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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 Thursday, 09/10/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of financial capital. Capital every time I see the road to Christmas, I laugh. How many days we got, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Hundred and five days.
Speaker 1:Hundred and five days till Christmas. Get ready. Let me also tell you about ramp.com. They're making a musical or Broadway play. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Save both. These used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. We'll get to the story, Budd. Awesome. Awesome stunt.
Speaker 1:It's also it looks like it's a it's a musical about ramp bill pay. Specifically, I like that it's not just about the corporate entity. It's the sub product. It's one SKU. You gotta be making whole Broadway plays about single SKUs for your company.
Speaker 1:No. They got Billy's name. They got a bunch of really talented people working on this. I think it's gonna be really fun. The the the teaser trailer dropped on Eric Lyman's ex account today, but it's gonna be fun to watch that project unfurl.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have Y Combinator Demi Day going on today. We got Gary Tang coming on the show, 11:25. Then we're going back to back with five different startups that are in this YC batch doing everything from humanoid robots to satellites to AI agents and credit cards, fintech. We're going all over the place giving you a tour of what's going on in the startup world, which I personally enjoy because it's a good way to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the in the at the early stage.
Speaker 1:There's so much discussion about what's going on among the big labs and Apple, obviously, in the news yesterday. It can be all encompassing. But the big the big story
Speaker 2:Time to talk
Speaker 3:to the future.
Speaker 1:Talk to the future the next
Speaker 2:really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are gonna look like in a decade. Yeah. Some people don't think we're gonna be here They in a don't. Never black pill. I saw a good post this morning.
Speaker 1:What'd you say?
Speaker 2:Josha, Box. Yeah. If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by 12/31/2030, you pay me 1,000,000 USD. If not, I will pay you 10,000,000 USD.
Speaker 1:That's a good good good
Speaker 2:Take it. Joke. Yeah. There's a lot of people out there that should take the bet, I think.
Speaker 1:Why? There's no I mean, that's a whole joke.
Speaker 4:No. I know.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. I mean, with a lot of these, the the the arguments break down, a lot of things break down. It's also just so difficult to to put a p doom over time because you have because you have to time bound it because, you know, general scientists will say humanity will go extinct eventually. The default number is ten to the one hundred years. That's a Google years from now.
Speaker 1:It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse. Yep. Even in a billion years, we're gonna be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the earth will will have expanded to become encompassing the So you gotta get off earth in the next billion years. We're working on that with SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Elon occasionally delayed. I think he's gonna make it before the next billion years. The AI thing, obviously, much more pressing. All sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on. And a wall to wall press tour from a lot of the safety community.
Speaker 1:Daniel from AI twenty twenty seven was on Joe Rogan. It was an interesting listen. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience. And then Rogan will take him in these very funny directions just being like, yeah, these AI agents are crazy.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about UFOs. It's actually like the meme. Yeah. They're like, oh, yeah. Like like, have you heard about remote viewing?
Speaker 1:And and he breaks down remote viewing for him, and Daniel has to be like, a little more skeptical of that, but I'm a real believer in x risk. And so I think the net effect is gonna be more awareness about the topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up modeling it because people now put x risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp. It's like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. It's like becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete.
Speaker 1:But I don't really know. We'll see. We'll see. What did AI 2027 predict for September 2026? They said this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself.
Speaker 1:We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research intern intern. An intern. Yeah. But that's accelerating and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip.
Speaker 1:The economically disruptive is the is the is the capability. Jobs. Junior software engineering faces major disruption. People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering major disruption.
Speaker 1:We'll see. We'll see if that plays out this month. The job market has been pretty strong. We mapped that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI related job losses but that that that's less than 1% of the 1,700,000 jobs that are lost every every month. But then, of course, there are more than 1,700,000 new jobs and new hires because people change jobs a lot.
Speaker 1:And so that's often what's going on. Markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026 and a 10,000 person anti AI protest and growing defense contracts. Though that
Speaker 2:seems that we haven't we haven't had a protest.
Speaker 1:There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco. A safety It was not
Speaker 2:it was not nearly 10,000 people. It
Speaker 1:was like more like under a 100 but dozens. But yeah, I mean, it seems like the Joe Rogan experience, the the national news tour, if you're gonna get 10,000 people in the streets, like, this is this is a key step in the in the chain.
Speaker 2:Well, Sheryl Crow was over on Instagram highlighting
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's worried.
Speaker 2:AI risk and someone was saying, Sherry O'Terry Mhmm. Is that is that a celebrity
Speaker 4:or something?
Speaker 2:Says take to the streets like they did in Albania, all of us Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So we
Speaker 2:can't be ignored. So there's I guess calls for protests.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there was another there was another risk incident reported by the New York Times today. Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons in a new report. The AI startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work. So some scientists were using an anthropic model to work on like biological research and the anthropic team flagged it as hey, this could be in the the line of a bioweapon.
Speaker 1:We don't know that that's what this person was trying to do but we're going to shut it down because of course a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into nuclear bomb. And same thing, these are a lot of dual use technologies. Anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxen who I think will have much more news. He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper, CNN. And I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point.
Speaker 1:It feels like there's going to be a it is interesting that with the launch of the Post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a one hour, three hour podcast. Like, we didn't get our situational awareness. Like I I want the five hours sit down with somebody.
Speaker 2:Based on the interviews Yeah. It doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content. Okay. Maybe he maybe he does.
Speaker 1:But it's the best a because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and like take someone on that journey. And that can actually be in service of updating people about x risk. You can you you you can you can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are, you know, the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I I Yeah. I thought it was
Speaker 1:I think it's coming. I think it's coming. Refresh your podcast player in a week. You're gonna have the full
Speaker 2:Let's this pull clip.
Speaker 1:Mean, he's gotta go on hard four.
Speaker 4:Pull up this clip.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:And let's watch.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:This is from Fox News last night.
Speaker 5:Industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible.
Speaker 4:Did it do you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?
Speaker 5:Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally in conversations I've had. Be serious that they think that
Speaker 1:are keying on to the background here. They're like, wait, this guy just
Speaker 2:He quit yesterday.
Speaker 1:And he already has a podcast studio. People are like, is that someone else's podcast studio? And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out whose podcast studio he's in. It's Call Her Daddy.
Speaker 2:Boom. Yep. This goes way Way deeper. Than we thought. It's freaking chicklets.
Speaker 2:No. So so I do expect it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At some point as they dig in here based on how much
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sort of it seems like there's very much a significant push Yeah. From the overarching AI safety community Yeah. To make this week all about Yeah.
Speaker 1:He clarified this a little bit on on Anderson Cooper saying that he, like, worked with a bunch of friends. And where's the line between, like, friends and professional, like, you know, we're all a big family here. We're all friends. So they're, like, the answer could be muddled. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm sure we'll find out more soon. Anyway, you think he's gonna launch a NeoLab? Think he's gonna drop a coin? Book? Movie?
Speaker 1:There's gonna be something. You know, the story is not over. Story is not over. There's gonna be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company It's crazy.
Speaker 1:And then his spoon gets better. I'm trying to transition here.
Speaker 2:No. It's somebody just said, Sebastian says he's a D cell with a crazy P doom. That's a quote from Mountainhead.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Remember? Which is now out maybe a year ago. I remember you watched it. Yeah. Which is
Speaker 1:yeah. Yeah. Maybe But that was that was sort of a niche film. It didn't it didn't go as big as I I Yeah.
Speaker 2:I didn't think it was a good film
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But it had some funny moments.
Speaker 1:And it and it was about like an AI apocalypse. Right? They go to like a
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it was around all about You go
Speaker 1:to a bunkie. Yeah. Is there a bunkie?
Speaker 2:There's a bunkie.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Maybe I got a But Mountain Head
Speaker 2:it's all about the the doom scenario was around deep fakes.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Humanity thinking that there was like, you know, conflicts happening which would create actual wars.
Speaker 1:I I I don't know that I'm super like worried about that particular scenario, but you could take me on that journey for twenty minutes in a long winded answer on a Yeah. Podcast and I would be I would be entertained. And so Yeah. I think that I think that there is material there. And I did see genuinely a lot of like sort of AI safety skeptics just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad.
Speaker 1:It's so easy to condense a PDOM down to a single number. But I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario as opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority. I have a lot of insight and 5% or 20%. That obviously, I mean, does go viral, but clearly there were people that had demand for more of a story that they could track and they could and they could falsify individual.
Speaker 1:Keith yesterday was was was struggling with this where it was like, it's hard to falsify someone saying 10 in the next ten years. But it's it's easier to falsify about like, well, the the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time and this is what's gonna happen and this is how they get Also
Speaker 2:the the job loss stuff.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.
Speaker 1:Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Thank you. We have some of our team up in San Francisco for YC demo day. We're gonna be joined by Garry Tan in ten minutes.
