire business to be built on how do you actually get things done for people in their lives? How do you help them along that next point in time in the journey without them having to do work? And so you're seeing, you know, a whole ecosystem of amazing companies being built on the agentic side around fulfilling different actions, but all of them need kind of a distribution entry point of like, how do we start that journey and what is the personal data that we actually help achieve some of those actions upon?
Speaker 4:And so I think email is a really great place for that. And if we can build an experience that starts to make that seamless for a user where they don't have to go and, I don't know, set up an API key or connect to a service, and they can just seamlessly launch that from an experience that feels native to them like email, it could be a really compelling experience. And I think, you know, we previously built a very big business with ads at Pinterest and other companies. And so this idea of being able to show people products and services at the right time, could lead to a really incredible consumer product that's also accessible to the masses.
Speaker 2:Ads. I was not expecting that.
Speaker 1:Well, that that was a Pinterest.
Speaker 2:No. I know. But but but you're saying aren't you saying like in theory, if you build a really
Speaker 1:Yeah. You pay to get the top of the inbox. I'm gonna say everyone's sending you a thousand emails and if I advertise and pay, can get more surface area maybe?
Speaker 2:Also, think people I mean, my our stance and many people stance, I'm sure your stance is like if you get a really nicely targeted ad, it is like additive to a product experience. And so I think in the in the world in the future where, you know, somebody's using extra for their email, like, and you decide to turn on ads, you could probably serve, you know, really high quality Yeah. Ads users. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Some of
Speaker 4:our beta users really love actually finding deals and products from brands that they actually love that often get buried and missed in their in their inbox today. And when we show CMOs and marketers the product, they absolutely love the idea of their products being displayed natively, not buried in a promotions tab. You know, their CTRs are through the floor with kind of the existing treatment in many people's mailboxes. So if you're actually interested in a brand and you've bought something from them before, the idea of being able to see other complementary products or things from that brand in the future could be very compelling. And I think we're thinking about multiple tiers.
Speaker 4:Like I think there's obviously a lot of folks that, you know, may just want to not have ads and pay. And so I think there's there's lots of different ways to go about it. We're still early in the journey, but right now we're focusing on getting as many people to have a a joyful inbox experience as possible before we start to monetize.
Speaker 1:What's the beachhead agentic experience? Is it just unsubscribe?
Speaker 4:People love coming in to clean up their inbox. It's crazy. I I I recommend everyone that's listening in like, if you if you're tired of your inbox being overwhelmed five minutes with our onboarding flow, we'll we'll give you a inbox designed around your life and, you know, and you'll feel a lot lighter and cleaner after after using extra. But I think a lot
Speaker 1:of the Is that specifically for the person that's sitting on, like, 200,000 emails? Or if they have, like, 10 like, I probably have, like, 10 emails in my personal and, like, they range a lot from, like, need to write a thoughtful response to need to do some flow in some web app or need to send a payment or need to do and I'm like, I don't know that I would hand over the keys to an agent for most of those, but I would definitely love for you page on my, like, promotions and updates tabs in Gmail, which are, like Yeah. Basically newsletters and and sponsored stuff. And then I would love because Gmail's done, like, an okay job with the unsubscribe button, but it misses it a lot. But then there's some services that are just like, we're breaking the law.
Speaker 1:And, like, you have to call us to unsubscribe for our emails. And I'm like, that I'm I'm not gonna, like, chase this down, so I'm just gonna keep getting, like, you know, random our privacy policy updated for some, like, telecom service usually.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think with Extra, you you get an amazing free page with the information they want. And I think, honestly, a lot of people just feel the sense of control and clarity of being able to see it in a different view of like Sure. Here's what's important. Here's what I need to do today.
Speaker 4:And, you know, it's distilled down to just a few items versus this long list of things that you have to do in your inbox.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Is the app, live on the App Store?
Speaker 4:It is. Yeah. We went live yesterday.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Your life's inbox. Here we go. Happening now. I'm getting it. Thank you.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Very excited to try this.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you. Well,
Speaker 1:thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:Breaking down for us. Congratulations Thank on. You, to give it a try.
Speaker 2:Talk to
Speaker 1:you Cheers. Goodbye. Up next, we have Avlok from AngelList. And I believe we might have someone else joining as well. Ankur's joining as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. They've both been on the show before. You know them. You love them, and they have a big announcement today. AngelList is launching USVC, a public venture fund alongside Naveen Ravarthy Naveen.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yo. Yo.
Speaker 9:Hello. Feeling great.
Speaker 1:To the show.
Speaker 2:Big day.
Speaker 1:Big day. Break it down for us. What is USVC?
Speaker 9:Alright. Perfect. I'm gonna let Ankur break down what Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're working we're working on getting a a four up. Just give us one second. Okay. We can just hang out. Great.
Speaker 2:Great. Great hair did you did you just get a haircut?
Speaker 1:Here we go. We got everybody.
Speaker 6:There we go.
Speaker 2:Yep. There we go.
Speaker 9:Yep. Got a haircut just for TBPN,
Speaker 2:you know.
Speaker 8:There we go. I thought so.
Speaker 2:Great to see you guys. Welcome to the show. Massive day. Ankur, it's it's been too long since
Speaker 7:Too long.
Speaker 1:This last
Speaker 6:week. Since I've been here. Every every Wednesday afternoon blocked out. But no, today's launch is really fun. I mean, we couldn't reveal that much last week, but really, the last month has been gearing up towards this.
Speaker 6:And I think I think Naveen mentioned it when he first started AngelList. This was such a big part of his vision of what this company could become, and it's it's really fun to, like, finally get this out there.
Speaker 2:Let's get right into it.
Speaker 1:How are you describing
Speaker 2:the product? Yeah. Let's talk specifically about the product. This the you know, everyone everyone is aware of the companies that are that are a key part of it. But but yeah.
Speaker 2:Talk about kind of the decision making that that went into the product, how it's how it's different than other other products in the market, all that stuff.
Speaker 6:Cool. Yeah. So the idea with USVC is we wanted to open up access to the asset class of venture. Right now, it's I believe it's very siloed. You need to know a lot of people.
Speaker 6:It's very, very hard for most of America to have to have access to, you know, the place where most of the wealth is created. So that's the goal with USBC. Can we build sort of a high quality way to index into venture as an asset class? What's unique about this structure is there are a lot of private market ETFs. People may have seen the Destiny ETF, Robinhood ETF, all of that.
Speaker 6:The difference with this is this is set up differently where it's a closed and tender offer fund, which sounds like a lot
Speaker 4:of heavy words. But what
Speaker 6:it really means is when you're investing in this, you're actually holding something very close to the underlying business. So the price of the price of what you pay and what you redeem at is roughly equal to the price of the underlying companies. It's not driven by FOMO or like markets being super excited or down. And I think that is structurally very different. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I don't know if I've
Speaker 2:and and part of part of the challenge with with some of these other products is they can have they can have great assets that make up the fund, but if you want to pay but but it's hard to justify if they're trading at five You have no idea. Seven times NAV. It doesn't matter how good the underlying assets are. No good investor can kind of confidently say, I'm gonna invest in this fund unless you truly think that the assets are kind of mispriced fundamentally by five or six x.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That yeah. That's exactly right. I think you the way to think about USVC is it's meant to be a vehicle that you can think about over the long term. So rather than trying to think about am I getting it at the right nav? Am I getting it higher or lower than its value?
Speaker 9:You can just trust that when you invest in USBC, you're getting it at the the right nav and you can hold it for the very, very long term. That that's why we made the or that's why USBC made the decisions that it made.
Speaker 1:So how do how do investors actually onboard? It's very easy.
