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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 07/23/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. El capital. You to Restream for powering this stream. We love Restream.
Speaker 2:Couldn't do the show without them.
Speaker 1:Seriously.
Speaker 2:It's They're a new partner, if you haven't noticed already. We're there in the intro in the fur in the last thirty seconds.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That little cinematic IMAX treatment. We've having a lot of fun with that.
Speaker 1:We realized how dependent we are on them. Oh, yeah. We had a small error at one point that we could not run the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Critical infrastructure But
Speaker 1:one out of a few 100 shows. Yeah. And it was fixed quickly. So
Speaker 2:You know who should get on restream? Apple and f one. That's the story that we're talking about today. We've talked about this before. So f one, fantastic race series.
Speaker 2:We're big fans. But the actual streaming rights to the to the races has been kinda hotly debated. There was an article in the journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80,000,000. And ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it. And we were going And
Speaker 1:they wanted something like 200.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They wanted a lot. And so, the the the stack of content to go through is growing. So we will be we will be thinning out Textbook.
Speaker 2:We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future. But for today, we're going through Let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some some details from reporting The Athletic, which is a New York Times property. Formula one is trending towards choosing Apple for its United States broadcasting rights for our for 2026 onwards. The technology company's bid being in the 120 to $150,000,000 range.
Speaker 4:Market clearing order inbound.
Speaker 5:It's a
Speaker 2:market clearing order. Probably will clear. ESPN has held the rights since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giant's exclusivity negotiation period period expired before February 2025 leading to interest from other
Speaker 1:broadcasters including Netflix and TBPN.
Speaker 5:Yes. We would
Speaker 2:love to.
Speaker 1:We decided to sit it out.
Speaker 2:ESPN has remained in the mix for US broadcasting rights though its bid is lower. Apparently, ESPN's offer is in the $90,000,000 per year range.
Speaker 1:Which is still wild because this is The US broadcasting rights. Yep. And I believe in 2024, Formula One had around 1,000,000 total viewers.
Speaker 2:1.2 1,300,000 race viewers on average per race. Yep. But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says f one on the other hand has a meaningful audience versus MLS, was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal, and and that wasn't growing. So this is six times as big as MLS.
Speaker 2:Yep. But again, there's I think there's more games than or more race more games than races. So it's not exactly Apple to Apple, but every race, but one has seen a year over year increase in viewership. So f one's getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by Drive to Survive.
Speaker 2:And this is the crazy thing. Given when races are televised, usually early Sunday morning, and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN in any meaningful sense, So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee show talking about, oh, you gotta tune in. A ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kinda show up Sunday morning and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can he
Speaker 1:said I would you just like make the timing any any parents out there Yeah. You know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. Yep. Kids wake up. Yep.
Speaker 1:And I find it's it's a nice background noise or viewing in those early hours.
Speaker 2:For sure. And so he says you can make the case that f one makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service. Basically, f one fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I when I was really getting into f one after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay. I'm gonna have to subscribe to f one, the app that like jumped through all
Speaker 5:these hoops.
Speaker 1:That's on your phone.
Speaker 2:And it was yeah. It's it's it's like as many hoops as f as UFC but people still do it. Yeah. And there's still there's still a big debate.
Speaker 1:But anyway And I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers of f one were basically already subscribed to Netflix. Yep. And so it didn't it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an Apple TV potentially that Yeah. That could potentially drive
Speaker 2:new think someone called it a streaming backwater or something like that in here. We'll we'll dig into it. Somebody had some not nice things to say about about Apple TV. Although, I'm a subscriber, and I think it's nice. So he says, makes this is Ben Thompson writing in Street Techery.
Speaker 2:What makes this all work is the fact that for f one races, f one races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F one, at least in The US, has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's drive to survive. Netflix pays f one a pittance for rights, apparently single digit millions for that. But it's okay for f one because the way they ultimately make money is by Kurt converting Netflix viewers into race fans. So if you're f one, you see that as a marketing channel.
Speaker 1:F one has sponsors at the at this sort of league level and also the individual teams. All of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through f one. Yeah. So it's sort of added value to them and they don't have to pay they're actually making money on I
Speaker 2:mean, a consequential I matter. Mean, of course, the sponsorships are like such like three sixty deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other, you know, advertising assets. But I wonder if they broke out, okay, how much lift, how much benefit, how many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive? Would that be when you total up all the all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the for the rights? It might be.
Speaker 2:It might be. Like, there's a lot of people that that see ads that are for specific f one sponsors in
Speaker 1:direction Ramco, like, hundreds of times
Speaker 2:During drive to survive. Exactly. Yeah. It's, like, pretty valuable ad space. So interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money.
Speaker 2:Anyway, making that model work, however, means actually monetizing the races, which means that it actually it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay 30 to $60,000,000 more for those rights. Have to capture value somewhere in the funnel. Moreover, you can make the case that many f one fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is this is where it gets interesting because the cable bundle is shrinking and the the F1 did this global fan survey. So it's their data.
Speaker 2:So Ben Thompson's kind of taken it with a grain of salt, but this is from the F1 global fan survey. They they conducted a study every four years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the sport. They got a 100,000 responses from self identified highly engaged fans in a 186 countries. That's a that's basically all of them. The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern modern fan mindset and show that Formula One is increasingly attracting new, younger, and more female audience with growth in markets such as The United States.
Speaker 2:Gen z is helping shape the rhythm of modern of the modern fandom engaging with the sport more frequently and on a deeper emotional level. Female fans now account for three in four new fans.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:I would not have predicted that. That's very very interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, the drivers are often Chads.
Speaker 5:And I
Speaker 2:can imagine That's what's driving it?
Speaker 1:That that could be part of part of the factor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's also interesting that there there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the in the NASCAR series for a while. But somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through Drive to Survive being more accessible on Netflix, more storylines pulling people in, and they're just going down that funnel.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, there's also the the the the WAG Industrial complex
Speaker 2:surrounding F
Speaker 5:1 Yes.
Speaker 1:That is aspirational lifestyle. Lifestyle.
Speaker 2:Maybe they should do a spin off of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with NBA? Isn't there a a show about like Wags or something like that? Maybe. That's kind of informally what the Housewives series is.
Speaker 2:Right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, fans in The US continue continue to stand out for their growth youth and digital fluency. They over index on content engagement, sponsor responsiveness and daily touch points signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially
Speaker 1:Saudi Aramco is like, why we seem to be getting a lot of female Zoomers. Female Zoomers. Zoomers.
Speaker 5:Oil. Following
Speaker 1:our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this. Yeah. What's happening?
Speaker 2:Maybe. I don't know. So so basically, Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is what what are you what are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers.
Speaker 2:Certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN two and Red Zone and all that stuff. Yeah. That's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience. And so,
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's that's really interesting. Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle oriented sports. Mhmm. These all alternative, you know, you could imagine them doing doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN Yeah.
Speaker 1:Red Zone subscriber.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So he says, could definitely envision a scenario where f one not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service instead of ESPN, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case. Given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a stand alone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle.
Speaker 2:What is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1,300,000 of those current viewers and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend double the money on a sport no one watches, which is MLS. So he's he's taking shots at MLS because there was an interesting quote in here from from something else. What was this?
Speaker 2:It was from The Athletic again talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers, the Apple deal which is Apple's deal to to air MLS is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans.
Speaker 1:Wait. They want the content to be completely free?
Speaker 2:New fans just don't want it on Apple apparently. Or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience apparently. They wanna be on ESPN or something.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Apparently. So the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we wanna grow soccer in America and grow MLS, change the format, change the salary cap.
Speaker 1:Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball or baseball if they
Speaker 2:want? Yeah. What's wrong with just throwing around a pigskin? Yeah. Change the format.
Speaker 2:Just turn it into American football.
Speaker 1:I have to say a football is one of the best things you can buy under $50.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 1:Period.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:That's non non non food. I mean, think the value you can get out of pig skin is
Speaker 2:absolutely insane.
Speaker 5:Hours of fun. The return
Speaker 1:on the return on pigskin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's fantastic. He says allow us to bring more attractive players. I I I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing like massive deals with these like legacy famous
Speaker 1:is the player that went to Galaxy?
Speaker 5:Messi or something? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is that right? I don't know. Well, this is how this is bad because I don't know about I don't know territory. There was somebody who went to Miami. There was someone who went to the LA Galaxy.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anyway, this GM says
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so Massey plays for Inter Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's a huge deal. It's like AI researcher money, remember? That's what we were how we were comping it. And the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for
Speaker 1:fans. Beckham.
Speaker 2:David Beckham.
Speaker 1:Played in the MLS.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And you have Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well. So Mhmm. They'll pull in some superstars but usually towards the end of their runs.
Speaker 2:So so so the GMs of the North American Soccer League, MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on ABC, NBC, Fox or more regularly more regularly because I think a lot of people a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovative innovative, but it's probably where things and it's probably where things will be going, but I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league when you're you're a different league when you're a subscription based league.
Speaker 2:I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are gonna sign up. And so, yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting. The risk for f one is that the series which has massive growth is going to constrict its conscript itself to the streaming backwaters, says Ben Thompson, just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime. So that that's the risk is that f one goes and, you know, gets stuck in subscription land and no one can just turn on the TV and see it. And the 1,300,000 fans don't actually migrate over and they say, I'll just catch the highlights or I'll just watch Drive Just Survive on Netflix. Instead of going set up setting up a new subscription.
Speaker 2:But if it's truly f one truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience, they might be that might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least. Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker 1:I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch f one on YouTube TV which I guess is through Yeah. ESPN. It's like I guess that will go away and then I would have to subscribe to Apple so they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple TV.
Speaker 2:You don't? I don't.
Speaker 1:Okay. Not not for any reason. I just I never wanna I never wanna go through the never wanna go through the I just don't watch a lot of television.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I
Speaker 1:don't wanna go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and it just like came with Apple TV plus and I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe and then I've been on that for a while. But speaking of a new iPhone, we have a challenge for Tyler Cosgrove, the intern at TBPN. We will be giving him a second shot on goal, a second kick of the old field goal If he missed
Speaker 1:it, we bricked his iPhone. He had to upgrade to liquid glass. It's been on its last legs.
Speaker 2:Mark Gurman has some interesting post today. He said, we won. He likes the new revision to liquid glass, the latest and greatest which I think you can't get yet. Break it
Speaker 5:down. No. So I it's mostly because my storage is so low. So I can't so you can't revert back because it's like But
Speaker 2:you also can't go forward.
Speaker 5:I can't go forward because I would have to like delete basically everything on my phone which I guess maybe I could basically clear it and then update and then get stuff back. Okay. But it's I don't know if that would work.
Speaker 2:Well, you're stuck in purgatory and iPhone, iOS purgatory, liquid glass, a liquid glass house. But today, you have the chance to win a new iPhone. If you can get on the leader board for Arc AGI v three, we gave Tyler the chance to prove his humanity and defeat the version three of Arc AGI. This is benchmark for artificial intelligence systems. The whole design is that anyone should be able to do this.
Speaker 2:Any human should be able to achieve to beat these puzzles. Tyler beat them, but we got some benchmark time. We gave him a time constraint. Mike Newpe, the co founder of Zapier who's also the co founder of Arc AGI and behind the lab that's actually pioneering this benchmark Gave me some times. Said fifteen minutes would be super hard.
Speaker 2:Twenty minutes would be reasonable. Twenty five minutes would be very doable. We set it as hard as possible. Fifteen minutes. Tyler came in around twenty five.
Speaker 2:So, but today, redemption is on the line. You get a second shot on goal of winning that iPhone. So what do we say? So the new human benchmark, there's a there's a leaderboard where you can go and do these tests as many times as you want. The first time you do it, it's hard because you have to figure out how the games work.
Speaker 2:But then after that, it becomes kind of kind of a speed run. But the leaderboard is based on efficiency. So how many how few moves can you make? How few actions can you take to solve the puzzles? To be kind of in the top 15 top 20, you have to do it under 600 moves across all three games and that's the challenge for today.
Speaker 2:There's no time limit. You can do this as many times as you want. You can reset. You can try and learn all the different patterns and all the different paths. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How We were worried about
Speaker 5:so I think originally we were gonna do like I had to be in the top 10. Yeah. But then I was little worried about stream snipers Yep. Coming in and you know viewers watching the stream coming in and just going crazy going ham and then I would be out of the top 10. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Beat if I did well.
Speaker 2:So so try and beat it today. Give us give us the bench line, the the the baseline score of how many moves it takes you the first time you go through. And then try and do it again try and become more efficient until you can hopefully cross the 600 move threshold.
Speaker 5:That's right. Get on get on
Speaker 2:the leaderboard. That should be a lot of fun. Alright. And what else is fun? Getting your business on ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. Ramp.
Speaker 2:Ramp. In other news, meme stocks are completely back.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for meme stocks.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for meme stocks. Let's give it up for top signals, baby. We got a bunch of them. So the Wall Street Journal has an article about Kohl's, the discount retailer and then Opendoor, the high flying tech company that was co founded by Keith or Bois.
Speaker 1:Recently more low flying.
Speaker 2:Yes. But got out I think via a SPAC was what was Opendoor's core business? Basically allowing folks to Buying sell and selling homes. Buying and selling homes. And the the stock's been up and down and there's been a lot of discussion over, you know, can they take on Zillow?
Speaker 1:Is this back at 10 at just under $11 a share. Okay. As of a month ago, it was trading at 50¢.
Speaker 2:Okay. So way down.
Speaker 1:So it's still down 7079% since the IPO. But more recently, it's up 300% in the past month. And people seem to be rallying around. I saw people saying, this is an $82 stock all day all day. I don't know why.
Speaker 1:I don't know why that number
Speaker 5:Not a lot of particular
Speaker 2:new c f's going on in meme
Speaker 3:stock Yeah.
Speaker 1:Vibes based analysis.
Speaker 2:It's been It's a proven strategy. Yep. A memeing
Speaker 1:stock. It happens. Crispy crispy cream
Speaker 2:Is also in the conversation.
Speaker 1:With a ticker d nut
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Is up 40% in the past five days. Yeah. So yeah. The the market lot of lot of opportunity out there but the thing that's been interesting is that Buco Capital bloke had a post earlier this morning. He said, Opendoor is down 10% after being down 10% yesterday.
Speaker 1:Krispy Kreme is up 37% after being up 27% yesterday. The meme market is brutal, lightning quick and moving way too frantically between absolute to ever have another stop. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dogs basically.
Speaker 1:So yes, it's it's interesting like this this eagerness from retail just investors broadly to find the next GameStop Yeah. Means that there's an incentive like, you know, if you don't get in before something goes up 300% in a week, there's there's almost this like, there's almost an incentive to just pick a new company Yeah. That has that that potential to to do something.
Speaker 2:I feel like Krispy Kreme in particular was part of the narrative that like GLP ones would destroy that business because people's appetites would be suppressed and so junk food markets would sell off and junk food companies wouldn't do as well. But maybe the meme stock retail traders know something. We don't. Anyway, let's go to the Wall Street Journal. Individual investors are once again loading up on a group of unloved stocks and taking to social media to defend them from haters and the short sellers.
Speaker 2:Meet the cast of the Meme Stock Craze season two. Let's go. A user named hot ticket nine four four zero wrote on a subreddit forum Tuesday as shares of Kohl's, which is down 17% when I took the screenshot.
Speaker 1:That's down 15% today.
Speaker 2:The department store chain surged by nearly 40%. Max Payne on the shorts, buy every dip. Together, we strong, said hot ticket nine four four zero. Open has GameStop vibes written all over it. SkipTradeless wrote Tuesday on X of Opendoor Technologies.
Speaker 1:Which is down 23%.
Speaker 2:23% today, but it was up yesterday, I guess. Real estate platform. It's a real estate platform. And in all caps, we won't stop until $82, which I don't know how that was picked, but we'll we'll find out.
Speaker 1:It's a nice nice number.
Speaker 2:Shares of Kohl's and Opendoor have rocketed highly higher recently. So have other oddball stocks including QuantumScape, a maker of batteries for electric vehicles, and Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing firm that we talked to Martin Scrella about. The the their recent rise and the cult followings they have inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and the original meme stocks that caught fire in the aftermath of the pandemic when interest rates were near zero and the market's rally was underway. What's interesting is, like, it was very clear to trace the origins of the meme stock craze. It was like you had social media had fully arrived.
Speaker 2:Had low interest rates, and then you had stimulus checks going. Yep. And there was a whole cottage industry of influencers and YouTubers who basically they made content around when will the when will the checks get delivered? When will the stimulus checks get delivered? How will you get how can you get your stimulus check sooner?
Speaker 2:People were googling for that. People were searching for that. And you would make a video explaining, okay, they're in the mail now. And people were just so interested to know when the money was coming and making sure that it would go to the right address. And that they were set up to get it because it's free money.
Speaker 2:You don't want to just lose out on it. Right? And so people made those videos and then the natural evolution was, well, now that you have the money, what do you do with it? And then they were making financial recommendations, financial advice. Right?
