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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, 04/15/2026. It's tax day. I hope you paid your taxes. We have a great show for you today, folks.
Speaker 1:Bunch of crazy stories going on. Allbirds is now an AI company. Snap is restructuring the entire company. Amazon's buying Globalstar. There's new info on Apple's new AI glasses.
Speaker 1:We're going to take you through it all. We also have a bunch of guests joining. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven guests joining. Kiva Dickinson, Aaron D'Souza Michael Mignano is now at Union Square Ventures. Massive pickup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're very excited for that. Wade Foster from Zapier is coming on. Ankur just got acquired by AngelList. Pure
Speaker 2:Rich Split acquisition.
Speaker 1:Split acquisition. I'm not exactly oh, so so half the company is going to AngelList, half the company is going to eat a lettuce.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Got it. I wasn't sure what that meant. Yep. I'm excited to talk
Speaker 2:to about And Ankur himself will Yes. Be over at AngelList. Very excited about that. Yeah. Great pickup.
Speaker 2:But fun show today. S and P 500 rises to a new record.
Speaker 1:Yes. So why are why am I not wearing a white suit? It's because although the market is at all time highs, I don't understand why. It feels like there's never been more chaos in the markets. And I'm seeing a lot of lot of companies that are under pressure, a lot of software companies that are under pressure, a lot of companies I know and love under pressure.
Speaker 1:But it does feel like the MAG-seven is doing well and some of the bigger companies are doing well. AI is still a mega cycle, and there are exciting pockets of opportunity in the market, but we'll Certainly. Be
Speaker 2:Allbirds is doing quite well.
Speaker 1:Yes. How much is it up today?
Speaker 2:714%.
Speaker 1:So we talked about this maybe last week. That's an insane gain for a single day. But they're completely changing the business model. The Financial Times has a hilarious article in Alphaville. Alphaville has a great great headlines.
Speaker 1:Allbirds is turning into an AI compute provider because of course it is. And it goes through what's happened over the last few years, few months. There's been a lot of twists and turns of this story, but we'll take you through it. So they start by saying, ah, zeitgeist. Allbirds is a San Francisco maker of wool trainers that was once valued at more than $4,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That's pretty big for a direct to consumer shoe company at the same
Speaker 2:TC darling.
Speaker 1:When it was growing and selling a lot of shoes, you know, Nike is a big company. It makes sense that if you could get a piece of that, maybe you could be a multi billion dollar company.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. And they were selling a lot of shoes. They were very on trend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think You got the revenues into the hundreds of millions of dollars and you would see them everywhere.
Speaker 2:Bunch of owned retail.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. They definitely had some owned retail stores and were pursuing the hybrid online offline sales model. It was working. It was never it was never just like some completely hypothetical vaporware company.
Speaker 1:Like they were real shoes. You could buy them, wear them. It was fine. But it was sold last month for $39,000,000 to American Exchange Group. The stock having slumped more than 99% since its flotation on the Nasdaq in 2021.
Speaker 1:And so look at this chart, Jordy. Very, very rough It is. For all
Speaker 3:the birds.
Speaker 1:Good. That is not good.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:But maybe the next plan is better. We'll figure it out. So the plan for the shell listing is quote to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service and AI cloud solutions provider in connection with this pivot. The company anticipates changing its name to NewBird AI. And so this was very unexpected.
Speaker 1:We can talk about where
Speaker 2:we shareholder approval. Allbirds will raise 50,000,000 via convertible notes from an institutional investor. It does not identify. Okay. So they're gonna be able to get at least a few GPUs Yeah.
Speaker 2:For that. Maybe maybe they'll be able to plug them in. Maybe Yeah. Maybe a whole rack. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They can plug in a rack. But, yeah, big questions around where where are they gonna get where are they gonna get the compute? Where are they gonna get the the energy? It will anyone rely on will be willing to rely on them? Yeah.
Speaker 1:This feels like Tons and tons of this feels like an institutional investor who says, I want to participate in this idea that even older GPUs are trading above par. And so GPUs are sort of gaining value. And they want in on that in some meaningful way, but they also want to wrap it in a public company that can sort of become a meme stock, essentially. And then basically everything else about the business will be different because the entire shoe business will be sold off. And and this is basically just a use for the it's it's a use of the of the ticker and the listing and the shell and then probably an entirely different team, entirely different strategy, entirely different Yeah.
Speaker 1:Everything basically. New name. So here's the Schedule 14a that explains the pivot ahead of a shareholder vote on May 18. It adds, With respect to the renamed corporate entity, we are investigating potential opportunities in the computing infrastructure market, including the acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, related high performance computing infrastructure capable to support high workloads, whether from artificial intelligence and machine learning or other needs of potential future customers and other related assets. Also, because the anticipated electronics infrastructure business would be less focused on the public benefit of environmental conservation which is stated in the company's certificate of incorporation, I guess Allbirds was a public benefit corporation because the wool was supposed to be more environmentally friendly and it was almost like an REI type brand.
Speaker 1:They are doing away with that and so the stockholders are being asked to approve the charter amendment proposal to remove references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit. That is not gonna be popular with the Allbirds fan.
Speaker 2:Oh, boy.
Speaker 1:The announcement was enough to establish Allbirds as a meme stock at pixel time when this went to print. The shares are up 774% at $21.76 a share to give the soon to be shell a market cap of slightly more than $184,500,000. And so I guess the question you have to ask is if this 50,000,000 comes in, they're able to buy GPUs, rack them, get some value out of it. Is that worth anywhere near $184,000,000 It's a tough sell, but the market will figure it out over the next few days, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:The value is Dave Fortnoy. Hold on.
Speaker 1:Let let let let's hear from him.
Speaker 4:It's interesting. I mean, $50,000,000 is, like, not enough to, like, lease to a NeoLab. Right? Because that you you just, like, can't buy enough capacity. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So it is interesting. I I don't know who the actual, like, consumer of GPUs will be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, what about Maybe you
Speaker 4:can just like resell them on on open router or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You can resell an open Just
Speaker 4:like you're running
Speaker 2:I mean, George Hots was talking about that. Remember?
Speaker 1:He was talking about like he found a building that had cheap power and he was gonna just buy a bunch of GPUs. And I think he was raising like 10,000,000 or 20,000,000 to do that. And he was gonna sell the the tokens on OpenRouter profitably. And so there's there's a potential business model there. Also, yes, you probably couldn't sell to a NeoLab that's doing some huge foundation model training run.
Speaker 1:But there might be some company that's doing like fine tuning on some small model or doing some niche model. I mean, again, to go back to to George Hots, like he had a a, you know, a couple racks of GPUs that he was training self driving cars on. And you have to imagine that there's lots of, like, long tail applications for a for custom models that need to be trained that aren't as big, maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, so so this is like essentially just a SPAC? Because you're just
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:Everything is different.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's it's sort of already was already a public company and they're just adapt. They're doing like a massive pivot. I don't think they will make any progress at all. No.
Speaker 2:I think that it is entirely a meme. I woke up this morning. I was like, that is really funny. You know, taking the the taking Allbirds became a meme. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? The company was basically dying, but the meme remained strong. Yeah. And it's kind of making Allbirds in some way just like became such a part of the uniform of Silicon Valley. It was something that Silicon Valley was mocked for.
Speaker 2:And to take that corporate shell and make a mockery of our industry again feels feels quite fitting. And so anyways, Is I'm this the shoes? Incredibly Even Dave Portnoy said, I don't get it.
Speaker 1:He loves a meme stock.
Speaker 2:And he loves a meme stock.
Speaker 5:So
Speaker 1:Can we play this video?
Speaker 2:I have no idea how the actual stock will perform. Yeah. Are you pulling it up?
Speaker 1:No. I I I don't have it here. I think you had it. But all the allbirds.com still resolves to the full ecommerce website. They have an extra 25% off sale discount applied in cart.
Speaker 1:You can get all the different shoes that they sell. I think they sell other stuff too now. And so I it'll be interesting to see. I mean, how quickly can they can they disentangle the new compute infrastructure division from the actual apparel and shoe division because
Speaker 2:Well, well, my understanding is, like, they sold off all of the Allbirds assets.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. So for $39,000,000, they sold it to American Exchange Group. Yeah. They got the domain.
Speaker 2:And so they're just kind
Speaker 1:of using the a quick way
Speaker 2:to get public markets. The ticker remained public and it was just sitting there. Mhmm. And I think a lot of people are sitting there sitting, talking to their friends being like, why did I not think to turn all birds into a neo clap? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why am I, we we we
Speaker 1:It's got it. It's got
Speaker 2:a very very smart investor who you could just tell wanted to slam his head into the table because he's, you know, spending all of this time trying to, you know, trying to pick real winners, invest in, you know, fantastic durable businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And all, you know, right in front of him was what in hindsight is like a very very obvious play. Yeah. But but but again, you know, look looking back at like the history of the last time this happened was Long Island Yeah. That's right. In 2017, December 2020, 12/21/2017, the company announced that it was changing its name from Long Island iced tea to the Long Blockchain Corp and said it would shift its strategy toward exploration of an investment and opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology while keeping its beverage subsidiary.
Speaker 2:The stock surged immediately after the announcement amid, Cryptomania. Again, this was the 2017 cycle. Coverage reported jumps of roughly 200% and some reports said it rose as much as, 380 percent, midday. And and and it basically then just started to, chop chop for a few weeks and ultimately faced various had a little run-in with the SEC. They brought insider trading charges ahead, you know, be because of activity that happened ahead of the pivot Yeah.
Speaker 2:Announcement. So I wouldn't be surprised to see I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar here.
Speaker 1:The Long Island iced tea company was doing 4,000,000 in sales in 2017, something like that. 25 employees, like, pretty small company back then, and then just sort of wound down. There the the people are not are not very optimistic that this would work. Ben says, hopefully everyone understands whatever the Allbirds pivot is, they will unlikely they will they won't likely secure any power, any GPUs at reasonable scale and need a lot more money than this to even have a prayer. And you certainly see that with all the other Neo Clouds that show up on on ClusterMax.
Speaker 1:Every Neo Cloud that we talk to on the show is, you know, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and then debt on top of it and is usually has a lineage that traces back years, if not a decade, and has a whole bunch of interesting, you know, unique value props to actually whether it's the on the software side, on the deployment side, on the on the infrastructure side, on the energy side, actually going and finding power is very, very difficult and continues to be. But, yes, a lot of people are saying this is .com vibes. It is crazy. Sutrini says, can we please wait until we are at least 5% above previous all time highs to start doing this? And it does seem like this.
Speaker 1:If you sell shoes, pivot to a GPU cloud, I guess. And negligible capital has the meme from Wolf of Wall Street. The name of the company, NewBird AI. It's a cutting edge AI native cloud infrastructure firm out of well, they used be out of San Francisco making sneakers. But forget that, John.
Speaker 1:They are now awaiting imminent deployment of next generation GPU compute clusters that have both massive enterprise and consumer applications. Now right now, John, the stock trades on the Nasdaq at about the price of a cup of coffee. And by the way, John, our analysts indicated it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. And, John, one more thing. They're up just a 160% today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What a wild what a what a what a wild time. Well, what stay safe out there. Do your own research and avoid all the froth. Mike Isaac says this is just going to be the default for any failing entity that owns a significant amount of real estate able to be converted into data centers.
Speaker 1:I'm waiting for the RB server farms. I don't know if that's what's happening here with real estate. I think it's more about the shell entity. The brand. No.
Speaker 1:Not even the brand. I mean, the brand
Speaker 2:No. The brand the brand is the like, there has to be a goofiness to
Speaker 1:it Yes.
Speaker 2:For it to be to coming become a meme. Because I don't think I don't think anybody who's investing in this company Yeah. Actually thinks they will build a great Neo Cloud. Neo Cloud.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is just We
Speaker 2:just we just have, you know, talked to so many of these of these companies. Yeah. And there are a number of established players. In fact, they're already you know, everyone expects the market for inference to be one of the biggest markets of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that that doesn't mean that that anyone that that attempts to build a business here will be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move over to Snap. Evan Spiegel, former guest of the show, two time in person guest.
Speaker 2:You're saying he went to Coachella and came back and was like
Speaker 1:Right size the company. So he's laying off a thousand full time employees, which is roughly 16% of the global workforce, as part of an effort to reduce costs and achieve profitability. In a memo to employees Wednesday, Spiegel said the cuts are necessary for Snap to boost efficiency as it pursues profitable growth. He cited improvements in artificial intelligence technology that lets Snap employees move more quickly. The company is also closing more than 300 open roles.
Speaker 1:Spiegel told staffers, many of whom were told to work from home on Wednesday, that the job cuts and pullback on hiring will reduce Snap's annualized cost base by more than $500,000,000 by the second half of this year. Snap estimated that total revenue rose 12% to $1,530,000,000 in the first quarter, so $6,000,000,000 in total revenue run rate. Adjusted earnings before interest, basically EBITDA is two thirty three million during the period. Snap shares jumped as much as 9% after markets opened in New York. Spiegel wrote a memo.
Speaker 1:He said, Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient while pivoting towards profitable growth. Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long term value. The stock is down 31% so far this year. And what's interesting is that it it is not really this this SaaSpocalypse narrative because even if you vibe code a Snapchat clone, you won't have the actual usage data, the network effect that exists. But the market has definitely turned on stock based comp and another of and and just is in the hunt for profitability broadly.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Which which, of course, Snap has has never had a had generated a single dollar of of net income.
Speaker 1:When you include stock based comp, right? Think I I think that always includes stock Yeah. Based Yeah. And so EBITDA is positive, but they they they issue a lot of stock to comp the employees. And that has has weighed down on the share price because there's a lot of dilution.
Speaker 1:And while Spiegel is also working to sell a vision for augmented reality glasses, which the company plans to debut later this year, it has leaned heavily on outside firms to power its AI offerings. Large arrivals are spending aggressively to build and develop their own state of the art AI products and infrastructure. The job cuts arrived just weeks after activist investor Irenic Capital Management took a stake in the company and called for swift changes in that memo that we reviewed on the show a couple weeks ago, including a recommendation that Snap cut its workforce in hopes of boosting the stock price. Like many of your peers, you over hired, the investor wrote in a letter to Spiegel last month. Unlike your peers, you haven't course corrected.
