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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, 06/02/2026. We are live from the TBPN, The Temple of Technology.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:The capital of capital. Let me tell you about, baby. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards.
Speaker 1:Bill Pay accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. It feels so good to be back. You know who else is back? Google with a huge fundraise, an equity fundraise.
Speaker 1:Surprising to a lot of people raised equity in years and years and years, but they raised a cheeky 80,000,000,000. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Alphabet's mega fundraising show
Speaker 2:The real story is that you got a haircut.
Speaker 1:I did. I didn't just get a haircut. Got them all cut. Got them all cut. Hey, we got the team there.
Speaker 1:There we go. That's a new that's a new angle. I like that. Well, Alphabet, in AI, money talks says The Wall Street Journal. The ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant.
Speaker 1:So let's run through it. 80,000,000,000 stock based fundraising should be taken as a rebuke to those salivating over the forthcoming IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. The search giant is showing its competitive advantage in an area that increasingly matters for artificial intelligence access to money. Ben Thompson has a great breakdown too of how capital is so important in the age of AI and the war for AI. In AI, money talks, the biggest companies are paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to lure top researchers and tens of billions to build data centers while financing losses as they build their AI businesses.
Speaker 1:The money being funneled into AI is probably already making it harder for non AI startups to raise capital with 61% of all venture capital last year going to AI. It's really like I was I was talking to somebody That who was trying
Speaker 2:to deals low. I got Based on based on But but there's a lot of there was a lot of hard tech.
Speaker 1:Well, everything sort of gets wrapped into AI. I was talking to
Speaker 2:that's why
Speaker 1:it feels how to have a conversation about AI. And it was like, you can talk about sycophancy. You can talk about data centers and water and energy and and like being an eyesore. And then you can also talk about enterprise sales and SaaS you can talk about consumer and it it just touches absolutely everything. And so it's it's almost it feels like if you're trying to have the AI conversation, Rude.
Speaker 1:Rude about the Jared Eisenman years. We love Jared Eisenman.
Speaker 2:Don't think that's secret.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Our great space leader Jared Yeah. Is incredibly handsome.
Speaker 1:People like saying that about getting a haircut. Got my ears lowered. That's another dad joke. Got my ears lowered. Anyway, yesterday Okay.
Speaker 1:Alphabet announced a massive $80,000,000,000 equity raise, says Brandon Grahl in the TBPN newsletter. Can go sign up, tbpn.com. The raise will be broken up into a few milestones over the course of this year. Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel at the helm, Warren Buffett obviously still at the table.
Speaker 2:A lot of people were there was a viral post yesterday. Yes. Somebody was saying, Buffett retires and they immediately invest in Google at all time highs. Yeah. What other company did they invest in at all time highs?
Speaker 1:Was that Apple?
Speaker 2:Apple.
Speaker 1:Apple.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Apple. Look what they did.
Speaker 1:Did. Pretty fantastic. Yeah. I mean, for a long time, for what, thirty, forty years, Warren Buffett was known as like not a tech investor. Couldn't wrap his mind around it.
Speaker 1:Valuation's always too high. Business too, too frothy or too high growth like Well, I
Speaker 2:think he knew vibe coding was coming. For sure. And and he thought, how are you gonna how can I value a software company when the cost of producing software is obviously going to zero? He was saying that back in 2010.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He wanted to get in on Genmoji a decade early. Yeah. No. Obviously, like the business was printing.
Speaker 1:It fit the Warren Buffett mold. I was actually doing this this deep dive on like where would Warren Buffett find value in the AI supply chain? I was trying to dig into, you know, if you apply that framework because there's a lot of froth, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of high growth opportunities, but
Speaker 2:Where would Berkshire trade if Warren came out of retirement and just said, I'm coming out of retirement to invest in AI bottlenecks? Not only does Berkshire rerate, I think everything goes way higher.
Speaker 1:I think so. I think so. Let's see. I wanna I wanna see because I I I did look at this and I pulled
Speaker 2:John, they want you to crack another Diet Coke.
Speaker 1:Another Diet Coke. Here you go. Boom. Satisfying. Another one.
Speaker 1:The when I did this analysis, the the the name that popped up was
Speaker 2:Buffet saw G Stack and knew that the AI revolution was real.
Speaker 1:It is God after all. It is
Speaker 2:God in the in the memo.
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:It's like God mode.
Speaker 1:If you are trying to get in on the action, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So my my previous analysis identified Qualcomm has enough AI optionality for the AI investors but enough business model durability for Buffett, an evaluation that does not require heroic assumptions compared with many AI semiconductor names. Most admired but disputed, TSMC.
Speaker 1:Buffett actually bought this company but then he sold because he was worried about geopolitical risk and there were some other options. But he wound up going with Google and we will break it down. So Berkshire's buying 10,000,000,000 worth of shares at a roughly 6% discount from Monday's closing price. Another $30,000,000,000 will consist of underwritten public offerings, and the last 40,000,000,000 will be staggered common stock offerings beginning in q three twenty twenty six. And overall, the dilution is very low.
Speaker 1:All the shares Alphabet will sell are brand new, meaning the plan is slightly dilutive for existing shareholders. But at their 4,000,000,000,000 market cap, where are they right now? They're way, way up. 80,000,000,000 just isn't that much dilution for the shareholders, fortunately. A lot of opinions on the timeline about this deal this morning.
Speaker 1:I've seen a number of people or Brandon Gorell has seen a number of people theorizing that Alphabet is sucking up liquidity AI demand from investors before they'd be able to buy an anthropic or open AI IPO. Richard Rehard Jark gave a few less conspiratorial explanations. Yeah. A lot
Speaker 2:of people were saying that about SpaceX. SpaceX. Yeah. But the other the the the the more simple answer is you should probably raise capital when it's cheap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's just a lot of irrational. Demand. There's a lot of capital out there. And so there's a lot of demand for basically all of these names when there's a new trend.
Speaker 1:And we've seen liquidity pull out of other sectors of the market and so it has to go somewhere. Certainly makes sense that it would go into the latest and greatest technology. So Alphabet is seeing demand for Gemini go up and so it's going to invest more in compute and scale. Ben Thompson had per usual solid piece on the race this morning. He wrote, The first question is why did Google issue equity instead of debt?
Speaker 1:So there's some rumors that debt might be coming and the equity is sort of a precursor to that, but Ben Thompson writes, Debt is, all things being equal, the preferred instrument for investment. The proceeds of the latter pay off better than the former and existing equity holders reap all of the benefits. Equity, on the other hand, removes the risk of debt but at the cost of giving up a future share of profits. That leads to why what may be the Occam's razor, Occam's one d razor, two d razor. No.
Speaker 1:A razor is three-dimensional. Right? So it's a three d razor. Like four d chess? Three d chess?
Speaker 1:Four d chess? Anyway, Google is going to start issuing a lot more debt as well, which is to say that everyone continues to underestimate the amount of demand there is for compute. Of course, that's not far off from a more bearish interpretation. Google is uncertain about the return of investment of all of that CapEx and would prefer to share the risk along with the upside. If there isn't a substantial debt issuance down the road, then this might be the right answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, compute is remarkably expensive. We're looking at, you know, even within the COGS or the cost of inference for the labs, we're seeing, you know, dollars per task. It's a lot of money, a lot of dollars flowing into these data centers. But when you actually run the numbers on the tasks that they are completing, comp that to other sources to get something done, you're seeing positive ROI.
Speaker 1:So it's all just a productivity uplift, which is good to good to see. The Wall Street Journal continues and says, Bond investors think the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt being raised by big tech is pushing up the yield and other borrowers have to pay and even and it's even affecting government bond yields. The the hyperscalers of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have become major bond issuers as they ramp up spending with Alphabet alone raising 85,000,000,000 in a series of record breaking issues around the world. In the past year, they might raise more in debt. But the stock market is the obvious place to raise capital to spend on the exciting bits of AI where the returns are unknown, technology is rapidly developing and business models are in flux.
Speaker 1:Unlike debt, companies don't have to repay their shareholders and if it takes longer to make money from AI or never makes money, the company can simply wait it out if was financed by stock, though investors would be very unhappy. Alphabet is one of a tiny number of companies capable of raising so much cash without tanking its stock. What did the stock do, Jordy?
Speaker 2:A couple points today, but I don't Okay. Necessarily.
Speaker 1:Thanks to its near monopoly in online search and credibility with Wall Street in new ventures. That's a really good point. For a long time, tech has been sort of cold on Google's side projects, but they're starting to bear so, so much fruit. You look at the progress with Waymo, and it's very clear that just one win in Waymo will be a power law that will wash out all of the side chat apps that never went anywhere or little little software projects that and April fools jokes that they launched. And some of them will become really big businesses as well.
Speaker 1:They have other stuff. Calico.
Speaker 2:They have the mosquitoes right now?
Speaker 1:The mosquitoes are crazy. That was a weird, weird headline. I didn't know
Speaker 2:I'm excited about releasing billions of genetically modified mosquitoes Yeah. Into the environment to try to kill all the mosquitoes.
Speaker 1:Wait. There are mosquitoes that kill mosquitoes? Is that what they do? Oh, okay. They're like infernal or something, basically.
Speaker 2:I'm excited because there's like almost certainly could never possibly be any unexpected Yeah. Downside to disrupting the circle of life?
Speaker 1:Who knows? Who knows? People have been studying this for like twenty years. So I'm I'm optimistic. It could be a
Speaker 2:fast Yeah. Human One of those things would be amazing. Yeah. If we can just nuke all the mosquitoes Yeah. Off the map.
Speaker 2:But I got a feeling they're doing something important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There Let's
Speaker 2:be let's actually Wait. Let's actually try to get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 1:Wait. Is the should we be selling the bug repellent industry short right now? Should we be going turbo short, all mosquito repellent companies? They're probably gonna go out of business if they get rid of all the mosquitoes. Right?
Speaker 1:This is, Finance one hundred one right here. Anyway, I can keep reading.
Speaker 2:Don't don't give our little retail truck
Speaker 1:over there
Speaker 2:any ideas.
Speaker 1:He's going to go short. While 80,000,000,000 is huge, it amounts to less than 2% of the market value of a company trading at $4,500,000,000,000. The stock was down just 2.6% in pre market trading. There seems to be an unlimited supply of willing buyers to fund AI. If it turns out there is a limit, Alphabet can only benefit by going first.
Speaker 1:From a societal standpoint, says The Wall Street Journal, the purpose of the stock market is to funnel money from millions of savers into giant projects, just as in the nineteenth century railroads. For the past twenty five years, that role has been less important as private capital funds grew large enough to finance companies for much longer before they needed to go public. AI's vast consumption of cash is beyond even the capability of private markets, however. Sure, there are other reasons to list, such as allowing employees to cash out their stock options. 30,000,000,000, you mentioned this earlier today, 30,000,000,000 of Alphabet's stock issuance is earmarked for paying tax on employee stock awards, but the ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant.
Speaker 1:As we move into a new era of capital heavy industries, the stock market stops being merely a way for private investors to exit, but an attractive source of capital. The bear in me worries that all this equity raising is also about taking advantage of record stock prices and could be a sign that the top is near, says The Wall Street Journal. They're almost calling it a top, but they said it's near.
Speaker 2:Mosquitoes do have some environmental value. Mhmm. Though most of it is not unique to mosquitoes, which is why people debate how much the world would miss them. They're food source. For spiders?
Speaker 2:Mosquito larvae are eaten by fish, frogs, dragonflies, beetles, birds, bats, and other insects.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Adult mosquitoes are eaten by birds, bats. So so we already have friends in the animal kingdom Mhmm. That are just eating these eating them alive. Yeah. So that's good.
Speaker 2:So you'd be pollination
Speaker 1:You would want more birds and frogs around.
Speaker 2:But the argument is that a lot of other animals like contribute the same sort of general environmental value. Sure. So if you took out some of these disease Pro predators
Speaker 1:mosquito. He's in the pocket of big mosquito over here. He's like, oh, I love oh, I have a pet mosquito at home. I love mosquitoes. Not a dog person.
Speaker 1:I'm a mosquito guy. I I like mosquitoes. This is you. You're a mosquito dude. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow. That's weird. You ever get a high like,
Speaker 2:swollen shot by a mosquito? No. Never. That was me, girl.
Speaker 1:I've gotten a few like bites on my legs. You kind of X them out or try not to scratch them. They say don't scratch them because that spreads the poison a little bit. But it's like a minor minor nuisance. But I think that they spread a lot of disease and that's the real reason why people are so aggressive about Somebody should do a street
Speaker 2:Somebody should do a street interview Yeah. Where they go around asking people Yeah. Would you want to you had the chance to eliminate all Yeah. Mosquitoes in the world with no downsides to the environment
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or a $100,000 and dinner with Jay Z Yeah. What would you choose? Yeah. We There would be some interesting answers. Are
Speaker 1:they releasing these in America? In California?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. A private company animals? Like, could could could Microsoft just release like a million bears or something? Like like, what what's the limit of this? Can you just release like, hey, yeah, like, we're we're releasing 25,000
Speaker 2:an early idea on this show. Right? It was like bear defense companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Domesticated bears, just, you know, wild dogs, more coyotes, more deer maybe. What what what what pick your poison. Whatever animal you want, just get it out there.
Speaker 2:I think if we put enough monster energy TruthSocial's gonna release
Speaker 1:like a million bald eagles. That's their goal. That's the next step.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's why the company's so unprofitable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That means buying bald eagles and breeding them continuously.
Speaker 2:No. I think I think one of the reasons mosquitoes buy humans is there's not enough cans of like cracked open monster energy. Yeah. So I think if you put a bunch of monsters out when you camped, you'd probably be
Speaker 1:safe. Okay.
Speaker 2:Mosquitoes would obviously much rather have monster energy than blood.
Speaker 1:And does that sterilize them? Think that might I think that might do the trick.
Speaker 2:It might do the opposite, actually. Yeah. It might make them even more powerful.
Speaker 1:Here's an idea. Release a 100,000 bulls charging through Manhattan as a sponsorship opportunity, as a marketing stunt for the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. They they have the golden bowl. There's the bowl.
Speaker 1:Why not release a ton of a ton of real life bowls? Who knows? Maybe it has a positive positive externality on the on the life cycle of Manhattan, you know? They they they wind up finding a home in Central Park, and the bulls run through Manhattan. Do you do you think
Speaker 2:Meta follows suit and does an equity raise like Maybe. I can imagine Zuck not wanting to do this right now given where they're trading.
Speaker 1:The stock's down.
Speaker 2:I was on
Speaker 1:I mean, it's not it's not that down, but it it isn't like popping like the rest of the AI hyper
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was comparing Meta to Tesla today according to companies MarketCap, which which doesn't seem to be companiesmarketcap.com has one job, which is to track the market caps of companies.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I find the data to be somewhat inconsistent.
Speaker 1:Meta's sort of near all time highs. It's not that far off. It's certainly it's certainly up from the trough of when the stock was a $100 in 2022.
Speaker 2:Anyways, so yeah. I was looking at the two. Meta had 200,000,000,000 of 2025 revenue, 164,000,000,000 of gross profit, 82% gross margins, growing 22% a year. Tesla had 94,000,000,000, 17,000,000,000 of gross profit.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Actually shrunk 3% year over year, and Tesla is getting close to being worth the same amount of 3,000,000,000,000. 1.3 versus
Speaker 1:mean, if you look at the mag seven, if you're just doing the the the biggest seven tech companies, it's it's like completely changed hands in terms of like Samsung, Micron. There's so many there's so many companies deeper in the supply chain that are are absolutely mooning on the AI boom. So maybe maybe we need a new term. We had FANG for a while. Now we have MAG seven.
Speaker 1:It feels like we're in the dawn of a new one. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway Anyway,
Speaker 2:where I was going with that Yeah. I I can see Zuck feeling like I'm not being property properly valued right now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Should buy the stock back.
Speaker 5:Yeah. If anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If anything. Although they don't have a lot
Speaker 1:of because they're spending a lot on Yeah. CapEx. Yeah. Yeah. Matt Dratch has some takes on Google on the raise.