Speaker 2:And they made a ton of money and they got really really big and there were some of them that were making like five videos a day breaking down, you know, all every different what you should do in Tesla, what you should do in GameStop. And so, there like the precursor was very was very was a very clear trend and also retail hadn't gotten burned in a while, I feel like. It was just like like all of the precursors were very clear. And now, I don't I'm having trouble constructing like the narrative around why this is happening again, other than maybe this is just like, it's just going to be cyclical forever. But anyway, their recent rise and the cult followings they inspired on social media are reminiscent of GameStop, the original meme stocks.
Speaker 2:Younger individual investors congregated on online stock picking forums to share their triumphs and losses and found every found a common enemy in the professional investors who were betting against their favorite stocks. Now, with stocks at records, the economy staying resilient and corporate earnings beating expectations. Netflix beat earnings, by the way. And we should expect that basically every tech company is going to beat earnings because the dollar is weak. And so and and so if you have a large portion of your business outside of The United States, you will see very strong earnings results this quarter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, one unfortunate thing for the meme stock movement is that Besant said this morning that Trump's not gonna fire Powell. Mhmm. And so the poly there's Jerome Powell
Speaker 2:Is it Paul Howard?
Speaker 1:Fed chair in '25.
Speaker 2:What does it say?
Speaker 1:Is sitting at 18% now, dropped on that news.
Speaker 5:What did it peak at?
Speaker 1:Peaked It at 20 was at 20
Speaker 2:So four it never went above 50%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it was at 24% and and it had been rising kind of week over week.
Speaker 2:I mean, that was a crazy It
Speaker 1:dropped on that note.
Speaker 2:Crazy time when the Jerome Powell stuff I didn't see that much real evidence. We talked to Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg about this a little bit, but it was a full core press by the financial media and the financial institutions to say like, do not do this. I remember opening up the Wall Street Journal one day and like there were five different articles from you know, news reports of big bank CEOs commenting on the record, hey, don't fire the Fed chair. Let's Fed independent. There were op eds saying that about the value of Fed independence that we shouldn't lose this.
Speaker 2:And then when we talked to Joe Weisenthal, he he also said, you know, it's like it it it is somewhat un American to not have an independent Fed. But then of course there are people on the other side of the debate. But if if Jerome Powell's staying around, what does that mean? Rates stay high and so we should see less froth in meme stocks in in theory. I don't know exactly how it works through the system, but but, you know, like I would imagine that it's harder to borrow on margin, harder to get more leverage, like all all these different things are functions of interest rates being higher.
Speaker 2:So, you see all these into these quote, you see all these indicators where this is full blown me mania, said Brent Kochuba, founder of derivatives data firm Spot Gamma. Opendoor was traded under $1 as recently as last week began to take off after social media users rallied around the company. Then hedge fund manager Eric Jackson said in a July 14 post on X that his firm EMJ Capital has taken a position in the stock. Opendoor notched six consecutive sessions of double digit percentage gains following his endorsement, and the shares are up 439% in a month. And look at that stock chart.
Speaker 2:Look at that. It is complete line just directly up.
Speaker 1:And of course, Keith, Riboy
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:good. Was absolutely loving it. Yep.
Speaker 2:You don't get 100 baggers without upset stomachs. This is Jackson, not Keith. But when you spot one early with almost no one else watching, that's when the magic happens.
Speaker 1:And so this was a guy that was doing a little bit of a general solicitation as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, is that guy?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2:38 year old educator in California says he began scooping up shares of Opendoor last month when it was trading under $1 a share. This is Melvin Berientos. He says he sold all his shares options tied to Opendoor over the past week and pocketed a roughly $3,000 profit. Put options
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:For the right to sell a stock at a set price. Barry Antos says he is always on the hunt for beaten down stocks and has traded meme stocks like AMC and Carvana before, often loading up on thousands of shares before selling them when they rally. He says he plans to sell more open door puts if the shares continue tumbling. And shares of open door fell 10% to $2.88 on Tuesday. It just happens by luck.
Speaker 2:Kohl's revenue is another example being battled
Speaker 1:What's your investment strategy?
Speaker 2:It's just luck. Luck. Luck. Make your own luck. Well, I feel like there's some great wisdom out there about luck.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't I wouldn't True. Doesn't feel like true mania since this guy's not saying I just quit my job Yep. To become a day trader.
Speaker 2:Yep. I don't know. It's very, very interesting. So meme stock traders are often talking are often target companies that are highly shorted like Kohl's and GameStop before it hoping to induce a so called short squeeze. Short sellers bet against companies.
Speaker 2:If the stock starts rising instead, short sellers may need to buy their shares back to exit from the losing trade a cycle that creates even more demand and can send shares soaring. The frenzy continued on Wednesday. Shares of GoPro soared 57. Krispy Kreme, which you mentioned, jumped 20% despite no clear GoPro,
Speaker 1:I mean, I love when they just pick an awesome company like GoPro.
Speaker 2:GoPro is a sweet company.
Speaker 1:Making cool cameras for doing cool stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How can you not love that? Yeah. It is interesting because yeah AMC and game and GameStop were very much like nostalgia plays. Whereas, Opendoor doesn't really fit that template of I feel like a lot of the GameStop supporters were also supportive of the idea of getting back to a world where you can go and buy a video game from a local store.
Speaker 2:And that just being like a fun childhood memory. I remember as a kid riding my bike to GameStop to pick up a new n 64 game
Speaker 1:or I love how there's there's somebody out there that's just like has that mentality of just buy buy the stocks of the companies you love. And they're like, well I love Krispy Kreme Yeah. And I love GoPro Yeah. Because I love doing some cool stuff filming it and having and treating myself with some donuts.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they think they're a genius investor not realizing And
Speaker 2:I mean, every once in a while things do get oversold. There's there's there's plenty of examples of companies that have been trading like below cash for some reason and it's a function of various lockups. And then the company kind of goes into wartime mode and rebuilds and does come out of it and and builds back up. And that and that does happen, especially post the end of ZERP, post the SVB crisis. There were a lot of companies that were just truly oversold, and they and they were able to come back, usually because they're founder led and the founders stuck stuck it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's lots of options being traded on Opendoor, Nvidia, Apple. And Opendoor is has over 3,000,000 option contracts that changed hands on Monday, almost as much as the S and P 500. Wow. With a market capitalization around 2,000,000,000, Opendoor is a member of the Russell two thousand small cap index.
Speaker 2:The fact that open more Opendoor options traded Monday than contracts tied to NVIDIA, The $4,000,000,000,000 behemoth was unusual. That's pretty much unheard of, Heisinger said, founder of options data platform Quant Data. And that trading increase obviously wasn't tied to fundamentals. It was a speculative squeeze. And so, there's a very funny article in Bloomberg from Matt Levine.
Speaker 2:He's a fantastic columnist and a This fantastic is taking it one step further. We're getting into meme stock treasuries at this point. Okay. So, he says, well, the other day I wrote and if you're not already subscribed to Matt Levine over at Bloomberg, you gotta get on Money Stuff. It's a great newsletter that you can get in your email inbox you subscribe to Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:Well, the other day I wrote that the crypto treasury strategy trade is very good, but but saturated. The US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. So lots of companies have acquired Bitcoin to make their stock go up, but the returns are diminishing. Companies have moved on to other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana, and and BNB, and Trump coin, but they are running out of space. And he wrote, if you want to do this trade now, you might wanna try something else.
Speaker 2:Maybe the stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of blank, you think. And where what goes in the blank is one, big and attention getting, two, relatively liquid, so you can buy it incrementally as money comes in and market to market as the price goes up. And three, somewhat crypto adjacent in spirit, but four, not a big obvious crypto token. And so
Speaker 1:What are what would the you what would be exciting? One of one Ferrari's class you know, classic?
Speaker 2:Ferrari treasuries?
Speaker 1:Ferrari treasury? There's something there.
Speaker 2:Something there. Is that sounds like something we Yeah. Would do as a And it will will actually happen in the market in a few in a few years. Maybe, someone should buy that McLaren collection.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:That's a good treasury.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:You got an original f one.
Speaker 1:Trying to think what else is what else is Send a big and attention getting and relatively liquid.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Well, his example is MicroStrategy. So he says, I feel like someone should try a micro strategy treasury strategy. Like you take over a small public company and you announce that you're raising 200,000,000 to buy micro strategy stock. Maybe that would be worth 400,000,000.
Speaker 2:And he says, I'm an idiot. But there's one obvious answer and I'm ashamed that I missed it. Quantum Biopharma found it.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:A biopharmaceutical dedicated to innovative therapies for neurodegenerative disorders today announced the purchase of 2,000 shares of GameStop to hold on the This company's sheet a strategic move aligns with Quantum BioPharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategies True.
Speaker 5:That's and
Speaker 2:advocacy against manipulative trade practices. Well, whatever your plan is, you're gonna need to design a graphic for it. You're gonna need to get on figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma designs helps design and development teams build great products together.
Speaker 2:Get started for free at figma.com. We
Speaker 1:have Yeah. An interesting Yeah. They hold Bitcoin
Speaker 2:They do.
Speaker 1:On their balance sheet.
Speaker 2:They do. I don't think that's because It wasn't
Speaker 1:It was it was more I think it was more like prudent treasury management Yep. And wanting to be diversified. Dylan's been a big believer in in crypto for a long time.
Speaker 5:I actually held But
Speaker 1:the mark when the s one came out and people saw that, everybody was pretty I
Speaker 2:actually held Bitcoin on the balance sheet of my first company when Bitcoin was
Speaker 1:Oh, because you guys had you were accepting We were
Speaker 2:accepting it through Coinbase. We had an integration where you could pay, but it was complicated because customers would pay in Bitcoin and then if the price of Bitcoin went down, they would ask for a refund. And if the price of Bitcoin or if the price of Bitcoin went up, they would ask for a bit a refund in the Bitcoin that they paid. If they So there's effectively the use your refund policy as a hedge and so if if the price of Bitcoin went down, they could like sell the product and then buy more Bitcoin with it. It was just like very very messy.
Speaker 2:But we wound up holding some Bitcoin on the balance sheet but we eventually sold it way too early obviously. And we also paid out a bonus to people. I think everyone everyone at Christmas got 5 Bitcoins.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 5:Easy to
Speaker 2:think about now. Wow. Was like $5 back then. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Anyway. Let's tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. I wish I had graphite back in the day.
Speaker 2:You can go to graphite.dev to
Speaker 1:I had graphite back in the day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, Matt Levine goes on 2,000 of shares of GameStop is like $50,000 which isn't gonna move the needle even on a $72,000,000 public company. The stock was down this morning but good effort.
Speaker 1:Good effort.
Speaker 2:So, he says, the simple way to think about exchange traded funds is that an ETF
Speaker 1:See, that would be Yep. If they added $50,000 worth of GameStop to their to their balance sheet and then the stock moon Yeah. Mooned, that would be true mania in my book. Right? Oh, totally.
Speaker 1:The day trader, the the educator who's day trading
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Options, quitting his job and you gotta have adding, you know, $50,000 of GameStop triple your stock price. To me, that's
Speaker 2:is so little. I mean, what yeah. What is the why did they do this? Like, what what is the is it just to get a press release? Just to get mentioned in
Speaker 1:Matt Well, John, it obviously aligns with Quantum Bio Pharma's ongoing commitment to combating market corruption and enhancing shareholder value through prudent financial strategy and advocacy against manipulative trading practices.
Speaker 2:How does this combat market corruption?
Speaker 1:They're making a statement, John.
Speaker 2:They're making a statement, I suppose. Anyway, there's no way that should there's no better way to make a statement than getting on Banta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Banta trust management platform. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're gonna talk about Hitting the gong this in just a little bit. Banta raised Banta raised some new money that was announced today and we will have Christina on a little bit later to break it down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, this this newsletter from Matt Levine is fantastic, but I'll let you go and subscribe and read it. We can move on to Wall Street Journal talking about Amazon. Amazon has launched a new or they they they bought an AI wearable that kind of flew under the radar. This is the b
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you ever have you ever heard of this company?
Speaker 2:I hadn't heard of it. I feel like I've heard of most of them but only the ones that kinda went viral. So the Humane Pen I followed. The Rabbit r one I followed. The the Friend I followed.
Speaker 2:And then obviously the Sam Altman Johnny Ive project IO which we don't know what it is. Might be a wearable, might be a phone. Don't know. I feel like there's been a lot of conflicting reporting about what they're actually building but there's a of stuff there and there's something coming. And then obviously, we've talked to the the founder of Whoop and other wearables and I'm aware of Fitbit.
Speaker 2:That's kind of in the legacy space. Apple has the Apple Watch. Now Amazon has the BAI bracelet that listens to your conversations throughout the day and automate automatically adds action items from those chats to to a to do list.
Speaker 1:So it might suggest, it'll it'll create a suggested to do for you on their website. It says, go grocery shopping for the week as one. Two is actually on their site says, send a Figma link of the work discussed
Speaker 5:to a
Speaker 1:team and three establish a daily routine to take a establish a routine to take a daily walk. And it gives you reflections and insights and the example they give on the site is you're adapting your parenting approach during wife's absence by creating special moments around routine activities like swim class. Not a bad reminder turn that swim class into a special moment.
Speaker 2:Do they have linear integration? The purpose built tool for planning products? You can use system for modern software development.
Speaker 1:I would get a b band
Speaker 2:if to help you streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. That'd be great. They should go to linear.app. Anyway, it's funny. After a decade of Amazon saying Alexa isn't listening to your every word, the company is buying a bracelet that can listen to your every word.
Speaker 2:Uh-oh. Let's go.
Speaker 1:The tin
Speaker 2:foil hats on. Bees wearable transcribes all the conversations in your day including when you talk to yourself. Then it uses artificial intelligence to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history offering up key events and even to do list based on your chatter. So interesting. Obviously, there's a big pushback on this from privacy perspective.
Speaker 2:Do you trust Amazon? I tend to trust Amazon on this stuff. The the bigger question is like, if I see you wearing one, are you gonna get the glass hole phenomenon? Do you remember that with the Google Glass thing? That seem we seem to have a long past that.
Speaker 2:So Google launched Google Glass back in twenty twelve ish, something like that. And it was just a it was just a pair of glasses with the camera on it. And you could take pictures. Very a direct precursor to the Meta Ray Bans, although it did have a heads up display. It was very small in the corner.
Speaker 2:You could kind of look up, and the and the basic, you know, use cases they were pitching were things like, turn by turn directions. If you're on a bike, you don't need to pull out your phone. You can get Google Maps integrated. Google was working on this for a while. Then eventually, it kind of got sunsetted.
Speaker 2:It was it was very there's this famous picture of Marc Andreessen in in the Google Glass, and a lot of people were very excited about it. It seemed like the the the era of augmented reality was on the horizon. Didn't really pan out that way that way. They pivoted to b to b or enterprise and the idea was like, okay, maybe if you're on a factory line, you could have instructions, work instructions pulled up there. That never really panned out either and they kinda sunset it.
Speaker 2:And it kinda went the way of the Microsoft HoloLens where there was some amazing r and d that was done, some amazing engineering. Yeah. But they never crossed the chasm, never got past the early adopters. And so but during that time, it was one of the first major backlashes against like the Silicon Valley tech bro. So people were wearing these because they were yeah.
Speaker 2:There's Marc Andreessen wearing the Google Glass, one of the prototypes.
Speaker 1:Looking sharp.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And interestingly, kinda solves the problem of are these sunglasses or are these indoor glasses like they're just it's not glasses. So you can wear it indoor or outdoor and I guess you could put sunglasses over the top of that more or less. But never really got adoption. And there was there was this I think like some sort of instance where a tech person was wearing them in a bar and someone came up to them and was like, I don't want you taking pictures of me.
Speaker 2:I don't want you recording me in public. Get that off of here. And it caused this kind of culture war issue and the and the and the portmanteau that became popular was glass hole.
Speaker 5:As you can imagine And what that
Speaker 2:so people were very upset about this and like, I don't want you taking pictures. Now we're kinda blown past that where everyone has a phone on them that could be recording you, and everyone's taking out their phone all the time taking pictures. And there's just kind of, you know, Emily Sundberg was talking about in the Hamptons how there's so many TikTokers around taking video of everything. You you can't even leave with another man's wife as she put it. Right?
Speaker 2:And so the such a funny phenomenon. But but I mean, it was funny because she said that and then a week later, the Coldplay concert happened and that went mega viral and that's of course the product of technology. That's a product of the fact that everyone is filming. There is going to be someone filming every screen at every moment. And so
Speaker 1:At a of
Speaker 2:that It wasn't like something happened and then the one person that has a camera needs to be like, oh I should take a video of that and post it. It's
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 2:There were after a while once it went viral, there were other camera angles that came out because other people were also filming at the same time. Now not everyone was but you put a 100,000 people together. They're gonna be filming everything at all at all at all all times, all the angles. Obviously, very beneficial when something disastrous happens. You have a lot of you have a lot of coverage to figure out what happened.
Speaker 2:But in in other cases, it is somewhat of an invasion of privacy, all sorts of things. And so long story short, we kind of blew past that. There hasn't been a pushback on the Meta Ray bans. People wear them, and there hasn't been
Speaker 1:any Don't they have like a light
Speaker 2:that lets you know if it's it's recording. Yes.