Speaker 1:Spiegel's note to employees didn't mention whether the job cuts were related to Irenic's recent demands. Other major tech companies have slashed their workforces, including SnapRival Meta Platforms, Meta eliminated hundreds of jobs globally in March and shed roughly 1,000 workers from its Reality Labs group back in January, all while ramping up investments in AI. Spiegel suggested AI was one part of his decision for the cuts. While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long term potential, Spiegel said of the cuts, we believe that rapid advancements in AI enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity and better support our community partners and advertisers. And so the the big question that I have generally is like the what is the actual replacement rate?
Speaker 1:Like, much are they spending on AI? We saw that report from Uber that they blew through year of budget for on AI tools in just a couple months. Yeah. And a lot of people were sort of reacting to that saying like, well, I've used the Uber app for years. It doesn't feel like it's changing dramatically.
Speaker 1:Of course, there's manual workflows that internally might need to be done and AI might speed that up. But in terms of getting like net new applications, net new apps that people actually use and enjoy, that seems to be like the next opportunity for real growth as opposed to just cost optimization. So the $400,000,000 deal with Perplexity is no longer happening. Guess that's been pulled back on And
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder I really wonder why
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The Perplexity seen seemingly some very real growth Yeah. In their new product. Computer. Computer. There's been they've been sharing some of their the the increased revenue that they're seeing from that.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, that was I think one of the things that yeah. What did what did in the Save Snap Now campaign
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That was one of the one of these suggestions.
Speaker 1:Was to pull out of that?
Speaker 2:Is to concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:So they were not in favor. And again, it seems seemed like Perplexity would be in a position where they would pay the most Yeah. Potentially for that distribution. And we'll see if they actually backfill that slot or just focus on
Speaker 1:their So own the full presentation is up now, which you can read through. After nine years of being a public company, fifteen years since being founded, Evan Spiegel finally decided to put a business plan together for how to reach profitability. And so you can go click through all of that. And what else is going on? Oh, you wanted to talk about Anthony Pumfleetto's new Agentic podcast on Wall Street.
Speaker 1:The show is called Best Stocks and it's a 100% AI generated. Each episode is based off the agentic research articles. Synthetic AI content will be more popular than human created content, he says. And had it covered in Accident. I could see it daily.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a lot of people are Best Stocks is kind of a funny name because it's just like the most generic possible name for a finance podcast. Yeah. What's your what's your finance podcast called? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Called Best Stocks. But I I think that historically, you know, the one of the main downsides of the podcast was that they always had this lag. Right? They were recorded, edited, and then eventually published. But people and so, in some ways, TV remained competitive as a place where you if you wanted to understand what was happening in the markets, you do it on CNBC.
Speaker 2:Yep. Right? It's always on. You can always kind of get an update there. And so I think that, real time podcast that was part of, part of what I think helped us get some traction early with the show was that we were publishing every single day.
Speaker 2:So it was like kind of a real time look into the markets. I I think that this show, I haven't listened to an episode yet. Yeah. I'll try it on the way home. But I wouldn't be given the popularity of I think this there's like a real time like politics one
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That that is done very well Sure. On Apple Podcasts. I think that I I think that this show could find an audience. Right? It's basically Notebook LM Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but a little bit more curated, probably a little bit more opinionated. Yeah. You don't have to like yourself. And I I would expect this to get some level of traction of people just wanting turn something on, understand in real time what's happening Yep. And it uses, obviously, the existing distribution.
Speaker 2:So we'll see. But not as bearish as some of the some of the other people.
Speaker 1:Switch over to Amazon. Why is Amazon buying Starlink rival Globalstar in an $11,000,000,000 deal? The race is heating up between Amazon and SpaceX. So Amazon's buying satellite operator Globalstar in a deal that the company is estimated at about $10,800,000,000 seeking to build a business connecting consumer smartphones with satellite Internet connections. The deal would give Amazon's LEO satellite ventures a boost as advised with SpaceX's dominant Starlink network.
Speaker 1:The Elon Musk controlled satellite business has been launching satellites designed to connect to consumer devices and signing agreements with mobile carriers. Here's what's at stake. Amazon plans to launch new satellite to cell phone service in 2028. That feels far away, I guess it's only two years away. A big factor in the deal is Globalstar's control over spectrum resources, which we've seen trade hands a few times now, which Amazon could use to provide satellite links to smartphones.
Speaker 1:Those wireless assets would enable a plan for Amazon to deploy its
Speaker 2:own yourself.
Speaker 1:Tell me.
Speaker 2:AST Space Mobile's down 10 and a half percent
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Next five days. Selling selling off.
Speaker 1:Selling off on this news. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe the the the people are worried about like a duopoly here. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompson was talking about ASTS a little bit. Where is it? AS
Speaker 2:He's joining the retail the AST AST Space Mobile Retail Army.
Speaker 1:Space Mobile. Yeah. He said this isn't the only example of leading companies wanting to avoid being at the mercy of SpaceX. Verizon is at it again in terms of their own satellite service doubling down on their investment in AST Space Mobile instead of coming to a deal with Starlink for not just better service but service that actually exists. So AST AST Space Mobile is years behind.
Speaker 1:They don't have a constellation actually up and active yet. But they have plans to. And to that end
Speaker 2:They have concepts of a plan.
Speaker 1:What other company is the clear leader in that space? Well, it's the one that Ben Thompson expressed hope last year would lean into a SpaceX spark partnership and that was Apple. And so he says the problem, he noted, is that it was hard to see Apple and SpaceX ever resolving who would actually be in charge. Apple clearly agrees because they are not only declining to work with SpaceX, I actually think they were the driving force in this Globalstar deal. And so the battles between all the different tech companies continue to rage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And AST Space Mobile now has a heavily, heavily, heavily funded competitor in the same general category. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was a moment where
Speaker 2:Like Amazon's not spending 11 and a half billion and then just gonna be like, alright, we're gonna like try to be really, you know, run this super Yeah. Efficiently. Heavily. Yep.
Speaker 1:In between have the it's distribution Blue Origin.
Speaker 2:Core Amazon business Yep. As they get to scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They don't have devices and so they won't be fully vertically integrated. But it but what Ben Thompson's pointing out is that Apple might not want to have a single point of leverage there with SpaceX, and so they're they're balancing the two out. Overall, SpaceX's overall Starlink fleet numbers around 10,000 operational satellites. Elon had this cool chart of 10 to the zero, ten to the one, ten to the two, ten to the three, like the exponential every 10 x number of satellites, and they check them off at at Starlink HQ when they get to the next the next order of magnitude.
Speaker 1:The company plans to launch thousands more in the years ahead. Starlink has deployed more than six fifty satellites dedicated to providing connections to cell phones as of the end of last year, connecting more than 12,000,000 people according to the company. Globalstar operates a network of satellites and in recent years has provided Apple with satellite links to support features for iPhones. Apple's service allows users to send text messages, call emergency assistance, and seek roadside help in areas where cell phone service isn't available. And the Globalstar service has always been slower than it's high Earth orbit, it's a lot slower than a Starlink connection.
Speaker 1:But they are already working with Amazon to figure out the next iteration of that. So Amazon said Tuesday that it agreed to a deal with Apple to power satellite services for its iPhone and Apple Watch and work together on future satellite services using LEO's growing network. Globalstar has separately been working with Canadian satellite maker, MDA Space, to develop new satellites that Globalstar would own with capacity dedicated to Apple. So Globalstar's global spectrum rights became more valuable as SpaceX and Apple began more aggressively using satellite links to connect phones. So connecting cell phones through satellites is still a nascent market.
Speaker 1:Most consumers who live in urban areas get links through traditional telecom providers, carriers that have struck satellite to smartphone deals, have promoted them as ways for consumers to always have some degree of Internet connectivity in remote areas. T satellite connects you where towers can't, T Mobile says of its offerings through Starlink. SpaceX, of course, has a rocket advantage. They have a company they have a fleet of Falcon nine rockets to build Starlink into the building biggest satellite fleet in history. Amazon has been splashing out billions of dollars to other launch providers, including ULA and Blue Origin to build up the LEO network, but delays have slowed Amazon's effort.
Speaker 1:Have a take?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I I wonder how, like, smoothly this will lead into space data centers because I I know Blue Origin has talked a little bit about doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think they they got some they got some permission from, I think, the I I think the FCC.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Like I it seems like this is the very like this is the natural endpoint. You're basically just like doing similar things to to to Elon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was I was reading I think Ben Thompson mentioned it about Globalstar's like original what was it? The is it processing? So Globalstar's assets are all things considered pretty middling. 24 satellites nearing the end of their fifteen years lifespan.
Speaker 1:So they only have 24 satellites up there and they use a bent pipe architecture, which is signal relaying only no onboard processing. So I think it's actually just a reflector dish. I don't I'm not for I'm not sure exactly how this works but that's that's what it seems like. I I mean maybe there's I mean he's saying there's no onboard processing. I'm not exactly sure how detailed that is.
Speaker 1:I wanna do a little bit of a deep dive on what the bent pipe architecture implies because it sounds like mostly just a reflector dish up there, but it works because you can bounce, you know, you have ground station, you can bounce stuff up. And so
Speaker 2:This is reminding me why did Allbirds not kind of rally their pivot around space data center?
Speaker 1:They should've. Yeah. Yeah. Why are huge. Why are they doing why are they doing data centers when when, you know, compute on the ground?
Speaker 2:Lean into the new meta.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The new meta for sure. Maybe. Yeah. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Maybe next week they'll be looking for another story and that'll be it. They have 24 ground gateway stations across six continents. There are some new satellites on the way to keep the constellation going, but it seems likely that still on the drawing board higher capabilities satellites will be scrapped. Approximately eight megahertz of the L band satellite uplink and approximately 16.5 megahertz of the S band satellite downlink and N53 terrestrial spectrum for private cellular networks, not phone to satellite communication that is licensed out. So those assets, by and large, serve one customer, Apple.
Speaker 1:Apple owned a 20% stake in Globalstar and had rights to 85% of Globalstar's network capacity for the satellite service it provides to iPhones and Apple Watches. So that's certainly a valuable relationship. But it also meant that Apple had a de facto veto on any Globalstar acquisition. And so what he's what he's arguing is that Apple is very happy that Globalstar and Amazon are teaming up in this way to provide them with another another option in markets.
Speaker 2:Like any we love all CapEx that is not our CapEx.
Speaker 1:They really do. They they are the master of that. We'll have to come back to the story of the Apple new Ray Ban competitors, the smart glasses, because we have our first guest in the waiting room. Kiva Dickinson from Selvo
Speaker 2:Series a lead Brooms. Brooms.
Speaker 1:Kiva, how are you doing? What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:Doing great, guys. What's going on?
Speaker 2:It is great to see you. I was looking in your background trying to see if we could maybe see
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where are
Speaker 2:our own office.
Speaker 3:Oh, are you in LA?
Speaker 2:Distance. You're
Speaker 6:Yeah. We're looking we're looking Northwest. Where are you guys?
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. We are In Hollywood. More east.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So not quite. But great to see you on here. How's your last how's your last week been? Was that your was that your first like billion dollar exit?
Speaker 6:First billion? Yeah. For sure. And that definitely definitely the biggest exit that we've been a part of. And yeah, it's been fantastic.
Speaker 6:It's exciting to share the good news and really incredibly thrilled for the company. Spent a lot of time with them this week.
Speaker 2:And fantastic for the category overall. Yep. You you guys have been through it. Obviously, you never lost you never lost faith. Otherwise, you wouldn't have invested in Grooms.
Speaker 2:But certainly, it's been funny today watching all birds have new life. Hope hopefully, your portfolio isn't isn't getting any ideas, you know. Hey hey, you know, the supplements category is running away from us, but we could pivot to AI compute. But but yeah, walk give us I I wanted to have you on just to kinda get an update on like consumer investing broadly.
Speaker 1:Can we start with like some background Yeah. And how the fund was set up, how you got into investing, all of that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Totally. I started my career in investment banking. Joined TPG about twelve years ago, in the consumer group. And and, you know, I I think it was an incredibly, like, formative time of learning what private investing was and and, you know, learning about consumer businesses.
Speaker 6:But what I was thematically excited about was really uninvestable for us. I was seeing these incredible companies line the shelves of Whole Foods and Target. They were getting more and more exciting every year, taking share of the companies that I had grown up with. And, you know, when we talked about them internally in our investment committee, the problem that we faced was they didn't consume enough capital for us to get our kind of $2,300,000,000 minimum check-in on the way
Speaker 1:up. Yep.
Speaker 6:And we couldn't outbid Unilever or P and G or Mars on the way out. Yep. And so my takeaway was like, I'm in the wrong seat. Like, I I gotta be doing something in the earlier stage, some be some part of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Of the early journey of these companies.
Speaker 1:So So wait. Double clicking on that trend that you see, I think everyone's familiar with the boom of I I mean, there were a bunch of different factors and I want to know your take on on all of them. Like Whole Foods at one point had like local buying. So if you could go in and like talk to the local, like the Whole Foods in your town, they could actually stock you. They didn't have centralized buying.
Speaker 1:There was also the D2C boom, online advertising, the influencer boom, celebrities getting the space. Like what were you identifying as the undercurrents of that broader trend of like new products taking shelf stay, like space on the shelf?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, this is definitely like height of the d two c boom. And so what was being talked about in the technology industry and in the press were companies frankly like Allbirds and Gasper.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think that was distracting a lot of attention and capital away from what I thought was the most interesting thing, which was when you walk through the aisles of a grocery store, you see completely different things than you did ten years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You saw companies like Kindbar taking enormous share and transacting with Mars. You saw companies like doctor buy selling to doctor Pepper Snapple for, like, $1,700,000,000. The these were not grabbing tech headlines. These were not grabbing traditional venture capital, but they were taking share of an absolutely enormous industry. I mean, consumer packaged goods, depending on where you get the from, is, like, seven to 10% of GDP.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Buy is such a funny story because, I mean, it has a traditional startup founder in his basement making the product, grinding, unique insight. But during the d to c boom, they didn't have a d to c website. Their website was just links to Amazon.
Speaker 1:They never set up a first party e commerce site because they just didn't need to.
Speaker 2:They went out of retail. Which make sense.