Speaker 6:So right now, yeah. It's very easy. I we'll get we'll get you all to invest soon. But it's, fully self serve, usvc.com. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:It's been yeah. Then that's sort of been the innovation here. Like, historically, types of funds require people to be accredited investors.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But now, access is truly open to anyone with as little as $500. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about number number of bets? It's it's open ended, so so it it sounds like uncapped. But is this the kind of thing where you wanna I I feel like is it you wanna concentrate on, twenty, thirty core positions similar to a venture fund? I imagine this isn't like you wanna spray and pray at at at seed, but maybe you would if it's the right founder. How are you thinking about it?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I can talk about portfolio construction. You'll see a lot of the names we've gone out with today are the names everyone has heard of, you know, xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic. Long term, I think a lot of the long term alpha is not even necessarily in these names, so we absolutely will also start investing in a lot of seed stage companies. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:The idea is these are bets. It's not just about the next one year, but bets that will pay off in the next three, five, seven, ten years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So about a third of the portfolio, the goal would be to have it skew early stage as well just because we want to be finding these companies before they're actually discovered.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah. So sim similar to a it's kind of a a platform VC where they're gonna concentrate a lot of their capital into later stage, established winners that are more stable, and then you can still get exposure to the early stage of of super promising companies. That's that's very cool.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about the concept of direct ownership? How many layers of abstraction? I think that there's there's there's just, like, FUD generally among retail investors that I've talked to that they will see a name that they're excited about, and then they will find a product that sort of proxies that name, but it's seven layers deep. It's very confusing, and and and they don't really know how to process it. And mostly, they're not even necessarily worried about fees or or anything like that.
Speaker 1:They're more worried about, like, well I thought I owned SpaceX and then it just turned out I didn't. And we've talked to Matt Grimm at Anderall about this. There's been all sorts Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of People promoting Anderall SPVs that don't have access.
Speaker 1:Don't have anything. And it's just like yeah. And I think that I think that that messaging is important. So can you talk us through the like like how you think about ownership, what rights you actually do need, what rights you don't, how you think about delivering exposure to the end to the end user or the end investor?
Speaker 6:I'm gonna let Avlok take this because AngelList as a platform has drawn the line on what they will expect as an SPV. So, Avlok, why don't you take this one?
Speaker 9:Sure. Yeah. One of the unique things about USBC is that it it runs on AngelList. So we're able to have it take advantage of all of the infrastructure of AngelList. And one of the things I tweeted out a few months ago was AngelList, as an example, had banned all layered SPVs by default for the reasons that you mentioned.
Speaker 9:In fact, when we did it, we lost revenue because of it. But that's because we didn't know who the underlying owners were, and we had no way to actually even trace it. And so we banned it. So in general, when it comes to the infrastructure that we're running at AngelList, we are always thinking first and foremost about ownership of the underlying assets because we're running infrastructure for funds, SPVs at scale. So from that vantage point, you can think of it as USBC in the way it thinks about it, acquiring assets, has the exact same ethos, which is you want to only look at assets where you actually know where the underlying assets are coming from rather than these layered SPVs that have fees that are not disclosed and carry that's not disclosed.
Speaker 9:That's something that we effectively banned from AngelList a while ago.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. What is what is what is
Speaker 1:the pitch
Speaker 2:for founders? Why why should they take USBC money? I can give I can give reasons, but how are you positioning I
Speaker 6:think I think that this is the most fun part, and you're gonna see see this soon where okay. You know, you'd argue that Anthropic doesn't really need more promoters right now, but we're going to be taking some bets on companies and startups that have very loyal, very passionate communities, but they may be a $50,000,000 business, a $100,000,000 business, something in that range. And to them, it allows them a very scalable way to actually let their community share in the upside. And that's gonna be one of the magical things here where it's not obviously an IPO or anything, now we can have a vehicle for people to get their communities involved in their upside. And for most founders, it's, you know, generally pretty cool to be able to say, hey, by the way, if you are a customer and you want to participate in this, you can invest in USBC.
Speaker 1:There's a $500 minimum. Is there a maximum?
Speaker 6:There's there's no maximum. So load up load
Speaker 4:up the truck. What
Speaker 1:what happens if Elon, Sam, Darian, these guys are like, you know what? I wanna just team up with the other guys. Let's let's throw 50,000,000,000 collectively into each other's companies.
Speaker 2:Through USBC.
Speaker 1:Through USBC. Yeah. Let's just let's just all create a ki rutsu. This is the Japanese way, correct? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You did you did strike something interesting. The the nature of this fund is different, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like
Speaker 6:Effectively, it's an evergreen fund Yeah. Which means we can accept kind of unlimited amount of capital. But from a deployment perspective, every time that happens effectively Yeah. We have, you know, we have to kind of come up with a strategy for that. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So it's a very different structure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How should investors think about the time horizon? If you're if you're going I I've talked to people that have LPed into VC funds and they're like, I don't even know if I'll see it before retirement. Mean, there's people who who got into like early rounds of SpaceX, and they're and they're, like, twenty years into, like, it looks great on paper, but I still don't have liquidity. And that's a that that's a benefit, but it's also a a drawback.
Speaker 1:And I think going in with eyes open is important. But how should the investor do they think about this as ten years journey or something that they're throwing in retirement bucket mentally or or or should they think about it? Obviously, it's not something that they're gonna be trading in and out of on a day to day basis, but what's the right mindset to go into this with?
Speaker 6:So I'll caveat that this is not a liquid instrument. Right? Yeah. Like we've been told to repeat this is not a liquid instrument.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:However, the goal with this type of structure is at our discretion Mhmm. Things are looking good and this is our goal. We will have up to 5% of the fund available for redemption every single quarter.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So the idea is that people theoretically, once we get into a good rhythm Mhmm. Can kind of pick and choose for how long they want to be a part of this journey.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 6:Again, it's not the most liquid instrument, but Yep. From a timing perspective, there's it is, you know, people can kind of come in and come out. However, you know, only through quarterly redemptions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Rudy, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This is great. I'm very very excited. This is the most angel less product ever, I think, even though you guys are more than a more than a decade in now. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. I I feel like I imagine you guys are gonna be spending a little more time on the East Coast with this. I guess you're already over there, Ankur.
Speaker 6:We're already in New York and on the
Speaker 4:West Coast.
Speaker 6:So we have good coverage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good coverage. The website is usvc.com. There's a beautiful video of Naveen Hunt.
Speaker 2:And I have no doubt we'll have many many of your new Port Co
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Founders on the show. We can't Yep. Wait. Keep us in the loop.
Speaker 4:Excited for it.
Speaker 2:It's great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. This this launch video is very funny because there there there are clips of Naveen and there are clips of founders and the first the first clip sort of makes it look like Naveen is talking to Steve Jobs if you if you just have the sound off. But what a what a fantastic portfolio.
Speaker 1:Go check it out at USVC. There are seven companies in the portfolio currently. XAI, Crusoe, who's been on the show, Anthropic, Sierra Technologies, Brett Taylor, Ligora, OpenAI, and Vercel. You have seven different companies here representing. Go check it out at usbc.com.
Speaker 2:Well Wow. Before we go Yeah. What else into the Breaking news. Next guest segment.
Speaker 1:What's up?
Speaker 2:I I'm trying to this hasn't been posted by any any super reputable sources yet. But there's a number of sources saying that Thoma Bravo, actually according to Reuters, is nearing agreement to turn software for Medallia over to creditors
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which would be a $5,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Right off. Loss. That is rough.
Speaker 2:Absolutely brutal. We'll dig in here more next.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have Joel Edwards from Zankar in the waiting room. Let's bring Joel in to the TBPN Ultra Realm. Joel, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 7:Good. Hey, guys.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 7:Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Great to hopping on, and thanks for cleaning the camera. I appreciate that. Always wanna look sharp on TBPN. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 7:Hey, guys. Joel Edwards. I'm a geologist by training. I'm from Zanskar Geothermal. We're a group that we wildcat for new geothermal resources out West
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:To make power.