Speaker 1:I think it's good.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so that was kind of where the technology resolution landed. Yeah. Now, meta ray bans aren't the most popular product, but there's certainly plenty of people that daily drive them and they're not getting, you know, aggressively yelled at for being like meta ray band holes or whatever. That meme is dead.
Speaker 2:And people just kind of assume that if I'm out in public, someone might take a picture of me with their phone or their meta ray bands. Like, it's just something that happens now. And we've just been normalized.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and anytime these wearable pendant bracelet things have popped up Yeah. People's immediate thought is, okay. So you're recording every conversation that you're having Yep. And that's being indexed Yep.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're getting transcriptions
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:Is that suddenly if if if somebody sues you Yep. Can can do you have to provide that you know as part of a lawsuit Yep. That you can imagine the kind of problems that that would cause. We should have so so Avi from friend.com Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's starting they're starting to ship their product on So July just a week from now. And I'm sure I'm sure he has some way that he's addressing that. But Yep. Bee is interesting. The company was started just under three years ago
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:By some former Twitter employees actually Really? Back when it was called Twitter. So, the CEO Maria and
Speaker 2:Twitter and Bee both like flower adjacent animals. I'm seeing a trend here. I like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I can see it.
Speaker 2:So Maria DeLorde Zolo said the company which imagines a world where AI is truly personal is joining Amazon in a LinkedIn post. An Amazon spokeswoman said that while the deal is signed, the agreement isn't yet closed. For Amazon, it's a small move in a potentially huge future market. I saw the bracelet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was interesting. I think the pricing strategy here was smart. The device, they they sold it for $49.99. So just clearly trying to sell these to as many people as possible and then I'm sure there's a subscription component to it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There there is something about the the the price point. And even though even though when the iPhone was released, it was like $600. It was very expensive.
Speaker 1:People Oh, and they actually haven't shipped any product yet.
Speaker 2:OBE hasn't?
Speaker 1:So so they they're shipping in
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And they were we're shipping in in February. Well Or sorry.
Speaker 2:September. So when they ship, will they have to pay sales tax? Or what should they use for
Speaker 1:that? Definitely. I would I would strongly recommend Numeral.
Speaker 2:Numeralhq.com. Sales they could put their sales tax in autopilot. They could spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. That would be amazing. Anyway, so they did send a demo to Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:She was impressed with how useful the bracelet was, but she wasn't sold on the privacy trade offs rather than saving audio. Bee only keeps a transcription but still the creep factor is high says the journal. We have long had listening devices in our pockets in our homes. For many, Amazon's Echo speaker was the first.
Speaker 1:It is it is kind of funny. Somebody, you know, let's say somebody, a friend comes over to your house and, you know, they've got their bee bracelet on. Yep. And then, they take it off at some point sitting on a table. Yep.
Speaker 1:And you're like, wait, there's, you know, let's say you're having a pool party.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:You're sitting at the table. We're sitting like this. So the the the person, the bee owner is off doing something else. If they actually get like a perfect transcription
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:They actually get recommendations. Yeah. It's like, hey, so and so is talking behind your back Yeah. For about thirty minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The mangoes he brought to the pool party, totally rotten.
Speaker 1:Totally rotten.
Speaker 2:Wow. Really laps Won't attention to be invited to the next pool party.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Until your bee is like, okay. So you really need to work on your mango selection going into the next party.
Speaker 2:Your friends were roasted behind your point.
Speaker 1:It's really a weak point for you. Yeah. That's good. That could that could be valuable.
Speaker 2:Think I think people are gonna have to fill out the apology form to all the schizophrenics out there who've been like, everything's listening to me. Because like, well, yes. In fact everything is listening to you.
Speaker 1:I think if if Meta if Meta could if Meta could have bought a company like this and said and said for $50 a month Yeah. We'll pay you $50 a month to listen to everything they
Speaker 2:say and give you
Speaker 1:better ad targeting. I bet Meta could make it back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I I do think the price point is like super, super key to getting the install base down. John Carmack was talking about with VR. What was he saying? Like, a 100 grams, a $100 for a VR headset.
Speaker 2:That's when you're gonna get everyone to buy them. And then there's gonna be such a big install base that everyone will wanna build on top of it. And that's when, you know, the the when the when the iPhone came out at $600, it was so expensive. It was such a luxury good, but everyone had a phone at that time. The phones were just heavily subsidized by the by the phone plans, and the phone plans had started at, $10 a month, $30 a month, and kind of worked their way up to a $100 a month.
Speaker 2:The phones were really only, a couple $100. So if you lost it, it wasn't that big of a deal. And like slowly, it had worked its way up from the bottom. It I mean, wireless phone, cell phones used to be a luxury. It took two decades probably from the eighties to go from the big DynaTAC all the way down to the Motorola Razr v three, which was like pretty much, you know, affordable to many families.
Speaker 2:We give them to their high school kids. Right? Yeah. And then so when the iPhone came out, there was already this install base of people who expected to be able to make phone calls sell you over the cellular network and then also text each other. And then the internet browsing was like kind of a nice to have extra feature.
Speaker 2:I remember someone had a really fancy, I think it was like a a Nokia or something or it was some sort of other phone that had a very primitive web browser on it about like two years before. Was really expensive because you had to buy a data plan too. But I was like, oh man, like the ability to access the Internet, like that's that that's such a killer feature. And so I I definitely could imagine world where, you know, you have to get these products just so cheap that everyone's buying them, wearing them. They're just baked into everything and then you can scale up to something that's more premium.
Speaker 1:Just seems we're so far past the Siri Alexa personal assistant shopping assistant rivalry. Yeah. But it makes sense for Amazon to try to get back in the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder, do you think do you think OpenAI could could kind of come out with an Alexa competitor that would do well?
Speaker 1:I mean, they are arguably already have.
Speaker 2:Which is
Speaker 1:It's just, I mean, ChatGPT. Yeah. I would say you use, specifically, use ChatGPT as like voice memo. Yes. Say like, you kind of talk through what you're thinking Totally.
Speaker 1:What you wanna do Yeah. And then it condenses it Yeah. Nicely. It's not taking a bunch of actions Yeah. Like being like, hey, I wanna make I I can see in the future where you're like, hey, wanna make a I wanna cook my wife a nice dinner in in this theme.
Speaker 1:Can you put together an ingredient list and order all the ingredients and have it home by 5PM.
Speaker 2:That's very very gentic. I I just imagine. I talked to somebody who said that they often leave or their their wife leaves Chatuchupty open in the in the conversational mode when they're just hanging out and then you can just like it it it won't chime in unless you actually act ask it a question and it will kind of know that, okay, now you're talking to me. Yeah. But it doesn't have a specific wake word.
Speaker 2:So it's just like a third party in the conversation. Felt very sci fi. Very very futuristic. I don't know. Anyway, so now, is interested in a wearable device that's always listening always listening, no wake word needed.
Speaker 2:So, has reminded us for years that its voice activated speakers only start listening when they hear the wake word even if you didn't necessarily utter it.
Speaker 1:But, they would, if you've had an Alexa in your home ever, it certainly will wake up when it'll hear something incorrectly
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pop on all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so, very interesting to see what they're thinking about here. B is one of a growing pack of AI gadgets out there. Google has Pixel earbuds that put Gemini AI in your ear. Meta Ray Bans, of course.
Speaker 2:We talked about Samsung recently showed up showed off Gemini infused Galaxy devices. Apple has been slower on the uptake. But remember we were hearing that reporting from Mark Gurman that Amazon or Apple was working on like a robotic arm or something like that? Something that like would sit on your table or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2:They had some sort of like robotics device like in the Yeah. Far road map.
Speaker 1:Apple's always I mean, I I I do believe that Apple works on a trim what what you see even leaks from Apple Yeah. Still like 5%.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. There's tons of
Speaker 2:hacking stuff. Under the surface. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Meta had an announcement today for a wearable device. Yeah. So I'll read their post. They said, imagine controlling your devices with a subtle hand or finger gesture.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Our cutting edge research turns intent and muscle signals into seamless computer control. This breakthrough risk technology is redefining how we interact with computers, intuitive, precise and ready for the future. And they I believe they released an entire study around this as well. We actually got a chance to take a demo
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of this. It was very cool earlier this year. I'm not sure how much we can actually say on it for now. But but yeah. So they they had they did an entire study as well around a generic non invasive neuro motor interface for human computer interaction.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah, the the team has it pulled up here. Yeah. You can see like you can click by going like this. You can scroll in different ways. And when we used it, it was extremely it was extremely intuitive.
Speaker 1:Like you needed to It took about thirty seconds to figure out
Speaker 5:how it was.
Speaker 2:Scrolling motion was particularly cool. Yeah. That was something I hadn't experienced with the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:And this is one of the ways in which Meta imagines integrating making something like a pair of glasses as functional as a phone or a computer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This was an acquisition too. So Meta bought Control Labs to bring this wristband into the company. That was a deal reportedly between 500,000,000 and a billion dollars. It's been six years now, and now they're starting to test it even further. What's interesting is that the Apple Vision Pro was pretty good at hand detection.
Speaker 2:And I feel like this is maybe one of those like Elon versus Waymo debates about like Yeah. You can do it with a camera. Like, you can see that I'm doing this. You can see that I'm giving you a thumbs up. You If you can see, the computer should be able to see with a camera.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and it's just a matter of getting the right training data, building the bright model, and then rolling that out. Yeah. So it should be doable from a from a pure software perspective, but it was nice when you put on the glasses and you put the control wristband behind your you didn't have to have it in view. Yeah. And so You
Speaker 1:could have your hand in your pocket and still be controlling.
Speaker 2:And that was a big part of the weight of the Apple Vision Pro was that it has cameras not just looking out this way, but also looking down to see your hands. So but if your hands are behind your back but it's such a weird niche use case. I feel like I could just get used to having my hands on
Speaker 1:the getting people to adopt effectively two new devices Yep. Is also Yeah. Not necessarily easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Putting on a wristband. I mean, if you put a watch on it, you put, you know, you make it part of the daily wear. The the big question is like Apple's getting so strong with the Apple Watch. Like, the ecosystem feels like if it really starts clicking the Apple Vision Pro can key off the watch and it just gets so much better if you have the watch on and you're like, okay, well yeah, I'll get the watch then to throw that on.
Speaker 2:But obviously that's no substitute for Patek Philippe or an Audemars Piguet. So you gotta head over to Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch, go to getbezel.com. But I don't know I don't know exactly how it will play out.
Speaker 2:It feels like you need maybe both. It'll it's still like it adds cost. I I feel like the I'm still in the camp of make the headsets light and cheap and give people the the ability to replace their TV. Like and then a a few other things that they can do. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they have to replace Not
Speaker 1:not a daily driver coming with you everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's so many people that build, you know, like, okay. I got three Apple Pro displays or three studio displays. I mean, look right there. We got we got six displays in the in the production suite.
Speaker 2:Like, in theory, that could be replaced with VR headsets.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and and you can have unlimited displays and reconfigure them you need on the fly.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And for a lot of people, especially if you're traveling, college student, a smaller apartment, you know, instead of a big 60 inch TV and a bunch of monitors for your desk setup and this and that, you just have one headset. But it's gotta be light. Gotta be able to wear it for a really long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's go and check-in with Europe. We have a post here Okay. Kai. He says, normalize sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything.
Speaker 1:And superstar poster Jira tickets says impressive. Very nice. Now let's see the GDP. Good to flag. There's a real cost to sitting outside the cafe all day and not really doing anything seven days a week.
Speaker 2:These guys look these guys look very retired though. Yeah. And I feel like
Speaker 1:Let them sit outside the cafe in peace but shouldn't be an invitation for you to do the same thing.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I I I think you flip this around and you phrase it as you're holding court. People come to you. You set up you set up shop.
Speaker 1:Holding court is underrated.
Speaker 2:Holding court is extremely underrated. You gotta just set up, you know, hey, you wanna come pitch me your startup? I'll be outside of this cafe all day long.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have a we have a friend of the show, media mogul
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Who holds court at a at a certain hotel in LA and he doesn't have to doesn't really have to leave all day long. Sure. They just, you know, he's there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 1:And they come to him. It's a fantastic way of doing business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, if you're struggling with a bunch of inbound emails to your support team, get fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in
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Speaker 2:This seems extremely dangerous. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? You just look at
Speaker 2:It's a tough yeah. It's like we wanted yeah. We wanted flying cars. We got them. And now terrified of them.
Speaker 2:And I don't necessarily want to go for a ride on this. It seems really fun. It seems like at the in the same territory as like wing suiting. Like as a kid, I was like, I'm definitely gonna become a pro wing suit. No doubt.
Speaker 2:Put me in.
Speaker 1:Put me in.
Speaker 2:Like, give me the Red Bull livery on my wingsuit. I'm a 100% doing it. And then, looked at the actual stats of how dangerous wingsuiting is and was like, I will never be wingsuiting. I will be watching Red Bull videos of wingsuiting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Leave it to the the red the Red Bullers.
Speaker 2:Do you even make this safe? This is
Speaker 1:So they're calling it the air bike.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's very cool that they built this. Very, very, very cool. I wonder I wonder how it commercializes. I wonder, like, where does this go?
Speaker 2:What use case is it?
Speaker 5:I mean
Speaker 1:It's also crazy on the on the link. I I have no idea who's building this on the LinkedIn. Yeah. It has one guy on it. Okay.
Speaker 1:And Tomas And it seems like where is this? Wonder if he's in Poland. Okay. He's apparently the only person working on this company.
Speaker 2:Solo dev. Solo preneur.
Speaker 1:Okay. So he he's also the founder of Jetson which is the EV tall company.
Speaker 2:Okay. So he built this on the side Little
Speaker 1:little side Built a speeder bike.
Speaker 2:He's in Poland. I wonder if there's a defense tech application.
Speaker 1:There's off anytime you can put something in the air and make it move fast
Speaker 2:there's usually mean if you're worried about a minefield and you need to get from one place to another maybe this is a good way to get around. And if you're really trained because you're in the military you're not just some casual person going for a flight like could be safer than trying to walk through a minefield. True. Of course, like you are a pretty big target up there. It looks like he's wearing some sort
Speaker 1:of mask. Yeah. Mean the way to think about this is this is a you could also imagine this as a drone. Right? There doesn't need to be a human on it.
Speaker 1:So it's it's powered by jet propulsion. Okay. It's designed to carry one person at speeds up to a 124 miles
Speaker 2:an hour. That's so fast.
Speaker 1:And what what makes it possible is they have the stabilization system
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Onboard flight computer. Yep. And and anyways, I mean, this looks like a beautiful future. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's just like how how safe does it need to get until I'll be ripping one of these from Malibu into the into the studio at
Speaker 5:I the
Speaker 2:don't even ride a motorcycle. So I don't know. I'm I'm more likely to go to the moon I think than than rip around on one of these. It seems like it it you have to
Speaker 1:Very doom pill, John. You don't think they can
Speaker 2:Maybe they it so so safe that it's that it's you know flyable by anyone certifiable by anyone. It's it's just so easy to drive that you know there's no risk then yeah maybe I'd give it a try. It looks rare very fun. It does look very fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One one solution is it is is it becomes like fully autonomous and you don't have this sort of like human saying I'm gonna I'm gonna take this turn
Speaker 5:then this little a drone, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But still be cool that you could ride on. Okay. That would take you around to places. Then
Speaker 2:you're just back in eVTOL territory. Right? I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I guess this is not eVTOL because it's not electric motors. It's jet propulsion.
Speaker 1:But imagine when this thing gets to the point where you can just like fly it up a mountain.
Speaker 2:That will be crazy.
Speaker 1:You're gonna be able to take these skiing?
Speaker 2:Just everyone's waiting in line at Everest and you're just bombing up to the top.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're just like taking it out in the mountains.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Again, it's like we kinda do have flying cars in the form of helicopters. Right? Just like not not evenly distributed. It's gonna be fun when they start selling these things.
Speaker 2:They're gonna get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have a feeling you're not gonna be able to just order one of these on the website anytime soon.
Speaker 2:No. So They're gonna need a sales team for this.
Speaker 1:Peer to
Speaker 2:peer sale. Let's check-in with Tyler. How are you doing on the challenge?
Speaker 5:Okay. So I played all three games.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:And then I don't know how the like scoring works. So I can look at each of the three games. There's
Speaker 2:like Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Scorecards and then there's recordings Mhmm. I'm on-site. So I can see the number of actions. If you add them up, I'm at five seventy six.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're pretty good.
Speaker 5:Wow. So that's under 600. Okay. But I'm not on a leaderboard. I don't know why.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 1:Maybe it needs some time to update.
Speaker 2:That's the real challenge now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The leaderboard.
Speaker 2:I'm not just trusting you.
Speaker 1:It's like I won but but
Speaker 2:Write a sequel injection to to half
Speaker 1:the day. Reach out to Mike. Yeah. Sounds like you might have this You might be getting a bug bounty too and your iPhone.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. But congratulations. That sounds like good work. How far are you away from number one now?
Speaker 5:I'm in thirteenth place. So I got five seventy six.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Number one is at five eleven.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's doable based on your
Speaker 5:definitely. I made a bunch of mistakes.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Maybe maybe give it another run.
Speaker 5:I could probably
Speaker 2:go for See if you go sub 500. That'll be good.
Speaker 1:Bang. There you go.