Speaker 1:Oh, makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Beverage specific.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Beverage is really expensive. Amazon has the logistics for it. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:What what so walk me through the decision and how you actually position yourself to get in at the earlier stages.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I made a stop at a company called Circle Up. They had pivoted from helping emerging CPG companies raise capital to actually raising a fund. And TPG invested in the fund. I kind of put my hand up and said, hey, this sounds awesome.
Speaker 6:I want to be part of this.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Did we lose you?
Speaker 2:We lost you.
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 6:It's called NutPods
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:That we eventually did I lose you guys?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just for a second
Speaker 2:you're back.
Speaker 1:So yeah, tell me about that first
Speaker 6:called NutPods that we yes. So we invested in a company called NutPods that we eventually sold to VMG. Mhmm. And then invested in a company called LiquidIV that we pretty quickly turned around and sold to Unilever
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 6:In about two and a half years. Mhmm. And it showed me what the risk reward can look like. It showed me also that the early stage companies had a real pain point at seed and series a. They needed not just, like, specific specialized capital firms who understood their journey, but also resources.
Speaker 6:And common challenges for these companies look different from early technology companies. It's like how do we do online growth marketing? How do we launch in retail? How do we scale a supply chain? How do we deal with not having all our eggs in the basket of one contract manufacturer?
Speaker 6:Traditional venture capital firms were not built to solve these problems. And so in 2019, I broke off and basically tried to build a proof of concept of what a modern venture capital firm built to serve these companies could look like. That's what Selva Ventures is today. We're now investing out of our second fund and and that fund has been a part of, like you say, said, Bruins, but also businesses like OneSkin, Javi, Midday Squares, Array to name a few.
Speaker 1:What's the sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what does best in class look like today? Mhmm. One of your one of your portfolio companies, which I won't name because I don't think that it's public, I I was able to watch them go from basically 0 to hundreds of millions of revenue in the span of, like, I think, like, roughly four years, something like that, very, very short period of time, very small team. Is that, like like, is that kind of what you expect out of out of out of a good investment?
Speaker 2:Or are there still some like, you know, kind of like slow burn kind of, you know, companies that that kind of like find that takeoff moment quite a bit later?
Speaker 6:Yeah. There are there are longer journeys. There are shorter journeys. Groon's is probably the shortest one I've ever seen. I mean, that that business is like thirty two months old now since since launching to consumers.
Speaker 6:I think what we do find is that the combination of online subscription, which is, for a great habitual personal care or supplement business can be really, really sticky, like software like retention plus the scale of the best retailers out there. I'm talking Walmart, Target, Costco, Sephora. You can build a very, very large business that doesn't consume a lot of capital in a pretty short period of time. And so when we talk short, like we underwrite our investments to five to eight years. You know, the exits can certainly be shorter than what we've started to see in the technology markets of like longer dated IPOs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, you know, the the off ramp for these companies is traditionally, you know, like Gruens in the best in class way and exit to a strategic once you're somewhere between 1 and $300,000,000 in revenue. And and that's something if the flywheel online and offline is going, you don't have to wait too long for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like a I mean, it's a great it's a great outcome whenever you see one of these, like, unfold. I mean, Grunz is particularly fast, but there's a lot of examples of, you know, raising money carefully, deploying it, growing steadily, figuring out the product, the supply chain, and then exiting to a strategic. We've seen that over and over and over again. Do you ever run into founders who are like, I'm going to take on Unilever.
Speaker 1:I'm going to become the next Unilever. I'm never selling. I'm going all over. I think
Speaker 2:everyone says that until they get an offer from Unilever at over 1,000,000,000 and then Maybe.
Speaker 1:You're like. I I'm just wondering like.
Speaker 6:We have it's it's funny actually. When I started this firm, I I I'd have a a bunch of traditional VCs like send me pitch decks to be like, what do you think? And and the subject line was like the next P and G or the
Speaker 1:next human labor. Yeah.
Speaker 6:These are incredibly sophisticated organizations.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:They're so good Yeah. At manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, regulatory. Yeah. What they're not good at is innovating. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so the idea of like building a new one from scratch is kind of like
Speaker 2:It's like scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need to
Speaker 2:do the innovative thing and do that really well while simultaneously doing it multiple times Yep. And getting the the scale the systems and the distribution dialed which Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean the one in our space that people naturally talk about is Harry's. Now called Mammoth Brands but you know they had a definitive agreement to be acquired by Edgewell who owns Schick like six years ago and it was blocked by the FTC. Now their only path is going public. And in order to go public, they need to basically build the modern P and G. And so they bought Cotery.
Speaker 6:They bought a personal care business called Lumi a few years ago and like they're probably the closest thing to it. Yeah. But I think these like pure play fast growing disruptors are really what we focus on. Yeah. Because we feel like, you know, you take share, you cause enough pain for these modern companies, you fit very well into the machine that they have built.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are you expecting chaos in the supplement category going forward after an exit like this? I'm assuming there's at least a 100 pretty smart entrepreneurs that that think, you know what, I've always wanted to build a supplement company and start going after it.
Speaker 6:I'd say like 2022, 2023 when the market crashed, there was a period of time where we talked about how all the all the tourists left CPG investing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And it was sort of locals only, and and I would say the space was sort of undercapitalized.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's when that's that's when groons and and I know a number of your other winners like formed Yep. Which is fitting.
Speaker 6:That that tends to be a great time to form a company. Also a hard time to raise capital.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But, you know, the competitive dynamics benefit you. I really hope that we don't have a flood of half baked ideas backed by nontraditional investors coming in and doing this the wrong way. I I feel like there's still a lot of scar tissue from the industry when traditional venture capital started backing b two c brands in the mid twenty tens. And, like, obviously, it's ironic with the Allbirds pivot today, but, like, I feel like I spend a decent amount of my time explaining to people why we don't invest in businesses like Allbirds
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And why CPG is fundamentally different than that. That direct to consumer is not the purpose. It's it's the products themselves and how much better they serve the consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:One one thought is that I feel like a lot of VCs are paralyzed right now because they've invested, you know, a significant amount of money into the labs, but they wanna invest in more companies because they have capital to deploy, but they're afraid to invest in the app layer and traditional software because of just AI disruption broadly. And I think that that could that could lead at least some folks from from to deciding to, hey, maybe we should take a flyer and let's let's just throw like $5,000,000 in this in this CPG company. Yeah. You know? Gruens is a good is a good comp for it.
Speaker 2:Sure. You know, why why not? It's it's just, you know, so hopefully you don't If I
Speaker 6:were those folks by the way, I'd be looking at the technology stack of Gruens. I mean Chad who you had on last week, it was a great
Speaker 1:it was a
Speaker 6:great interview. Like he he publishes a lot on on LinkedIn, like all of his vendors, all the technology solutions. I mean, there is a huge opportunity to be the picks and shovels of this type of company that will not stop taking share from large CPG. Yeah. And are willing to try out new AI tools or new technology tools.
Speaker 2:Outcomes have there really been in that? Because because again, that that was like a wildly popular category during the d to c era too. Was like, I'm gonna invest in I'm gonna invest in the brands, then I'm gonna invest in the technology stack. And you had the Klaviyos of the world. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Klaviyo. Did well. Obviously, Shopify has, you know, been been incredible, but it's hard to think of a bunch of other examples that got out at actually a venture scale.
Speaker 6:Yeah. None obviously come to mind, although there's there's been some smaller attractive exits. I mean, one one of the best, like, tech enabled Amazon agencies sold yesterday. Oh, interesting. And so, you know, you gotta think about entry prices and the value creation to the early investors in these companies.
Speaker 6:They don't have to sell for billions of dollars to be really interesting investments. Yeah. But, you know, we see companies all the time that are just like changing the way these companies operate and reducing the number of people that you need to run a CPG business that interfaces with the physical world so you would think naturally would need more people.
Speaker 7:Think
Speaker 8:Do it's really
Speaker 2:you guys do any of the infrastructure or are you
Speaker 6:We don't. We don't. But we try to be pretty fluent
Speaker 1:in it.
Speaker 2:I love the focus. It's basically like there's there's two companies a year that you need to find and back and you need to try to hunt them. And and just focus all your energy on that.
Speaker 1:So I I mean on that hunt, you said you you wouldn't back just a d to c company with, you know, decent growth metrics potentially. The product matters. What does that actually look like? Is it all your own taste? Are you doing surveys and panels and trying to understand where the white space is for a particular product, how durable that white space is?
Speaker 1:Because every once in a while, there's like a new co packer that comes online and unlocks a new stick pack or a new gummy format or And then there's a boom around that and it feels differentiated. But really what you're looking at is like, oh, there's just a new piece of machinery that's in a bunch of different co packers. So what's your process for actually understanding whether a company has a great product and will continue to be able to compound on the back of like the quality of the product?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, think you gotta be pretty thoughtful about value proposition. Mhmm. And a lot of new consumer value propositions for a CPG product are like downstream of changes Mhmm. In how nutritional knowledge and human health plays out in our world.
Speaker 6:So, you know, GLP ones have a bunch of downstream effects. We don't just invest in GLP one companies, we invest in companies that ultimately take share because of a world where GLP ones are important. And so the first thing we're trying to understand is like where is the puck going in terms of human understanding and therefore value proposition in the future. We're trying to find signal of great companies with D to C and offline metrics. And then most of our job frankly is figuring out what are the false positives.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Like what are the reasons why a company might be growing really fast and efficiently that ultimately won't translate to successful omnichannel distribution and velocity and a successful acquisition.
Speaker 2:That was the thing with Groon's that that I think some people maybe like Rest. You know, drove them to pass is that there had been that company on Amazon that had scaled to like 500,000,000 or something like that in sales that was doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Just basically no value creation at all even though they had tons of sales.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I think people were kind of like wrote off gummies as a category.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2:And clearly that was, you know Yeah. Wrong.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We were grateful for that misunderstanding.
Speaker 1:Sure. What about the temperature with LPs right now? I imagine that you have a unique value proposition and LPs are watching, you know, much like k shaped winner take all dynamic in AI and it's such a complicated industry to allocate towards. What are you hearing from LPs on appetite for consumer packaged goods investing broadly?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think it's a lot of curiosity. You know, naturally these are things that they see in their physical world and you know, when an outcome like Roon's crosses, but Roon's not the only one by the way. Mean Poppy, Doctor. Squatch, we've had actually like a slew of billion plus dollar acquisitions in the past year in our industry.
Speaker 6:And they see that in their news cycle. They see it through the grocery store. I think there's curiosity moment like what's happening here and how does it work. And I think a little bit of that is trying to square that against what they've heard about the D2C revolution not working over the past ten years. And so I would say there's a wading into the waters.
Speaker 6:There's definitely anytime a new cycle of these acquisition hits, people start to double click and try to understand it and spend time. I think what we found in our meetings specifically is folks appreciate the specialization in recognizing that this is different from technology. So if we were a traditional firm that was trying to spend 15% of our time on it, I don't know that we could do a very good job on this. Us spending 100% of our time on it feels like more comfort in their mind, but a little bit distant from what they usually do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a lot sense. Yeah. And and I think at this point, like if somebody starts a consumer brand and they are talented, you they will get introduced to you some way or another. So you can kind of like meet every every great entrepreneur which I feel like would be is basically impossible in like traditional tech investing.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 6:That's the goal. I mean, there's not a lot of people that I mean, there's a few firms that we love and respect that do this. But like, one of the reasons I started this firm is like there's no benchmark Sequoia A-16Z. If you're an entrepreneur out there, like there's not that firm that you've always dreamed of partnering with and getting started. And so you know, eventually myself and a few of my peers decided like we we've gotta go create that firm for them.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Love
Speaker 1:it. Well, all. Great to Thanks for coming on to break it down and have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Good to see you guys. Great to
Speaker 6:see you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank We'll talk to you soon. Up next, have Aaron D'Souza. He is the founder of objection.ai and the enhanced games. He's in the waiting room and we'll bring him in to the TBPN Ultradome.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Aaron, how are you doing?
Speaker 8:I'm great. Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:Thanks for
Speaker 1:being here. You want to give us a little bit of your background? You've done a lot in your time. I'm super interested in enhanced games and then we can go into objection.ai at some point. But how how are you introducing yourself these days as a multi hyphenate?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So I'm a lawyer by training. When I was 24 years old, Peter Thiel hired me to lead his litigation against Gawker Media Mhmm. Involving the wrestler, Hulk Hogan. We won the largest invasion of privacy judgment in history.
Speaker 8:It's a subject to the bestselling book Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. Yeah. A forthcoming movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And There's
Speaker 2:a movie. There's a movie.
Speaker 9:There's a movie.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And since then I've
Speaker 8:gone on to found nearly 12 companies. Wow. You know, most famous for the enhanced games, this quote unquote steroids Olympics. But launched today, my new one, Objection AI.
Speaker 1:Okay. Do you know who's going to play you in the movie yet?
Speaker 8:I don't know. It's Okay. You know, Hollywood is not like Silicon Valley. It takes them a very long time to make a movie and it seems to go through a lot of different iterations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It should be interesting. Well, let's I I would love an update on the enhanced games. The the first event is happening in in late May. Is that correct?
Speaker 8:That's correct. In Las Vegas.
Speaker 1:Las Vegas. And and talk to me about the scale, the the the the the potential value, the goal with that project. It certainly got a lot of a lot of attention. Everyone has a take on it.
Speaker 2:Well, timing feels pretty good considering it feels like more people than ever are enhancing them.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. With GLP ones stuff which
Speaker 2:ones might be banned which which, you know, are are some of them are banned Yeah. Some are not Okay. In in traditional Yeah. Sporting events.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what yeah. What led you to the the enhanced games and and give us the update there.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I'm I studied philosophy as an undergraduate Mhmm. And I've always been interested in bioethics, and I read a paper by professor Julian Savarescu, who's a professor at the University of Oxford. Mhmm. And he actually argued back in the nineties for an enhanced Olympic games.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And I learned that there were nearly half the athletes in the Olympics admit to using banned performance enhancing drugs. Interesting. Yet less than one percent get caught. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So there's this like real disconnect. And at the same time, things like peptides Mhmm. TRT are becoming increasingly normal. You know, even people like Secretary Kennedy, our health minister in The United States, is quite an advocate for human enhancements. And so I thought to myself, you know, why should we be shackled by the ideas of the past, And shouldn't we be able to unleash the full level of human potential using the best of science and technology?
