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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Monday, 04/20/2026. We are live from the TBPN ultra dumb, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital.
Speaker 1:Of capital. We
Speaker 2:have a great show for you today, folks. Absolutely incredible edition of The Wall Street Journal. Over the weekend, I saw these hit the app, but they're in print today, Monday, April 20. There's two articles from two tech CEOs that run companies that are almost identically valued. Salesforce is I think a 150,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Verizon's a 190,000,000,000. They're right in that sweet spot.
Speaker 1:And I'm assuming they
Speaker 2:have the
Speaker 1:exact same point of view, kind of same market outlook.
Speaker 2:They have exactly opposite points of view. And I thought it was interesting seeing what what is a victim of the SaaSpocalypse have to say about AI? And then what does someone who is the most resilient to the SaaSpocalypse have to say and potentially is like, let me in. I want some of the drama. I want the smoke.
Speaker 2:And so Mark Benioff is who I'm talking about at Salesforce. So he says the software bears are all wrong about Salesforce. Had a bear, but it was it was too
Speaker 1:was too tough.
Speaker 2:So so we skip it. But he says, people think we have our back against the wall, but customers aren't replacing offerings with AI. They aren't replacing Salesforce with AI. They aren't ripping it out. Of course, everyone will say, well, yet.
Speaker 2:But let's dig into Marc Benioff's argument and how he's processing the SaaSpocalypse and what he's gonna do about
Speaker 1:opening. Marc Benioff has some problems. His enterprise software company Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that Wall Street thinks may get decimated by artificial intelligence. Its business model is centered on selling software to large companies on a per employee basis, but many of those firms are expected to downsize as AI agents become increasingly proficient at performing real world tasks. It's a daunting double bind, it isn't even the worst case scenario.
Speaker 1:Salesforce stock is down a mere 28% year to date. The hardest hit software as a service companies are down about twice that much on similar fears. But Benioff thinks the bears have it wrong about the SaaSpocalypse thesis generally and especially about Salesforce. AI, he says, is making Salesforce more valuable to its customers than ever. The leading AI labs couldn't replace what Salesforce offers even if they wanted to.
Speaker 1:And they would rather partner with him for now. Anyway, nor could Yeah. He's like, I dare you. I dare you. I I dare you.
Speaker 1:He's he's I I wish I wish we had Benioff on right now. Yeah. It's it's it's a joy to to speak with him. But continuing, nor could customers easily vibe code their own sales management software that could compete with Salesforce on security compliance and other vital features. People think we have our back against the wall when in fact the opportunity has never been greater, Benioff said in an interview.
Speaker 1:An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been developing and pushing its own AI tools for years. By the end of this year, it plans to unveil a new AI platform that automatically studies its users and takes actions on their behalf. Codename Agent Albert. It's kinda cool to put agent in the name instead of just Albert. Agent
Speaker 2:Well, they had they had Einstein. Right? So Albert Einstein is their whole shtick here.
Speaker 1:Agent Albert is the culmination of an effort that began three years ago when Benioff galvanized when Benioff, galvanized by the debut of Chetch BT, instituted a standing Saturday meeting to accelerate Salesforce AI efforts. Saturday stand up, everyone.
Speaker 2:An earlier flagship product of that push, AgentForce has been somewhat slow to gain traction. Launched in 2024, it is used by 23,000 customers of a total base of a 150,000. So what is that? A little little under 20% of the customer base is using agents. They're building
Speaker 1:Jason Lemkin came on the show and he was like, I use Agent Force. It's solid. Yeah. Like he's like, it it won us back a customer that like we weren't reaching out to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It like it made me money. Yeah. So he he was an Agent Force Yeah. Enthusiast.
Speaker 2:And so Salesforce's yearly revenue growth at 10 is down somewhat from recent years. But interestingly, the the deceleration in in Salesforce's revenue growth started back in 2022, maybe even a little bit earlier. If we scroll down on this on this image, you can see back in 2012, they were growing 36. Then as recently as 2020, they were growing 28.7%. There was acceleration in 2022 to 24%.
Speaker 2:But then 2023, 18%. 2024, 11%. Twenty twenty five, 8%. And then we're actually seeing some reacceleration this year from 8.7 to 9.6 to 10.8. And so the it's it is it feels like definitely too soon to for the SaaSpocalypse narrative to show up in the actual, revenue growth rates of these SaaS companies.
Speaker 2:I I pulled together, the recent earnings from a variety of public cloud software names. And they're all still growing, which you would expect. I mean, of course, like, you know, you wanna be growing fast, and there's a lot of things, and there's, the long term durability of the value that of the stock that actually informs enterprise value today. But we're certainly not seeing like, okay, there's so much churn at GitLab, for example, because people are forking it because it's open source and vibe coding on top of it and they don't need to pay GitLab that you would expect GitLab's revenue to actually be shrinking. It's not.
Speaker 2:GitLab is growing at 23%. Adobe is at 12%. PagerDuty, 2.7%. Little low. But UiPath at 14%.
Speaker 2:Box is at 9%. Asana is at 9%. Asana feels like, you know, textbook, like, you could just vibe code this. It's a it's, you know, it's a Kanban board, a task list, but it's still growing. Zoom at 5.3%.
Speaker 2:Snowflake's growing 30%. Workday's at 14.5%. HubSpot's at 20%. Datadog's at 29. Cloudflare, 34%.
Speaker 2:Monday.com, 25%. Like, there is really, really strong revenue growth across the SaaS category. Of course, the expectations have been very high. So when there's a readjustment in expectations, you see a selloff in the market. But this idea that the companies aren't growing anymore because they're being replaced so rapidly, that certainly hasn't taken hold just yet.
Speaker 2:So partner at partner at Salesforce, investor Chicago Capital, been impressed with some of its recent moves. But what Salesforce really needs, he says, is positive word-of-mouth from clients talking up the value they derive from its AI products like Jason Lemkin. They need to show revolutionary jumps. Benioff has said Salesforce was destined to be an AI first company as far back as 2014 when it's launched its AI research unit. I didn't realize that AI research unit all the way back then, But it makes sense just for, like, tagging and classifying different records inside the CRM.
Speaker 2:Still, it was caught flat footed by the arrival of high functioning chatbots in the form of ChatGPT. Customer superintelligence. Customer superintelligence. I mean, the this is it is it is funny because a lot of this, the agentic enterprise, it is a little, like, boring, and it's not as, like, sexy as some of the the more, like, crazy sci fi scenarios. But in terms of just, you know, incrementally improving the value that is delivered to the customers, it seems like things are doing okay.
Speaker 2:Early reviews were tepid, though. Customers complained of having to spend half their time preparing data so the AI could understand it, limiting the platform's effectiveness. To help fix the problems, Salesforce built a layer into its tech stack that automatically pulls in customer data from external sources and purchased a string of companies that include firms specializing in data management and AI powered sales. At education company, Pearson, agents now autonomously handle queries about order statuses, refunds and lost access codes for its customers. This has increased the percentage of customer questions that don't involve human interaction by 40%.
Speaker 2:While Agent Force where Agent Force has been lacking in a in its addressing complex customer problems and those require human touch, David Wemsley, chief digital officer at Pandora Jewelry, said Agent Force hadn't been able to reliably recommend products on its own based on the vague context that customers share through its website, like, my wife likes dogs. What should I buy her? That's such a funny funny question. But, I mean, I guess the natural text natural language interface should be able to find you jewelry based on a love of dogs. Although I think that a lot of people who are dog lovers might have different tastes that appeal to their jewelry.
Speaker 1:Why not just get her a dog or multiple dog?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. That's
Speaker 1:So how does How this does how does Salesforce's Yeah. View compare to the Verizon CEO?
Speaker 2:So so Verizon has a new CEO. His name is Dan Schulman. I don't think he's related to John Schulman, the cofounder of OpenAI and Thinking Machines, but he is stepping into the AI debate. He says for The Wall Street Journal says, For a big company CEO with big AI ambitions, Verizon Communications, Dan Schulman doesn't pull punches about the pain the technology could unleash on America's workforce. Just months into the job, he has predicted 20% to 30% unemployment within the next two to five years, which is staggering, staggering.
Speaker 2:I mean, I can put that into some context. He says he warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still seen as safe today, and he has pushed for more education and reskilling to help workers adapt to intensifying technical disruption.
Speaker 1:Put this into context So for
Speaker 2:he's so this is an insanely
Speaker 1:aggressive so this is like potentially the most aggressive stance
Speaker 2:I mean, there are
Speaker 1:any worse Dario. So Dario had the clip going viral this weekend. It was a clip from last year
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talking about risks to entry level white collar job. Yeah. And Dario, which is like, I would say like on the frontier around being concerned around AI job loss was not calling for 30%
Speaker 2:Well, no. Unemployed. So he was saying 50% but he's To entry level white collar work. Entry level white collar work. And and that sounds really bad until you actually dig in and you realize that America only has five to 7,000,000 entry level white collar workers, and The US labor force is 170,000,000 people.
Speaker 2:And so if the Dario prediction came true, the overall employment unemployment rate would sit somewhere between 69%, which is not great. And it serves it's obviously deserving of intervention. But it's far from the 20 to 30% outlined by Dan Schulman. And and it's it wouldn't even be even if the Dario scenario of 50 of early stage white collar work unemployment, that happens, you're still below COVID, below the Great Depression. And I think that there's a whole bunch of government interventions that could offset that pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Like 20% to 30% is truly like the do nothing the government never engages. There's never any sort of, you know, incentive to keep hiring people. And there's this like fast takeoff in AGI and also humanoids, which I think people are, worried about. But if you look at the deployment rate of self driving cars, people have been saying that all the truck drivers were going to go out of a job. And this is a very, very slow takeoff.
Speaker 2:The number of self driving cars on the road is well below 1% of overall cars on the road still. And this is just the case across the board. I was listening to a podcast with someone who was very worried about unemployment internationally and he was saying that AI could upend The Philippines because The Philippines does a lot of customer service.
Speaker 1:Which we haven't seen at all yet.
Speaker 2:No. None of this is showing up in the unemployment data. It's not showing up in U. S. Unemployment data yet.
Speaker 2:Mean, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be aware of this stuff, but but it's it's certainly not sure. Just like the SaaSpocalypse is not showing up in revenue yet, you know, AI unemployment is not showing up in any of the employment statistics yet. So but this individual was on a podcast and was saying that something along the lines of AI could be devastating to The Philippines economy because The Philippines is very dependent on customer service. And the stat he quoted was that 90% of The Philippines economy is based around customer service and customer support and handling people on the phone. And I was like, 90%?
Speaker 2:That seems really, really high. Like they have to do other things in The Philippines because sure you go to work at your at your customer service job, but then you go home and you buy food and you live in an apartment. There must be real estate agents. There must be homebuilders. There must be people who work on roads.
Speaker 2:There must be doctors. There must be lawyers. Like like, the an economy requires more than just like a single like, it's it's 90% feels, like, incredibly concentrated. So I looked it up, and I was like, how how big of an issue is how big of a of a of a of an industry is customer service in The Philippines? Like, is it 90% that feels high?
Speaker 2:Maybe it's 50%, maybe it's 40%. It was like 6%, 7%. It's really, really small. Now it's like huge in terms of like
Speaker 1:You don't want it to go away.
Speaker 2:You don't want it to go away, of course. And you don't and you do do a number of industries that are flourishing. And that is probably more concentrated than many other countries. There's probably many it might be the country with the highest percentage of customer service intensity in the economy, but it's not 90% of their economy. And so there's a little bit of this, like, people don't seem to go back to the raw numbers because if you go back and you try and understand, like, okay.
Speaker 2:What would 30% unemployment really look like? Well, that's like, you know, Great Depression level with no intervention, no no action from the Fed, no action from the government, and it seems a little bit, a little bit crazy. So I can't tell if this is just like saying the biggest number, but there there's a little bit of that going on here where if you wanna grab headlines and you go out and you say, okay. Well, someone predicted, you know, 5% unemployment. I'm gonna predict 10%, and then I'll jump to the front forefront of the discussion.