Speaker 1:Okay. What's the best?
Speaker 2:Incredible. What's the best to my ears. What's the best I got one more AI agent, I was No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:Name every geothermal resource. Like, what are we actually we just concretize it for me. Like, what are we talking about here? What is you striking gold look like? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Striking gold. In in your head, have you guys ever been to Yellowstone National Park? 1st National Park?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Think so.
Speaker 7:Steamed the old faith faithful geyser, any of those thermal Okay. These are the types of systems we're looking for.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Except for the systems we're looking for are hidden or blind.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 7:So there's nothing at the surface. There's no geyser. There's no hot springs.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Nothing. But there are massive geothermal resources Okay. At depth that you can tap with a well field. Okay. You can pull that heat out of the ground and you can put it in a turbine and make electricity.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Take me through the the the the geology one zero one. The where's the heat coming from? Why is this underground?
Speaker 1:How do we get it out? Is it just there there are just, like, pockets of hot air, hot water? I I got really dumb it down for me.
Speaker 7:There are pockets of hot water underground
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Not hot air.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And they're fairly discrete, fairly local, but when you find them, they're incredibly energy dense. Mhmm. So think in your mind like volcanoes. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:That's a that's a manifestation of a geothermal system. Okay. Think hot springs and so forth. There are parts of the world of the crust where there's just a lot of heat. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And that gets manifest in these different thermal features. And you can drill into these things and you can pull steam or hot brines out of the ground, and then you put it into a power plant just like, you know, all thermal power plants, nuclear Yeah. Coal, combined cycle gas. Yeah. They all put heat into turbines.
Speaker 7:Turbine spins
Speaker 1:Generator. Spins
Speaker 7:the generator, and you make electricity and so forth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's that classic meme. We we discover a new way to generate power, and we are gonna use it to boil water and generate steam and spin a turbine so we get more electricity. And this is like Exactly. We do every time we discover something new.
Speaker 1:What making
Speaker 2:steam. Does the what is what is the business actually gonna look like? Is this a whale hunting where you're really trying to find a single site in the next twenty four months, and then you'll spend years
Speaker 1:Do you want commercialize it, or do you want to sell it off to another company at that point? Like, how how full stack do you wind up going here?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We already own and operate a power plant, geothermal power plant in New Mexico. So we sell electricity
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:To an investor owned utility, and then they service Albuquerque and Santa Fe and so
Speaker 1:forth. Interesting.
Speaker 7:So the business is to find geothermal resources Mhmm. Build a power plant, and then sell the electricity to a customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So this is part of that Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sorry. Sorry. Is there is there this feels like eco friendly. Is there pushback to geothermal energy production generally? Like, people are worried about earthquakes or something.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Like, wait. It feels like this is There's is
Speaker 2:step forward. People are gonna find a way to hate So what are they gonna hate about this?
Speaker 1:Like, are you in like are you renewable? Are you clean energy? Like, what what category are you in do you think?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Right now, we are beloved
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:By both sides of the political aisle.
Speaker 1:So you show up in DC Enjoy it while you Yeah. Guys, Exactly. Somebody will find a way. Triple glazed.
Speaker 7:We're we're one of the few, like, bipartisan things where you show up in DC and everybody loves you, shakes your hand. It's a really exciting moment.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 7:There's there's attributes about geothermal that people love. It's baseload. There's no emission profile. It's domestic, so all these resources are in The US. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, it uses US supply chains. It uses drillers. Everybody loves drillers. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Well, not everybody, but a lot of people love drillers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so forth. So, it has a lot of those attributes that speak to both the left and the right. Sure. And then probably, you know, another attribute is the underdog attribute. Everybody loves a good underdog.
Speaker 7:Geothermal is an underdog. We're a niche, small industry. We have a lot of the same setup that oil and gas had like a hundred plus years ago where Sure. It looks like there's a lot of resource out there, looks like a ton of potential, it's still niche. Is it gonna scale to
Speaker 2:Is this one of those things like rare earths are not actually that rare? Just hard to find,
Speaker 1:hard to
Speaker 2:get to, hard to We don't like doing that. The refining nearby. Yeah. How Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess how rare
Speaker 1:How much geothermal energy is there? Like, are we talking, like, tens of gigawatts potentially if we were to put in, like, AI data center per parlayance?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I think tens of gigawatts is near term super duper realistic based on the tools and the tech that we have Yeah. So exciting. Yeah. Obviously, there's people talking hundreds of gigawatts, terawatts.
Speaker 7:We'll see what happens. Right? Yeah. As as things as industries scale, nonlinear, unpredictable things happen. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Cost and technology and all these things change. So it's hard to predict what's gonna happen ten years from now, but, basically, there's two things that drive scale for resources. It's the number of resources out there in existence. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then it's your ability to extract the resource, and that's really technology dependent. So geothermal where where Zanskars really focuses on finding more geothermal hotspots Mhmm. We have a thesis that there's a lot more out there. We've already found a bunch of sites. We've announced a few of them.
Speaker 7:There's more to come. And then there's other groups that have focused on how do you get more out of these systems, and those are in the unconventional bucket. It's like it's like the oil and gas play in the Permian in West Texas. Yep. Right?
Speaker 7:They came in with unconventional well fields. They drill horizontal wells. They stimulate. They get more hydrocarbons out of the rock. Yep.
Speaker 7:That process is happening in Gethermel right now as well.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:So you have the exploration piece finding more and then getting more out it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Double clicking on the exploration piece. It sounds like AI can be used to do more computational discovery, actually interpret data. But what's the gold standard for actually obtaining the data? Like, what like, what sensor are you using to detect the potential of a geothermal, you know, discovery?
Speaker 7:System, what's the secret? No. We the the the trick in geothermal is that there's not a single type of geologic data that tells you if a system is in existence other than just drilling a well into the thing and
Speaker 1:measuring nothing you can do just like radar or, like, pull something through the ground and find it that way?
Speaker 7:Unfortunately, no. I wish it was that easy. Okay. You got In oil and gas exploration, they use seismic reflection imaging and that was kind of their silver bullet toolset to find a lot of these reservoirs. In geothermal, we use a mix of data sets to try to find these hidden systems.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 7:And that's where that's where, like, AI tools really flex because they can they can handle the hyperdimensionality problem really well better than humans. Interesting. So we basically build the sandbox in which the models learn how to find systems. Mhmm. The building the sandbox piece is the really hard piece.
Speaker 7:You have to put the right data in there. You have to put the right learning Yep. Objective rates and so forth. That's that's the piece that we live in. We build the sandboxes for the models.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Last question for me.
Speaker 2:I feel like you guys are betting towards the the, you know, the meme template, the world like the world if it ran on geothermal energy and it's like You you know, just flying cars. Everything's green.
Speaker 1:Hypothetically, friend of the show Mark Benioff, he's out in Hawaii. He's big on AI. Could we put a cap on a volcano and capture all the energy out of a volcano and use that to power Salesforce AI?
Speaker 7:Sure. Why not? A cap? What is what is the cap look like?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'm just imagining I'm imagining a physical Something
Speaker 2:to trap the
Speaker 1:heat. Something to trap the heat that comes off of the volcano.
Speaker 2:Water to
Speaker 1:Maybe you wanna drill into the volcano and extract the lava that way. But has anyone actually at least theorized about capturing energy from volcanoes? They seem very powerful.
Speaker 7:They're they're pretty powerful. We have a lot of active operational geothermal wellfields on volcanoes today.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 7:So the main island of Hawaii Yeah. Has a geothermal wellfield. Wow. They've drilled into the side of that volcano, and they make electricity out of it. That's crazy.