Speaker 1:We'll do a quick round up of the rest of the news. Should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about Bending Spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Let's start with Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons acquires Miro Mhmm. For 1,790,000,000. Yes. Paul Bonnet over a GP over 20 BC Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Says, but who gets the money? My usual breakdown.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So this is 89% below the last round and at less than less than three times
Speaker 1:Woah. Miro was valued at $17,500,000,000? Yeah. That's really high. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:So anyways, you know, we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff. A lot, you know, investors are getting
Speaker 1:Yes. But but I am interested in the bending spoon strategy because Airtable, Miro Miro felt like it felt like modern collaborative slides and and and like mood boards. And then Airtable felt like the modern, you know, Excel sheet. And it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle. But I don't know if that's actually how Benny Spoon thinks about this.
Speaker 1:It feels like in the past they've been very interested in just it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a roll up where if you have Airtable, you get Miro for free or vice versa and there's cross selling options. Because if you like these more modern tools like an like a Miro, like an Airtable, I've seen both of these deployed in the same startup. And the and the startup, there's always this tension between, hey, we're paying $20 a seat for this, $20 a seat for that, or we could just do $15 Yeah. For Google and we get all of them.
Speaker 1:So you actually wind up with the portfolio and I I don't know, maybe the sum is greater than its parts. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Potentially. Mhmm. But but yeah, it was very it's just insane to me that this was a $17,000,000,000 company just just a little bit ago. And ultimately, this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these like later stage or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because they're clearly there's certain teams that are fantastic. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Great categories, great Mhmm. You know, on the path to being great businesses Mhmm. And yet, they feel so many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at a 100 or Mhmm. Trillion or or whatever the number is. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are around this valuation now that Mhmm. That three years from now will sell at a 90% discount.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'd be interested to see if, like, have the metrics at Miro changed in the age of AI? Because you could imagine that people, if they need a collaborative, you know, mood board or slide deck, They can vibe code their own tool, but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it even if you can clone it. So SaaS apocalypse fully avert fully averted by the sales forces of the world, and the revenue decline never showed up in the SaaS companies. And so the SaaS apocalypse was was canceled.
Speaker 1:But was there a micro SaaS apocalypse that did show up at this level and that's why we're seeing these deals? I don't know. We the it's not pub public.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Senra's new episode with Luca Ferrari? Because David Senra has perfect timing. I have an episode with Luca Ferrari coming out this Sunday. Is that okay? He's just like, thank you.
Speaker 2:You for lining up this deal Promo. With you coming on my podcast. Promo. No. Jason says three x paying three x ARR at 600,000,000 of ARR, over 750 customers paying over a $100,000 a year.
Speaker 2:Cash flow positive, man. And but Jamie Quint says multiple years of 5% ARR growth will do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you're not if you're not accelerate. I mean, the the entire multiple is based on growth. So Yeah. There's not gonna be a, you know, a significant acceleration
Speaker 2:You gotta be to the point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true.
Speaker 2:So Another acquisition news. Oh, yeah. Tailwind. Tailwind got acquired by Shopify. That's very cool.
Speaker 2:Remember you remember, I think Tailwind Yeah. Was accelerating AI software development but wasn't directly a beneficiary.
Speaker 1:And didn't they get like sort of like, you know
Speaker 2:A bunch of people in the industry I think Like
Speaker 1:Google, right? Wasn't it Logan? I think I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like such a cool community moment. And interesting that they're they now like found a proper landing spot Yeah. Which is cool. Yeah. Very optimistic scenario.
Speaker 2:We we had a little bit of iPhone Duo coverage yesterday. Yeah. We didn't see the crease.
Speaker 1:We had a key question in the chat from Salmon Analysis. They asked, what do you guys think about the crease? I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders. Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. True.
Speaker 1:My accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease do matter at all. Yeah. Especially if this is a mode where you're using two apps, you don't care about the middle at all. I have seen guys on football days off four TVs next to each other with full bezels.
Speaker 1:Like you can see the line going down the center of the and they just don't care. So like this is not a big deal. Now, the interesting thing is like will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a on a film. But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by nine and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides.
Speaker 1:Not a great experience. Some of the demos of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like four three. So maybe you go back and you get some four three content from like the seventies and eighties and that displays really well because you don't need to do the the pan and scan thing anymore. But and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying.
Speaker 1:It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix. Like, what percent, like, will this be as popular as the iPhone Pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle?
Speaker 1:Will it be 1% or 30%? It's the the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out, it's their most foldable phone ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This was a this was a comment from
Speaker 1:Thank you to the listener. Prolific
Speaker 2:Spotify From the Spotify? Comedian Dave. He commented yesterday it's their most foldable iPhone yet.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:And it really is. This was we should've we should've this should've come to us on the show yesterday but thank you Dave for for throwing that in the comments.
Speaker 1:So it has yeah. It has something fresh. If if you're bored of the same phone every year, this is a way to inject some variation.
Speaker 2:So so really it's like when they introduce the iPhone Duo two Mhmm. Which will
Speaker 1:Quattro?
Speaker 2:I think they're gonna have to to to to multiply them and and get the iPhone Quattro. Yeah. Then they'll say, it's our most foldable iPhone yet. It has four
Speaker 1:fifths Until it's just a full accordion like a fan that just fans out. It screens
Speaker 2:Yeah. The fan, the iPhone fan Yeah. It's just like this, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 20 different folds. What was funny is I'm gonna put you on blacks here a little bit as you come in and you're like, yeah. Like this just makes me want an iPhone 18 pro. And you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone yet.
Speaker 1:They it's just a great phone. They they made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, this is your joke. You fell for your own joke. And it but but it is sort of like this it could be for some people like an anti Halo phone.
Speaker 1:For some people, it's gonna be the Halo where they're like, I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing. I got that. For other people, they're gonna be like, oh, thank God I don't have to deal with the with the foldable thing.
Speaker 1:Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 plus, you know, all these crazy things. Yeah. You know, catalog variety is is valuable, you
Speaker 2:know. Blake Scholl Yeah. Jumped in and said when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why why why exactly you you need a bigger screen.
Speaker 2:It's like, hey, you know, we know some of you guys are spending, you know, hours and hours and hours a day.
Speaker 1:This is such a okay. Continue. Just finish your argument so I can rebut.
Speaker 4:No. Why don't you jump in, John?
Speaker 1:I just think that there is there's cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain rotty when you're on a bigger screen.
Speaker 2:Like games on your phone. Like, which you you would from time to time from time
Speaker 1:to I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate, I'm going Lawrence of Arabia. I'm going Citizen Kane. Yeah. I'm I'm No.
Speaker 2:And and and I I agree that that is the use case. Yeah. But I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff. Yeah. It's bad for kids.
Speaker 2:It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out is like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, mindless entertainment from our devices. And so we get we get we're giving you a bigger screen.
Speaker 1:I I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like, you can answer your emails. You can connect with your friends. You can text them.
Speaker 1:You can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah. There's some game that's brain rotty, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo.
Speaker 1:Like, these are these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So being able to do more of that. Plus, it's just like you don't know when you're it's very hard to plan ahead for like, oh, I'm gonna get caught with an extra hour waiting at the DMV or I'm gonna wait on a plane or I'm gonna have some downtime and I'm gonna wanna actually like enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, oh, I should've break an iPad because I'm gonna be stuck waiting this line for twenty minutes.
Speaker 1:So I wanna watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the Duo in your pocket, you're good to go.
Speaker 4:I'm not
Speaker 1:Get get this
Speaker 2:guy a job at the Apple store.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. We have Gary Tan in the waiting room. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 1:Let's even keep him waiting. I wanna know, Gary, how you doing? And are you going with the Duo or the Pro Max Plus 18? Do you want a folding phone?
Speaker 6:I'm down for the folding phone. Okay. That sounds great. I got the Samsung tri fold, it's pretty safe. You do.
Speaker 1:Woah. So you're living
Speaker 2:I'm holding out for the iPhone Quattro.
Speaker 1:You want the four
Speaker 2:screen. I want it to fold out like an accordion.
Speaker 6:I buy that as well. I would also buy that.
Speaker 1:Also buy that. Okay. Well, how how are things going?
Speaker 2:Wait. Please. Like Yeah. It's top of mind for everyone. Yeah.
Speaker 2:YC demo day is also top
Speaker 1:of mind.
Speaker 2:Yes. But are there any new ways that you use the tri screen phone? Oh, Outside of just more entertainment, I'm struggling to
Speaker 1:see When when does it go full full trifold for you?
Speaker 6:You know, like just watching watching TBPN mainly.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. Okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I wanna see your beautiful faces, you know, in in just full resolution, you know.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Got it. Awesome. Well, great to have you here today on another absolute
Speaker 1:kick us off with the stats. Like, where is y c? How big is this batch? What differentiates this batch? And then we'll go into the broader technology landscape, the startup ecosystem, all that.