Speaker 8:And that's where the idea of the enhanced games came from.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How many athletes have actually stepped forward and said that they want to participate? Like, how how big is the movement at this point? Obviously, the first games is happening. Do you want to put it on the similar, like, every two years cadence?
Speaker 1:Is there demand for more of a UFC like schedule? How do you think this all works out?
Speaker 8:It's good. It's the aim is for an annual schedule.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:We're very pleased that the company is gonna go public through a SPAC combination on the New York Stock Exchange in the coming weeks. Obviously, I stepped down from being CEO a few months ago to focus on my new venture.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So I can't speak to the Sure. Exacts of the the the SPAC. But a $1,200,000,000 evaluation we're very happy about. And ultimately, it's not the number of athletes participating, it's the quality of athletes. We have Olympic gold medalists, we have world record holders, and in fact, we've already set our first world record in the 50 freestyle
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 8:Which was set by Christian Kolomev of Greece in an exhibition event last year. He's running faster than any man in history had up to the point in time. And he had only been enhanced for a couple of weeks. And so show you how much of a difference that could make, Christian was 31 years old at the time, which arguably is about ten years past his prime for a swimmer.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Wow. Okay. Well, take us through Objection AI. What's the thesis?
Speaker 1:How do you like, what led you to start another company at this moment in time?
Speaker 8:I believe that the fundamental problem that we face in our society is truth. Mhmm. There is no sense of an objective arbiter of truth in our society, and this is something that has caused, you know, great societal decay. If we don't have a shared sense of truth, we can't have a functioning civilization. And, you know, two decades ago, we would have said the New York Times is the arbiter of truth.
Speaker 8:And today, you know, the social platforms don't seem to care about it very much. AI, you know, juggernauts don't seem to care about it very much. And so I said to myself, what is the best way to find truth? And truth is not a vibe, truth is a process. That process is very well documented in courts.
Speaker 8:Courts are viewed by Americans as being very trustworthy entities versus the legacy news media in particular has seen a collapse in credibility. Mhmm. Fifty years ago, according to the Gallup poll, 70% of Americans trusted the media. Today, that's down to only 30%. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so, the goal of Objection. AI is to create a system where anyone can challenge a claim made in the legacy news media. Independent investigators will then investigate it, former CIA and FBI agents. And then all that data is presented to an AI jury to analyze, to figure out if the original claims made by the journalists were true or not.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. Something that's It feels like community notes have been a a good innovation Yeah. For like truth online. But the big flaw is that by the time a post gets like a like solid community note, oftentimes like a million people
Speaker 1:It's already got viral.
Speaker 2:Seen it already. They didn't know that that it that the that there was Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean, the the logical follow-up is is speed a problem here? Because I imagine that
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I imagine that if you have to run a whole jury process and have discovery and argue argument like the original claim could be baked into the society's like mind share before you have
Speaker 8:to Yeah. Change So that's that's the fundamental problem about news media today is that false information spreads six times faster than true information. Mhmm. And so the incentives for generating clickbait content is very pronounced,
Speaker 3:and we've known this for a
Speaker 8:very long period of time. Mhmm. And so by compressing the legal process, which often takes ten or twenty years and costs $10,000,000, as we learned in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Down to something driven through software and artificial intelligence, down to a couple of days, we can adjudicate factual disputes much, much quicker and much cheaper. The whole process on an objection can cost as little as $2,000 and can be done in as little as twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:So is the business model to sell directly want to contest claims that are made on on the Internet?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. So if the New
Speaker 8:York Times writes something inaccurate about
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:You guys and your wonderful podcast, you can file an objection.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:Then human investigators will investigate the story line by line, source by source. They'll call everyone quoted in the article. And then they'll present that information to an AI jury. And the original author, of course, has the opportunity to respond.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:And say, hey, my reporting was good. It was high quality. But, you know, we live in the era of data. Mhmm. And I think it would be wonderful if every story published by the New York Times included the long form recordings of each interview.
Speaker 8:Right? I've done thousands of media interviews. Journalists always record them
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:But they never publish them in full. Mhmm. And so being misquoted or, you know, anonymous source, these are the tools that in particular print journalists use that have seen a massive degradation in trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you been following the Satoshi Nakamoto story recently? That feels like
Speaker 2:a Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Textbook example of something where it's been disputed but it's very hard to dis prove if you're being accused of being Satoshi. How do you process that particular story?
Speaker 8:Yeah. And so courts are a very good methodology of finding truth. I think there are only two solid methodologies of finding truth. One is courts and the other is the scientific method.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:And so if you take a scientific method approach
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Anonymous sources should never be allowed. Mhmm. Right? So you can't say to a scientific publication, a source told me this. You have to be able to replicate the experiment Sure.
Speaker 8:Over and over.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? Or courts is the alternative method of truth finding is where you have two adversarial parties Mhmm. Often arguing antithetical points of view. Mhmm. And what is truth?
Speaker 8:Right? It's a really important question. It's almost the core question of philosophy. Well, in the court setting, it is it is who has made the better argument? Who has presented more evidence?
Speaker 8:Mhmm. And and how coherently has that argument been made? And now, with the magic of artificial intelligence, we can do all of that very quickly and very cheaply.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about tuning different models to actually give you unbiased results? It feels like every different model has slightly different flavors and things that it likes and dislikes and might see things different ways. Like these feel like it feels like a subjective technology. How do you get it to be impartial?
Speaker 8:Yeah, so that's a great question. And that's exactly how we face these issues with human juries and human judges.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:Right? So human judges are extremely infallible. According to a paper from Professor Posner, who's one of the leading scholars of law and economics at the University of Chicago, AI applies the law 100% accurately. Human judges only do it 52% of the time, because human judges can be swayed by whether they've had lunch or not, whether they're having a bad day, know, they have a savvy lawyer in front of them. And then in the same way, we use a jury based system.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Five different models prompted to act as if they were different personas of people based on, you know, a statistical sample of how everyday Americans behave themselves and demographic samples. And the models have to find, you know, a majority opinion to pass a verdict.
Speaker 1:Are you thinking about integrations with social platforms? Jordy mentioned the community notes system. How do you think about distributing findings once you actually have reached a conclusion?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So this is the principal flaw of courts. So courts issue a judgment Yeah. But they have no distribution mechanism.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 8:And we have something called a fire blanket.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:So we have an algorithmic posting system on X Mhmm. So that every single claim that is under investigation, we immediately fire off a tweet that says, this claim is under investigation, please see the full case file.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And then when the similar claim is retweeted at some later point in time after adjudication is complete, we then say, that claim is false or that claim is true. Please see the full analysis that was done. So it intercepts the spread of disinformation as it is happening.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:Excited to follow along.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to
Speaker 2:And come chat Chad with wanted to confirm though, you are not being held hostage right now.
Speaker 8:Am not being held hostage I'm right in an undisclosed location.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Because as someone who is often subject to negative media reporting, like to show where I live.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, luck and we will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me on
Speaker 1:the chat. Have a good rest of your day. In other news, Uber is now going back into robo taxis. Uber commits 10,000,000,000 to robo taxis and strategy shift. Uber's committed more than $10,000,000,000 in buying thousands of autonomous vehicles and taking stakes in their developers, breaking from the asset light gig economy business model to avoid disruption from robo taxis.
Speaker 1:The ride hailing app has aggressively increased deal making over the last over the past year announcing partnerships more than a dozen providers including China's Baidu and US based Rivian as well as Here's the kicker.
Speaker 2:Yes. As well as plans to launch robotaxi services in at least 15 cities in 2026. That's So they're gonna be putting Rivians on the road I autonomously.
Speaker 1:Or maybe they'll do a deal with one of the other robo taxi providers. Rivian seems like I mean, great cars, really loved Everybody says
Speaker 2:like the autopilot in Rivian is great. Yeah. But so it's also great in Tesla and we don't see Robotaxi scaling. Truly scaling yet.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know anyone that's that's ridden in a in a Yeah. Robo taxi.
Speaker 1:But things are moving quickly and, you know but it is 2026 right now. So that is a very aggressive timeline to actually launch robotaxi services. But maybe that means more of, like, partnership with existing robotaxi providers. We'll have to dig into it, and we'll talk
Speaker 2:Market likes it. Stock is up 6.8% Yeah. Today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the stock has been trading down as Waymo and Tesla expanded services. It sold off. Uber sold off. And when Ray Waymo raised $16,000,000,000, Uber sold off again.
Speaker 1:And when Zoox expand planned major expansion, the company, Uber sold off as well. The stock is down 23% in the past six months, and investors are starting to get to get concerned about autonomous vehicles. So Uber is responding. Well, without further ado, we have Michael Mignano from Union Square Ventures now in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN.
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:Let's hit the gong for you.
Speaker 2:We're going straight to the gong.
Speaker 3:Oh, man. I love that.
Speaker 9:I love that gong. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Re reintroduce yourself. Tell us where you were and where are you now.
Speaker 9:Of course. I'm Michael I am a GP at Union Square Ventures. Most recently, a partner at Lightspeed and then before that co founded Ankur which sold to Spotify and I'm very excited to see you guys again. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:What motivated the move? Did you just want to go to New York? You want to work with Fred Wilson? Like what was the what what what was the reason to jump over to Union Square?
Speaker 9:Well, I'm from New York. I've always been here. I've always lived on the East Coast. I've always been somewhere in or around New York City and I've known USV forever. So I built Ankur here in New York City, pitched them back in the day for our seed and Series A and they passed both times unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Sorry. No,
Speaker 9:I love it. I love it. Got to know the team obviously. And after we sold Anchor to Spotify, became an LP in the funds and stayed close and just always loved their approach. Know, USV is famously thesis driven, right?
Speaker 9:They've always been sort of willing to bet early on the stuff that looks weird, the stuff that looks funny. And I've always really appreciated that approach. And so late last year, they approached me and they said, hey, how about coming over to USV and joining us and joining the partnership and had to do it. So here I am.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How should I think about USV right now? How big is the firm? How big is the partnership? It feels like a unique firm at a time when many firms are just going for insane scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Building platforms. But it feels like it feels like Benchmark and USV are two two funds that that could have built platforms and, you know, have made the decision to, you know, stay stay true to Venture.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. I I think this has always been USV's approach. Right? It's been it's been a famously small partnership for a very long time.
Speaker 9:Small in terms of the number of general partners and small in terms of the fund size relative to lots of other bigger platforms, as you mentioned. And I think they've made it work because what we talked about a little bit earlier, they've always been willing to have a thesis and have a point of view and go really, really early when a lot of the other big firms and the big platforms are chasing more consensus deals to their credit, right? I think the platforms have been very, very successful at using large, large, vast quantities of capital and speed as a weapon to back the winners. But I think what USV has always done well is said, we think the world is going in this direction. We're going to bet really, really early.
Speaker 9:Sometimes we'll get it wrong, but every once in a while, we'll be one of the first investors in Coinbase or Twitter or Mongo. And obviously, for a fund of this size, that ends up having a massive impact. And I think that, that is the right playbook to be playing moving forward. Obviously, AI is going to create a proliferation of startups like we've never seen before. And I'm not actually sure it will be possible to see them all.
Speaker 9:And I think the only way you're really going to be able to have a great bet if you know what you're looking for before you see it. And that's always what USV has done.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I still am surprised when I look at the App Store charts and see that we really just have LLMs in the and not much else. And it feels like that has to that has to change at some point in the next in the in the next year or two and and yeah, fully expect that. So where where do you want to focus your time? What's exciting?
Speaker 9:Yes. I've always been somebody that's been excited by great products. I'm a product builder myself. We mentioned Ankur. I have another startup, which we've talked about on here, Oboe.
Speaker 9:So I'm naturally drawn towards products, great product oriented founders. When I was at Lightspeed, I led deals like Suno and Granola, which I think for me have always fit that bill. But also, I think take a little bit of an interesting approach that's relevant to building startups in AI moving forward. Suno is a company that's taking a form of media, and it's leveraging the democratization of that media to not just optimize an existing workflow or optimize an existing market. They're doing it to build a completely new format and unlock a whole new form of creativity for people.
Speaker 9:And so I think we're going to see a lot of that moving forward. I think AI is going to unlock use cases and applications that we can't really dream up now, maybe to your point about there only being like three LLMs at the top of the App Store now. Yeah. In fact, I believe that software is starting to represent more and more a form of media. Right?
Speaker 9:It's so easy to create this stuff. I'm sure you guys, just like me and everyone watching, are building apps and creating agents every day. Think about what happened with video. Think about what happened with podcast, with text. It wasn't just about building the media.
Speaker 9:It was about the enablement that goes under it, the platforms, the payment rails, the distribution.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I think there's probably going to be a massive amount of enablement that goes into supporting the massive long tail of software we're about to see.
Speaker 2:Well said. Wanted to get your take on synthetic podcasts. We saw Pumfleet a synthetic an AI generated podcast today called Best Stocks. I'm assuming they talk about the best stocks. But, wanted to just get your kind of overall take.
Speaker 2:We've seen some other AI generated podcasts start to, top the charts. What's your perspective there? Not not not not a venture opportunity, but certainly, I would say interesting.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Look, I think it's I think it's super interesting. Back in the day when when I was building Anchor inside of Spotify, we actually had a partnership WordPress where if you had a WordPress blog, you could tap a button and it would immediately turn the text and the blog content into a podcast, right? So it was a way for the creators to get more and more distribution. And I think it was great.
Speaker 9:We saw a lot of demand from the creators, but it may have been too early on the timeline in terms of the quality of the content and sort of that that uncanny valley. And I think that
Speaker 2:has a lot to do models just were not What's that? Models were not good or Yeah. We were using.
Speaker 9:Exactly. The voice models were not that good yet. Obviously, they're a lot better right now. Eleven Labs creates phenomenal voice models. I don't know what this podcast you mentioned is using.
Speaker 9:But I think the closer and closer we get, not only to great voice quality but also a human like experience for these hosts, whoever they are on this show, I think the closer we can get we can get to getting it to work. I mean, one of the reasons people tune in to TBPN is not only to kind of hear the news and hear people speak, but it's to watch you guys. Right? They like you guys as the hosts and they like the personality and the human aspect of you guys. And so I think the agents that are hosting these shows are probably going to have to get closer and closer to that end of the spectrum before it really takes off.