Speaker 7:So I guess if that's the cap
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess there's a cap. The cap is a long mini caps.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but but they are extracting energy from the volcano. That's a remarkable
Speaker 7:That's right. Wow. Yeah. So there's a lot of geothermal operations, power plants in Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, where a lot of these big volcanic systems live. In The US, we have some volcanic systems generating power in California.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then most of the rest of the systems are generating from from cracks or fracture zones
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:In the crust. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's very exciting. Did did you raise money?
Speaker 7:We raised some money. Yeah. We've we've got some cash.
Speaker 1:I wanna ring the gong for you. It's exciting.
Speaker 7:The gong is the gong is coming. I knew the gong was coming. Yes. We we raised a 115,000,000 a few months ago and Sounds good. Congratulations.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Wait. $40,000,000 what? Credit facility?
Speaker 7:It's it's a it's a credit facility. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Massive? Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's all good.
Speaker 7:I'm really glad you're doing Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 2:Really glad you're doing this. Appreciate it. You know, there are people talking about AI, bottlenecks in AI. Right? You know, talent chips can you know, energy and there there's and there's sort of like this cycle in technology live streaming right now.
Speaker 2:And right now there's sort of like a talent bottleneck but and an equipment bottleneck. But, know, if if we keep doubling from here, there will be a an energy bottleneck in in technology live streaming. So I'm glad you're I'm glad you're doing this work.
Speaker 7:Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Have you ever been on a drill rig?
Speaker 2:No. I have.
Speaker 7:You guys have not lived yet. I mean, I know. This is the American experience is to be on
Speaker 2:a drill rig. I know. I know. Tell us tell us when you're in Southern California. We Alright.
Speaker 2:Would love to go live from from the rig. Yeah. So anyways Thanks for hopping on.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 7:you guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Up next, we have the founder and CEO, Vast Data. Just hit a 30,000,000,000 valuation. Congratulations. It's a $1,000,000,000 series Absolutely this massive news.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 10:Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:We're good. Would you mind, just giving us a little bit of the journey, a little bit of the background? I'd love to know, all the things that went into, building the company to this point since it's such a, you know, massive milestone?
Speaker 10:Of course. It's been ten years in the making. We started in '26 We're gonna read the research. Hit that We wanted to redo infrastructure. We We thought thought AI AI required required a new infrastructure stack way back then.
Speaker 10:If you remember 2016, it was a very, very early days of AI, but it was already clear that you needed fast access to a lot of data to train these massive systems.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And now, needed to infer and to fine tune and for reinforced learning. And so, we've been on this journey with AI throughout its various evolutions. We started from storage, building Was
Speaker 2:there was there any any Were there any points on that journey where you were like, maybe maybe we were too early. Did we pick kind of the wrong category? Or was it kind of like steady You felt like there was steady progress being made, and you had line of sight to getting to where you are now the entire time?
Speaker 10:We definitely did not have line of sight. When we started, if you looked at my presentation that I built for myself, the last slide had a picture of a brain on it, and it asked, can we build a thinking machine? I I'm not sure we still have today line of sight to doing that, but it's been our North Star. And over the years, we always partnered with the organizations that were on the bleeding edge of AI. Before generative AI, it was hedge funds and life science institutes that were doing massive analytics using GPUs.
Speaker 10:And then, of course, once generative AI hit, it became the labs and the AI clouds that became our biggest customers.
Speaker 1:Do do you have insight into how hedge funds are scaling compute resources? Just saw, didn't Jane Street invest $1,000,000,000 in CoreWeave? And it seems like I saw another company that they funded that was doing custom silicon, and it feels like they have an incredibly advanced compute stacks that are a little bit more opaque because they're maybe just have a different recruiting flow or a different public messaging flow.
Speaker 10:That is exactly right. In fact, Dane Street is a customer of ours both directly and through CoreWeave, and so we know them well. Yeah. We play in that space now for seven or eight years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:I found that before the big AI labs, the hedge funds were the ones that had the biggest GPU clusters. Yeah. They're they're ahead of their time, and they're very secretive. So Yeah. We don't know much about what's going on there.
Speaker 1:What about the social social networks and the social platforms? I feel like ad delivery is also potentially underrated as a source of, like, large scale machine learning, large scale compute clusters. We've seen, you know, Meta trained the LAMA model on the the the real sized cluster that they built as sort of a bonus. But how how big is how big is that of a business for you, and how how do you think it comps to the hedge fund world?
Speaker 10:I think the hedge fund world is a lot more secretive, but I would dare to say that it's bigger in terms of size. There are very few of these metas out there Yeah. And there are a lot more hedge funds.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, talk about what the next phase for your company is on the back of this financing round.
Speaker 10:So we're trying to fill in that software infrastructure layer. Jensen gave a really good analogy of a five layer cake, power, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. Mhmm. We're that middle layer. We want to abstract this new hardware away from these new models and applications.
Speaker 10:We want to make it easy, make it secure for everybody to generate AI agents and use AI in production. Mhmm. And especially as we move from the labs into enterprises, I think it needs to be simplified. And it's always been that software infrastructure layer, what I call the operating system that took a new technology from new hardware and a killer app to making it widespread where everybody can use it. And I think we're at that moment with AI, and we're trying to do our part in in accelerating the adoption of AI.
Speaker 1:How have you been processing the the the CPU shortage? This idea that, like, as agents get more and more robust, they need more CPU. They need to be fed. You gotta feed the GPUs. Is that something that you're working on particularly?
Speaker 1:Or do you have a view on the the overall just just CPU shortage, which sort of blindsided, I think, lot of people in tech who've been following the the GPU ramps, but then they're saying, oh, well, what what what's going on with the CPU crunch?
Speaker 10:I think these AI factories are bigger pieces of technology than we've ever built before. It includes CPUs. It includes DPUs. It includes GPUs. In some cases, it includes TPUs.
Speaker 10:Sorry. What were these DPUs?
Speaker 1:Can you break that down?
Speaker 10:D, data processing Oh,
Speaker 1:data. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yes. And so all of these chips are in high demand. We're seeing a NAND shortage
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:That's extremely severe right now. We're seeing a memory shortage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And so I don't think there's anything that is of abundant supply right now. The fabs need to be built out. Nobody was expecting this type of curve in the growth of AI. Yeah. And I think it's going to continue for definitely a few years to come, if not many years to come.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And so the hardware vendors need to build out a lot faster than they have been.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you walk me through at a deeper level your relationship with CoreWeave and how that fits together? I think a lot of people think of CoreWeave as servicing, you know, the the the the the companies that are training and inferencing models specifically. What are you getting out of that partnership?
Speaker 10:So CoreWeave has been an amazing partner for us. They're the biggest of these new AI clouds, like EnScale and Crusoe and Lambda. You see them around the world also as sovereign clouds. Yeah. And basically, they're building this new stack.
Speaker 10:And they're making it easy for end users to consume this new stack in a cloud environment
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Or just the software builders.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 10:And so we try to provide them with as much software as we can such that they can turn that around into cloud services, whether it's a storage service or a database service or a streaming service. Mhmm. As we add more and more layers of this stack, those are the things that are required from those end users.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we were I mean, we were just talking to the president of Adobe. It sounds like Adobe is doing inference and they're training some models and they're doing a lot of different things. They might go to CoreWeave and then VAST Data might be powering the software underneath and they might not even necessarily have a direct relationship with you because they're getting just access to the best possible product from CoreWeave directly effectively. Is that right?
Speaker 10:It is right. Adobe specifically does have a direct relationship with us. Okay. Yeah. Most of these larger enterprises
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Tend to have both cloud environment that they're leveraging and on prem and hyperscale. And what we've built, what we call a data space
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:Basically allows them to do all three of those and have one abstraction layer that enables a seamless experience.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Given given your exposure to the to the world of hedge funds, are there a bunch more situational awareness ask funds that have absolutely printed over the last year or so, but just done it a lot more quietly and the West Coast kind of hasn't picked up on it?