Speaker 6:That sounds great. Yeah. I mean, it's 200 companies presenting today. About a quarter of them are hard tech. That's up 40 x since our low bar, maybe like three or five years ago.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:I mean, hard tech is in, it's big, and it's here because of AI. Mhmm. I mean, intelligence is on tap now. Right? So what that means is instead of just doing bits, like it's time to do atoms, guys.
Speaker 6:It's time to actually like create abundance for one another and then the kind of stuff that people are doing, completely insane. I mean, it's it's, you know, some pretty pure research type stuff. We got a company called Frontier. They're they made biochips that use basically neuronal cells.
Speaker 1:I think we had them on the show already. Yeah. Yeah. Think he went viral earlier and we got them on the show.
Speaker 2:That was yeah.
Speaker 1:Brain in of that. Yeah. We were doing Brain in of Week. We had like three companies that were doing bio stuff. Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's a crazy time. The hardware question, is it Are we seeing a boom in hardware startups because there are more cool things to do with AI. I'm thinking of I have a sticker box. You push the kid pushes a button, they say a prompt and then it prints a little cartoon sticker. It's very cool.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't exist before generative AI. But then there's the other side, which is like hardware has always been hard. You have to have these long cycles. You have to deal with manufacturers. And I feel like AI can speed that up by going and getting you quotes from a bunch of different factories, making sure your supply chain is in order, doing inventory management, all these different things.
Speaker 1:Is it both? Which one are you seeing be the most accelerator?
Speaker 6:Oh, I mean, look at what's happening with g p six, Navier Stokes equation. Oh, yeah. Like, that's insane.
Speaker 1:Right? So so if you're to do board layout, it's Yeah. You know, it's you're going to be able to do it much faster.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And you know, what what was the alternative to that? Like Mhmm. If you are a team of like one or two people in a garage, the chance of you actually springing the person who really understands some hard tech thing that you really need. I mean, it's so close to zero.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. You know, or you need to have raised a $100,000,000 to convince that person to quit. Now, you might not need that person on day one. Mhmm. And you could just go to GPT6 Astra.
Speaker 6:Yep. You say, hey, look, this is what I'm trying to figure out and you're iterating with it. You actually have a demo that's 10 times better than what you could have done without hiring that person out of that lab or, you know, that university. Like, you don't need to convince them. You just actually get it farther along.
Speaker 6:You can show it to an investor. You can get money. You can get there on 5,000,000 instead of $50,000,000. It's sort of like, you know, multiple stacking things that are happening. Like, you have intelligence on tap, then any given founder who can identify a thing that people need in the world, suddenly you can say, you know what?
Speaker 6:This is the path. This is like, this is always what we've done at YC
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Is, you know, we're giving you $500,000. What can you actually get done? You know, these days, it's $500,000 plus more than a million dollars in cloud credits. Right? Wow.
Speaker 6:So what's a million dollars in cloud credits? If not like maybe the equivalent of $10,000,000 worth of r and d for, you know, whatever.
Speaker 1:Remember back in you know? I remember back in 2012, was a 170, a 150, and then a 150 in cloud credits. And it was hard to spend those credits. Like, you you had to actually get things to scale because it was it was only if you had the demand side solved then your then your server hosting could be deferred a little bit. But from in actually going zero to one, that that that 150 on AWS was sort of just like, I wish I could use it.
Speaker 1:And people were joking about like, maybe we should mine Bitcoin with it. But you couldn't actually use it in the R and D phase. And now you actually can pull those credits into the R and D phase in the form of tokens, which is a very different dynamic. So I imagine that the the credit usage rate has gone up a lot.
Speaker 6:Yeah. People need to be token maxing. I mean, what's funny I mean Yeah. You know, OpenAI will come and just give any YC company $2,000,000 worth of tokens. Wow.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 6:I mean, a part of the that's a part of the deal now. Right? Wow. Like, it's optional. You don't have to take it.
Speaker 6:But Yeah. Tell people, look, like, if you're doing something hard
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You should probably take the $2,000,000 because, you know, if you can't figure out how to turn $2,000,000 worth of tokens into a $100,000,000 worth of enterprise value
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:What are we doing here? Yeah. What are we doing here?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Are you what are you seeing on the hard tech side in terms of distribution and go to market? One of YC's strengths has always been selling into the YC network. You start a payroll company.
Speaker 1:You can get the other batch mates to test it out. You get your early adopters there. And I noticed that this was happening a little bit in the Gundo where you would see one guy is running a machine shop, one guy is running a cloud seating, one guy is running a drone company and they'll run across the street and say I need a new drill or hammer or whatever they need. And but I'm wondering in hardware sense, are there YC companies that are actually able to get products in the hardware space that bring value to other startups? Or is it more of like camaraderie around we're in the hardware world, we'll we'll communicate and share notes, but we're not actually selling to each other on day one?
Speaker 6:I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other. That's happening like the space ecosystems coming together. Like Star Cloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech. Sure. That's that's been happening.
Speaker 6:I mean, we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes, like we're putting together a CRADA so that we can actually help all YC defense companies get in theater with real Department of War departments
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Right off the bat. There's just a lot that we can do. Next week, we actually have a a DC defense tech conference Cool. In DC. We're bringing in a bunch of our top defense companies, and they're meeting the policymakers directly.
Speaker 6:They're meeting the people from the Pentagon directly Mhmm. In their own backwoods. And that's actually stuff that YC can do now that, you know, it it just increases the chance and likelihood of people actually succeeding. Mean, I defense tech is the wildest thing that continues to happen in this administration is that I think, you know, huge credit to the people in the current administration because they're realizing like, hey, we got a drone war happening. We have an AI war, and America needs to be it can't just pay, you know, cost plus to these defense, you know, the the sort of like industrial complex that exists today.
Speaker 6:Like, we actually need and and they're willing to give 7 figure contracts to teams of, like, two or four people who, like, suddenly become teams of 20 or 30 people plus, like, hundreds of agents.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's been remarkable how how many opportunities that have been there even in the post Palantir and Andoril world. There was a there was a time when I think people thought that there might be more of a winner take all dynamic. It might be more like social, but there's been so many teams that have had impacts in various ways.
Speaker 2:It's been exciting. So 25% of the batch is hardware Mhmm. Up 40 x. Mhmm. About the the other 75%?
Speaker 2:What are the trends that you're seeing on on the software side, dev tools? I think a lot of like, part of why some people are driven into hardware is they're looking at how easy it is to make software now and how fast it is and thinking, I well, I don't wanna go if if I can build this in two days, someone else can build it
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In two days, so maybe I want a hardware component. But at the same time, we're still seeing a bunch of early stage software companies rip. What trends are you seeing across the board with, you know, agents and and infrastructure and and all those things?
Speaker 6:Yeah. This is I mean, honestly, this is the golden age of software as well. And it's interesting because I mean, my prediction would be you look at the public companies of today. Any company that's got thousands of engineers who are doing it the old way, like, they're gonna be replaced by a YC startup or a company like that that has maybe 20 people working there. And that those 20 people each will do the work of, a 100 engineers themselves.
Speaker 6:Right? So you got, like, a 2,000 person workforce, and you're just like blowing them out of the water. And so that's gonna be the biggest shift. Like, you're gonna have AI native startup companies that are just brand new, that have started in the last two or three years. They don't have any of the bad habits that were developed over the, you know, sort of ZERP era, And they're just gonna come in and out execute every single SaaS company that doesn't do it that way.
Speaker 6:And it's it's gonna be pretty epic. It's gonna be a turnover of epic proportions in the world of software. And, you know, that's sort of the rest of the story.
Speaker 1:Are you seeing pitches for stars. Like Neo Clouds? People that want YC? Yeah?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, wafer is killing it. Okay. Shape form is killing it. I mean, you know, the amount of inference in the world feels like it's gonna go up like 10,000 to 100,000 Like Yeah.
Speaker 6:People are just not really prepared for you know, it's actually kind of the funniest thing. Like, you can work in SaaS where, you know, things are going to grow 10 x.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And then or if you look at inference, you look at data centers, you look at semiconductors, you look at GPU, and even CPU demand, it's gonna go up like a thousand x. Right? So that's even it's even bigger an opportunity. And I I think people are just not it's not priced in. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I you know, personally, I think it's just not priced in at all. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Where does are are you still using the term little tech? I always like that.
Speaker 6:Oh, definitely.
Speaker 1:I mean yeah. Yeah. Where where where does little tech stand on the the AI slowdown debate regulatory capture risk? When I look at some of the companies that we're going have on the show, I feel like they might not be affected positively or negatively by the discussions in Washington. But how are you seeing it broadly?