Speaker 1:Did you explore any version of that WordPress to podcast workflow that would sort of on demand hire a voice over artist? Was there any demand for that or did you ever explore that?
Speaker 9:We did explore that and it we was one of those things where, again, at the time, it was going to be challenging to spin up the content for that quickly enough such that we were confident that there would be enough demand to make it worth it. I think with media and with publishing, people really want immediacy, right? When we were first building Anchor actually, the way that we went from being a social audio app to a podcasting is we found that all the people that were publishing just inside the Anchor app said, We want a podcast. We want this to be on Spotify. We want this to be on Apple.
Speaker 9:But there were no APIs at the time. So the way that we did that was we actually had human beings sitting in our office and manually creating RSS feeds and posting those RSS feeds to Apple Podcasts in real time. And fortunately, we were able to do that quick enough within a couple of hours that it satisfied the creators. But I think at the time, your idea, what you're talking about now, the gap just would have been too long. It would have been days or weeks before the content was ever delivered.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you reflected on the just like there's such incredible model progress and such incredible AI functionality progress. But I I the I would have expected to have found in in the same ways that the AI generated podcast seem to be working and we've seen some audio stuff work, I would have expected to see like a substack that was AI generated text that got really popular. That seems somehow easier from an from just an AI capability perspective. There's less steps in the chain, But it hasn't really broken through in that way.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if you've ever like grappled with that question of like why that hasn't why even like the simpler, condensed text. I don't even know if I follow I mean, maybe I do, but I I don't know if I follow any Twitter accounts that are like fully AI generated news headlines
Speaker 2:that you know.
Speaker 9:This was actually going to be my question to you. I mean, it's possible that that already exists and maybe these publications or these writers or these journalists aren't really admitting it yet. I mean, I have to imagine a lot of the content we now consume on the Internet is AI generated. We may just not know that it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like a lot of it is like the we're in the centaur period where the human plus AI works well. So you you see people doing research and then processing it and adding their own spin
Speaker 2:and Alex Heath was talking about how he's doing a ton of AI in his writing process. Yeah. He can he can say that because people are paying to subscribe to sources to get like net new information that doesn't exist anywhere else. Yeah. And so no
Speaker 9:one But can I I think that that only makes, you know, human powered content that more valuable? Again, not to keep bringing it back to you guys. Mean, I think this is a reason that people like this. And I think there's a reason that, you know, sports live sports viewership is at an all time high and people are going to concerts. Right?
Speaker 9:I think I think people crave this this farm to table human experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I feel like you've done a good job of that with your content. Can you sort of reintroduce it for folks who might not be fully familiar because the the production quality is extremely high. But it feels like you're sort of playing a different game in terms of release cadence, like making sure that everything is special and not formulaic. But how are you thinking about your own, the content that you're putting out these days?
Speaker 9:To to be clear, I think you're referring to the podcast I was running at Lightspeed called Yeah. Out of Office which Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which I'm no longer
Speaker 9:the host of now. Okay. I'm not at Lightspeed. Yeah. However, the philosophy Yeah.
Speaker 9:That we and I had for that I think holds true and I believe in it which is there's so much content out there in the Internet.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:And the tools have gotten so good at clipping and mass producing video content or two people sort of sitting in the same setting, having the same style of conversation that you really have to do something different. You guys did something different. Are a number of podcasts out there that are now doing something different. But one of the ideas that I had
Speaker 8:There's five.
Speaker 9:That we ran what's that?
Speaker 2:There's five total.
Speaker 9:There's about five, maybe six. Yeah. Thing the idea that we had for Out of Office was why does this conversation have to happen in a studio or why does it have to happen around a table? How great is it to watch an episode of comedians in cars getting Coffee and watching these guys behind the wheel of an awesome car or in their favorite coffee shop or watching something like Anthony Bourdain, Parts Unknown and watching these two iconic people travel around a really iconic familiar place. And we thought, hey, can we bring that to the tech podcast?
Speaker 9:And so that was that's out of office at light speed again. No longer something But I'm involved stay tuned because I do think, you know, I and maybe USB will have something similar in that vein coming soon. I actually just posted a little bit of a teaser photo on my ex a few hours ago. Go check that out if you haven't already. But but look, think the I think the theme is like to break through right now and break through the noise.
Speaker 9:You've got to do something that looks a little bit different and you have to do something really, really high quality because the tools have gotten good enough. Mhmm. There's a baseline quality that you just get out of the box. So if you want to stand out, you actually have to go above that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jordy?
Speaker 2:How many investments do you expect to make you know, what percentage of investments do you expect to make in New York versus the West Coast? You know, listing off some of USV USV's iconic investments, of course, you know, the the Coinbases, the Twitters, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Many of them were on the West Coast. So are you gonna be over here a lot?
Speaker 9:USV's always been a sort of one office, New York centric firm. Obviously, the namesake, Union Square Ventures. But USV has also made a lot of money all over the world. You you just rattled off some of the locations. When I was at Lightspeed, I was based in New York.
Speaker 9:And even though I was based in New York, I was making investments all over. Think most of my portfolio actually was on the West Coast, obviously, had Suno, which we just mentioned in Boston, Granola in London, but a lot of them were in the West Coast, gonna continue to operate that same way. We'll invest wherever the opportunities are, but the home base is gonna stay in New York City.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's this what's the secret to getting good deal flow at the early stage? I feel like that's such a differentiator for Fred Wilson throughout his career. You are teasing, you know, some sort of conversation. You've clearly been working with him for a while.
Speaker 1:What do you think makes USV particularly differentiated in finding great companies early on?
Speaker 9:I I know it sounds simple simple, but I think it's a willingness to be wrong and and and actually make predictions. I think so much of this industry is focused on momentum and focused on consensus driven bets, which again can be very, very lucrative Yep. If you get in them
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:And you have the capital to to fund them. But I think what Fred and the team have always been great at is having a conversation which lasts maybe not just one partner meeting, but last weeks or months or in some cases years. And along the way, making some bets against that idea and against that thesis, which which may look wrong for a very, very long period of time. You mentioned Coinbase. USV famously made that really early Coinbase investment, but they had invested in crypto before that, right?
Speaker 9:They had a strong thesis around crypto before that. And it took some cycles for them to gain conviction in what they ended up seeing in Coinbase. So I think it's about engaging in honest discussion with your partners. It's about not being afraid to have a crazy idea, to like the weird and and and to keep that conversation going for a long term long time.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about wearables these days? It feels like the meta Ray Bans are having like an inflection point. There's you know, Apple's coming to market with stuff. There were a few startups that
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then got a HealthSight, Aura, Whoop Yeah. I've seen
Speaker 1:It feels like it's maybe undercovered, but have you processed any of that as like an interesting endpoint for technology broadly?
Speaker 9:I think there are a couple of interesting aspects about it. Jordy, you mentioned earlier at the top of the App Store, we're seeing the same three apps now for the past two years or whatever. Hardware, which I think has often been thought of as too hard, right? You always hear the term like hardware is hard. And so venture capitalists often ignore it.
Speaker 9:We might want to rethink that a little bit. Hardware could be considered a wedge now, right? Maybe it's actually a defensible layer where if you can actually have a successful product there, that's going be a lot harder for a massive foundation model lab to go and replicate than leveraging their distribution for a new form of data collection or whatever the case may be. So I think there could be some interesting edge model or edge data out on a hardware device that is pretty defensible. So that's something interesting I like about it.
Speaker 9:I think the other thing that's interesting about it is we've you you guys have talked a lot. I've talked a lot about how context is king and finding these edge data sources is really, really unique. That's obviously something that has been pretty fascinating about Granola, right? They're capturing these conversations that you can't really capture any other way or aren't being captured any other way. And so that provides a lot of model to or a lot of value to the model.
Speaker 9:Hardware offers a similar opportunity, right, where using hardware, whether it's the glasses or maybe something else completely, a pen, an Oura Ring, you're capturing an edge form of data that the labs can't really see unless they have that hardware. So I actually find hardware to be quite compelling at the moment and I think it actually is an area of opportunity.
Speaker 1:How are you seeing startup culture change in terms of like who's hiring? I'm thinking about hardware. I was reading this report. Maybe it was in the Journal or the Financial Times about how more and more students are choosing, like, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering over computer science because of the rise of AI that can code very effectively and the job market changing. And that feels like potentially a boom for hardware startups.
Speaker 1:Like you have to imagine hardware gets less hard if there's just more hardware engineers and it's easier to staff up for that. But I'm wondering if you're noticing any other changes around location or work life balance or in in person. We did the COVID thing. We did full remote. Then we went back full in person.
Speaker 1:Then we go into hybrid. Like, how how is how are the start ups that you're interacting with like looking different than a decade ago?
Speaker 9:I think the big difference that's happening right now, and this feels like a very recent thing, maybe past few months, maybe past six months, is I think we're going to see a swing back towards the mission driven company. I think we've seen a lot of capital flow into the ecosystem over the past few years. And I think that that has turned a lot of missionaries into mercenaries. And by the way, it's worked phenomenally well. Again, we keep talking about the same two or three startups that are massively, massively valuable.
Speaker 9:But I think we're also seeing a lot of churn, right, and a lot of attrition at these companies. And I think it has to do with this mission based thing, right? If you think back maybe five years ago or ten years ago and some of the behemoths that emerged from maybe the previous software and startup cycle, these companies were very, very mission oriented. They were all aligned around the same mission. They stayed incredibly lean, incredibly focused on what they were trying to accomplish.
Speaker 9:They left the politics and the bullshit out of the office and they just focused on hitting that mission. And I think right now we're seeing a lot of people get burnt out after just chasing huge huge paydays at incumbents or insanely well capitalized startups. And I think we're going see the pendulum swing back in the other direction.
Speaker 2:White pill. Pill. Yeah. How many last question for me. Just because you're the first person from Union Square Ventures to come on the show.
Speaker 2:Many How many partners are there? Like how big is the investing team, guess, is a better question.
Speaker 9:There's about eight of us and the whole team in general is under 20.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:So we're a small team. Like I said, we're all in one office and we talk a lot. When I was at Spotify, Gustaf Soderstrom, who I think you've had on the
Speaker 1:show Yeah.
Speaker 9:Had this famous saying inside of Spotify. Everyone at Spotify knows this saying. Gustaf says, Talk is cheap, so you should talk a lot. And what he means by that is the cost of getting something wrong is actually way more expensive than the time it takes to actually talk and align and earn the right to go invest or spend or bet on something. And what I've always loved about USV is they have a similar philosophy.
Speaker 9:They talk a lot. It's a small team but they spend a lot of time together forming their point of view on the world. And to your question earlier, I think that's what's given them the edge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, they're very, very lucky to have you excited to see what you guys do together. It's great to see you.
Speaker 9:Thank you. You too. And by the way, congrats to you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're very excited.
Speaker 2:Come come see us when you're in LA. And we'll do the same I'd love
Speaker 3:I'd love
Speaker 1:We'll talk you later. Have a great rest your day.
Speaker 2:You're the man.
Speaker 9:Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Jordy.
Speaker 1:Speaking of Meta, Meta Platform's CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly moved his desk into the AI lab working directly with Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman. Zuckerberg is reportedly coding throughout the day. There's a story in the New York Times about AI sunglasses. I feel so sorry for my AI sunglasses. And it opens with this anecdote about trying to use the glasses to identify, what is it, some sort of bird?
Speaker 1:It says, one afternoon on a sunny stroll, I stop to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree. Hey, Meta, I say. What kind of bird is chirping in that tree? My sunglasses make their little ding dong noise analyzing the world. Finally, they speak.
Speaker 1:I don't see a bird in the tree or hear any chirping, they say. I point directly at the bird, which is still chirping. I don't see a bird in the tree where you're pointing, my sunglasses say cheerfully. Just bare branches and sky. For several weeks this is how it goes, the disorienting sense of chatter with a toddler who is drifting off into nap time.
Speaker 1:Look, would be easy to dunk on my very expensive staggeringly incompetent glasses. Critiquing AI these days is like shooting fish in a barrel And I mean poorly animated fish that keep sprouting human fingers inside that barrel. And so, yeah, it's a very interesting read because it's clearly like there's so many times when you're interacting with an old legacy model in a particular in a particular endpoint where you're not getting the most frontier intelligence and it can really throw you off. Andre Karpathy had this whole take about people that used like early LLMs that would hallucinate and haven't tried the latest coding models to really understand how powerful the technology is. There's this big division.
Speaker 1:And so you sort of have to do both, acknowledge that diffusion takes time, actually rolling these models out to a device like glasses takes time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting with Beta because it feels like they're glasses. Yeah. I'm getting served a lot of videos.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. People are using them as as GoPros.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they're just cameras.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As cameras. And and I know a lot of people that use them as AirPods replacements. Like, they use them just to take phone calls, listen to music because then they don't have anything in their ears and it's just more comfortable for them. They even have clear ones that they can wear on.
Speaker 1:It doesn't really work on a plane because it's too loud, but when they're just in the office. But actually getting the AI features into these Alright.
Speaker 2:Devices is They have Humor Bench.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:Hey Meta, I said one day. Tell me a joke. Mhmm. Why did the baseball go to the doctor?
Speaker 1:Why, Geordie?
Speaker 2:It had a little rundown in its batting average.
Speaker 1:Rundown?
Speaker 2:I don't really get it. Swing and a miss.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It might be better in this case just to pull from the bank of vetted jokes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You don't need to generate one Siri
Speaker 1:did that early on.
Speaker 2:Look up you can just look up some of the No.
Speaker 1:When Siri initially launched, they had comedy writers write out a whole bunch of jokes. And when you ask Siri, tell me a joke, it would put just pull one off the shelf that was handwritten by a human about Siri, aware of the context, aware of everything. I'm now I have triggered Siri, so I'm in trouble on my laptop. But it is it is just very interesting. Apple, of course, we we touched on this.
Speaker 1:Mark Gurman has a report on the upcoming AI smart glasses. They'll come in several styles and colors. A few of those frames seem like they're direct competitors to Wayfarers. It will be very interesting to see the ecosystem integration with Apple. And Dan Primack has a take here.