Speaker 1:He says, first, I don't think this has anything to do with their view of equity value, so they don't necessarily think they're overvalued. Larry and Sergei want to spend. Sundar and CFO said our debt rating though and so we are here. They don't want to raise more debt of the 80,000,000,000. 40,000,000,000 is for infrastructure, but I suspect that the equity check for a meta like SPV structure will be levered five to six x.
Speaker 1:In other words, the spending implications are much greater than the headline. Can't believe it's only Monday. So they're gonna take 40,000,000,000, lever that up across their infrastructure efforts and put something closer to 200,000,000,000 to work over the next year, that pays for their CapEx bill for probably just next year because they'll probably be around there in, like, the AWS tier, especially on the back of that Google Cloud growth that's growing faster than AWS, growing faster than Azure. So lots of reasons to spend, spend, spend.
Speaker 2:John, they're saying we need a L'Oreal ad read from John
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:With that new hair. Shout out. We'll work I on like that company.
Speaker 1:They're a great great team. Anyway, Google raising 80,000,000,000 in equity, more compute, more AI spend, full send downrange. Jack Raines says the gigabrain move by Google is sucking up some of the AI demand via equity issuance instead of debt before Anthropic and OpenAI go public. We'll see what happens. We'll see how much demand is out there.
Speaker 1:SpaceX is going out in just a couple weeks, so we'll see how that goes. But there's a lot
Speaker 3:of there's a lot of
Speaker 1:money A couple
Speaker 2:weeks, John.
Speaker 1:Couple days.
Speaker 2:Next week.
Speaker 1:Next week. I mean, there's yeah. There's a lot of there's a lot of liquidity across all of the retirement funds that are funneling into these things. There's a whole bunch of different things. Sergei Alexchenko has the chart of Google alphabet equity raises.
Speaker 1:This can't possibly include, oh, their venture round.
Speaker 2:So SpaceX going out on a Friday. Mhmm. That is gonna be insane.
Speaker 1:After the market cluster or something?
Speaker 2:No. Mean, obviously, we'll It
Speaker 1:would be a global list. Bloping.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But then, immediately goes into forty eight hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This chart this chart can't possibly include the venture rounds that happened pre IPO. Right? But I guess they might be so small that they don't even show up on here in because it's less than 1,000,000,000. I mean, Google famously did not raise a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Was very profitable when they went out to go public. And top tick crypto has pivoted to the memory trade and says the memory trade can't keep going because the hyperscalers can't spend more than 100% of cash flow. And while Google would like a word because they can spend more than a 100% cash flow because they can raise equity and they can raise debt and they can get all sorts of money from all over the place. So what else is Berkshire doing these days? Berkshire is investing 10,000,000,000 into Google in a private placement as part of the broader $80,000,000,000 equity capital raise.
Speaker 1:Warren Buffett is here watching Greg Abel take 10,000,000,000 of money that he painstakingly made over his entire investment lifetime and put it into Google at all time highs. I don't think this is an accurate reaction to Warren Buffett because this play worked with Apple and Google's in a fantastic position to continue doing this. Ben Thompson broke this whole this whole thing down comparing what Warren Buffett had done with C's candy to buy a railroad, which is a fascinating example. So they they bought C's. Berkshire Hathaway bought C's candy for 25,000,000 when sales were $30,000,000 So less than a 1x revenue multiple.
Speaker 1:Pretax earnings were less than $5,000,000 so they paid roughly 5x pretax earnings, so EBITDA. The capital then required to conduct the business was $8,000,000 locked away in C's candy. Then they had some seasonal debt but generally the company was earning 60% pretax on invested capital, 5,000,000 out every year, 8,000,000 locked up. So last year, this is from 2007, the shareholder letter. Last year, C's sales in 2007 or 2006 were three eighty three million dollars Pretax profits were $82,000,000 And the capital to run the business, it was only $40,000,000 So they'd grown the amount of capital by four x, five x, but they'd grown the actual cash flow from that business significantly from 5,000,000 to 82,000,000.
Speaker 1:And so Warren Buffett says, this means we have had to reinvest only 32,000,000 since 1972. 1972 to 2,007. He's reinvesting 32,000,000. Every year he gets a check for $82,000,000. That's a fantastic cash flowing business.
Speaker 1:What did he do with that business, which generated pretax earnings of 1,350,000,000 or something like that, which was sent to Berkshire. Well, he bought a railroad. So BNSF railways, the railways require a ton of capital to operate. BNSF consumed 3,800,000,000 last year. They also make a lot of money.
Speaker 1:The net income was 5,500,000,000 on revenue of 23,400,000,000, but it requires a lot of business a lot of revenue a lot of, cash tied up in the business to run that. And so to put that in perspective, the total amount of money that Berkshire has made from Seas Candy is probably less than $3,000,000,000 so less than BNSF made last year. So which is a better business? And he goes on to talk about cloud and Google and how they have the search engine that throws off cash. They can use that to build the railroad of the future, which is all the data centers and AI infrastructure.
Speaker 1:And so a lot to like. And it's not as much of like, oh, this is wildly outside of the wheelhouse. Berkshire's never seen a business like this. That's not true. It.
Speaker 1:This isn't that out of characteristic. It is a wonderful business and it actually pattern matches to what Berkshire has done with Apple and also with the railroad and C's Candy before. So don't be that surprised. But what is more surprising is this story. So, Jordy, do want to take us through it?
Speaker 1:But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 2:In the journal today, Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive. I realize, John, there's a bunch of soundboard effects that I would only hit when we were doing ads.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:So I missed them.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so
Speaker 2:feels very nostalgic. Ads back. I love it. Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Under its new chief
Speaker 1:Olds
Speaker 2:and Craig White Abel. Berkshire Yeah. Raises its bet on a market recovery by adding another housing company to its portfolio.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Berkshire Hathaway, $6,800,000,000 deal to acquire. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 1:I'm just laughing at the fact that like like, know, they did two $10,000,000,000 deals. And one was buying like an entire homebuilder and the other was buying like point o 1% of Google. And just the scale of these different things like like the it's an extremely cool deal. We'll get into it. It's very interesting.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, it's like total peanuts compared to like the AI build out.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. It's like what is that? Potentially like a work harder or work smarter not harder moment. Like, we'll see which one of these ends up generating a better return.
Speaker 1:This seems extremely important. I'm extremely excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Extremely like important. Like one data center or an entire home builder that is their entire business and probably very storied will get into it.
Speaker 2:Well, we don't know. He might be pivoting it into a data center. Maybe. That would be the ultimate. Maybe.
Speaker 2:Black Two
Speaker 1:by fours, rack them, you know. Metas using tents. Maybe the next data center looks like a house. A lot less controversial. You know, the NIMBY, if you just see a nice craftsman home next to you, you're like, yeah, whatever.
Speaker 1:It looks nice. You know, I don't I don't have a problem with that. You know. Oh, they're chimneys smoke generators.
Speaker 2:There's a data center among us.
Speaker 1:This might be the solution. Tyler, what you got?
Speaker 2:I I was gonna say, like, these two deals are still small compared to, the actual cash that they're holding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What did they have? I I
Speaker 2:think most recently it was 397,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That's so much.
Speaker 2:So even then it's like, oh, wow, know, he's so white He's
Speaker 1:turbo long. Would say,
Speaker 2:but you know, he's still cash Chad right now.
Speaker 1:Oh. Hopefully inflation doesn't get him. We'll see. Anyway, continue.
Speaker 2:With an all cash agreement Sunday for Taylor Morrison Home Corporation, the Omaha based conglomerate is poised to become a top five US homebuilder Mhmm. Adding to its growing portfolio of housing related companies. Berkshire's homebuilder deal is the sign that a prominent investor thinks the housing slump will eventually pass and it wants to be positioned to take advantage of any market turn. More than 75% of young renters still think they someday will own a home. That is great.
Speaker 2:Glad that I I would have thought it was less than that given given like sentiment online. And so it's great.
Speaker 1:There's been a bunch of there's been a bunch of weird studies where like when you zoom out, you look at Gen z homeownership and it's actually pretty high, but that's driven by noncoastal cities because people move to San Francisco. Obviously, house prices are through the roof, and a lot of people are like, yeah. I I wanna rent and go to some local house party. Like, I I want to be in the mix. And then at some point, people make the decision.
Speaker 1:So it's more about like family planning, but of course there's
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All sorts of, you know, affordability issues. But
Speaker 2:Chat says, white pill, never doom.
Speaker 1:Never doom.
Speaker 2:This investment is grounded in a long term belief in the strength of America's housing market and its underlying fundamentals, which we see as enduring over time.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Berkshire is raising its exposure to a housing market in its fourth year of dismal sales. High mortgage rates, job market uncertainty, and the rising cost of living have kept many prospective buyers on the sidelines. Builders have been forced to offer incentives such as paying part of buyers' mortgage costs just to unload their inventory. Builder confidence is low. Single family home starts declined 9% in April, the steepest drop since August.
Speaker 2:A third of builders said they had cut their prices last month. Moreover, many Americans now think homeownership is beyond their budget. More people are renting for longer or putting their savings into the stock market rather than investing in a home. But analysts think analysts say The US housing shortage of more than 4,000,000 homes means new homes need to be built. They expect more buyers will return to the market once mortgage rates, which recently hit a nine month high, come down and trigger pent up buyer demand.
Speaker 2:Berkshire has agreed to pay a 24% premium to Taylor Morrison's closing stock price of $58.58.
Speaker 1:That's an incredible bargain.
Speaker 2:Friday. Analysts see the price is a good deal for Berkshire because the actual value of the builder's home portfolio bellies its lagging stock price. That is an incredible bargain, says Tony Avila, chief executive of Builder Advisor Group. Taylor Morrison's stock shot up 22%. Monde This is
Speaker 1:quote by Warren Buffett. This is the first deal for Abel, Greg Abel, new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett said, he gave a quote to the journal, he has launched.
Speaker 7:He
Speaker 1:has launched. I love it. Monday. Then they talk about the the Google deal. Taylor Morrison is a safer bet in a precarious home building market.
Speaker 1:The company tends to focus on the higher end of the market, has performed better. A significant part of its business is built around buyers looking to upgrade to nicer homes rather than entry level buyers who are struggling the most. In addition, the company is part of a smaller segment of builders that have leaned into so called build to rent communities of single family homes constructed for the sole purpose of renting. Congress recently threatened build to rent developers with a proposal that would force them to sell their properties within seven years of building them, but house lawmakers removed that proposal in an attempt to rescue the burgeoning sector. The Taylor Morrison deal is the latest example of consolidation in the residential construction industry.
Speaker 1:Last month, Avalon Bay Communities and Equity Residential agreed to merge in the largest multifamily combination on record years after sluggish profits. This puts pressure on others to find a dance partner, says Alan Ratner. Interesting. Well, we'll continue following up on that. Well, they own railroads and you should be on Railway.
Speaker 1:Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app service databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. We have some time before we go into What do
Speaker 2:you think the odds that the admin does some type of mega project around home building?
Speaker 1:Almost zero. Like, I I don't see I don't see the government building homes. I think that the number one lever that any administration has over housing affordability is interest rates. Sure. And doing something program?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but specifically just the the Fed funds rate. Like, if you can do something to bring that
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just I just mean we're at a time we're at a time with like, at least in modern history history relatively unprecedented government intervention. Yeah. You know, government taking a stake in Intel.
Speaker 1:You think they might be build the cube.
Speaker 2:You know the cube? What's a cube?
Speaker 1:There's a cube that if you built it in Central Park, one mile by one mile by one mile, it would fit a billion people inside. So housing housing crisis solved. No windows, but if you build the cube, no more housing issues.
Speaker 2:Wait. Not Buffett, but who's the guy that built the the Nolan? No. The dorm at UCSB.
Speaker 1:Oh, Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Munger. Munger.
Speaker 1:He was
Speaker 2:building cubes. He was he was early in Not the
Speaker 1:a member of the government, not doing a mega project. I would be surprised if there's something that's first party. But Tyler has another take.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say the admin is not supposed to be able to like interfere with interest rates. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But That is independent.
Speaker 2:There's a
Speaker 1:lot of things that you can do where Interest
Speaker 2:rates were declining until we got into
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like like if you strengthen the economy, pull back from from geopolitical risks and whatnot like Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like physical dominance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This kind of Yeah. There there's just there there will be things that open up the Fed to cutting rates potentially. But yeah. I I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's a very clearly it's not within the admin's abilities. What James Walker Okay. What's James Walker out
Speaker 2:He's boarding this morning's flight with an emotional support trout.
Speaker 1:Is this AI? Is this real? This is insane.
Speaker 2:Honestly, don't think AI could nail this era of Instagram filter.
Speaker 1:Bringing a is the fish alive? This is crazy. Bringing a fish on a plane is hilarious. But that does not feel very humane. It feels like a very uncomfortable situation for a fish.
Speaker 1:But I guess we gotta get somewhere. You gotta go you gotta go in the tube.
Speaker 2:Think about it though, John. Yeah. Think about the things this fish will have seen that many fish would never see in a lifetime. Yeah. So is it is it inhumane?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or is it inhumane not to let the fish Yeah. If you got a trout,
Speaker 1:it's like I think the earth is flat. I've never seen the curvature. You're like, well, you're going into seven forty seven and I'm showing you out the window. You look out the window, you'll see the curvature of the earth potentially. Or maybe it's just the windows.
Speaker 1:Maybe the windows and the plane are curving it.
Speaker 2:Was a good post from Key. Said, dude is effing Sherlock Holmes.
Speaker 1:Forget. Somebody
Speaker 2:says, 100% this ad is sponsored by OpenAI from
Speaker 1:The OpenAI from the official
Speaker 2:OpenAI account. It's not even sponsored. It's actually hosted just It's just by OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Not even marketing. It's just communications. This is a wild this is a wild post. It's so funny. Terrence Tau, AI creates more room to experiment, test unexpected paths and discover what might otherwise stay out of touch.
Speaker 1:Terence Tau, GOAT mathematician from UCLA. Very fun to see him talking about his process, where he's still seeing value, how he's using models. He He talks about this a lot a lot of times. It just allows him to flesh out his work, build a chart that he wouldn't otherwise build, very synergistic, fully in like the centaur centaur era. I don't know who got paid to say what, but that ad is sponsored by OpenAI.
Speaker 1:I think it's best to show real results. That's so interesting. This is so funny. Anyway, else is going on in the timeline? Joe Weisenthal has something the price of whey is going bananas.
Speaker 1:It's protein crisis. This is not good.
Speaker 2:So so What's going on? Here's what's a little funny.
Speaker 1:Okay. Break it down.
Speaker 2:We know why the price of whey is going bananas.
Speaker 1:Same to
Speaker 2:We don't need Joe to tell us.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's because Joe is going bananas Yeah. On his weight consumption.
Speaker 1:Oh, you think he's
Speaker 2:responsible He's for like, we're all trying to figure out who did this.
Speaker 1:He has been looking bigger.
Speaker 2:Much bigger.
Speaker 1:His traps, specifically, they've been eating his
Speaker 2:head. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he has those death star delts on the caps, on the shoulders. It's really crazy. In the lats, when he does the lats spread on Odd Lots, it gets aggressive. It's a little too much.
Speaker 1:So cooler with the whey, Joe. But here we have some news. In earlier May, in early May, a supplier delivered bad news to baking and beverage company Hello Amino. It had run out of whey protein. Canada based Hello Amino uses the ingredient in all of the 30 high protein baking mixes it sells.
Speaker 1:Founder Ali Swift found another supplier, but it means importing whey protein isolate from The US at a price that's 50% higher and due to increase again soon. The new whey protein delivered other complications. It dried out the company's baking goods due to the manufacturer's different processing methods. That's true. A lot of different ingredients will change the output, not always created equal.
Speaker 1:Our pancakes came out like sawdust, Swift said. The company plans to reformulate using different combination of proteins. Protein has really leaked into everything. I have not found I I I've been surprised whenever I see the trend pieces about like proteins packed with everything. Everything has protein in it.