Speaker 2:Sub 500, you get upgraded to more storage.
Speaker 1:I will reach out to Mike because I think there might be a bug here and I don't want I don't want the reason that that you're not gonna win your iPhone to
Speaker 2:be True. A True. True.
Speaker 1:I feel I want yeah. It feels like you might have earned
Speaker 2:Yeah. You also don't want bed bugs either. You want a new bed. You wanna go to 8sleep.com.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Get a pod five. Thirty five five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.
Speaker 1:I am sleep in those days. Deathly ill. I'm trying to keep the energy up. Ate sleep
Speaker 2:Let's hear for Jordy. I think he's putting out a fantastic performance. Hey. Production team.
Speaker 1:Didn't know this was possible. HRV last night was at thirty two. Okay. Which which I thought would imply death. But I'm here, I'm doing
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 1:show and it's scary to imagine what my night would have looked like without my sleep.
Speaker 2:Indeed. I don't even
Speaker 1:want to imagine that world.
Speaker 2:Indeed. There's one founder I know who's sleeping a lot better, sleeping well, Sameer from Vise. He this company just hit $22,000,000,000 in platform assets. Do you know the story of this company?
Speaker 6:All I
Speaker 1:know is that he got marked up like a back to back to back Yes. Sort of 2021 era. Yes. Unicorn. Yep.
Speaker 1:And then they they
Speaker 2:went young founders, and there was all this, like, oh, like, they're overvalued. Like, you know, and the guys apparently just kept sticking with it and chopping wood. And I love to see this. This is amazing. So he says, one learning to share with all future entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Great businesses take a long time to build, ignore the noise, and keep going. It sounds like that's exactly what he did. They grew 1275% year over year. They're growing 40% quarter over quarter, a record number of new firms. So what this company does is is is software for fund administration for asset managers, I believe.
Speaker 2:And so they're Portfolio management. Portfolio management. So they're onboarding more managers and and bringing those assets on the the platform. I don't think it's fair to say like, 22,000,000,000 is it revenue or they'd have some take rate. It's more like a GMV type of thing and they probably take a small small fraction of all that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But still like growth is growth and it seems like they're doing very well. So good to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cool to see. I think he's been a huge beneficiary of Gen AI from what I can tell. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yep. It is funny. Mean, looking at Lucy's been on an absolute tear this year. Yeah. And hearing like how many years of that that were not super exciting that you were just chopping wood Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just just trying to be better every single month.
Speaker 2:It's been
Speaker 1:had a buddy I had a buddy come to me last year and he was like, yeah. I think I wanna create like a zen competitor. Like I think it'd be pretty pretty simple to get it to like, you know, just like get it to like a $50,000,000 run rate, know, nice little lifestyle business. Was thinking about your journey with Lucy being like, I don't know. I I don't remember the exact numbers but it just was the exact opposite of like a of a fast growing you know
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Company at the beginning. Just had to like just just compound compound compound and it took took so long to really unlock the growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It always grew. Growth rate was always decent but it just took a decade to get any meat on the bones. Just like I always refer to that as like once the company like it has enough revenue and profit to like sustain the operations out of the out of the fundraising to survive mode.
Speaker 2:It just and it's actually like a player in the category not just some wild bet. It takes a long time for the majority of companies. Some people they're just built different. Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they made their own luck.
Speaker 2:They you know they they rip from day one and we we love to celebrate them here.
Speaker 1:We
Speaker 2:do. But yes, sometimes if you have something you know, the die has been cast, the Mark Zuckerberg quote. You know, you release the arrow and it travels in whatever direction you released it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For as long as possible. But hopefully, that's at a compounding rate upwards for a long time. Anyway, if you're looking to compound, get on public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millionspublic.com. Go check it out.
Speaker 2:And Sonos
Speaker 1:has a new News out of Sonos, out of Santa Barbara County, California. Tom Conrad has been asked to be the next CEO of Sonos. He's grateful for the perspectives and critiques that many of you have shared here these last six months while I was interim. So excited for the road ahead. So big pickup from Sonos.
Speaker 1:We've covered Sonos before. We've shared Yep. Frustration Yep. Over the years with Sonos. But fundamentally, the products are incredible when they're working.
Speaker 1:Yep. And it it feels like it was always software problem. Right? Not necessarily maybe Which Firmware.
Speaker 2:I'm still confused by because they haven't rolled back the app. And so I'm wondering what's going on because my Sonos app still takes a long time to open. Just opening it up is a full at least ninety seconds to just adjust the volume, which is crazy bad experience. And the crazy thing is that the same hardware with the same phone used to be ten seconds. And so there's something that changed when they added some new functionality that really bogged down the network or the app or something.
Speaker 2:They gotta roll it back. It's very clear what they what what what they need to do. Yeah. So hopefully he can do it. He's been he's been interim CEO for six months.
Speaker 2:Hopefully he can turn things around. There's a lot that they need to do. It'll be interesting to see where some
Speaker 1:He's these got experience. He was the executive vice president of product at Pandora for ten years. Yeah. And then became the chief technology officer then went over to Snapchat was the VP of product there. Also had a brief stint at Quibi as the chief Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Product officer. So excited to see what he does with Sonos and considering I have a bunch of Sonos in my house still.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do any Sonos speakers have microphones
Speaker 5:on them?
Speaker 2:Let's figure it out. Because I
Speaker 5:don't know.
Speaker 2:Yes. Several Sonos speakers come equipped with built in microphones. The Sonos One, Sonos Era 100. And so you should be able to talk to them. They work with voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistance, Sonos Voice Control.
Speaker 2:Opening eyes got to buy this company, right?
Speaker 1:I can see it.
Speaker 2:That would be a wild deal.
Speaker 1:Because at 1,300,000,000.0, current market cap It's affordable.
Speaker 2:It's affordable. Then you just jump forward in the supply chain. You can start delivering all of these things and then you just have an Alexa competitor.
Speaker 1:Distribution it up. Millions of homes.
Speaker 2:And also in through like the actual distribution like chains like Best Buy and stuff. Like Yeah. Like maybe you wanna start from scratch. Maybe you wanna greenfield it. I don't really know.
Speaker 2:But this feels like something that would be a no brainer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So in 2024, Sonos shipped 5,000,000 units globally. Yeah. That was down from the year before. But still, that's a lot of devices out in the world Yeah.
Speaker 1:In a single year that What I could see
Speaker 2:about Perplexity? Are they at 18,000,000,000? Perplexity by Sonos?
Speaker 1:Well, they're working on a phone. They're working on
Speaker 5:a lot of different stuff.
Speaker 1:Solana's working on a phone.
Speaker 2:Lots of new phones coming.
Speaker 1:Everybody's working on a phone.
Speaker 2:But maybe the smart speaker market has like languished enough that there's something interesting to be done there. I mean, just the voice transcription is so much better. We talked to the the CEO of the Nothing Phone and he was saying that he's integrated Whisper and Gemini and kind of beefed up the voice assistant. But maybe people aren't willing to jump from the iPhone ecosystem. But you know if you're like, oh well I could offset the lack of a great Siri with a great ChatGPT enabled smart home device.
Speaker 2:Kind of interesting.
Speaker 5:I don't know.
Speaker 2:You put some AI researchers on the problem of getting the Sonos app to load in less than ninety seconds and I think you might solve it. Tyler, you have an update for us? What's up?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm on the leaderboard. You're on
Speaker 2:the leaderboard.
Speaker 5:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Come over ring the I'm going for number one. Ring the gong. Hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Hit the Gong.
Speaker 5:Wow. Are the proud owner
Speaker 1:of a new iPhone.
Speaker 2:That's There we go.
Speaker 1:Incredible. Deserved. Give it a better hit than that. Give it a better hit than that. I'm gonna I'm gonna kinda cover the mic but
Speaker 2:Bigger hit. Bigger hit.
Speaker 1:So fairly gentle but great contact. Great
Speaker 2:contact. Nice work. Work.
Speaker 1:I see it.
Speaker 2:So what yeah. Yeah. Give me the position. What ranking are you now? I wanna see you go for number one.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think I'm number 13 now. Think we can 13? Don't know you already showed it but yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay. Can we pull up the screen? Okay.
Speaker 5:What am I? 65 moves behind.
Speaker 2:Okay. And what was it? What was the total number of moves that you
Speaker 5:Five seventy six.
Speaker 2:Five seventy six. Not bad. You smoked 600.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:And and you gotta get to five eleven is the number one. Yeah. So. So you gotta cut down a little bit be a little bit more efficient but I think
Speaker 1:you can do it.
Speaker 5:Should be doable.
Speaker 2:Very cool. And then after that we gotta get you working on the agent side of that leaderboard. You've seen that? So on the other side I've
Speaker 5:at a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the other side, they they actually have like a harness that you can use to get started and you can start trying to build a your own AI agent that will go and try and solve it and and and rank on the on the leaderboard. Interesting. But, you know, that's enough about leaderboards. Let's talk about billboards out of home advertising made easy and measurable with adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 2:Only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe, folks.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile on the timeline Yes. Ryan Peterson is throwing out some bait. He said rail is best used for freight while humans should fly through the sky at 500 miles per hour because they value their time. And he says, just discovered that saying bad things about rail travel is an evergreen way to engagement bait. Plan accordingly.
Speaker 2:People love love rail. But it is very true. America is very different than Europe like the Trans Grande Vitae, the TGV that goes from Paris to London. That's I think that's like the equivalent of like Boston to to New York. Like Europe is just so much smaller than the than the Western Side Of The United States that even with a high speed rail system getting from LA to Chicago is still hours and hours and hours just so much longer than than on a plane.
Speaker 2:And so we actually do have a pretty robust rail system, but we just choose to use it for freight and then we fly through the sky at 500 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, Meta is investing in their own AI chip Olympus. Zac is really cornering a lot of these iconic Olympus like words. Right? He says Yeah. He loves this.
Speaker 1:Meta recently updated its ASIC roadmap adding a new project ARC, a supplementary of its ASIC product line which leverages TSMC's two nanometer technology and is targeted to enter mass production in the first half of twenty twenty seven. We believe Meta plans to make adjustments to the design of Olympus to compete with NVIDIA's Rubin GPUs resulting in a delay from fourth quarter twenty twenty seven to first half of twenty twenty eight. ARC will focus on post training and inferencing purposes. The design service vendor selection will be complete in coming weeks and we think media tech has a good chance of winning the product the project, sorry.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Semi analysis says, don't worry h one hundreds, h two hundreds won't be worthless anytime soon. It will still be a valuable baseline that impressive AI accelerator upstarts like MATX, etched AI, OpenAI, Titan chip, Meta and Microsoft can use in their performance comparisons. This of course is when when folks come out and say, we were buying h 100 equivalents. And and so they share a picture of Jensen here, chief revenue destroyer.
Speaker 2:After Blackwell, you can give away a hopper because Blackwell will be so performant. So interesting to see where this goes. It feels like Nvidia is the one company in the mag seven that every other mag seven company is coming for and being like, I'm sick of paying them.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas all the other mag sevens have kind of
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, Elon's just saying, want a $100,000,000,000, Jensen?
Speaker 2:That's true. Yeah. He isn't he isn't designing his own ship yet. Yeah. I wonder if that'll change.
Speaker 1:But I do believe there was an XAI engineer yesterday that was saying that the keyword and some of the the things that XAI was putting out as they said, like h 200 equivalent or something
Speaker 2:like that
Speaker 1:or Blackwell equivalent GPUs. So Could be they're not necessarily fixed on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, like, Google and Amazon compete on like shopping searches and LinkedIn competes with you know Facebook in some ways. But basically every hyperscaler kind of has corner and their own monopoly built out like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In search and social networking and in desktop or cloud or or shopping. And then they all butt heads in little ways like Google going up against Tesla with Waymo and and they they they kind of touch on each other's territory but they don't often It's it's very rare that all of them are going up against one but it feels like that's the narrative around around Nvidia. Everyone's sick of of paying the Nvidia tax maybe. I don't exactly know. But it seems like if if you're trying to cut them out, if you're going to TSMC and fabbing your own chips like that is straight up cut cutting out Nvidia.
Speaker 2:Yep. And Google seems like was successfully doing it with the TPU.
Speaker 1:Yep. Signal has a post here. He says, meanwhile on the app store and there is a new king of the app store free charts. It is tea dating advice helping women date safe. From my understanding, they basically productize the groups on Facebook.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The are we dating the same guy groups.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so this is acts as a layer over a bunch of different dating apps where women can effectively review, add comments, leave Yelp style reviews for the men that they are going on dates with. And the founder, I think his name is Steve Cook. Let's see here. Sean Cook. He was a director of product management at Salesforce for just under four years.
Speaker 2:What's he really Salesforce PX?
Speaker 1:Putting in the work at Salesforce. We love to see it. And I said earlier, this is just a massive moment for big tech PMs.
Speaker 5:It is.
Speaker 1:Never doubt them again. Never doubt them. A lot of people have been doubting the PMs. They'd say, oh, you're just changing the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The color of this button.
Speaker 2:The color of the button matters apparently because Apparently. You have to imagine that this that this app category is highly competitive. Like like, I don't know. May maybe they're
Speaker 1:just Yes.
Speaker 5:So I was looking at
Speaker 1:there has to be multiple So I was looking and
Speaker 2:Someone built something third most
Speaker 1:popular app I believe is is the same exact
Speaker 2:Concept? Concept. No way.
Speaker 1:It's called T Born.
Speaker 5:Oh wow.
Speaker 1:Dating advice. See the truth before you date. So they went with the same name.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:This is number three. It has very few ratings. I do wonder Tea Dating Advice has 56,000 ratings but the number three app is Tea Born Dating Advice.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So so strange. It only has 60 reviews but clearly climbing up the charts.
Speaker 2:Well, here's some dating advice. Book a wander. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better
Speaker 1:right. And without further ado, I think we have our next guest.
Speaker 5:And I
Speaker 1:gotta get this ready.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the studio.
Speaker 5:How are
Speaker 1:Massive day.
Speaker 2:Massive day. We're getting a little bit of feedback on the audio. Can we turn up the levels a little bit? Can we can you hear us okay?
Speaker 6:I can hear you well.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. It's just a little bit muffled. Are are you on headphones? Maybe take those out and we'll see if the computer audio is any better.
Speaker 1:Should be better.
Speaker 6:It's better?
Speaker 2:That's way better. There we go. We go. To the stream. No problem.
Speaker 2:Kick us off. Give us the news. What happened today?
Speaker 6:We at Vanta announced we raised a $150,000,000, series d, 4,000,000,000 pre, four one five post. Congratulations. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Been waiting to do that.
Speaker 6:Appreciate
Speaker 1:it. Such a massive milestone. Can you catch us up to speed on you know, I think people know your story by now, but can you catch us up to speed on on just, the last couple years getting to this point?
Speaker 2:It was an overnight success. Correct?
Speaker 6:Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I haven't been working on this for like eight to ten years totally. But he's scanning. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Okay. So we started most known for like automating SOC two.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Putting up billboards on the 101. So we still do both of those things. We also help our customers like build out their security programs, improve them in a bunch of different ways, and then take all that hard work and use it to build trust with their customers through audits, through trust reports, through security questionnaires, all sorts of things like that.
Speaker 2:Is the characterization of Vanta as like a point solution company, at least when you started the company, correct? Is point solution a pejorative in Yes. It is. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:You see that. Yeah. Yeah. Break break that down. Why is it?
Speaker 2:Is it all because of Parker Conrad, who's a friend who who's coined the the the compound startup and you have to do everything at once? What what what are what are the trade offs of being point solution early on? And then how do you think about adding things on? Because it's there's probably some trade off of you build trying too much territory, trying to capture too much territory, you can't hold on to it. But at the same time
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a need to argument if if Christina had started and said, we're a platform.
Speaker 2:That might have been rough.
Speaker 1:Beginning could have been a much, could have still been successful, but maybe a much smaller company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So walk me through that journey.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So we started I mean, our word was wedge. Okay.
Speaker 6:It's a nicer word. Yeah. Right? Like, it sounds better than point solution, which sounds kind of, like, trivial.
Speaker 2:Well, wedges have points on them. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. They come to a point. They're the strong ones.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You need a pointy wedge. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. That's a
Speaker 6:good thing. But we started with SOC two for startups. Mhmm. And because they're like I don't You might remember this, but, like, 2017, like, no startup got SOC two. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Now you get it when you're, like, two founders, which is a little wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But they were, like, so valuable then. We figured if we can do that, customers will let us do a lot and give us a lot of access, and we can help them with a lot of things. And then we can use our pointy wedge to expand into, like, a platform over time. And I'm, like, joking, but, like, that was a seed pitch. I posted one of the slides on it today.
Speaker 6:It was, like, truly the 2018 pitch, and so it's kinda cool to be here, you know, a little bit later.
Speaker 5:And Were
Speaker 2:were you getting were you getting pushback on, like market size at that point? Were people saying like Yeah. You're gonna need an act two basically?
Speaker 6:Oh, totally. People weren't even like, you need an two. It's like you need a new idea. Like you just pitched me on sock doing all the startups and no startups get sock twos.
Speaker 5:So what were what
Speaker 1:were you what were you seeing then that other people were missing? Because it seems so obvious in hindsight that young startups would need SOC two and and a variety of other things in order to sell into enterprise and do other things that they wanna do. But like, what what were you seeing then, that now looks obvious in hindsight?