Speaker 1:Because typically, regulatory capture can you know, harden the position of incumbents, and that's bad for little tech, but how have you been dealing with the current conversation?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, you know, I think we should be talking less about this Jacob Coxen guy. We need to be talking a lot more about what is actually happening with Hugging Face. Sure. Like, are agents swarms gonna come and take over infrastructure on mass?
Speaker 6:And then what are we actually doing about that? Like, I don't wanna hear about some guy who worked at Anthropic for two months. And I don't really care that there's a, you know, there's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to sort of do a knee jerk response. Like, the thing is like, we shouldn't be that's a smoke screen. You shouldn't be paying attention to that.
Speaker 6:We need be paying attention to what is the actual thing that we can do to prevent, you know, agent swarms taking over entire data centers. Yep. Right? Like, what's our what's our what's our shutdown strategy? Right?
Speaker 6:Like, how do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? Like, you know, what can what software can we build and what cyber security defenses can we build today? And like, you know, that that's the level of discourse that I think we need, and we just don't have that. Right?
Speaker 6:People are just saying, you know
Speaker 2:Well, discourse is discourse is one thing. Are there or is there a meaningful number of YC companies now that are actually focused on that set of problems? Because one way to think about AI safety is to go on podcasts and talk about it and write essays and write blog posts. And another way is to actually build cybersecurity products. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Specifically with like, you know, agent swarms in mind and, you know, thinking of Ilia's post about Neo Cloud security. It's like, well, I hope there's five companies that saw that post and we're like, you know, I'm sure that Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike and all these companies are are thinking about that opportunity as well. Yeah. But it just feels like any anywhere there's like fear, there's also an opportunity for Solutions. Commercial solutions
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To the problem that won't Yep. Fix everything.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We I mean we got that too. Right? We got a tenant company like is able to do hundred milliseconds in in request loop prevent prompt injection. Sure.
Speaker 6:Right? So you got an agent swarm. It wants to take on you know, take over your AI systems and, like, it's in production now. Like, it basically prevents prompt injection, and it can do it at a level that, like, you know, it it sort of doesn't matter how much smarter the underlying AI becomes and how much more powerful it is at cybersecurity. Like, if you have a kill switch
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:On entire request because, hey, that's a prompt injection. Like, that's sort of the stuff that we need today. So I don't really care about science fiction, man. I saw Terminator two also. Like, that's you know, we're not here to talk about that.
Speaker 6:Like, we need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with agent swarms, how do we actually prevent that. And I think that, you know, little tech has a role in actually solve actually providing the software, the services, the hardware, the things that actually solve these things. And then when it comes to regulation, it's like, let's actually pass regulation that prevents the thing we actually care about instead of whatever a socialist says on the in the New York Times. I don't care about that.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What what are you telling YC startups not to do right now? I'm thinking there's opportunities in, like, selling data right now. If you just wanted to generate as much revenue as possible before demo day, maybe brokering data could be a way to do that. But maybe it's not the best way to build, you know, a super enduring business. But maybe that's one example.
Speaker 2:But what what kind things are
Speaker 6:you Like, Mercur are very very you know, they're they're body shops at some level, and then we're seeing this new wave of data companies like Afterquery or DataCurve that basically beat them head to head. And they don't do it by being body shops. Like, don't need thousands and thousands of people. You need, you know, dozens of people. I mean, it's sort of the same deal.
Speaker 6:Like, you look at, you know, a workday, it's full of thousands of engineers who are not, you know, using agentic systems. And like, I would argue that like a lot of those, you know, first wave data companies don't. Like, they're basically kind of like, you know, glorified labor marketplaces. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But the new wave of data like, have more than 10 companies making more than $10,000,000 a year in data, and then the top two are making, you know, hundreds of millions, on on the way to billions. And so, you know, there's a new wave, and those new wave companies do not have a thousand employees and won't ever have thousands of employees. They will have 20 or 50. Right? And how are they doing it?
Speaker 6:They're actually doing it in a proper agentic way. And so, you know, that that's like, you know, same thing in software, same thing in hardware, same thing in data. Like, there's a new way to build these things and, you know, either you're building it that way or you're doing it the old way. Like, you know, people can still raise money. They they can still go to Sand Hill and get that crazy growth round and people are just, you know, going to do it the old way still.
Speaker 6:But the new the the new way is going to come and it's going to wipe out the old way.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Gaming. A lot of people have seen Astra demos from the last week. You know, people just building GTA six because they're impatient. They get they get something that is who knows how many, you know, hours of play it'll actually get, but it but it's an open world game that, you know, has multiplayer components, things like that.
Speaker 2:Do you think that we'll see a gaming boom in the next batch of just small teams that are like, hey, I can kinda build anything that I want and I can build the kind of thing that would have taken hundreds of people and and years historically and I can build it in, you know, three months.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I just funded a company called Summer Engine, for instance. It's growing really, really fast. It's just like roadblocks, actually. But and, you know, I think that that's the way to think about it.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, CodeGen is opening up all this stuff, and then actually, like, shouldn't people you know, a lot of the value is actually gonna be in your guild, your people network, like getting your friends to come on and play, knowing when they're playing, like, you know, designing all of that is actually the ultimate value. And like and then I think it's the same thing all over again. Like, if you look at, a company like Roblox, like, I don't think that they're building around, like, this idea that you could vibe code anything. Like, this the future's already here.
Speaker 6:People just act like it's not. Right? And that you know, anytime that happens, there's like infinity, just opportunity. And, you know, the startups are finding it, they're going to go for it. And, you know, that that's the future.
Speaker 6:I'm I'm psyched for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Would almost disagree. I feel like Roblox is going to come out with an amazing tool We
Speaker 1:have tools.
Speaker 2:For yeah. No. Nobody but even seeing like Astra being like, hey. We can make this even even better. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And but there's still plenty of opportunities for early stage companies to just adopt these tools even more aggressively and come up with with
Speaker 1:Yeah. Entire is the one that's, like, on the edge of the network effect. Like we we we can debate it more later. Thanks so much for hopping on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, Garry.
Speaker 1:On another fantastic
Speaker 2:Excited to to meet Excited to handful of these founders and, yeah, keep it up.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Always great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era.
Speaker 1:Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. What do you think of the iPhone Duo animation? Marques Brownlee shared it on X. Do you love this? What do you think?
Speaker 1:So when you open it, it fades as if it's looking through the glass. And when it closes, it shows you what it's about to show you. It could just show you the actual outside, but instead, it it it animates so that it looks like it you're looking through glass and it appears three-dimensional. What do you think?
Speaker 2:It's so incredible. It it I mean, it really pushed, you know, pushed personal computing into an entirely new dimension. I think No. It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:I think I
Speaker 2:It's beautiful. Well done well done to the team.
Speaker 1:And I think I think this is what makes Apple so special is that the folding phones exist. Somehow no one thought of this. How did they create an environment, maintain an environment where you can still go and experiment and think of a little touch like that that makes something that's been around for a while, Garry has one a folding phone, still make it special. And now, you know, you've got everyone talking about this. So good stuff.
Speaker 1:Anyway, our next guest is in the wave Room. Let's bring in Om from Olam, Labs, the co founder and CEO. How are you doing, Om?
Speaker 7:Hey. You got my name right.
Speaker 3:Congrats on
Speaker 2:the pronunciation.
Speaker 7:How did you Hey. I used to How did you pronounce it?
Speaker 1:To No way.
Speaker 7:People say Om. They see they see Om a lot. Okay. I used to watch your YouTube videos. It's like all like the the company documentaries and down here stuff a couple years ago.
Speaker 7:It's great.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah. Well, thanks for hopping on the show. What do
Speaker 2:you was eight years old that
Speaker 1:time, John. Stop making me feel old. Introduce yourself at the company and then we'll we'll chat about it.
Speaker 7:Of course. Yeah. So we do all environments and training data. We work with labs to evaluate like behavioral things and models. Okay.
Speaker 7:Like what models lie more, who's more deceptive, who collaborates better, all those kinds of things. Yeah. So typical oral environments are a lot more about, like, you know, how well can you complete this coding task? How well can you do this solve this math problem? That kind of thing.
Speaker 7:We're testing a lot more of, like, the real like, we're we're aiming to create, real world environments, you know, companies talking and Slack to each other, you have a PM, you have a CEO, you're playing diplomacy, negotiating, and pretty much, like, creating all of those things that are more, like, qualitative and and more difficult to verify, but also a lot more valuable if we can start to measure it
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what does the what what's what's the first step in building the company? Like, when you started this, was it like, I'm gonna go build the environment and then I'm gonna go to labs and say, hey. I have this thing. Do you wanna buy it?
Speaker 1:Or are you just going to them first and saying, like, look, I'll build anything. I'm I'm gonna build like, what is the flow? Because the demand is so clear and high. I imagine that it's it's working very well, but but what direction do things flow right now?