Speaker 1:He says, Apple isn't burning mountains of cash on GPUs or investing billions into Frontier Labs, but it still may win the AI race success from the sidelines, sort of a contrarian take at a time when Apple doesn't really want to talk about AI right now. They're clearly in this They really
Speaker 2:don't wanna talk about AI.
Speaker 1:But they have partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini at this point. They're using AI tools all over the company. And it feels like they internally are starting to feel the AGI, but at the same time have a very unique strategy of not overreaching and it could really work out for them. So it's an exciting time and an exciting story to follow. Well, without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room, Wade Foster from Zapier.
Speaker 1:Zapier. Wade, how are doing?
Speaker 10:Good. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:We're good.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:Nice to see you. Thanks so much for coming back to the show. How are things going? Give us the general update on your company and then there's a million different things that we can talk about. But I'd be interested to know what you're learning from your vantage point as CEO of Zapier.
Speaker 10:Well, yeah. You know, we launched our Zapier SDK last week. That's probably the most exciting news. Congratulations. You can install it inside of, you know, Cursor, ClaudeCode, Codecs, any coding agent you might use.
Speaker 10:I use it. I'm not an engineer and I basically built like an entire AI chief of staff on top of this team thing and runs in the background. I don't have to close my laptop or I can close my laptop lid and not worry about things breaking. So it hooks into all 9,000 different tools and I have it running all over the place. So that that's probably the exciting news out of Zapier's land.
Speaker 1:Do you do you feel like the the vibe coding boom generally is more heavily tilted towards internal tools, dashboards, reports, chief of staff, b to b applications because it feels like clearly people are consuming a lot of tokens. They're spending a lot on inference. The models clearly work. The coding agents clearly work. At the same time I open up the App Store and I'm not seeing the, Oh wow, somebody vibe coded a Call of Duty competitor that is blowing up on the steam charts.
Speaker 1:Right? Like we're just not in this like in this like everyone's talking about the the the new app or the new Uber or the new game that's like been created much faster with a leaner team. But everyone has a story of we pulled forward our roadmap at our company.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We've definitely had a renaissance of internal tools internally. We, our marketing team ran a hackathon recently. It's about 50 people on the marketing team. At the end of the week, there was like 80 plus new internal tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Most of these were like dashboards and data and things like that that in the past, marketers like especially are pretty analytical. Yeah. But they may not be like the best at like using SQL or running these things. Totally. Getting access to the data has been clumsy and hard.
Speaker 10:And now, it just feels like they've got a jet pack on where they can just go build these like really quick simple tools that allows them to make like hyper specialized, hyper customized campaigns because they can quickly run an analysis and see, oh, across the last month of like social posts, these are the ones that took off. Here's the common traits about them. So let's figure out how to like tweak our next campaign for the next month to be more like this and less like that. That type of analysis would have been really difficult for a marketer to do solo, you know, in the past. Now, it's you know, less than an hour of work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think Terrence Tau had a the mathematician had a point about this where he was he was he was saying that like in his papers he will use AI agents to create new visualizations that would have taken him multiple days to make. Now he, but it's not like it's saving him time because in previous papers he just wouldn't have put the visualization in. And so it's this element of like people just doing more with more. But I'm wondering like as you see, know, so many companies have done this where there's a hackathon for the marketing department or some organization and the prompt can often be like replace yourself.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually happen or if it's more like the competitive dynamic is everyone's getting more leverage, doing more things and just out of the 20 ideas that they have, they're able to do 15 instead of five.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I definitely think it's more the latter right now. Mhmm. You know, across Zapr, a 100% of our employees are using AI daily. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:I would say this is like individual AI usage. People are individually more productive. Yeah. But if you were to ask me is the company more productive? Institutionally, are we more productive?
Speaker 10:A lot harder to say yes to that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I think that this is where like the company is on the cutting edge. This feels like the next thing that everybody's working on is how do we actually accelerate the institution? And this gets harder because you actually have to rethink how the company works. To give you an example, we've gone from a world where code was expensive to now code is cheap. Yeah.
Speaker 10:In the world where code was expensive, you had all these processes upfront to talk to customers, to align on roadmaps, to figure out what the right thing to build was because if you chose the wrong thing, that was a really expensive mistake. And so, these humans and all these processes exist up here. But when code is cheap, you can get rid of all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And that takes redesigning jobs or rethinking the human where the human actually exists in the first place.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And so
Speaker 2:if you were in YC and you're about to talk to your customer, just cancel the call.
Speaker 5:Just don't you don't to do
Speaker 2:it anymore. It's all good. That's an old no. I'm kidding. No.
Speaker 2:It's a it's a very good point. It's like, hey, show the customer That's the thing.
Speaker 10:It's like you don't Yeah. Need to show It's like a non tech founder in the past would like show up and like give them a survey or like ask them generically about the problem or something like that and you would get some signal from that. But now, a non technical founder can literally show up and say like, Can you just use this?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And see what happened. And that gives you a lot more information in the past. And so, it's just a much different like learning cycle. I think companies that are not in YC, companies that have been around for a while, have all these systems and processes that have been built up have to be torn down reassembled to work in the AI area.
Speaker 10:And that's where I think the institutional AI really kicks in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how have you been grappling with the idea of work slop? There was this a great cartoon early on where, you know, the the the joke was take these three bullet points and turn it into an email. And on the other side. So he says take this email and turn it into three bullet points and people should have just been sending three bullet points to each other the entire time.
Speaker 1:And I feel like we are hyper in that world where I can send you a full essay, a deep research report, a book if I want, a dash board, a visualization, a 100 page deck. And at the same time sometimes the human intuition of knowing, okay, this was a good post, let's just do more of that might be the right intuition. So how have you grappled with fine tuning the team on, okay, it's great. Everyone should be using AI, but let's stay away from Workslop?
Speaker 10:Yeah. You my cofounder Brian says you can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the accountability. And so, you know, if you're slinging this stuff, you got to stand behind. It's okay to present AI author work. Do that often.
Speaker 10:Oftentimes, I will say, hey, I was going back and forth with my AI friends.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 10:Here is what I found.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 10:yeah. I have read this and I actually like stand behind it and agree with this. But if you're just going to like, you know, throw a random prompt in and then pass it off as like your own work
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:That ain't cool. And so like we kind of try and coach people on that, the kind of etiquette around that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's Yeah.
Speaker 10:It's tough.
Speaker 1:I I had that early on. I was working with somebody and they sent me something that we had clearly been, you know, hydrated by an LLM. And I was like, you you could just send me the prompt because I can actually imagine it exactly what it was. And like, yeah, if there's a fact that we need to look up, we can use it for knowledge retrieval. But I I I actually don't need all of the hydration.
Speaker 1:You can just you can just send the prompt.
Speaker 2:Jordy, guys you guys are a remote company. How do do you think that gives you an advantage in the in the AI era? Do you Yeah. You know, what are the
Speaker 10:ways I think the thing the biggest advantage we have is every last bit of work exhaust is documented. Sure. So all of the stuff is inside of Slack. All of our meetings are recording. You know, every last inch of work that happens, there is a like a written trace of that.
Speaker 10:And so we can put chatbots on top of that. We can put LMs on top of that and that creates a whole bunch of institutional knowledge that accelerates the work. So a new person coming in can literally figure out is there a standard operating procedure for this? Is there a skill for this? Is there a whatever to do this thing?
Speaker 10:And you don't have to go like chase people down in offices and tap on shoulders and sort of hope that the campfire wisdom like finds you. So I do think remote companies have a big advantage because they do tend to have so much of the work has a digital exhaust.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how are you thinking about, like, the the volume of content? Are you is it just like stuff everything in one large context window? Are there like pro are there agents that are going around and, creating little roll ups of things and there's processes for teams to boil things down? Because even even just the explosion of like, you know, Zoom call recording and note taking can produce like so many transcripts.
Speaker 1:And I've been sort of shocked by the slow speed of just search every tool that I use because there's so many more words that when I search for receipt in my email or something I get you know every single email possible because they all have so much text now.
Speaker 10:So what we have done internally is we built a company brain out that has canonical data. So it exists at a couple different layers. There's a set of company data. This is like our company strategy, our company values, ideal customer profile, things like that. That is curated by me and a handful of other people that sort of say, hey, this is the truth in these areas.
Speaker 10:Yep. Then there's team data. So, every team internally has a similar version that kind of cascades down. Yeah. And then finally, folks have individual content that they've sort of used to supplement that's private to them.
Speaker 10:So anytime someone is like talking to their AI, they have this source of truth that has been curated. Then, folks know that they can pull in other additional content at any given time. And so for me, if I wanted to pull in a meeting transcript or a Slack thread or something like that, would point the SDK at both those documents and say, hey, I want you to go review those against the backdrop of this company brain. And so it sort of helps you manage the context window because you can take bite sized chunks here and here, you know, have the like company brain as like the backdrop to all that stuff and get better insights versus just saying,
Speaker 3:look at all of Slack or look at all
Speaker 10:of the meeting notes, which that would just not be very effective because there is a lot of noise inside of Yeah.
Speaker 1:Have you seen more have you seen acceleration either at the lower end below your average customer size or or bigger companies onboarding? Like, I I imagine that there are a lot of tailwinds right now for you. But what's where are you seeing faster adoption or more interest?
Speaker 10:You know, think small companies tend to just move faster. They just have less bottlenecks on this type of stuff. Yeah. That said, I have been somewhat surprised over the last couple of years how fast enterprises have gotten onto this stuff. They still have more procurement hurdles and boxes to check to really take off here.
Speaker 10:But they're not asleep at the wheel, which is kind of the meme is that, Ah, these enterprises move slow and don't make decisions. I think they just have more things that they, the considerations that they have to do. But I I do think smaller companies generally just are moving a lot faster on this stuff.
Speaker 1:Are you are you feeling CPU poor? We've been seeing like with the with the explosion of agents and just more work being done on the Internet, I could imagine a lot of your customers submitting way more requests. There's an explosion in demand. And maybe there's two ways. One is just scale up your servers, but the other one is maybe work on optimizations and rewrites.
Speaker 1:Now the company has been optimizing for over a decade now. So I imagine things are pretty optimized. But how have you been processing just increased demand relative to, you know, just infrastructure?
Speaker 10:I think the most interesting place we've seen this is new usage patterns. Mhmm. So agents, you know, interact with APIs different than how like a human might set something up. Yeah. And you're also able to deploy them faster and at a larger scale.
Speaker 10:And so, you know, when we're hitting, you know, like I don't know, like let's use like Slack for example. Like the way you might, you know, set up automation across your Slack channels like looks a lot different than it did pre AI because you have new use cases and new patterns that you wanna use Mhmm. That are more just want more data. Like, it just wants to look at more stuff. And so I I do think that's probably the the most interesting changes.
Speaker 10:The the usage patterns are are are different in the AI world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For some of the more like basic workflows, what is the what is the pitch for using Zapier instead of vibe coding something that takes my LinkedIn post and emails it to me or dumps it in my Slack? Because that feels like something that you could effectively one shot but then you get caught in who's going to maintenance that or who you're serving that, what happens when the API changes like I feel like there's a lot of excitement about oh I can vibe code this in an hour and maybe people aren't thinking about what it takes to maintain a service but how are you how are you reiterating the benefits of being Yeah. On Zapier?
Speaker 3:I think the the fact
Speaker 10:that we maintain all this stuff is a huge advantage. Yeah. The other thing is it's storing your tokens very safely. Sure. A lot of these vibe coding tools will say, Hey, just copy and paste your API key here.
Speaker 10:And it goes into a plain text file that might get shipped up to GitHub and might get shipped somewhere else that's like, Oh, crap. We're in And Zapier just tends to be a safer place to do this. Plus, we have all the vibe coding capabilities as well too. So, hey, take my leads from this service and add them to that and da da da da. Zapier is able to do a lot of that as well.
Speaker 10:So tends to be a little bit, you know, safer, more reliable place to to run these types of automations.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Timelines around fully autonomous companies Mhmm. Where you can have an agent that you just kind of prompt it to, you know, this has been an idea that's been around for a while, you know, you just say like, figure out a way to make money selling software and it just goes off and it maybe makes some software and figures it how to how to market it. This already kind of exists in kind of the trading world, hedge fund world where they're creating algorithms that just go out and figure out ways to make money. But on the software side, I'm curious given everything you know about, you know, automating business processes,
Speaker 10:when
Speaker 2:do I you think it's really
Speaker 10:I To your point, I do think for some very simple things, like it is pretty close. Trading, you know, whether you're actually good at it or not, TBD, but like pretty dang close there. I also have a former Zapier boy, this guy, Nat Eliason, who made it
Speaker 6:love that.
Speaker 10:He's an Open Claw that started making money on courses And basically was yeah, Openclaw was just like figuring out how to go do it. And so, yeah, it's like pretty close. So you're starting to
Speaker 2:see There's also use cases like I think of like a simple app in the Shopify app store
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Where you could
Speaker 2:just say like, go compete with this app. And then it's like Mhmm. Pretty obvious where you need to advertise it and you can figure out the equation between like, you could just make the make a clone of the app and then figure out the equation of like, what is the minimum amount that I need to charge in order to be able to spend enough on user acquisition to like eke out some like very thin margin that covers the cost of inference.
Speaker 10:Totally. The thing I don't know is if it's truly gonna be a zero person company or not. Like it does still feel like you need a human to like supervise this thing to like, you know, when when it goes off the ropes to actually have the initial idea. So, you know, I don't think we're at this dream where you like poke the
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's always gonna be qualifiers. Even the one person, $1,000,000,000 company that was in the New York Times, it's like, okay, like he hired his brother and then also he had a bunch of contractors. And so there's never like even if you do create like an autonomous business, if it's working at all, then suddenly there becomes an economic incentive to maybe, hey, maybe I should spend an hour on it. And then like, well, is it still really autonomous if you spend an hour a week on it?
Speaker 10:Man, that's the thing I think is also gonna make it hard for these things to be crazy pervasive is that if someone is being that successful, there's another person that would look at the thing you're doing and say, well, I can do that too and let me go compete against your margins.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yep.
Speaker 1:How do you think about terminology? Jordi always gives this example of a company that had workflows and they just rebranded it agents and they didn't really change anything under the hood. And it feels like there's immense pressure from investors and marketers to just use the latest lingo. And sometimes that's useful because the capabilities change and so the nomenclature should change. But we're in this weird continuum where there's there's workflows, AI workflows, agentic workflows, full AI agents.