Speaker 10:That's a really good question. I actually met those guys from situational awareness a couple weeks ago. They have a really interesting view into the future, and I think they're capitalizing on that view for every phase as as it unrolls. I am not the right person to ask because those funds tend to not have as much infrastructure. The ones that we work with
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:Tend to be more quant driven. Yeah. Yeah. Situational awareness, I think, is just a few very smart people. They don't need that much compute power.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's more macro research.
Speaker 2:Doing it the old fashioned way with with guts.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Conviction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, conversations and research and having a having a contrarian view. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet
Speaker 1:you. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Appreciate you breaking it down.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 6:Thank you.
Speaker 4:Have a
Speaker 1:good one. Yeah. Can you imagine situational awareness with a couple gigawatts of compute under the hood? Anything's possible at that level. I was Fantastic.
Speaker 1:What what was that what was that copy trading profile? You you know the one I'm talking about where you can like create the Nancy Pelosi Autopilot. Autopilot. Yeah. Autopilot has a tracker for situational awareness.
Speaker 5:Every time they they post about it, they they use this like AI image of them. It doesn't look anything like
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. But But but there's so few images of Leopold on the internet that that AI image has just become like what mainstream media will pull for for him because they just assume that that actually him and it's not.
Speaker 1:But it's just very funny that it's
Speaker 2:A man who has only appeared on Dwarf Cash.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:There's no other there's only video of him.
Speaker 1:SPF just posted his full holdings. If lawyers hadn't fire sold, he's up a 165 x on Anthropic, 72 x 27 x on Solana, eight x on Robinhood, Genesis Digital. Anyway, he's taking a victory lap. We have our next guest, Darian from Gradient Ventures in the waiting room. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Hey, How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 8:Hey. How's it going? Good to see you, Jordy. Been a while.
Speaker 2:Good to see you. It's been a long time.
Speaker 1:Good to see you too. Where are you calling in from? Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm in our office in Jackson Square. We just moved in here about eight months ago and we're right next to Thrive and Obvious and IVP. It's like a, you know, a VC community now. We can almost live in we can live here even. There's apartments upstairs,
Speaker 7:you know.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Since this is the first time on the show, I'd love to get some of your backstory, some of your journey to venture, just a little bit of like how you wound up in this particular seat in Jackson's Sure.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I I I grew up in Silicon Valley. My father came here in the seventies. He worked in tech as well.
Speaker 1:What was he doing in the seventies? Like, what was tech like in the seventies? Semiconductors. Semiconductors. The true Silicon Valley.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. True Silicon Valley where we actually God. SAS Valley. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We actually made some
Speaker 2:SAS Valley.
Speaker 1:He was industrializing. Now we're re industrializing. But so he was working in semis. Okay.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And then he sort of fast tracked and like coached me through everything on, you know, what startups were, venture financings, all those kinds of things. He had he was actually fortunate because in business school, his his closest friends were Vinod Khosla and Bob Cagle. Wow. Probably everybody knows Vinod, but Bob was one of the founders of Benchmark.
Speaker 8:And so he had been steeped in, you know, all these different kinds of communities that were very very venture focused and startup focused, and the industry has evolved a lot. Yeah. Then I was fortunate because I actually got an introduction to Sean Parker when I was 17 through my cousin Hadi Partovi Yeah. Who I think you've had his brother on the show. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Mean, He introduced me and and I I visited the Facebook office and met Mark, and Mark was like, yo, you should come work here. I I think they were struggling to hire people at the time because I wasn't exactly the best engineer, but you know, it it was it was a fun time. You know, we built a lot of stuff. We launched news feed photos, etcetera. And then I
Speaker 1:went to college. Is the story is the is the apocryphal potentially apocryphal story of, like, everything was a single file and you would yell, hey, I'm I'm changing the code. Is that do you think that story is real at all?
Speaker 8:Oh, I mean, like, we when we wanted to push to the web tier, we would just rsync the latest folder on Dustin's laptop.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 4:It was like
Speaker 8:that was the push process. And and then we we introduced Subversion. Actually, was a guy that I worked with, Aaron Sig, who was brilliant, who who we we put together like Subversion, checked in files in and out. We created templating. I worked on that project too.
Speaker 8:When But we got there, there was like tons of SQL interspersed with HTML. It was it was hilarious. But, you know, that that is what startups are about Yeah. Because it's super messy. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And that's what I learned there. Although I also learned that, you know, only one in a billion are as anomalistic as Facebook, know, they're not every startup can go that way.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But also hilariously Did warp your your kind of like where where I don't I don't even I don't know the
Speaker 1:everything I turned, everything I touches turns into gold and then it's like, okay, normal VC world like Yeah. There's gonna be failures.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I feel like I'll talk with with founders sometime and it's their first company. Yeah. It's going so well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they had they don't even know that that like how anomalous it is. Yeah. And and sometimes they'll just be like, you you have something really really special here and and like and stay locked in because the odds of this happening, you know, another time in this way are very low.
Speaker 8:Oh, totally. I mean, I I ended up starting an enterprise software company which was much more difficult. I remember meeting Aaron Levy when he was starting Box. He was in a bunk bed with Dylan in a house in Berkeley, and they asked me if I'd invest, and I thought they were crazy, and I didn't. And that was a huge mistake.
Speaker 8:So, you know, but then there there there are positive stories. Like, I met most of the founders of Palantir and invested personally early in Palantir, and that was ended up being an incredible company. Or, know, you know, when Luke Nosek was talking about SpaceX Mhmm. Like almost a decade ago, and I was like, you're crazy. We're gonna launch rockets to the moon?
Speaker 8:Like, we're not gonna do that. And ultimately, you you you really just have to surround yourself with really smart people. Fortunately, I've always been surrounded by people much smarter than myself, and so I think that's why I'm in this chair. Yeah. Ended up being a founder, invested in a lot of great companies, like first investor in CaseText, which got bought by LexisNexis.
Speaker 8:Oh, yeah. One of the first investors in Legora, is now on a tear. And then in Gradient, we've, you know, seeded Lambda Labs. My partner did that deal. You know, joined here about eight years ago with the goal of investing in AI, mainly because I didn't get crypto.
Speaker 7:And I
Speaker 8:was like, I don't understand why crypto's interesting. And so I joined the nerds at the AI Fund that Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then during the 2021 era, like, you got you know, you were the the Google's early stage AI fund but you were still like as a fund overall, some of the partners were like branching out and would do different stuff obviously. But but you guys now get the benefit of like, we were doing all these companies like Yeah. You know, almost a decade ago or a decade ago and now they're they're
Speaker 1:What was what was the enterprise software company that you built? And and like coming out of consumer social, why enterprise?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I was always obsessed with data. Okay. Like, I I actually thought that the edge that Facebook had was how clean the data was on everyone's profiles. Like, you people would just give us their birthday, like, what classes they were in, like, all this information, and it was very well organized.
Speaker 8:And this is before LLMs where, you know, you couldn't organize and massage that data very easily. Now you can, things can be amorphous and it's easy to process, but before you couldn't. And so, know, I was very interested in, you know, small business data. I thought that we could compete with Dun and Bradstreet. It was a company called Radius that we scaled to pretty significant ARR and we sold it.
Speaker 8:It was a huge it was a long journey. Was full of crisis, full of learning. And actually that kind of helped me with a with becoming a VC mainly because I I really empathize with like how founders are going through a terrible time. I mean, running a company is not fun regardless of whether it's going well or not. Like, the best companies in the world, it may look like everything's going well
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:But the mess is just masked by growth. Yep. It's like, that's the difference between a good company and like not a good company. And and in general, like founders, I really have a lot of respect for because I decided not to sign up to found another company after my own. I decided to go to the dark side and be a VC, which sometimes I say is a cop out, but you know, being a founder is really what it's is really the most difficult job.