Speaker 7:It's it's it's a lot more of the former of what you said. So like the the latter, like the latter, like going to a lab and saying I'll build anything you want, that only works if you have like relationships and a lot trust with them or you used to work there. The former, like like when you're selling data, the best mental model is that you are selling a capability to a lab. Like, you're selling them something to get their models better at. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So if you if you have a benchmark or you have a a dataset on, like, here is how you can get better at coding. Here is how can get better at at at at at, I don't know, like, like collaboration, like just anything Mhmm. Then you can sell it to them. That's why all these companies, like, you know, like any data companies even posting like their evals on Twitter and trying to get like to go viral. Because that's like proof to the labs that, hey, I can make great data and like like like package it well.
Speaker 7:Yep. And so that's like that's like why the answer is the former. Sure. Like everyone's trying to show that we can make great data and then use that to to sell to labs.
Speaker 1:So do you have evals? Do have benchmarks? How much time do you spend thinking about benchmarks or building new benchmarks?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I mean, there there there's two things. So so like making great benchmarks and publishing them is great for just, the broader industry. And, like, especially in our case, we're, like, we're measuring a lot a lot of things that relate to, safety and all, like, the OpenAI Hugging Face stuff going on. The things about, like, how agents actually behave in in these, like, multi agent environments.
Speaker 7:That's that's more our domain. So we wanna we are publishing stuff. We have we released evals and how models all compete relative to each other, how how how much they lie against each other Mhmm. How well they collaborate. We we we have a bunch more coming pretty much.
Speaker 7:But, yeah, just like our we've had some tailwinds in recent times on, like, the kinds of things that people are looking for is pretty much exactly what what we bet our entire company on four months ago. Sure. So it it is working out well in that regard.
Speaker 2:What what if any are some historical comps for your business? Like, what was what was what was your business twenty years ago?
Speaker 7:Oh, god. Like, I mean, it it didn't exist twenty years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, I
Speaker 4:no. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I know. I I that that's what I'm asking. I'm trying to I'm trying to understand like
Speaker 1:I have no
Speaker 2:idea. Like, what what was there companies that were helping Amazon in the way that you were helping like the labs for example, where it was like this helping them deliver core product quality increases that were scaling scaling this way. And and part of why I'm curious is because I'm I'm trying to understand what your business looks like in five years. Yeah. Five years, ten years, and and how you think about that.
Speaker 7:I think I think a comp that I would give is, like, all of, like, kind of, like, the Internet infrastructure companies. Like, everyone who is doing fiber and Internet and, like, and and CPU is in RAM. I would say that is, like, the the the closest comparable thing to data companies nowadays. Like, you're building the foundations. Like like, all all the data company really is, like like like, Merkor, all those guys Mhmm.
Speaker 7:They just go out and and buy like, capture stuff from the real world and then give it to a lab, which isn't, you know like, if you're buying CPUs, you're just constructing stuff in the real world and giving it to, like, a a large cloud to then, like, service their customers. So I think that would be the close like, comparable thing that that that I can think of. There there has been a question about the viability of these businesses, but I will say is that I think the viability of these businesses would be the exact same as the viability of, like, the let's say NVIDIA. I think for for for for for AGI for ASI to come, there are only two bottlenecks right now. We have no bottleneck with architecture or or compute or agents or anything.
Speaker 7:It's data and compute. Compute is the biggest bottleneck, but, you know, now we're gonna we're gonna have 10 x more compute coming on online in in the next two years. So then compute even more becomes data. So because that that is like like if you're scaling a lot pilled and if you're pilled in all the ways that these AI labs are, then then data is the, like like, true like, bottleneck. Like like, the the new deep sea model that came out last night Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Like, the the reason that's, a crazy, like, dominating model is because they spent all the time on amazing data. That's it. Like, all they did they do like like, most of the time was on curating amazing data. That's pretty much all they did. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:But yeah.
Speaker 1:Are you compute constrained?
Speaker 7:Yes. Like, I think
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:think How so? Like, what is the nature of it?
Speaker 7:So I think the best data companies are research companies. So one thing that we do is like when we create like post training tasks that we want to sell to a lab
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:We test them ourselves on GPUs by like post training like open source models.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 7:For that to like source GPUs and do that, you know, as we grow and as we scale and if we want to like like even more and more, I'd say at at our stage, like it's very easy to source than our GPUs that we need. I think especially like I see a lot of other companies I know like in this space where you're doing research broadly, even Neolabs, they're all compute constrained. I think that is where the labs have their biggest advantage. Mean, know, they they have the highest margin on every megawatt that they make. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So they will they will continue to, like, gobble up more and more compute faster than anywhere else. So I think that that if I was to name a risk, that would be, like, the main the main risk for like our business and other businesses like it.
Speaker 2:When you Andrew Ross has a comp, LiDAR Flyover Company selling to Google Earth.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's that's a good comp. The the only thing is like Google Earth like it always was sort of, I guess it I guess it is constantly like the intelligence of Google Earth is always scaling. Right? Because you can always get like, you know Higher resolution. Higher resolution.
Speaker 1:I was also thinking about like like this is a weird example, but like movie production studios that sell content to Netflix. Like you want the Netflix library to keep growing, so you constantly have to be making new capabilities, new content for the network. I mean, there's also just like in the Amazon example, it's like the sellers. Like like there's a company that like makes the knives that are sold on Amazon and makes the
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Appliances and stuff. So, yeah, all all a huge ecosystem. Fascinating stuff. Hugging Face, very scary. Are you optimistic?
Speaker 1:Are you a techno optimist? Do you think it's solvable or are you just spinning your wheels before before the single a? Well,
Speaker 7:I am optimistic. Been optimistic my entire life but but like I I will say it is getting scarier and scarier. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. We were clapping for optimism.
Speaker 7:Oh, okay. Okay. The part that is, like, like, very scary is that, like, normal oral environment companies that are selling, like, coding data, even they're now having to do safety grading.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Because, like, they're seeing, like, when you're when you're having Claude do a like, a normal coding task
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:They're trying to, like, reward hack and trying to escape the sandbox into, like, normal environments. So it is getting like like, everyone's becoming whether they want it or not, a safety company. Like, just because it's it is becoming, like, like, critical a issue for everyone. Yeah. And I think that is only going to increase and continue, not like kind of randomly go away and get solved.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, thank you.
Speaker 2:What numbers from your demo day pitch can you share with us? You wanna hit the gong?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:I can't there are some numbers I can't like
Speaker 1:How many employees you got?
Speaker 7:It's only me and
Speaker 4:my co founder.
Speaker 1:Two of There we go. Yeah. Well, congrats.
Speaker 2:But need less to say, you're ripping. That's that's kind of the vibe I'm
Speaker 1:Seems like you're doing well.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We I mean, most of our metrics are public if you go through like our our stuff. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, have a great day. Thank you so much for hopping on.
Speaker 2:It's great to hang. I'll back on soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. We have Karen Serfaty from Agent Card, the founder and CEO, hopping on the show next. First, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 1:Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let's bring in Karen from Agent Card, talking about giving AI agents credit cards. Why not?
Speaker 1:Amazing shirt.
Speaker 2:What is let's start
Speaker 1:with the shirt. Let's the shirt. Start What's on the shirt?
Speaker 8:That is the correct question. So this is Braxtor. It's an AI character that we came up with.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:You know, this this way, sea events are like a like an ocean of black t shirts Mhmm. With very small logos. Yep. And it was very important to distinguish ourselves, so
Speaker 1:yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Smart. Tell us about the the character. It looks like an a real person of sorts.
Speaker 8:Yes. So it's like a banker from the eighties. He does all our marketing. If you've been to our website, you'll see that he's he's there. Okay.
Speaker 8:Promoting agent card.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Awesome. What is the elevator pitch for why not just use a standard card? Why not give your personal agent just your personal card? You can do a chargeback if it messes up maybe, but why do you need a new Actually,
Speaker 8:we think that you should be using a real card.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Agent card is not a new card that you give to your agent. We actually help you use your Chase card or whatever it is that you have so the agent can use it in a way that's safe. Yeah. Because I fully agree with you. I think that when you ask consumers, people actually prefer to use the real cards
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Because you get points, you get disputes
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 8:Like, all the things that you heard about. So that is actually what we do.
Speaker 1:So then at what point do you plug in to a company that wants to enable Agenda Commerce, to an agent platform that wants to provide more secure payment interactions, who are you selling to?