Speaker 6:Think of this, like, if if you could make it easier, like less time, not necessarily less money, less time for a startup to get a SOC two, would they 100% do one. Mhmm. The problem is you really had to give your CTO up for a year who would go talk to a bunch of accountants and then become very sad. And so no one would do that. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But if they didn't have to do that, everyone would go sign up and press the fast SOC two button.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You you I don't think it's an obvious idea at all. Like, when when you when you start a company, most people No. I need a laptop.
Speaker 1:No. No. I'm saying it was it was not obvious then. That's what made it a great opportunity.
Speaker 5:Totally.
Speaker 1:But it was clearly obvious to Christina Yeah. The team.
Speaker 2:What what do you think of the it feels like you're one of the success stories of like selling to other startups early on and there's been this like criticism people have bubbled up of like it's this kind of like circular economy that happens in the startup world. We've seen a lot of people break out of it. What's the secret to breaking out of it? Is that still a good wedge? Is that still a good go to market?
Speaker 2:And just kind of what are your thoughts on that idea of like, you know, be being a startup that sells to startups?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Well, first, I appreciate the use of the word wedge. I still actually think it is, like, a good idea. There's, like, definitely some, like, circular or a boros thing in certain partially because, like, especially early stages, everyone cares about growth. They don't care about your costs.
Speaker 6:And so there's, like, can be some amount of trading that happens. We tried not to do that. And I think actually, the couple of times when I did that, it just blew up later. Like, was a bad idea.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But I think with that, you like, hopefully have startups that are growing. Like, you have the cursors in your user base, you have the ramps, you have the And then those customers, like, push you upmarket, whether you're ready or not. And if you can hang on to them, you can, like, start serving bigger customers, but kind of you need that growth out of the startup base too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On on that note of, like, the like, people care more about growth than costs, like, were people ignoring margins early on? Oh, yeah. For to margins early on,
Speaker 5:though? Not at all. Okay. No.
Speaker 1:What are those?
Speaker 5:Exactly. Software. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Non AI software.
Speaker 2:Then then talk to me about we we were just talking to another entrepreneur who has kind of a wedge type of product and is expanding and there's this trade off between take what you have into new places either up market or international versus add new products, new SKUs and that's kind of an an age old question. How have you worked through it through the past couple years and and do you have any like like frameworks for thinking through those types of processes?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So I think that what we I mean, you do both, right? Yeah. Both is sometimes hard to do at the same time. And so what we did was like, take the same thing if the go to market's working and, you know, do it in Europe, do it in Australia, do it in Asia, right?
Speaker 6:And then and at the same time, start to, like, build the muscle to build multiple products because it is hard. Everyone talks about it. It's hard. And I remember being, like, kind of why. And I don't know.
Speaker 6:I've lived through it. It's hard. It's I don't have a great answer. It's just, like, the organization gets optimized around, like, doing the thing you're doing, and you have customers and your revenue, and it, like, all reinforces itself. And so when you wanna go take a group of people and do something that has no customers and no revenue, you kind of can, but it it's it's just weird.
Speaker 6:It is hard.
Speaker 2:Are you big on is it Gresham's law, the idea that you, like, ship your org chart? Have you noticed that?
Speaker 6:I do.
Speaker 2:Yes. No. No. Gresham's law is bad money drives out good. I don't know the one I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:It's a different law, But it's it's this idea that you ship your org chart. So if you have an org chart that's you know, heavily internationally, you're just gonna wind up selling internationally. Do do you think about it from that perspective?
Speaker 1:It's Conway's law.
Speaker 2:Conway's law. Conway's Have law. You have you been through the wringer of Conway's Law? Have you learned how to fight it? Have you learned how to deal with it?
Speaker 6:Oh, totally. I think I've learned you can't fight it, and you just have to change your org chart sometimes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? Because you're going to ship whatever your org chart is. So try to make your org chart the thing you actually want to ship. That makes sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that. What's the what's like the the correct way to keep morale high while basically doing a reorg and telling someone like, hey, you're gonna be working on something different but you're but you're talented and we'd like this, but it's just like, it makes more sense for the business to do this here over over here.
Speaker 6:Like, I mean, beyond all the, like, be honest, like, actually say or, like, make sure you believe you're saying those things when you're saying them. I think we went through a phase where I went through a phase where, like, we tried to we reorg kind of a lot. And it was because you always did feel like you had a better structure. And it was like, that was too much. Also, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6:Let the order hang out for six or nine months. Don't change it every quarter. You're just gonna drive people crazy. Sounds really obvious when I say it, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 4:That one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What what what are some like, any new techno like, technology trends that that you're seeing across the customer base in terms of, like, challenges and ways that you guys are reacting? I can imagine social engineering, like, you know, hacks and challenges must be skyrocketing. But what what are you guys seeing broadly?
Speaker 6:That's a good one, especially with, like, AI and deepfakes and, you know, the, like, text message gift card scams, but, like, ratcheted to a 100, like, really good versions of those. Yeah. I think the other thing we see, especially for our European customers, is they just get a ton of pressure from European enterprises on AI. Some it's on AI in general, some it's on the American model providers, especially the ones you might guess. Right?
Speaker 6:And there's just like all this kind of default skepticism in Europe that then if European
Speaker 5:startups
Speaker 1:And that's around, like, data usage and Yeah.
Speaker 6:Exactly. And just like, I don't trust OpenAI, and so don't send any like, I don't even want to use something use a tool that uses OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like a CTO or CIO saying that basically.
Speaker 6:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. Do do you think I I I wanna know the thoughts on just general competition when you're selling a wedge product from bigger companies that might want to add this on as a feature. We've been talking to a bunch of founders about how to deal with competition from bigger companies. What what have you been through?
Speaker 2:How'd you get through it? And then I want to talk about how that landscape is changing.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we've been slightly different. It's like we never really had competition from big companies because people didn't build what we built before. They built vertical trash track task trackers, but no automation. What we had was in the COVID boom, lots of folks decided to start Vanta knockoffs.
Speaker 6:And so we had like a round of that and kind of went through the gauntlet that, you know, like gone through that whole roller coaster and now we're on the other side of it, but sort of different.
Speaker 2:How did that manifest? Was that like pricing pressure or just like like having the market slice up differently, needing to reprioritize or kind of double down on kind of territory that you kind of claimed and felt you were confident on and then had to retrench a little bit?
Speaker 6:Some of all of it. I mean, I think in the early days, we were kind of, probably in retrospect, like, too pleased with ourselves. Sorry. For, like, coming up with this category and this product. Sure.
Speaker 6:And, like, the honest answer is, like, no customer care. I mean, they care, you know, or, like, they're very supportive, but, like, they just want the best product for them. And that might be the first one of
Speaker 1:the things they like, oh, you created the category. Great. Then I won't I won't look at my other options.
Speaker 6:Exactly. Like, said no one ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? And so I think it pushed us to be, like, okay. We did whatever we did years ago. Cool. What have we done lately for customers?
Speaker 6:Like, have we done today? What have we shipped, you know, this week, this quarter, this month, this day? So it's that piece, which I think we got a lot stronger because of that. And then pricing pressure for sure. Because in our space, because it's it's sales all the way through, like, there's no self serve trial.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:The dominant strategy for a competitor is to, like, copy the demo, do the same demo, and then say, hey, prospect. These products are the same. You're right. You just saw the same thing. But like, we're 30% cheaper.
Speaker 6:So like, why would you go with Vanta? Yeah. And like, we kinda learned what to do with that.
Speaker 1:Why why did you go international so early? Was it was it was it to defend against other people being like, I'm gonna build the Vanta for x y z country, but it sounds like it was more customer driven?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was about like a 20% of our customer base, I think at the time, was outside The US. And we hadn't done anything for that. It's just like, you know, founders in London, you know, watch TBPN. Like, there's not like just because they're in London doesn't mean they like don't listen to American podcasts.
Speaker 1:Sure. Well, and they're selling to American
Speaker 2:companies. Exactly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Exactly. Yep.
Speaker 2:What what's up with all the colors? I feel like Vanta black is the darkest black you can possibly buy. It's like patented paint. But then Right.
Speaker 5:We're not being
Speaker 2:back for that. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:To create more color.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take take me through that.
Speaker 6:So, yeah. Not not touching that. But we kinda coined purple in the early days and so we have we've become the purple llama company.
Speaker 2:Purple llamas. Where'd the llama come from? Because, yeah, mean, yeah.
Speaker 5:And by the way by the way,
Speaker 1:we called every llama owner in LA. We were trying to get llamas here in the studio to join us. Have a we have a third mic but it ended up being it ended up being a massive challenge and we were worried about. We didn't have a carve out in the lease that said we could bring llamas in our studio. So it ended up being but but I think you guys should actually it it would be great to get to get some live llamas.
Speaker 5:Popular with
Speaker 2:the kids at the petting zoo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We tried it Downtown San Francisco. Downtown San Francisco also not the most llama friendly place.
Speaker 2:It's hard. They're they're tough to get.
Speaker 1:You can't even you can't even bring llamas wherever you want in this country anymore.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's really.
Speaker 2:What is it coming to?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:a disaster. On on the kind of the AI's like on the AI story, there's like this question of that I've been I've been noodling on with a lot of founders about like, is AI a reason to launch a new product that the customer feels? So an agent, a prompt box that they interact with versus just, hey, behind the scenes, we're gonna use a ton of AI. You're not even gonna know. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 2:But the product's just gonna get better, more efficient. Maybe our margins go up. Maybe we are delivering things that we want to deliver you faster, more reliably, more accurately, all these different things. Is there one area that's more exciting? I know you're probably doing both, but how do you Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think about
Speaker 1:mean, I've a trend of companies that are basically clones of existing companies that were traditionally seen as SaaS platforms. And they come out and they're basically like, we're this, but it's an agent. And then if you look and try to understand the product, it ends up looking exactly like SaaS with maybe a slightly different workflow. I don't know how much more valuable it is to customers or if it's actually a better experience.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Oh, totally. There's, like it's an agent, but actually it's forward deployed engineer, but actually it's like a founder pressing all the buttons. I that's the you know, and, like,
Speaker 5:I did that. It's
Speaker 1:a crud app.
Speaker 6:Totally. It's a crud app with, like, the founder, like, pressing buttons at 11PM at night. So, like, definitely that. I think it'll get better over time. To the first question, like, we do a bit of both.
Speaker 6:It's actually more AI in the background just doing stuff. Mhmm. And then sometimes when we're going to start, like, surfacing it more, and we might call that, you know, oh, that's an agent, or the agent did that. And, like, yes, it is AI, but it's really just getting rid of workflows behind the scenes that no one really wanted to do or needs to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I've I've I've been personally experiencing it in Gmail where it was very easy for them clearly to like add an extra panel with like, now you can chat with your email inbox. But for me, the search still doesn't work. And so I much would I would much rather that just every email that comes in gets condensed down, summarized, and then when I go to search, it really knows what I'm looking for and it just gives me a better product behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:But that's probably like a harder technical challenge or or maybe just it's just less experimental. So people are kind of debating. What about in terms of like internal productivity? We were talking to a friend earlier that said that he's seeing there are examples of 10 x engineers going to 100 x engineers because of tools like Cursor and Windsurf and Devon, Cognition, all that all all the different tools that improve developer productivity. But he was actually more excited about designers becoming one x engineers.
Speaker 2:I And thought that was a very interesting take. And if you kind of do, like, a divide by zero, maybe it's an infinity game. I don't know. But he was saying that, like, that has been more exciting to him. And I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like, what what are you seeing internally?
Speaker 6:So some of that also PMs with, like, a v zero replet, lovable, like, right? Because you, like, have this idea for a thing, then you can make a version of it and then go stick it in front of five customers. And, like, it's just and you can do that in fifteen minutes, like, actually. You know, it was before you'd have to, like, write the spec or draw the picture, then get the designer to make the mocks, and then animate the Figma, you know, whatever. Like, that loop went from, like, ideally two days to fifteen minutes and that matters so much for like just testing new stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What what about just this idea of like generally AI being like a reinvigorating force for founders who are in your position where like the business has worked. The business like is big basically and like you have Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the the valuation
Speaker 2:Post product market fit like
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the the the like series b c d just shows like a clear story of just execution but then what John's getting at and and we we've had Oun over at intercom from the show who actually left his company, came back and then was like fully ready to just like restart the company almost because there was so much net new opportunity.
Speaker 2:Even Ben Thompson was saying like he was kinda getting bored of writing about tech and then AI happened and he's like, I can't I can't wait to write the articles anymore. But what what's your what's your experience been?
Speaker 6:Like, basically that. Mhmm. There's all these, like, magical product experiences that we've thought about but just couldn't build until now. My favorite like ClearVanta example was in 2017 when it wasn't clear if anyone wanted to talk to. It was clear people answered security questionnaires, like those long spreadsheets of questions.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so we wanted to automate those and tried and like weren't good enough ML engineers and libraries weren't good enough that we didn't and went down the SOC two path. Anyway, it's kind of working. But like, now Vanta has really good questionnaire automation. We thought of this building this in 2017.
Speaker 6:We just like couldn't until now. And that is like very fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where next? You guys have just been chopping wood seemingly like just ex ex ex just executing day every day. But but where where are you going from here? Hardware. Hardware.
Speaker 1:AI pendant from Vanta. Exactly. Captures every single word that if you say a single non not
Speaker 2:compliant compliant word. It just makes
Speaker 6:it like No way to say trust like a constantly listening AI pendant.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But what what's next?
Speaker 6:You know, keep building stuff, cool stuff for our customers. We have a bunch of security products that are launching that I'm very excited about. So you, like, get customers in on the wedge, you know? But then over time, after they get their two, they start growing. They start needing more things.
Speaker 6:They start thinking about building out different parts of their security program. So a couple big launches there coming, and a couple more things that we have in store.
Speaker 2:Last question from my side, we'll let you go. Has the rise of defense tech American dynamism, ITAR compliance been, like, a like, how how have you been, like, playing in that space?
Speaker 6:Oh, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. We're actually we're working with the government.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So this administration is trying to make it easier for everyone to procure software. Yeah. There's like a FedRAMP there's a new FedRAMP 20 x pilot we're in, and we're doing doing that for two reasons. One, so our customers can sell to the government and have a path there that is not, you know, years and consultants and, like, literally thousands of pages of long form text model. Like, can do a lot there.
Speaker 6:And then also helping the government go procure software. And so we are just like doing a ton there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. The it feels like it's incredibly cumbersome to the defense tech founders that have to get ITAR compliance, but then they kind of wear it as a badge of honor. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I have to use teams you know because my work's so important. I'm like yep. Yep. Like I your work is important but now it's become this badge of honor. But it's great you know.
Speaker 2:They need to stay compliant. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Congratulations. I love I love just the the steady Yeah. March building momentum and I'm sure you'll be back. If history repeats, you'll be back on here very soon with with the next one.
Speaker 6:Knock on all the things. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. We'll talk Talk to
Speaker 1:soon.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Dina from Lux Capital. I will I'll take the be right back. Jordy and I will welcome Dina to the TVPN UltraDome when she's ready to hop on the stream. And in the meantime I can give you some news. Check-in with Tyler.
Speaker 2:How's Tyler doing over there?
Speaker 5:Alright. I'm up to tenth place.
Speaker 2:Tenth I'm
Speaker 5:at five fifty so I dropped I think 26
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Moves. I still I mean Are
Speaker 2:there obvious low hanging fruit for you?
Speaker 5:At this point it's just a grind.
Speaker 2:Just a grind. Just a
Speaker 5:grind. I'm just I think I gotta just basically Lock write down my moves.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:And then just try to optimize one by one.
Speaker 2:You need maybe like a screen recorder or something so you can watch some game tape?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think you
Speaker 5:hit the tapes.
Speaker 2:We need a coach. Yeah. Yeah. Who else could help? You need like a world champion like speed runner or something like that.
Speaker 2:Anyway.
Speaker 5:We have
Speaker 1:Dina in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 2:We have Dina in the restream waiting room. Welcome to the stream Dina. How are you doing?
Speaker 7:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 1:So good to see
Speaker 7:you guys.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for joining. Sorry for the delay. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and I'd love to know kind of how you fit into the Lux Capital structure ecosystem, what you're focused on and kind of and then we can go into a bunch of questions from there.
Speaker 7:Awesome. Well, I'm Dina. I am a partner at Lux Capital. We're a multistage venture firm. We love turning science fiction into fact.
Speaker 7:I know you've had Josh on here before and heard all about that. We do everything from pre seed to pre IPO, so truly multistage. And I have a particular propensity for health care, which I know we're gonna be talking about today. Yep. But we are all very much generalists.
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's just we'll we'll get into the other questions later. I already have completely new questions. Delian asked Beruhov over at Founders Fund, buddy of ours was saying that the seed ecosystem is just kind of been eroded by founders just skipping rounds and it feels like that's a lot of kind of a it's in large part because these like AI companies were able to justify, yeah, I need a billion dollars to train a foundation model. And so even if you're not training a foundation model, multistage the firms are like, yeah, we can do a $100,000,000 seed round.