Speaker 1:Like, are these meaningful definitions? How have you been processing all of this since you're sort of in all categories? We
Speaker 10:definitely have a slide that explains the difference between all three of the things you just said.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Practically speaking though, they're all agents. You know, I'm sure like somebody who is like a master wordsmith would like try and debate the finer nuances of it. But what I see in the market is practically what people are saying is an agent is a thing that does automation for me. Yeah. Whether it's purely deterministic or whether it's purely agentic, it's kind of an agent at the end of the day.
Speaker 10:Now, you know, deterministic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages. Agentic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages. As you start to go build these in production use cases, you probably should understand the difference between these things. But practically speaking, we see customers showing up, and they haven't really figured that stuff out yet. They're just like, I have a problem, and I want that problem solved.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about vibe coding? Like, how how broad do you think this trend goes? I saw someone I think it was who was it? Downtown Josh Brown joking about how there's he's getting sent like a new vibe coding thing every single day.
Speaker 1:Like You
Speaker 2:gave the example of like somebody that makes an app that like displays their Spotify playlist Yeah. Nicely and he's like, you're not my child. Like I'm not gonna spend time on this. I don't I don't owe you any time. But of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I'm just wondering how how you're processing. Like, it it feels like this year, vibe coding is going very mainstream. A lot of people are toying with it. What do you think retention looks like?
Speaker 1:What do you think the knock on implications are of this? Any, like, security concerns? Just how are you processing this idea that, like, the number of people that will have created software will probably, like, 10 x this year?
Speaker 10:I think it's very exciting. You have all these folks who have had ideas or coming up with ideas for problems to solve, etcetera. But in the past, those ideas have kind of been locked away because they can only implement like a small piece of it. And now with vibe coding, it feels like you can do a lot more stuff. And so I think that's why we've seen such a surge is that everyone feels like they can get these creative ideas out of themselves.
Speaker 10:I do think as an industry, there's going to have to be a lot more stuff built out to make these things work in all the various, you know, use cases. I think one of the places Zapier is like very helpful is, you know, connecting to all your data sources and doing it in a secure way. We'll handle all your authentications clearly. And so that's a way that we can sort of, you know, play a really important role in how people go build out, you know, these these in infrastructure. And it can move less from Vibe into more trusted, you know, infrastructure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This is great.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Have a great rest of your week, and we'll talk to you soon, Wade.
Speaker 2:Good to see you. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Before we bring in our next guest, Kevin Warsh, who is the new Fed chair nominee, had a financial disclosure and has a ton of startup investments. He's in SpaceX and a whole bunch of other companies. Zebra heads. He's a one man Brave.
Speaker 2:VC machine. Brave that the Clay Browser. Cognition. Clay is a banger.
Speaker 1:The tech enabled patent law firm. D D Y
Speaker 2:E Protocol.
Speaker 1:He's in a lot of stuff. Think some of this
Speaker 2:is Holloway.
Speaker 1:I think some of this is through funds that he's invested But still, it's a it's a whole bunch of it's a whole bunch of companies, and it's interesting to to dig into. He also owns a a horse racing stable, something like that. Did you see this? It also includes his role as a general partner in the garage stable, a horse racing operation.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:He he has invested in all sorts of things. So he will be disclosing all of that. I'm sure people will dig in more as he goes towards the committee vote. But without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ankur from Carrie is the founder and is here with an exciting m and a update.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. Looks like looks like we both have some M and
Speaker 2:A to announce in the last couple
Speaker 3:of weeks. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. Talk us Great
Speaker 2:to see you.
Speaker 1:First, let's start by Let's
Speaker 2:start with the Gong.
Speaker 1:Let's start with the Gong. Let's hit the Gong for the deal.
Speaker 2:There we go. Now we can continue.
Speaker 1:But let's, yeah, let's talk about the the company that you built, the background, maybe your background even before starting this company that was just acquired.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. Before this, I used to run a company called teachable.com, which helped people make money online for the first time. So it helped people create online courses and coaching and had a successful exit there during the pandemic. Took a couple of years off trying to figure out what I wanted to build, and then I started about three and a half years ago.
Speaker 3:And the mission with Carrie was we help people first make money online, now we'll help them grow their net worth, be smart about taxes. I think I came on the show last to talk about taxes, so a lot of that stuff. And now here we are three and a half years later, excited to share that we've been acquired by two separate companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Explain that. That that it feels How very did this happen? What who's going where? What's the how did this deal?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's my second exit. I wanna get acquired twice this time. Twice the the the next company, you might get Yeah. Acquired by four different
Speaker 3:Twice the diligence, you know, nothing like like running two simultaneous M and A processes. Yeah. But no, the overall company is bought by AngelList, which is a platform I've had a long standing relationship with. I, you know, my first company raised money on AngelList, I hired a lot of my team there, ran my funds there. They saw the marketing engine we've built, they saw our ability to build and launch financial products, and they wanted to buy us to build and launch new financial products to make the private markets more accessible.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. As they did this, you know, we obviously have built what I consider to be the best solo four zero one k self employed retirement platform. They didn't really have a logical kind of use for that asset, so we partnered with a company called Lettuce Financial that does tax, bookkeeping, payroll, insurance for self employed people, and that's where we're selling the retirement platform.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So it's almost two two separate acquisitions.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, what does that look like from a customer perspective? I mean, maybe walk me through the fir like, the the actual go to market for the company while you were building it, what the last couple of years looked like, because then we can go into, you know, where what what the experience with the customers is like.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So our go to market, which I think we we were quite good at, is we never spent a single dollar on paid marketing. I think a lot of it was content education. Teaching people about the insanity of the tax code, which is there's something fitting, by the way, in announcing our acquisition on April 15. Was completely unintentional.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's funny it's funny how that happened. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah. The amount of I would read, like, one of your posts and then send it to my CPA and just be like, please make sure that we're doing this.
Speaker 1:Following this.
Speaker 3:You're doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what what was the was the marketing strategy go direct or do were you doing I mean, it sounds like Go direct. Content education. Content education. What content education work the best?
Speaker 3:We had a personal finance newsletter with over a 100,000 people, which worked Yeah. Quite Twitter has always worked well. I I do think there's some percentage of people who follow me on Twitter are gonna be relieved to see less tax content. We have lot of buddies be like, dude, like, lay Leo. But but look, I think, you know, I'm excited for the next chapter with AngelList where we will apply a lot of the same, you know, go to market to launch new products for the private markets.
Speaker 3:Meanwhile, Lettuce is the platform stays exactly the same. Customers will, you know, only get a better experience since Lettuce allows people to also do taxes, payroll, health insurance for self employed people. I'll continue to stay involved there as well Mhmm. With more of my day to time on AngelList Mhmm. But most of the team ends up going to Lettuce.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was what was the founding team like? Who did you hire? How big did the company get? Talk to me about like the shape of the company.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So we we got to about 25 people, about 4,000,000 in ARR. Founding team had, you know, four four other co founders.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:wow. And yeah, it was it was the business was at a point where it was growing quite nicely where we got to about 250,000,000 in assets on the platform. Wow. However, looking at all the things happening in the market today, you know, you look at it and I'm like, three and a half years in 4,000,000 ARR. It's a good business.
Speaker 3:Sure. But you look at some of these modern AI companies and you're like, wow, know, it's a it's a good business, not a not not sort of the crazy multiples you see these days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about the the the I mean, I guess like level set for me on the boom of the solopreneur, like what have you seen there? What what what has stuck out to you? And then I want to talk about that in the context of AngelList.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we stumbled upon this in my last company where for the first time we saw, you know, tens of millions of people start a business online. Mhmm. I think marketplaces made it very easy for anyone to get attention, and when you got attention, you could start to monetize this.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So saw that first happening at Teachable, but then kind of kept investing in the creator economy and seeing the growth of that. And when it came time to launch the new business, which was Carrie at the time, realized that, like, so many things are provided to you by your job, like your retirement plan, your insurance, all of that. As a self employed person, you may be financially doing quite well, but you have to go figure it out for yourself. And the solo four zero one specifically was one of those too good to be true sort of personal finance things, where it's a private four zero one ks plan just for yourself. You can invest in literally any asset you want.
Speaker 3:Your money grows and compounds tax free. You can use it all to contribute to a Roth IRA. You can borrow money from it. You can get a tax credit for setting one up. I was reading this, and I'm like, this is insane.
Speaker 3:Like, why why isn't anyone, like, doing anything about it? So that's where we built Carry, where, you know, we kind of helped, I think, 4,000 separate people set up their retirement plans and custody their dollars and all of that. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And then within the AngelList ecosystem, how do you see it feels like there's a continuation of the solopreneur boom. Vibe coating is obviously a big piece of that. I I I definitely agree with a lot of people that have talked come on the show and talked about this idea that maybe we're not at a one person, $1,000,000,000 company yet, but just the ability to build something that is software with a smaller leaner team sort of lends itself to maybe lower capital requirements, not needing to go the traditional venture path because it might look more like a lifestyle business. But I'm wondering how you think the financial markets will react to that dynamic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing a lot The rise of the one person business is only becoming bigger, but the AngelList acquisition was also We spent a lot of our time educating people on investing and, you know, being smarter with money, and I think there's still a big opportunity to make private markets more accessible. I mean, we're seeing this with companies going public later and later. So much of the wealth creation, people are locked out of. I mean, you can Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, like, come on. You can you can buy prediction market contracts and how long a handshake will last. You can, you know, gamble on shitcoins. So I don't really buy the whole, like, we're protecting people angle. Sure.
Speaker 3:So the idea with AngelList is we're gonna spend some time and figure out sort of how can we take some of this world creation that's historically been only for a very few people and make it more accessible, but in a way that's actually, you know, fundamentally good and investor friendly products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What in in a perfect scenario, do you think that the the public funds invest in private market companies should be basically valued at one x NAV? Because we've seen a couple things go out and they get really highly valued and it feels like some sort of like, okay, the market's not efficient here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think there's there's a couple of very, very big IPOs coming up that will that will determine, I think, like, I know I'm gonna sound dramatic, but the future of the private markets in a lot of ways because there is such a massive disconnect right now where you have so many fundamentally good companies in the public markets getting completely slaughtered. Meanwhile, all kinds of private businesses are are, you know, continuing to rip. So I think I think there's going to be a reckoning. I think, you know, companies are staying private longer.
Speaker 3:But, you know, I mean, like, I would I would imagine anthropic and OpenAI have unofficial markets that make them more traded than a lot of public securities. So, like, you know, the the line is blurring. There are effectively stock prices for a lot of these late stage private companies. So Yeah. I think it's a really interesting time, and it's to me inevitable that we allow private markets to access more of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I know you guys have some big news coming up. So I have a lot more questions but we'll save it for when you guys are ready to announce which I'm looking forward to. But congratulations to the whole team.
Speaker 2:I think it's super smart to, you know, make this decision and I can't wait to see, what you do at AngelList. It's gonna be incredible.
Speaker 3:Yep. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, guys.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good day. Bye bye. Up next, we have Bailey Pumfleet from cal.com. Cal.com is considering going closed as AI agents overwhelm the open source ecosystem. We're excited to have Bailey join us.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Hey. How's it going? Been a busy day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very busy day. Please introduce yourself and the company. We've we've reacted to some cal.com posts in the past, but, it's a fascinating company. So take us through, the shape of the business, a little bit about yourself, and then we'll go into the decision today.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Calvert.com has been an open source scheduling software. We've been around for like five years. The whole company is around being open source. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And, like, we're huge fans of the open source space. And, yeah, today we we made the announcement that we're actually going to be closing source which is a very tough decision and quite a controversial one.
Speaker 2:Before you before you continue, your audio keeps kind of cutting in and out. Do you have headphones or I don't know if you're kind of covering your your mic at all. I don't know if you're picking
Speaker 1:that up. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds a little muffled.
Speaker 2:Hearing every other word.
Speaker 5:Oh, dear. Is there a sounding bad song?
Speaker 1:That's a lot better actually. Whatever you did
Speaker 5:That's a a Zoom magic. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 5:But, yeah. So, you know, we we started this company as huge believers in open source and important to a lot of shifts in AI. The whole sort of risk perspective has completely changed. AI is now able to break code at completely unimaginable speeds. It's the one thing that nobody is really talking about.
Speaker 5:We've seen little drops about like Anthropix Methos model and nobody has really taken the time to just kind of understand the ramifications which things like that can have on not just open source but broader application security.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What was the business model in the prior era? How how if you're an open source software, how do you keep the business running?
Speaker 5:Fundamentally, the business model has not changed at all. So we've always been open source and the code has been open and that's mainly for the things that the average person would need to be able to run their own scheduling service on their own domain or something like that. As a business, we actually sell this software commercially. Open source is actually something that benefits us commercially because we can go to people and we can say, hey, you can look at the source code and you can verify that we're not doing anything sketchy with your calendar data. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What, if any, are the benefits of being open source during the, you know, AI agent boom? Because I imagine that you are getting automated pull requests and vulnerability reports. Are there any silver linings that you where you know, things you put in the in the pro column before you realize that the con column overwhelmed the pros.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think a lot of these things remain to be true that, you know, with open source, everybody can audit your code. Mhmm. So, you know, especially with AI producing a lot of slop nowadays, the one thing that we have going for us is that we have code which is written by humans and reviewed by humans. It definitely creates a lot of trust in that sense.
Speaker 5:It's just that for us, there's a lot of pros really and we also just genuinely care about open source. We care about trying to do the right thing with this business. We're going to make money and we're going to do our thing whether we're open source or not. I think one of the common misunderstandings about this discussion is that it's some kind of business decision that it leads to greater profit for us. Really, we just always try and do the right thing by our customers and by our community.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about reputation farming attacks. I haven't heard that much about this. What is going on in the open source ecosystem with reputation farming?
Speaker 3:What do you what do you
Speaker 5:mean by reputation farming specifically? I'm not
Speaker 1:Specifically, like like agents that are trying to go and make low quality contributions in order to
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, earn some sort of reputation in the open source ecosystem so that they're more likely to see other pull requests accepted.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I asked for clarification there because there's actually a lot of different Okay. Sort of like branches of reputation farming Yeah. You have You have, for instance, these people out here who are just trying to use AI to attack open source, to just get cheap bounties. You get people who are using AI to make small contributions to open source.