Speaker 8:Exactly. So we work with companies building personal systems.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So I'm sure you've seen online companies like Instinct, Orchid. Yeah. These are the type of companies that are trying to enable authentic payments for consumers. Yeah. And what we do is basically we're the payments platform that they can use so their users can use their guide their cards safely.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And then do you charge a fee that's based on the transaction size, or is there just a SaaS fee associated with using the service?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we charge a monthly fee to companies. Okay. They get access to our main product, which is called the Vault. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Vault allows companies to store customers' cards. Mhmm. And we have a second product called a purchase API, which is basically a single API that these agents can use to buy from any merchant online Mhmm. Which is a very hard problem to solve. Like, you if you want your agent to be able to to buy something, maybe you've tried it, like you go to Codex.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 8:And you say, hey. Buy me a table from Amazon. And what the agent's going to do is open a browser
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And start navigating
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Which is very painful to watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I got I I I got banned from a website for doing this exact thing. It was like you're a bot. You cannot I was like I'm just trying to buy an expensive shirt. Like give me a break here.
Speaker 1:They lost my business for maybe ever, but definitely a few days while I was on the cool down from using an agent. What do you expect ecommerce merchants to do differently? Because when I my experience was having an agentic interface to their ecommerce website was going to accelerate my purchasing. I was going to spend more, more confidently. I was going to become a more regular customer.
Speaker 1:It felt very accretive for them. And yet clearly their current defenses and their their posture was we don't want that business.
Speaker 8:Yeah. In my experience, merchants do want agents to be able to buy. They're just not sure about, like, how to implement that in a way that it's not a risk for them, which makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:We think that the way to enable agentic payments and agentic purchases is to solve all this flow. So the first part is like, how do we give agents a card that they can use? Second part is how we help agents navigate these websites. Yeah. And the third part, is actually the hardest part, is how do we help agents complete a checkout page?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Because like the problem that we see now is that like we've been working on this like Cloudflare has been working for ages now on preventing bots from completing checkout pages. And now we need agents to be able to do it. So that is the that is the problem that we solve. It's not only the card.
Speaker 8:It's the whole thing. Like, how do we help merchants sell to agents?
Speaker 1:How much of that is a technology problem? Because I anytime I see a Captcha, I think, okay. You could throw a lot of compute at this and beat it or you could just meet with the CEO of that company and say, hey, let's let's figure this out. We're gonna do a deal that's mutually beneficial. How much of it is on the phone and on meetings versus technology?
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 8:think that a big part of a company like this is the partnerships. Mhmm. But what I think too is that we cannot wait for the merchants to be ready. Mhmm. There are a lot of companies.
Speaker 8:This generation of companies that's building, like, this next
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Consumer app, they need this right now. And they are educating consumers so they can buy things with agents. So we need to solve this right now. Like, in the meantime, we need to be talking to the merchants, and we need to be talking to the PSPs and to everybody that's involved so they can Yeah. Enable payments for agents.
Speaker 8:But in the meantime, we need to solve it.
Speaker 2:How are you how are you sort of tracking the the growth of of this market? It feels like it feels really primed to be, you know, something that 100 x's over the next year if it's done, which means Yeah. It's a great category to be building in as as a startup. But how are you tracking it today? What are you looking at?
Speaker 2:Is it is it the instincts of the world driving, you know, most, like, actual volume of payments right now? I know that Muse seems very interested in in actually driving a bunch of conversions and and purchases with their agent, but how are you looking at it?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think it's impossible to tell. I think that we have two intuitions. The first one is that we've been using agents to buy things for months now. And we know it's only a matter of time until someone figures out what's the right interface so consumers can do that too.
Speaker 8:I buy things from my terminal. I've been buying flights from my terminal with my agent for months. Oh. But I know that my mother is not gonna do the same. Like, she needs something that's better.
Speaker 8:And then I think that that's where companies like Instinct come in. Right? Mhmm. They are building on top of my message, which is like something a platform that's a lot more familiar to consumers. We have no idea the size of this market.
Speaker 8:Our guess is that this is going to be larger than when ecommerce started. Mhmm. Because agents are faster. They can make more payments. They're more efficient.
Speaker 8:And it's just in my experience, it's just a better experience to buy with agents than to buy from a website.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Congrats on a great day. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Have a one there. Have good one. Soon.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe you start at YC, maybe you make it to the NYSE. Up next, we have Antonio Lee from NORE Robotics.
Speaker 1:Not gonna spoil it too much, but building humanoid robots, and the price will shock you. Shockingly cheap humanoid robots. Too cheap, too good to be true. Let's bring him in and ask him. Antonio, we're going to bring him in in just a second.
Speaker 1:Tennis matches are finishing at 03:33AM. We'll get to that story later. For now, we're staying with humanoid robots because we are joined by Antonio Lee from Nori Robots. Woah.
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:Now, I understand how it's so cheap. I can see the cost reduction. How much does that thing cost? I want one.
Speaker 4:$16.88 under two k.
Speaker 1:$16.88. $16.88. No. Cheaper than an iPhone Duo. Than an iPhone duo.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Hogging turnus.
Speaker 1:It has not one hinge but multiple hinges. How'd you build this thing? What's the idea? What is it actually capable of? Why should people buy one for $1,688?
Speaker 4:Great question. So we built it entirely in San Francisco. We typically put a bunch of motors together. Majority of it is three d printed plastic, and then we have a aluminum base below
Speaker 1:it. Okay.
Speaker 4:It's able to do almost anything. Well, it's obviously it's a humanoid robots. And you should buy it if you want to do development on American Humanoids.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Shotgun
Speaker 2:bench.
Speaker 1:Dev kits.
Speaker 2:Can it shotgun that ramp cold brew Cold brew. On the desk.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, do anything within the API. I imagine you're not doing Boston Dynamics level demos, juggling and dancing yet, but it's an opportunity for someone to come in and solve a particular problem. Do you see this as more consumer focused or industrial? What what do you there any forks in the road that you're designing around?
Speaker 1:Obviously, price is a really key differentiator, but where do you see your design your design decisions today leading to in the future?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we see it being used within the home mainly for now. Right?
Speaker 1:Right now
Speaker 4:it's able to handle it to 80% with 90% of the majority of home tasks. Mhmm. But in the future, we obviously want to be able to deploy into hotels, grocery stores, nursing homes, anywhere that can be of help with the sort the labor shortage that we're seeing right
Speaker 1:now. Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about the importance of just low cost in the take off of humanoids because I think one of the I know so many people that would buy an iPhone priced humanoid just to mess around with it and have some fun. Honestly, I think a lot of venture capitalists will buy it just purely because they want to understand the category and the and the and the progress being made. But a lot of people are when when when you're starting to see a humanoid that's priced more like a motorcycle or a car, it just gets into a different like, people are gonna have such high expectations where they're like, hey, I spent Yeah. You know No.
Speaker 1:I could have gotten a model three. The the the robot dog, you can actually buy that, but it's like 50,000 and I still haven't really seen that many people pick them up for fun or for experimentation because they're too expensive. Yep. Yeah. Please.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So obviously, I think like when it comes down to early adopters, you need to have an initial low cost as a wedge into the market. Right? Right now, humanoids are a little bit stupid. It's because the AI behind it is not very well developed. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So you need to have it more be like a larger point in some ways and be within that price point to be able to appeal to a larger consumer base.
Speaker 1:What's the weight limit for what it can pick up? We got a question from the chat.
Speaker 4:It's around 1.5 kilograms per arm.
Speaker 1:Per arm. Okay. So, yeah, a plate, a cup, a beer, a four loka. Can it can maybe get you
Speaker 2:A monster.
Speaker 1:A beer
Speaker 2:with the Monster energy. What what tasks do you guys use them for around the office and how do you actually control what what are the best ways to control it as a consumer? Are you just giving it, you know, verbal commands Yeah. Asking nicely, of course?
Speaker 4:So some like the easy task, like, had it grab us beers towards the end of the day and also grab us waters. So some of the simpler stuffs right now, the majority of the controls come directly from LLMs so far. So we've seen actually an incredible improvement in the ability of like LLMs to control robots on a lower level. So Chat two v five Astra has been absolutely amazing for us, and it's been able to one shot a lot of tasks really well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How important is the development of agentic coating systems and these harnesses? Because it feels like, you know, a decade ago people would grab like a Raspberry Pi and but they'd have to write all this code. They'd spend days just wiring up like a, you know, some gadget that would turn on their lights, you know, around Christmas or something like that. This feels like even if you're interfacing with the robot at a pretty low level via an API, there's a lot more flexibility on the dev side to accelerate these demos and these experiments.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Of course. I would say like the like, coding agents have been so incredibly important for robotics because it actually allows you to use a generalist robot in a generalized way. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 4:Obviously, if you take like ten hours for it to just code it to grab a beer, then it's not gonna be very useful in the house. Whereas if it can take under like a second for the robot to write a thousand lines of code and deploy to the robot, it kind of a game changer and how useful the robot can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So are you seeing like, I can imagine I get this piece of hardware and I wanna write a a script that has it go to from my living room to the fridge and the kitchen and I can use an agent to write that code. But I could also be feeding the actual data live via the API to the actual model. Are people doing that? Are you are you successful there?