Speaker 1:Because I feel like I don't know. I haven't like it hasn't snuck into that many of the things that I eat throughout the day. Like There isn't protein in my diet Coke. I don't know. I don't know what else I consume.
Speaker 1:But this whole trend of protein packed cereals and salads and lunches and dinners and protein packed pastas and stuff, I never really
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's this
Speaker 1:just kind of stuck with the normal stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The idea that if you eat one two to three solid meals a day, you have some protein, that you also need to be snacking on protein in between is just insane. It's completely unnecessary.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Protein shake gets it done.
Speaker 2:Well, let's check-in with one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders because they've launched an athleisure clothing line. Guaranteed Rate has rolled out Rate Fit, a wellness driven lifestyle brand. They were the seventh largest mortgage lender in the country last year. Colin is baffled. I had to check if this was real.
Speaker 1:Is it?
Speaker 2:And ratefit.com, it is. You can get a you can get pretty much all the things that you would get over at a Lululemon
Speaker 1:Oh, launches this.
Speaker 2:Aloe or Vori.
Speaker 1:It's 20% time project or something?
Speaker 2:I bet you I bet you this was Paper fools joke? No. I bet you this was this was just Shopify. It's just so good at sales. They were doing a little outbound campaign, and they're like, sorry, we're a mortgage lender.
Speaker 2:Like, we're we're not really set up.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's a rogue agent. Maybe someone just, you know, at at guaranteed rate just said like
Speaker 2:Make money.
Speaker 1:Make my business make money. And it was just like, I'll set up a Shopify store and contact a distributor and a manufacturer. You're now in the clothing business. How long until that happens? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Any any day now. I'm sure. I'm sure. The sooner I get a Porsche, the better for my mental health. Good luck, Mason Hughes.
Speaker 1:Good luck on your on your Porsche pursuit. Maybe a very depreciated Taycan. Cheaper than you think. Right?
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 1:The fact Aliezer isn't isn't lux maxing is the ultimate condemnation of rationalism. People have talked asked about this before. He should get into lux maxing. Why not? Why not?
Speaker 1:It's a good time. Well, I had another question come up from a friend of the show about why are companies filing IPOs confidentially. It's an interesting question and I sort of pulled tugged on the thread. Liz Hoffman was talking about this a little bit. So Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-one registration statement to the SEC June 1.
Speaker 1:That was yesterday. Liz Hoffman said, Reminder that the ability to confidentially file an IPO was twenty twelve rule change meant to ease small companies, meaning less than a billion dollars of revenue into the markets. And it was later expanded to what were Yeah.
Speaker 2:It meant to be like a smoke grenade.
Speaker 1:A smoke grenade lets you talk to investors before you get out. Do we change the camera? But I I I so she asked the question of like what are we even doing here? And I was curious, like what are we doing here? Like why why do all these companies file confidentially and then the s one comes out?
Speaker 1:This is what SpaceX did. It's not like Anthropics unique in this. This is very much standard practice at this point. But how do we get here and why? Is this good?
Speaker 1:Do I like this? I don't know. Let's find out. So first, the basics. Confidential IPO filing.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that you IPO in secret. It means the company submits a draft s one to the SEC for private staff review, SEC It's
Speaker 2:a smoke grenade.
Speaker 1:It's a smoke grenade. Yeah. Great analogy. Before releasing the prospectus on EDGAR, which then every hedge fund can download, anyone can download, it becomes public. So this lets companies run the SEC review process while keeping the sensitive financial details private.
Speaker 1:And there's a few reasons why you might want to do that. So any regulatory stumbling blocks can be dealt with in advance. And so the final filing is clean and ready to go. SpaceX did the same thing, filing a draft submission confidentially before the public S1 dropped a week or two ago. So after the two thousand and eight financial crisis, this is where this all starts.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of regulation that results from the fallout. Sarbanes Oxley is the main one. And the financial markets slowly built back and started opening up as the economy rebuilt. So post Dodd Frank, post Sarbanes Oxley, you get a lot of regulation. And then over the next few decades, certain pieces get relitigated, renegotiated and different paths open up to slightly less regulatory burdensome pathways in the financial markets.
Speaker 1:And so before 2012, the S1 became public early in the process, which was great for journalists who wanted to report on IPOs. It wasn't really that beneficial to very many other people, but it raised the stakes for companies because if anything was off it could result in a botched IPO which would be damaging for morale. You know, you hear that your company filed publicly and immediately something comes up and you can't fix it, so then you have to pull back and it's seen as seen as Weakness. Damaging. Seen as weakness.
Speaker 1:No one wants to be running a company that publicly failed to IPO. And so in 2012, the Jobs Act passed and they created a new class of company with some relaxed filing requirements. These are called emerging growth companies. It's defined by the SEC. They're called EGCs and EGCs were defined as any company with less than 1,000,000,000 in revenue.
Speaker 1:Later, was inflation adjusted to be 1,235,000,000. But that doesn't really matter, though, because in 2017, staff at the SEC under Trump won explained expanded the confidential filing flow to include all issuers, not just EGCs. So anyone, no matter how much your revenue was, you could go through this process. And so the job the Jobs Act was driven by Republicans but broadly supported and the 2017 change happened under Trump won, but again, it didn't face strong opposition. So private market investors like IPOs for liquidity.
Speaker 1:VCs love to come on the show and do a victory lap when they take a company public and it's great to return capital to LPs. And then on the other side, public market investors like access to more names. So it's sort of win win. In 2017, this was a huge year for huge large growth stage companies. These Decacorns, you had Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Palantir, they were all well past the billion dollar revenue threshold.
Speaker 1:But there was still a lot of uncertainty about how the market would value these companies because they had sort of new business models. There were some questions about different margin profiles, how the market would price these. There weren't direct comps to Uber and Airbnb already in the market. Are you going to just trade Airbnb like it's a hotel chain? Not really.
Speaker 1:It's asset light. So market needs to digest that and confidentially filing was beneficial and it was encouraging to these companies to say, yeah, we'll go try the IPO thing because it's less burdensome. So But
Speaker 2:Stripe should file confidentially for IPO but then never actually go
Speaker 1:that's a Collison brother nightmare. I think they wake up in cold sweats and be like, I took the company public. What happened?
Speaker 2:No. I know. But it would be kind of funny to, like, confidentially file
Speaker 1:Yeah. But then Just pull it back.
Speaker 2:Let it just let it just kind of sit there
Speaker 1:Troll. For another Troll IPO. So the confidential filing rules were expanded again in 2025 under Trump two SEC staff to include other financial offerings. So new issuance of stock, other classes of securities, these things can be reviewed before going out in the market. This allows companies to test the waters on follow on financings, spinoffs, other capital markets transactions.
Speaker 1:You can go and test the waters. So there's no question that companies are staying private longer. Everyone knows this. Private markets are incredibly deep, driven both by mega fund raises from the largest venture capital firms, crossover investors from hedge funds coming into the market, and then also plenty of activity from the hyperscalers and strategics who can write a $10,000,000,000 check into a private company no problem. The end result is that the public markets have been losing companies to private markets for years.
Speaker 1:Exchanges don't want this. Public markets investors don't want this. And so there's a huge demand to make going public less painful. Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands. But it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in public markets.
Speaker 1:And so that's why companies are allowed to file confidentially. And I don't know. After reading that, don't really have a problem with it. But you let us know. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Should it be illegal? Should it be straight to jail if you if you file confidentially? I don't know. We can roll it back.
Speaker 2:Couple more notes before our first guest. Yeah. Joe Wiesenthal is reporting that on the eve of the IPO, SpaceX employees are organizing more than a thousand current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax saving financial products ahead of the IPO. Interesting. I I imagine the wealth management firms are thrilled about this.
Speaker 2:They were joking, of course.
Speaker 1:Very fun.
Speaker 2:One more note. Yeah. Friday IPOs. Yeah. Alibaba.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Uber. Oh. Big ones. And Meta. Oh.
Speaker 2:All on Friday.
Speaker 1:Okay. Very interesting. I think there's gonna be a lot of fanfare. If if the images in the s y were anything to judge, I think that, like, the actual coverage will be a spectacle. We will see Starbase in full force.
Speaker 1:It will be a lot of a lot of great entertainment and a pretty wild day. Pretty wild day for the for the for financial history. Before we bring in our next guest, me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB.
Speaker 1:Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we can bring in Jack Doohan. He is the founder and CEO of Vuze. Welcome to the show. How are doing, Jack?
Speaker 1:Very
Speaker 5:well. Thanks.
Speaker 1:How are you guys? Thank you so much for taking the time
Speaker 2:to Great
Speaker 3:to have
Speaker 2:you on.
Speaker 1:Great to Why meet don't you kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?
Speaker 5:Certainly. No. Thanks. Thanks for having me on, boys. Myself, a bit of a whirlwind last twelve months of my whole life.
Speaker 5:Been driving towards being a Formula One driver. Yeah. So, you know, in that realm, let's say, and I was always in the mindset of doing one thing properly or two things averagely, right? So I always wanted to build and wanted to do many things, but that was full focus. Ended up getting the Formula One at end of twenty twenty four for the final round Abu Dhabi.
Speaker 5:Signed for three years which was, you know, obviously a huge huge thing for me and for the kid from Australia. And then, yeah, six races into that season, sort of sidelined for some circumstances outside of my control, let's say. And there was a big moment for me of realizing not that you're set, right? You're never set in stone. Nothing's ever guaranteed.
Speaker 5:But I definitely thought with security with the three years and with how things work that it was a little bit more stable. So, it was a big reality check. I said, Okay. For what I'm locking into for the next for my life and what I'm carrying. You know, the next ten, twenty years is not going to be from something that's, let's say, decided by these political circumstances.
Speaker 5:So then, to be honest, I had an interest in AI since late twenty twenty. I was teaching myself to code since 2019 on a low basis. Definitely not I'm not engineering behind Muse at all. So I've just done it from my understanding. Then ended up founding Muse sort of at the end of December, doing some small passive tech investments, setting up some SPVs and some opportunities.
Speaker 5:But, yeah, it's crazy the distribution that has been gathered now since being actually in in this paddock and and around as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I wanna talk about tech and business, but I have two questions about racing. First, I'd love to know a little bit more about your early path. Did you go through the typical kart racing Formula three? Like, walk me through the steps to actually get to F1, a little bit of the history there.
Speaker 1:Then I would love your view on like the future of the sport, where things are now, what's changed, what you've observed as you've been probably not just competing in F1 but also a fan.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. Certainly. Know, it started from carding as you mentioned. Then sort of in Australia, there's the other ceiling.
Speaker 5:You know, like, I guess, like any small like any not small country. We're a big country with 25,000,000 populations compared to The US. You know, very, very different but you always have the goal of of going to the top of what you're doing. And even from Harding, the main space was Europe. So that's where the world championships were.
Speaker 5:European championships were. So as a kid, I always wanted to be over here. Ended up moving over on my own when I was 13 just before I was 14 years old, did a year of karting, was then picked up by the Red Bull Formula one hundred
Speaker 2:and eighteen. On your own, that means like you said, see you to your parents or what did that look like?
Speaker 5:It was the first seven days was with my father and then I was on my own with like people that my that was sort of connected into this into the in the European region
Speaker 2:Still, that's wild.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 5:It was really like, you know, I think when I came over, I was wearing shorts when I was in Europe and the guys who were mentoring me said, I looked too Australian. I remember I walked in, I was a 30 year old kid. I walked in the go kart track and it was the first time I was in Europe and there was a Scottish guy who was mentoring me. I walked in and I high fived a couple of kids and I sat down into my awning. And he looks at me and he goes, What was that?
Speaker 5:And I said, What do mean? And he's like, you know, you're happy, you're high fiving, what was that? I said, oh, they're just my friends. He looks at me and he goes, the only friend you need is me. There's no other friend.
Speaker 5:Know, you know,
Speaker 2:if you're There's no friends out there on the track.
Speaker 5:Honestly, I just came from Australia where we're racing, then we come off on our scooters, we're running around, we're having fun, you know, and then, you know, racing. And obviously, it's fully competitive but it wasn't to that aspect. So was a big wake up in the in the in the realm to get there. Then climbed up from the four, from the three, from the two and then was a reserve driver in 2024 Yeah. For the Alpine team.
Speaker 5:And then mid year, July, signed for the three years.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Where how how important was the sim during that time? Did it become more important, you know, throughout that early part of your racing career when you're kind of moving up the ranks? Or was it important the entire time?
Speaker 5:It's an it's important the entire time, I guess. Like, the simulators we have are obviously at home or or to an extent on a junior level, very obviously on a low caliper. When you reserve driving, you're doing the sim overnight on your Saturdays. So, you're typically at the track on a Friday. You do the first free practice session, free practice session two and then you'll fly back to the factory, do the simulator from let's say 6PM until 3AM.
Speaker 5:So all of the things they want to try throughout Friday that they weren't able to go and try overnight because they have curfews so they obviously can't then the engineers can't keep working towards you. You're working it overnight. And then, I'll get in a transfer, head straight to the airport and then head back to the track to sort of deliver this and more in a driver's perspective rather than just engineering feedback that's been delivered. It's very rare So, So that you would have
Speaker 2:you're not flying you're not flying commercial in that situation?
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just crazy because it's it seems like a pretty tight window, you know? You're Yeah. You're going to the factory, getting on the sim, getting off, headed straight to the airport, but then I imagine you're arriving shortly before the race on Sunday, right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It just means not great or let's say preferable flat times and then options of sleep. But it's weird. Like, you dread it and then you get to like twelve, midnight, 1AM, it's tough and then you sort of then push through your coffee's deep. You're also doing some cool things and you enjoy it definitely after a while and it's not it doesn't become you get some bad time zones like when you're doing you're in The UK, you're doing for Australia, you're in well, since always from UK, in Mexico, some weird places where you're having to do some very strange time zones.
Speaker 2:Brian Johnson's nightmare.
Speaker 5:Literally, no. There's no good light therapy there.
Speaker 1:So I mean, throughout this whole process, you're also learning about technology. I'm sure meeting people, thinking about the company. What is your workflow like? What is your free time? Does it track with seasons?
Speaker 1:Does it track with certain days of the week? Do you have downtime where it just doesn't make sense to put any more time on the tracker in the simulator and so you do have free time? Like, is the work life balance like as you're sort of grinding up the ranks? I imagine it's pretty full tilt but you obviously had a little bit of time to think about what was next.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. I like to think about it now because I went from that being my full life and you had very little time off in the sense of every one of your spare days was a marketing day or was a media day or was a partnership day. And then, if you did have then a free day, then it was more time on the sim or doing more correlation and not doing effectively. You'll be going back to maybe a race six races ago and redoing things with what you have now and how that's changed.
Speaker 5:And then, had time off that was off, right? It was fully just like you're completely done. When now, I'm a reserve driver for Haas this year doing 10 races. It's you know, what will be what will be with what might happen but I'm very limited on the control that I have on getting back into the car. Sure.
Speaker 5:So, I'm not you know, I'm not to they only have X amount of time on simulators. I'm not on the sim. I'm currently not testing. So, when I'm here or if I'm off and as I guess you are when you're in this world, it's never fully off, right? Even if you are on the weekends or away, you're constantly still taking that 2AM call, you're still working through things, there's still communication going on.
Speaker 5:It was quite a difference. You didn't have any flat out commitments of these partnership nine to six and here to there. Yeah. But you're still, you know, you're constantly doing something.
Speaker 2:Is is part of what attracted you to entrepreneurship is like I feel like the the challenge in Formula One, there's only, you know, in entrepreneurship you're getting like no's all the time and you and you're and you're sometimes you get an opportunity, sometimes you don't. But in Formula One, you're like almost entirely reliant. There's like a set number of teams on the grid. There's a lot of stuff that's out of your control whereas in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of stuff that's out of control. But if you get a no from one customer or one investor or a hire you want to make, there's always like another one and you can keep working towards
Speaker 1:where
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:feel like I agree every
Speaker 3:day.