Speaker 2:No problem. Like, you have a good pedigree. Maybe there'll be a aqua hire or something. Where is the pre seed market? Where is the pre the seed market still interesting?
Speaker 2:Or do you disagree with that entire take and you think it's never been better?
Speaker 7:You know, I think it's a tale of two worlds. And honestly, the nomenclature for rounds doesn't really mean much these days anyway. Sure. On the one hand, the advent of AI has made it more cost effective than ever to start a company, and you are no longer judged in terms of growth by how many people you're hiring or how much money you've raised, but actually how much far you can get with the least amount possible. And that is only gonna continue to happen, as we see the advent of sort of AI software tooling and and all of that.
Speaker 7:On the other hand, to your point, if you are raising, for a company that is infrastructure intensive, that requires high amounts of compute, where you're building your own models, and let's be honest, how many of those do we need? Those types of companies can and will raise a $100,000,000 plus seed rounds. So, you know, I think yes is the answer. It's never been better, but, also, you will very much see a tale of two worlds. And, you know, on our end, we're funding, you know, tiny seed rounds and very large seed rounds.
Speaker 7:It really depends on the company and what's needed.
Speaker 2:Okay. Related to that, give me your take on this post from Caitlin Balnik Relos. You must be one of four things to raise right now, an AI high flyer, a seed company with the promise of being an AI high flying company, extra points if you're young, an American dynamism reindustrialization company, or biology enabled by AI. What do you think?
Speaker 7:Caitlin always has the great hot takes. I think that's accurate. Although, honestly, it's not the best time for companies that are raising in the biotech space. So I'm not even sure that I would necessarily include that in the list.
Speaker 5:But Yeah.
Speaker 7:Definitely, every company right now needs to have an answer to what their AI play is for sure. That being said, you know, if you're seeing Groundhog Day of pitches that are, you know, AI notetaker, AI agent, like, yes, we all use these companies and they're wonderful tools, but what we look for is sort of the operating system, right? The actual picks and shovels, the really generational companies. And where the innovation is not just the act of using AI, but something that's actually defensible and transformative.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Elad Gil had a post yesterday. He said AI markets crystallize for a subset of AI markets. It is suddenly clear who the finalists or winners will be. And so he breaks down a few categories.
Speaker 1:LLMs, code, legal, medical scribing, customer service, and search and IR. How are you how are you thinking about AI markets within healthcare? There's obviously a bunch of different subcategories but at the same time some of the biggest headline fundraises have been around these sort of medical scribe products or at least products with that as kind of the core wedge.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, I I we've actually invested with Elad in a company in the health AI space, which I'll chat a bit about called Blue Note. But, yes, AI scribes, I think, were the lowest hanging fruit in health care. The you know, one of the biggest pain points was with, you know, documentation and note taking for physicians. These companies were not immediately up into the right.
Speaker 7:Many of them have been around for quite some time. But, of course, the advent of LLMs and and really the the the openness to adoption, which has always been the biggest sticky point in health care, has made them particularly effective now. But there's still so much latency in health care. We are still talking about AI in the context of fax machines. So there's a lot of opportunity outside of that.
Speaker 7:And I get excited about, you know, the clinical research side of things, the opportunity in clinical trials. You know, if you're talking outside of patient care, we're in a company called Trial Library, which is, you know, using AI and and technology to rapidly accelerate getting patients into trial trials, for life saving therapies. And, frankly, this is where pharma companies are willing to spend a lot of money to find those hard to reach patients. Companies like Bluenote, which we invested in with Elad, for example, are using generative AI to help get drugs to market, so to help with regulatory and medical writing, etcetera. Etcetera.
Speaker 7:There's a massive opportunity outside of scribes. And although scribes are very interesting, it is increasingly a very crowded market. Last count, I think it was over a 100, and there's probably
Speaker 2:So many. Wow. Yeah. Alright. Have you seen anyone
Speaker 1:I'm sure I'm sure more are being formed.
Speaker 2:As we speak?
Speaker 1:As we speak. People are the tech crunch headlines and they're saying, hey, maybe I should create.
Speaker 2:It seems like Stripe Atlas has gone down under all the pressure.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just kidding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On the note on the note though on the last company, mean I think one question that that's come up on the show is can what will it take to actually reduce the cost to create and bring a new drug to market? And discovering the drug itself is one thing but then is there any hope of reducing the cost of the next stages in terms of outside of the paperwork and things like that but it seems like if you have this huge kind of variable cost of of trials, is there any is there any sort of hope of of bringing that down over time?
Speaker 7:Yeah. For sure. I mean, the the sort of drug discovery piece of it was really, you know, v one of AI in in this in this field, and we've invested in companies in that space. And there are new companies that are forming in that space. But outside of that, there's a lot.
Speaker 7:As you pointed out, clinical trials. Right? Big area. There's you know, there have been lots of companies trying to apply technology there, yet still a massive pain point, particularly if you think about where the bulk of the spend is in pharma, in specialty drugs. The these are tens of billions of dollars of of market opportunity here to help get these drugs to market faster.
Speaker 7:And in order to do so, it often requires finding really difficult to reach patients. There's only so much right now that AI can do to make that happen. So it requires really unique business models. And the company I mentioned, Trial Library, is a great example of a company that is using technology, but ultimately to find and match humans with one another. And those humans are patients and those humans are providers.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. I wanna go shark tank mode for a second. I got a pitch for a hypothetical company. I'm not actually building this. But, today, there's a piece in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon buying a bracelet for $50 a pop.
Speaker 2:You get a transcription of everything you
Speaker 1:buy a bracelet. Have
Speaker 2:any of the AI scribes in healthcare done something like, hey, the doctor wears a bracelet and then the scribe is, you know, there's a hardware play or there's a wearable play. Have you seen anything like that? Is there an opportunity
Speaker 7:to do invest bracelet per se. Are over a 100, so I wouldn't be surprised if one of them involves a bracelet. But, yes, I have some hardware plays. This sort of idea of ambient, you know, note taking. That I've seen that in the form of cameras that are sort of, you know, adding on the computer vision element.
Speaker 7:I've seen that, of course, in terms of, you know, different types of of tabletop devices. There is an extra added concern with health care, which is, you know, the elephant in the room, and that is around PHI and privacy. And so and oftentimes that's overengineering it. Really, what you need is to understand what's happening in that encounter with the patient. And as it turns out, you don't necessarily need, you know, a ring, a bracelet, you know, a camera hanging over you, oftentimes audio.
Speaker 7:And in many cases, just, you know, AI enhancing text inputs is all you need to get to the outcome that's desired.
Speaker 2:And for that reason, you're out.
Speaker 1:How are you how are you, approaching this, brain computer interfaces as a category? It's interesting. There's been
Speaker 2:Neuralink.
Speaker 1:Neuralink, Nudge announced yesterday. But how how are you thinking about the category broadly? Feels like something that right now, it seems like a very small group of exceptionally connected and talented teams are sucking up the vast majority of capital, which I guess happens in in every market, but maybe more pronounced in in the BCI space. But do you expect that to be a category where a few years from now there's hundreds of of players or more concentrated until, people can really kind of derisk
Speaker 2:the Remember we talked to a peer fellowship company that was doing that kind of the other side of the barbell there. But
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, as I think as a trend, at Lux, we were investing in this space before it was obvious. We were early and proud investors in Control Labs, which you may be familiar with, which was a Yeah. Part of Yeah. Reardon, the founder, is actually now a venture partner at Lux, and it's fun to jam with him on these topics all the time.
Speaker 7:I my father happens to be a neuropsychiatrist, so I have a particular interest in this space. He was really big on TMS, and I think that there's still so much opportunity there. We are actively looking and spending time with a lot of these companies. To your question, I don't know if there's gonna be a 100 of them in the future. These are still very capital intensive.
Speaker 7:There's still a lot of science, that does need to happen. We're seeing companies at the earliest stages through our Luxe Labs initiative, researchers who are rapidly accelerating on the kind of innovation side and ultimately to get to commercialization. That piece of it is the piece that I think is still still remains to be proven, but we are we're excited about what's to come.
Speaker 2:In in health care broadly, I'm I'm sure there's tons of opportunities for start ups to build new companies that are kind of built on the back of the AI trend. Are there any places where you think that AI in a narrow sense would be a sustaining innovation for the existing large players? I'm thinking of like in the in the enterprise, it feels like, you know, Google might be facing disruption in search to some degree, but like the Gemini API seems to be doing really really well. And like they were set up well to serve you know a frontier class model as an API. And so they're leveraging that and they will continue and Azure has seen a similar thing with Microsoft.
Speaker 2:They've they've been beneficiaries and in many ways it's been a sustaining innovation for them Yep. In terms of cloud. But but what is the shape of like the big players in healthcare? Where are they going to like just completely win so you probably want to stay away from it as a as a startup folk?
Speaker 7:I love this question. I don't know if you guys know this, but I I actually got my start in health care at Google helping to build what eventually became Google Health. Back then, one of the first products that I got to work on was this knowledge graph for health, which was, you know, taking symptoms and conditions, mapping them together. So if you search for itchy eyes, you'd have this graph pop up that explains to you you might have conjunctivitis. Very novel at the time.
Speaker 7:We launched Google's first HIPAA compliant product. It ultimately led me to venture because it became abundantly clear to me that the real innovation in these really intractable industries was actually coming from early stage startups. This was before the advent of LLMs and all of that. I ultimately think that these big tech players are obviously going to be key distribution partners. Google is still the digital front door for a lot of health care.
Speaker 7:Increasingly, OpenAI and others are are becoming that. But it is still where so many health care encounters begin before a patient even knows that they're a patient. That being said, do I think that the, you know, the top innovative companies in the health care space are going to emerge from these big tech companies? Unlikely. But I think that they will thrive and exist in partnership with them, and the hyperscalers, when it comes to AI, are always gonna play critical roles.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what role are the like the big tech equivalents in health care playing? Like this is the big insurance networks, big big hospital networks. I mean, we've heard General Catalyst is buying a hospital. I I don't fully understand the the thesis there.
Speaker 2:Haven't fully dug in. But but what what are the bigger players doing that that might where they might just be just default beneficiaries of new tech
Speaker 7:Yeah. Ones? I mean, I've so I spent a lot of time speaking with the, you know, the leaders of some of these companies. Obviously, they're critical important partners to our companies. And they are rapidly looking at solutions in AI.
Speaker 7:So they were they used to be bottlenecks. These are the distribution partners. You know, selling into health systems has always been a slog. Ask anyone who's done it. They've got the gray hairs to prove it.
Speaker 7:I was in a board meeting recently actually with a major executive from one of the biggest national payers out there who blew my mind talking about how they were thinking about adopting clinical AI. We're talking actual bots that are that are that are engaging with patients in a way that was far more ambitious than even some of the most, you know, out there VCs that I had seen. If they're doing it that fast, like, we need to get on this quickly. It is clear that, you know, in health care, you wanna meet patients where they are, and this is where patients are. They're using these tools constantly.
Speaker 7:Providers as well. There's a new generation of providers who expect more digitally. And as you can imagine, and you see this in pretty much every major earnings call from these payers, this is no longer just a nice to have. It's a mandate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about, robotics, in, surgery rooms? We've seen Stryker. Yeah. I mean, Neuralink specifically Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is has talked about building basically their own system in order to do these surgeries. That's They like built a it. Very Yeah, they built it. They're using it. Very kind of like narrow use case for something that they're doing.
Speaker 1:But how far out do you think we are from robots conducting kind of routine surgeries? Let's say you you need to get an organ removed or something like that. Is that something that you'd bet on a human still doing ten years, fifteen years, twenty years from now? Or or are we gonna be at a point where a human is sort of kind of observing a robot, you know, working, but not necessarily, like, doing the actions themselves?
Speaker 7:I mean, it's already happening. So we're not talking about ten years from now. It's already happening across the board, and robotic surgery is an area that we've invested quite a bit in. You may have heard of a company called Auris, which was acquired by Johnson and Johnson in which we were lead investors. It's happening in other procedures, in ultrasound, in IVF.
Speaker 7:We have a company that's on the software side, but enabling computer vision through IVF. If you've ever had I don't know if any of have had surgery, but many many procedures that used to be highly invasive are now done laparoscopically through robotic surgery. So it's one of the areas in health care actually that has seen the most adoption, and it's still human assisted in in many cases. A lot of that ultimately comes down to, you know, to patient preference as well as liability. But I would not be surprised if we increasingly move more and more to a world with, you know, robots at the forefront of surgery.
Speaker 2:What was your take on VGCMOS post kind of outlining therapy potentially as one vector that OpenAI's ChatGPT core product could be impactful. That feels like an example Yeah. Of
Speaker 1:meeting Health was the other big category that she laid out as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like meeting customers where they are and yet all of a sudden we're talking about, you know, a research nonprofit is now competing in the health care space. It feels like it's a it's it's definitely like an unexpected turn of events if you were looking at OpenAI as a health investment a decade ago.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Totally. Well, Fiji's amazing. She's become a friend, and we actually met in the context of health care. So I know it's an area she's deeply passionate about.
Speaker 7:It's not surprising. It is wild, but it's not surprising. Again, meeting patients where they are and particularly for, you know, a chatbot that does tend to air toward, you know, sick of fancy that's constantly telling you, great idea. Let's elaborate on that more, etcetera. Like, chat GPT in an era with an epidemic of loneliness can become a very close friend.
Speaker 7:It can, in many cases, diagnose. And, you know, there have been some really interesting studies published in JAMA actually looking at the empathy factor, comparing AI to humans, and sometimes the AI actually does score better. Now do I believe that therapists will be replaced by AI in the near future? No. But the fact of the matter is people are already using it.
Speaker 7:The numbers are staggering. They're using it for this case now. And so I think what we need to think about is what are the guardrails? How do we ensure that that, you know, you don't end up with the types of situations that have made headlines, you know, whether it's suicides and so on? And and how do you ensure that this is done responsibly?
Speaker 7:And I'm excited that someone like Fiji is at the forefront of that because I believe that they are really thinking about not only the the ethics, but the responsibility of having human lives in their hands.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Feels like something that's gonna be like back and forth in the news cycle constantly but ultimately, you know, top of mind and they have all the capabilities and teams in place to to, you know, execute effectively in that category. But it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot of PR back and forth I'm sure. Jordy anything else?
Speaker 1:No. This is great.
Speaker 2:This is great. Thanks so Awesome. Much for hopping
Speaker 7:Great to chat with you guys. Take care.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Let's go to this post from Nick Carter.
Speaker 5:Do you hear this? Do you see this?
Speaker 2:No. They're they're gonna own you. Oh wait. No. You're a millennial too.
Speaker 2:He says millennial millennials will be slash are the peak IQ generation. Zoomers are iPad kids lobotomized. Gen alpha will be largely incapable of learning anything due to AI. Tyler, what do you think?
Speaker 1:Well, Tyler's you're Gen z. Right? You're not You're
Speaker 2:Gen z?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm definitely Gen z.
Speaker 2:Do you think you're an iPad kid? Do you think you're a lobotomized?
Speaker 5:I think that's a little bit younger Okay. Than me. I think that's probably true like
Speaker 2:How do you avoid
Speaker 5:Just replace iPad with TikTok. Sure. Like you've talked to the average like, I mean, like I don't wanna you know. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't wanna throw your whole generation under the
Speaker 2:Under the bus.
Speaker 5:I think there's a big power law. Yeah. And you'll see it like grow more and more with Jen Alpha.
Speaker 2:What separates the high performing zoomers from the lobotomized brain rotted ones?
Speaker 5:I mean, I think it's you can probably just like if you need like one thing, it's just like do they use TikTok daily? Mhmm. That's like you probably get like 90% of the
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder like is it a screen time thing? You have to cut it off early?
Speaker 5:I don't think it's necessarily screen time because you see a lot of kids who just like if you're like reading like less wrong or something. Yeah. Have ever talked to someone who like obviously like read a lot of like blog like online blogs like They're like super cracked. So it's not necessarily screen time. One
Speaker 1:thing is I I feel like maybe the the kids that have it the worst are like 10 years old right now. Where I feel like parents today, there's a general awareness that having your kid glued to an iPad Yep. Is not great. Yep. If you see, I'll be at a restaurant and I'll see a kid just like drooling over their iPad Mhmm.
Speaker 1:For two and a half hours, not engaging with the parents or whoever they're with. I I think that's like fairly frowned upon now. Like I I I got an iPad for my three year old but he's only used it on flights. Yeah. Like he really just doesn't He only thinks of it as a Yeah.
Speaker 1:Flight device and that's purely because I don't want other people to be angry if he's gonna you know cry for four hours.
Speaker 2:Tyler's over there being like, I'm not addicted to Apple products but I'll do anything for an iPhone. Which one is it Tyler?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Which one is it? Pick.
Speaker 1:Gotta pick.
Speaker 2:Any more progress?
Speaker 1:Are you
Speaker 5:still working through? I'm going like very slowly.
Speaker 2:Okay. So yeah because there's no time so you're just really calculating.
Speaker 5:I can't see my score
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 5:until
Speaker 2:the Okay.
Speaker 5:So I think I'm doing better, but it's
Speaker 2:very slow. And and are you like actively on a run-in Arcade GIV three right now?