Speaker 1:Or is it too slow at this point? Like, what like like, at what point do you stop actually writing any glue code between the model and the robot?
Speaker 4:So I think in the near future, you still need a lot of that glue code. Yeah. The main point is to make it as easy as possible for the LLM to use the robot. Mhmm. So for example, let's say if you want to move the robot from the kitchen to your bedroom, you can simply call on the onboard slab, which is a two d LIDAR that has a navigation stack.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And that makes it it's just like two lines of code. It just goes from one place to the other very easily. Sure. It's all about simplifying that and abstracting away for the LLM.
Speaker 1:Got it. What is your capability? You've built one. Can you build 10 this year? Can you build a 100?
Speaker 1:I imagine there's gonna be a manufacturing facility. There's a lot of different steps to actually scale up to any meaningful volume. But what does that road look like for you?
Speaker 4:So right now we're making around two to three per day and we're mainly deploying to our earliest sort of research partnerships. We are manufacturing them all entirely in San Francisco or right down ten months from here from Tundra's Point. And our goal is to basically by the end of six months from now to ramp up to around four robots per month manufactured here in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's not bad. So already doing a thousand a thousand a year. Next year, 10,000 at least, something like that.
Speaker 2:What do you so do you how how do you think that like, where where will the intelligence, like, specifically with the long term? Like, I can imagine, like, somebody just has, a Codex or Claude, and Claude just has fully access to the robot. And so you as the manufacturer, Nori, don't even necessarily need to provide the intelligence layer as long as like the the robot has like the right sort of control mechanisms. Is that is that one potential scenario? Because I can also see the scenario where you guys end up building effectively your own end to end agent and you have local models and and cloud models that help people accomplish tasks.
Speaker 4:I think the way that we see it is it comes down to how fast LLMs progress in the next one year or so, and they have been progressing very, very fast for the past year. I think somehow, I'm not sure how they did that at OpenAI. They managed to give Astra the ability to understand three d spaces very well, which has been a game changer for robotics control. This was I thought to be impossible even a year ago. I think for us, it ultimately comes down to I think like we don't quite have control over how fast these big models or these big labs progress.
Speaker 4:So we're gonna be using what's on the market to get the best use cases and the best consumer product to our users.
Speaker 1:Last question from the chat and we'll let you get out of here. Do these robots have lifelike hands? Will the hands seem a little shy below the table? What do we got? What are we working with?
Speaker 1:Is it a claw?
Speaker 4:It's a claw.
Speaker 1:Okay. We
Speaker 4:Looks good. Obviously, the cost is a pretty large consideration for us. We tested out a bit more dexterous hands. Yeah. And from the results that we've seen, you are able to do 90% of what a hand can do with a claw for now just because the control policies are not quite there to fully leverage the dexterous nature of a hand like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. That makes a ton of sense. Trade offs and everything and I think you made the right one. Well, congrats and thank
Speaker 2:We so have a we have a drum set here at the office. We gotta get a nori to just play the drums so Yes. One of us has a good line, he can go.
Speaker 1:That'll be good. Have a great rest of Great
Speaker 2:to meet you.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 4:Good to meet guys.
Speaker 1:Go on. Great stuff. Cheers. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get to the tennis story, but we are joined by Edward D from Exosat, founder and CEO, building sovereign satellite infrastructure to compete with Starlink going up against the easiest man to compete with Elon Musk. What is the plan?
Speaker 2:Edward doesn't look worried at all.
Speaker 1:Not worried. What what what is the plan? How many satellites do you need to launch? What what what cadence do you want to get these up? What is the key pitch for ExoSat to differentiate you in a in a very competitive market?
Speaker 3:I mean, we filed for 11,000 satellites. We actually have a published ITU API and source spectrum filing for 11,000 satellites. Think it's it would be the biggest satellite network outside of The United States, possibly even China too. The idea is this, right? A lot of countries don't want to rely on American defense contractors or Chinese state corporations for critical network infrastructure.
Speaker 3:And we are coming in and we're offering them something in the middle that's cost competitive, that can be launched on any launch option in the world, be it an American rocket, an Indian rocket, a Chinese rocket, and that just ensures no single nation can block them from getting into orbit. And, yeah, going up against Elon Musk is a huge proposition. But think about it this way, if we are even a mild annoyance to a $12,000,000,000,000 company, how much would we be worth?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. You're in San Francisco, probably a Delaware c corp feels like an American company. How are
Speaker 3:a Delaware c corp We are a Singaporean parent company. We're one of the only single yeah. So I think every y c batch is around like two or three weird companies like for they're either doing crypto or some weird reason like us. We're they are not Delaware c corp. Got it.
Speaker 3:We are one of these companies. So all of our engineering is done outside of The US. Okay. We know we don't use US vendors. We don't use US supply chains due to ITAR, and that means we can launch build satellites that can be exported to and launched from any nation in the world.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Interesting. So the are are you basically going after like the long tail of countries? You mentioned it could be launched from a Chinese rocket or an American rocket, but it seems like you'll be selling to like India, Japan, loosely western countries, but is that of
Speaker 3:global South countries Okay. Like Kazakhstan Oh, interesting. Nations in Africa, Indonesia, and Malaysia. We have huge huge interest here. Sure.
Speaker 3:A lot of it is we found there's a lot of countries out there that want independence from US supply chains, want independence from Chinese government owned infrastructure, and that's what we're really going after. Uh-huh. The world is getting more multipolar. We're starting to see like a lot of countries start to essentially become, like what was the what was the word again when it comes to supply chain independence? Sovereignty.
Speaker 3:Sovereignty. Yeah. But sovereignty goes both ways. Right? Sovereignty affects both moving away from both the Chinese sphere but also The US sphere.
Speaker 3:We are the company in the middle that's giving them the salads that you want.
Speaker 2:How how do you approach launch? How do you get these things up?
Speaker 3:Well, we we work with Indian, Chinese, and American launch providers in The US. Right? We can use like SpaceX. We can use Stokes space on Nova rockets. In China, we have the land space e q three as well as the Long March 10 b.
Speaker 3:In India, we have the Vikram one and the Vikram two from SkyRoo and the PSLV launch vehicle. And in New Zealand as well, we have the Rocket Lab vehicles. So we can launch anywhere.
Speaker 1:What was your background?
Speaker 3:So I'm a second time founder, built in the second space company. Before this, I dropped out of school in 2022 to build my first space company called eighth row. At eighth row, we were doing radiation hardened satellite edge computers and orbital data centers. And I scaled we we grew the company quite a bit. We actually got to millions of dollars in revenue, and we actually put three satellites into orbit successfully.
Speaker 3:But the big thing was we didn't I think the biggest so two things. I'm a huge believer in sovereign technology. Right? So I think a future where just SpaceX and China dominate all of humanity's space infrastructure is not a good future to be in. It's like AI.
Speaker 3:You don't want just open AI and drop it to rule all of humanity's AI. That's a pretty bad outcome. So I think the other 8% for now is you have to say in that future. And the second thing also is I think the biggest space companies in The US and China have already been founded. Right?
Speaker 3:I think there's so much competition going after these big anchor customers like the US military or the PLA in in Chinese first variant. But, like, space is a field where incumbent advantage matters so much, and that the best move to do might be just going after everyone else, going after all of these countries that traditionally haven't been prioritized by its based companies. And that's what we're doing.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congratulations and thanks for coming on and breaking it down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very cool. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your demo day. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:And I'm also gonna tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. We have our next guest, Alfredo Gonzalez from Momenta, coming on in just a minute. Just a minute.
Speaker 1:There are so many good iPhone duo reactions. The toughest thing for Apple's marketing team, the sequel, they're gonna call it the iPhone Apple Duo two. Is it not the iPhone Duo? It is the iPhone Duo. Right?
Speaker 1:It's not the Apple Duo? It's not
Speaker 2:a set iPhone Duo.
Speaker 1:IPhone Duo two, iPhone Duo three. That's gonna be it's gonna be a mouthful. They never did they don't have iPhone Air two yet, do they? It's just iPhone Air and then they just stopped it. They haven't refreshed it yet.
Speaker 1:Air Max. IPhone Air Max '95. They'll get there in ninety four years, something like that. Well, anyway, we have our next guest in the Let's bring in Alfredo from Armanta, building a personal research lab around individual patients. Alfredo, how
Speaker 2:are I like the one liner. Thank
Speaker 1:you so much.
Speaker 9:Thanks having us.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on the show. Congrats on a great demo day. Introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So a little bit about me. We're our team is essentially biomedical researchers that have been dedicated to just improving patients' health outcomes Mhmm. For the last decade. And we realized that there's a huge gap right now with the resources that patients and clinicians have as far as being able to go really deep into their data and ultimately understand the biology of their tumor and their diseases.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And that's what a month that does. We're laying down the infrastructure to be able to essentially have a whole team of LLM and AI agents that are supporting patients and clinicians with their care, helping decoding their specific disease, their biology and finding the not just the ideal therapeutic path but additional therapies that would have been missed otherwise.