Speaker 2:As an athlete, can be very frustrating where you're like, I'm doing everything that I possibly can and yet I'm reliant on these external parties in order to push my career forward. Does that does that resonate at all?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Massively. I think even once you're Formula One driver and you can be in an airtight situation, your seat is always for sale essence, right? Like, you know, maybe not depending. There might not be any buyers that are able to compete with ticket size that sitting on but there's never a certain amount At the end of the day, you're an employee.
Speaker 5:You're still contracted. You can be fired. Yes, that can happen in entrepreneur states if you're a CEO or founder. It depends on your structure, you at what stage things are at. But I definitely want to be, like I said, more in in control.
Speaker 5:And I've been through, you know, although I'm young, I'm not I'm not super young anymore anymore, but still young and being through quite a lot of, let's say, networking and navigating different realms whether it is, you know, whether it's trying to source a client in a specific region. For us, since the old CEO of the Alpine Fulaland team didn't really read the media, didn't watch the news, but he just specifically had a little newspaper for his local town in Italy that he always read each morning. So, I ensured that, you know, what I was doing in my testing and my work that was getting correlated was made sure that it was published in that specific news because I knew. Right. And it's the same thing if you're trying to, you know, target a market in MENA or in India or The Philippines that are overlooked on the West, you know, let's say West innovation or the technology and looking at things from a different perspective.
Speaker 5:I think these are all like aspects that I've learned to sort of track the target, have a different scope on things that I wouldn't have known at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, tell us more about Muse and tell me specifically like why this company? Like what was the opportunity discovery moment?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think, you know, what I wanted to do was solving like a little bit of the fragmentation issue for your non, let's say, high enterprise institutions that they had everything aggregated have these things that are together in order to then implement and optimize AI. Sure. So, I didn't really know where that was. It was quite horizontal of that factor, especially targeting your, like I said, let's say, lower served countries whether in South America, Brazil, India, Philippines, where things are more fragmented, Indonesia.
Speaker 5:And our first contract came actually in the food and beverage space with Oakberry which is an acai society company. And it was an extreme like eye opener of how many systems that they run on, how they don't communicate, how things are just not, you know, tracked obviously over three, four days because your input is your tracking sources about 17 to 18 year old kids, whether it's an Oakberry or whether it's a QSR, your employees that you're managing and that you're relying on to track all this reliable data that you end up will be having automated or optimized was done by someone who doesn't really want to be there. Who is checking in at the latest point and is checking out at the earliest point and things are not being done with, let's say, top level accuracy. So, that's where we wanted to really time down and thought if we're going to try to do many other things especially in this realm, it's so important to find that trust. And so, we really wanted to niche down and capture one vertical properly.
Speaker 5:And as, you know, as we could dive into it, you just get further and further into the rabbit hole of finding your niche, right, and and getting into the area where you really want to solve. And it went from, okay, supporting on agents for, you know, your POS systems, your inventory, your waste, your your invoicing. And then finding that none of this can be optimized until these are communicating because each QSR system is using between 16 to 80 different software systems, you know, can be very, very large. They're all third parties. And none of them obviously are cohersed.
Speaker 5:None of them communicates. All this data is fragmented. No AI agent, let's say, AI is going to be strong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. And your big institutions, Burger King, your Restaurant Brands International, McDonald's are very tech forward. They have their own agents, but they're only accessing many queries, maybe start training.
Speaker 5:And because in order to aggregate all of that data, would mean, you know, shutting some part of their system down to do it.
Speaker 1:Is it hard to get companies to pay for this? I feel like a lot of the traction in SMB restaurant, it's driven by the POS system, like Toast, because you just take a small cut of the credit card fee, and it's sort of like this invisible cost that then can scale really dynamically. But if you're going in and you're saying, I'm gonna sell a solution, like, how are you justifying actually getting someone to open up and put down a credit card or pay for a recurring service, which I imagine is the business model.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Definitely. No. It's it's not easy on the aspect if you think you come in and you're trying to sell something that is, oh, this is better than what you can't have. Right?
Speaker 5:By going to replace x. Yeah. They're getting pitched how many tech, you know, software so has the daily emails come through that what we have is better than what you have. Yeah. Use us and not them.
Speaker 5:We have a great AI agent for F and B, both, you know, fast. No one's got a good AI agent until operating on the data. But what we're trying to operate is it's like headless as default, right? It's an underlying layer that is almost like super good. So, in essence, AI cloud systems, whether you want to call it a company brain, where it's unifying all their current systems into one aggregated location which then, if they're not optimizing AI, as long as we have at least three months of that data, you know, up towards three years, then we're able to, you know, really act and create for that.
Speaker 5:Or if it's your larger companies who have already an agent with Burger King, BK system or others, then you're feeding this, let's say, aggregated and orchestrated data to this agent which before they're all individual third party softwares. And now, they're in one hub which can be orchestrated. They're all communicating together and you're actually going to get that optimization.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:Cool. So it's much easier to sell like that than actually saying this platform is gonna replace what you have, let's say.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Well Last question. Please. How's how's the grid reacting to the Luce?
Speaker 5:The Luce?
Speaker 1:The far Ferrari Luce, the new electric vehicle from Ferrari. Just a few so
Speaker 2:locked in. He's like, Lucey, what?
Speaker 1:Thousand dollars US. It's a steal.
Speaker 5:I thought that was sort of having dessert for a second. Something like that.
Speaker 2:It does
Speaker 1:does sound
Speaker 2:like that.
Speaker 5:No, I think, look, I'm with Haas and we have a relationship with we're running for our engine. I think it's amazing. Looks terrific. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Couldn't agree more.
Speaker 5:Cannot bless it more. I'm sure we'll chat about that more, Jordy. But guys, I'm sure it's my time. So it's great to Yeah.
Speaker 1:So great
Speaker 2:to meet you. I I love I love I love the energy and
Speaker 1:Thanks, Adam. The
Speaker 2:focus. And let's do it again soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to Great
Speaker 5:to meet
Speaker 2:you, Jack.
Speaker 5:Awesome, boys.
Speaker 3:Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Let me tell you all about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 2:You heard it from Jack.
Speaker 1:I think our next guest is joining in just a minute. But in the meantime, we can talk about the AI executive order. This was signed today by the president. And Dean Ball has some, some context here. He says, wow.
Speaker 1:This EO is almost exactly similar to the leaked text from the EO, the president chose not to sign because it was too regulatory. The only major difference is that the voluntary predeployment review process is now only thirty days rather than ninety days. That's a concession, but a very small one compared to what I would have expected based on the president's remarks about the earlier draft. So if you haven't been following along, AI companies will be able to voluntarily submit their new models to the US government for review. Now they will the government will get back to them in thirty days as opposed to ninety days, evaluate them, and make a call or give advice or give some sort of commentary.
Speaker 1:Every word that comes from the government is a potential lawsuit in the future. And so, or will show up in a potential lawsuit. And so, you can expect a lot of thought and care given to whatever the whatever the government responds to. A lot of government applications from the FDA previously, the the the response would be no comment, and no comment is tacit approval. The the FDA, with some products, with a lot of nutritional supplements and food ingredients, they don't necessarily want to say, this is FDA approved because that's a very high bar.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of regulatory and risk and legal ramifications from approving something. But they can decline to comment. They can decline to not permit the company to move forward. And I would expect that even a small result like we send them their model, they reviewed it for thirty days, and they didn't say it was bad, will be a good signal for AI labs that submit through this process. So Dean Ball continues.
Speaker 1:He says, this is a fairly major win for the safety contingent within the admin and a significant loss for the SACS accelerationist wing and is surprising to me. I continue to think this EO is a mistake. The clear the this is clearly teeing up the infrastructure for a model licensing regime and the fact the administration is classifying the new detail the details of how this voluntary system will work is egregious. So everyone wants to know what are they going be evaluating? Are they going to be doing, you know, Arc AGI tests or some other benchmark or humanity's last exam or just red teaming it or just talking to it.
Speaker 1:Who knows? It's classified. Everyone is interested to know. Dean Ball is certainly interested to know. But we don't know yet, but maybe in the future.
Speaker 1:The public, he continues, the public and the employees of the labs have a right to know how this works. It is very frustrating when you're interacting with the federal government and you don't know their rubric for grading you. That is one of the most frustrating pieces of going back and forth with the regulatory body. It's best when there's a very clear test for the DMV. You show up.
Speaker 1:If you know the answers to the questions, you get a driver's license. If you don't, if they were like, we test you on a mystery rubric, that would be very frustrating for anyone looking for a driver's license. He continues, most lab staff don't have clearances, but some do. But if the literal regulatory thresholds that trigger pre deployment review are classified, researchers themselves won't know whether they are true what they are training is regulated by the CEO. All for the benefit that is barely articulable.
Speaker 1:What exactly is the intelligence community going to do in thirty days to make the model safer? I don't know. They could there's a lot of tests you could run-in thirty days. You know, try and hack this thing. Try and design a bio weapon.
Speaker 1:These are things people are worried about. In thirty days, you can certainly get these models to attempt those and see how they respect, see how they respond. So he says it's not a huge mistake, but a small medium sized one, but I am fairly confident this is a mistake nonetheless. Well, we will dig into it more in the future. But our next guest is here in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:We have Luke Cavanaugh from Special. He is the co founder. Welcome to the show. Both of you, please
Speaker 2:What's going on, guys?
Speaker 1:Introduce yourselves and tell us about the company.
Speaker 4:Hey, guys. Good to
Speaker 1:see you.
Speaker 4:Appreciate you having us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great to
Speaker 3:have you on.
Speaker 4:Yeah. My my name is Nate Cavanaugh. Justin Fox is my cofounder on the line. Fantastic. We today we are excited to announce Special, which is a new holding company that we really view as an extension of the work we did at Doge.
Speaker 4:So Justin and I worked together at the Department of Government Efficiency for the past year. Yeah. But we're now building effectively Doge but for the private sector. And so we're focused on this $10,000,000,000,000 main street services economy, which in in many ways is like the federal government. It's massive, it's inefficient.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And in a lot of cases, it's still funded in part at least by the government. And so we announced that today and excited to chat with you guys about it.
Speaker 1:Do you have a particular industry that you want to focus on? Do you want to be general? I mean, see this loosely in the bucket of management consulting, delayering, understanding efficiencies. There's a tried and true track record. I'm interested to hear how you're differentiating from other management consulting firms that might already be doing some of this work for large companies.
Speaker 1:But then also, I'm interested to know where you're focusing, where you see the most opportunity.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, the the main point of differentiation is there's two components to Special's business model. So Special's developing a set of AI tools that we can apply to these main street industries. We're starting with healthcare
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And more specifically a bet on the aging population demographic of The US. And so we identified that as our first vertical. We're actually incubating a new brand to become category leader, and we're going out and acquiring these great independent small businesses and applying those AI tools into the businesses that then we will will own forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so we Just to guess, are these like Medicare related businesses Hospital
Speaker 1:or like a primary care or like a urgent care? Like, are what are we actually talking about in terms of health care?
Speaker 4:The specific market is at home senior care. So it'd be a nurse going to a senior citizen's house, provide them with care in the home. It's the lowest cost way to provide care for senior citizens in the country. And as I'm sure you guys have seen, there's a lot of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. We're focused on trying to provide the nurses, critical workers in these industries with the best AI tools so that they can provide better care for Yeah.
Speaker 4:For seniors.
Speaker 1:And there's probably a lot of back office work that goes into scheduling, and all of those things can be enhanced with AI tools, I imagine. Got it.
Speaker 4:Exactly right.
Speaker 2:Jordy? Yeah. Why why a Holdco? I'm curious. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, this feels like healthcare is like, you know No. Could do this. Industry. Up. Guys Sounds like you have a playbook that you feel like can be applied across different categories, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is healthcare not big enough for you guys?
Speaker 4:Justin, you wanna take this?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look. First of all, it's great to be on with you guys today. Look, I think, know, with with special at the top parent co and developing these AI tools, I think, you know, to limit sort of the expertise that we've learned from Doge and from, prior careers to just healthcare, I think would be narrow. You know, the the point of having the parent co with engineering talent is that we can deploy into multiple verticals.
Speaker 7:And so, I mean, as as you can imagine, the main street economy is massive. And so if we're just going to address health care, I think that's that's too narrow. And frankly, there's there's so many independent business owners that we're looking to problem solve for. So Nate alluded to it, but, you know, Figure is going to be or Figure is our newly incubated strategic brand in healthcare. And so that brand is gonna inevitably be carrying the torch for these business owners through development of AI.
Speaker 7:So we're gonna be working hand in hand in the weeds with these operators to develop the tools that they need to succeed.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How do you think about the size of a company that you want to acquire and fold in? Obviously, there's some organizations that have already been sort of rolled up. They're large. They're private.
Speaker 1:There's probably public companies that you could do a take private of at the biggest scale. There's also probably very small businesses with owner operators who might be getting older, looking for liquidity. Like, what is in your strike zone?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, today we announced our new financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and a lot of our Doge teammates, guys like Steve Davis, Antonio Gracias. We and we in that same announcement, announced our our first acquisition that's under contract. It's It's a business that's doing, we'll say tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Speaker 4:They have about 1,500 senior patients that they care for and about 200 nurses on the payroll. It's a pretty big business based in Texas. And we have a pipeline of others that we plan to do. So I'd say it's a business where it already has some management sophisticated sophistication and some real scale
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But is not at the scale of doing a public take private.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Out of curiosity, how like, is there significant like, how significant is the back office, like, OpEx? Because I imagine, like, you know, seniors want to be cared for by individuals. I imagine they don't wanna just, like, jump on a a Zoom call and and get care that way. So it is is this a play that you think you can use AI to grow the business much faster?
Speaker 2:And do you feel like there's significant sort of back office savings? Or like where do you think you'll get the most return?
Speaker 4:Justin, go ahead.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Look, I I I think what we're not what we're not suggesting is that a robot is going to replace a nurse in in grandma's home. That's not at all the case here. Yeah. Look, I I think, you know, when we think about the the delivery of service, you know, if that takes up about 50% of the cost to pay your nurses, there's something like, you know, 40% of the remaining dollars are getting spent on a lot of administrative tasks that can be solved with AI.
Speaker 7:And so our view, you know, the
Speaker 1:way that we think about
Speaker 7:it at Figure is, let's make the jobs of our back office team members easier. And instead of what maybe a traditional PE or strategic would do, which is pocket those savings and and market a huge margin accretion, Let's share those savings with our workers. So one of the things that's unique about this space is there's a massive shortage of nurses and caregivers. And so to the extent that you can be in a market and be able to pay your team the most, everybody will flood into your business. And so then you can provide care for these millions of Americans who sometimes don't have access to it.
Speaker 7:So that's the underlying thesis. I think it's share the pie, grow the pie with everybody. It'll help you grow and deliver better service.
Speaker 4:And Jordan, to your to your point, this is the playbook that we plan to replicate across not just health care, but markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a lot of learnings we had from Doge can then get applied back into the private sector.
Speaker 1:Yeah. More leverage on the key workers that are doing the most important tasks, the things that are actually aligned with the mission, and more efficient back offices. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:You guys sticking with a five day work week? Oh. It's been a hot debate. I got a feeling you guys might be putting in a few more hours.
Speaker 4:I don't think we're as we're somewhere between five days in in Corgi. Okay. I think is a
Speaker 2:That feels healthy. That feels sustainable.
Speaker 1:Just heard of tattoos. Suppose. Never get a tattoo. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Congratulations and thank you so much for
Speaker 2:coming on guys. Congrats on on the the the raise and I'm sure you'll be back on with more news soon.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of
Speaker 4:your guys. Thanks. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have Tom Mueller from Impulse Space. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Two job titles? Three job titles? We're very excited to have Tom Mueller back on the show.
Speaker 1:He's been on before, but great to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:First question,
Speaker 1:Ferrari Luce reactions. What you got?
Speaker 3:What do I have?
Speaker 1:Ferrari Luce reactions. Ferrari Luce, the electric Ferrari.
Speaker 3:Oh. It's coming out $640,000.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's underpriced? Overpriced? What do
Speaker 6:you think?
Speaker 3:Overpriced for overpriced for that styling.
Speaker 1:It is it is
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:It is an odd I think so. Odd positioning. But it got to be one I'm talking
Speaker 3:the f 40.