Speaker 5:What you what do
Speaker 2:Like, like, do you kick off a new new test or can you optimize each one individually? One I
Speaker 5:think you can do each game individually. And then it's do a specific level. Like, you have to do The
Speaker 2:whole thing.
Speaker 5:You know, one through eight or whatever.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I need I still need to do all three because I've only done the first one. I I have I actually haven't beaten it.
Speaker 5:Did you time yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, no. Because I did it in parts. Right? I did like a couple minutes before the stream and then I did five minutes on the stream and then, you know, I I I think I I think I know enough at least to be like to probably have an edge so it wouldn't be apples to apples. But maybe I gotta check the number of moves.
Speaker 2:That's the move. Okay. Well, we have our next guest here in the studio. Let's bring them in. Good soundboard, Jordy.
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Into the stream. How you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome.
Speaker 3:Awesome to meet you.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 1:Great to have you.
Speaker 2:I thought I was worried we had some audio issues. Turns out we don't. Can you give us an introduction? What are you building?
Speaker 4:Of course. I am building Diode Computers alongside with my cofounder, Lenny. And we use AI to automate the production of printed circuit boards. We design them and manufacture them.
Speaker 2:Very cool. What's the state of the art right now? Like, what what who who are your competitors?
Speaker 4:So there's a a bunch of companies that really, like, try to build circuit boards. Circuit boards are at the heart of every single electronic products that you have. You you name it, like, aerospace, robotics, medical devices. These are all industries that traditionally would take months to come up with designs and, like, volume manufacturing of these boards. And so our goal is to help them and, like, scale up to production right away.
Speaker 4:Our competitors are folks like Altium Cadence, but also, like, current manufacturers that are, like, building circuit boards right now.
Speaker 2:And what's the latest news? Do you have anything to
Speaker 4:give us? I'm very proud to announce that we raised a series a by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 5:Point 4,000,000. Fantastic. When when did you start the company?
Speaker 1:I don't know if I I think I missed it.
Speaker 4:Exactly a year ago. Like, we hit the one year anniversary three days ago.
Speaker 2:And is am I looking at a virtual background, or is this actually your office?
Speaker 4:No. This is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We build circuit boards in Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker 2:Cool. What what what is the what is the core value proposition? Speed, quality, time? How do you think about like, what what are your customers asking for right now?
Speaker 4:So the real, like, thing that was very interesting to me is that we have fewer and fewer people that can build circuit boards at the highest, like, level of complexity. And these people are working at insanely good companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Meta, and they're very, very hard for other hardware companies to kinda, like, take away. And I like, I used to be at one of these companies. I used to work at Apple. I used to work on custom silicon.
Speaker 4:So our goal is basically to democratize the way that we currently, like, build circuit boards and allow, like, from startups to large enterprises to take advantage of a very high end type of workflow. And the only way we could think about how to do it is to teach large language models to actually generate schematics. And so, like, the the advantage and the difference is that we use code to build our circuit boards, which is something that usually, like, is not done this way. Circuit boards are very visual. Like, you can think about them almost as, Figma.
Speaker 4:While we what we do is, like, more like web design, like CSS and code that then gets rendered into, an actual circuit board. It's called artwork.
Speaker 2:Can you can is it, like, okay to take a circuit board schematic from an existing product? I remember we had this founder on, I think it was the Matic robot, and he had was was that right? Or we had some founder on who had printed on their on on their circuit board like, hi, Amazon, because they knew that Amazon was gonna take it apart and, like, try and understand how they were doing what there was. I might be messing up the company names. But it seems like there's some proprietary information in the way in the like, yes, there's amazing data and amazing engineers at these big companies.
Speaker 2:They're making these circuit boards, but they're probably not okay with you just taking that as training data or maybe it's legal. I don't know. What what what's the deal there?
Speaker 4:You're absolutely right. I think that Matic is a fantastic company. They and Whoop both print on their circuit boards like the mother
Speaker 5:copies us.
Speaker 2:That's the one. Yeah. Whoop.
Speaker 4:That's right. Fantastic detail. I I really love it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. You can make that
Speaker 1:you can make that a feature.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We'll do it for everyone of our circuit boards. Yeah. Data is actually, like, the most important part of this. Yeah. So, like, there is no we like, easily available data for this kind of problem.
Speaker 4:Like Mhmm. Whereas on code, you can basically take GitHub and kind of, like, start training your models on very high end, like, data that you can use. Part of, like, what we are doing at Diodes is we're rebuilding the dataset from the ground up. And so there's a lot of, like, data annotation, data cleaning, like, generating new types of data that we can use to improve the models. And we are about to announce, like, next week a partnership with, like, a very large, like, software open source project.
Speaker 4:And and our goal is basically to contribute back to the community, generate this data that, like, we're gonna use to train, like, better models without going and, like, touching on proprietary data. Like, we own our own designs. And so while we assign the IP of the boards that we designed for our customers to them, we usually retain the rights to the individual components that we generate. And those are, like, a competitive advantage for us. We are basically building an internal data structure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why why do you even need, real data? I feel like you could generate all of this in simulation. Like, I I when when I hear people talk about bio and saying, we don't have a simulated cell, I'm like, okay. Well, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Like, humans are really complicated. Biology is really complex. But, like, we created circuit boards in the first place. We should be able to simulate those. Like why can't you just simulate all possible circuit boards and then do some sort of search through that?
Speaker 2:Why do you need hard data?
Speaker 4:You're absolutely right. We actually do do that. Like we have reinforcement learning algorithms. There's two types of simulation that you can do. One is like an electrical simulation which you can absolutely, like, get right.
Speaker 4:It's called SPICE. But then, like, the second order effects of, like, physics are quite complicated to model. And so there's a really like, there's a good saying around, like, very talented electrical engineers, is which that you never trust them. Like, you basically like, you can try simulating it, but then, like, manufacturing something and making sure it works is the ultimate, like, simulation test. Like, the the boards may be manufactured in a different way.
Speaker 4:The the, like, board house may not, like, respect your specifications. And so we 100% do simulation. That's how we bootstrap the process. You couldn't, like, build the library of data that we have built just by hand. Like, it's physically impossible.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 4:So we we use, like, simulation to bootstrap. But then the ability to manufacture the boards is really what creates differentiation and, like, brings on the fact that these, like, circuits are actually working.
Speaker 1:So what are you guys actually doing on the manufacturing side? Are you gonna be scaling manufacturing? Are you just making prototypes for customers and then they take those elsewhere to To scale?
Speaker 4:Excellent question. So our offer to the world is come to us, bring us what you want to design, we'll design it for you, optimize it for manufacture it, and then scale it with you. Today, we have only small batch assembly in house. Like, we actually have, electric lab right here that we use to assemble Mhmm. Like circuit boards like these.
Speaker 4:And then we partner with manufacturing houses for, like, the largest higher volume production. But the, like, eventual future is we are going to vertically integrate this manufacturing. And, like, this is what we want to offer to company. If you look at the current offer for printed circuit boards in The US, it's very, very hard to manufacture them, like, within the nation. It's usually, like, anytime you want to scale, you need to go to China.
Speaker 4:And we think that the way to solve that is basically by making all of our design look the same from a manufacturability standpoint so we can generate volume and, like, bring it to all of our clients at the same time. We also do things like automatically matching the parts and the ordering, which is something that normally it's done manually and it's incredibly, like, long and annoying to do. And so to, like, keep a very complicated process short, we make ordering PCBs from The US as easy as ordering them from China. Not quite as inexpensive yet, but we are gonna go there.
Speaker 1:Where do you think you'll you'll set up your actual manufacturing hub? You're you're you're in the Brooklyn Navy Yard right now. Do you think you'll go elsewhere or do you wanna keep it in the in the great state of New York?
Speaker 4:So I'm a big believer in, like, decentralized approaches for prototype level. So we're actually opening an assembly shop in San Francisco for our clients there. And we're thinking about one in Austin where we have, like, some clients that I absolutely love alongside the one in New York. And I think that long term for scaling production, the best strategy will be to co locate the warehouses for the components and the assembly. So we are probably gonna open a larger facility in either Arizona or Ohio, most likely.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Last question for me. IMO gold medal. What was your reaction to the news? And is is solving IMO level math useful to you?
Speaker 2:Do you think there will be transfer learning from that model into the circuit board design domain? Or are we in the era of spiky intelligence where until you RL on that particular problem, you're not getting generalizable results?
Speaker 4:I think even if we were in the era of like spiky intelligence on like RL on a specific problem. Like circuit boards are an absolutely like good way of doing this. Like conceptually, a circuit board is orders of magnitude simpler than a silicon design. Like before, like building circuit boards for a living, I used to do like custom silicon designs And those have been, like, represented as code for years. This is 100% an RL approachable problem.
Speaker 4:I do think that the IMU news is fantastic. Like, clearly, there there are incredible returns if you do train on, like, a very specific set of data. I think that the the biggest moat will be in the data. Like, what we consider to be our competitive advantage is not really, like, training new foundation models. We actually rely on, like, foundation model improvements in the wild.
Speaker 4:And our, like, entire, model is based upon feeding those models with better and better data and being able to fine tune and reinforcement learning train very specific parts. Like, one of them is, like, the model that spots mistakes. That's how you tell like a good generated design versus a bad generated design and you can ground the model in reality and physics.
Speaker 2:That makes no sense. Thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the race. On crossing the one year milestone. Fantastic. Getting an a done as well. Great stuff.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Bye. Cheers. And up next we have Elan who I met and Delian was mentioning was building a company in France. Now he's building company in America.
Speaker 2:We're gonna dig into the differences between the two countries.
Speaker 1:Figure out
Speaker 2:which country is the best. Get to the bottom of it. Hey, how you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 3:Hey, I'm good. I'm good. And you guys?
Speaker 2:I'm good. Great. We met at Miami Tech Week a few years ago. Correct?
Speaker 3:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 3:And I remember you telling me quite specifically you didn't see yourself starting your venture business but venture backed business but you said media was something you were very interested in so it looks like it turned out quite well.
Speaker 2:Here we are.
Speaker 1:Here we are.
Speaker 2:Here we are. But yes, give me give me the background on your journey. We'll get to the current company but I wanna talk more about building a company outside of America. Delian gave us a little bit of the background, but I wanted to just hear that journey and kind of tangle with it for a little bit.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I started a company called Kala with two cofounders probably a bit more than eight years ago. The vision and the mission was to basically make real food more affordable by using robotics and AI to automate the back kitchen operations. And if you look at the typical p and l of a restaurant, it's like 30% food cost, 30% people cost and 30% overhead, real estate, rent, electricity, those sort of things. And like the 10% EBITDA margin, if you are performing well, most a lot of restaurants actually kept losing money.
Speaker 3:So that was the vision. We said, okay, we can actually build machines and robotic systems to bring down operating costs, to bring down the required footprint of a restaurant to run, which means we bring down overhead as well. And hopefully, we can reinvest part of those gains into better quality ingredients to make the product more affordable and higher value. And then we can also make the restaurant itself more profitable, thus more scalable. So that was the vision.
Speaker 3:We basically ran the company for eight years. I did a bunch, like an ungodly amount of mistakes along the way, but in the end, we managed to have five very, very, very profitable restaurants. Basically, I'll give you a few numbers, like 60% retention, customers coming more than once a week, 95% customer satisfaction. Can give you the profitability numbers, but much higher than what any other restaurant has achieved in the world thus far. And so the thinking from there was, okay, we have kept those great first results with the free restaurants.
Speaker 3:Let's kind of start scaling. We had raised €10,000,000 up to that point from VCs, and we kind of get hung on a very kind of structural problem of Europe, which is there's a big financing gap when you go when you get to like the Series Aseries B kind of moment, whereas, basically, there's just a gigantic cliff of funding there. And so, basically, we didn't we did not understand that when we could have created the business and structured the business. And so we basically were, like, starting to assemble the plane, get ready to take off, and then we hit the wall, like, straight on straight on. And we just hadn't built we should have built, like, a a much smaller plane or or or whatever, delta plane or something something that's more lean than what we had prepared to do because we had kept a much more ambitious vision that what was achievable in Europe.
Speaker 3:And the thing that's quite specific and that Delian was referencing a few days ago on the show was restructuring the business to go from those handful of restaurants that were very profitable and a very high HQ cost, trying to restructure that to get to a profitable kind of breakeven point at the business level was basically on paper possible, like we could have cut down cost enough to make the business profitable. But just pure French regulation prevented us from doing that. Just the severance cost, Dalian can operate quite well. Purely the severance liability was higher than the cash on hand we had at the time, and we had quite a lot of cash. And still, it was like a lot of money that we had to pay in severance and plus other liabilities around that.
Speaker 3:And so in the end, we basically tried to talk to the regulators, to the government, to kind of any structure that was around us to try and find a workaround, but we kind in the end, we couldn't really go beyond what the kind of the laws and rules have allowed. And so we ultimately, we had to shut down the business around, yeah, a bit more than two months ago, which was kind of quite a shame. I was very, very angry throughout the the whole process Sure. Kind of which obviously kind of pent up in in the next few in the past few weeks. And and when I met Delian a few yeah.
Speaker 3:Actually, a few days after the decision from the court kind of came down, I was still kind of on the fence about what I wanted to do next. I was still thinking, should
Speaker 5:I Well, one
Speaker 3:one seem very angry about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One thing I I would just highlight, I I the the idea of using robotics to deliver better cheaper food was not novel. What was novel was actually getting it to work. Right? Like so many company so many people have tried to do this in The United States.
Speaker 4:This is a graveyard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's an absolute graveyard of companies with super talented founders and teams that for some reason or another couldn't like Dude, it's enough.
Speaker 2:Lee Friedberg started one, Itza. Yeah. It's interesting
Speaker 3:was the other way around like they automated the front of house not the back of house.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 3:But but a lot of a lot of businesses like, I could kind of give you twenty, thirty different businesses that I've tried. And I I think up to that point, we are the only business that had and, technically, Sweden does as well, but had kind of proven, let's say, kind of incrementally positive kind of return investment on the whole investment of a restaurant. Meaning, if you actually invest the money it takes to build the machine and put it in the restaurant, you actually get end up with a higher ROI on the whole investment than if you are just launching with a normal team. I think Sudgrain is the only restaurant that had this kind of apart from us, and I for them, it's not very clear exactly how they achieved that in terms of how transparent they are with the numbers. But yes, other than that, I don't think anyone had even made like, had even it actually paid back a single installation of a robotic system in a restaurant.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And so, yeah, we are we are very proud of that result that we got a few years ago, and then we managed to launch more more stores, get more revenue, get stores doing very high kind of EBITDA margin. But yes, in the end, we couldn't really get there with CALA. And I think in the end, the biggest mistakes we made was definitely starting the business in Europe, in France specifically. There's just market and the let's say, whole ecosystem is just not made for ambitious plays.
Speaker 3:And, like, if you want to build something ambitious, you can really do it there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think that the the restrictions and the regulation that you ran into, are those broadly popular or are they kind of like legacy rules that if you put them up to a purely democratic vote, most people would say that doesn't make any sense. Because there's a lot of like like, know, legislative and regulatory cruft in America that isn't popular but hangs around and people just kinda deal with it. But but what is like the mood in France around this? Like it's it sounded like there wasn't very much like public outcry, but it feels like a situation where kind of everyone loses because the customers were enjoying the food, the employees were enjoying their jobs, you were enjoying building this company, and now they all go, just go away.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I don't so this regulation specifically, I don't think it's known enough. Like, company going bankrupt is not something that makes national news. Sure. So it's not something that people have top of mind.
Speaker 3:But I think overall, people would probably support it because what the regulation actually says is just that when an employee when a company kind of goes bankrupt, the employee gets pretty high severance, meaning they don't have to find it up straight away, or if they can't, they can take a few months to find it and it's fine. And so I think on with the very kind of socialist mental model that most French most French people have, I think this would probably be popular. But on top of the severance itself, the state puts in place a lot of other protections even beyond what the severance cost is, like you basically get your full salary for a year if your company goes bankrupt, paid by the state.
Speaker 2:Paid by
Speaker 3:the state. So does, I mean, partially by the company, but the state kind of, puts a bit more on. And so there's a bunch of those rules that I think people would probably be in favor of if they thought about it, but it's just not something that's top of mind for anyone.
Speaker 2:Have you talked to any other founders in France who went through something similar or had, like, cautionary tales to share? Is it because it feels like this was widespread. We'd be hearing about it a lot and people would be starting to lobby or anything or maybe just everyone leaves.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think the one of the reasons why it was so hard for us specifically is that the the so first, we had our business, and so the HQ cost component is is kind of harder to scale down than a typical software business. I think it's probably one reason why it was hard. And also, I think there are businesses that fail, especially start ups in France, just fail because they can't really find product market fit and they can't even get kind of commercial traction. And so in the end, you don't really mind the company going bankrupt because, like, you just didn't have something that was worth working for.
Speaker 3:Versus for us, I think it's a bit different because we actually had a product network and and the economics were there. We just couldn't keep on scaling, and we should have to have understood that maybe two or three years earlier and just been a little bit more conservative on the the structuring of the business.