Speaker 5:Maybe they might be trying to get open source bounties for developing code. Maybe the end goal insight is to get a job at one of these sort of companies or something like that. Just like how we see a ton of AI slop on LinkedIn and things like that, we're seeing a lot of AI slot on GitHub. Granted, for us, that doesn't really affect everything that's happened today. We don't make any decisions because there are some AI slot pull requests, But that is something I'm hearing a lot from other projects
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Where it's really hard for smaller teams to deal with just the sheer amount of review workload.
Speaker 1:How are is there I mean, it's weird because you're already open source. There's always the possibility that a paying customer would say, you know what? I'm just gonna self host this. So in some ways, by being open source, you don't really face the competitive threat of, oh, I'll just vibe code this software and I won't use something off the shelf or I won't pay you. But is is there a business threat from AI?
Speaker 1:Is the business threat greater now that I mean, obviously, the model capabilities are are greater, but being closed source sort of incentivizes people to say, hey. If I want to get it for free, should vibe code it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think the question about can vibe coding replace my SaaS startup is Yeah. You know, the the hot thing right now. Yeah. We feel pretty confident in our defense of that whether we're open or closed source because scheduling is so fragile and so nuanced.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, if you if you say, okay, I can build a basic scheduler in a weekend Mhmm. I probably believe you. You probably can. But to build something the scale of cow.com that actually works in all these enterprise use cases and things like that, it's a lot harder, to be honest.
Speaker 5:And, you know, you're going to run into so many little hiccups that just AI, you know, sort of vibe coding can't currently sort of hit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's I I I mean, I have to imagine the models will be able to to create a good scheduling app, but it's more about I I and I wonder if you agree with this, but it feels like it's more about the potential of just a company prioritizing their time. Because there's if there's so many other things and you're spending your time rewriting and maintaining all of your custom in house vibe coded tools, maybe just pull something off the shelf even if it just costs a couple, you know, $20 a month or whatever. You're just going to have more mind share towards, oh, the scheduler broke or it's down or it there's a security vulnerability we need to patch it. Instead, you can go focus on whatever your actual business is.
Speaker 1:And so I imagine that the prioritization is a big factor there too.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, it's the same way nobody's gonna build their own Stripe for payment processing or you're probably not gonna build Intercom for your customer support. Absolutely can do that, but Yeah. Is it really worth it? At the end of the day, For us, sort of our business model has never really relied on sort of gatekeeping anything.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But just more the bringing something out of the box and just deploying it and getting selling is the most important thing to pretty much every founder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us and break it down. Good luck with the decision and and the reaction from the community.
Speaker 2:And one of my favorite .coms It is agreat.com,
Speaker 1:cal.com. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Still underrated even after all these years building on it.
Speaker 1:Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one, Ben.
Speaker 5:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Up next, we have Han Wong from Mint Lify. He's the co founder.
Speaker 2:And Allbirds were the markets are closed but Allbirds is down almost 10% after hours.
Speaker 1:Off of the high?
Speaker 2:It ended at 17.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's pretty high. That's a very big departure from it was a $10,000,000 company, $20,000,000 company 20. Yesterday. And now it is 20
Speaker 2:to one.
Speaker 1:Over a $100,000,000 company. That is a massive gain. So we'll see where all birds goes. They have a lot to prove, but we're rooting for them. And we're also Let's bring in Hong from MignanoFi.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:I'm doing really really well. Hey, thanks
Speaker 7:so much guys for having me on today.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Love the energy. Yeah. Are you fired up? You seem fired up.
Speaker 7:Oh. Allbirds proved to the rest of us that you can just do things.
Speaker 1:Yes. And that's
Speaker 7:the energy that we aspire for.
Speaker 1:Indeed. Yeah. It was a it was a wild But we're not here to talk about Allbirds anymore. Tell us about you. Give us your backstory and then tell us about the company and then we'll get into the news.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So my name is Pan, one of the cofounders of MignanoFi. We founded the company in 2022 Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Really off of the simple idea Success. That we wanted to
Speaker 3:thank you.
Speaker 7:To help enable other builders.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:Right? I've been a programmer since I was 11 years old and it's just basically been defining Success. Elements of my
Speaker 3:There you go. It's a start.
Speaker 2:I'm so curious by all the
Speaker 3:I know I love it.
Speaker 10:Good to
Speaker 7:basically wanted to build a company enabling other developers because it was, you know, who I was and who I fundamentally am. Mhmm. And now, cut forward a few years, Netlify now powers, you know, the docs for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Coinbase Yeah. OpenClaw, Perplexity, and now well over 20,000 others. You know, that now reaches over a 100,000,000 people
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Every single year, which is,
Speaker 3:you know, something that we're, you know, incredibly proud of and, you know, of the impact that we have.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Amazing. I mean, fundamentally, developer docs are taxed on an HTML website essentially. But what's usually unique is the harness and the environment that migrates any changes to the code or API endpoints onto those docs. What was the first approach to actually deliver something unique or more enterprise ready than Yeah.
Speaker 1:Say, some of just like the open source, like reverse engineering the URLs and just statically serving it, which is Yeah. What I think most people will be familiar with. What was Yeah. What was like the v one, like, we have product market fit. This is better Yeah.
Speaker 1:Than the status quo, and then we'll go into AI era.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Initially, when we started, it was off a very simple idea that anything on the market wasn't fundamentally built for developers. Mhmm. Right? Which is so ironic because it's the developers who are often maintaining the content.
Speaker 7:It was developers who are often reading the content. Mhmm. And everything that was out there was just kinda like static site builders that were, you know, often adhering to like a different audience, it felt like. Mhmm. And having personally, you know, suffered from so many bad docs out there, I was like, hey.
Speaker 7:Look. Like, if we're gonna go build one, let's go build the one that we always wish we had. Mhmm. And let's make that great.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it turns out those opinions that we kind of made into building this platform really resonated with a lot of the industry.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? It started initially with, you know, like, a few of our YC batchmates, then grew to about a quarter of the entire YC batches. Yeah. And then it grew eventually now to serving some of the largest companies
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, including Microsoft and others.
Speaker 1:So how do you think about integrating AI? I imagine that there's there's more docs than ever that need to be written. Those docs need to be read by AI. But then Yeah. Also whenever a new endpoint is created, even if it's created very quickly, it needs to be documented equally as quickly.
Speaker 1:How have you integrated AI into the product?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Many different ways, but I think it's really important to first take a step back and understand the changing role of
Speaker 5:all of this. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Right? When we started the company in '22, it was a very simple idea. Hey. Like, docs are almost like you know, you can think of them almost like, you know, an instruction manual. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? Like, you know, when you assemble, like, let's say, you know, LEGO bricks and, like, you know, LEGO kit, you know, you have to read the assembly manual in order to figure out how these things work. It's written by people You
Speaker 2:don't have to. You can do it the
Speaker 5:old fashioned way.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:But I get your Yeah.
Speaker 7:But now it's really important to understand that 50% of the viewers for the content is actually not humans anymore. It's actually AI. Mhmm. So we basically took a look across all
Speaker 3:of our data, you know,
Speaker 7:a few months back and we're like, look, You know, we felt the change in AI agents being the end users. What did that actually look like? So we went through a proxied our viewers, identified what our agents and what our humans. And out of curiosity, John Jordy, I'm curious. If you guys had a guess, like, what percentage of traffic do you think now comes from agents versus humans?
Speaker 2:Didn't you just say 50%?
Speaker 7:Oh, I just said 50%. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I was
Speaker 1:thinking it was a trick question.
Speaker 2:I was like, trick question. Oh, yeah. It's actually 500%.
Speaker 1:Fifty fifty is an interesting place to be because I feel like it'll Yeah. It was probably 0% a couple years ago and it'll probably be 99.999% very quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would have I would have guessed if you hadn't said.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Literally. It went from 15% about twelve months ago
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:To about 50%
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:A few months ago. And I would say now it's like closer to 70%.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 7:And so we have a very strong opinion that by the end of the year, to your point, it's gonna start to look like 90 plus percent.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Right? If for no way if for no other reason than a developer will just be using a chat app to interface and ask the questions that they want and have the chat app go to the particular website, pull everything in, contextualize it at their level based on their memories Yeah. Based on those particular questions they ask instead of opening up 12 tabs and scrolling through a bunch of different endpoints.
Speaker 7:Exactly. Yeah. Exactly it. And also if you think about even like what the like the developer work like cycle is
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Nowadays. Right? It's like I'm getting here to ask Claude code to go Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, vibe code my product, vibe code my app.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:And if for instance, I'm like, hey, let's go and use,
Speaker 3:you know, let's figure out how
Speaker 7:to implement Stripe or a new feature
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 7:Or an integration, it's gonna the first thing it needs to do is actually crawl through the content to figure
Speaker 3:out how it's done. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so to kind of tie it back into the LEGO kit assembly manual, if you're tasked and AI to go do it, the first thing it's going to need to do is to read that instruction manual.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And so we view the change of content out there not so much like a platform or like a website like it used to be Mhmm. But like a crucial part of infrastructure for agents to understand how to implement, how to understand the world, and how to even maybe even surface like, you know, whether or you use your product
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Because of what it knows.
Speaker 1:How how do you think about that? I mean, you have some huge customers, like the biggest companies in the world. At the same time, like random, like, people that don't even have a business are, vibe coding software. And Yeah. Do they need to be releasing developer documentation?
Speaker 1:Will they be your customers in the future? Like Yeah. Is the long tail gonna get longer or or fatter? Yeah. Or or or or do you think this is is you're gonna stay focused on enterprise consolidation, like the really, really high traffic, the important endpoints that get pulled off the shelf from agents consistently?
Speaker 7:Yeah. That's a really good question. What we're seeing is a bit of both. Mhmm. So while it's more important to optimize for, like, the heavy hitters
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Because those products are getting more usage than ever before
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And to make sure that they're really well optimized for agents. It is also equally important for, like, your next two person, you know, YC startup or your billion dollar one person company to make sure their product is also out there. Mhmm. Because in the age of AI where agents are making the decision
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:How well it understands how your product works, right, is what informs of it of, like, whether or not you use your product at
Speaker 3:all. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And so discoverability, right, making sure that your content is out there, available, is just more important than ever, especially in the age of where software is, you know, starting to get commoditized as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened?
Speaker 7:Yes. We raised series b.
Speaker 3:How much?
Speaker 2:How much?
Speaker 3:$45,000,000 and $5,000,000 valuation. Congratulations.
Speaker 7:Fantastic. I'm honored.
Speaker 1:I got the gong. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 2:Last question for me. How how did you answer the SaaSpocalypse question? Obviously, you guys were using a bunch of AI. You're building agents. I feel like that must have come up during the round and I'm sure you had a good answer because you put it together.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Of course. So what we fundamentally view is that the SaaS apocalypse is fundamentally more of an enabler for us than anything else.
Speaker 2:As
Speaker 7:more products gets built because software is actually you know, the cost of barriers is is cheaper these days, things like discoverability, how well you expose your content out there is just far more important than ever. Right? And this influx of companies being created, companies being out there and making sure that they expose their information out to the world and agents has kind of what we've seen in our data, this massive tailwind of adoption for our product. And now if we're here saying that, like, you know, most of the viewers of your products or how to use your product or agents, you know, like, having every company enable that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Is, you know, what we've seen as kind of just this big tailwind and explosion of of of use across the board. And especially since Netlify as a company have taken this developer first approach into building docs, it actually was really beneficial for agents in actually spinning these things up faster than ever before as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. More more companies pulling it off the shelf and not and and not Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's more software companies and then also an agent can just use MintLify Yeah. To build docs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 7:And I think the really important thing to note is like even from the ground level, we've only seen the adoption of our product go up Mhmm. Significantly in the age of agents.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 7:And I think as more companies, you know, have more competing priorities and just more things to do in the SaaS apocalypse, I actually think the build arguments is actually stronger than ever before to preserve focus
Speaker 3:Yeah. For what really matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Your I gotta say your customer page is absolutely stacked. You got Coinbase, AT and T, Cognition Browser Base, Anthropic, Fidelity, Kalshi, Decagon, Flavable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's everybody.
Speaker 2:PayPal, Perplexity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this is a good definition of like, you know, you're an ad Reply. Company if you're accelerating revenue Save in
Speaker 5:the ad
Speaker 2:For sale. Evolution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Axe. Yeah. Wow. Amazing.
Speaker 2:You're gonna run out of companies soon. That's the barricade. You're gonna run out of customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like the design language there where the logos we'll have to pull it up. But the the the the logos have, like these generated images behind them that have this, very cohesive style, but they all have slightly different flavors to each Yeah. Each logo. I I really like the design.
Speaker 1:I thought it stuck out.
Speaker 2:Awesome. All really Great to meet you, Han. Chat loves you too. Yeah. Thanks for putting up, for our sound effects.
Speaker 7:Alright. Thanks so much guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good day. Alright. We gotta close.
Speaker 2:Gotta close out.
Speaker 1:Farm people who are doing schizo edits now. It's in the timeline. 4,000 people liked it.
Speaker 2:I missed this.
Speaker 1:You you missed this one? Look at this. I I imagine this has
Speaker 2:the pig pageant.
Speaker 1:I I have seen people direct their pigs with the with the little guides. We
Speaker 2:have some SD kid here.
Speaker 1:Oh, it is SD kid. There we go. No. See, it sounds like in that genre, but the the background is crazy. The the rotoscoping is extremely sloppy, but that is the
Speaker 2:essence. Alright. Enough of that.
Speaker 1:So edit. Yeah. Gonna give
Speaker 2:you a headache.
Speaker 1:Enough of that. Enough of that.
Speaker 2:But TBPN is gonna wrap for today. Yes. But our friend Who is
Speaker 1:Warkesh Yes.
Speaker 2:Has Jensen on his show. Yes. And I'm gonna listen to that Yeah. On my way home.
Speaker 1:Go over there and listen to that. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM sharp.
Speaker 2:It's been an honor.
Speaker 1:Give us five stars. Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you Goodbye.
Speaker 2:We'll see you soon. Love you.