Speaker 1:I think the f 40 is going to hold value. Smart. Don't think it's going to be an f 40 disruptor. Not many people trading those in. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Ferrari.
Speaker 1:We're here to talk about impulse space. Can you reset the table for us, reintroduce the company, give us the news, tell us what's happening, and then I have a million questions about the space broadly. But let's kick it off with that.
Speaker 3:Impulse Space, I started this company five years ago. It's Space Mobility.
Speaker 7:Ignite success. Which
Speaker 3:basically means that we take over where Yeah. Launch leaves off. Yeah. So we move things around in space. So starting starting at LEO, we move things up to to GEO, like, up to 22,000 miles up.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We can, you know, take things to the to the moon. We can greatly increase the the amount of payloads you can take to Mars. We have our MIRA spacecraft. Three of those are flying right now, and a bunch are in build.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Those things do precision maneuvering in orbit. They can host payloads. They can deploy payloads. They can do rendezvous. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We are hope hopefully, we'll get on ramped onto the the new lunar cargo program and do some some ton one ton class lunar landers. It's a lot happening right now.
Speaker 1:I can imagine. There's been so much excitement about LEO, Starlink, Planet Labs. You put a camera up there. You put a WiFi router up there basically, not to simplify it too much, but even VARTA manufacturing LEO. Like, so much of the attention has been on LEO that I think a lot of people have sort lost the reference classes for what happens in higher orbits.
Speaker 1:Can you give us some examples of what's interesting at higher orbits, whether that's, Middle Earth orbit, I think. Is that what it's called? MEO?
Speaker 3:Yeah. MEO.
Speaker 1:Middle Earth is just hilarious because it's the Lord of Rings reference. But MEO, GEO, I understand geostationary orbits are sometimes useful, but give us the one zero one on why why someone would be unsatisfied with just YOLO ing endless satellites into LEO in perpetuity.
Speaker 3:Well, the nice thing about GEO, you know, is where where really Commsat started is that you can cover the whole Earth with just three satellites.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 3:And and, of course, geo geosynchronous means or or geostationary means that it's a twenty four hour orbit, so you're you're always looking at the same point in the Super important. Still an important orbit. It's kind of been overshadowed by all of the LEO launches, but there's still, you know, a dozen launches or more that that go to that orbit. It's becoming more important of an orbit for the Space Force. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:There's a lot happening up there Yeah. That I don't even know about. I don't have the need to know, but there's a lot going on up there. And, you know, but our adversaries, China and Russia, are maneuvering around our satellites up there. So we need to we need to go to have mobility to go up there and and defend and find out what's going on and be able to protect our assets.
Speaker 1:So we have we have the capability to get to geo, obviously. There are satellites currently in geo. You mentioned there's maybe a dozen launches. That sounded annual like maybe something like that going up there. So we have the capability like the rockets exist, but it's uneconomical.
Speaker 1:And so the the value prop of Impulse, just to say it back to you, is get on a rocket that's going to LEO but end up in GEO and not Yeah. And you don't need to pull all of those resources. And so you're sort of unlocking geo based on all of the LEO capability that we have in spades. Is that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So what we're talking about here is our Helios product, which is what we call a rocket on a rocket. We add basically a third stage to a Falcon nine. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's got 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, very high performance pump pump stage combustion engine, and it can get you from LEO to GEO in a day. So it basically helps Falcon nine do what Falcon Heavy does Yeah. For tens of millions of dollars less.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Or for an example of a you know, commercial guys usually don't fly on Heavy. They'll they'll fly Falcon Nine. Sure. And then they'll spend months using electric propulsion to get to to where they wanna get. We'll get you there in
Speaker 6:a day.
Speaker 1:Realize that. I didn't realize that was an option. That's so interesting. Yeah. I'll have to I'll have to research more of that.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm fascinated by that. But talk to me about how Starship changes things for you. Is that an accelerant for you? I mean, you're raising a $500,000,000 series d. I can imagine, and you worked at SpaceX obviously for a very long time.
Speaker 1:I imagine that that's not a nail in the coffin. That's not a threat. But I imagine it's a benefit. But how is it a benefit because the intuitive, you know, the lay person might think bigger rocket that'll get me to geo easily. That that that why do I need Impulse now?
Speaker 1:So talk to me about how Starship fits into the future of the space economy.
Speaker 3:I mean, Starship is the, you know, is gonna be the the ultimate Leo, you know,
Speaker 1:cargo ship. Yeah. Cargo ship.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because it it, you know, it it doesn't need to refuel
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To get to Leo. It can get to Leo and be fully reusable, come back, and fuel and go again. Yeah. So it's gonna greatly reduce the cost per kilogram or per ton to get to get cargo to to orbit. And that's that's why I started the company basically because I worked on Starship Belt
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, last six years I was there Yeah. Realizing that now we have such an efficient way like I mentioned at the beginnings, launch is solved. Now we need to figure out how to move all that cargo around once it's up in orbit. Of course, Starship can refuel and go to these high energy orbits, but I think it's gonna be more efficient. And if you need Starship there, that's what you need to do.
Speaker 3:Like, if like, if you're taking cargo to the moon or humans to the moon or to Mars, you that's the right thing. But if it yeah. I don't know that it's the right thing if you don't actually need the Starship up there. Because if you think about it, Starship's a 120 tons of stainless steel you gotta bring up there. Oh.
Speaker 3:And and then you gotta bring it back to get it back.
Speaker 1:It it
Speaker 3:comes we'll see how that how how the economics work out.
Speaker 2:Okay. Speak How did how did the space sort of like founder and startup community react to Blue Origin? Obviously, you know, massive setback and disappointing hopefully for all humanity. I
Speaker 3:don't think anybody was cheering that on. It's, I mean, it's obviously bad for industry. Launch is, you know, is still constrained even though SpaceX is flying so often. There's just so many payloads that need to go that we need all of them to be successful. And I think it's been mentioned many times, SpaceX is not gonna lower their price until they have a true competitor.
Speaker 3:Yep. And we need true competitors to come online. It's happening, but, you know, these setbacks delay it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what have you heard around how big of a setback it actually is? Is this setting the program
Speaker 3:Dave Lamp, the CEO just, I think last night tweeted that they think they can it's not as bad as it initially looked and they they think they can fly again this year, which is great. It's great news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was looking at the aerial photography of the LaunchPad, and the the headline was billion dollar LaunchPad, the only one they have completely destroyed. But some of the buildings looked pretty Yeah. Usable. I I I I was optimistic.
Speaker 1:So I I'm I'm glad to hear that Dave Limp is is sharing some optimism there as well. I would love for you to sort of walk me through some of the trade offs and economic considerations about getting to the moon because we just saw with the Artemis launch that single rocket seemed to be able to just fly right up there, come back. Yeah. And then when I see the Starship plan, I'm like, it's as big or bigger rocket. It should just be able to go straight there.
Speaker 1:But then when I see the actual plans, it's like seven different refueling stages and it seems much more complicated. And it and it seems like you have the ability to potentially get to the moon with certain plans. And so it feels like there's an ensemble approach. There's different trade offs. Like, what is the logic as we try and get to the moon more regularly?
Speaker 1:How will this actually play out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think, you know, there's there's two ways to do it. You you you use a large, partially reasonable where you throw you basically throw away those upper stages
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 3:And and and take a lander to the moon. That's kind of the blue origin approach. Or there's a fully reasonable with with multiple refueling to get there and back, which is the SpaceX approach. Mhmm. What what we do with Helios is sort of the former.
Speaker 3:We're adding this this expendable third stage Sure. And now we can we can 10 x the amount of payload on a Falcon nine to the moon. So imagine that lever. Like, you basically, the same cost of the launch vehicle puts a little bit more for the Helios, you're getting 10 times the amount of cargo. And and we've looked at missions to Mars where Mars where we get five times the payload to Mars just by adding a Helios.
Speaker 3:So it's a huge leverage. It's it's gonna be a really compelling product when it starts flying. It's it's already selling really well. I think once it's flying, we will be able to make them fast enough.
Speaker 1:So you you you have the money raised. What what what are you actually working on in terms of creating reliable manufacturing your supply chain? Because I imagine that it's not enough to build one prototype, a few prototypes, something hand built. That might be something you're experimenting with in the early stages, but the name of the game is industrial capacity here. What do the next few years look like in terms of scale?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Ramping up production. We're hiring more people, and we're and we're hiring a lot of people in the production area, you know, manufacturing engineers, technicians, all kinds of people now, where earlier, you know, earlier in the company's history, we were mostly hiring, you know, a lot of development engineers. So now we're really getting into production on our products. And we we just moved into are starting to move into a much larger facility here.
Speaker 3:So we're filling that out with, you know, production capability. And we're always the same thing that we did at SpaceX. We're constantly bringing more things in house, like getting becoming even more vertically integrated.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Vert vertical integration takes a lot of capital, which is why we've raised a lot. Yeah. But it it once you vertically integrate it, you have a huge advantage. We see that we see this with with SpaceX, able to able to execute very quickly, very efficiently at low cost. Basically, you can control cost, schedule, and quality if you're vertically integrated.
Speaker 1:And and take me through the shape of that vertical integration. Are you buying, like, two bending machines, CNC machines, three d printers? Like, what what is the shape of vertical integration? Are you building, like, specific machinery that will just make one product over and over and over again?
Speaker 3:I mean, that that's the tooling part of it. But certainly, you know, milling machines, lathes Every three d printers Yeah. And building out test capability.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So like raw materials in and
Speaker 2:you Bring in
Speaker 1:the finished product eventually.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's you know, you bring in raw material and spacecraft come out the other end of the factory.
Speaker 1:I love it. What do you
Speaker 2:think the impact of the SpaceX IPO will be on, you know, the space economy broadly, you know, talking about, you know, maybe people that have been there for a decade, maybe ready to do something new. Yeah. How do you think it'll impact the industry?
Speaker 3:Well, certainly, you know, the space economy has been accelerating, you know, since the time that, you know, I've started this company a lot. And I think that's just the really the the general effect of of SpaceX and other startups have on the industry. And now with the announcement, it's just supercharged the space industry. It's which is great. And I love what Elon's talking about, you know, building, you know basically, he's talking about building megastructures now in space.
Speaker 3:You know, millions of of AI servers in space, and he's already talking about using the resources of the moon in order to build when, you know, when they when they max out what they can launch. And this is the theme of my company is, like, this is something I've talked about a lot, is you need to use the resources of the moon to build these megastructures in space because it's gonna be destructive to to Earth to to launch it from Earth or grab it from Earth or or in the in the the case of compute power to the amount of compute power we're gonna need in the next thirty years as it's growing at 15% annually is is just crushing. So moving that to space is is the obvious thing in the long term. I'm glad to see it's happening sooner.
Speaker 1:Seems like you're excited about both the moon and Mars. Yeah. Elon was like a Mars Maxi for a long time. Now he's interested in the moon. It's been exciting.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm obviously excited about both. But what is different about these two missions? Obviously, the moon's closer, but like what Yeah. What's uniquely unlocked by the moon? Why is the moon important?
Speaker 1:Why do you see Mars as as important as well? Obviously, you should never stop. I hope you wind up going to Alpha Centauri soon. Everywhere. But but let's just narrow in on moon and What are the unique opportunities?
Speaker 1:What are the risks? What are the trade offs?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've always been more of a moon proof myself. I I think the moon is more important in the near term. Mhmm. It's it's easier to have a permanent base there.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think everything we need to build in spaces on the moon, the metals, you know, water, you know, oxygen, so everything we need to to be self sufficient of of building megastructure spaces is there. And I would also add near near Earth objects. Some of them are easier to get to than the moon. Mars is super important.
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. What's a near Earth object that's closer? Are there secret It's a planets or out there you know about, night out?
Speaker 3:It's an ash near Earth asteroid.
Speaker 1:Okay. Near Earth asteroid.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The thing about the moon is it still has a gravity well. You know, we talk we talk kilometers per second. Yeah. Earth has a gravity well of like nine kilometers per second, and the moon has a gravity well of like two two point four.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:But it still have you still that's a lot of propulsion to to to break down the onto the moon at 2.4 and then come back. Yeah. You're talking five kilometers per second total. Yeah. That's a lot of delta v.
Speaker 1:And you gotta bring with you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You gotta bring the propellant to do that. Yeah. That's why the moon is is still pretty tough. Whereas a small asteroid is, you know, is is meters per second, maybe, or centimeters per second because the gravity is so low.
Speaker 3:So you don't have to to to use all that pro propellant in order to get there and back. So that's the big
Speaker 1:And and those meteors, I'm not trying to quiz you on something that you might not have dug into, but I'm passing. Are these, like, meteors that are just passing by and the whole point is that they pass by regularly enough that we could go up and back? Or are there actual meteors that are, like, orbiting the earth right now that I don't know about?
Speaker 3:There are. I mean, they Really? There are I think there's one right now. Right? That's these things get temporarily captured in Okay.
Speaker 3:Orbit, and then they eventually That's cool. Around the table and they get thrown out like the moon will throw them out or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But there's, you know, there's a lot most of them are, you know, further than the moon. Yeah. But once you So accessible. Get gravity Yeah.
Speaker 3:It just takes time to get there, but but you don't have a gravity well once you once you get there to get the material to come back. But the moon the moon is easier in just that you have surface gravity and a, you know, and a nice surface you can land on and build on. So I I think the moon moon is super important also.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry, Drew. Do you
Speaker 2:have something here? Not right now.
Speaker 3:I I I I
Speaker 1:can keep going. I'm interested in I'm interested in the in both the footprint of the company. You mentioned you're expanding. I know the original headquarters is in El Segundo. Correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I still have that little building over in El Segundo. It's a 7,000 square foot building.
Speaker 1:And I imagine you've outgrown. So what what is the footprint of the company? What what what's the workforce like today? Where do you see that going? What are you hiring for?
Speaker 1:This feels like a great company to join if you're, you know, uncertain about how AI will change the world. Well, we're gonna be shooting rockets for thirty years, as you said. We have a lot of work to do. So this feels like a fantastic opportunity for folks.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So like I mentioned, we started in a 7,000 square foot garage, people call it over there. We maxed that out, and then we moved into the our facility had an interim that's about 60,000 square feet, and we just acquired another 240,000 square feet on the same at the other end of the block that we're we're just starting to to build out. We've got 500 employees right now.
Speaker 3:We just we just passed 500 in And few weeks we've got 200 open jaw bricks. So we're hiring.
Speaker 1:Woah. Is is fantastic. Take me through the shape of the there we go. Hiring 200 people. That's serious.
Speaker 1:Take me through the shape of the of the of those job racks. Are you hiring software software engineers? Are you using AI everywhere? Everything. Are you hiring everything?
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 3:I mentioned earlier, we're hiring a lot in the production area. Okay. We're, you know, we're we're hiring software Yeah. People. Just I mean, we're a spacecraft company.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we do you know, we have to do comms. We have to you know, we have radios. We have antennas. We have reaction wheels.
Speaker 3:Do all kinds of stuff. Lots of avionics, lots of propulsion, lots of structures, lots of software to control it. There's, you know, no no such thing as being a tech company without software to to operate your hardware. So Yeah. All of the above, guidance navigation and control, orbital mechanics are I'm a rocket scientist.
Speaker 3:I don't understand most orbital mechanics. That's that's really tough stuff. Super smart guys that figure out how to get how to how to navigate in space. Yeah. All of the above.
Speaker 2:That's great. Awesome. We have a gong. We'd love to hit it
Speaker 1:in Tell us about the fundraise. You raised $500,000,000 from one three seven Ventures.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Love Christian, guys. Love Christian.
Speaker 3:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. We Thank you so much. OpenAI announced that they're breaking ground on Stargate, Michigan, a one gigawatt data center utilizing closed loop cooling and they're getting out ahead of the water, the water FUD. They say it uses water at the rate of a typical office building creates thousands of units
Speaker 2:Not an office building that I'm in.
Speaker 1:No. I know you're drinking a lot of water. You're not drinking tap water. You're bringing in the glass bottled water potentially.