Speaker 8:And if you can sign up for it multiple times, I mean, that's incredible. That's a sign of like just incredible resilience.
Speaker 2:Or a masochist.
Speaker 8:Yeah, that too. What are you I'm
Speaker 2:I'm so curious curious what you're excited about investing today, and I know it's probably like comes down to like just backing great teams because that that typically works well. But we're in such an interesting time right now where it feels like all software, all enterprise software is like converging on the same kinds of simple use you know, use cases. It was like collapsing. Interface to get agents to do things. Like everything is everything is converging
Speaker 1:To just the tensors.
Speaker 2:And you know, you guys were you know, you did Neo you did Lambda, you did a Neo Cloud eight years ago. That was like the best time to be investing in a Neo Cloud. And then now that it just feels like, you know, that you have the SaaS apocalypse in the public market and then a lot of early stage companies that are getting investment are still SaaS. Like, so I'm curious like Mhmm. Do you still believe in do you still believe in SaaS?
Speaker 2:Like, what kinds of opportunities are you most excited in?
Speaker 8:I I believe in shorting SaaS if I can. Like, that's that's probably what I believe in right now. Like, I I generally think that software
Speaker 1:is Bullish on puts.
Speaker 2:That's a good that's
Speaker 7:a good laugh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:I'm bullish on Salesforce puts is what I'm saying. But, you know, I think I think that the reality is that we are doing a lot of soul searching like a lot of seed funds. You know, there are a lot of things that are still very interesting and investable. Like, we just invested in a robotics company that I'm super excited about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That has a hardware component. Yeah. I wouldn't touch hardware with a 10 foot pole five years ago. Now I'm very interested in it. You know, we've invested in, you know, tools that help you manage multiple coding agents.
Speaker 8:We've invested in, you know, video editing solutions. We're investing in an AI hedge fund. Like, we are investing in a lot of really interesting things that are outside of the software as a service scope. Yeah. And the real reason is just that, you know, if you wanna build anything, can in a few hours.
Speaker 8:Like, it's just so easy too, and I think that that is a major change.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Not just for software companies, but generally for, like, the bottom 40% of work that you don't that you sit behind a desk for. Maybe the bottom 60%. And so, you know, we're spending a lot of time thinking about ways in which we can, you know, think about new areas. Now we have the benefit of having done this before, because when we launched in 2017 right after the transformer paper came out, there were no AI companies. Yeah.
Speaker 8:That like, there were none. And, like, OpenAI was a nonprofit, and profit didn't exist. Yeah. You know, like, DeepMind had you know, was still, in a small division within Google. You know, now you know, so we had we had to go and hunt and find companies like Lambda, like RadAI, like Streamlit, like Writer, you know, like a lot of these businesses.
Speaker 8:And and so we're we're getting back onto what we had done before, which is scouring and doing a lot of outbound, going and meeting founders, getting to know founders, and and really slowing our deployment pace until it's very clear where the value is gonna accrue at the seed stage. Yeah. And that I think is the smart thing to do right now. I think that software in general is really in jeopardy, and there we've made some software investments, but we believe they have strong moats Yeah. Because they have network effects or they have data network effects.
Speaker 8:But in general, like, percent of software companies are really in trouble.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the pipeline for founders and how it might be changing. I'm sure you've been tracking like there's this crazy falloff in the number of computer science grads, and that used to be just fertile ground for it used to be general casting, right? Central casting for VC backed founder was like Stanford CS. And I don't know about Stanford specifically, but it seems like we're getting a lot less or fewer computer science grads.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if you envision a future where you'll be pulling more physicists and mathematicians or theologians or philosophers into entrepreneurial stuff. I mean Mark Zuckerberg did not study computer science as his primary major, right? Wasn't he a philosophy major I think or something?
Speaker 8:Psych major.
Speaker 1:Psych major. Major. So like like there's plenty of examples
Speaker 2:It honestly makes a lot of sense for social media
Speaker 1:Brilliant.
Speaker 9:Founder. Brilliant.
Speaker 1:But I mean do do you see there being like a pipeline crisis as the contrarian move now to study computer science at a time when coding jobs are going away? Like walk me through how you're processing this idea that, you know, our best and brightest aren't going to, you know, just learn to code and become computer scientists, you know, at the same rate?
Speaker 8:Oh, I mean, absolutely. You talk to any scale up or, you know, tech company today, the mid level engineers are managing coding agents in English. Yeah. They're not even coding. They're managing, like, hundreds or many dozens of coding agents at once.
Speaker 8:I think this at the senior level, the engineers are probably okay because we do need more code reviews and evaluations because a lot of these coding coding agents are spitting out bad code at at volume, and that will that will get improved over time, but I think it is a challenge. But I do think for entry level positions, we've told the whole generation, including my generation, that you should go to college when like, I don't think that that's necessary. Right? Like college was originally formed, especially liberal arts, was formed for the process of being creative, or thinking, or philosophy, or things like that, or writing. You know, we we've told people that they can go to college and get a good job at a tech company, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 8:I think that that's kind of in jeopardy currently. My hope is that we focus more on like real trades, right, like welding and plumbing and a lot of the or you know, ceramics and pottery, like these are gonna be like more respected work, lines of work in the future as knowledge work just gets completely replaced by AI. I don't have a great answer for you, but I generally do worry about this because I don't know if colleges should be teaching computer science to everybody. That being said, I think everyone should take a course to understand how AI works. Yeah.
Speaker 8:How these LMs actually work. Yeah. I think that everyone should do their best to read the transformer paper, you know, everyone in the world because it is kind of the Magna Carta of this generation. But, you know, I do worry about this. I worry about, you know, workforce displacement and how that transition works and if our government is even capable of helping help helping people transition from one phase to another Yeah.
Speaker 8:Or one era to another.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm just wondering, like, is the next great, like, pottery entrepreneur going to go through pottery trade school or, be a business major and be able to, like, marshal a billion dollars of capital to, build the pottery empire of the future? Like like, do you do do you go deals guy route and then tack on the trade? Or do you pull from the trades goal? Maybe it's a moot point because you'll know it when you see it and you meet the person.
Speaker 1:But it's a fascinating world to imagine because for the longest time it was like, oh, want to do something into pottery? Well, it's going to be a SaaS company and you're going have to know computer science. And now it's a little bit different. Right? I'm like somewhat right here.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 8:I think think actually oh, go ahead go ahead, Jordy.
Speaker 2:No. I was going to take the conversation another way. So finish finish finish
Speaker 8:Oh, was just going say that like, imagine being someone that's incredibly good at like some form of ceramics.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You would create your product and then AI would market it, take photos of it, would you know, design it, buy ads for it, do the back office and do the finance for it. That's actually the future that I think we're gonna end up in. Now ceramics is kind of a weird example, but you know what I mean? Like a car mechanic, like an antique car mechanic, or or something, or a welder. Those are examples of like how I would help those people.
Speaker 8:So I think we'll have many, many more entrepreneurs that are not building unicorns. They're gonna be building, you know, smaller lifestyle businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I completely agree. It feels a lot like what happened when everyone got an iPhone and a YouTube account. There were a lot more creators. There's like this Flurr or Shopify same thing.
Speaker 1:Like you're democratizing these like long tail businesses that like previously it would be like, oh, you wanna like during the .com boom there was like, oh, you wanna you wanna sell t shirts online? Here's a $10,000,000 check so you can buy some servers and rack them and and just have a Yeah. T Geespring spring. Was like sort of a meta platform a little bit. But yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a good example of like a lot of hot a lot of expensive infrastructure for doing something pretty basic. Sorry, Jordy. What's that?
Speaker 2:I I was curious. Do you think you'll write more checks this year than last year or vice versa?