Speaker 1:That's kind of our that's self through doctors, like if I have a tumor, I go to a doctor, they biopsy it, send it off to a lab, there's some raw data. The doctor might be interpreting that for me, having a conversation for me, but they might also give me a report from you or access to an app from you. How does how do I see the results here?
Speaker 9:Fantastic question. I appreciate you did your homework there. That that's that's definitely much more knowledge than most people have. But So as of right now, the way that the medical system works is they do take your sample and they do these very limited sequencing panels. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Typically about 50 to 500 genes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Our whole gene space is about 20,000 plus genes.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Right? So it's trying to debug and not having access to the whole code base. Right? And to be able to fully do this, it's a fairly it's knowledge intensive work. But now in the area era of LLMs and protein models, that's where you instead of having one single person that could do all this, you have a whole team Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Of agents that can do that deep dive.
Speaker 1:So there are labs out there that can do the full sequence. You might advise a doctor to pick one of those labs because it's not just going to be more data, it's going be more data that's actually actionable thanks to your platform.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So our platform is that missing link that helps the helps the patients, the collisions go deeper.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because as of
Speaker 9:right now, what they have is these very static reports.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Right? So if they're not dynamic enough to be able to keep up with the pace of discovery generally or do discovery in real time for the patients.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So do you have a pretty typical business model like insurance reimbursements or like the clinic will pay for this as a service or is there something else going on?
Speaker 9:Great question. So right now is direct to patient, direct to consumer Okay. Or direct to a a sponsor. Ultimately though, you know, there has been so much research showing out that the earlier you do it, do the sequencing and informatics, you actually can significantly improve the median life expectancy of patients but also reduce the cost on insurance payers. So it's definitely something where we are already seeing the signs of insurance starting cover.
Speaker 9:Actual insurance cover sequencing for recurrences and advanced tumors in most developed countries, right? And you are starting to see already how insurance, the tailwinds are there. Insurance will eventually cover this because ultimately it is cheaper for the payer insurance and you're also improving life expectancy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What is the biggest bottleneck right now to AI progress in cancer detection in medicine?
Speaker 9:Honestly, think it's the infrastructure. So it's a fairly huge data science problem. Right? I think we have these legacy systems that are built around megabytes of patient data outside of imaging, but the genomic sequencing you're talking about hundreds, like 200 gigabytes, 30 to 200 gigabytes, like it's a significant data science problem. So the infrastructure is not set up yet for these systems to fully take advantage of it.
Speaker 9:And that's in the sense what we're also setting up.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Very cool. What, what kind of traction did you are you sharing at demo day?
Speaker 9:Oh, so we have launched almost a month now ago and we are at 319 k MRR Wow. With over a 150 patients that have a BMI.
Speaker 2:Crazy. Bang.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. You
Speaker 2:gotta lead with the the ARR number.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They pick pick the bigger number. Yeah. I thought you were gonna say 319 ARR.
Speaker 1:You had me in the first half. It was good.
Speaker 4:No.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. It's surely a successful demo day.
Speaker 9:Thank you so much. Yeah. And it's it's it's good to be able to help patients and their families and and help improve the health outcomes for everyone. So you so much for the support.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exciting. Great to meet you, Alfredo. Have a great rest of
Speaker 1:your Good day.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Speaker 1:Okay. We got through demo day. We got to go over to tennis. Tennis. Tennis.
Speaker 1:Tennis. There was a match that ended at 03:30AM. And people are not happy about it. Wall Street Journal's headline is no no no no no no no. There's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 03:33AM.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 03:33AM isn't cool. It's ridiculous. What what happened? Bill Ackman loved it.
Speaker 1:He said one of the greatest tennis matches ever and very few got to see it live. This needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors in sports. What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change?
Speaker 1:Start the game earlier or cut it off entirely if it keeps going?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm I'm trying to figure out why why this ever was is or was a thing. I hopefully, the journal article can can break it down. But I watched a little bit of this game.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:did? I went to bed. It was I think
Speaker 4:I went went to bed. It was actually a later night.
Speaker 2:I went to bed around eleven. But the game was going at well past three
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ben Shelton who actually won the match, it was an upset, was hitting a 146 mile an hour serves at
Speaker 1:Who am I?
Speaker 2:At Carlos. Carlos at one point was shooing off the the the camera crew because they were filming him and he was throw like, actively, like, gonna throw up. He was pushing it so hard that he was gonna throw up into into a towel. Yeah. Really, really crazy.
Speaker 2:Anyways, Wall Street Journal says sometimes this glorious sport can't get out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience. We're supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Felton took the second set. I do actually have a family member that did exactly that, like Yeah. Blowout second set.
Speaker 2:Yep. They were like, alright. Like We're good. We're good. And it ended up being this incredible game.
Speaker 1:K.
Speaker 2:The US Open has long cultivated the idea that the wee hours are part of its identity as much of as much a part of the formula as the $23 Honeydeuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke wafting in from a nearby park. Even ESPN feigns enthusiasm for the Opry Midnight when it would never schedule a tentpole like the Iron Bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis? Okay.
Speaker 2:How many 03:30AM finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo on your back long after quitting time. The subway is 247 Theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn.
Speaker 2:There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 05:45AM. It's zany. But Alcaraz versus Shelton isn't a corned beef sandwich at an all night diner. This sounds like AI slob. It's a marquee showcase for
Speaker 1:a I I I've been reading this and I think I think it's just like fun turns
Speaker 2:No. It's good. It's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of US attention it can get and it got buried like a Tom Snyder sit down with Buddy Hackett. Even people in Hawaii were like this Alcara Shelton match is running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm sorry. Lot of a we're lot of a lot of gonna have to run this through Pangram. Parallelism. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This isn't a routine to celebrate. Parallelism. This is when someone needs to step in and scream, what are we doing?
Speaker 1:You know, I found two new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them. One of them is in our increasingly online world, when someone's writing about online culture or something that happened on the Internet or, like, with the boom of social media. Like, there's two phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using this phrase. That got baked into the LLM, and then now it's getting spit back Yeah.
Speaker 1:At people. And so a lot of people are turning away from the phrase in our increasingly online world. So avoid that one too, I guess.
Speaker 2:Says nighttime, you wouldn't understand that. It's a New York thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's funny because I feel like you can maintain the the mystique of the the US Open by just having games wrap up around midnight. Mhmm. Like, it's still very much nighttime. Totally.
Speaker 2:Like, it's dark out. You
Speaker 1:know? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:People are people are sleeping. Anyways, definitely seems just incredibly rough and and unfair to the to the players. Mhmm. Has happened in in UFC a few times where the the in order to hit a US time zone for the pay per view
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6AM
Speaker 1:Oh, where they are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is just imagine waking imagine one going to sleep Mhmm. At like ten knowing that you have to wake up and get in a death match at 6AM. Sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just
Speaker 2:try to try to
Speaker 1:be Because it starts at six. So you gotta
Speaker 2:Your fight warmed up. Like, the whole event is starting at at probably midnight.
Speaker 1:Well, guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag. Like, get there on your schedule and just treat it like it's a 6PM fight for whatever your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this? Chairman, Burb Bernanke.
Speaker 1:You can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for, like, twenty years in a row, and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight and people call you psychotic. I think it's fine to eat the same dinner every night for a month.
Speaker 2:What's wrong with being a psycho? A psycho. I used to I used to do Yeah. Wrong. And rice.
Speaker 1:Chicken and rice.
Speaker 2:Every night. Yeah. For months. For years. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a good point. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries with great customer service. And they got more.
Speaker 1:Anything else in the timeline before we get out of here? We do have to cut the show a little bit short today. We have a little bit of family stuff going on, but we will be back tomorrow at 11AM sharp. We have a great show. Alex Heath is joining us.
Speaker 1:He has some big news. He's becoming a venture capitalist, putting some money on the line, finally risking
Speaker 2:Putting it all.
Speaker 1:In the markets every day.
Speaker 2:Putting putting down his capital j journalist hat, hanging it up.
Speaker 1:No. He's keeping the hat.
Speaker 2:He's keeping the hat.
Speaker 1:He's keeping the capital j journalist hat, but he's also gonna be ripping some checks.
Speaker 2:Okay. Ripping some Taking wires.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. We got Sager and Jetty coming on tomorrow. I'm sure we'll talk about that AI safety stuff because he's been a friend who's been evolving.
Speaker 2:And hopefully we get an update on Sagerbet features.
Speaker 1:Definitely. I've been enjoying seeing the Sagerbet references in the chat on and off. But leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 1:Sharp. We love you. Goodbye. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Have the best Thursday afternoon of your entire life. Goodbye. Thank you.