Speaker 2:Aurora's Aurora water. Aurora's Yeah. You know, getting Yeah. Thousands of gallons a day.
Speaker 1:AI pivot for Aurora, filtering the water that goes into the data center, making
Speaker 2:Only sure it's clean the
Speaker 1:sure that there's a water system in these Yeah. In these data centers.
Speaker 2:In other OpenAI news
Speaker 1:What else is going on?
Speaker 2:There's now sites in codex. You can turn work ideas plans into interactive websites Yeah. Or apps. Your team can explore, use, and share. This is very cool.
Speaker 2:This is what you asked for? Yes. The first
Speaker 1:time you tried to benchmark my hello world test. Like can I go on my phone into into any of these AI apps and have it generate me a link to a website that I can share with a friend because I can generate a big deep dive text thread and I can share that link with someone? They can go in the app and see what I've been texting back and forth. That's very useful. You can generate an image and then you can say that to your camera roll, send that around.
Speaker 1:It's very portable. And when I demoed Meta AI, the the latest launch, one of the suggested prompts is like vibe code a video game. And it actually does a really, really great job building a little miniature video game and it gives you a link but the link is like trapped within the meta AI. I'm like, oh, we're so close. It's such a minor thing to have a to have an actual hosting service there.
Speaker 1:But I think that that's exciting for virality and something a
Speaker 2:bull market for simulators.
Speaker 1:Yes. Because you'll be able to I mean, the the there are a lot of people who, you know, they as much as they want the Mac mini and the the the MacBook Pro with the lid cranked open at all times, they want to, you know, vibe code something or build something on their phone and then send that to a friend. And and if they build something interactive, they want that to be shareable. And this is, you know, exciting exciting development.
Speaker 2:Speaking
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Of Meta, they had
Speaker 1:What's going on with Meta?
Speaker 2:I think a pretty insane
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Is this real? I I saw this and I was like, this cannot possibly be real, but it is in four zero media.
Speaker 2:I've a number of people that I know that have one word usernames.
Speaker 1:That got that got hacked? Yeah. Okay. So basically, this is from four zero four media. Hackers simply asked Meta AI to give them access to high profile Instagram accounts.
Speaker 1:It worked. I'm sure they're rolling it back. I'm sure they're on top of this. But the exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI. I guess AI was able to deliver, you know, account recovery information to anyone who asked and it wasn't segmented.
Speaker 1:It didn't do the proper validation. Hackers say that they use Meta AI chatbot to break into a host high profile Instagram account.
Speaker 2:Here's a video of how it worked. Okay. Pull it up.
Speaker 1:Play that video and we will see From how their zero four The Obama White House account got hit. Oh, no. People were saying
Speaker 8:I'm high profile Instagram accounts using the easiest possible method. They're just asking Meta's AI chatbot for access to the accounts. Here's how it worked. Basically, they
Speaker 1:started This music in the background.
Speaker 8:Meta's AI chatbot and said, hey, I want access to a specific account. Please send a reset code to the hacker's email
Speaker 2:can't do that.
Speaker 8:Loons Meta's AI chatbot said
Speaker 1:That's not our soundboard.
Speaker 8:Hours, we've seen some really high profile accounts targeted this way. We saw Barack
Speaker 1:Obama's White House
Speaker 8:account get stolen. We saw a Space Force account get stolen. So they
Speaker 1:were only targeting high profile Instagram accounts. Do they go after yours, Jordy?
Speaker 2:This is what No. I'm not I'm not in that league.
Speaker 1:Oh, they they came they came out of mine insane. I was just getting bombarded because they were like, we gotta get this guy's Instagram account.
Speaker 2:No. They're probably going for your dog's Instagram account.
Speaker 1:Maybe. I think he still has more followers than me. Rest in peace Gustavo. One of the best to ever do Anyway, you know who won't be passing away anytime soon? Vladimir Putin because he is on a $26,000,000,000 quest for longevity.
Speaker 1:Brian Johnson's chiming in.
Speaker 2:It's so
Speaker 1:rich person's yacht or fly a private plane
Speaker 2:Russia has invested more in Putin's longevity
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Than AI or close to it. That's I was trying to figure out how many GPUs they had inside of
Speaker 1:best AI people like left via Yandex and are now running in Neoclouds yeah. And And also Clickhouse. Anyway, from mini pigs to an organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia's president has turned antiaging research into a Kremlin priority. And remember, was caught on that hot mic with Xi Jinping saying that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs. Some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats.
Speaker 1:In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia's flagship scientific projects. Like other Silicon Valley billionaires, Putin has been long fascinated with anti aging research. But in Russia, Putin's quest to stave off declines now a state priority. Last month, Russia's government announced that scientists are developing a gene therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of the 26,000,000,000 longevity initiative. The drug represents one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging.
Speaker 1:Another auspicious avenue creating human organs in a lab for transplantation. Sounds normal, a very normal thing to do. One of the lifespanics spending
Speaker 2:Wasn't Tyler trying to He's been doing that. Been We doing always say, hey, knock it off, Knock it off.
Speaker 1:Breeding the human organs. All these efforts are part of a national longevity initiative he unveiled in 2024 which promises to save a 175,000 lives by the end of the decade. That's great. Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key areas, bioprinting or three d printing living tissue and xenotransplantation or growing human organs inside mini pigs. What if the next what if the next, you know, longevity hack comes from the mosquito and we kill them all?
Speaker 1:And it's like, oh, you need to do is get a blood transfusion from a mosquito.
Speaker 2:It's the next Yeah.
Speaker 1:The next GLP one potentially. You gotta be careful about these knock on effects. Who knows?
Speaker 2:I think conspiracy theorists would would say that some humans already discovered the mosquitoes one simple trick.
Speaker 1:Yeah? What's that? Drinking blood. Oh, yeah. Weird.
Speaker 1:Russian scientists are working with government agencies to claim that they have that bio printed human cartilage tissue, that seems doable maybe, and a mouse thyroid gland with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2,030. They're trying to grow organs inside pigs. In the Russian Federation work is underway on a whole range of scientific programs in this field. These projects are supported by the state and many scientific and research institutions are taking part of them. It's difficult to discuss immortality, but the ability to repair man will undoubtedly increase, they told the Russian media.
Speaker 1:Unlike similar research funded by American tech elites. The work promoted by Putin's circle has produced little peer reviewed research in major international journals. He's keeping it to himself. He's gonna live forever and not tell us how he did it. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Anyway, he's doing a cold plunge too. So he's doing some of the old stuff, some of the new stuff. The average male life expectancy in Russia is about 68 years roughly compared to 76 in The United States. So lots of room to catch up. 80 over Western Europe.
Speaker 1:The Europeans are living to 80 these days. But in Russia, just 68. So lots of room to improve health over in Russia. We'll see. We'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:Maybe they've discovered the next GLP one. It feels like it is they they are behind the ball on AI, and it feels like they, would be potentially enhanced by having AI tools to help them alongside this. I have been I I feel like AI 2027 China wakes up this year. When is Russia waking up?
Speaker 2:Do some quick research.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No no evidence of any anything like, you know, black wall level chip, which makes sense. I don't think and NVIDIA has plenty of demand. Wouldn't be selling them. The country.
Speaker 2:They do have likely small numbers to low hundreds of h two hundreds.
Speaker 6:Potentially
Speaker 2:hundreds to low thousands of h one hundreds.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then they have some a one hundreds, but again and then and then certainly could have some within the military that they're not talking about. But but yet not they're trying to get up to 10 supercomputers by 2030 is their Mhmm. Stated ambition each with 10,000
Speaker 1:That just sounds like not a lot. I think you're gonna
Speaker 2:They're calling they're everyone else's bluff.
Speaker 1:You absolutely must not dunk on any Russian oligarchs if they talk about their underfunded AI projects. I
Speaker 2:will not. I will not.
Speaker 1:You must abstain because you can have a fun you can have some fun witty banter with the president France. But I do not want you to draw the ire of the Kremlin at any point I respect their supercomputers. I respect them. They're doing great. Seems like it's on track.
Speaker 1:Good job everyone over there. You're doing great.
Speaker 2:Really, really good.
Speaker 1:AGI definitely on the same timeline as every other country. Yeah. We have to pull up this video. We have our next guest in the waiting room. But first, we have to play this video from Jensen Huang because the gamers are rising up and NVIDIA is delivering a AI chip for laptops, for PCs, supercomputers at home, AI agents at home.
Speaker 1:It's in Section K. He was on stage and he had a very funny quote. I want you to listen to this, Jordy.
Speaker 3:The new double o seven game, I'm looking forward to playing it. I look a little bit like him.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Isn't that hilarious? I
Speaker 2:look a little bit like him. They're gonna blow out. They're gonna blow out. It's such funny. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1:blow out quarter. As man, he's playing like he's like, this this laptop has fours on it, the racing game. This this laptop has double o the new double o seven game. I look like him. It's like, I guess he's wearing a leather jacket or something, but it's just so funny to be like, I'm I'm
Speaker 2:He's having a great quarter.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. It's such a great bit. And then he shows some other racks. But there's a lot of good stuff from NVIDIA. Why NVIDIA inside can work in the PC market, the world's only $5,000,000,000,000 company can sell the concept that AI computing won't confined to data centers.
Speaker 1:So he's already getting ahead of the future of on premise AI compute local AI inference happening in your house. You get a DGX. You get a big powered PC and it runs your lights. It runs your smart home. It runs whatever you want locally and actually can inference a near frontier model in the future.
Speaker 1:So exciting to see. I like it. I like the idea of having powerful AI that's not in the cloud, that's local. I think that that's fun. I've always been a fan of the tiny box and this is in that vein.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And actually, I bought the property right next to your home. Yeah. And I'm putting a
Speaker 1:Data center.
Speaker 2:Little data center in it.
Speaker 1:As long as I can throw an ethernet cable under there. Well, have Edward Kim from Gusto. He's the co founder and head of technology. Welcome to the show, Edward. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:I'm great. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping on. Great to
Speaker 3:have you
Speaker 2:on and great to meet you.
Speaker 1:For I I think Yeah.
Speaker 6:Nice to meet you. I think I'm the third and final co founder.
Speaker 1:Third and final co founder. That's what I was gonna say. So
Speaker 2:There must be one more you guys have hidden.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like one
Speaker 2:of your series.
Speaker 6:No. Just three.
Speaker 1:No. Just you three? Okay. Well, anyway, take us through the launch today. Tell us what's happening in Gusto World.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So today, I'm really excited. I think it's the most important moment for us as a company since the launch of the company almost fourteen, fifteen years ago. Wow. And we're launching today Gusto cofounder.
Speaker 6:Gusto cofounder is really the first agent that can automate most of what a small business does Mhmm. In their back office.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You guys were just talking about personal computers and I have a Mac mini where I set up OpenClaw. Took me eight hours to set up. Yeah. Pain in the ass. Yep.
Speaker 6:And then as soon as I got through the entire setup, I didn't really know what to do with it. Yeah. Right? I still kind of like use it as a glorified search search engine.
Speaker 1:There's people in the back.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Someone someone on your someone on your team in
Speaker 6:the office. We're in we're in the office here in .patch. People are still using it still as a Yeah. Glorified search engine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And that's kind of the problem that we set out to solve with Gusto Co Founder. Yeah. Instead of starting from the technology and and then giving people a blank canvas on something to do with it, what Gusto Co Founder does is we start with all of the problems that we're already helping our customers with payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling time, and then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it. So at the center of Gusto Co Founder is a concept called automations. And essentially, you tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, all these things that we're already doing for you.
Speaker 6:And Gusto Co Founder will basically run your business process for you. You communicate with it through SMS and Slack, so you don't really even interface with it through a through a website. And then, of course, we'll connect to all of your systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. So Notion, QuickBooks Mhmm. Google Workspace.
Speaker 6:You have a lot of information and data that sits outside of Gusto as well. What Gusto cofounder does is it brings it all together into one place where it can automate your your your business processes.
Speaker 1:Why why SMS and Slack? Why not, like, a chat in your face and a Gusto app directly? Like, what what does that allow you because
Speaker 2:I mean Yeah. I'll tell you it just mimics exact I mean, I I remember even with how Gusto how easy to use Gusto was in 2018 when I had my first business, I was still relieved when we hired somebody whose job was just to kind of like handle everything on the payroll side and Yeah, exactly. If I needed something done I would just text them or I would Slack them and say, hey, can you do this thing? Or hey, we're onboarding this person or this contractor. We need to make sure they get paid by this day or whatever it was.
Speaker 2:And so I just think actually making it feel like a teammate is getting you much closer to the experience of People are not waking up every morning. Entrepreneurs are not waking up saying, I want to spend a bunch of time in my payroll platform today. Right? Like, you want it to be so seamless that it's just it's just happening.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That that's exactly right. We want it to feel like your teammate. It should be someone that, you know, you feel comfortable texting, having run processes for you. So you could have it actually text you when it's run your payroll.
Speaker 6:It'll it'll tell you the, like, total amount and all you have to do is say, I approve it. It'll actually run your payroll. You never even have to, like, log in to Gusto to run your payroll ever again. If you wanna do more one off things, like, hey, pay this contractor $500 Yeah. You could just text it as well.
Speaker 6:One of the things I really loved about OpenClaw is just it just blew my mind. It was such a simple concept that seems so obvious, the ability to text with it through Telegram. And that's kinda I wanted to bring that magical experience into Gust, the co founder. It it just really changes the game, and it's hard to understate how important that is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So is the product development for this sort of, like, indigenous in the sense that your your experience are, like, informing the product decisions? Or is it you're noticing customers, like, you're noticing an uptake? Or you I don't even know if you can detect if your customers are interfacing with Gusto's core endpoints or UI with OpenClaw? Like, you able to see some sort of data to show that there's demand for this?
Speaker 1:Or is it just like
Speaker 6:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Know, you've experienced it and you're launching this?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, if you just observe some of our customers Mhmm. Like, I'll give one example. There was a massage spa in New York, and what they do every week to run payroll is they typically have work tracked in some other system. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:In this case, was Mindbody. Right? A lot of like spa, yoga studios, pilates, they track work of their workers in in Mindbody. Then every week, what they'll do is they'll export data from there. They'll put it into Google Spreadsheets.
Speaker 6:They'll run some crazy calculation in there. They'll say, you know, if you worked this many if you did this many massages, then you'll get paid this much. If you upsold CBD oil or a hot stone massage, you get $15 for each one of those. That goes in as a bonus and and commission, and then here's how we do tips. We'll split it across all of our therapists.
Speaker 6:They do all that calculation, and then and only then, they go into gusto, put in all that information to run payroll. Mhmm. That part we see, obviously. Right? And so if you only look at that part, we're like, great.
Speaker 6:We did a great job. It takes like seconds to run payroll. But if you look at the entire process that they're running, there's this whole, what I call the work before the work that happens. And you really only, like, understand that when you observe a customer, like, end to end, not just using your system, but all the systems that they're using to run their business. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And that's why kind of having these connectors in Gusto Co Founder was so important to us. We recognize that these businesses are not doing everything within Gusto, at least not yet, and they have multiple systems that they're connecting. And and these entrepreneurs are really creative in stringing them together, but there's still a lot of work at the end of the day. And they can just really kind of have those business processes just tell Gusto cofounder once that, like, hey, go export it from this system, do these calculations on it, then put it into Gusto, run payroll, and then text me the the final amount so that I can approve it before you actually run payroll.
Speaker 1:That's Last question for me. I'm I'm very interested in how, like, I don't know, like, a company of Gusto's scale thinks about launching new products within Gusto, like, because you sort of there there are a lot of people that are just like, oh, Gusto works perfectly. I'm not gonna think about it. And you have to, like, you have to market this new feature, this new product to your existing customers. Obviously, it's a draw for new customers because new capability, better product.