Speaker 2:That seems to be a way to get earned media. But I mean, let's unpack a little bit more of his discussion because we we we will see if there's a way to steel man his take around 20 to 30% unemployment. Said, coached in the blunt AI talk is a warning for other CEOs. Be candid about the coming disruption or risk a public backlash. It's a very difficult time and everyone knows this, Schulman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:So I think being authentic. Don't even agree with that stance. If you everyone that's being candid or even talking about it is immediately getting backlash anyway.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Sorry. Alright. So I think being authentic, being realistic, telling the truth as best you can is key. That belief, he said, is why Verizon created a $20,000,000 career transition and retraining fund for the age of AI when the company began laying off
Speaker 1:We are gonna have thousand workers greater unemployment than in the Great Depression. And I'm gonna you know, he's taking the piece of duct tape. You know, there's water pouring out.
Speaker 2:He's I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:And to be clear to be clear, this is not our view. Like, this is not our view at all.
Speaker 2:No. But I mean, at the same time, like, he did layoffs. They probably hired a lot during COVID and beyond. And they and and a $20,000,000 career transition retraining fund is great.
Speaker 3:It's a
Speaker 2:good start. That is good. Like, this is a good thing. But he says the warning, this is from the journal. The warnings are a departure from the messaging of other public company CEOs, many of whom have been bullish about AI's potential to unlock new levels of growth but demure on or even reject the idea of job losses.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are saying AI is coming. We're going to run out of jobs. It's exactly the opposite, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said last month, pointing out that every other technological advancement has brought more productivity and more prosperity. And there is some new data showing that productivity might be climbing, which is very exciting if the all the economists wind up developing a consensus around that. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is similarly sanguine about potential job losses to AI.
Speaker 2:Though some roles will be replaced, there will be other jobs created. In the short term, though, a cavalcade of companies from Snap to Amazon have invoked AI or a desire to find efficiencies as they slash large portions of their workforces. Block, which cut nearly half of its predict half of its staff predicted other companies would soon follow suit. A new Boston Consulting Group report predicts that AI will shape roughly half of U. S.
Speaker 2:Jobs in two to three years and then up to 15% of jobs could eventually be eliminated outright. Again, that's you know, reshaped, and eliminated does you know, would be offset by the creation of new jobs. So even in this b BCG report, you're probably looking at, like, again, maybe a transition of, like, six, seven, eight, nine, 10% unemployment while there's an adjustment period. Many many Americans fear that will happen too in a Quinney Piak University survey of 1,400 adults. 55% said they felt AI would bring more harm than good, up from 44% in a poll last year.
Speaker 2:And so the average American is dooming for sure. CEOs are not thinking about this the right way, said Bill George, the former CEO Medtronic, is now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. Too many, he said, are focusing on productivity instead of laying out a strategy for how companies can find new business models to grow or on how workers can best use AI. They should be very candid with them and paint a big picture. Truman's big picture also included sweeping job cuts, the 13,000 layoffs he announced shortly after his appointment as CEO in October, where Verizon's largest ever, but not but necessary to make Verizon more efficient.
Speaker 2:He said Altogether, he's seeking to cut $9,000,000,000 of costs. Verizon said its layoffs were not related to AI. The carrier was too hierarchical, too bureaucratic, way too process oriented as opposed to outcomes oriented.
Speaker 1:And the CEO is saying, this is already happening in a big way. But the layoffs we're doing are just that we're bloated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Verizon has 90,000 employees and they laid off 13,000. So maybe like a little over 10% rift. Verizon's a weird one because the stock is basically completely flat over the last it's actually up 15% year to date and it is an incredibly stable stock. And it's also just like should not be a victim of the SaaS apocalypse because they own Very hard to find spectrum allocation.
Speaker 1:Own cell towers.
Speaker 2:They own cell towers. Exactly. And that's just Or they
Speaker 1:or they have like very, very long term lease agreements.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I mean operators. They I there is there is the case that, like, you know, if Starlink direct to sell gets really good, even, I mean, even Elon's saying, like, it's not gonna be that good inside buildings. Like, it's pretty difficult to get to a point where all of a sudden there's a new technology that's just wildly disruptive. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, maybe if you're, like, somehow transitioning from Starlink when you're outside to Wi Fi when you're inside, like, you could cut the cord with Verizon, but that just feels so, so far away for something that is, like, a pretty key, utility in most people's lives, like their water bill or electricity bill, like their their their phone Internet bill is, like, pretty, is, like, one of the one of the probably the the least elastic things. Like, they will just keep paying and and and stick around. Now they might move to Sprint or AT and T, and there's gonna be some competitive dynamic. It is an oligopoly after all. But it it doesn't seem like there's going to be some massive disruption moment where people are vibe coding their own cell carriers necessarily.
Speaker 2:So in meetings, he has repeatedly told Verizon staff they must embrace AI, describing it as core to the company's future. He used it himself to comb through some 8,000 responses after hours.
Speaker 1:This is the future. Trust me. I used it once.
Speaker 2:Schulman's embrace of AI goes deeper than cost cutting. He envisions a company wholly reshaped by the technology from improved customer service to more personalized options for consumers. And he has encouraged staffers to talk to their children about AI at the dinner table. In one all hands, Schulman recommended that staff ask AI to write their obituary so to see how the technology works and What? How it frames their lives.
Speaker 2:Just dig your own grave.
Speaker 1:He's literally the title of this article that he's saying AI is coming for your job and everyone knows it. So They're ready to tech, in tech, we're starting to, you know, every company is adopting this technology at a rapid rate.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But everyone's like, hey, this, you know, basically like jobs aren't tasks. Yeah. Right? This sort of narrative is building. Like we need to figure out how to it's it's we've we've built a bunch of very useful tools Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they are going to have powerful effects in our economy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But we have to kind of change the narrative around this because like a fear based approach is not working. And the whole thing is like AI is coming for your job. Everyone knows it. Write your obituary.
Speaker 2:Write your obituary.
Speaker 1:It's so not so not helpful and and and they're not even doing AI related job cuts.
Speaker 2:No. I love
Speaker 1:So I just don't understand. I don't understand this whole press cycle.
Speaker 2:I I love that he just comes in and just immediately starts black billing. It's so wild to just get this job and immediately start black billing.
Speaker 1:Like, do you think this is a setup for for a much, like, deeper than they've done historically?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, it's possible. But I I I think that they would need to do some serious, like, AI tooling and implementation and actually figure out, like I I mean, I would be surprised about those 90,000 like, I wanna know more about the breakdown of those 90,000 employees or 80,000 employees. Like, what are they actually all doing? Which ones are actually just sitting there being, like, I just do tasks all day long.
Speaker 2:Like, form comes in, I type it into an Excel sheet, and I email it to somebody. Like, that type of job, yeah, that's probably gonna be automated in some way and that person will have to find a different way to make a play inside the organization. But for a lot of but for a lot of the folks at Verizon, I imagine that they're that they're working on bigger projects than just, you know, just throwing throwing tons and tons of people at a single problem. At the same time, who knows? Maybe maybe it's 50 maybe half the company is customer support reps.
Speaker 2:I don't know. He has invited staffers to experiment with AI by writing poems to their loved ones. Some employees responded by a by using AI to write poems for Schulman and they weren't half bad, he said. Like it or not, we live in the age of AI. I I happen to like it.
Speaker 2:I I agree with that. It's like we all wanted to live in the Renaissance or, like, when fire was first invented, how cool would that be? He continued. We're in that stage. We're not just appreciating it for what it could be.
Speaker 2:That's a very optimistic take. I like that. I like that sentence. That's good. Some prominent CEOs are starting to join Schulman in acknowledging he has potential for a disruption.
Speaker 2:Others have also recently sounded warnings. There's real risk of artificial intelligence could widen wealth inequality, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month last month. Jamie Dimon recently told investors that AI's productivity gains could lead to other derivative effects. It may happen faster than we can adjust to it. Schulman said AI may reach human level capability known in the industry as AGI by the end of next year on the early side of most most industry predictions.
Speaker 2:So 2027 for AGI isn't that crazy. I mean, Sequoia has an event right now, AISN. There's the whole keynote slide is AGI is here. And so, people are going back and forth on that. But I think I think it's not it's not that crazy to to imagine, you know, very, very human level AI by the 2027.
Speaker 2:That doesn't seem impossible whatsoever. The the question is just like how much will this be additive? How will the government respond? What will, the actual effect on the labor market be? And I think people are digging into that a lot right now.
Speaker 2:There's a good podcast on this, on Odd Lots with Alex Imas. He's a professor at University of Chicago focusing on economics and applied AI. Highly recommend you go check that out if you're interested in going deeper into, the labor market. Well, moving on. Blue Origin rocket stumbles on first commercial mission.
Speaker 2:AST Space Mobile, who we've talked about a few times here, Jeff Bezos' rocket company said the satellite from ASTS was deployed into an incorrect orbit. And so a little bit of a setback for them. I think the stock traded down in the news a bit. The launch of the company's New Glenn rocket started smoothly with the vehicle shooting into the sky from the Blue Origin launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the flight, New Glenn's third ever, the vehicle the vehicle's huge booster returned safely to Earth, only, a feat only Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX have ever achieved with orbital rockets.
Speaker 2:But the mission later suffered a mishap. A satellite the rocket was carrying into orbit for AST Space Mobile, a company building cellular broadband network in space, wasn't deployed correctly. In a post on X, Blue Origin said its rocket delivered AST's satellite into an incorrect location in space. The payload was placed into an off nominal orbit, adding that teams were assessing what happened. AST said the satellite's altitude was too low to sustain operations and that it will be taken out of orbit.
Speaker 2:The cost is expected to be covered under its insurance policy. Stumble comes as Blue Origin works to ramp up flights with new clients.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw some of the the AST retail army saying like, don't worry. Keep holding.
Speaker 2:Keep holding.
Speaker 1:It's covered under insurance.
Speaker 2:It seems like
Speaker 1:Very very very unfortunate, but
Speaker 2:It seems like it's somewhat rebounded a little bit.
Speaker 1:Somewhat to be expected, right, as Blue Origin, like, figures out their commercial business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It traded down like 16% overnight, but it's down just 6% today. So a little bit of a rebound.
Speaker 1:And we got a fantastic video of the booster landing that we can pull up here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Curtis, can go of Jeff. Tyler, you dug into why doesn't ASTS just launch on SpaceX? Well, so so there are
Speaker 4:two things. I think Yeah. One thing I thought was interesting is, like, there's this whole press cycle about it, like, oh, it was like a failure of a launch or something. But this has, like, happened a number of times before, like
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 4:SpaceX in in 2024. There's Falcon nine that that kind of the upper stage, like, failed and then a few, like, Starlink satellites Just
Speaker 2:went to the wrong orbit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Basically, and then they're too low and then they just
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Get get burned up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Companies don't typically like to talk about when they send something into space and lose it Yeah. Basically. But that happens too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember at the beginning of last year, there was a launch for for a venture backed space company and and, you know Oh, yeah. They basically put a satellite up and almost immediately lost contact with it. So it's not not unusual, unfortunate, but they'll be back.
Speaker 2:In in 2016, SpaceX blew up a Facebook rocket, which was crazy. Mark Zuckerberg laments the loss of internet.org satellite. The Facebook CEO said he was deeply disappointed in the explosion of Falcon nine rocket carrying satellite intended to provide Internet coverage to parts of Africa. So writing on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg said, as I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent. The accidental explosion of the Falcon nine rocket early Thursday morning, this is back in 2016, referred to as an anomaly by SpaceX engineer, destroyed both the rocket and its cargo, the AIMO six satellite, which Facebook had planned to deploy to provide Internet coverage to parts of Africa.