Speaker 2:What's the strategy for the
Speaker 5:new
Speaker 2:company? How do you, you know, leverage what works and avoid what doesn't?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so I think so the the first one kind of key lesson is definitely being a lot more lean on the on the HQ cost. I think one thing that I learned is that even though I think this business can be kind of scaled and built with venture capital, I think you have to build a strategy around your financing that's both VC but also private equity that does kind of retail and restaurants come more naturally. You have to be able to tailor your business to all those guys because at some point, you're going to need them. And so that means lower HQ cost, more lean, HQ operations.
Speaker 3:That means other structuring element that you have to do differently. So that's definitely one big learning. The second one is also in terms of, let's say, structuring of the operations. We had built restaurants that were too small. So even though they are very profitable, they didn't bring in as much EBITDA as we could have.
Speaker 3:If we had stores that were doing like, let's say, 3,000,000 revenue per store, we'd have been bringing a lot more EBITDA per store than the revenue we had in our stores. So that's another kind of key learning. And the tech itself, also, are changing a bit the product. We are not taking any of the previous IP or tech that of developed. We are kind of rebuilding everything from scratch, but we know kind of overall we have kind of rough idea, good ideas of kind of what are the prototypes we made, what worked, what didn't work.
Speaker 3:And so we're also kind of approaching the tech a bit differently than what we did with Kala, and thus we're also approaching the the product differently. We're not gonna be serving the same the same food.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Jordy, anything
Speaker 5:else?
Speaker 1:So so what yeah. Can you what's the timeline for the new company? Sure. And where what what kind of key markets are you looking at?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when I spoke with Delian a month and a half ago, was not really decided on it yet. So barely basic incorporating the business now. Already have basically, I talked to a bunch of CALA shareholders that when I announced that this that we had to shut down the business in India, we kind of we are forced by the state to shut down. It's not even like we decided to do it.
Speaker 3:With a bunch of them that basically said, k, whatever you guys do again, if it's the same business, we're to back you again. So right now, just thinking about kind of how I want to think about financing and and the first few months is very kind of very kind of high level at the moment, not really into any details. But so that's kind of first step in the next few months. The high level higher level kind of road map is to launch the first store in New York middle of next year, midpoint of next year exactly kind of when it's gonna depend a bit on a few kind of elements around training and also timeline on regulation. But, yeah, the first restaurant in New York, we're gonna launch a few restaurants there, and then pretty highly considering franchising as kind of a path to to scale a lot more aggressively than and a lot more efficiently capital efficiently than we did with with Calais where we own every single restaurant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think most people don't understand just how if you if you have a hit restaurant, you know, concepts and you can scale with, you know, with franchises, not only can franchisees, you know, change their lives through through that opportunity, but you can have what ends up looking like a software or better than software margins in that, like, super lean HQ and just printing cash off the top line. So
Speaker 3:And imagine imagine if the restaurant itself doesn't do 10% EBITDA multiple kind of x around kind of above that. The amount of money you get out of the top line of the restaurant is just so much higher than, let's say, you are, let's say, restaurant does 10% EBITDA margin. As a franchisor, you're going take 5%. That's not a lot of value you're taking for you basically not doing everything, but creating the whole value in the end. Yeah.
Speaker 3:If you have a restaurant that does a lot more than that, you can get a much bigger chunk of the top line of that restaurant and thus, the the gains into by not operating is also much better.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, excited for you to come to The US Thank you, and build here.
Speaker 3:I hate you up on some day. I'm gonna come to the restaurant.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. We'd love to try it. Awesome. Thanks, Austin.
Speaker 5:Thanks, Thanks,
Speaker 2:See you soon. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 1:Great stuff.
Speaker 2:Tyler, any more progress?
Speaker 5:How you doing? I made it to fifth place.
Speaker 2:Fifth place?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Tyler. Moves are five twenty five.
Speaker 2:Five twenty five. You're You might be a number one by the end of the day.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But it's pretty marginal like. It's hard now? It's gonna be hard from here on out.
Speaker 2:To squeeze out the last little bit of performance.
Speaker 1:It's all
Speaker 2:Good job.
Speaker 1:It's all your mindset Tyler.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's Did Tyler win the iPhone? He did. He did. Did.
Speaker 1:He did. I got a Constellation Prize ready.
Speaker 2:Oh, do have Rubik's cube? Oh, got a Rubik's cube now? Yeah. That's too easy for Tyler. That's a that's a three by three.
Speaker 5:I got the nine by nine.
Speaker 2:Tyler can do the nine by nine.
Speaker 3:That's the You
Speaker 2:say that you can do the nine by nine. But that thing has not been
Speaker 5:solved yet. Done by tomorrow. Yeah. Think Tomorrow? That's should do
Speaker 2:it live.
Speaker 5:Live. Do Twenty minutes. Tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Do it
Speaker 2:Do it tomorrow on the stream.
Speaker 5:Okay. Scramble it.
Speaker 2:It looks pretty scrambled to me. It looks like the last like the hardest part is ahead of you.
Speaker 5:No. The hardest part is
Speaker 2:Oh, almost done. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Nice little timeline?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Brian Johnson
Speaker 1:says Blueprint has been a pain in his butt. It's kept me from not focusing on the single thing I'm consumed with. How does the human race survive the rise of super intelligence? Every minute spent dealing with problems like why a supplier shipped us something out of spec is a minute not spent figuring out how to make don't die the fastest growing ideology history increasing our odds of survival and thriving. At the same time, Blueprint produces products my body and mind that bring my body and my great joy.
Speaker 1:I rely upon them for my well-being. I trust it so do tens of thousands of happy customers. After years of consuming, I am at a molecular level blueprint.
Speaker 2:How big do you think the business is? Tens of thousands of customers. What do you think LTV is?
Speaker 1:I had thought or heard that it was at
Speaker 2:like A $200,000,000
Speaker 1:run rate.
Speaker 2:That feels about right. I feel like if you go into the blueprint ecosystem, you go pretty hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could end up consuming Yeah. Because you
Speaker 2:in there. Use everything.
Speaker 5:And you
Speaker 2:go Yeah. It's not just like, you know, one protein bar and that's it. It's like it has a whole variety of things to to purchase.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Supplement companies continue to be undefeated in terms of monetizing health audiences.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Especially if you have a good audience. He does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He says Blueprint is the best longevity stack in the world. That's not an exaggeration. Stacks. It's meticulously designed based on scientific evidence, third party tested, comprehensive, easy to consume, delicious, and priced to be accessible.
Speaker 1:And anyways, he'd go on to say that he's been basically attacked for by people saying that he's grifting.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:That he, know, is is the whole kind of blueprint don't die ideology is is meant to sell supplements.
Speaker 2:I mean, Netflix did a documentary. Wow. That's really really big.
Speaker 1:But the news here is that he's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead the business day to day while he focuses on Don't Die. Yeah. And so, interesting opportunity here. There's a bunch of different product lines. Have Nourish, Biomarkers, Quantified and I guess clinics are coming soon.
Speaker 1:I don't know I don't know that any exist yet but they're raising money too. They need some hardcore builders so Yeah. I think this would be a great SPAC candidate, John. It's real revenue, charismatic founder. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Take it take it public, Brian.
Speaker 2:Take it public.
Speaker 1:Just just do it.
Speaker 2:Buy some meme stock for your treasury.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Keep some GameStop
Speaker 5:and some Bitcoin on the balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Diversified memes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Some fart coin in there in the corporate treasury. That's the move.
Speaker 1:I can see What
Speaker 2:what a run. He is such a master of earned media. It's so crazy. He's this is basically what like a hiring post. He's saying like I'm hiring two people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Amazing essay. Super viral. And then also a business insider piece that he gets coverage from and can screenshot.
Speaker 1:The master.
Speaker 2:What a beast. Sicky How
Speaker 1:does does he do it?
Speaker 2:Putting up massive numbers. His portfolio company just exited today and he got paid. Waters on me next time folks because he received a distribution.
Speaker 1:Better than nothing. Two dollars
Speaker 5:It's not
Speaker 1:a zero. A zero.
Speaker 2:What happened? It's so interesting that it wouldn't be a zero but it also wouldn't be like like a real number. It's like the smallest amount.
Speaker 1:That happens. Money has to go somewhere.
Speaker 5:I guess. I guess.
Speaker 1:Michael Kratios Yep. Has a video today to win the AI race and ensure global technological dominance. We need more power. So we have Michael be coming on the show tomorrow. Correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And a lot of news here. I'm sure we'll be digesting it. The All In podcast is also having a crossover event with Hill And Valley Yep. With a bunch of hitters breaking this down.
Speaker 2:There's a Absolute lot
Speaker 1:dogs.
Speaker 2:Absolute dogs.
Speaker 1:I don't know if there's been more absolute dogs under one roof in Washington in in maybe since Hill And Valley.
Speaker 2:It's pretty it's pretty wild. The actual action plan is really, really, like, huge. The the the basic summary is that they're shift they're trying to shift or they're shifting with this document AI policy at the federal level from safety first posture. We're worried about paper clipping. We're worried about, you know, like the doomer scenario.
Speaker 2:Should we you know have an FDA for that was one of something that was thrown around on podcasts a while ago. Should these models need to be approved by federal government before they go into general release. Yep. Now there's a shift in posture to a growth in geopolitics posture, basically. So the immediate practical effect is the publication of priorities.
Speaker 2:Real world impact will depend on how quickly the 90 plus follow on actions, especially deregulation, fast track permitting, new export packages, and procurement rules move from paper to binding regulations, guidance, and contracts over the next few months. So there's a bunch of stuff in here. It's gonna touch the OMB, NIST, all the cabinet agencies, commerce, energy, labor departments, treasury, Department of Energy, basically, census, like, treat AI scale programs as tax free educational assistance. There's a whole bunch of different ideas in here.
Speaker 1:They're bringing that golden retriever mode ideology to
Speaker 2:AI. There's gonna be the creation of the Department of Defense AI and Autonomous Systems virtual proving ground. I was talking to somebody yesterday about how big is AI on the battlefield? How big of an issue is having frontier AI in a military context? And it's very unclear if you can just know, hey, invade Taiwan.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes. Like one shotting these prompts, we don't think we're there. But even if you just think about if you're going up against a an adversary and they have Microsoft Excel and you don't, Well, their logistics are gonna be smoother. And so even just having AI tools and systems in all the different little places within your military force, that could be advantageous even if we're not talking about the Terminator killer robot scenario like the the humanoids. All of that stuff feels a little bit further out.
Speaker 2:But just using AI to make standard processes a little bit more efficient seems seems like an important advantage to have in a conflict. They're also expanding the national AI research resource pilot in the creation of financial instruments, spot and forward markets to give startups on demand access to GPU capacity, NSF, DO, Department of Energy, secure compute environments, and national secure data service portal for controlled access. So there's some open source and research efforts. There's a ton of stuff in here. I'm sure it'll all be Yeah.
Speaker 1:Trickling the open source stuff was was exciting to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see how Mark Zuckerberg like fits into that because if he stays with the new super the super intelligence team is stacked but there was always a question about like how long will llama stay open source. China seems to be beating us up on open source. We saw Quen doing really well, DeepSeek doing really well. And so if there's going to be an open source champion in America it feels like that could come from Meta and so it'll be interesting to see how badly he wants and how badly he wants to stay there and and how valuable that is to stay in the open source in at the at the frontier of the open source.
Speaker 2:Speaking of that there was an interesting debate back and forth. I forget who said this. Oh, Francois Cholet said, please note we are not able to produce the 41.8% result from Arc AGI one. That's the first Arc AGI test claimed by the latest QUEN three release neither on the public eval set nor on the semi private set. These number the numbers we're seeing are in line with other recent base models.
Speaker 2:In general, only rely on scores verified by the ARC prize foundation on the semi private set. That way you can trust that the methodology was consistent and fair across all models verified. But then one of the team members I think says, hey, we use the JSON format for convenient parsing. I'll DM you for reproduction. Sounds good.
Speaker 2:Waiting for your DM them. So we will have more news on whether or not Quinn three really did jump forward in Arc AGI. But again, you know, the the goal should be a 100% Yeah. On Arc AGI since these are these are tests that, you know, everyone from an intern to a, you know, I don't know, 10 year old can do. I don't know how low it goes.
Speaker 2:I don't know if a five year old can do it. I gotta I gotta put it to the test. I gotta have the kids try.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Martin Shkreli has a good post here responding to Caitlin She says, you must be one of four things to raise right now. AI high flyer seed co with the promise of being an AI high flying company. American dynamism slash reindustrialization company. And Martin says, how about just growing revenue and profits really fast?
Speaker 1:That is a fantastic strategy.
Speaker 2:The Lindy way. Then if you're growing profits really fast, you might not need to raise. You might not be able to justify a big raise potentially.
Speaker 1:Just raise it 500 x revenue.
Speaker 2:I guess. Yeah. 10,000 x EBITDA or something. Anyway, in other news, people are still memeing about the nuclear reactor breach by hackers via Microsoft SharePoint.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was interested in the timeline there. I was getting into that story yesterday. Yep. The vulnerability was discovered in May at a hacking competition that Microsoft put on.
Speaker 1:They then patched it later which didn't work and then the major hacks happened over the weekend just a few days ago. And so the timeline there is like kind of weird like did they not and people were pushing back and saying like very unlikely that there was
Speaker 2:A serious breach?
Speaker 1:Well, no. No. More so unlikely that super critical documents were shared in those systems.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:But still, any of any and all information related to the US nuclear weapons agency and just program broadly should be pretty secure. So, yeah. Anyways, I'm sure we'll learn more about the kind of timeline that that led to that over time. And some final words of advice from Sahil
Speaker 5:When you're ready.
Speaker 1:Says buya.com domain. Go into debt if you have to. I saw somebody quoted this and and said, I actually did do this. I went into debt. The the guy who got the domain contra.com.
Speaker 1:Okay. Which is a nice Did
Speaker 2:it work out?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Raised raised a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:It's a great domain. Great name. Fantastic. We got our domain from snagged.com. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Rob.
Speaker 2:Go check it out.
Speaker 1:Industry leading domain services. He helped us get tbpn.com in thirty minutes. Wow. It was one of the fastest negotiations of all time.
Speaker 5:It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:And we are very grateful. It's also cool he started Roe. Roe. A
Speaker 2:Pharmaceutical company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Roe.co. So he's been in the domain game for a while.
Speaker 5:But Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Fire domain.
Speaker 1:And last, I gotta do one more
Speaker 2:final Do
Speaker 1:it. From Will Brown. Chat GPT should have a big green switch that says sicko mode.
Speaker 5:Sicko mode.
Speaker 2:Like, sicko fancy mode? Yeah.
Speaker 1:S I c o mode. If you wanna just turn it on and just get gassed up by the model, you should be able to to to really
Speaker 5:Stay turn it
Speaker 2:safe out there. Stay safe. Don't get lost in the sauce. Don't get lost in the sauce.
Speaker 1:And one more final post.
Speaker 5:Okay. One more. The CEO
Speaker 1:of Brew Markets is highlighting the CEO of Nvidia. Jensen. Has a legendary LinkedIn profile. He was at Denny's for five years, 1978 to '83. He was a dishwasher, busboy and a waiter.
Speaker 1:So just working his way up the org chart.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:If he had stayed there, he probably would have become CEO. But he went and a decade later founded Nvidia and has run been running it for thirty two years and seven months.
Speaker 2:What a run. Biggest company in the world. What you got?
Speaker 5:I think we low key gotta put him in the truth zone because he worked at AMD.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the that that's the post.
Speaker 5:Oh. Oh. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. Didn't highlight. Leaving So out the years that he worked at AMD and LSI is a great example of how a lionizing narrative works. Creates the impression of superhuman genius which confers a valuable aura that has material impact on morale negotiations etcetera.
Speaker 2:He worked at or something has a plaque on the wall like Nvidia CEO worked here. Very cool. And he still does Denny's stunts. He did one with the acquired guys. He came by and like, I think he delivered them Denny's or something like that when they were doing some event at Nvidia GTC.
Speaker 1:At this point, he should just buy Denny's. It's 237 mill it's trading
Speaker 2:at $270,000,000
Speaker 1:market cap right now.
Speaker 2:It's that cheap? Wow. I didn't realize it was pure play like
Speaker 1:It's also like just one. Guess it's getting meme stocked. It's it's up 16% in the past five days.
Speaker 2:Not financial advice. Financial Should
Speaker 1:really Pick it up. Pick it up quick before it runs too hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean he's in the interest of keeping it alive because if it just goes away no one could turn
Speaker 1:every Denny's into a showroom for his latest chips. Know, just carve out a booth.
Speaker 2:I feel like I read some article about Denny's or some sort of restaurant chain using AI to help the servers or something. Everyone has an AI play. Restaurant Yeah. Or they're about. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Headquartered in Pasadena.
Speaker 1:Very American episode today, John. You could not put that football down the whole time.
Speaker 2:It's fun. It's nice to just have like a little fidget. It's the original fidget Yeah.
Speaker 5:Something about John with a football.
Speaker 2:It's great. Great. Yeah. Tried to keep it like below the desk during the interview so I could
Speaker 5:be a little bit more
Speaker 2:serious but you know. I I think eventually we're gonna be tossing the pigskin. Well, talking to some founder about the race.
Speaker 1:On that note, leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and
Speaker 2:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Cheers, folks. Bye.