Speaker 1:But also just you have to tell people, obviously, you can email them. But I'm interested to know, like, because every payroll admin probably has a phone number already, like like, authenticated for two factor, like, is there some sort of, like, internal go to market strategy that's more mature than just throw it in the newsletter, tell everyone that this thing exists? Like, how are you thinking about actually onboarding, measuring churn, making sure there's satisfaction for sort of, like, a new product within the Gusto ecosystem?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, think it's really just talking to your customers all the time. I think really understanding what their needs are. There's always gonna be more problems that we can solve for them. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And then when we solve those problems, you know, we're pretty good at tracking either through, you know, customers we've talked to or through our data like, how do we reach out to those folks that would specifically benefit from what we just built?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:That way we're not, you know, kind of spamming every single one of our Yeah. 500 plus thousand employers on Gusto Yeah. For every little thing that we launch. We want to kind of just kind of communicate to them only the most relevant things. And so with Gusto co founder, we're we're we've reached out to 500 customers
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:To give early access to this starting today. Got it. And they're naturally a little bit more on the tech forward ones are the ones that we've talked to that, you know, are already using AI to automate parts of their business but can do a lot more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cost. How much does it cost you? How much does it cost the customer? Is inference a problem?
Speaker 1:Like, are you able to use a series of models? Like, how are you thinking about is it is it like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think you gotta worry about people being like, hey, I'm trying to ship this new feature.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You think you can And Gusto co founder, like, you actually just do product development for me too? And it's like, no problem, boss.
Speaker 6:I mean, I think the philosophy we took with Gusto co founder is we wanted to unconstrain it as much possible.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Because I I really want to just learn to see how people use it. Right? If you have it, say, hey, text me the weather every morning, especially if it's going to rain today because my business is a tour business. Yes. That might even be relevant.
Speaker 1:Even though sounds like a wild like just random open claw task, like that actually does make sense in that business context.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And then and then look at my customer list and send them an email Yeah. Saying to bring an umbrella for Yeah. Today's tour.
Speaker 1:To build this automation.
Speaker 6:You can do that on Gusto co founder. That's And we had some conversations, do we really want to let people do this? And Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 6:our bias has always been, why not? Right? Yeah. That's the problem of why people aren't getting the most out of AI is because I think a lot of folks are putting unnecessary constraints on those systems. And obviously, like, at some point, there's certain things that we won't want Gusto cofounder to do.
Speaker 6:We're not going have it like, you know, serve as your cloud code or anything like that.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:But I think for now, we're we're more at a learning mode. Want to kind of see how people use it. We want encourage people to get as creative as possible with it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Jordy, you think of what I'm thinking? Automatic swear jar. Anytime you swear, docs your gusto payroll automatically.
Speaker 2:I like it. Agentically. This is You can
Speaker 6:do that.
Speaker 2:Probably. I like that you guys didn't just pick some quirky like human like name.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. Like co founder. It is just like a just like a very
Speaker 6:think about it. Should be literally the person that you are on a texting basis, you feel comfortable reaching out to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Day or night to take care of something to help you with running your business.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Would you one day allow it to make calls on behalf of Mhmm. Customers? Like, let's say there's some, you know, you you have a
Speaker 1:I nine verification.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was thinking more like, you know, let's say you have an employee in another state Yeah. And like, you know, the the the tax board there or some type of agency like Call them and explain this to them. I I feel like every every startup founder is used to getting like some type of letter in the mail from some random state that you pay to you have
Speaker 1:to call. I feel
Speaker 2:like there's probably some stuff there down the Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, I I don't see why not. We don't do that today, but you can just certainly tell it to email Yeah. On your behalf. Right? And so if we're willing to do email Yeah.
Speaker 6:Then why not calls?
Speaker 1:That'd be amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of
Speaker 2:your day. Great to meet you, Edward.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the launch.
Speaker 2:Congrats to the team.
Speaker 6:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Okay. Section out, we got to pull up the Ferrari Lucha. I think this is the third mention of the Ferrari Lucha of the show.
Speaker 2:This show.
Speaker 1:But people have been talking about different specs and this Instagram account showed the Ferrari Luce 1.9 JTD base spec and I think it looks fantastic. What do you think? Scroll through some of these. So this is is this when you get it with a 1.9 liter, turbo diesel. It's like a base model Civic.
Speaker 1:Spec like this, it looks fantastic. Just just minimal. Minimal. Scroll through all of them. Here we go.
Speaker 1:Look at, yeah. The the the central console delete and then the stake shift there just
Speaker 2:I actually love the way this looks.
Speaker 1:You don't.
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:This looks like a 1995 Honda Civic.
Speaker 2:I think this looks
Speaker 1:The graphic.
Speaker 2:Okay. The the rear end looks a little bit but.
Speaker 1:Just ultra ultra discounted.
Speaker 2:Let's compare it to the Spectre
Speaker 1:Okay. EV What's
Speaker 2:going with the Spectre? From Rolls Royce. Yeah. Coming out starting price
Speaker 1:Series
Speaker 2:two up ground for Half a mil. Okay. 307 mile range.
Speaker 1:20% cheaper than a Luche?
Speaker 2:0 to 64.1 seconds.
Speaker 1:Good. Very slow, very big, very heavy, but that's
Speaker 2:6,600 pounds. It's the same as a Same
Speaker 1:as a Cybertruck.
Speaker 2:That is wild. But it looks incredible.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, would you get one of these? One Rolls Royce Spectre series two or 10 Model s plaids used? Model s plaid goes zero to 60 in two seconds. You can get 10 of them.
Speaker 1:So you can just be launching them off some cliff. Dive out. Get in the next one because you got 10 of these things. Zero to 60 in two seconds. A tough
Speaker 2:call. It's a tough call when you put it like that.
Speaker 1:At k, the used Tesla Model Plaid is hard to beat. What do you think
Speaker 2:alternative with the Lucha, you get 15
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tesla Model s Plaids 15.
Speaker 1:Or one Lucha. The crew just zero to 60 in two seconds. The drag racing would be very, very good. You have your whole whole bachelor party doing drag races. What do you think of the GMC Hummer x SUV pickup truck concept?
Speaker 2:This would be good for you.
Speaker 1:I like this. And you know where they launched it? The Pasadena Design Studio. Can you believe that?
Speaker 2:No way. They brought it to my hometown. Way. It's a sign, John.
Speaker 1:It's a sign. I think it looks good. The the the the truck also looks good. I it's interesting because it looks it still looks huge, but in a world of 20 1,250 horsepower Corvettes, ultra luxury Cadillacs, the GMC Hummer SUV, and pickup trucks are no longer the most outrageous new cars in the General Motors family. That does not mean they've been forgotten, though.
Speaker 1:GM is celebrating the opening of a new design studio in Pasadena, California. Let's go. By reimagining its enormous electric SUV with a pair of outdoorsy concepts, one size smaller than we've seen recently. I think I think it looks cool. Looks very like ready to crawl over some rocks.
Speaker 1:I think it's a fun fun time.
Speaker 2:Anyway Let's
Speaker 1:me tell you about
Speaker 2:let's have Whistlin Diesel put it to the test. Because he tried to test the Cybertruck and I think it it stopped. It basically bricked before he could really make a video.
Speaker 1:100%. We gotta we gotta see the the what what what is it called? Durability test. Whistlin Diesel durability test. Let's see it.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of their IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And our next guest is in the waiting room. Shreya Murthy from Part of Fall. Welcome back.
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. It's great to see you. How's it going? Nice to meet too.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having You were what what were you dressed as last time? Was it Halloween?
Speaker 9:Yeah. The Wicked Witch of the West.
Speaker 1:Was appearance. That was really really fun.
Speaker 2:You said you weren't gonna dress up this time. Yeah. But I still am kind of disappointed that you
Speaker 1:dress up.
Speaker 9:I'm disappointed myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, I'm not disappointed.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:Progress in Particle's world. Tell us
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and you guys gonna finally make some money? What's going on?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I know we literally promised to the world an iron bound agreement that Particle would never make money Okay. With a very literal tweet that was clearly meant entirely seriously That
Speaker 1:makes sense.
Speaker 9:And could not possibly be a joke.
Speaker 2:Ads Mhmm. Based on Partifull.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? In the app. Like, you know, I want it I want I want it to feel like Partifull is listening to me. Yeah. But I don't that's what you're gonna do.
Speaker 1:It should let you stand up a b to b MLM on demand. So this person was at this party with this potential customer, enlist that person to sell them ramps. Something like that.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. Buy some Tupperware.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Tupperware for enterprise SaaS.
Speaker 2:That is what that that would have been a good play. It's like, hey, we're we're we we said we weren't gonna make money. Turns out we are part of full Tupperware parties. Host a host a party in your area.
Speaker 1:It'll be good. But actually take us through the Real Monetization plans because we've riffed enough and I wanna hear the real story.
Speaker 9:So, yeah. I mean, today, Particle launches ticketing. It's available on app, on web. You can now buy and sell tickets directly on Particle. So it's not just us making money, it's Yeah.
Speaker 9:Hosts making money too and Okay. That's the most important thing.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Who I want to know, yeah, is it like walk crawl run? What do like, do you imagine that you're going to bring in like a new like like, you know, a know, like a band that's performing at a concert and that's going to be a new user that has been on the fence and not jumped in? Or do you think that there will be a sort of more gradual evolution from people that are throwing events on part of full, It's an easy add on. So the next one in their series of events, they will just have paid ticketing for because they already have a lot of traction and they're a power user.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Little bit of column a, little bit of column b. Mhmm. So the impetus for building it was something that I've been building for quite a while, which is that people were already trying to host paid events
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:On Parkville. Yeah. You know, supper clubs, run clubs Sure. You know, community events, concerts, album release parties, fundraisers. And because we didn't have ticketing, it was not a great user experience.
Speaker 9:Like, hosts were linking out to other platforms. Yep. Guests weren't sure. Cross reference. Does my RSVP count or does my ticket host or cross reference?
Speaker 9:So that wasn't really upholding our standard of what we want Particle to be and what Particle is known for, which is having a super seamless experience no matter what kind of event you're Yep. And so, first and foremost, we saw this as a feature gap. And it was always a question of, well, when do we close this feature gap? And I think the tipping point for us was starting last year, we launched our Explore feed, is a tab on the app that you can go to and you can browse events that are happening around you. They're highly curated.
Speaker 9:You can see what your part of all mutuals are going to, and increasingly, are using that as a place to discover things to do. And so with the launch of Explore, we started to see a proliferation of these events that really needed ticketing because they're marketed to the public, because they're often higher production value. Like, it it takes real money to put on a lot of great events, and that funding for hosts has to come from somewhere, and it typically comes from selling tickets. And so all of that really culminated where we were like, first and foremost, we wanna create a much better experience for the hosts on Part of Full today and the guests on Part of Full today to do what they're already doing but in a seamless way. And then two, we absolutely know that there are types of events that you can't have on Part of Full because we don't have ticketing.
Speaker 9:And so we're hoping with this that we can grow and actually get even more of those events onto Particle that weren't on the platform previously.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I can imagine like a lot of even emerging artists that aren't on like some insane, you know, tour To get mass tour, you you and Like, the experience of like an artist being able to like send a easy text blast Yep. And feel like they're communicating and and then have like social features built in. I feel like that'll be a much much cooler Yeah. Experience.
Speaker 2:What trends are you seeing on part of full? Like, I I would I feel like you guys should should maybe you do and I and I haven't seen them. But like I wanna know like have have run clubs peaked? Have people stopped running from whatever they're running from? Like what what what what's kind of maybe
Speaker 1:How's the health of the look alike meet up? Are are are we we reached peak lookalike meetup or are are we to boom?
Speaker 9:Well, it's funny you you mentioned that because on our very serious Twitter that should be taken literally at all times, we did tweet like think a year ago that lookalike contests are dead and that future lookalike contests will be banned on the platform. And actually, a news publication picked it up and said, Particle has canceled lookalike events. But they're still happening. And and and and, you know, honestly, in 2026, many of them are still great. Like, there was big heated rivalry lookalike contest that was still happening.
Speaker 9:There was a JFK junior lookalike contest. And so I I think I've I've come around, and I can never say no to a good lookalike contest. There's also these just, like, mass meetups in Central Park and, you know, Dolores Park to do whatever. And so I I think that's the trend that we're seeing is the rise of these viral events of someone, you know, taking a funny meme and actually bringing it to life in the real world. And it's so much better when that happens.
Speaker 9:Like, people yearn to touch grass. Mhmm. And they yearn for these types of events that feel, like, easy, low key, and something that where they can participate in a collective cultural moment and say that they were there. Like, I I don't I think
Speaker 2:feedback loop too because Yeah. The meetup itself produces so much viral content that then feeds the meme because it's like, well, that person doesn't look exactly like so and so. Yeah. You know? Sometimes sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Public events are social. Reason ticketing's on particle now.
Speaker 1:So have you discovered any like, lessons from, like, particularly seamless payment processing? I feel like so much of the beauty of Particle is, like, how, like, the text message integration, the seamlessness. And I feel like there's demand for Apple Pay or or Venmo. There's like a whole bunch of different ways you could solve that. Maybe you just do the hard work to get everyone to put their credit card information in, then it's all saved nicely.
Speaker 1:But like what was the what were the trade offs? What was like the best practice that you wound up landing on?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So first and foremost, it was like, this should feel ridiculously easy because RSVPing on particle is really easy. It shouldn't feel quite as easy as RSVPing because, like, you do have to pay money. But if if you go through the flow, it still feels like buttery smooth. Like, you tap by tickets.
Speaker 9:You add, you know, you add the number of tickets you want. If you have a promo code, you use that. Like, we we have an event for tech week tomorrow where tickets are $10,000. But if you Wow. Have the
Speaker 2:secret That's the mastermind.
Speaker 9:Promo code.
Speaker 1:How much is it, though?
Speaker 9:We have the secret promo code.
Speaker 1:It's 20,000. Woah. The secret promo code. It's $9,999. Very fun.
Speaker 2:What what what like what what's your motivation at this point? Like what's your what's your ambition? I feel like, you know, I I imagine you guys have had a bunch of acquisition interests this entire time to date while you're not making any money. And you you know, somebody makes an offer and you're looking at it and you're like, wow, this is, you know, a big number. It's I feel like the hardest time to turn down an acquisition would is when you're not making money.
Speaker 2:Once you're making money and you're growing and things like that, like it can there's more of like a line of sight to, hey, this is like a really big real business. But how how did you how did you process like building a company for this long that's so in the public eye, that's so popular and not making money and and stay focused on the long term?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's a great question. It it's a bad day for everyone who wanted to acquire us when we weren't making money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 9:For sure.
Speaker 2:Brutal. Brutal. They hate they all the acquirers probably love that, oh, yeah. Particle is cute. Like, they're not really monetizing yet, so they'll they'll take our offer eventually.
Speaker 2:Nightmare. Nightmare for them. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But they're they're down bad today. But but I think this is like this is exactly the next step we wanted to take for our long term ambitions. Like, we intend for Partifle to be a massive company, and we've already proven in so many ways that we're there from, like, a growth perspective, and we're continuing to grow. But this just felt like such a natural addition to our ecosystem where it's a win win.
Speaker 9:We're closing a feature gap. We're making an experience buttery smooth, which is what we always want to do for everything we're building. We're solving a problem for hosts. We're solving a problem for guests. And yes, this feature happens to be one where we can make money.
Speaker 9:It's not the only feature that we'll ever build to make money. There's a lot more to come, but it is the right next step in our journey. I think what's cool is that it's coming at a time where there's this real cultural moment around gathering in the real world for these fundamentally social experiences, and that's where Particle plays really well. One thing that's pretty different about us is we're not a ticketing company where social is an afterthought or nonexistent. We're a social product that now has a ticketing component on top of it.
Speaker 9:And so what does that get us? Like, you mentioned concerts earlier, Jordi. Like, Weezer, for example, threw a ton of pop ups on Particle that were just free events that they were doing for their community as part of their tour. And before, Particle didn't have ticketing, and so, like, all Weezer could do with Particle was host their their free events. But I think they're one of so many, like, artists, cultural institutions, performers, creatives who are really harnessing Particle connect with their community and create social experiences with their community.
Speaker 9:And so that's the ball that our eyes are on is how do we supercharge this thing that we're seeing in the culture and what are the features we can build to help accelerate and expand that and make that accessible to more people.