Speaker 8:I think Have
Speaker 2:you gotten to or have you reached a point of frustration around valuations? You're like, you've been through you've been you've been through, you know
Speaker 1:Cycles.
Speaker 2:Cycles enough to to kind of know when things are getting probably overheated.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, we don't feel as though evaluations are out of control at the pre seed and seed stage. The where they are out of control are probably in the later stage. You know, like series a, b's, even really late stage are trading at incredible multiples. I mean, you know, I think that we did this robotics company at, sub 50.
Speaker 8:We've done, you know, this other multi coding agent company at sub 50 as well. Like, we're pretty focused on keeping valuations below 50. And I think that capital constrained companies are the ones that end up being very successful because they sort of figure out how to build better products and become more efficient. It's when you overfund companies like some of these new neo labs that are raising billions of dollars. People like start making bad decisions when they have when they're overfunded.
Speaker 8:And so I think that where we play, which is not funding the next contender to Anthropic or OpenAI, the valuations are pretty favorable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:Thoughts on solo GPs today? It overrated to be a solo GP?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And should there be a trade school for becoming a GP? Should we should we take
Speaker 2:That's how we of venture
Speaker 1:capitalists. Who's doing billions. You know, we keep coming back to the pottery example. If you are a top level ceramicist, which is the actual term, it is incredibly lucrative, incredibly prestigious like it is it is
Speaker 2:I didn't know you had this pottery.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. Ceramicists are real like it is an art form and it is incredibly high skill ceiling.
Speaker 7:Similar to Not as high of
Speaker 2:a skill ceiling as venture capital. Yeah. Not as high as an art form.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. It is an art form. But, yes, thoughts on solo GPs?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I I met one this morning. I've invested in a bunch of them. I I think that the sub $50,000,000 solo GP is a great business. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:If you can raise the money, you can get allocation rounds, you don't have to compete. It's when you get above 50,000,000 that it's really challenging because you're going be ownership constrained.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:You're competing against someone like us. Sure. And, you know, we have we have we we write a larger check. Yep. I think also another thing is that the solar GPs are really effective at feeding companies to the multistages and to, you know, pure play seed funds like us.
Speaker 8:Yep. And so I think it's actually a fantastic place to be. Yeah. But it's just going to be really rare for the solar GPs to break out fund size well beyond that. So you have to be comfortable with being, you know, a a fund of one Yep.
Speaker 8:With no help, and you have to be because your fee structure is not going be able to support much more than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so but I am bullish on it. And especially with these AI tools, you can really diligence companies without needing more people. You can run your back office entirely without needing other people. And so I'm in in general, like, pretty pretty excited about them. They have struggled to raise more recently.
Speaker 8:Right? Like, LPs are not deploying capital at the pace that they were when solar GPs were breaking out in 2021, 2022. Yeah. And so I think that you're gonna see a lot of them probably go join funds and a lot of the really good ones with good returns be able to raise their next fund. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And Do so more you
Speaker 2:of them should be thinking like, okay, I'm gonna do a $30,000,000 fund, a $30,000,000 fund, and then a $30,000,000 fund? Because it feels like a lot tend to be like, okay, I'm gonna do this $25,000,000 fund and then I instantly wanna ramp up as much as possible and then suddenly have a different strategy. Suddenly, you're actually competing head to head. Where it feels like if you do wanna break out and become a brand and a platform over time, if you have like three really high quality funds back to back, but in deploying them on a shorter time horizon, maybe it could be a better route.
Speaker 8:Yes. Faster deployment cycles, smaller fund Mhmm. Because they're they're just sort of liquidity constraints across LPs. But a lot of the fund to funds I've noticed are now focused on sub $75,000,000 funds. And so there is a a market for that.
Speaker 8:Excuse me. And so I I would generally focus on keeping your fund size consistently small at 30,000,000, maybe deploy over a shorter time horizon. And then you can also get LPs to, you know, pre commit to multiple funds, which is something I've seen people do is that, hey, I'm gonna do this every eighteen months. Do you wanna commit, you know, some amount every 18? And that actually ends up being a better story for people than raising one bigger fund.
Speaker 8:And so I generally do think that the faster that the smaller fund on a faster cycle will yield better results, because you also have to put a lot of companies in the portfolio. Like, if you run portfolio modeling, which we do quite often here, at our fund size, it's usually 40 to 50 companies per fund in our Monte Carlo simulation that yields a four to five x fund. In the smaller funds, it's really like 80 to one twenty. And so you have to be writing a lot of checks and get to conviction quickly and be willing to own less, and then you can run SPVs into the into the follow on rounds, which I think has been really successful for a lot of people. But the smaller the fund, the more work in my mind because you have to constantly be looking at deals every week.
Speaker 8:You have to be putting capital out every week into different companies in order to make the, you know, math work out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, tell us about the latest fund at Gradient. What's the structure? How much did you raise? I wanna hit the gong.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We hit we raised 220,000,000. I
Speaker 1:think we already talked about deployment and how and
Speaker 2:It's also possible we already hit the gong for well, just, you know, whenever whenever it got announced. Thanks. Well Great great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate all the insights.
Speaker 2:Let's get let's get your new robotics bet on the show they're That'd
Speaker 1:be amazing. Yeah. Have a great rest of your week. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon. Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.
Speaker 8:Thank you so much. Great to see
Speaker 2:you all. Later. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anything else going on in the timeline? There's a bunch of stuff. Tons of images. Where else where else do we want to go today?
Speaker 2:What other
Speaker 1:Oh, I wanted to get your take on this. Imagine if Codex existed in 2005 And it's this very retro people are doing. Imagine if Codex existed in 2012, and it's the it's the Apple design cues from early Mac OS 10 and then the Windows XP aesthetic. Do you think the Windows XP aesthetic is overdue for a comeback? This is in the middle of the GPT image two feed right there.
Speaker 1:This aesthetic.
Speaker 2:It's gotta come back.
Speaker 1:This is a Mountain Dew.
Speaker 2:All It could fix you.
Speaker 1:This would fix me. No. I I you know, I have somewhat fond memories
Speaker 2:of XP.
Speaker 1:John. This is XP.
Speaker 2:Imagine playing Halo while you just look over and this is just running there.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:You're just drinking a Mountain Dew.
Speaker 1:For some reason, I don't know. The the a lot of the Windows features that we're launching during this time were a little bit rough. This was when Mac was starting to take off. And these releases, Windows Vista, Windows post XP, post what was it? I don't really I don't even remember the other versions, but oh, Windows eight, I think, was one of them.
Speaker 1:They were starting to be less loved. They were starting to be a little bit more, like, is it worth the upgrade? Is it a good is it a good vibe? I mean, it's not nostalgic for me yet, I guess, is what I'm saying. But there are there are a couple other important warnings in here.
Speaker 1:One of them let me find it. I know I know you had thought about potentially putting on a bear costume and trying to defraud your car insurer. And if you in the audience were thinking about dressing up like a bear and attacking your car in order to collect a insurance payout that's up to a $141,000, think again. Think again because humans, this is in the New York Times, humans who used a bear suit to defraud car insurers are sentenced to jail. You be thinking, I'll just throw on this bear suit and I'll attack my car and then I'll call my insurer.
Speaker 2:Collect the check.
Speaker 1:And I'll collect a check and it'll be easy easy money. Easy money. Get rich quick scheme.
Speaker 2:No. No. Three Southern California residents were sentenced to jail after masterminding a scheme in which they staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars then collecting more than 141,000 in insurance payouts. To carry out the attacks, the residents had a person in a bear suit climb into the cars and use claw like kitchen essentials to leave scratch marks. The Los Angeles residents then filed claims to defraud three different insurance companies.