Speaker 2:Fortunately, we have developed other technologies like Aquila that will connect people as well. We remain committed to our mission of connecting everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the opportunities this satellite would have provided. Contrary to Zuckerberg's description, the satellite did not belong to Facebook. In October 2015, Facebook partnered with Eulstadt, Eulstadt, I can't pronounce that, a French satellite company to lease the broadband capability of the AIM o six, which was built by Israeli company Spacecom. According to Space News, which reviewed Spacecom filings with Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the joint lease cost $95,000,000 over five years.
Speaker 2:So this like $100,000,000 satellite just blew up on the pad. So lots of different setbacks. But there is one technology that is not having setbacks, which is robotic marathoners. And there's new This is crazy. Information.
Speaker 2:There there's a crazy video. I don't know if the video relates to this, but a Chinese robot beat beat a human best time in a half marathon after a stumble. Tech companies are making progress to fixing humanoid runners' malfunctions. A year ago in Beijing, Humanoid Robot Half Marathon Race, the first runner to cross the finish line took more than two and a half hours. In this year's event, the champion beat the fastest human ever.
Speaker 2:Sunday's race demonstrated China's rapid progress in humanoid robotics, a field American tech leaders including NVIDIA's Jensen Huang and Tesla's Elon Musk say is the next big thing.
Speaker 1:Beige This video is pretty wild.
Speaker 2:Is this the
Speaker 1:actual is car? One that's failing. Okay. Didn't didn't make the half marathon but you can see there's dry ice spilling out of the back. This Oh, they've been cooling
Speaker 2:it off? Interesting.
Speaker 1:Which is like very Woah.
Speaker 2:Cypherpunk. Woah. That's crazy that you have to load it up with dry ice as well. I like that. About 220 yards in the finish line, the five foot five lightning slammed into a barricade and collapsed.
Speaker 2:The red and black robot managed to get back on its feet with help from humans and ran across the finish line in fifty minutes and twenty six seconds according to state media. I feel like if you fall down and you're a human in half marathon and humans help you get up, that's still fair game. You're still good as long as you finish. This probably still counts. Last month, the humanoid the human, the actual human world record holder from Uganda finished in fifty seven minutes and twenty seconds in Lisbon, Portugal.
Speaker 2:Lightning and two siblings from honor swept the podium. All three navigated the course without human control, excluding the one time help the champion got. The race penalized the completion times of those relying on constant human remote control, including one that finished the race in under fifty minutes, but it was teleoperated. The Tian Kung Ultra, which was developed by Beijing based lab ex humanoid and won last year's race, more than halved its finish time this year, clocking in at one hour and fifteen minutes without any human intervention. That is pretty impressive.
Speaker 2:Like they're they they they cut the time in half in just one year.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:The 13 mile course included more complex terrain than last year such as slopes, narrow passages and sharp turns, testing robots abilities.
Speaker 1:If you assume an acceleration in progress, eventually one of these humanoids is like running a marathon in like an hour or like thirty minutes. Just like truly insane insane speeds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, as fast as a cheetah
Speaker 1:Tyler could still take it out though.
Speaker 2:I think so. China is moving to quickly dominate the humanoid robotics industry and cement its place in the global supply chain. While The US controls the best chips and other technology for robot brains, China leads in the manufacturing ecosystem for humanoid robot robot bodies. That has been reported many, many times. Well, without further ado, we have Signal here in the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:Let's bring in Signal who is launching Sky, an agentic AI home screen, replacing the iPhone app.
Speaker 1:There he is.
Speaker 2:With content
Speaker 1:Handsome fella.
Speaker 2:Driven intelligence.
Speaker 1:Dude, I can't believe
Speaker 2:It's been too long.
Speaker 1:This long.
Speaker 2:We've reacted to your post, like, so many times. So good to have you.
Speaker 3:I oh my god. It's incredible to be on here, guys. Welcome. It's been a long time coming, but I just wanna start off by saying congratulations. FabriQ.
Speaker 3:This has been ridiculous. Yeah. What a while. I've been watching you guys since day zero.
Speaker 2:Really? You watched the first episode?
Speaker 1:No. Because I think we were covering
Speaker 2:I think we did.
Speaker 1:Post would have been making it into, like, the first episode.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:You're probably like, why are these two guys in suits? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reading printing out my tweets. This is
Speaker 3:I I tweeted this out a little bit, but I was like, man, when I read that and you guys were reacting to what I posted because I didn't really think about what I posted and you guys analyzed it, and I was like,
Speaker 2:oh my god, this is ridiculous. Holy crap. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What did I even write?
Speaker 2:I don't I don't remember. You have a ton of bangers. They're all good posts. You had a great time. That was the lifeblood of the show.
Speaker 2:It was so much fun. Anyway, we're not here to talk about, you know, the the first episode. We're here to talk about your first episode in this new journey. Talk to us about what you're launching, which
Speaker 1:Very you're smooth, John.
Speaker 2:I try. I try.
Speaker 3:You guys survived.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've come a long way for sure. Anyway, introduce yourself a little bit. Introduce the app. Introduce the product, where you want this to go, and I have a ton of questions.
Speaker 3:No. Absolutely. You know, we're I've always been in consumer software and I think there's just not that much other than the sort of main players. I noticed and there's there's a lot to be done and and what a time to be alive. So, you know, we're experimenting at the very basic layer of how to make this stuff really easy to use, really easy to access for normal people that have not really come into this agentic AI world in full speed other than sort of chatting Yeah.
Speaker 3:With chatbots and whatnot. And I think it was an it's an early experimentation of what we're up to is kind of how AI will kind of speak to you as well as how, you know, sort of ambient AI will be in various surfaces starting with your phone. Right? Like maybe your phone may not look exactly the same way even in the next couple years. So we're kind of operating at the very earliest stages of experimenting of how AI will communicate with you and we're trying to think of creative surfaces.
Speaker 3:And one of the one of the most interesting places, you always, you know, people take out their phones and they glance at it and turns out, you know, this stuff hasn't really changed in such a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The iPhone home screen is twenty years old.
Speaker 2:That's Yeah.
Speaker 3:Two decades and it's just static icons. Yeah. It it roughly speaking, it has not really evolved in any They one shot it.
Speaker 2:They one shot it. Yeah. That's the steel man.
Speaker 1:The steel man
Speaker 4:is good.
Speaker 2:It's the final form.
Speaker 1:It's the final form.
Speaker 2:Don't change.
Speaker 1:We're all gonna
Speaker 2:We could always do a three wheel car or five wheel car or six wheel mean, the thing
Speaker 1:that I've been pressing on is like you would think, you know, if I could rewind two, three years, I would not expect and and and knowing how much progress there would be in AI, I would not expect to look at the top 25 apps in the app store and only see LLMs.
Speaker 2:Like chat apps.
Speaker 1:I would expect to see like a variety given given just like how many magical experiences people have had. Yeah. A variety of like
Speaker 2:new
Speaker 1:products
Speaker 2:coming up. Uber, new Instagram. I like like
Speaker 1:And that's, like, some
Speaker 2:argument previous app boom that was, like, very diffuse. You got you got Candy Crush and and, what's the one with the pigs? The flappy bird and Yeah. Angry birds. And, like, you got all these different apps, Runkeeper and Diet products, and it feels like this has really collapsed down into just chat apps.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, you know, I actually recently got a new phone, and I was installing apps. You know? I always like to set up my phone bare. Like, I don't like to transition my phone.
Speaker 2:Yep. Interesting. Really?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It
Speaker 3:gives me a little bit of a reset on not only what I need and what I don't need, but also how to think about software as it exists today. Like, I don't want to be tied to what I was before. I want to kind of be a new, if you will. And, know, it turns out I installed, you know, GPT and Claude and whatnot. And I was like, man, I don't think I really need that much stuff.
Speaker 3:You know, these LLMs are kind of collapsing how and what you do into an interesting dynamic. And I think generally, they're incredibly powerful and the fact that, you know, those top five are all LMs roughly Yeah. Is speaks volumes to the zeitgeist and speaks volumes to the impact of the actual technology. Like, don't think Yeah. You know, previous, I think technology has always been kind of a little bit more evolutionary than not.
Speaker 3:Obviously, hindsight is twenty twenty. But, but this feels so so different, you know, as a technologist. This this world feels very different. It feels, just just things are gonna rapidly change from here on out in terms of how people experience their lives, how people interact with each other, and how, you know, we're gonna facilitate brand new interactions potentially or, you know, completely reinvent old ones. So I'm very excited for that and I think our company and the way that we think about it from a consumer perspective is just to make things, you know, easily accessible for these individuals.
Speaker 3:And I think we're gonna we're gonna attempt to do that. Very basic stuff.
Speaker 1:Is your like, more as like a CEO, I I I it sounds like you guys have raised a little bit of money and like are just like in an experimental phase. Is that like generally the right read?
Speaker 3:I think yeah. I think generally, I would say two things. Number one is, look, we built a really fun product that we're gonna give to lots and lots and lots of people. Turns out, you know, this era is non zero marginal cost. We have raised a little bit of capital.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But, you know, inferences is nontrivially expensive. And especially if you operate at like agentic inference or just background inference. That stuff is just consistently going unlike, you know, Claude or GPT where people actually make requests or go on there and type something. We're we're doing it on behalf of you.
Speaker 3:Right? Like we're doing those things in the background where we anticipate, we listen to contacts, we we turn the you know, every time for example, every time you get an email, we process it with one of our agents. It it sort of turns out it buckets that item. It tries to figure out what to do with it. It tries to see if there's it deserves some higher, order like ranking, and then it tries to figure out, oh, can I complete this task?
Speaker 3:Can I draft a reply? Oh, maybe it does deserve a reply. Let me go back to John and say, okay. Hey. Here's a reply that I've crafted based on everything I know.
Speaker 3:And it's a very look. Replying to emails has been, you know, thirty, forty years, but this is a new world in terms of how you think about communication and how agents kind of mediate this world and apply that to any, you know, any aspect of your life whether it's health or finance or where even where you are. Right? Like one of the underlying things that we do is location. And, you know, imagine learning about the world around you through an LLM, whether it's through text or voice by simply it being on your home screen wherever you are.
Speaker 3:If you're in a museum, if you're in a new neighborhood, and that's one tap away. Like, goal is to make intelligence either zero or one tap away, not one prompt away.
Speaker 2:Learning a question.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you how do you make this product free so that everyone can use it? Will we see ads on the home screen of the iPhone ad supported? I think ad supported could make sense. Right? I'm walking by a coffee shop and I get I get an offer.
Speaker 2:Hey, there's ads in Apple Maps now. So Apple
Speaker 1:You're seeing my notification stream in. So you you can really Yeah. You know what I like.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I I'm on this counter position.
Speaker 1:I I think the interesting thing here is like you like you guys can operate like, you can kind of wake up and ask yourself like, what would Apple do if they were like truly excel excited about AI versus like seemingly scared of it?
Speaker 3:You know, I've posted about this a little bit with with respect to Apple. Apple relies on a deterministic world. Right? Like a world where lots and lots of elements from design to the experience to the underlying context, that doesn't change as much and it's very deterministic. So for example, iPhone is very much kind of a software is very broadcast y.
Speaker 3:Right? It's a one to many. They write it once and it runs for everybody and roughly speaking, it runs exactly the same way. Now with a nondeterministic world, that could change drastically. Like for example, for when we, you know, give this out to everybody, everybody in their everybody has a very different experience with our app because it's completely nondeterministic.
Speaker 3:And Apple lives in a deterministic world and having to transition into nondeterminism and nondeterministic software, it's actually a really nontrivial transition, especially for a company like Apple where every single corner or every single thing needs to be tightly controlled. So I think for us, we're kind of paving a path where we can marry some level of like expectations and determinism with the beauty of nondeterministic elements of AI and create a really great user experience around that that lives on your home screen and works for everybody. That's how we think about it. So we're kind of maybe in some sense moving ahead of Apple who has to deal with a few billion users, you know, just just minor amount of users. So I think I think that, you know, this this world deserves more experimentation like like what we're doing in terms of both user interfaces and experiences and feeds and ranking.
Speaker 3:And Jordy going going back to your point on on monetization, I think that's the number one thing that I think about quite drastically. Look, we're trying to capture real estate on your device that is the home screen that is available at a glance. And you know, think I posted about the
Speaker 1:greatest billboard of all time.
Speaker 3:Exactly. I mean, it is it is insanely powerful if we can activate that. Now, that's a tall order, but at the same time, you know, like I've I've posted about ads and advertising. Look, I've I've been in technology for such a long time from consumer, you know, whether it's like feeds at Facebook or, you know, even Google and whatnot, but you know, you sort of think about advertising has done a lot of good for the world, you know. It has actually made things accessible and and and I think generally if advertising is done well, it is actually one of the most useful economic paradigms in terms of delivering equality in services to people who would have otherwise not been afforded.
Speaker 3:So I believe in advertising. I believe in good advertising. I believe in advertising that is actually like complimentary to the user experience and not necessarily taking away from it. It's tricky to do. But, you we
Speaker 1:ad experience I've ever had as as an ad enjoyer was like in college, I was buying a Kindle and they were like, do you want the ad supported Kindle for like a $100 or the ad free Kindle for like a $120? And as a college student, I was like, I don't I don't think I'll mind ads.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, why not? That's Are
Speaker 2:they bad?
Speaker 1:And it's on the home screen when the device is locked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And they're just showing me books that I would never read.
Speaker 2:It's bad targeting?
Speaker 1:So it's terrible targeting and it's a device that's just like sitting around my house all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of looks like, wait, you're reading that?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 1:so if you can avoid that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 2:There's a question from the chat. Why are you anonymous? Do you plan on continuing to be anonymous? I mean, I I imagine as you grow the business, like, it would be interesting to stay anonymous forever, but, you know, at some point, a journalist will want to know. And I imagine that unless your op sec is super tight, it'll come out.
Speaker 2:Not that it's, bad. I I'm just wondering, like, how have you processed the Anon thing?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. You know, my entire online existence as it exists today with respect to this account is is a giant accident because I was trying to find my old username and password for because I just wanted to post a little while ago. Maybe, you know, whenever I started posting. But I think when you guys actually started started TBPN as well
Speaker 1:and I I think must have gone from like a thousand followers to 80 like
Speaker 2:k.
Speaker 1:Over a 100 within the few months of of us. It
Speaker 3:was kind of nuts. Okay. So the the whole story is, you know, I I was kind of I was like, you know what? I just want to read. I'll reply or something.
Speaker 3:And I had a lot of fun. And, you know, whenever I'm having fun, I like to double down on things. You know, maybe not change change it around too much. Look, I think certainly this this world is gonna change at some point. But for in the in the meantime, you know, I love leaning into fun new things.
Speaker 3:Know, if you wanna do anything new in the world, you got to do it a little bit differently. You got to be a little bit more unique. You got to be a little bit more mysterious, a little bit more yeah. I don't know. All of this stuff is just so wild to me.
Speaker 3:Right? Like the anonymity aspect of it and the x culture and the anons around it and you guys have had, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can never dox. I'm sorry. You can never dox. I mean like Banksy Banksy getting en masse, is that good for the brand?
Speaker 1:Could be taller than John, Gigachad. Everyone just it won't be enough. Right? Like picture you as a philosopher king Yeah. Sorts.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's beautiful, isn't it? I mean, I I my my bio and my like, actual content are like sometimes sometimes the same and sometimes destroyed, but that's I think the beauty of it. So in that realm, you know, like I was actually talking to some people around this and I was like, I I I sometimes I basically kind of do what I feel like and right now it's like just been so much fun to to kinda lean in on this world and and you know, but I think certainly I'm I'm I'm I'm more like I'll I'll I'll marry myself to the zeitgeist if you will and if that if that calls that then I'll I'll I'll continue and we'll we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:Not married to the game. Married to the zeitgeist. Okay.
Speaker 2:Take me through take me through iOS development like current status because this seems like a really good idea that people would want. I do think people are bored of the grid and having something that's more dynamic and agentic makes a ton of sense. And I think you could deliver a ton of value. But my fear is that Apple's just like, no, that's our real estate. So is there a clear path right now through like widgets and the shortcuts API to actually do interesting things?
Speaker 2:Or am I going to have to like side load a different OS? Like, how how, like, consumer friendly and, like, easy will this be, or will you be bumping up against the walled garden of Apple pretty quickly?
Speaker 3:That's a really great question. Look. Every single thing we do is within the confines of the Apple ecosystem and experience in the way that they've designed and made it work. And we've designed our product to fit almost like a glove in that into that ecosystem. You know, when when you onboard into our experience, you just connect the things in your life that you think are you you would want more
Speaker 2:Yeah. The server side connections, I totally get. Like like all of that makes sense. You can Yeah. Like like OAuth with the email and use APIs or MCPs.
Speaker 2:Like there's a million things that you can do on the server. What I'm interested in is like is like how big can the widget be or can you actually take over the whole home screen?
Speaker 3:We can we can take care of the we basically ask you to install two widgets, a medium widget and a large widget that encapsulates the entire home screen. I love work in dynamic Very together. So the the medium widget will basically what we call a wild card widget Yep. Internally, which shows you precisely what you might need to know at this point in time.
Speaker 2:That's And very then
Speaker 3:the rest, the big widget is what we call a for you widget, which is just a a feed. And our you know what we're doing, John, I think is we're we're building kind of the new iteration, the the Facebook Facebook News Feed two point o
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's entirely AI generated about your life, highly personal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that lives directly on your home screen, and you can browse it as easily. The feed paradigm is so familiar with individuals, And it the the beautiful part is that it's all, like, AI generated and AI mediated. Every we have 22 agents that work continuously to generate content for that feed.
Speaker 2:It's funny because, like, everything everything that's fancy, I'm like, yeah. That's easy. And then like getting people to install two widgets, I'm like, that's the hard part. And I don't know if I'm right but like it feels like like like that it it like I'm still in like prosumer territory but that's a good place to start And then you can hopefully make it easier. And then maybe Apple opens it up to a point where like you downloaded an app and just by clicking yes, it just installs the widgets by default or something.
Speaker 2:It does feel like the the biggest thing is like I just love when like these new surface areas are explored. I mean, you you you mentioned Nikita, but like he's but he's done a great job of really understanding all the different hooks, what you can do within iOS, you know, pushing those to the limit, creating like new UX, new experiences on top of like what Apple gives you. It feels like that's really underexplored.
Speaker 1:Have you thought of have you thought about build trying to build any products within within any of the LLM ecosystems?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Just given that they they already have an exist you know, massive existing user base? Yes.
Speaker 3:That's a great question. And, you know, I've explored like, every single thing with respect to an API or a platform that comes out, you know Sure. I you know, for example, the WWDC APIs that come out every year, I Yeah. I read them like like the bible, you know, like I would I I I would
Speaker 1:Bro, it's a
Speaker 2:bunch of apple.
Speaker 3:You know, that that's my that's my, you know, religious holiday or whatnot and every time is the pope.
Speaker 2:He's your pope.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:We get it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, you know, so I scrounged these. I think generally these API the the sort of apps or chat GBT apps are it's unclear to me what the incentive structures are for the app developer just yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's unclear to me why applications deserve to exist inside of an LLM just yet besides just adding more context. Because theoretically, an LLM is powerful enough to even generate an app to be able to do something, in which case, I'm not sure exactly unless you bring some highly proprietary data like Zillow or whatnot. Maybe some of these experiences work. But otherwise, I don't know if the small time developer you guys remember the flashlight apps and
Speaker 2:the Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The lighter apps on the iPhone? Like, you know, you're not really seeing those
Speaker 1:experiences as well. Probably 12 year old was the beer app.
Speaker 2:The beer app was good.
Speaker 1:Just thinking that thinking that that was like that was peak humor.
Speaker 2:What about the I'm rich app that was like $10,000.
Speaker 3:Thousand dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was just it showed a picture of a diamond and it was just like you could just open a picture on your phone. But if you bought that app, you could show people that you just wasted 10 k on a iPhone app or whatever. I think it literally maxed out. It was the most expensive app you could possibly like type into the App Store.
Speaker 3:I think the guy sold, like, over 500 copies before Apple removed it. Yeah. No. Not offering real person. So I think he he made made 500 times a thousand dollars, and it was incredible.
Speaker 3:See, these are the kinds of experiments and creative elements that, I think deserve to exist in the world today. Yeah. And I think, you know, we're a few handful of individuals that are kind of trying to make that happen and we're trying to be really creative, really fun, really interesting, engaging. And AI is a super plow powerful tool to be able to do that. More powerful
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Than the original iPhone APIs. Like, holy crap. So I think we're we're we're early, but we're gonna try dream. To
Speaker 2:Like like, there's so much like there's
Speaker 1:You're doing this you're doing this the right way because there's another scenario where like you could raise a series a right now. Yeah. Like or it's like you you know.
Speaker 2:You have a team. You have a technology. And and the wait list. Like you'll be able to test things and learn. Like there's so much opportunity.
Speaker 2:Well, what an exciting time. Thank you so much for joining the show. This is great.
Speaker 3:Thanks a lot guys.
Speaker 1:Great to finally have you on and congrats again.
Speaker 3:1000%. And maybe next time we'll talk about hot takes. For sure. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:What do you think about this AI powered cannabis vape with blockchain rewards?
Speaker 2:I'll have to I'll have to try What? Out before
Speaker 1:So John was John showed me like a screenshot. He was showing you the website for this this morning and I didn't realize today is 04:20. So that's what like this is like a 04:20 joke.
Speaker 2:Is it a joke though? I think it's a real website. Like I think it's
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. John, you can make a joke website. Did you know that?
Speaker 3:I know. I know. But I I John Claw design, man. Claw design. Can do anything.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:So you're telling me if I put this in the way back machine and it shows up, as of yesterday, it's not a joke? Because I bet you this existed yesterday. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Let's see.
Speaker 4:Let's see.
Speaker 1:I bet you if they were planning to make a
Speaker 2:April April 6, it's in the it's in the way back machine. What does it say? It says let's see. It's loading. It's got blockchain still.
Speaker 2:I think these are hustlers who have been just tacking on every single possible trend to go as viral as possible. I don't know. We'll have to dig into it. Well, thank you so much for joining the show, Signal. Yep.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Great thing.
Speaker 2:News. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 2:we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Up next, we have Ethan Ding from TextQL. He is the cofounder and CEO here to announce It's the time
Speaker 1:to talk about enterprise analytics Enterprise Workflows.
Speaker 2:I think we had him. Let's check-in with the team and make sure that he is here. I believe he is. So let's bring Ethan Ding in from TextQL into the TBPN UltraDome. Ethan, hello.
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on, guys?
Speaker 2:Oh. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:How's it going?
Speaker 2:It's good. We have two of you. So please introduce both of you.
Speaker 1:And it looks it looks like it's being filmed on a, you know, phone camera from 2005, but but we're excited to have you on. Hi.
Speaker 5:I'm Ethan. I'm the CEO and co founder or Yeah. This is my co founder, Bart. They're our CTO. We're we're we're actually at a customer off office Oh, on-site, and this is actually a company that does not I I think like like like IP bands like Zoom from their their internal network, which I found out, like, literally last second.
Speaker 5:Phone phone. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's great. I'm I'm super we're super excited to have you guys on. Walk walk us through history of the company since it's it's your Yeah.
Speaker 1:First time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think we started this at, like, late twenty twenty two, right before ChatGPT came out. We had this this idea that we if we if we spent a lot of money and time on, like, trying to make analytics work, it'd be it'd be worth something. We we really didn't know what we were doing when we first got started. Since then, what we've, like, really, like, realized is after after, like, two years of rebuilding the product, like, 10 times over, we landed on on something where, you know, I I think, like, the typical enterprise has, like, a 150 databases, 10 different dashboards, BI tools.
Speaker 5:They have, like, 20,000 different charts, another, like, 400,000 tables. Every single vendor wants you to, like, migrate into their thing. Sure. And, like, drop another $20,000,000 on, like, systems integrator for another ten years to, like, do the migrations. Yep.
Speaker 5:And you're, like, let's, like, build things that can, like, connect everything and and and hopefully be yeah, the do for do for analytics with a or, like, high frequency trading firms into, like, stock markets.
Speaker 2:What was the first, like, analytics stack? Because if you're pre GPTs, are you just doing like word clouds or clustering based on keywords and tagging different phrases as they flow through a system? Like what was the initial like, okay, there's a stream of data, there's a bunch of text in a variety of databases. Like, how are you giving the customers value from that?
Speaker 8:Well, it was pre chat GBT, but still post GBT. Okay. So we had GBT three, I think, as we all know at this point, the the IQ of that was way overstated, at least for business stuff. And so, we had a text box on the right. We type in your question.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 8:Like, how do I get revenue? Then a text box on the left with with the SQL.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 8:then Oh.
Speaker 7:You run it
Speaker 8:and you copy it and then paste it into your whatever tool. Interesting. And then that was it. Yeah. We've come a long way from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So walk us through I mean, you don't have to tell us what customer you're with today, but what does actually as a group of cofounders going to a customer site, like, what are you doing? How deep in the weeds are you? Is it just sort of like a high level pitch, or are you rolling up your sleeves and and working on actual integration?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, I I think, like, today today's session was basically, like, walk us through, like, the the I mean, every single Fortune 500 company, like, basically spends, like, 9 figures Mhmm. On, like, AWS, GCP, and Azure. They spend another, like, like, 10 figures on, like, paper that, like, like, like, manages all these systems. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And it's kinda this, like, concept war of, like, you you go from, like, spending $20,000,000 to, like, like, Teradata on prem to, like, spending, like, $30,000,000 with, like, a Databricks in the cloud or something. And so, like, what we're what we're we're trying to map out with them is Anthropic is telegraphing, that they want to be the size of AWS in, like, three years. Right? And they're and they're an enterprise oriented company. They expect that to basically come out of, like, companies like the that that that we're working with, slight budgets.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so it's they they basically expect them to take their entire IT budget of, like, let's say, like, $203,100,000,000 dollars, double it, and, like, materialize this money out of, like, thin air and, like, spend it on inference. They're they're they're they're walking us through, like, the the parts of their road map where, you know, what kind of SaaS can they sunset, what kind of labor costs are they, like, thinking about, like, the trade offs around on, like, what time horizons to, like, create up? And also, like, like, what kind of, like, workloads that are gonna be extremely expensive that they can, like, kinda just kinda, like, start basically triaging off, like, the large, like, models. Because because at the end, like, these are these are kind of the people, like, when you see, like, the token charts, like, everyone's token maxing, these are kind of the people who, like, pay the bills on, those tokens.
Speaker 5:And and, like, like, they notice the size of that bill, like, you know, like, blowing up, like, 10 x, like, year over year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Interesting. It's interesting side of the equation that I guess, like, people don't spend a ton of time talking
Speaker 2:Yeah. How have you been processing the SaaSpocalypse narrative? Benioff was given some pushback. Other folks were very bullish on it. There's a whole bunch of different data points.
Speaker 2:I've been just shocked that we haven't seen revenue declines from really any software company that's been targeted. Although, you know, you could talk about the long term, but Slowly growth. Growth like, companies are still growing even if they are in, the direct path of the AI companies.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I for like the for the longest time, I assumed that like everyone likes to buy like good enough. I think really in the past like three months, I've heard like like six different CIOs or CBOs of like Fortune one hundreds Mhmm. Like talk about how they're ready to like like Salesforce has, like, increased, like, they're headless, like, taxed, and they're ready to, like, like, do, like, a two year migration, like, off into, like, like, Postgres or something. Wow.
Speaker 5:It's it's not like they're going to another vendor. They're just like, like, I need to free up money to, like, set on GPUs, like, set GPUs on fire. Sure. And I'll pay, like, anybody to, like, like, move me into, like like, a Postgres instance in, like, Google Cloud or, like, like, AWS.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Okay. So so that's a little bit of your opportunity. You help with migration?
Speaker 5:That that one that one's kind of adjacent to us. We we look at lot more, like, low level infrastructure, like Databricks, Snowflake, like, Shallow, and otherwise. But it's it's interest like, a CRM is basically the second most important system of record at an enterprise next to the ERP.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:If they're willing to entertain, like, moving entirely off CRMs within, like, a two year time horizon, maybe they'll completely fail. Yeah. But, like, the willingness to, like like like, forge into that is then, like like like, an order of magnitude more higher than expected. And surprising based on the
Speaker 8:profile of company. That's something you don't expect from, like, Google or Facebook, like, the most mature end end end companies in the world. You you see this effort starting to come from a 100 year old companies as well.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Interesting. And is is is that driven more by they think that over the long term there will be a net cost savings to having their own system or more that they want something that's completely bespoke and more custom to their business?
Speaker 5:It's mostly not there's an interesting thing Larry Ellison talks about when it comes to enterprise sales, which is not like enterprise sales is not like buying Gucci bags. It's much more like like any given year, you have a CIO come in, like, right, like, the the the half life of, like, a CIO is, like, like, five years before they they retire. New one comes in. They have to, like, start a a set of, like, new initiatives. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Often, like, they're they're going, like, they they're they're finger testing, like, the market and trying to figure out, like, who who has the best vibes.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And, like, basically, who who okay. Whoever has the best vibes, I'm gonna throw, eight figures against, and I'm gonna, like, move that eight figures away from, like, someone like, a company that has, like, worse vibes.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:I think there's like, weird self fulfilling prophecy where
Speaker 1:They're vibe procuring.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're vibe procuring.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, you walk into a room, you can tell when that company stock is up. You can tell when the CEO is extremely cocky. You can tell when the FDEs and the salespeople are like, Listen, you don't even have to move this today. I'm gonna get your business next year no matter what because I know we're on the open up.
Speaker 5:And you can also tell when a vendor is desperate, right, and they're moving for discounts. As long as the perception that a company, like, the market is short a given, like, SaaS vendor, customers start asking for discounts. The most aggressive ones go first. But now, like, all the sellers on that team are, like, like, bad like, you know, they're they're traumatized between, like, the next set of renewals, so they're they're progressively gonna give more and more ground. It's kind of a rough yeah.
Speaker 5:Wouldn't wouldn't wanna be one of those right now.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Interesting. Well, your business is growing. You're raising money. Tell us about the latest round.
Speaker 5:Yeah. We we it was actually like a like a two two part round. The first, like, led by, like, Hoth Capital and the latest part, like, by what? Blackstone.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise?
Speaker 5:Think it's 17 in total.
Speaker 1:This was this was awesome, guys. I really I really enjoyed speaking with you both, and thank you for making time on while while you're hanging out with your customers. We appreciate it. The perspective. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's let's do it again soon.
Speaker 2:And good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 5:Thank you. Have good one.
Speaker 2:Cheers. A good rest of your day. Up next, we have Matt McKinney from Loop. He's the cofounder and CEO raising a big CRDC in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:Matt, how are doing?
Speaker 7:What's going on, guys?
Speaker 2:Not too much. Happening. Good to have you here. First time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?
Speaker 7:I'm Matt McKinney. I'm the co founder and CEO of Loop, and our mission is to unlock value that's trapped in the operations that power the physical economy. Mhmm. And we started specifically in a back office where no one else wanted to go and back office services and automating things like accounting and general ledger coding and payment services. And all we knew to exist is to make our customers more efficient so that they can better serve their customers.
Speaker 7:And we work with some of the most important companies in the world, 20% of the Fortune 100.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:And excited to be with you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, how I mean, there's a different world when you say like procurement or accounting that you could have been like, we're of agentic accounting firm or something, and it feels like this is much more cross functional. How are you actually positioning, like, the integration? Who's the buyer? How how does the how does the business, like, instantiate itself inside of your customer?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We started we started with a very acute problem, which is if you look at the supply chain industry
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Roughly 30% of invoices are wrong or they have an error, so clearing of them is really painful.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And because of that, a bunch of services firms popped up, specialized services firms popped up.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And all they do is attract address that specific problem which is you gotta adjudicate this invoice, you gotta ensure that it's accurate, you gotta remit payment to the truck drivers and the carriers across the And that's a big industry. It happens to be a $5,000,000,000 industry alone and it's all done with human labor. And obviously LLM's presented a perfect opportunity for that. But I think what got Mike Hovind and I most excited is really the data. If you can go organise the data then you can obviously automate things like we just mentioned, the accounting.
Speaker 7:But you can use that as a wedge to expand into adjacent use cases, whether it be in compliance or planning or procurement, and continue to unlock value for your customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what does it look like for a customer to actually onboard? I imagine you need access to their emails, like the actual PDFs of the invoices, whether things have gotten paid. There's often, like, multiple versions of a particular invoice, and then you need to plug into bank data to see what what's actually moved around or accounting systems. Like, how long does it take to integrate, and how key is that?
Speaker 7:It's I mean, what's so wild about supply chain, supply chain is just a network of networks. Yeah. And you've got, you know, a a transportation carrier. You've got a supplier, you could have multiple versions within your own enterprise. Yeah.
Speaker 7:A lot of these big companies, they do a bunch of M and A and so you've got all these different versions of the truth. So just take for example, the weight and dimensions of a package or a shipment. There could be seven different versions of the weight and dimensions for that package, and so you need almost like a data auditor itself to prove that that's the correct data. And we get it from a bunch of different sources, we get it from, you know, email, we get it from EDI. We get it from API connection.
Speaker 7:We get it from Excel spreadsheet, PDF, you name it. It's just really messy unstructured data. Data that no one's ever organized. Quite frankly, no one was able to organize until the power of LLMs came out.
Speaker 2:Does When you talk to customers, do they care about the AI buzzword at all?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are they trying to buy AI?
Speaker 2:Do they just want a solution? Not again. How are you thinking about how how front and center AI is in your value prop and pitch?
Speaker 7:All our customers want is just outcomes. Yeah. And they don't really care how you deliver it. Now sometimes they might have a top down AI mandate Sure. That they're looking to check the box, but at the end of the day, they don't care how the sausage is made.
Speaker 7:They're buying an outcome. That's all that they want. And if you can demonstrate that you can deliver a superior outcome, it's better, it's faster, you're, you know, for example, you're finding more errors or whatnot and you have faster resolution times so you can close your books faster. That's what they're buying. They're not buying agentic buzzword fit into their, you know, their checkbook.
Speaker 7:They they really wanna buy the value.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the value of like getting this business to scale? Is there is there something where you can, you know, optimize the supply chain, introduce different clients that need different resources and help them buy the best product at the right time or reviews or even just like panel data of like how the economy is moving. We've seen that from some financial, some fintech companies. Like, how are you thinking about the value that's unlocked as you become a platform?
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's more you mentioned like procurement, for example. There's more obviously when you you have a bunch of data that you can use and say, this is good, this is bad,
Speaker 5:or Yeah.
Speaker 7:You should be working with the supplier and you're not because we see it over here. But I think that, you know, really building context across the network is probably where we see the most gains where you can take learnings from a carrier that's working with, you know, suppliers working with multiple parties in the network, and then say, oh, well, this carrier always likes to build a specific way, and so propagate that learning through the LM's context across all the companies that work with that carrier. And I think that's really, I'd say the unlocking automation that you get at scale, and then obviously the you mentioned the intelligence one, the time to value. You're able to get someone on much faster because you're working with 95% of their suppliers instead of 2% of their suppliers. That's a huge one as well.
Speaker 2:What were you doing before this? Did you always have a love for back office supply chain optimization?
Speaker 1:I can tell you. I can tell he has since he was a bull Since
Speaker 2:was a bull, I
Speaker 7:I came out of the womb and I just said, wanna automate the back office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Complex logistics. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I I've always used to assess the systems and making them more efficient. And I think, when you you look at the physical world, and it's supply chain, you know, the trucks and the train, and that stuff's just so exciting. Feel like it's the last frontier where you can truly unlock value. I mean, supply chain alone just in The US is $11,000,000,000,000 in spend.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 7:You know, one
Speaker 2:of the largest Really huge.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. If you want
Speaker 7:if you wanna have an impact on GDP and
Speaker 2:Oh, too high. Sorry.
Speaker 1:I was giving you that for the 11,000,000,000,000. You said the biggest number.
Speaker 2:So That
Speaker 7:was huge. Wanna If if you wanna have an impact though
Speaker 2:on Yeah.
Speaker 7:GDP. At the end of the day, GDP growth is just productivity growth. The technology is the leading advantage in that. Yeah. You're you're saying that $11,000,000,000,000 in spend goes to supply chain and no one's really touching that, then we gotta go attack that problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I have so many more questions.
Speaker 7:Before yeah. Before that, we were my co founder and I were at Uber and Okay. Yeah. Early on the freight team. There you go.
Speaker 7:And we saw a lot of the, you know, the real world there where you had nasty PDFs, you had bill of ladings, proof of deliveries, just a total data mess, to be honest with you. And we knew that there had to be a better way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Dude, perfect perfect VC pattern match. Uber Freight Team.
Speaker 2:Yep. That's a great team. Great company. We know so many entrepreneurs that came out of Uber. Tell us about the round.
Speaker 2:What's what's going on? How much did you raise?
Speaker 7:We raised $95,000,000.
Speaker 1:Couldn't pull together that last five.
Speaker 2:That last five.
Speaker 9:What was
Speaker 2:going on?
Speaker 1:Innovated Innovated
Speaker 2:you. Sand bagging. Sand bagging.
Speaker 1:No. You had to set up Sadah had to set up the next round.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You got a little 9 figure.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I'm super excited. Really really stuck.
Speaker 1:Where are guys where are guys based?
Speaker 2:Valor, Atreides, AVC, Founders Fund, Index, JPMorgan. You got everybody. You got everybody. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Wait. Where are you guys based? Sorry. Missed you.
Speaker 7:We're based in San Francisco. We got offices in Chicago as well as in New York.
Speaker 2:Is that because Chicago is a major, like, logistics hub with trains and trucks and stuff?
Speaker 7:Yeah. There's a lot of there's a lot of
Speaker 2:There a major I'm not making this up. Right? Like with the boat because the boats come through the the lakes and like it it was like a major hub of transactions.
Speaker 1:Is that because Chicago has trains and trucks?
Speaker 2:They do. They do. This is real. Right? Am I wrong?
Speaker 7:You're not you're not wrong.
Speaker 1:I'll give
Speaker 7:you stats. So 30% of goods that enter America go There through
Speaker 2:you go. Thank you. Thank you. 30%.
Speaker 1:Not bad. God was right.
Speaker 2:Was right. It's a You're like, oh, Chicago. Why? It's such a weird pick. It's not.
Speaker 2:It makes a ton of sense. Well, thank
Speaker 1:you so Great to meet you, Matt. Congrats to
Speaker 2:the whole
Speaker 1:team and hopefully hopefully you're back on the show this year with some more news.
Speaker 7:Really appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Love the show by the way.
Speaker 2:Thanks, dude. Have a good one. To you. Up next, we have Errik Anderson from Alloy Therapeutics.
Speaker 1:I love I love messing with you.
Speaker 2:You love messing with me? Never
Speaker 1:gets old.
Speaker 2:Well, without further ado, Alloy Therapeutics has raised a series e to build full stack AI biotech infrastructure. Errik Anderson is here live.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Keeping extra on. Errik, how are you doing?
Speaker 9:Gentlemen, I'm doing great today. Yeah. Good to have
Speaker 2:so much for hopping on. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company a bit.
Speaker 9:I'm Errik Anderson. I'm the CEO and the founder of Alloy Therapeutics. We're a biotech infrastructure company that works with a bunch of companies all over the world helping people discover and develop drugs.
Speaker 2:Okay. Infrastructure. What exactly is going on in the biotech stack? Imagine everything from centrifuges down to writing PDFs for the FDA to trials. There's so much that goes into that.
Speaker 2:What what are you focused on specifically?
Speaker 9:You got that. So the the technology we have is really around more drug discovery and then into drug development. So the folks that do regulatory, the folks that do clinical, we work with them Yeah. To discover drugs with the companies that we help to support. So we work with big pharma companies.
Speaker 9:We work with small biotech companies. Okay. What's going on in the industry today, the big trend right now is when we talk about infrastructure, who's gonna actually do the wet lab work today in the lab? Sure. In addition, we've got everything going on with tech bio of all of this in silico work that's happening Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's really exciting. And sort of bringing those things together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No idea. So you
Speaker 9:can do the lab and the The
Speaker 1:idea is like you can have like mill you know, a million times more ideas for different drugs, but then you still have the constraint of the physical world needing to kind of be able to actually run experiments until ideally we could simulate a lot more in the future, but maybe we're not not there.
Speaker 9:Exactly right. And you can simulate all these things, but it's a bit of a design build test that then you learn. It's that it's that loop we all
Speaker 2:know. Yep.
Speaker 9:And right now in the biotech space, we've made some incredible progress with Gen AI and machine learning capabilities to come up with a lot of those ideas. You gotta close the loop then and actually be able to test them. And then there's a lot of skill that goes in just the the skill of drug development of of what makes a good drug. Connecting those things together is what we do, really well.
Speaker 2:So how how much of this will wind up looking like an AWS for drug development? I can provision a certain machine, and you have it, and I can interface with it all over, you know, the Internet, and you will do all the physical stuff for me.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's part of it. So AWS just launched a service. Amazon launched a great service that connects these these generative companies back to a back end of how you manufacture the protein and you test it. Okay.
Speaker 9:That's one small piece to the process, I would say. Yeah. A lot of scientists out there, they can design things in silico, and then send them to a lab like that. That will help.
Speaker 1:Is that not like a crazy side quest for them? Like, it's
Speaker 2:We did AWS has, like, centrifuges now and, like, like No.
Speaker 9:AWS is actually just connecting them together. No. It's pretty Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Got it. Got it.
Speaker 3:Got it.
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 9:what they're going for there is that they wanna be the cloud. If you're gonna do your compute to come up with these with these InSilico things Yeah. They wanna make sure they see all the traffic
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then just connect it to anyone else on the back end.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's I think Wizard.
Speaker 2:Got it. Got it. Yeah. So Makes sense. Can you zoom out for me and and just do a temperature check on biotech?
Speaker 2:We we read one article about how Boston's going through a really tough time at the same time. Like every time I open up the Wall Street Journal, there's a new billion dollar acquisition.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So last year felt like like the dark the dark ages for biotech Yeah. Felt like everyone every every Yeah. Every bio biotech investor that we were talking to was like, don't even know why you'd keep investing in in these companies. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like the returns have been so bad. And then this year is like the biggest year of biotech m and a Yeah. Since
Speaker 2:2019. It feels like they're just rich from the GLP one boom, but I'd love to hear your sort of, like, narrative setting.
Speaker 9:Certainly, the GLP one boom. One of the trends that's going on here is that the industry has to restock the shelves for new drugs. As drugs go off patent, there's these revenue cliffs. And so big pharma is sitting on probably the largest pile of capital they've ever sat on, and they look to acquire a lot of their innovations from small companies. Those are the folks that we support to create new medicines.
Speaker 9:So there's definitely a huge m and a trend that's happening this year, and it'll continue to happen for the foreseeable future. A big thing that's happening if as you read about that news in Boston though is we're doing drug discovery and development here in The US, but there's been a big shift to move it overseas and to offshore and for pharma to acquire assets from outside of The United States. And so that's that's been more of the big, I would say, the headwind for the domestic biotech space.
Speaker 2:Okay. How are you feeling about just acceleration in drug development generally? Like, we you know, in in cybersecurity, agentic coding, like, there's these very clear scaling laws and, you know, we have the meter chart of the amount of time an AI system can work on a single problem. It's doubling. It's on a very clear trend.
Speaker 2:I haven't seen a chart that's like that for biotech, but it feels like we're going through advancements and we're just getting more cures. So something's happening. Are you tracking it at a quantitative level yet? Or just qualitatively, how do you feel about drug development process?
Speaker 9:We're living in an era right now where the trend of all of the drugs that we're discovering, have an acceleration in the amount of innovation that's coming from our labs. So, that is just an incredible trend that is supporting everything we're doing in the lab. The byproduct of that is, of course, generating massive amounts of more data, making sense of that data, and this is where a lot of the machine learning is coming in, is how do we digest all of the data that's being created in the industry, making sense of it, and then turning that into new cures as rapidly as possible. That is an enormous trend right now in the industry. Yeah.
Speaker 9:The advances that we have just from literally using Clod and OpenAI even in the lab and just day to day things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You're seeing a handful of things come together. So, first of all, you see this explosion of data. You see the wet lab capabilities largely looking the same. And what's happening then is we're trying to organize that data and turn it into new curios as rapidly as possible. And In the background, what we have is a number of new companies, new entrants in the tech biospace that I think are just natively better at understanding this massive data problem and being able to make sense of it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Then on the other side, you have the pharma and biotech, which actually require all of those skills to actually make sense of what's going to work in a in like a human biological system. Yeah. What's coming together this
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. This year, I would say, is that there's a lot more folks in tech bio that are getting better, but then we're just seeing the bio folks actually get better at tech. So, basically, you're at this place where, like, the tech bio folks need more bio and the biotech folks need more tech. And if you're bringing those things together, I do think we're going to have an acceleration in a lot of the cures that we're making.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Jordan? Give us a view into how big pharma executives are thinking right now. Are they confused why everyone and their grandma is injecting themselves with Chinese peptides, yet at the same time, like hype more skeptical of vaccines than than maybe ever. I feel like this kind of interesting dichotomy.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, in the industry today, would say the executives in pharma are looking at it from the same place they always do, is about efficacy and patient safety. And so we're looking for drugs that work and improving that they work in animals and then ultimately in humans. Peptides being injected into humans, I think everyone is just saying, Hey, what's safe? What's efficacious?
Speaker 9:The FDA has done some pretty amazing things in this administration, I think, to give flexibility what's allowed. There's been some incredible changes that have happened that I think will accelerate the pace of innovation, what we do in the regulatory space, in the clinic, as we're testing it in humans. And so think pharma is apprehensive about the changes, but overall, they're excited that things are moving along and that we're going to see a lot of new drugs coming on the market.
Speaker 2:Can you help me understand the flow to get to, like, a data boom in biotech? Because I I would assume that that's more driven by, like, costs of DNA sequencing than anything from the Gen AI world because the but maybe there's something where the Gen AI world can process data that previously locked up in PDFs or something? Like, what what is actually driving the data boom?
Speaker 9:It's those things really coming together. So, certainly, the the continued falling cost of DNA sequencing Yeah. And then the falling cost of all the other types of data that you can generate along with when you're sequencing someone's DNA. Yeah. So if you go to a place like Function Health here or like where you can pull off your Oura Ring or your Apple Watch, there's actually a massive amount of data Sure.
Speaker 9:That is that is being generated passively.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And right now, the ability to connect that data to that I would call it real world data that we can connect to what's happening in patients Yeah. Is a level of complexity that we just haven't seen before on the data side.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But it's got to be rooted back in basically the wet lab. You're describing these things taking your DNA or your tumor DNA and you're learning from what's actually happening in a patient. Yeah. And bringing those together is actually a huge data problem.
Speaker 2:I imagine you work with, like, mostly, like, big pharma or real biotech companies, we're but also seeing this like boom in like a single person vibe coding cancer cure for their dog. Like
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:Do you have a policy for whether like how small a team can be? Because I imagine it's not far from you getting like an inbound from like a single person who's like, I want to do this by myself. I'm a so I can
Speaker 1:be trusted with advanced AI by
Speaker 2:And maybe they should. Maybe they shouldn't be. I don't know. I I just want to know how you've like grappled with it. Maybe it's just not a business concern, so you don't need to worry about it, but I'd love to know, like, how are you processing that ideal No.
Speaker 9:I mean, I think everyone can be trusted with this generally, so that's actually not the problem. Don't don't worry about kind of these fear mongering that's happening on this front. Okay. At our company, we service anyone who is interested in discovering new drugs. Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's a lot of what we're trying to do with our company is how do we democratize access to many Yeah, of these yeah. We started in a particular place nearly ten years ago and that was before we had any of this Gen AI work going on.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 9:It is lower. That single person biotech company or maybe just more of the virtual biotech company where you've got five or 10 folks and they can work with a different contract research organization to help do their drug discovery and development. Yeah. That's been a trend for a while. What's happening is we're just getting more efficient at it today.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I do think the future biotech company is gonna be much, much smaller and be able to plug into these different resources and be so much more efficient at coming up with ideas and testing them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it is interesting. Tech loves to sing the praises of, like, the five or 10 person team, but there are a lot of biotech companies where it's like one genius researcher who discovered something and a couple support staff and then a lot of outsourced stuff all the way to, okay, we're ready to sell it. And it's mostly just a research organ.
Speaker 2:This is not entirely new there. You you mentioned that you're not worried about, like, doom related to, like, bio. But, like, you know, how how how are you grappling with the idea of, like, somebody making a super bubonic plague or, you know, some new flu. Like, are are you do you feel like there's safeguards? Or how how have you processed that question?
Speaker 9:There there's lots of groups of folks that are worried about this, and Yeah. I think the United States military and some of the the consortiums that we've been involved with are giving that thought. It really comes down to, though, is you could make a lot of things that might be dangerous. There's always a bad actor problem. Yeah.
Speaker 9:The way that we think about that is through our biosecurity division. We try to make sure that the capabilities that we need to have in The United States are always available and accessible to us. So call it medical access capabilities. We've learned a lot of lessons in COVID. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Everything from could we actually just test for for viruses in the community, and do we have the reagents available to do that? And then, of course, we had masks and everything else. From our perspective, we think about biosecurity as a way of making sure that you do all of those components from being able to surveil what's happening in the theater all the way out to can we discover and develop a drug very rapidly. There's some great different initiatives that are going on of these ideas. Can you go from a threat to a hundred days later actually have a drug ready to go?
Speaker 9:Our company and others participate in making sure that there's just a really robust response available with incredible supply chain
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And and sort of to make sure we can do everything here in The United States at all times.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it certainly seems like like the the the advancement in the positive side, like, we're seeing a major, major swing to the upside right now. Every time I hear about one of these new medicines or new treatments, it seems really positive. There's a huge story about pancreatic cancer recently, which was complete there's white
Speaker 9:Right now, we've got conferences going on and we saw two different studies that we're showing just for some of the patients that were on drug, I think it six years later, they still had no disease. And that's when We we saw another
Speaker 2:saw is really, really tough.
Speaker 9:Oh, it's really incredible. It's one of the worst cancers we have.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 9:think this is the overall trend. We are living in a world where we will cure everything that is curable, I think, in the next three decades. It's really just a question of, and maybe even faster than that, It's a question of how fast can we accelerate
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And really give as many people as possible access to these incredible tools. And just like in tech, I mean, where where you saw these very small companies be able to do incredible things in the last five, ten, fifteen years. Yeah. I was investing back during the first Internet bubble back in in venture capital twenty five years ago. And in those times, the world just looked a different place.
Speaker 9:We actually middleware
Speaker 1:Were you 10
Speaker 2:years old?
Speaker 9:I I was I'm like 48 right now. So, yeah, I was I was still a child.
Speaker 1:You looked late you looked like late thirties. So so that's Yeah. So that's good good for you.
Speaker 9:I was a child at the time, but it was incredible because there was a lot of the same criticisms that we're hearing in the tech space right now and as it relates to biotech. It was like we were wrong about everything back then except for what we were right about. Yeah. We we did see the flow of investing coming in, and many many things went bankrupt. But the things that didn't go bankrupt changed the world.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And that exact same thing is happening today that you're gonna see an incredible number of winners. And I do think biotech is gonna be an important part of the the big market that everyone's going after in in the AI and AML space as well. Tech space is gonna go conquer biology as much as it has in other places. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But I would say also that pharma and biotech very much have a seat at the table. Our academic researchers have a seat at the table there, and it's really about bringing the two domains together that are gonna be critical. One of them is not gonna go it alone without the other. Again, is more bio. I need more tech.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise? How much did you raise?
Speaker 9:Raised $40,000,000 this time. Yeah. We hadn't raised any money.
Speaker 2:We go. Thanks, man. Congratulations.
Speaker 9:Appreciate that. We've been working hard to build a real business. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So yeah. This
Speaker 1:This was the first round?
Speaker 9:Been a long haul for us.
Speaker 2:No. This is
Speaker 9:This is our series e.
Speaker 1:I'm a little old school.
Speaker 9:Back when I was a child, when I was a baby investing twenty five years ago, I I learned that you It's It's okay to just letter your rounds just like normal. Our last round was in 2022. Yeah. Yeah. I'm kinda old school in that way.
Speaker 9:So in 2022, we did a round, and it between then and now, we really laid down the infrastructure so that we had operations across 17 time zones now. We're operating in The United States, Japan, The UK. We have an incredible group that's actually working in the GCC right now in The Middle East. Obviously, there's a lot going on there that's that's creating a bit of a headwind, but we're very bullish on the work we're doing in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Riyadh, and Doha, and and and over in Abu Dhabi. So, yeah, bringing all this stuff together has been really important for us.
Speaker 9:And just our our view is you stitch together the supply chain of innovation, you link it to great world real world data, and you bring a lot of AI and ML in there, and we're gonna really accelerate the pace of drug discovery and development.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Well, thanks so much for joining the show. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your
Speaker 9:week. Thanks for having on, guys.
Speaker 5:Thanks a great day. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Up next, have Pippa Lamb returning to the show from Sweet Capital alongside James Wise from Baldwin Capital Partners. I believe they are in the waiting room calling in from across the pond. Are you both over in The UK today?
Speaker 1:It better be. You're over here. Giving the news.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome to the show. Why don't Pippa, why don't you reintroduce yourself and James since it's the first time on the show, can introduce yourself as well.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Big day. James' first time on TBPN, Yes.
Speaker 2:We're very excited.
Speaker 1:Fantastic to have you.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So those I haven't met before, I'm Pippa Lam. I'm a partner here at Suite Capital. I'm also an active angel investor here and also scout with a sixteen z, but generally sort of sit between the ecosystems of The US and The UK tech.
Speaker 1:Wow. How do you I I didn't know you were you were the triple threat there. How do you how do you
Speaker 2:decide who gets who gets That's interesting.
Speaker 10:No. Yeah. Secrets. Secrets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Secrets. James? James.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:First time caller but long time viewer. Thanks guys.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 6:Having me on. So I'm a general partner of Balderson Capital. We're a $7,000,000,000 venture firm. We're based here in London. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And we used to be called Benchmark Europe.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 6:We've the buzzer.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 6:So back back in 2001, we were Benchmark Europe. We we, we spun out in 2010 when the European market really took off. Okay. And for the last four months, I've also been helping set up The UK Sovereign AI Fund.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Take us through that. I think that's what we're here to talk about. How long have the talks been going on?
Speaker 2:How big is the fund? What's the strategy? What makes it unique in that it's, so linked to The UK specifically?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, about a year ago, we kicked off this big AI opportunities plan. There was huge news about it at the time. And we've been working through all the various parts of that, and, Pippa can talk more about things we've been doing in data centers and compute. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But the fund was set off to really accelerate some of The UK's big, UK AI successes, but with a lot more than capital. So we've got about £500,000,000. It's a starting point. It's the entry ticket in this game. But more importantly, we're providing, access to UK supercomputers here.
Speaker 6:So huge amount of compute. We're providing, fast track visas. We're providing any datasets. We're providing government as a customer, so procurement through government. Basically, to give a lot of the companies that could benefit from working with the government a massive boost.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have to say that supercomputer is such an underrated term. Whoever thought to rebrand supercomputer to data center Terrible. Is an idiot. Terrible.
Speaker 2:Because data center sounds so boring and terrible. Futuristic. Supercomputer is awesome.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna take my job.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm supercomputers. I'd love to use a supercomputer. So but It's
Speaker 6:your grandfather's data center. Right? It's the thing supercomputers like what IBM used to build.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And and and they have them in like cool scientific locations like CERN has one and like you always hear about, oh, they're doing astrophysics on them. There's so many cool things. But that does link to, you know, where will The UK get the most leverage out of investing because I imagine that there's not a lot of value in just trying to like clone Google search or Instagram for Europe.
Speaker 2:Like those platforms, it's fine, but at the same time, Sovereign AI does have value. Where in the stack does that live in your mind?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we're building out a whole range of talent. Right? So we're gonna be doing everything from electron to token. But obviously, working with American partners, doing that and international partners as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sometimes at the chip level, sometimes at the model level. And then we're starting to focus on where The UK has huge advantages. So life sciences is a huge area for us. Right?
Speaker 6:If you look at isomorphic, which is actually a spin out of Google, you know, they're based here in London. The whole team basically is European and they may be the closest we get to a AI company getting a drug all the way through to approval. That's sort of end to end AI design. Yeah. Outside of life sciences, loads of stuff in physics and material sciences.
Speaker 6:So a lot of the AI science end of the spectrum rather than the AI slop end of the spectrum.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Pippa, are you seeing are you seeing like a an effect where entrepreneurs from around Europe are moving to London in the same way that folks from Chicago moved to San Francisco to do startups? Like, is there is there a proper movement to make London like the destination for ambitious European founders these days?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think it's you know, I'm obviously fairly biased having spent a lot of of time here, but I think that The UK has always battered above its weight in terms of the deep r and d pockets we have here, you know, in terms of universities, the talent that are coming out of the local schools. That's already created a very fertile ecosystem, and I think that one of the reasons we wanted to jump on here today was because it feels like UK is having a bit of an AI moment. It's not to say that we weren't already at the forefront of many of the innovations happening here. Of course, we always talk about Demis, Hannes Sabes from, you know, DeepMind.
Speaker 10:That was founded in The UK. We would have loved to have kept that here, but of course, it also went with Google. But, you know, we have long been at the forefront I think it's a
Speaker 1:super critical that that they DeepMind maintains such a big presence
Speaker 8:Oh,
Speaker 1:in in The UK because you guys now at the Sovereign AI Fund, if someone wants to Spin out. Leave DeepMind, spin out, like, you guys can be there to provide capital and
Speaker 10:Exactly. And that's what we're we're seeing now. I think both from the idea that we want to be an AI maker, not just an AI taker. We're seeing, you know, grassroots innovation come out of the schools here. But as you say, we're also having people either leave DeepMind, also in terms of our partners across in The US.
Speaker 10:I think, you know, James can correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like a lot of the, you know, the first destination headquarter within Europe is usually in London. I think that that is pretty much most of the large AI companies we've had. So I think that there is definitely it's always been a good hub for AI, but we are seeing a lot of additional tailwinds of which Sovereign AI is one of them at the moment as well.
Speaker 2:We went through this period last year, and I I might still be going on. I don't really have a pulse check on it, where every AI company seed round was in like the hundreds of millions of dollars and I imagine that you're not gonna spread this fund over just five companies and so do you think Now that
Speaker 1:John, it's one
Speaker 2:bet. It's one bet. But I mean, do you imagine being like investing alongside other funds and doing more structured rounds where a lot of capital comes together to take like big swings? Or is there actually some sort of structural shift in the type of startups that are getting built today where $5.10, $20,000,000 can actually put some points on the board early on and get in the game in a meaningful way? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You see that you guys can make a number of bets in the app layer. You can talk about energy, maybe Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a lot
Speaker 1:of different stuff. More science focus. Neo labs Yeah. Maybe Neo Cloud. Like, feel like $5,500 will like really can kind of, like, seed Yeah.
Speaker 1:A bunch of different players. But
Speaker 2:But, yeah, how are you thinking about, like, the dynamics of, like, early stage startup fundraising right now?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, in The UK, actually, we are seeing those $100,000,000 and even Sure. Billion dollar seed rounds now. So there's a rumored billion dollar seed round in a a founder who's at a
Speaker 2:deep mine, which is incredible. Let's go.
Speaker 6:And and there's there's been a bunch of those
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In the last few months, which is great. The fund is actually doing it. They were other way around. So we're saying we're gonna give you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars possibly of government procurement contracts. Right?
Speaker 6:You can build it. If it's good enough, if you are world class, we're the customer. We're ready to buy.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:Same thing with compute. We're able to give a sort of, you know, a significant amount of compute to early stage companies. The quid pro quo is, hey, the taxpayer is taking all this risk backing you. What's our upside? Right?
Speaker 6:We want to be on the cap table. Right? We want to do it on commercial terms. It's, you know, going to be on the same terms as an index, as a bolder turn, as an Excel, as a ACC, Z, whoever's there. We're going to be good partners.
Speaker 6:But the money isn't just about unlocking upside and getting, you know, getting on the cap table. It is is also about helping the companies to some degree. And obviously, you know, still £510,000,000 can make a difference. So I don't wanna be like too flippant about it. You know, those things early stage do matter.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But, you know, we're we're we're here to help the taxpayer get a bit of benefit from all the risk we're taking supporting all the AI companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Pippa?
Speaker 10:I think that's also one of the things that jumped out at me as well as, you know, as a commercial VC, it's hard to compete purely on capital, right, especially in AI right now is where the numbers become so so huge. Yeah. I think that something I've been really excited to see from the sovereign AI fund is is exactly as James said, is this kind of hands on ops help, whether it's how to navigate large datasets that the government may have access to that, you know, portfolio companies will will have have help navigating, whether it be early procurement opportunities, as James said. And then obviously, we're going back to the million GPU hours of compute from the supercomputer, which is, you know, a huge, huge help. So, you know, it's not purely trying to compete going on a capital basis, which I think, you know, frankly would not play to the strengths of of what the fund can do.
Speaker 2:So AI is extremely popular in China and India, deeply unpopular in America. Do you think The UK will land? Do you think there's a chance that that the population broadly will be supportive of artificial intelligence?
Speaker 1:They're like, AI allows me to spend more time at the pub.
Speaker 3:That's the
Speaker 6:way to sell it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 6:Now, look, The UK, we've been pretty, strong in early adopters, almost of every wave of new technology. Right? Whether it's financial services like, you know, paying with this thing, the Brits are way ahead. Earliest adopters of And when it comes to sort of first generation AI tools, your Claudes and GPT, I think The UK is number one or two in Europe for adoption. So so far so good.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But of course, there's loads of issues. You know? I I think that there's gonna need to be some really strong political leadership to explain to people the trade offs between, you know, these things can be transformative, make, you know, your wealth and your health and your security of your nation better off. At the same time, you know, we're gonna need more energy.
Speaker 6:There's a load of issues we need to navigate on online harms and copyright. So some of those battles have been fought publicly. Some of them are still to come.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you you say that there's an opportunity for the government to be a buyer. I think a lot of people jump to defense and military. I'm more interested in in if you're seeing any opportunities in nondefense sector opportunities for efficiency. I feel like, at least in America, everyone laments like the DMV is a huge weight.
Speaker 2:And, like, if they just had a piece of software instead of a physical form, things would speed up. Are you seeing opportunities for startups to increase efficiency across nonmilitary portions of the UK government?
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah. I mean I mean, everywhere. And I think, you know, there's a bunch of businesses here in Europe. I'm sure there are in The US as well Mhmm. Who are using AI for you to complete procurement contracts.
Speaker 6:You know, these, like, 400 page things you have to do. So private companies have been doing that. In response, you know, the UK government at least is already smartly using AI to read them as well and prioritize them. Right? They don't make any decisions, but they help you help you navigate some of these processes.
Speaker 6:Same thing in transcription and voice. Obviously, we're already seeing GPs and doctors benefit hugely from being able to use these tools to quickly take notes and actually look at the patient rather than spend all their time sitting in front of the computer filling out the health records. So, look, there's been some early wins. And I think part of the job at Sovereign AI is to work out which of the companies we should work with and the government to to see where else those wins are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Jordy?
Speaker 1:Super smart. I hope that you can work out, like, on the cap table to just say The United Kingdom. Yeah. Because, like, I feel like as founder, if you just see your country on your cap table, you're like, well I gotta I gotta I gotta
Speaker 2:You gotta deliver. I gotta deliver.
Speaker 1:You gotta deliver. But very cool.
Speaker 10:I think they'll get there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The country is lucky to have you both Working. You know, leading this effort.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by. Have a good rest of your day and we'll talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye, Bye, guys. Bye.
Speaker 2:There's some huge news in the world of robotics because they made a slot machine that can follow you across the casino floor.
Speaker 1:We we actually got a slot machine stalker before a humanoid demo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is before
Speaker 1:I guess not demo.
Speaker 2:Well, this is before it can actually fold your laundry. Like we've been seeing a lot of laundry folding demos. We got the slot
Speaker 1:machine Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or humanoid robot founder to let you alone with the robot for thirty seconds.
Speaker 2:Okay. But what is actually happening here? Because obviously like the joke is that it will follow you around so that you never stop gambling. But that can't be why they actually built this. It must be because they want to be able to reconfigure the layout easier.
Speaker 1:It's probably that but also the novelty.
Speaker 2:Okay. Oh, if you see something moving around.
Speaker 1:You're walking through
Speaker 2:You'll be like, I gotta chase that down and and throw a
Speaker 1:Oh, that's funny.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:Robot slot machine.
Speaker 2:This also looks like I don't know what Novo Matic is, but this does not look like it's this does not look like it's at at an actual casino. This looks like it's at a trade show for casino equipment, which I think might be this is a demo of something that this company is going to try and sell to casinos. I don't know that this is actually at a major casino just yet, although people are walking around. But it looks like it looks like trade show bags to me. I don't know.
Speaker 2:This says trade show all over it. I do wonder if this is being teleoperated or if this is end to end machine learning. I need to know. I need to know the tech stack and I need to know is this is this truly is this truly autonomous or is this just being puppeteered by an Xbox controller?
Speaker 4:Because We gotta get one for the studio.
Speaker 2:We've had we we've had this is not this this could be just a remote a remote controlled car, which has existed since like what the eighties maybe maybe longer. But we're in this we're in this phase where we want to layer on, oh, this is AGI. This is this is truly AGI. What else is going on in the timeline, Jordy? Anything else?
Speaker 2:The must have item in Silicon Valley is a $178 sweater with a CEO's face. Leaders from companies from Nvidia to Palantir are now driving fashion signaling a new era of the cult of the founder. We saw Nick on our team rocking the Jensen sweater from GTC. It looks great. This is a very beautiful
Speaker 3:It does
Speaker 1:look great.
Speaker 2:Funny, very silly. And and just a nice departure from just a normal t shirt. You know, for for what? Twenty, thirty years, the tech the tech merch was just a t shirt with a logo on it. That's fine.
Speaker 2:But why not mix it up? Why not go in a different direction and make a sweater with the CEO's full full cartoon character on it?
Speaker 1:Why not? Dollybolley says is showing a screenshot from, I believe is biz biz buy sell of a laundromat which is selling it's got 421,000 of EBIT. It's asking just under 3,000,000. So getting a better multiple for your laundromat than most than most public SaaS companies out there right now. And it was established in 2024.
Speaker 1:Wow. So they just made this business in a couple years.
Speaker 2:Lifestyle business.
Speaker 1:And they're like, I would like $3,000,000 for it now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Couple more posts. John Fio, friend of the show says the sphere is probably the most important piece of architecture in the last hundred years. It's a hot take. It's what the VR trade was trying to be but manifested in the real world with a real novel experience instead.
Speaker 2:It's what Apple and Meta were trying to go after but failed because they tried to shove it into a scalable box instead of building for real life. A sphere in every major city will be a proprietary technology for a new kind of stadium. It will suck in only the best acts and they'll stop playing regular stadiums. It's the perfect example of mixing real novel tech with real novel life. This is how you capture value over the next cycle.
Speaker 2:And I agree with this. I think this is a great take. Yeah. Back
Speaker 1:rewind to a year ago. Yeah. Like companies are going to announce hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of Nvidia orders. Do you wanna meanwhile, we have the Sphere Yeah. Which they built the Sphere.
Speaker 2:It's it's one concert venue.
Speaker 1:They built they built a really cool concert venue in Vegas. Yep. They got a bunch of debt. But it's awesome. Which one do you which one do you wanna own?
Speaker 1:The Vidia or the Sphere? And of course, on on Nvidia, you were you were still up you know, a 100% over the last twelve months. But if you had bought the Sphere, you were up 442%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did very well. I I made a whole YouTube video about the Sphere two years ago and was pretty bullish on it. Had dug into the founder and how it got built. It was just a fascinating, fascinating story.
Speaker 2:But I think he's right that that there will be a Sphere in every major city. There is technically a Sphere like location in Los Angeles over by SoFi Stadium. It's not technically a full sphere with LEDs on the outside, but it has a big screen. You can go and watch a football game there. And I think it's doing well as well.
Speaker 2:I haven't dug into that one nearly as much, but I do think that these types of like immersive experiences The Sphere is unique because it grabs attention from all over the world. You fly by on a plane, you just see it and you see the emoji
Speaker 1:on It's kind of a miss that we've never done anything with this fear. No. Good place. Last little white pill here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's up? Meta announced Level Up, a free four week training program that takes people with no prior experience and prepares them to work as fiber technicians on data center construction sites across The US. We built this program with CBRE because the fiber technician field and the broader construction industry is facing a nationwide shortage at a time when data center demand is higher than ever. And, I'm sure people will come up with reasons why this is bad actually. But, I think this is I think this is great.
Speaker 1:It's a great opportunity. And Tyler, we didn't get a chance to talk with you about, with talk with you about this before the show, but you're actually gonna be going through the program starting tomorrow. We got you a slot. Fantastic. And so get That seems fun.
Speaker 7:I would
Speaker 4:be interested in doing this.
Speaker 2:It's data center they made data center They simulator in real made data center simulator in real life. That's amazing. Tyler, do you ever play Elden Ring? No. No.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's such a
Speaker 1:good No
Speaker 4:more like online games.
Speaker 2:More on Elden Ring can be online.
Speaker 4:Okay. I don't know.
Speaker 2:You can play with people. They're making a movie about it. The live action adaptation of Elden Ring produced by a twenty four in partnership with Bandai Namco and film for IMAX is slated for release 03/03/2028. Wow. That's a long ways away.
Speaker 2:Production will begin in spring. But if you haven't played Elden Ring, it's a fun time. It's really really hard and sometimes it just gets like a little bit too much. But it's a good time.
Speaker 1:Anyway Well, folks.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning in. We will be
Speaker 1:It's been an honor privilege.
Speaker 2:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for a newsletter at tbpn.com. And Flashbang out. We'll see you later.
Speaker 1:There we go. Going flash bang.
Speaker 2:Going flash We
Speaker 1:love you.
Speaker 2:Goodbye.