Speaker 2:Do you expect there to be an entire class of Partifold entrepreneurs? Basically, small business owners where the vast majority of their revenue or almost all their revenue is flowing through Partifold? Does it feel like there's like a line of sight to that?
Speaker 9:I think that's going to be a huge and very important subset of our ticketed hosts, but I also think it's equally important for us to be serving the more casual host who needs ticketing for their event for whatever reason, whether that's a frat, whether that's someone putting together a party bus for their birthday, whether it's just someone who wants to charge $10 to make sure that people don't flake from their event. Like, there's so many ways that you can use ticketing to get what you need out of your event, and there's so many people where they have a day job, but building community is their passion project. We hear from so many people like that. And so I really see ticketing as something that very much unlocks what they're able to do as much as it is something for the person where their lifeblood and their business and what they're building for themselves and their lives financially is powered by PartiFull.
Speaker 2:What's a country that uses PartiFull a lot that people wouldn't expect?
Speaker 9:Italy has a very strong
Speaker 2:I would expect that. I would expect that. I have a bunch of Italian friends. They like to get together and do things.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. The the Italians look portable. Mean, The UK is really big, but, like so it depends on how you feel about the The UK. I've been to some phenomenal parties in London, so it doesn't surprise me, but some people are like, what?
Speaker 9:No. I would say, like, the most unexpected thing is the random most of our users are in The US. Like, the random contingents of people that I didn't expect. Like, my mom's friend texted her that Partifull has gone viral in a South Florida over 55 senior living community, and I love that.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Amazing. Partifull retirement. What a wonderful way to to to retire. What's the work culture like at Partifull these days?
Speaker 2:You guys like work more on the weekend than like the a normal company because there's a lot of actions
Speaker 1:stuff going on.
Speaker 2:Or or is the product robust enough that that you guys can, you know, take a couple days off?
Speaker 9:Well, it it's always the product's really robust, but it is always stressful to be on call on the weekends because, like, if something breaks, that is when it's gonna be, like, a bad time for everyone. So I would say, like, the culture is work hard, party hard, which probably doesn't surprise anyone. Like, we can't be nine nine six because in order for us to do our jobs right, everyone on the team physically needs time to party. Like, it doesn't work without that. But, yeah, I would I would say events that are otherwise totally fun and stress free for other people like Halloween.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Like, that's my I'm in the situation room
Speaker 1:It's for Super Bowl.
Speaker 9:All Halloween. Right? New years. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Exactly. I'm I'm not partying. But, yeah, we the the party product research a very important part of our culture.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the progress and
Speaker 2:I'm glad
Speaker 10:that It was great to
Speaker 9:see you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great great launch. Excited to attend my first ticketed Particle event whenever that is.
Speaker 9:Fantastic. $10,000 tomorrow. Amy.
Speaker 2:There we go. See you later. Great to see you.
Speaker 9:Bye bye.
Speaker 1:Good rest of the week. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Speaker 1:Go check it out. Figma.com. And our next guest is returning to the show. One of my favorites. Probably the my number one favorite new consumer electronic device product of the last I don't know how many years.
Speaker 1:We have Brynn Putnam from Ford. She's the founder and CEO. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 10:Thanks so much for having me back, guys.
Speaker 1:Last time you
Speaker 2:were on, we both left.
Speaker 1:We both ordered on show. Yeah. Very easy to check out. Thanks to Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank
Speaker 1:you. And and they arrived and we have been entertained for hours and really really enjoyed the product. But tell us how things are going on your side.
Speaker 10:It's been a crazy six months. It's been so fun just seeing Bored actually out in the wild and seeing seeing people using it and loving it. I think it's really just sort of exceeded our expectations. We have, you know, thousands of households using the product and loving it, and people are actually starting to create their own games for board, which has been the most surprising but exciting development for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You three Talk about
Speaker 1:us as as Marc Andreessen and Elias has ever dressed up on Halloween. It's very funny because it's like a
Speaker 2:Very meta.
Speaker 1:It's a character of a character but what like what does that represent? They are in real
Speaker 2:than they looked
Speaker 1:On the photo.
Speaker 2:In the photo.
Speaker 1:They loom large. They loom large, But but but why would a customer want to print something? Walk me through the thesis like how is this actually playing out?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So today, people are, you know, using their favorite AI coding tools to build using our SDK, which really surprised us Yeah. That your sort of average family was sitting down around this new shared surface trying to create their own experiences. And so we've decided to really lean into that and are creating a product we call Board Studio that really makes it just easier for your average person to start to build. So they'll sit and just prompt, and the board studio will create the experience for them, including their very own custom miniatures.
Speaker 10:So very excited to see what people are creating, everything from educational apps to things for healthcare settings or bars or restaurants. It's really been a diverse range of Yeah, interactive
Speaker 2:what's the secret to making a, you know, basically, I'll call it like a vibe coded game studio. I imagine you want you don't wanna change is like reskinning the best way to think about this? Because coming up with like original game mechanics and rules and all these things feels like much much much more challenging for the average person than just deciding like, I'm gonna make this character look like this and I wanna change the setting and and choices like that.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I think it's important for us to really create, like, a batteries included environment. So to give people good project templates, good asset libraries, an easy way to, you know, connect directly to their board so they can kind of automatically automatically build, build, deploy, and play games and start to test and to help kind of steer people towards experiences where they really can go from prompt to prototype in an hour. So that's not going to be creating highly complex games with where the technology is today. But it's it's quite impressive how quickly, you know, people are able to create things that are fun just using sort of a set of prepackaged assets and and templates.
Speaker 1:Walk me through where the board SDK ends and the and the vibe coding begins. It feels like there's an SDK that's open source hosted on GitHub or your website, something like that. I download that, Then I can kind of use the vibe coding tool of my choice. I could use codex, clog code, whatever I want to sort of build. But then am I am I testing the game in a browser?
Speaker 1:Is it going am I deploying to the board? Is there the idea of, like, test flight? Or then at some point, does it get released to an app store that you review? Because I imagine there's all sorts of, of, you know, privacy and security, you know, goals that you have in mind as the company.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So for q four, you'll be building on a computer and then directly deploying on your board for use with your own family. I think
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Our learning has been the act of creating a game on board is actually one of the most fun games on board.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:So I think for many people, the experience is just going to be vibing things that they love and that their kids love that they want to play in their own homes. And then from there, if they want to share with the broader community, we have a review process. So you submit your game to us. We have content standards and controls, and then we'll release those games in our board store. So the first of the community games goes live next month.
Speaker 10:Sure. And that was something that a member of the community created using the arcade pieces from our arcade suite, and it's a reimagined game of pinball that we're super excited about, and that will go live in July. And it just went through our review process to ensure that it was fun and accessible for the community.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I have a game idea.
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 2:Monopoly style game where you develop data centers.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Love it.
Speaker 1:I yeah. I was Tyler? Thinking
Speaker 2:I was thinking Tyler on the team to
Speaker 1:do simulator. It just runs a full spreadsheet sort of like how Ramp Labs came out with their ramp sheets, you know. You just get the kids started early.
Speaker 2:These will be the the least popular games in your on your community forum, but the most potentially the most popular And
Speaker 1:my children will be required to play Eight hours a day. Probably nine nine six really. Yeah. To make sure that they understand the discounted cash How did
Speaker 2:you feel your intuition was around this launch, you know, versus Mirror? I feel like the hardest thing with hardware is you spend like, you know, one, two years, sometimes more time developing something and then you just have no idea. You you have an intuition around how people will react to it. Did you have more confidence going into board than the last go around? And and, you know, did did obviously, the launch has been great, but did it kind of meet your expectations?
Speaker 2:And how are you kind of adapting your thinking going forward?
Speaker 10:I think it surprised me, honestly. You know, I think we thought that we would be talking to kind of early adopter gadget geeks, maybe some hobbyists who wanted to build, you know, interactive D and D campaigns on board early days. And the audience has been much broader than expected. You know, we have grandma and grandpa who are buying it for when the grandkids come over along with, you know, teachers and doctors and restaurant owners. So the breadth of the audience, I think, has really surprised us, and it's great, but it's definitely been a challenge the team now has to meet because we have to create games quickly that can satisfy not just deep, passionate gamers, but people who for whom this is, like, really their only gaming experience.
Speaker 10:It's bringing sort of new people to the table. And so it's been really fun, but the mission of making playing together more accessible and creating together more accessible is all that more important given the breadth of the audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how are you thinking about intellectual property in the modern era? Because I can tell my son a bedtime story where Spider Man meets Superman, which belong to different different studios. Never the two shall meet on the silver screen, but in the imagination of a five year old, anything is possible including cross IP infringement. And some of the AI models will sort of play friendly with you if you ask, you know, Chad GPT, hey, tell me a story or flesh this story out where Spider Man's interacting with Superman.
Speaker 1:Some of the companies have licensing agreements and they make royalty payments and all sorts of things. But there's some sort of interaction there where I can draw Spider Man and I think that's legal. I think I can just draw an image of Spider Man and give that to my kid. But if I take a picture of that, upload that to board, I imagine at some point you'd be partnering with companies. But is there some sort of terms of use that you have to think through or guardrails that you put on?
Speaker 1:Because some of the magic of creation is drawing Mickey Mouse for the first time. But if you're monetizing that and selling that, that's a whole different equation. So how do you think about playing that side? Because I imagine there'll be huge demand for intellectual property based games, but you need to be careful that you don't run into any trouble with the big studios.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, I'd love to get to a point where it's just one big universe where, you know, everyone is playing together in the board sandbox, but we're obviously not there. So I think today, you know, we are making every effort to respect the IP holders and also respect the sort of safety and privacy concerns of our community. You know, these are families that are using the device, and I have a three year old, and I want to make sure that when the three year old sits down to me in pieces that nothing comes out that would be upsetting or surprising But to those are definitely active conversations that we have had since day one with IP holders about how we can move to a future universe where creation isn't really limited, that people can can bring Spider Man and and, you know, Miss Piggy together into into an incredible new world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When I think of D and D campaigns, I I start to think about almost like Internet connectivity within the game. I I imagine that most of the games are self contained. It feels like there is a there's an internal state of, you know, is the is the cartoon character clean? You have to wash them off.
Speaker 1:If you save the game, you come back still dirty. But how are you thinking about making the games are are you thinking about expanding to something that is more cloud interactive multiplayer at some point? Is any of that on the horizon? Is that interesting? Is there demand for that even?
Speaker 10:Yeah. That's definitely a polarizing topic within our audience. Sure. Some people would love to be able to start a game on their board and then have grandma play on her board in a different state, which we don't do today because the other app of our audience also feels very strongly that board feels safe because it is a closed community. So our tabletop product is the first product that will be networked.
Speaker 10:You will be able to link to your FoundryBTT account and play your campaigns with people elsewhere. But we felt like that was a specific segment of the community that understood the connectivity. And so, otherwise, we are keeping it sort of limited to to your board. That may that may evolve over time, but for now, I think those are guardrails that are important to keep it really feeling full family for everyone.
Speaker 1:Wait. So sorry. Take me through the product catalog. It sounds like there's there's are are there are there multiple products at this point? Or is it all just one the one that I have the, like, the big board?
Speaker 1:I just think of it as the board. The board. But is there a different is there a different skew at this point? Or is there one coming?
Speaker 10:So we launched with a founder's edition which had 13 games included which is the version that you guys have. Yeah. And then we unbundled in March. And so we started selling five of the games a la carte which was really exciting for us. We saw over 60% attach rate on games with most people buying four out of the five games we had available.
Speaker 10:So that sort of gave us the confidence that more games were needed in the community. So starting in June, we'll launch another 10 games between now and holiday. And the board tabletop product is sort of the most unusual of those, and that is it's specifically for the tabletop community that's currently using BTTs. Otherwise, they're all sort of full family games.
Speaker 1:Got it. Awesome. Warhammer, it's coming.
Speaker 10:I'm excited. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Talk about the round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna hit the gong. How much did you raise?
Speaker 10:Alrighty. We raised at $20,000,000. Know.
Speaker 2:I I could hear you because I had an idea, but who who led the round?
Speaker 10:Mike Mcdonough. There we go. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 1:We love Mike. We love Mike. I love I don't know. Everything Union Square is doing, this company, everything about this is just delightful and amazing and obviously a good business as well. So it's a royal flush of good news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Great update.
Speaker 1:Thank you
Speaker 2:for taking
Speaker 1:the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest
Speaker 10:of the Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 1:see you soon. Cheers. Bye bye. We got to go back to Instagram because in the a I in the era of a I slob videos, the rental encore was doing it better than anybody years and years ago. We gotta pull up this video.
Speaker 1:I want your reaction because this seems like peak cinema. I want your analysis. Break it down. With independent suspension for amazing handling. Okay.
Speaker 1:Reasonable car. Right? Efficiency. Wait until you see the advertisement.
Speaker 3:Affordable. 50
Speaker 1:Cheap car.
Speaker 3:59.
Speaker 1:You can get a 100 of those for the price of Ferrari Lucha. Encore. 100 Renault are encores. Anyway, it's gonna it's gonna restart and you're gonna be amazed. Watch this.
Speaker 1:If you are what you drive, imagine yourself as a Renault Encore. Expressively sporty and pale look, Stylishly European and decent. We don't know how to make vibe reels like this anymore. Leading carmaker Show me the founder transforming into the b to b SaaS that they are launching. Electronic fuel injection.
Speaker 1:Put away the cinematic softbox. Take away the soft, shallow depth of field. Show me the founder transforming into the product. I can see myself in a reno. The one
Speaker 2:Such a good ad.
Speaker 1:The one to watch. Great ad. Right?
Speaker 2:Such a good ad.
Speaker 1:Someone You Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Speaker 2:Mike Isaac said, get ready to get even more annoyed by your cheapest friends because the Germinator is sharing that Apple readies iOS 27 service that will let users split bills for dinners events by taking a photo of a receipt and assigning items to friends. This is annoying super intelligence that I won't be using. This will be part of Apple Wallet and Cash Yeah. Taking on Venmo and Splitwise.
Speaker 1:You gotta do the credit card roulette.
Speaker 2:I love that game.
Speaker 1:Or the inverse credit card roulette where one person, you take out one credit card, they don't pay. So they get the free dinner and everyone else splits the bill. And everyone else pays like 10% more, but someone else got like a free dinner. So they get a great, you know, excitement.
Speaker 2:And everyone got great company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But no. Every dinner should be a ruthless game theoretic Nash equilibrium, everyone trying to drink exactly the same amount or buy the most expensive steak to one up each other so that you don't get taken into the cleaners with an even split. You want to get your money's worth. So if you see someone ordering the porterhouse you say, I'll have two porterhouses.
Speaker 1:Give me two porterhouses. We're splitting this evenly, right? Oh, you got three glasses of wine?
Speaker 2:Let's do another round.
Speaker 1:I'll take 10.
Speaker 2:But cripple me up.
Speaker 1:And I am having dessert.
Speaker 2:I'm having a big dessert guy.
Speaker 1:I'm a big dessert guy, actually. I'll be easier to go.
Speaker 2:That's the
Speaker 1:best dessert to go.
Speaker 2:Order lunch for tomorrow too.
Speaker 1:And I'd like a third porterhouse.
Speaker 2:For lunch.
Speaker 1:For lunch. For Let's split the bill evenly. Don't don't pull out your Apple intelligence on me. Don't do that. I what's the crime?
Speaker 1:Having a porterhouse? Having two porterhouses? Having three porterhouses? Four? You're gonna buy that up with Apple intelligence.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:don't Take want
Speaker 1:one of your receipt.
Speaker 2:Don't want one of your good friends to hit their macros? Yeah.
Speaker 1:What are you trying to do here?
Speaker 2:There's a whey protein
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Why? There's a whey protein shortage and you're saying I shouldn't order my second and third porterhouse. What is going on? When you know if I go to the store right now, whey is gonna be priced to the
Speaker 1:Let me have a porterhouse. Let me have three.
Speaker 2:That's a good place to end it, folks.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let me tell you about Ramp one more time. Time is money. Say both.
Speaker 1:Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and all one more.