Speaker 2:So I don't understand why they had to be in a bear suit. Like were they filming? Were they filming Yes.
Speaker 5:There is security footage. It's Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna pull up the It's security absolutely Yeah. I'm
Speaker 5:a Rolls Royce ghost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A 2010 Rolls Royce ghost. I know someone who has one of those. I don't think he's responsible for this, but they are dressing up like a bear to get into the car and rip everything and destroy it so that you can file an insurance claim.
Speaker 2:Hey. I'm just a bear. I'm gonna just get in this car.
Speaker 1:The schemes are really out of control these days. That is a wild, wild one. The California Department of Insurance began its investigation called Operation Bear Claw after an insurance company flagged a suspicious claim about a, about a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls Royce ghost in Lake Arrowhead, California where there are in fact bears. So it's not that unreasonable. The defendants claimed that a that the bear had damaged the interior of their Rolls Royce with photos they submitted to the insurance company showing scratch seats and doors.
Speaker 1:Video footage submitted with the claim and released by the department shows what appears to be a bear crawling around in the backseat of the Rolls Royce and swatting at the dashboard. Investigators later discovered fraudulent claims submitted to two other insurance companies that claimed a bear had damaged the same interior I
Speaker 2:think they're just
Speaker 1:two Mercedes Benzes.
Speaker 2:Just scratching everything.
Speaker 1:That is like the most perfect scratch line. Like it's so suspicious. Like it's so clearly like I feel like a bear's claws would be way more organic and like
Speaker 2:doing more damage. That looks like the weakest Yeah. Bear ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because it's not a bear, it's a human. After its investigation, the department concluded that the culprit was not in fact a particularly nimble bear. The defendants were arrested
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:In November 2020.
Speaker 2:So I would I would my my first thought is not super believable that the bear walks up to the Rolls Royce Ghost, opens the door Yeah. Just goes around. But a few weekends ago
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was hanging out at a former guest of the show's house. He has goats.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Friend drives up in his car, parks Mhmm. And leaves the door open. A few minutes later, what's in the car?
Speaker 7:A
Speaker 2:bear. A goat. A A goat. Goat in the got into the car and was just like No way. And this was a this was a Land Rover Defender.
Speaker 2:Okay. It was like quite a jump Goat jumps up and it's just hanging around like actually just
Speaker 1:Was there damage to the Land Rover Defender?
Speaker 2:I don't think that. If if there was, he didn't bring it up. But there were maybe some hoof marks. Hoof marks? Some hoof scratches.
Speaker 1:And and this is all complicated
Speaker 2:It just seems like such a such a wild There's
Speaker 1:a real bear going in a car.
Speaker 5:From Tyler.
Speaker 1:Okay. They really can open the door.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I feel like they had to have seen this video and thought, finally.
Speaker 1:I thought I I feel like most cars will automatically lock the doors. You know, this wouldn't happen with those everyone loves to hate on flat door handles that all the electric cars have, but Bayer's gonna struggle to open a Tesla door for sure. This is is is the Bayer still in there, or is he he's wow. There's there's there's a history of of bear visitation
Speaker 2:What do they know?
Speaker 1:Pasadena
Speaker 2:What do they know? Where
Speaker 1:there was a woman who was on the local news and said that a bear came and and swam in her pool. And she seemed, like, oddly happy about it or, like, excited. Like, she sort of liked having the bear come and visit. And it felt like she wasn't exactly, like, building the strongest fence and maybe was sort of excited about the idea of a bear coming for a dip in the swimming pool. But people do odd things with animals.
Speaker 1:People dress up as bears. Scientists also apparently have been giving salmon cocaine. I have no idea why. But the New York Times has a post the these salmon got high on cocaine. That wasn't the craziest part.
Speaker 1:Scientists in Sweden made an unexpected discovery. I think Tyler read this piece and can spoil the ending because
Speaker 2:What are they doing over there Tyler?
Speaker 5:I I think they tested like what happens when you give the fish cocaine.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And I think the answer was that they swim much faster and they can swim for longer.
Speaker 1:Okay. So And that was unexpected? That feels like
Speaker 2:Imagine being the scientists that like didn't get a grant for their research. Yeah. You know, and they were working on something. I'm
Speaker 1:close to
Speaker 2:they're breaking Alzheimer's. Reading this article and they're like, wait, like I was gonna do Alzheimer's research and then these scientists just wanted to give hard drugs to fish. Nearly twice
Speaker 5:as I
Speaker 1:guess that's somewhat interesting but this does feel like something that could be one shot
Speaker 2:There's just no way you could've
Speaker 1:just You had to prove it.
Speaker 2:You had to prove it.
Speaker 1:Had to I mean, I guess it's relevant in the in the field of environmental toxicology as much as we're joking around.
Speaker 5:This is a
Speaker 1:good quote.
Speaker 5:While it's unclear if swimming faster and further while under the influences harm these fish, experts say it's probably not great.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I mean, I I I guess if you're an environmental toxicologist, it is useful to have various data points on what happens with contaminants in the environment to the fish populations in specifically. And so I I am willing to to believe that there is good that will come out of this other than just a viral a viral post. He wasn't trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life. He wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal drug, and there might in fact be pollution if, you know, if importation goes poorly and and narcotics are delivered to the water supply, that would certainly not be good. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of waterways polluted with the drug cocaine, prompting scientists to wonder how fish might be handling their highs.
Speaker 1:As it turns out, fish indeed get wired. In a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology, doctor Brandon, his colleagues showed that coked up salmon this is in the New York Times. Coked up salmon swim. Isn't there isn't there some account that just says like in like like first time it's ever been printed in the New York Times and they just screenshot, like, words and phrases that feel funny in that particular when they're shown in the gray lady in print. It makes them swim faster, travel farther than their sober counterparts.
Speaker 1:The study prompts additional questions about the effects that human drug habits may be having on salmon and other freshwater fish. Well, we certainly want clean waterways.
Speaker 2:Speaking of What else you got? Things under the sea, Red Lobster brings back endless shrimp for a limited time starting April 20. Shrimp. Luke Metro says this is an EA cause area hostile takeover of Red Lobster. Make it vegan.
Speaker 1:Make it vegan.
Speaker 2:Make it vegan.
Speaker 1:No. They gotta they gotta make a play to make it come back, and this seems like something that customers were clamoring for. So I I don't have you ever been to a Red Lobster? Nope. I don't think I've ever been to a Red Lobster.
Speaker 1:I've done Outback Steakhouse.
Speaker 2:There are things in life that I don't think I will ever do. No. And Red Lobster, I believe is one of them. Ben, have you been to Red Lobster?
Speaker 5:I've been there.
Speaker 1:Yeah? You
Speaker 2:They're big in Minnesota. One to 10. Wanna
Speaker 1:One to 10.
Speaker 5:It's fine.
Speaker 2:I I think they're all gone now.
Speaker 1:One to 10. What what are you rating it?
Speaker 2:Like a five. Like a five?
Speaker 5:I think before it was
Speaker 2:no five. No five. No five. Four. Four.
Speaker 2:It's okay.
Speaker 1:Subpar. It's sub five in fact. Anyway, thank you for watching. Anything else, Jordy, you want to run through?
Speaker 2:No. It has been an honor and privilege to
Speaker 1:Well, this is kinda cool. ESPN launching sports only trivia show called ESPN Jeopardy. I like this. I know this is a really, really good idea. I can't believe it took them fifty years to come up with this concept.
Speaker 1:But apparently, Joe Buck is closing on a deal to host the show. ESPN jeopardy is expected to air on Hulu, Disney plus, and may make a run on linear TV on ABC or ESPN streaming platforms. Very this seems like, you know, so so obvious in hindsight. I think it'll be very very effective. A lot of sports fans love trivia and now you can watch it.
Speaker 2:Bowling flashback. We love you.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow.