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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Thursday, 06/03/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology.
Speaker 1:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 2:The capital of capital. And we have some breaking news. Soham Parikh, he's he was fired multiple times yesterday, I believe. He's been fired many times
Speaker 1:the to be fired by five startups, five plus startups in a day.
Speaker 2:In a day. In a day.
Speaker 1:Was The positive news, any
Speaker 2:Timeline exploded.
Speaker 1:Any companies that he works for that are predominantly on LinkedIn Yep. He's safe for at least a week. Another payroll cycle Yeah. Will come through.
Speaker 2:For sure. And so there's a big debate raging. Is he a scammer? Is he a misunderstood builder? How wrong?
Speaker 2:What was what he did? The headline here, India based engineer is accused of juggling multiple jobs and misleading wise
Speaker 1:Is his job done,
Speaker 2:sir? Startups. He defends his passion for building and lands a new role in a video AI startup after online backlash. Yeah. Break it down.
Speaker 1:Atlas says they hated Soham because he was profitable.
Speaker 2:Probably was extremely profitable.
Speaker 1:It is wild to think, you know, if if five plus companies came out yesterday
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, you know, realized they were all employing him. How many others was he was he is he actively working for that just didn't happen to pop up on x that day?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The only it seems like the what do they call it in manufacturing where there's like the the single rate limiting piece of equipment is the one that you need to like build everything else around. It it basically like there's some choke point and for him it was probably like stand ups. And so could he do 10 stand ups and Stop.
Speaker 2:At the same time? Stop. It's hard to juggle those. Yeah. But I mean it seems like he got the numbers up there.
Speaker 1:I bet you his TC was on average significantly higher than the ARR of the companies that he would work with.
Speaker 2:Wait. Oh, his personal TC across all of the jobs. Grouped. Which you put as over 2,000,000.
Speaker 1:Over 2,000,000 is
Speaker 4:my estimate.
Speaker 2:I was thinking over one.
Speaker 1:That's 5. That's five. Let's say, like, t t c 200 k
Speaker 2:Are we we thinking cash on equity or were
Speaker 1:we accounting the equity as The thing is he interviewed very well.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think pretty universally people were impressed by him. Yep. He could easily go in and get, you know, 180 k
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:For, know, cash comp and then you add some equity into that. I mean, the big question, Matt from Anti Metal who had hired him over Yeah. Two years ago said that he was joking about how much equity he'd actually left on the table over the years because probably unlikely that he was hitting the cliff Yep. These companies. That wasn't really the strategy.
Speaker 1:He out so quickly. The new CS grads called They are poor poor CS grads. SOHAM getting all of the jobs.
Speaker 2:Well, the market is ripping. Wow. Bitcoin's almost at $1.10. $1.10 a $110,000. So we are in white suits to celebrate the jobs news and the market news.
Speaker 2:We'll be doing a deep dive on the news and doing our normal interviews in just a minute, but we believe we have Soham Parikh joining the show in about four minutes. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we can go through
Speaker 2:this, but we will keep you up to date. Hopefully it happens.
Speaker 1:We can go through some other posts.
Speaker 5:We have
Speaker 1:a post here from Anna Mostaruk. She says the tech industry needs a are we dating the same guy group. These are groups that pop up on on Facebook and things like that where people coordinate and and see if you know, girls see if they're they're dating the same guy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Clearly, we needed something like that
Speaker 1:or we needed I think the big question that that we were kind of debating is, you know, was he, you know, a lot of these companies don't typically have something in their in their offer letter that says, you legally cannot have other w two income.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a big question. Yet,
Speaker 1:he probably was signing full time
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Job offers. Who knows, you know.
Speaker 2:So we'll have to dig in dig into it with him. But we believe he's here in the studio with us here. So welcome to the stream. Soham, good to meet you. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:There he is.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Thanks so much for joining.
Speaker 6:Welcome to show.
Speaker 2:Why don't you why don't you introduce yourself and just take a few minutes to just give us what's going on in your world? What's the last twenty four hours been like? How would you describe yourself? What what what do you have to say to people? And then I'm
Speaker 1:sure Let's go back to the very beginning. Who are you?
Speaker 3:Where do
Speaker 1:you come from?
Speaker 6:I mean, I'm, you know, I'm originally from Mumbai. I kind of grew up, you know, here all my life. Obviously, drove into computer science, like, you know, coding and everything kind of without a choice, kind of process of elimination. Fell in love with it, you know. As you're aware, at this point, I'm like everyone's, like, favorite founding engineer pretty much or work for 17 or whatever you might call it, like AI bot or so home as a service.
Speaker 6:I don't know. Yeah. But yeah. Don't have much to my story, essentially. You know, I've just been always passionate about, you know, building
Speaker 3:What was
Speaker 2:your first job?
Speaker 6:My first job was actually at a company called Allen. It was like a voice assisted, like, conversational startup. Okay. You know, this is back in, like, 2020, 2021.
Speaker 1:2020. And when did you come to The States? Because I know I was talking to Matt, and he said you you would go to the anti metal off sites, and and you're very much a part of the team.
Speaker 6:So to be honest, in my my you know, I have family in the East Coast. The first time I ever visited US was in 2018, and then I was supposed to do grad school there. You know, different financial circumstances, couldn't do that. Had to kind of, like, you know, not go with that with that plan. But, obviously, you know, I have visited, you know, America mostly for, like, off sites and stuff just to catch up with team members and things like that.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the main claim that was levied against you on X yesterday kinda started with Suhail over at Playground. He accused you of working at multiple jobs simultaneously. Is that true?
Speaker 6:It is true. And yeah. I I would, you know, love to add color to it, but, you know, that is true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts, or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?
Speaker 6:I mean, honestly, I think going back to, like, how it even, like, started to happen and what the motivations were
Speaker 2:Yeah. Please.
Speaker 6:Would probably have you know, obviously, I I would wanna, like, preface with saying, like, I'm not proud of what I've done. You know, that's not something that I endorse either. But, you know, financial circumstances, essentially, like, no one really likes to work one forty hours a week. Right? But I had to do with this kind of out of necessity.
Speaker 6:Like, I was in extremely, like, dire financial circumstances and somehow, like, you know, I don't I'm not a very people person. I I don't share much in terms of, like, what's going on with my life and
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 6:Kind of in my internal thought process, you know, was kind of, like, getting more stressed with, hey. You know, I wanna, like, come out of the situation. What should I do? So it's more it was not more so kind of loud greed, but essentially, like, necessity. And just, like, thought that if I work, like, multiple places, you know, like, I can basically, like, help myself, like, alleviate the situation I was in much faster.
Speaker 2:No. It's very economically rational. What about the conjecture that that you had as a team of junior developers underneath you helping you actually accomplish the tasks. Is there any truth to that?
Speaker 6:I wish I had the money, and I wish that was true, but that is not true. Really? Any of the founders that, you know, I worked with can vouch for that. I have multiple locations, like, where I program with people. Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, I've written every single inch of the code. You know, Antimet is one of the companies I worked at. Yeah. You know, they have pretty high bar for design as you might know. They did a launch recently.
Speaker 6:You know, there were two occasions where, you know, just before the launch, like, you know, the the contractor who was going to do the front end for us essentially had bailed out and Oh, interesting. We as a team had to figure out and do everything, which was a team of only three engineers. Right?
Speaker 1:So so how did it originally happen though? You started with one job in 2020 then you realized, hey, I could add another and then you realized you could just continuously add them. Did you create any type of financial models to kinda model out potential churn as you would get, you know I'm curious if you were operating this looking at as basically a SaaS business, the SaaS of Soham.
Speaker 6:This was this was not a business to me. Every company that I've worked with, I have deeply cared about, like, you know. And again, people who spend, you know, a a lot of time with me can, like, back that on multiple locations. The and again, I do not have any financial model. The like I said, the only motivation for me was, hey.
Speaker 6:You know, I'm in a financial jeopardy. Mhmm. You know? And so I didn't do this until 2022. 2022 is actually when I was, you know, running into issues.
Speaker 6:I had deferred my, you know, grad school
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Admit and, you know, did, an online degree, but basically, you know, did not have, like, enough, you know, like, essentially, like, you know, just to get out of the situation I was in.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 6:Don't wanna talk, like, too much deeply about it. But No.
Speaker 2:No. That's fine.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So that's
Speaker 1:Talk about talk about your own talk about your own abilities. Every it it seemed universal that the the the teams that you worked on said that you were extremely talented, that you interviewed incredibly well. It's, you know, easy for, you know, new CS grads to be frustrated because you're probably running laps around them in the interview process. But but, yeah, it's very impressive if you actually didn't have a junior team and you were just, you know, juggling, you know. It seems estimates seem to put it at maybe five five companies at once.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you just are you just like hyper productive? Are you leveraging AI tools and coding assistance? Are you just able to move really quickly in a startup environment? Or are you also, like, talented at, like, systems engineering and algorithms and, like, solving really, really hard computational prog problems?
Speaker 6:So I'll preface with this. You know, some of these companies I worked at was before the Copilot boom. Right? There were no AI assisted programming. At least three startups have went on the record, like, saying this.
Speaker 6:People who've proved fair program that we can also watch with this. But the real truth is, you know, there's this funny line in some of my intramers, like, TLDR. I don't do anything outside coding. That is very true. And if you're, like, spending hours, like, you know, sitting in front of the computer, you will eventually, like, at least at home, so, like, get good at it.
Speaker 6:I I I would there's obviously a lot for me to learn in general. You know, I wouldn't say, like, I'm, you know, like a a I don't know what they call, like, you know, like a platform engine or something like, you know, shop principal or whatever. But I I would like to believe that I I was a decently enough a good enough engineer to essentially be able to work at two places because that's the only thing I did the entire day.
Speaker 3:So so
Speaker 6:for them.
Speaker 2:Average day for you an average week for you, it feels like, basically, maybe you sleep for six to eight hours, and then you're basically programming
Speaker 4:I have for twelve to
Speaker 2:fourteen hours every single day for seven days a week.
Speaker 1:But as as some of these, you know, new coding code gen tools came out, Claude code, cursor, Devon, etcetera, were did you feel like you could add maybe a few more jobs? Were you getting, you know, more efficient Or do you still handcrafted code, farm to table, organic, you know, handmade?
Speaker 6:I mean, like, know, having more, like, you know, AI assisted tooling, like, definitely help, but it did not amount to, like, me working on more jobs. Mhmm. Because, like, I would still love to spend, you know, a justifiable hour, like, working on something, and it doesn't have, like, a measure. It's not like, hey. You know, I'm gonna split time, like, four hours for this company, first, for that company.
Speaker 6:Like, I was essentially, like, working until got something done for that day. And I think people around me will probably say this, that I am notoriously known for not sleeping. I am, you know, I'm a serial, like, non sleeper at this point is what I would say.
Speaker 2:In zodiac.
Speaker 6:But yeah. And as far as the interviews go, right, like, so one there there's also been a lot of things around, like, hey. Know, I probably used, you know, some sort of, like, tool, like, Cluely, which, you know, I would love for the founder to essentially go on record and say if I'm a paying customer, I'm not. But or or some sort of, like, you know, hack to game the system. The truth is a lot of these companies did not have lead code style problems.
Speaker 6:And if they did, I would have bumped interviews, you know, because I don't practice lead code as much. I'm I know my data structures well. I know what to use when, but, you know, like, typically a gun
Speaker 3:Well, you're also great at cold email. I saw some of these cold emails. You got
Speaker 1:a great format. It pulls people in. It it it shows your personality. It shows that you care about, you know, coding. And I think that helps a lot as well.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I do care about coding a lot. But again, like, you know, most of these companies essentially had a take home assessment or a work trial. Right? So it's very difficult to, like, game a work trial or game a take home assessment.
Speaker 6:Like, you have to do it and then deliver it. And I I did everything, you know, on my own. Like, I was also doing the work trials on my own. And Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, I guess I'll I'll leave it at that. If if they did have lead call, I would have bombed the interviews, but luckily, didn't. Like, startups usually just, like, care more about, like, working with you.
Speaker 2:About talk a little bit about the companies that you chose to work for you applied to. Do you think you could have pulled this off with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and split three times? Or do they have defenses in that would make this difficult? There's a variety of memes around maybe big tech companies. It's easier work.
Speaker 2:Maybe startups are harder. I'm just kind of curious about it seems like you went for a lot of startups. What was the reasoning behind that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So it feels counterintuitive. Like, if I was in dire need of money, like, why would I work for, you know, startups as opposed to big time? Because they clearly pay well. They have a nine to five schedule.
Speaker 6:For the most part, like, I would say, you know, people don't really care about, like, what you are essentially, like, doing. The thing with me is, like, if you're spending, you know, multiple hours a week, like, working on something, you would have to at least decently be passionate about it because otherwise, you'll just, like, burn out. Like I said, you know, each of these companies that I've worked for and again, you know, founders some of the founders who spent meaningful time with me can vouch, you know, would would say that I actually cared about these companies. So it wasn't, like, cold email without context. Like, I deeply read into what a company was doing, what their business model was, you know, who their customers were.
Speaker 6:I had great ideas about, like, you know, what to build for them, what not to build for them, you know, what the platform is like. You know, I did deliver, like, beyond engineering for a lot of these companies. And, yeah, like, it was more kind of like, hey. If I'm spending, like, one forty hours, like, I wanna do something that I actually care about. Like, I don't wanna, like, you know, do nine to five and kind of, like, center a dev in, like, six hours or something.
Speaker 6:You know, that's that's just not me because I do like what I do. And and and that's kind of
Speaker 1:Cold email hack. Send the cold emails from the heart. Put some real thought into them.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about other alternatives that you may be considered or maybe didn't. Did you ever think about going to a startup and saying like, hey, I'm doing a great job. I'm working forty hours a week. I need to make more money. I'd like to take on a second job.
Speaker 2:Would would would that be amenable to you? Do you think that founders might be actually open to that?
Speaker 1:Or say I'm working eighteen hours a day. Can you pay
Speaker 2:me Can you pay me three times as
Speaker 1:pay me
Speaker 2:I'm doing the work of three devs because there is a world where you could have allocated all that time and one startup would have gotten three times as much value but they probably should have paid you three times as much maybe to make that balance out. And so did you ever have those types of decisions like we're seeing this with the AI talent wars. The the 10 x engine you can think of yourself as like a three to five x engineering. No offense. But you know, the 100 x engineers are getting a 100,000,000
Speaker 1:Maybe be 10 x if you just if you really focus.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so and so it it it's almost a question of like why couldn't you get the money that you wanted from a single job? What was the what what was the what was the stumbling block there?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think the part where, you know, I should have basically done is, like, come clean with my situation. Mhmm. You know, to be very frank with you, like I mentioned, like, I'm not a good, you know, person with sharing what my internal conflicts are. I do like to keep boundaries between my personal and private, you know, like, whatever is, like, going with me mentally.
Speaker 6:And that's true with any person I'm with as well, like, know, that's outside of work. So one, there was an embarrassment to essentially, like, admitting that, hey. You know, I have this struggles mentally, you know, like Mhmm. And talk in open about it. And then the second thing is, you know, I really did not, like, think through this because, like I said, it was an action that was done more out of, like, desperation to get out of the situation I was in rather than, like
Speaker 2:I mean, the flip side here is that you you don't necessarily need to have something going on in your family to justify a $10,000,000 salary or a $1,000,000 salary. Like, LeBron James doesn't need to say, oh, like, you know, I have a sob story, and that's why I need $50,000,000 He's like, I'm delivering this value to you, and you should pay me the value that I'm creating. And so I'm wondering if you ever considered just coming to a founder and saying, like, I can do the job of three engineers, but you gotta pay me three times as much.
Speaker 6:Honestly, I it again feels counterintuitive. Like, I don't really care much about the money. I was really into it for building. So, like, greed was not, an incentive for me. Again, regardless of my financial circumstances, in most of these companies, I always took the lower, you know, pay a higher equity offer.
Speaker 6:Again, like, equity for me was not even, like, vested until I would make the move to US, which, like I said, you know, I was based out of India. So I had to go through a whole visa process in order to make that happen. So I wouldn't even be getting equity as long as my immigration was uncertain, which it was. Yeah. So all of the decisions seem counterintuitive.
Speaker 6:Basically, for me, it's like, hey, you know, I have to do something to kind of get out of the situation I'm in. I also wanna do spend time, like, building something meaningful. Mhmm. You know, as long as I like the startup and as long as it's not like hand to mouth Yeah. It did not matter too much like, you know.
Speaker 1:So what are you gonna do now? You have the intention of the entire tech ecosystem that and I appreciate how candid you've been Yeah. With us and and
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about dev shop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean there's a few angles here. You could do the the dev shop of Soham Parikh. I think you would be able to get a handful of clients immediately. Yep.
Speaker 1:I think you could sign a max out max out contract with Cluely. They would probably pay you a pretty penny to to join the team over there. And I also, it sounds like you're interested in joining as a founding engineer of a new AI startup. So how are you thinking about your opportunities right now and and how can you turn this into a win?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Look like I've, you know, regardless of the situation, like, I've been privileged to, like, work for some of these companies like, you know, Antimetral, you know, shares and the founders, like Sync Labs, you know, Pradi, you know, They're one of the most, you know, grad places I've been at in general, partly because they had me maybe not. I don't know. I can stand with that. But I think the main thing is, like, I am really excited about what I'm gonna be a part of next.
Speaker 6:So, you know, I'm working with a company called Darwin. They are essentially, like, building a new, like, AI driven, like, data plat like, you know, video platform essentially for Mhmm. More kind of, like, you know, UGC style media. And we're gonna release to the market very shortly. This is the only thing I'm going to focus on.
Speaker 6:I think, you know, they've put a bet on me. I have a
Speaker 3:lot to prove, and there's there's not a lot to me to say. So yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you rebuild trust? How do you how do you give them the confidence that this isn't just you're focused on it for a couple weeks and then the second job creeps in and then the third job creeps in? Is there something that you see happening down the down the line around, you know, worker monitoring or or checking when the GitHub commits are coming in or doing something to understand if someone else is is is working multiple places. Somebody was saying we like, tech needs a, like, a some sort of service to see, hey. Are we employing the same company?
Speaker 2:How do you how do you rebuild trust and and guarantee that you won't be working multiple jobs against the will of the current employer?
Speaker 6:So I I think, like, you know, all all of this that has taught me is, like, you know, just coming to kinda, like, probably under makes people understand your situation. After all, like, we all are humans. I don't anticipate, like, working on multiple gigs again, but, you know, my financial circumstances have not changed. So if even if it did came to them, which it won't, like, right now I'm very clear that this is my sole focus. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know, I would probably, like, approach with, like, being very candid with the founders and just letting them know. And if that's not a possibility, you know, that's fine. You know, maybe I can figure a way out where, you know, there is, like, a higher pay or whatever. Kinda like your point. Right?
Speaker 6:Mhmm. But in in in another spectrum of the world, I think, like, what I've really realized is that I just, you know, I just wanna be a part of, like, building something that I can, like, focus on a longer term. And that's always been the goal. You know, it is always a goal with any of these companies I worked with. So, you know, I obviously, you know, like, I I I believe in actions more than words.
Speaker 6:Like, I guess what we'll build and launch in a month would probably be a testament to, you know, what we've been able to build.
Speaker 1:Well, you're certainly gonna have a lot of attention around that launch. I hope you now is probably not the right time to renegotiate renegotiate your your offer letter for the new company. You should probably, you know, stick with it. But I think you're gonna bring a lot of marketing value to to Darwin, the new company you're joining. What's the reaction been like at home?
Speaker 1:You getting a lot of messages from from
Speaker 2:Has this broken tech acts and broken containment into kind of your your your world beyond just people asking you about this?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, reaction is natural. Like, a ton of people have been asking about this. What's also funny is, like, you know, some of the memes, like I I am very new to Twitter. I joined Twitter yesterday.
Speaker 6:So this was a lesson for me in social media in general. Like, I am not a social media person. So it just like I was, like, you know, very old and with it in general. Obviously, you know, feeling shitty about it as well. Like, I like I said, you know, I'm not a proud very proud of what I did.
Speaker 6:I think there was a way where I could have course corrected in in a much different manner. So there's a lot of, like, reflection in general, but I think friends and family have been strong. You know, like I said, I was lucky to work at some of these places where I had really close relationships with the founders. I know a lot of them reached out, you know, they to essentially be, like, helpful here, kind of give advice on what I should be doing next. Even, like, know, sometimes, like, staying through with with me like, you know, just to make sure that I'm like, You know, like
Speaker 1:No. I think it says a lot that that a a number of the people that that you work for that fired you Yeah. Because you're working multiple jobs still care about you. It shows that when you were working for them at least, you know, that that it does seem like you really you really did care.
Speaker 2:Are there any startups that you've worked for in the past that you were working multiple jobs for that you haven't gotten a chance to apologize to yet that you plan to?
Speaker 6:I mean, in general, like, plan to apologize to everyone. Like, that's that goes without saying. Any
Speaker 1:companies that you still need to resign from?
Speaker 6:None whatsoever. I mean, it's the only focus I have.
Speaker 3:That's great.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. He's on the record. You're on the right path.
Speaker 2:On the right path.
Speaker 7:Well, I'm
Speaker 2:rooting for you. I I I hope this is a story of redemption. I believe in forgiveness. I believe So mistakes and I'm I'm I'm optimistic that this can have a good ending.
Speaker 1:Me too. So to be clear, your ex account is at real Soham Parikh. Right? Yeah. That's the real one?
Speaker 1:That's the real one. Because there's lot of fake ones floating out there trying to take trying to ride the hype wave. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, a 100%. There there's been so many fake accounts and lot of fake narratives as well. But, yeah, that is my real account. There's there's one person who asked me to post a picture of banana on my head with a fork in my hand.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And I did not have banana at my home at that point in time, but I was trying to do that just to show the Perfect. Perique.
Speaker 3:Okay. Yep.
Speaker 6:But it's it's been it's been interestingly, like, in a while to, like, notice how people are, like, taking this in different ways. But, yeah, that kind of helps, like, just feel a little bit less less shitty about it. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what what are the the questions here? Remote versus in office, US versus international,
Speaker 3:AI Yeah. I mean, I think
Speaker 1:we we had a post from a mod at at Mercury. I think I think the reason this set struck such a chord is, you know, again, it's this remote angle, the international angle, the ideas around a 10 x engineer, the potential of new AI tools. But this has been really helpful.
Speaker 3:It's been very And
Speaker 1:I think you were getting You provided entertainment for a lot of people the last twenty four hours. So I'm glad to hear that you're gonna apologize to everybody that that you misled. I am excited to follow what you do next.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks for stopping by.
Speaker 6:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk soon. Bye. Fascinating. Fascinating. I think he's handling it quite well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I do think this is a situation where the damage is hopefully minimal to the companies. It's not it's not like he was working multiple jobs and then there was like a, you know, the customer database leaked because he wrote bad code because he was working multiple jobs too stressed out. There's no there's no one alleging that yet at least that we've seen.
Speaker 1:And I think the founders that hired him and then fired him in general
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably noticed it pretty quickly. Sure. This is not like somebody joining a big tech company and working there for five years
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Not doing any work and just sort of like being a cog in the machine. Yep. And so, yeah. Ultimately, it's unfortunate Silicon Valley runs on trust. Yes.
Speaker 1:He violated that trust. But I was happy to see that he was, you know, really apologetic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's the thing about the startup ecosystem. Like we did like Silicon Valley has really really leaned into the trust thing to the point where a venture capitalist can shake your hand and say I'm gonna invest a million dollars and the expectation is that they actually do that. And they don't back out. If they do back out, it's it's a big thing. It's a big deal.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, even even though, you know, I don't know how I don't know how ironclad every work contract is. Like, we were going back and forth on, like, does is there a specific no moonlighting clause that describes exactly what you can do in your free time? And can you go do DoorDash or Uber Eats on the side? Or can you take a, you know, you know, can you earn an ex creator pay pay share, like rev share? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like does that count as moonlighting? You're posting, you're making
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:$200 or a thousand bucks from x. Is that moonlighting? You know, maybe there's something cost All very different. But people know what full time means. And if I send you an offer, I'm I'm offering you a full time job.
Speaker 2:I'm expecting you not to take another full time job. Like, maybe, yeah, maybe, you know, someone throws you $50 to, you know, walk their dog once, you know, once on the random on the weekend. But the idea is that you're not taking a very similar job in another company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It seems pretty clear even if there's no major like legal ramifications. So I don't know. He seems he seems like he's he's handling it well and and and going on the the correct apology tour and there could be the good ending here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lulu said, come clean. Be sorry. He did that. Be willing to laugh at yourself, embrace a good meme.
Speaker 1:Yep. Worker 17. Did that. Feed the curiosity. What was it like?
Speaker 1:What did you learn? Don't sugarcoat. I thought it was interesting that that he would have been hilarious if he came out and said, oh yeah, I'm running you know, 10 Codex agents, I'm running Devon, I'm using Claude Code. Was just like, no, I just worked really hard. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't do anything other than
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It is always tough with this stuff because you know, like somebody who would lie about working multiple jobs might just come on here and lie to us. But he seemed he seemed he seemed sincere. And so I'm I'm I'm inclined to believe that he is an insomniac and just was working three jobs forty hours a week each.
Speaker 2:And that's a hundred and twenty hours and that's, you know, Morgan Stanley Investment Bank associate. Yeah. You know, work. But it does raise this question of like like there are people out there who are willing to work a hundred hours and if they go to Wall Street they get comped on that immediately. And startups don't really have a mechanism.
Speaker 1:Not necessarily immediately.
Speaker 2:But but the the comp and the expectation is matched and and like I think Wall Street has like absorbed that that latent demand for work and capacity of young people who are down to grind basically. And they can choose to opt out of it and get getting a different job, but they kind of know what they're going into. Like, no one no one no one shows up at Goldman Sachs and is like, oh my god. I had no idea I was gonna have to like do a slide deck on Saturday. Right?
Speaker 2:But in startups, like, there's kind of this like, hey, we're we have this, you know, good work culture. It's kinda chill. Let's, you know, do forty hours a week. But then, you know, also there's no real way to make three times as much if you're willing to work three times as hard. So, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. It's an interesting story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And to be honest, he he posted yesterday. He said, there's a lot being said about me right now. Most of you don't know the full story. If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I love to build.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Which I do believe. Mhmm. He said, that's it. I've been isolated, written off and shut out by nearly everyone I've known and every company I've worked at.
Speaker 1:That doesn't feel completely true because he's Yeah. In conversation with the CEOs that had hired him. Yeah. But building is the only thing I've truly known and it's what I'll keep doing. Earlier today, the timing of this is amazing.
Speaker 1:Earlier today, I signed an exclusive founding deal to be founding
Speaker 2:engineer
Speaker 1:I'm
Speaker 2:sorry.
Speaker 1:At one company and one company They were the only ones willing to bet on me at this time. I actually think there's a lot of companies that would take a bet on him now. Yeah. And it just has to be, you have to promise Yes. Me that you're gonna work for this, just for us.
Speaker 2:Exclusively.
Speaker 1:And and I think the right thing to do for this next company is try to bring him out to SF or wherever
Speaker 2:they're For sure.
Speaker 1:Because he will probably spend eighteen hours a day in the office.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's so much easier to deal with a with a known unknown or like a known risk factor. It's the devil you know. Like forever this will follow him as like hey monitor this guy make sure he's not working a second If
Speaker 1:you scroll down on this post he says, I'm pissed and I've got something to prove. It's like
Speaker 2:He had a very aggressive posting style and he came on
Speaker 1:and was very
Speaker 2:like sweet and nice and just like kind of contrite.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Seems like he got in a bad spot. He made some bad decisions. Yeah. He's sorry about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he's now got something to prove. Yeah. And he's now infamous.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Infamous. Well, that's a
Speaker 2:fun story. I'm glad we were able to get him on and cover it. That's that's part of the beauty of the show. Live, baby. Anyway Newsmaxing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that provides some good closure to this chapter of the timeline.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have a million messages coming in from various sources. I can go through a little bit of the stories if you want. Gotta ring the gong, though, because The US economy added a 147,000 new jobs. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Manufacturers are It's a it's a it's like a a very very slight job speed. It's not actually that big of news, but we're very excited. Joe Wiesenthal has a post in the stack somewhere where he says
Speaker 1:Breaking. It's a beat. A 147,000 new jobs. Unemployment rate falls to 4.1% last month revised higher. Analysts had expected a 106 k new jobs and a 4.3% unemployment rate.
Speaker 1:So we love to see it. Stark contrast with the calls from our president to reduce rates. Yep. If if jobs report is good Yeah. It's hard to argue to drop them.
Speaker 2:So manufacturers are pausing hiring amid tariff uncertainty while unemployment fell partly because fewer people are looking for work. So that's never a good sign, but it does seem like the the American consumer seems resilient and things are, we're we're we're staying in the kangaroo market. We're neither we're neither you know, it's not so over, but we're maybe not so back just yet. We're kind of, right back where we started at the beginning of the year in terms of the stock market rates. Anyway, the CEO of Ford had a controversial quote in the Wall Street
Speaker 1:Journal. AGI pilled.
Speaker 2:He's AGI pilled. He's been talking to Dario over anthropic. Clearly. The so the CEO of of Ford said, AI will replace, quote, literally half of all white collar workers, which is something that was definitely said on Dwarkesh Patel first. I think, Sholto might have mentioned that, and then mentioned it in the post as well.
Speaker 2:And, Anthropic's been kind of noodling on this, and then, OpenAI and Meta have kind of stayed back from that. And a lot of the other labs have kind of said like, I don't know. Like, you know, Dario I think the quote from Sam was like, Dario is a scientist. Like, you should apply more scientific rigor here to, like, do this prediction. Like, this is a
Speaker 1:very jar of Yeah. Was Brad like cap over
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Brad Brad like cap. At OpenAI. At OpenAI. Was pushing back a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But look, the when he was making these comments, he was also talking about just how advanced Xiaomi and these other Chinese EV manufacturers are. So this was coming from a broader conversation. Yeah. AI Sure. A good, you know, ultimately, whether or not he actually believes this is true, he's signaling to the market that he's he's on top of this trend.
Speaker 1:Yep. And if this does turn out to be the case, it's very possible that, you know, Ford will will be a beneficiary in some way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 2:it's a it's it's tough business. And I'm sure he's looking to the Chinese manufacturers and looking at their their cog structure and their and their s g and a spend relative to revenue and and seeing how they can benchmark. Not that not that the Chinese EV manufacturers are necessarily adopting AI any faster than Ford, but it's certainly the idea of, like, how the shape of the business will be A little bit.
Speaker 1:They do, like, facial recognition tech. That's true. I think it will, like, you walk up to your car Yeah. Unlock
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. For you. Think there's a story about the Ford CEO dailying a Chinese car just to get a taste of, like, okay. We need to step it up a of different ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In other news There's no reason that that Ford can't catch up on these type of things.
Speaker 2:Right? In other news, we have a massive story out
Speaker 1:of Huge story.
Speaker 2:United Kingdom, folks. Britain's royals gave up their luxury train citing fiscal restraint. This was sent to us by a friend. In an era of hard choices for economies around the world, Britain's royal family is also playing up its part, waving farewell to perhaps its most extravagant mode of transport. The royal train, the House of Windsor's personalized service that chugs the royals to engagements will be axed in 2027 after a review concluded that it no longer offered value for money and that two new helicopters
Speaker 1:Nothing is sacred anywhere. I know. Nothing is sacred
Speaker 3:anywhere.
Speaker 2:Their train. The locomotive service, which features bedroom compartments, a dining room, and a study has has been a lightning rod for anti monarchy campaigners who pointed to its costs as emblematic of royal excess.
Speaker 1:Shows the power of democracy that
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That we have anti monarchy
Speaker 2:You be a king with a private train anymore. What's happening to the world? It's ridiculous. You know, royal excess, what is royalty if not excessive? It it it's the brand.
Speaker 2:It's it's terrible. Last year, King Charles the third undertook a 190 mile rail trip to the capital from England's East Midlands, which was billed at nearly $62,000. It's like the price of a Model s.
Speaker 1:Wait. The the trip was 62?
Speaker 2:It was a 190 mile rail trip on a private train car. And so they have to staff it. They have to float load it up with fuel and food and all this different stuff and the study has Does that
Speaker 1:not strike you as I mean, it's it's a it's
Speaker 2:$62,000 for a 190 miles.
Speaker 1:A hard But but a 190 miles, it's across maybe a few days.
Speaker 2:Probably bringing multiple people too.
Speaker 1:Having meetings on there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that's a 100 people
Speaker 1:Cheaper than, you know, taking a a zipping around in a in a PJ, that whole thing.
Speaker 2:Well, they well, a review by the government concluded that to buying two new helicopters would be a relative a reliable alternative. So a viable alternative.
Speaker 1:What about safety though? I I have to imagine trains have a better safety
Speaker 2:I would think so. I would think so. James Chalmers, who manages the royal finances as keeper of the privy purse, said the decision to halt
Speaker 1:the personal train would be the
Speaker 2:fondest of farewells. Yes. This is the Wall Street Journal. In moving forwards, we must not be bound by the past, he added. Rough.
Speaker 2:This kind of public fiscal self flagellation is nothing new to the British monarchy, which is often at pains to point out its value to UK taxpayers who bankroll the franchise. The late Queen Elizabeth the second gave up the royal yacht in the nineteen nineties in the name of financial prudence. But this latest decision is all the more surprising given that the royal family's finances are arguably stronger than they've ever been in modern times. The royal train
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for the royal family's finances.
Speaker 2:The royal family's finances. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Ramp I don't I don't think ramps in in in The UK yet, but No. They they they'll be able to get to the next level, obviously Sure. When when that happens.
Speaker 2:The royal train will stop rolling for the first time since Queen Victoria first commissioned coaches to be pulled by a locomotive in the eighteen sixties, the train's importance in an age of air travel has repeatedly come into question. Once the train is mothballed, Charles, who has long advocated protecting the environment, will instead use two newly leased helicopters that run on sustainable aviation fuel. The train will be taken out on one more tour of Britain before it is retired and can be placed on display. So RIP to the royal train.
Speaker 1:The royal
Speaker 2:Hopefully, it makes it come back at some point. Yeah. I think American Train. You know, the Royals are backing off. Let's get an American Train.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is actually could be bullish for trains because them them shutting it down Yes. Creates an opportunity for them to start it back up, which would be a positive catalyst for for the train.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. I agree. Well, you mentioned ramp. Time is money.
Speaker 2:Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, a whole lot more all in one If you're trying to expense train trips, do it on ramp.
Speaker 3:The way to do it on
Speaker 2:ramp travel, baby. Ramp travel. What else is going on in the news? JPMorgan is revamping its bank for the super rich to cater to global clientele. David Frame named global head of private bank, helping deep pocketed clients invest more abroad.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh, there's also a big news.
Speaker 1:Not very American.
Speaker 2:No. Not very American. But Ilya Sutzkever has issued a statement on Daniel Gross with super Safe Super Intelligence. So Ilya Wrights, of course, the OpenAI cofounder now at SSI, says I sent the following message to our team and investors. As you know, Daniel Gross's time with us has been winding down.
Speaker 2:And as of June 29, that's three, four days ago, he is officially no longer a part of SSI. We are grateful for his early contributions to the company and wish him well in his next endeavor. I am now formally seeing
Speaker 1:you the lines. Do we think he hit his cliff?
Speaker 2:I don't know. When did SSI start? Probably one year cliff or your best. You think it went default? I don't know.
Speaker 1:When was SSI founded? 1970. Scuba schools international.
Speaker 2:Wow. Super intelligence has not arrived in Jordi's web browser just yet.
Speaker 1:Oh, he hit it. He may have hit his cliff. It was founded 06/19/2024.
Speaker 3:No way. But it's
Speaker 1:very possible this was resolved prior to that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely dog.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Elias says, am now formally CEO of SSI and Daniel Levy is president. The technical team continues to report to me. You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through.
Speaker 1:He's a missionary. We have the compute. We have the team. We know what to do. Together, we will keep building safe super intelligence, Ilya.
Speaker 1:So DG has entered the trade portal and Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:The trade portal. I don't even know what that means. I've never heard that term before,
Speaker 3:but I understand that it's vaguely
Speaker 1:It's portal time.
Speaker 2:It's portal time.
Speaker 1:It's portal time. But anyways, the the rumor is that he's going to Meta, but we will have to see.
Speaker 2:Yep. Well, speaking of Meta, Nat Friedman officially posted that he has in fact joined Meta. This was rumored and and leaked multiple times. Yep. It seemed pretty pretty confident.
Speaker 2:Everyone seemed pretty confident in the reporting, But he has confirmed it. He said, I started work at Meta this week. This is Nat Friedman tweeting. My job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use. Using the application layer, baby.
Speaker 2:He's productizing.
Speaker 1:The app layer.
Speaker 8:We love
Speaker 2:it. I'm so excited for what he's gonna Will
Speaker 1:says, taking the balance sheet of the world's largest mega corp and using it to develop the technology to find Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant and other biblical artifacts is top tier stuff. Congrats, King. Ashley Vance says, if you're not hiring an intern to use ground penetrating radar to find the ancient first copies of Solaris buried under Building 12, I'll be disappointed.
Speaker 2:I love it. He says it won't happen overnight but a few days in I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead. Yeah. I posted something when when the news leaked that it's like it's 2026. I put on my meta quest for Llama open Instagram and pull up the latest Vesuvius scroll.
Speaker 2:Because I certainly hope this means more Nat Friedman side projects. Obviously, he's gonna be incredibly locked in. He has a huge task in front of him, catching up to the big labs. Yep. He's, you know, has an incredible team now, a lot of funding, but it is a big challenge.
Speaker 2:And I'd certainly hope that he has time for some side projects. I wonder what this means for AI Grant. I wonder what this means for the the rest of the Nat Friedman cinematic universe of of kind of cracked interns that have gone on to the the Nat Friedman diaspora is really illustrious at this point. Yep. Sort of sort of a new teal fellowship.
Speaker 1:So breaking news, the big beautiful bill has passed
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:The house. I had a poly market just about forty five minutes ago had it had rocketed up to 99%. It's now sitting at a 100%.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So Axios has the reporting. The house passed president's big beautiful bill Thursday. This article is from five minutes ago clearing the way for Trump to sign it by his July 4 deadline. It's a massive victory for speaker Mike Johnson who was able to flip dozens of members who had initially threatened to vote no as well as for Trump and senate republicans. The bill passed 218 to 214.
Speaker 1:Representatives Thomas Massey and Brian Fitzpatrick were the only Republicans to join all the Democrats in voting against the measure. Moderates and conservatives demanded adjustments after the senate made significant changes to the house version, but ultimately none were made. Several key holdouts flipped following meetings with the president at the White House, but a ground of of a group of hardliners needed more persuading. Anyways, so we will wait to see the the impacts of all of this. I'd be curious to get Zach Kukoff on maybe at the end of the show to just kind of break it down.
Speaker 2:We will be continuing to track the big beautiful bill. But if you're trying to design something big and beautiful, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com.
Speaker 2:Are loving
Speaker 1:the s one. Yes. Actually, loving it.
Speaker 2:Yes. Then they're going out
Speaker 3:of this.
Speaker 2:We gotta get Tanay on who does the s one deep dives for sure. We gotta do that. And if you're also in the s one deep dive business and you have an interesting take, hit us up. We'd love to have you on a chat about the Figma s one. Very interested in that.
Speaker 2:Anderol, Palmer Luckey has an update on the story about how many weapons from America are flowing to Ukraine. He is kind of giving his take and where he stands on this issue. So Andrei Jermak says, today, I remembered an early wartime meeting with Palmer Lucky. I remember I think I remember this photo or a photo like it going out at the early start of
Speaker 1:the war.
Speaker 2:Steady, kind, and clear like Tanjiro in the face of darkness. Grateful he chose to stand with Ukraine. His company's growth is proof. Good people build strong things. And Palmer chimes in and says, Anderil had people slash hardware Ukraine two weeks into the invasion.
Speaker 2:Our autonomous weapons have destroyed hundreds of millions of worth hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russia's war machine. The United States should give them the tools they need to win. It is the fastest path to peace one way or another.
Speaker 1:I had to look it up but Tanjiro is an anime or a manga? Tansaro. Manga Demon Slayer. So, Andre clearly knows
Speaker 2:his audience with
Speaker 1:that post. Luke Metro has a post here. So OpenAI came out yesterday and said, these OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood. We're not involved with this and do not endorse it.
Speaker 1:Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval. We did not approve any transfer. Please be careful. And Luke Metro says, what every CFO is thinking. Yeah.
Speaker 1:These tokenized shares on Robinhood are every startup CFO's newest headache. They are derivatives from what I know. So they're not it's not actual equity. It's closer to it, you know, something like prediction market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No one is more creative financially than secondary salesman.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you remember the whole Ford contract situation? This whole thing? Yeah. Yeah. You'd write that I mean, it's a derivative contract, but people were doing that for a while, and then that got banned.
Speaker 2:And I don't know how they're doing this one, but odd to
Speaker 1:Never bet against American financial But the interesting thing,
Speaker 2:what does this say about Robinhood? Says that they're not AGI built. Because if you truly believe that OpenAI is building God, you wouldn't wanna make God angry. So not AGI built, I guess. Something the conclusion?
Speaker 1:That could be one one conclusion.
Speaker 3:I think we need to we need to
Speaker 2:frame everything in the context of do you believe
Speaker 1:Every decision is how AGI, you know, you're just reading between the lines.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even even the even, you know, The UK is clearly not AGI pill because if we're approaching super abundance
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's your What's wrong with having a royal
Speaker 1:out how to operate the royal train
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Cheaper than, you know, walking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? This is this is very damaging for their brand. Yeah. Ford CEO though, AGI Pelt.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Let's get him on the show. Anyway, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your trust, out of your security and compliance process, and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway Head to the manager.
Speaker 2:Has some fantastic photos and Getty Images. He went through Getty Images and found some insane photos of Steve Jobs that I hadn't seen. I thought I'd
Speaker 1:seen He's watching.
Speaker 2:Photo. He's watching in
Speaker 1:the bottom right corner if we can pull this He's watching Larry Ellison game tape.
Speaker 2:I love it. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. He's really watching Allison just being like, okay. What's he saying? How am I gonna counter this?
Speaker 2:How am I gonna do that? I I assume.
Speaker 1:We're just learning from from one of the best.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Zoom in on the bottom right laying
Speaker 1:on the floor like you know deep in conversation or argument.
Speaker 2:No. No. I always get on the phone. I I I think he's just like he's just thinking. It just seems like he's on the he's just on he's just like exasperated like taking a second.
Speaker 1:They didn't have it's funny. I just assumed he had an iPhone up but the phones weren't that small.
Speaker 2:No. He invented the phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. They didn't have that.
Speaker 2:This is pretty You
Speaker 1:had to go through that to make the iPhone. Indeed. Speaking of hardware and jobs Mhmm. I have Reggie James new book here. It looks absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:I got it Thank last night. So, well, thank you for making it. I purchased it
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:To support Yeah. A fellow technology brother. But it is
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Absolutely fantastic portfolio company in there, daylight.
Speaker 2:That's very cool.
Speaker 1:Love to see it. And bunch of other features.
Speaker 2:There we go. I love these books.
Speaker 1:There nothing? Oh. We got nothing in there?
Speaker 2:No way. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very cool. Beautiful. Beautiful stuff.
Speaker 2:So go pick it up. What is it? Hardwarebook.com. Think was what he said.
Speaker 1:Hardwarebook2020four.
Speaker 2:Hardwarebook2024dotcom.
Speaker 1:It's sold out. So
Speaker 2:It's sold out, but I don't know. DM Reggie with something.
Speaker 1:He'll figure it out.
Speaker 2:And figure it out. Or it is But if you're trying to build a product, go to linear.com or linear.app?
Speaker 1:It's linear.app.
Speaker 2:Linear.app. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. And they got linear World's
Speaker 1:best team. The best teams use linear. They got cursor, per perplexity, retool, ramp, open AI, scale, boom, cash app, resell. You should be one of them.
Speaker 2:Kinda LeBron James of of product planning.
Speaker 1:Speaking of LeBron James, breaking news from Emily Sundberg. LeBron was in the Hamptons last week and needed somewhere to practice. Instead of going to some weird rich guy's home gym who who would have probably asked for photos afterwards, he turned to the most obvious solution, a high school and Emily interviewed a teenager who played pickup basketball with him. This is amazing. So, great story.
Speaker 2:Good for his brand too. Yeah. Just for all around.
Speaker 3:It's great for his brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like an it's an unexpected gift in unexpected time. Like, you played you're a teenager, you probably played basketball at this high school gym like, you know, every day for a couple months during basketball season, probably off season a little bit. And then all of a sudden, the greatest basketball player of all time, potentially. I don't know where you stand on the GOAT debate, Jordy, but he he just shows up, puts on a clinic.
Speaker 1:There's only one GOAT debate I care about.
Speaker 2:The best entrepreneur of
Speaker 1:all We have another post here from Jira at Jira tickets. Good morning. 10,000 new AI startups with cute little minimalistic names and logos just launched and they say they're gonna change everything. Please enjoy your timeline scroll. Just call me if you need anything.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 3:We have a post Is
Speaker 2:he just saying that there's a ton of AI startups launching every day on the timeline?
Speaker 1:Basically. And they're all gonna change everything, John.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:They're gonna they're gonna do their best.
Speaker 2:Names, logos. I feel like I feel like what's clogging up the timeline more is like, you know, people actually taking like the viral video seriously, like, and like breaking through. I I I don't see that many, like, cute little minimalistic names and logos that much. But I don't know. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess I guess it is a it is a paradox that there could be so many things that all that all change everything simultaneously.
Speaker 1:My my recommendation for Soham. We were on the drive in today. Were working on this. It's hard to see.
Speaker 2:Maybe text it to the group or put it in the tab.
Speaker 1:The Dev Shop of Soham Parikh.
Speaker 2:The Dev Shop of Last.
Speaker 1:And just flip the browser company logo. Yep. You're at $5,000,000 of ARR by the end of next week.
Speaker 2:I I really I really do think that I I I'm, you know, hopefully excited for him if he's going to this new video AI startup and he's working seriously on that and he's enjoys the founding engineer role there, rooting for him. But I do think the dev shop, he's teed up for something amazing. Like, I I think that that would be a fantastic business
Speaker 1:for Deeply aligned with the culture. Clearly loves building. Yeah. He got it over his skis, made some bad decisions Yes. Disappointed some people, maybe broke some rules.
Speaker 1:Yep. But if he just if he just, you know, stayed in Mumbai and found Yeah. 50 other guys like him and Exactly. And and he was the guy that that was onboarding clients, he would absolutely crush
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. Yeah. Onboarding clients would be
Speaker 1:huge for him. Likes juggling, bouncing around.
Speaker 2:Totally. And and I think most importantly, with this, like, the crazy viral attention that he got, I think he had a chance to kind of rewire people's brains on what it means to use a dev shop. Because using a dev shop feels very antithetical to, like, the way startups are built. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Like, you're like, it's a it's a sign that, like, you can't hire or you can't actually build.
Speaker 2:Like, you don't have a team on your like, aligned to you. But he is he has such an interesting story that I think a lot of people would would say, yeah. Let's get Soham on for, you know, the dev shop on for a quick sprint for three months. Seems to be good at good at that. He has a good team, and he could grow it from there.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. I'm I'm optimistic about that. I was surprised that that didn't it didn't seem like when we talked to him that it was even in his mind that he that he could do that. It also seemed like he hadn't considered just having a bidding war between the three jobs and saying, like, who can actually pay me more?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think
Speaker 2:there's a The equity thing
Speaker 1:was weird too. There's a bunch there's a bunch of teams right now where if you just said, I'm gonna work eighteen hours a day on your company, they would probably pay you 350 k.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, some There was something weird there was something weird about the fact that he's I I don't wanna talk about my personal life, but I have financial needs. But also, the I did wasn't doing it for the money. And actually, like, I cared about the equity. Because it's like, if you're really in, like, I have medical bills or something, you'd be like, cash now.
Speaker 1:No. The schizo take away is that, like, there's like, he's the mob, the the Mumbai mob is, saying, like
Speaker 2:Go get equity?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Like, go. You you you work for us kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure. But but in that case
Speaker 1:You would just max out the cash.
Speaker 2:Max out the cash. Right? Yeah. You max out the cash comp, and you and you try and go get one one job or multiple jobs that just pay all cash or as much cash as possible.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, I mean, we need to talk to more of the founders on the other side of It wasn't like
Speaker 1:he had this master plan of, I'm going to Sure. The takeaway from yesterday is, I was coming away and being like, Okay, if five people came out on X, are there 20 more on LinkedIn? Yep. And it's like this massive conspiracy that he was like master plan. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it didn't that wasn't my takeaway.
Speaker 2:We'll have to dig into it more and talk to more folks because it's totally possible that more people
Speaker 1:Didi Didi had a post from yesterday. Yeah. He was on the show yesterday. He said, Soham is just the tip of the iceberg just like this redditor pulling 800 a year working five jobs.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:There's a reddit, what is it? A group called r slash overeemployed.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's 500,000 people where people just maniacally discuss this. There are thousands of Soham Pariks we don't know about.
Speaker 2:That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:There's a post here from user big fat phony account. He says five jobs at 800 k t c using an ROI mentality. I've jumped from three jobs to five jobs two weeks ago. I'm now making $3.03 k a day. It's doable for me.
Speaker 1:Here's why. I'm an expert in my field, is data. I know how to solve problems in various forms. Clients, as I call them, know my value. If there's a problem or they need my expert help, they like having me on the team.
Speaker 1:This expertise has come from fifteen years of experience, but also three years of over employment teaching me the latest methods. I'm all remote. None of this one day in the office b s. Just say no. So he's basically giving the playbook.
Speaker 1:The funny thing is you could just have a consulting shop and do this above board and probably be way more successful. Yeah. You just have to build the muscle to sell your services and and not just get fixated on just applying for jobs. Yeah. Like, you can still look, okay, this company is hiring for this role.
Speaker 1:Yep. Great. I should reach out to them. Hey, I offer x y z service. Yep.
Speaker 1:I I'll be, you know, fractional Yep. Staff engineer, whatever it's called. I command a premium because I'm super experienced and I have this team. Yep. You can call me anytime.
Speaker 1:I'll be available, you know, eighteen hours of the day and you could just build a legitimate business. So I think that that should be the takeaway from engineers that are getting inspired by Soham in the wrong way is just build a consulting practice.
Speaker 3:I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree. Well, if he does, he's gonna have to reach out to a lot of people. He needs a CRM that he can trust. He needs That's right. Adio, customer relationship magic.
Speaker 2:Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company in the next level. Let's mix it up with a post from the pea god. If you're pure
Speaker 1:is important going into the weekend everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is huge for July 4 which is tomorrow. If you're pure of heart, drinking 17 ice cold beers isn't bad for you. We gotta have Andrew Huberman back
Speaker 3:on to debate this. And
Speaker 2:and Brian Johnson too. We'll we'll get both
Speaker 3:of They'll they'll love it. They'll be
Speaker 2:they'll be like, yeah, hard agree.
Speaker 1:Think we feel this way about splitting a bottle of champagne.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It certainly doesn't feel bad. Everything in moderation including moderation.
Speaker 3:That's what I
Speaker 1:like to That's right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, what what else do we
Speaker 1:got here? Leaf over at Public, our friend said, this is some interesting context tokenization of private companies. So he says, tokenization of private companies is tricky and risky. Yeah. Public used to offer alternative assets like music royalties and we look deeply into offering tokenized private company shares.
Speaker 1:Here's why we haven't done it. Mhmm. The risks come down to four aspects, liquidity, supply, information rights and investor protections. First, some background public offered private assets via regulatory framework called reg a. Think of it like a wrapper that turned a private asset like IP art, real estate or private company into a security I e securitization enabling it to be traded.
Speaker 1:It's very similar to what a crypto token represents in the Robinhood tokenization scenario. Same thing, different database. And he goes on to give a lot more context. He says, let's say Robinhood now owns $10,000,000 worth of stock at a $300,000,000 valuation. They could spin up 10,000,000 tokens priced at $1 each and offer them on their platform.
Speaker 1:Customers then own the token, not the actual shares in OpenAI. Think of it like a ticket representing a sliver of ownership in the SPV but not OpenAI directly. And he says issue one, a $10,000,000 float on a $300,000,000,000 company with major hype is unlikely to meet demand. That limited float can quickly lead to a price spike a k the shares will trade at a premium. The $1 token might jump to 10 implying a $3,000,000,000,000 valuation for OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What started as a fundamentals based investment quickly turns into pure speculation. People buying tokens in the hope someone else will pay more.
Speaker 2:Mean, the float on some these things is crazy. I I mean, the the numbers that That's what
Speaker 1:was saying with with with republican
Speaker 2:$5,005,000 investments, $5,000,000 total. So there's 1,000 people that are putting 5 k down to set the price of SpaceX. It's like, does that make any sense?
Speaker 1:Not setting the price, the initial price.
Speaker 2:Well, they're setting yeah. Offering. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:But but like, there are essentially 1,000 slugs of 5 k value kind of set the price. It's like the the smallest possible market. So, yeah. I mean, I I I think that there's there's a lot of risk to that. I they could just trade like
Speaker 1:The other thing because, you know, these types of offerings will typically to be tied to SPVs, not the underlying shares. There's usually no information rights. There can be dilution, other changes. And so you actually don't know the the value of the underlying assets.
Speaker 2:Well, really quickly, let's tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. We have Chris Miller joining, the author of Chip War. In just a few minutes, I wanted to run through this post in the it's not a post. It's an article in the Wall Street Journal from yesterday.
Speaker 2:China is quickly gaining in the AI race. I think this is something we'll be talking about with Chris. Chinese artificial intelligence companies are loosening The US global stranglehold on AI, challenging US superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology. In Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup DeepSeek and ecommerce giant Alibaba, that's Quen, of course, as alternatives to US offerings such as ChatGPT. HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun testing DeepSeek's models internally according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 2:Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center, which is interesting because Saudi Aramco, I believe they have their own model as well. Yep. And so they're they're testing DeepSeek.
Speaker 1:Very AGI pill.
Speaker 2:And, I mean, you could you could rewrite this to say like, hey. Like, you know, Perplexity has a deep seek fork. Microsoft serves deep seek. So maybe it's okay. But, obviously, the larger geopolitical narrative here is like, we don't want to have the rest of the world standardized on non Western models that could be very harmful to global competitiveness.
Speaker 2:And so that's something that we'll be digging into. Even use US major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google offer deep seek to customers despite the White House banning use of the company's app on some government devices over data security concerns. Of course, there's a there's a separation between the layer there. If you're running the open source model on your own chips, it shouldn't be able to call back to China. But if you're installing the DeepSeek app on a government phone, well, then everything that you send, it has to go to a server to be processed to then be inferenced.
Speaker 2:And so, like, when like, I assume that everything I've ever said to ChatGPT exists on an OpenAI server somewhere. Right? Because they have to store it because when I open the app, I wanna see all my chats.
Speaker 3:Required
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's a yeah. It's required. Well, that that that's a slightly separate thing.
Speaker 2:That that's about, like, actually disclosure. But, yes.
Speaker 1:Hey, Seth.
Speaker 2:Hey, Seth. I'm the deep
Speaker 1:sea gaps. Just being like, thoughts on wrong right now? What should we do?
Speaker 2:Brutal. OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's predominant AI consumer chatbot with 910,000,000 global downloads. Let's hit the gong for OpenAI. There we go. Compared to with DeepSeek's a 125,000,000.
Speaker 2:Give me the. 125,000,000 for DeepSeek. Not even close to OpenAI. DeepSeek, you gotta catch up, buddy. No.
Speaker 2:It's very impressive. A 121,000,000 is a serious serious number. Figures from research sensor tower. The US's AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard because of advantages in computing semiconductors, cutting edge research, and access to financial capital. But as many other industries but as in other as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices, I imagine.
Speaker 2:Let's see. Prices. Yeah. A study of global competitiveness in critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks of AI, data and human capital that are keeping it pay that are helping it keep pace. The competition, some industry insiders said, has set the world on the path toward a technological cold war, potentially even a chip war.
Speaker 2:And we have our guest, Chris Miller, in the studio, author of Chip War. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 9:What's happening? Good.
Speaker 10:Thanks. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1:It's great to have you.
Speaker 2:Great to have you. I would love I mean, were just reading an article from the journal about the the China versus The US AI race. There's a whole bunch of modern details but I'd love to kick it off with a little bit on your background and how you initially came became interested in the idea of a chip war and kind of how things emerge from there.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I I got interested in the idea of a chipboard because I realized we've been living through multiple iterations of one since the first chips were invented in the late nineteen fifties, that you couldn't really separate the development of military power or a country's strategic position on the world stage without understanding their ability to access and deploy computing power. And so we're seeing a new version of that right now with AI, but it's it's actually replicating what we saw in the Cold War competition between The US and The Soviet Union or the economic competition in The US and Japan in the nineteen eighties. And so then as now, there's this deep link between access to compute and your strategic position.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Going back in the history, we we we were digging into some of the the efforts that the Chinese government had
Speaker 1:Yeah. How many how many five year
Speaker 3:plans have
Speaker 1:they have they done?
Speaker 2:They they keep stacking these five year
Speaker 1:plans and it seems to be working.
Speaker 2:For decades, just to stay on the lagging edge, what did you learn about that? And what what can you tell us about, like, that narrative as, you know, maybe the chip war is heating up right now, but China has been aware of this for decades and has been investing against it?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. They they've certainly been investing, for a a long time. I think, really, the last decade or so, it's kicked up a a real notch, both because China solved a lot of its other technological problems. It's become self sufficient in many other spheres of of manufacturing, and making chips is the one of the really few areas and the largest by far where China still has to import manufactured products from abroad, such that today, China's largest import, more even than it spends on oil, is importing semiconductors from Taiwan.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 11:And that so this is something that they wanted to break free from.
Speaker 1:More on semis than oil
Speaker 2:as well. That's right.
Speaker 5:That's insane.
Speaker 2:Yep. When you talk about that, are is is that driven heavily by stuff that's not sanctioned on the lagging edge, the, you know, the fifteen, sixteen nanometer, like the bigger chips? Or or are we talking about, like, smuggling numbers of three nanometer chips that have been repurposed through shell companies or something like that?
Speaker 11:It's it's a mix, but it's it's mostly things that are are legal to sell to China. Sure. And you could sell both the the lagging edge, like things in your dishwasher, but also a a smartphone chip at three nanometers that you can still sell to China, and there's a large volume of those for PCs and smartphones and autos that are still being sold.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So every every Huawei phone has a chip, and those are not not sanctioned. We're just talking about the large accelerators, the g the big GPUs that are really under under lock and key.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Then take me through kind of how you process the initial rollout of the chip ban during the Biden era. What, how did that play out for you? Were I assume people were calling you. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I wanna I wanna know your side of that of that era of history here.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Well, I would actually rewind the clock back to 2018 and '19. Please. That's that's when ASML, the Dutch company that produces the lithography tools you need to produce cutting edge chips, was first thinking about selling a cutting edge tool to a Chinese customer.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And then the the Trump administration and the first administration leaned very heavily on the Dutch and said, don't let this go through because if you do, China will have everything it needs to catch up in in chip making. And so I think that was actually the the key turning point. And then the 2022 restrictions that not only tightened up the rules around chip making equipment, but also banned the GPUs that you can make with these tools, in some ways naturally followed from that first 2019 move. What was different in 2022 was that there was a real, I think, understanding, and it came before ChatGPT that AI was gonna be a big deal and that access to GPUs was gonna be a critical input into building bigger and better AI systems.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how did the chip shortage fit into all of that during COVID? I mean, everyone experienced, you know, the the the chip shortages from, like, auto prices going up, used car. There were so many market distortions. Yep.
Speaker 2:How did you process that point in time? And then I wanna step forward even further.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So I think the chip shortage, it didn't really impact tech companies. It impacted, as you say, autos and dishwashers and microwaves, but it brought together a political coalition across the West that included the auto companies and the tech companies and and medical device companies, all of whom realized chips were very, very important. We needed reliable supply chains, and we needed to stay ahead technologically in, in this. And that's why, whether in The US or in Japan or in Europe, you had chips acts being passed to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing to try to provide some more resilience for the supply chains.
Speaker 11:It would have been unthinkable five years earlier, but because of this coalition, it was possible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is it is it a misnomer to call China's strategy around semiconductor and domestic production of semiconductors and all of their semiconductor strategies communist? It feels like they, in some ways, have an extremely capitalist system with not picking winners and putting out, you know, huge government incentives. They're they're shifting the market. But from what we've heard, a lot of times, there's just a huge pool of money, and there's vicious competition to go after it.
Speaker 2:So how how would you actually characterize or, like, what words are we using? How are we describing the Chinese political system now with specifically with regard to not just how they elect people, but specifically their chip policies?
Speaker 11:Yeah. You know, I think you got a a strange mix of of policies being deployed by the Chinese, and and in some ways, that's why it's worked relatively well by a lot of metrics. You you have the benefit of the market weeding out, firms that can't compete, but you've also got the benefit of the government devoting long term patient capital into its priority areas, which pulls in resources, pulls in entrepreneurs, to these segments. I think the risk for China is that unlike other sectors that they've done well, like solar or EVs, where they've had a thousand flowers bloom and you figure out which ones are capable, which ones are not, in the chip industry, you don't have nearly as much of that. And in fact, the key players today, like, the most significant, most advanced maker of processor chips today was also the most significant advanced in China ten years ago.
Speaker 11:So there's much more
Speaker 2:Huawei?
Speaker 11:That would be SMIC, which produces chips for Huawei. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And so you you don't have this thousand flowers bloom dynamic in the chip industry just because it's so capital intensive, and the number of people with the know how is fairly limited, that you got a small number of flowers blooming.
Speaker 11:And all these flowers now have state ownership.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you
Speaker 11:And so it's a different dynamic.
Speaker 2:It feels like they're building, like, a, like, a mirror stack. Can you walk us through, the equivalent to NVIDIA, TSMC, ASML over in China? And then maybe give me
Speaker 3:a little bit Yeah.
Speaker 2:And on on the SK Hynix side as well, are they doing stuff there? And then I'd love to know kind of if you can give me, like, a qualitative grade of, like, how serious these these competitors are. Huawei seems super advanced. It seems like smickens me, maybe not, but I'll let you explain it.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yes. I think you're right. They are trying to build out the entire supply chain. On on the memory side, you have YMTC, which is their leading producer of NAND memory, CXMT, leading producer of the DRAM memory, including, eventually, the DRAM memory that will go into the be paired with GPUs, the high bandwidth, memory.
Speaker 11:I think on the memory side, China's done really well. You probably wouldn't say it's at the cutting edge in terms of its ability to produce that volume, but in terms of the kind of pure technological capability, they've if they haven't cut up, they've gotten very close. Yeah. I think for the the the processor chip side, it's been more complicated. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Huawei is very capable at chip design. It's done it for smartphones at the cutting edge. Now it's, you know, catching up very rapidly in terms of GPU design. Hard to exactly benchmark vis a vis NVIDIA, but Huawei is very capable in chip design. The the challenge it had is that SMC is about right now, about five years behind TSMC, five or six years in terms of its ability to produce processor chips at quality and at scale.
Speaker 11:And so that has been a a real limiting factor. And the reason it makes behind is because there are no real Chinese equivalents today of companies like ASML or Applied Materials or Tokyo Electron that make the tools that make chips. There are companies that would like to compete with them that can compete with some of this really simpler lower end tools. But when it comes to the advanced tools, the Chinese firms just aren't there yet. And so SMIC needs to buy.
Speaker 1:How far behind?
Speaker 11:Hard hard to say.
Speaker 2:Question.
Speaker 11:I mean, I think certainly certainly ten years behind today. They're now investing a ton. They're reverse engineering, the usual playbook. But if you look at the the leading edge fabs that SNC operates, it's still mostly Western tools inside. And every single year, for the past decade or so, China's been one of the largest, if not the largest importers of chip making equipment in the world.
Speaker 11:Last year, China accounted for ballpark half the revenue of all of the world's key chip making equipment vendors, which is a pretty good data point for where those firms are relative to their Chinese competitors.
Speaker 2:What about on the
Speaker 1:What about
Speaker 3:the I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:What about the scale of the shell company activity buying from from TSMC and and other players? Did have you tracked that closely?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Well, certainly, big shell company was discovered and then we hope shut down last year, but the scale was vast. Truly enormous. Millions several million ships procured from TSMC and then appears diverted to Huawei, which is, you know, at a scale that I am frankly surprised by. Everyone knew there'd be smuggling in the scale of dozens or hundreds or even thousands, but smuggling at the scale of millions really calls into the question the ability of the US government to properly enforce these rules.
Speaker 11:And, you know, the only thing worse than a rule that is is overly broad is a rule that's overly broad and not not seriously enforced. You get the worst of of of both worlds. And so I I I think the US government has a lot of thinking of its own to do, and how do you actually make these rules, stick in the real world? And thus far, there's it's been a real struggle.
Speaker 2:Are there any underexplored areas in data center build out that where people aren't really tracking the competitive dynamic between China and America? I was listening to Dylan Patel talk about how with Huawei's CloudMatrix three eighty four, they were able to do, I think, fiber optic connections between the chips and basically do NVLink at a much larger scale. And NVIDIA had tried to do that and maybe not been able not been as successful, and it felt like, you know, Huawei's slightly behind or seriously behind in a number of categories, but that might be one place that they're actually ahead. Have you tracked that at all? Is there is there anything that people should be digging into there?
Speaker 2:I feel like the the narrative was like, everyone was getting up to speed on NVIDIA, and then people learned about TSMC, and then they learned about s ASML, and then they learned about SK Hynix. And I feel like we're all about to learn about a networking provider soon, but what what what's been your what's been your take on that industry?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. No. I think you're you're right to focus on networking as a as a key area of rapid technological advance. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:You know, it's hard to benchmark who's how far ahead, unlike in foundry where you've got, like, a really clear way to measure TSMC versus SNC, that there's not such an obvious kind of benchmark. I I think the the underexplored area in in the Chinese ecosystem is actually not at the chip level but the cloud level, which is we know that China's smuggled in a large number of chips. We know that there are a meaningful volume of chips that SNC has produced domestically for Huawei. But it appears that a lot of these chips are in data centers that have low utilization. And, anecdotally, all the anecdotes we hear about, utilization of AI data centers in China suggest a lot of real challenges in terms of getting utilization, partly because there's some state owned telecoms that are just mismanaging their cloud businesses.
Speaker 11:But it's, I think, surprising that Chinese firms like DeepSeek talk about compute limitations given the number of chips we know that are actually in China. And so if you're, you know, if you're starting with a thesis that China is good at centralization, that's doesn't appear to be what we're seeing here. We appear to be seeing an inefficient, decentralization, perhaps driven by some of the pathologies of having state owned firms run data centers.
Speaker 2:Do you have any, insight into what's happening that benefits China but happens outside of China? I've heard reports that, folks are taking, training data on hard drives and flying it to another country. We're doing a training run, saving the weights to hard drives and flying back. You know, you could imagine, you know, Deepsea v four or something being trained by, you know, a series of shell companies, and it's just an American guy with a big AWS account. Right?
Speaker 2:But at a certain point, I would hope that Amazon says, wait. Who are you, and why do you wanna spend a $100,000,000 this month on in on cloud? Like, we we like billing everyone a few thousand dollars, but this is gonna set off some alarm bells. What are the risks there? Are is the government doing anything about that?
Speaker 2:What what is your take on this idea of of just, you know, hopping on to other clouds and then routing the data backwards?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think this is an emerging area of focus for, the government. I think you're right that it's an area where the US government doesn't have a whole lot of visibility, and I think cloud computing companies haven't they've got, you your customer requirements, etcetera, but not nearly as as much investment as, say, a financial institution spends on making sure they're not transferring money to a sanctioned Iranian entity, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if for the next couple of years, we have a lot more build out of this type of regulation precisely to deal with, what you're talking about. And I think, you know, a large training run is large.
Speaker 11:And so, I think we shouldn't be surprised to see heightened know your customer requirements as you get larger and larger in terms of the scale of compute that you're you're using. The other nuance is that certainly US cloud providers are are are key here, but there are also cloud cloud providers from other countries in other countries that are playing a role. We read a lot about Malaysia in the last couple of
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 11:Months as one of the key buyers of GPUs and a variety of Malaysian companies that are, you know, maybe working with Chinese companies operating there. I I think that's also an area where we might see, more regulation. There there's been proposals in, out of the house representatives, for example, to say, we want more GPUs going to US cloud providers and fewer going to non US cloud providers precisely for that type of of region. America first for AI is sort of the, the the way to think about that. And and, you know, there are different parts of government that would find that pretty appealing.
Speaker 2:Can you, I mean, you mentioned Malaysia. Can you take me on a little bit of a tour geopolitically of of what's going on in some of the other countries that might might be on the horizon for, AI relevance? I'm thinking about, you know, we've obviously, everyone knows US and China and then Taiwan's role and then Malaysia pops up and then France have has Mistral now, and there's deals being done in The Middle East. I was always surprised that Russia was not on the conversation at all because they have a very fit like, long lineage of incredible math prodigies, and it feels like you you would I mean, there are a number of AI scientists in America who come from Russia. And so I was I'm I'm surprised that we're not seeing, oh, Russia's getting in the supercomputer game or trying to build out some massive
Speaker 3:Well, they do this.
Speaker 2:Data center. They have been busy. And so what are some of the other countries? Can you take me on a tour of maybe maybe let's just start with like what's going on in The Middle East? How are you thinking about that?
Speaker 2:Is is it just like a jump ball bidding war between are they going with the West or the East? And then we can move on to some of the other regions in the world that might be relevant or not.
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. And The Middle East has a real advantage in terms of the amount of capital they can deploy, which matters if you're trying to build big compute clusters. Yeah. And I think both for Saudi and especially for The UAE, there's a desire to build their next generation of industries if and when oil becomes less less less reliable for them.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And and that that's driven this investment in terms of building infrastructure. And we saw after Trump visited, a couple weeks ago now, big deals announced, especially in The UAE, you know, 500,000 GPUs a year. To The UAE is a large number. I think the question for The UAE is there's no doubt they can build data centers. No doubt they can afford the GPUs.
Speaker 11:Can they build businesses on top of that? Mhmm. And I think all these countries want to do more than just host Azure or AWS data centers. They wanna own their own businesses and and build on top of that, and that's a harder thing to do than than simply building data centers. I think The UAE has big ambitions in particular, but it's it's easier to have ambitions than it is to realize them, and it'll be a challenge.
Speaker 1:What's, what's your take on TSMC's traction in Arizona? NVIDIA's had some announcements as well. How how bullish are you on on the progress they're making?
Speaker 11:So I think the good news is that TSMC has publicly said their manufacturing yields, the share of ships that they produce that actually work, are just as good in Arizona as they are in Taiwan. That's a a really powerful data point. I think the bad news is that on a unit cost, they're still a lot more expensive Mhmm. Than in Taiwan. And that cost differential will decline over time, but it's it's a real differential, and it's not gonna go to zero.
Speaker 11:And so the key question, I think, is to what extent TSMC's customers are gonna keep pushing TSMC to build more in The US Mhmm. Versus be comfortable with production in Taiwan. I think the trend has been that they're pushing TSMC to do more in The US. And, certainly, TSMC, looking at the tariff dynamics, has has registered that. They've announced plans to build six fabs beyond the the one operational, one under construction right now.
Speaker 11:Unclear exactly over what time horizon that happens. But so long as you've got these kind of tariff and geopolitical issues front and center, think TSMC's customers will be encouraging them to to pursue this diversification.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who who would eat that cost? Because NVIDIA has famously very high margins. All the hyperscalers are thinking about doing in house chip design now. I'd love to know your take on on Microsoft strategy, the TPU at Google, anything else that's going on, Trainium and Amazon, for example.
Speaker 2:Because you could see those, you could see, yes, t m c TSMC in Arizona is more expensive, but that cost is kind of mitigated by being able to route around NVIDIA's margin. But I don't know if that's a reasonable thesis.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And I think my assumption would be that the the cost is shared by across the supply chain. And, actually, if you look at the supply chain, you've got a a number of high margin companies involved. TSMC has a pretty healthy margin. Its key customers do as well.
Speaker 11:And if you, you know, take an iPhone as an example, you know, ballpark the the share of t s m the TSMC content in an iPhone, $50, let's say. If if that goes up by 30% in the context of a thousand dollar iPhone
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It's not dramatically gonna change the economics. Same for same for an NVIDIA server. So I think you you're right to say there's there's plenty of places where you could you could absorb some of that cost. What share of it goes to TSMC versus customers, I'm sure, is a a constant source of negotiation?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's there's kind of, like, an interesting supply chain here in the actual delivery of AI applications. And I can't help but wonder if some of the some of the international players outside of America and China are maybe targeting the wrong thing. It seems extremely valuable to be able to fab chips in your country and own your supply chain and be able to produce a consistent flow. And then it also seems incredibly valuable to have the front end to AI, essentially like a ChatGPT national champion that users go to.
Speaker 2:But the model itself and the data center seems maybe less important there, but it feels like all of the different countries that we're talking about, whether it's France or Saudi Arabia, they seem obsessed with owning a data center. But then if the local population is going to chat.com instead of lechat for Mistral, like, has France really won if they just have a model? And maybe they may may may maybe they're thinking about in terms of, like, deploying within the government in the same sense that, like, the DOD is deploying LAMA right now. But how do you think their how do you think these international countries are thinking about the different places that they can try and plug into the overall delivery of artificial intelligence?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think that's the right question to to ask, and I think you're right to suggest that just having a data center is not a guarantee of making money off of AI. Yeah. And it it seems highly likely to be the case that the the application layer and the the the operating system, for AI, however that develops, will be places where a lot of money is made. And, again, not clear that that if you build a data center in in your country, you're gonna guarantee that you have that at all.
Speaker 11:I I think when governments think about this, there's probably a degree to which they're not asking the question you're asking, and they ought to. There's also, I think, a degree to which they're thinking about, sovereignty and control over their their tech infrastructure. And they're worried, that if they become wholly wholly reliant either on US or Chinese AI providers, they're gonna be in a a weakened position politically. Now is is the best use of their resources solving that problem building data centers? I think that's an open question.
Speaker 11:But we've certainly seen a lot of countries, turn in that direction as their first response, for trying to build a bit more, room for maneuver in the AI space.
Speaker 1:It's interesting in the as The UAE was was opening up to Western businesses back in the day, there was a structure that was popular where if you were Coca Cola or Michelin and you wanted to sell into The UAE, from my understanding, you needed to set up basically a j like a fifty fifty JV with somebody locally. So it was like basically owned and operated to some degree, but almost like more of a franchise model. And I wonder we're we'll end up effectively seeing something like the Yeah. Like that on the data center side.
Speaker 2:I just wonder I just wonder how much that particular layer matters. Like, if you look at what China's done in just the delivery of conventional web services, It's like, obviously, knockout drag out fight to try and build data center capacity and import chips, but also develop the traditional semiconductor, the CPU supply chain, and then ban Facebook and Google and develop homegrown alternatives for the application layer, but they haven't tried to rebuild Linux from scratch. Like, North Korea does have a fork of Linux called Red Star Linux apparently. But, in general, you know, Chinese phone companies have been fine forking Android. That hasn't been a place where they've said, oh, we gotta rebuild.
Speaker 2:We gotta own that from start to finish. It's like, we wanna be able to make the phones, and we've got wanna be able to deliver the services so that, you know, Google can't, like, bring their own censorship rules, and we can't and, you know, Samsung can't cut us off of actually delivering the phones. But in terms of the actual operating system layer, everyone's been kind of fine with standardizing around Linux and Android. I don't know. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanted to talk about the AI trade deals
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So this is where I want to get into. I would love to understand the talent market in China to the extent that you can.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:It's been what we've been covering for the last couple of weeks, these sort of massive changes in talent moving around between the different labs. I'm curious if there's that level of competition for talent or it's Between like deep sea
Speaker 10:and knowledge.
Speaker 1:Because in some ways, you know, these American, you know, researchers constantly, you know, shifting around to the highest bidder. Yep. It's not necessarily the best for winning the AI race or winning the AI war. It's the right strategic moves for the different labs and different hyperscalers to compete for this talent to to build the best businesses and products that they can. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's not necessarily Yeah.
Speaker 2:An authoritarian might say, hey. Let's just consolidate all of the AI talent at one lab in America. That's not the way America works, but how does it work in China?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I I you still do have a a pretty flexible labor market. I I I think there's an interesting question. Would you be right to consolidate all AI talent? I I think if you're if you're a believer that we're gonna kind of reach a single threshold called AGI, and if you reach it two months earlier, you've got this kind of enduring strategic prize, then maybe concentration is the right strategy.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. But if you're a believer instead that there's gonna be a bunch of different products, which will themselves be pretty transformative, but there's not kind of one threshold you wanna pass, then, actually, you probably want a more flexible, system that's gonna allocate, between different firms. And, you know, maybe it is macro efficient to have people jumping between firms, once every year or two if they're bringing the cutting edge, spreading it to different firms. That could actually be a good thing on on the macro level as well as for the the individual level. I would be more pessimistic about China's chances if I found them centralizing more aggressively.
Speaker 11:I I thought one of the most pessimistic data points this year about the Chinese AI ecosystem was the news that deep sea researchers were having their passports confiscated Fed to report international travel, which to me is a strong disincentive to do it doing AI research.
Speaker 2:They China seems to love doing that. They were doing that to rare earth element experts as as well at rare earth minerals. It seems like it's just in the playbook when, when a when an industry becomes important, the passports start disappearing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the other the other elephant in the room is you can imagine the amount of pressure that the CCP is putting on Chinese AI researchers that are here in The US. Maybe they want their their citizens already or they Yep. Have a path to citizenship. But if they have any family or any exposure at home, they're still Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. Still a lever that they can pull.
Speaker 2:I wanna talk about talent in the context not just of AI model development, but actual chip fabrication. It feels like right now what we're seeing in the Foundation Model Labs is an extreme power law in the value of AI researchers. Hence, $100,000,000 offers for top talent and starting salaries in the 300 k range. Like, that is a wide, wide power law. Right?
Speaker 2:There's always been this narrative around TSMC that you can't chat GPT how to make a semiconductor. There's a couple books out there, but it's it's a lot of lore. It's a lot of tutelage and mentorship. How power law distributed is talent in semiconductors? And is there a world where Chips Act two point o gives Intel a bunch of money or something, and then they start offering TSMC experts a $100,000,000 offers, and that really pulls forward American, chip production?
Speaker 11:So I I don't think the mental model is is that expertise is power law distributed. I I think that there's lots of very unique capabilities you need to make a chip, and the level of expertise you need in each of the verticals is very deep, and you need all of them. As you only got 90% of them, your chip doesn't work, and so you need to build this expertise over a long period of time. And so if you were to say, who are the three people you need to, hire from TSMC to replicate I would say that's not the way to think about it. That's a question.
Speaker 11:I hire half the half the staff or
Speaker 10:or or more.
Speaker 11:When when TSMC was bringing the facility in Arizona online, they had hundreds of people from Taiwan working in Arizona, and this was not even their most leading edge ship production. There's this was two generations behind the cutting edge with all of the explicit help coming from headquarters as well. And so I I think that helps illustrate how much of the the transfer needs to happen at different levels. Mhmm. But, you know, if you look at who's Nick hired over the last decade, it's been the panel engineers from Western, Taiwanese, Singaporean, semiconductor firms.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And I think a lot of the advances that they made can be ascribed to the fact that they were able to import all of that human capital from workers who had previously spent a lot of time at other companies.
Speaker 1:What are you tracking? We're halfway through the year. What what kind of events are on the horizon or or various potential new legislation are are you kind of following?
Speaker 11:I think from the the policy side, there's gonna be some action on tariffs in semiconductors, it seems. Presidents repeatedly said that. Unclear exactly what direction that's gonna take, but it could have pretty big implications for the cost of building AI data centers. That's that's certainly one. And I think on the kind of tech controls front, we haven't seen the last moves from this administration either, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more there too.
Speaker 2:Can have you been tracking the leadership change at Intel? Lip Bu Tan is coming in. It seems like they're gonna be doing doing a lot of layoffs. I was trying to go back through Ben Thompson's analysis of Intel through the years and try and understand how the narrative I haven't been tracking Intel that long to follow whether there should be a split. What has been your take on Intel, and has it changed?
Speaker 2:And how do you think what what should we expect from Intel over the next few years? It seems like they're gonna be tightening things down, but do you expect any significant changes? Would you recommend any specific changes? I'm interested to hear your take on Intel.
Speaker 11:There's a lot of people who think that a a split between the manufacturing design businesses is the right way forward. I think that the question, if you think about a split, is what does that mean concretely? Mhmm. Because the reality is you'd still need to have a fair amount of integration between the design side and the manufacturing side because the manufacturing side is making chips for the design side that will be in progress for a number of years, and the manufacturing side needs business from the design side. So the split or no split is probably too simplistic a way of thinking through the option set.
Speaker 11:There's a bunch of different variables, around that, and I think that's probably exactly what Lip Bu is wrestling with, right now. I think the the second challenge that Intel has is in its products business, the CPUs for DCs and data centers. I think there's a a a wide, agreement that they've got work to do on both those fronts in terms of, remaining competitive with AMD, and they've lost market share, over the past couple of years. They need to win that that back. And so I think those are the the the two key issues he got to deal with.
Speaker 11:And they're, of course, interlinked, it's hard to hard to say you're only gonna focus on one of them.
Speaker 2:Totally. This is great. Any other questions, Troy?
Speaker 1:Fascinating. No. We'd love to have you back on.
Speaker 2:This is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1:Next quarter.
Speaker 2:Really appreciate this.
Speaker 11:Well, thank you for
Speaker 1:having Cheers. Bye. And I'll be right back.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have Aaron Ginn, the GPU whisperer as, his moniker in the information proclaims. He has a new piece out in the wild. I believe it's in the Wall Street Journal. We'll we will get the latest from him. Aaron, how are doing?
Speaker 10:Hey, man. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. Did did I get that right? New piece in the journal or somewhere else?
Speaker 4:The one on robots?
Speaker 2:Well, Arena Mag. Is that where
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. That one that was yeah. Arena Mag, and then I did
Speaker 2:You're prolific.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's fun.
Speaker 3:It's great.
Speaker 4:I'm a I'm a kind of a not only Christian, but academic at heart. So I That's great. Like I like writing. I like all sorts of things in in that zone. So, but, yeah, I have a new one on on robots.
Speaker 2:Okay. Take me through it. What was the inspiration? What's the thesis? Give me the details.
Speaker 4:I guess, you know, I I kinda known for hot spicy hot spicy cakes done in a kind manner.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:And they
Speaker 4:do something better. But I think I think most of the analysis done with people in our space is devoid of any kind of reference framing. They kinda live people in Silicon Valley, particularly people in AI, live in the they think they live in this kind of arrogant microcosmist CS Lewis would say, like chronological snobbery. Mhmm. So they don't appreciate how other things that look very similar are just patterns of repeating Mhmm.
Speaker 4:As the, you know, one of the most famous Solomon phrasing, because the theorized in the Bible that Solomon said that, you know, that there are nothing new in the sun. Mhmm. We don't fully know what it's attributed to, but generally it's attributed to Solomon. And and in that sense, like, innovation kinda goes the same pattern that you have something that innovation's always intentionally oriented to CapEx, both in sense of knowledge workers and also capital expenditure. And and it always starts with the as a rich luxury, but then it gets proliferated out.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And robots, as people have been kinda pitching, both in the sense of the doomsday sense and the utopian sense Mhmm. I think are wrong because they if you if you look at past patterns of innovation and how it's been adopted in society, it generally doesn't get oriented towards the rich. Like, the rich continue to do what they do. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Like, like, there's a reason why rich people have their own planes, have their own drivers, have a yacht, have multiple houses, have chefs and carers, things like that. Like, that's basically the same trajectory of lifestyle that they've had for a while. Yeah. And in terms of, like, things that you own, things that you do, things you buy, like, there's there the the names that are associated with the Yale Club and the Harvard Club continue to be the same names. Yeah.
Speaker 4:People will go to Davos with the same names. Yeah. But the real arc of capitalism, which is why the existentialist, the German, the Frankfurt School was completely wrong, is that what it does is that it takes those luxuries and gives it to everybody else. Mhmm. I think that there's a there's a I've read the name of venture capitalist, but he said that, his his kind of moniker of looking at innovation and adoption is oriented towards taking something that is available for the rich and giving it to somebody else.
Speaker 4:So Uber is the example of that. Right? Private driver to everybody else.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 4:And and so robots will be the same thing. Like, certainly, like, robots will there'll be a certainly, you know, a luxury version of a robot that will be deployed for people and the rich and famous. But the rich and famous can afford people.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And rich and famous like character. They like things that are like, go listen to like, I know people love comparing you and Jordy to All In. Right? And just go look at what Shammoth talks about. It's like, it's things that are take a long time or delicate and
Speaker 2:cashmere. I love it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's one of my favorite Yeah. That was it. This is made of endangered panda fur, right, that
Speaker 3:I hunted myself. Right? I I am.
Speaker 4:And so, like
Speaker 2:No all in host has ever worn panda fur. That's so famous.
Speaker 3:But the
Speaker 2:king's cashmere is real. Yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. So so, like, so for the rest of us, right Yeah. Upper middle class down, robots will be for us. Robots will give us the ability to do things that we didn't have before that makes us more like rich people
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 4:And a k a time. Yeah. And and so that's what it's arguing is that
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:That robots will not be dystopian. They will not be utopian. Yeah. They'll be every other pattern of wave of innovation in helping the average American live a better life.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I know I noticed this when I started interacting with, like, the the multi multi billionaires that every app on my phone, they had a person for. So Uh-huh. If you do incorporation of your company through LegalZoom or Stripe Atlas, they have a lawyer full time on staff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have Uber, they have a driver. You have DoorDash, they have a chef. And and Yeah. It's like
Speaker 1:Gotta have guys.
Speaker 2:The new technology yeah. The guys. Yeah. How many problems can you solve by just calling a guy? Very interesting.
Speaker 2:What do you think about it was Chris Pike. Right?
Speaker 3:Who had this
Speaker 1:takeguys. App. They're democratizing access to To guys. To guys.
Speaker 2:To just a guy. And
Speaker 3:it's just
Speaker 2:a database of, like, good
Speaker 1:lawyers and drivers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even even, like, you know, you don't call 911, and that that's for everyone. Private security is the opposite side of that.
Speaker 2:But what do you think about Chris Pike's take that, when I I I mean, I guess this relates, but I think his take was that if there is a human that is acting as like a a roadblock to something that you want, that will be a that will be replaced by artificial intelligence or robotics. Mhmm. But if it's but if the human is is part of the delightfulness of that experience and his example was like an omakase chef, that will never be replaced because you want what do you think about that? Give me your reaction, please.
Speaker 4:So so, like, I'll I'll I'll, like, I'll I'll be at Shimoff for a moment. Right? Because, like, the other question was Okay. He said, like, we don't, he was talking to Jay Cow. Right?
Speaker 4:He's the ultimate, like, the thing guy. Whatever the thing is, that's that's Jay Cal. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And he goes, you know,
Speaker 4:talk about watches. And Tramato was like, oh, get a handmade mechanical watch. Right? So I'm wearing one right now, actually. So
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 4:So, like, the and and so you look at this right now. Right?
Speaker 1:It's a lot
Speaker 7:of money.
Speaker 2:Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you anywhere to the planet, literally any watch.
Speaker 4:So so it so it, you know, Han and Kan, Gillichet, Han and Carr Ken Carr, VGT is software engineer that he'd be gotten watches. And and so the reason why this is worth it is because of that human interaction.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:Right? It's that his his ability to do everything by hand is, like, the machine built in, like, late nineteen hundreds. He does everything. He can show it. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It's, like, that's the point. Right? And so another example of this would be, like, being a waiter. Yep. Like, you could I'll use this as an example.
Speaker 4:Like, there is automated checkout on Applebee's. I don't know if you've been there recently. But there's automated checkout Applebee's. Like, Chick fil A, right, one of the most highest grossing per store sale fast food joint in in the world. One of the best delicious.
Speaker 4:Has tons of people. Right? So it could if it wanted to, but it's not the point of where you go. Mhmm. And and fundamentally, there there's this disconnect.
Speaker 4:I think it's spiritually connected. I think you can watch some of Peter Till's recent, interview with Toufat, and you can kinda hear some of these trends.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 4:It's like if you remove the ability of the anthropomorphic orientation of what innovation is and why you do it Mhmm. You come up with these end conclusions that are basically absurd. Like, there's people in the Silicon Valley who argue absurd things about the nature of what argument innovation is going to because the presupposition and priors and the metaphysics, like, built into it are basically that humans are worthless and existential, and they kind of have a Sartre Descartes view of the world that's very dark. And and the same thing exists with social media. The same thing exists research, the same thing exists with mobile phones, now it exists in AI.
Speaker 4:All of these are continuations of the same thing. Yeah. And just like the AI doomers, if you go look at the names of the people, it's like the same people who are like the title to social media is gonna end the universe or to people Mhmm. Because it's the same line of thinking. So humans just like what you're doing now, people watch this show because of you too.
Speaker 4:Sure. Like like, it does even if there is a memetic machine Yeah. It's not the
Speaker 1:most efficient way to get the news, but it's fun.
Speaker 4:But it's fun. Right? Like like like, be because it's it's part of what the nature of this the it's hard for me to imagine Yeah.
Speaker 3:That we're
Speaker 1:The the idea that that, let let's say a humanoid robot, you know, gets real traction in restaurants. Well, natural, you know, and and you can go and sit down at a restaurant, the humanoid can serve you and whatever, and it's efficient, it's fast, it's smooth. That will naturally create even more opportunity for human waiters, waitresses that love the craft Mhmm. Of service. And I think it is a real craft.
Speaker 1:I think that anybody that's had a truly fantastic dinner and Yes. Can can Attest. Can attest.
Speaker 4:Yep. Yep. So so it's a it's the one reason why I think the adoption curve of AI is gonna be kind of like 2 different bucks of buckets of things. Mhmm. There's gonna be the infrastructure side, which we're gonna excel at.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And then there's gonna be the adoption side, which we're not gonna excel at. And some of it is political, which is everything from we lost the AI moratorium and the bill. But, thankfully, the bill got passed, so we're not paying higher taxes. So thank you, daddy Trump.
Speaker 4:Daddy t wins again. So yeah. You know, so
Speaker 3:yeah. Exactly. Thank what I know is.
Speaker 4:Right? So but but the but
Speaker 5:the but the on the
Speaker 4:other side is, like, if we're gonna do, let's say, one of the best things AI does is that it it allows this the ability of computers to look like humans behave like humans. It's it's fantastic at that. It's the ability to to to model us. Right? To to make a mimetic version of us.
Speaker 4:And from an education perspective, that could be incredibly powerful. Because my upbringing, even though I went to public school before it was insane, so, like, y'all safe from that. But my dad, who's Chinese, read me much more of a Tamyuta traditional tiger dad sort of fashion. So I still remember this one conversation I had with my dad. I think it was in, like, fourth grade.
Speaker 4:And I got, like, a 100 in a class, and he said, why did I why did I do extra credit? Right? And it was, like, his immediate response. And and, you know, and they you know, they're they're more the Caucasian people in the audience will clutch their pearls, like, my god. It's so traumatic.
Speaker 4:Right? But but the but the point of it, right, is like, oh, you always can do more. Right? He's teaching me resiliency, teaching me how to challenge myself, teaching me how to, push beyond what I think I can do and to, like, open my expanse because his goal was to not have the upper knee he did, which is super poor. And and so imagine AI that could do that.
Speaker 4:Right? That could be your your own yeah. Yeah. They did. Like, your own ability to challenge your thoughts.
Speaker 4:Like, people are thinking it like the clue y thing, which I think is a very surface level understanding of what AI can do. But imagine if AI was actually, like, a challenge agent. That let's say you got the right answer, and AI was like, you're wrong. So prove it to me like you're right. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, there there's a whole other layer of of this. And this is this is what, like, in terms of the El Salvador project that we're working on, is like that that's kind of like the orientation of why other countries don't have that. Like, they they don't have the teacher, the the the regular units, let alone. They don't have the internal capability of delivering these types of things today, but a computer can come in now. Because what they have now, they have nothing.
Speaker 4:Right? And they're willing to take a swing being like, well, you know, if it works 50% of the time, that's a huge win for our country. But America, the lawsuits and this and this and this. Right? But, you know, but Kelly is just like, oh, this sounds like a great hit.
Speaker 4:We should just try this. If it doesn't work well, I'll do something else. Right? And and so that's why I think we will excel at infrastructure, which is why it's so important we push in video products everywhere. But the adoption's gonna be in Africa, second world, third world countries.
Speaker 4:It's not gonna be in America because we already have people doing it today, and people will still be the preferred like, rich people still have tutors. Right? And they're still gonna have tutors even though AI can actually be good at tutor.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Interesting. Give me the update on sovereign AI generally. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think yesterday, about more and more western companies adopting DeepSeek and Quen.
Speaker 3:It's like, oh,
Speaker 2:I actually read that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I I need
Speaker 2:to check. No. It's Josh Jim. He's in Lynn. But but yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, any major updates there? Did anything get stuffed in the bill related to chips or semiconductors or anything like that that's relevant?
Speaker 4:Not that I not that I know of. I mean, mean, people also have to to take a step back and realize this is a tax bill
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Not a spending bill. Yeah. I'm I'm an Austrian economics guy, as you all know, so I don't like that. I'm not I don't believe that you can keep spending forever. This is a tax bill.
Speaker 4:It's literally why it's going through reconciliation. Mhmm. It's be willing to, like, lower your threshold. Like, I agree with Elon. He's one of my heroes.
Speaker 4:He's very wrong on the purpose of this bill. But he's he's but he's right. We're spending too much money, but it's also we have to get away from omnibuses. So the the AMR touring stuff got removed. I'm pro that.
Speaker 4:Stacks is pro that. The OSTP office is pro that. I I this is not gonna something that should be ruled out of sticks. It it it's something that we have to win, and we can't have these, like, varying laws everywhere. On the chip side, essentially, you know, there there are, like, have a hat that the the president's seller gave me.
Speaker 4:So, like, the so, like, you know, countries like, you know, Bukele, who's trying to, basically provide this sort of infrastructure and capital to the world, the market is there for us. And we have these, basically, voices that I think are living in an era of where the moat resided in areas that they or previously defined sort of infrastructure waves. And we're at this moment now where we could accelerate victory to where, hey. How about, you know, China, we outsource all, you know, manufacturing the last thirty years to them that make all the stuff in TEMU, take all the stuff in Sheen, all this crap. Like, why can't we do that to them for semiconductors now?
Speaker 4:Like, why can't we take their money? Right? And you see all these people, oh, but wait a minute. Like, what if AI destroys the world? Right?
Speaker 4:And it's like, it's all this kind of like soothsaying. I can title two people. Go back to the to that debate. Remember, free speech debate online and, like, telco versus where does the the right to speak reside and the right to serve content. Those people are the same people in the AI moratorium.
Speaker 4:It's literally the same line about thinking. And and so the the the AI moratorium was supposedly specifically on, like, training and application. But in El Salvador, like, they passed an AI law, like, basically a a free training law where the which is how the law should be structured. When you train something, it's up to the user to apply it. If the user applies that to make a robot to kill somebody just like you get a hammer and kill somebody, right, or get a robot to scratch, you know, Jordy's Mercedes, right, it's that person's fault.
Speaker 4:Right? It's not gonna be like if John trained that, you know, open source model, they use it against, know, Jordy. It's like, it's not John's fault. Yeah. So, like, in El Salvador, they passed that law.
Speaker 4:But in America, they wanna commingle these responsibilities Yep. Most out of baseless baseless fear. But but but still the the policy of the administration is still towards we need to export. We need to become the AI exporter of the world Yep. Because we have this ability to be the definite infrastructure of the next era
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And not reside in this kind of loose or not loose. It's definitely it's actually really hard to understand I mean, even with less are saying.
Speaker 2:Even with something less dramatic than, like, you know, using an open source LLM model to commit a crime or something, just just just the intellectual property thing. Like, it's very easy that we've had the ability to go and, you know, pirate a movie and upload it to YouTube for a very long time. That's like not a crazy new technology, but it is in the sense of like copying data is new and distributing it all over the world. And yet, you don't you don't even YouTube doesn't even need to stop it ever from happening. They just need to stop there to from being an economic model.
Speaker 2:Like, you can't build a business on top of YouTube just uploading Star Like, that's not gonna work for you. And as long as you kill that economic model with enough pressure and and say, hey, we're not gonna serve ads against this. We're not gonna pay you out. We're gonna ban your account eventually. There there's a bunch of ways to prevent this stuff at at at the level of, like, yeah, like, someone might some kid might upload Star Wars and five people see it and before it gets taken down, not the end of the world.
Speaker 2:Who cares? Exactly. And so yeah. Yeah. Going after the, like, the individual actors.
Speaker 2:That that's a very, very good point. I like that.
Speaker 4:The most the most freeing phrase you could ever and maybe you could raise your kids this way too, because it was the most freeing phrase ever received from a from a guy who's famous, but I won't say his name because I but he's he's a huge radio star. And he he taught me this. He goes, whenever you feel stuck, just say the phrase so what? So what? Right?
Speaker 4:And and then they like, why should I buy into your presuppositions? Why should I believe in these things? Like, prove it to me. Like, so what? And and and it and it's so freeing to reside in that zone of, like like you just said, so what?
Speaker 4:Like, somebody does that, like, why is that a big deal? Like and and then it kinda puts people on their heels. Like Yeah. Like, I said this once in a debate about, like, since they're talking about chips, like, woah. Like, you know, ByteDance could get access to this.
Speaker 4:So, like, first of all, Oracle's number like, top five customers are, like, Chinese. So, like, you know, they're already doing it. Right? And then I said, like, so what? Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Oh my god. Like, it's like it's it's like, oh my god. Videos will be more musical. Like, I was like, it it's a and and they're like, well, like, could do this. Could do this.
Speaker 4:Could do I'm like I'm like, yeah. I could say the same thing about anything. I could say the same thing about, like, well, you know, you if you if you buy this watch, you could use this to put on a palm. Right? And and like it's like it's like that's like their level of thinking.
Speaker 4:There's so many steps.
Speaker 1:Was gonna ask Chris Yeah. Earlier, you know, how if how he thinks about AI war versus AI race. Mhmm. And then you would have to ask him the question. Well, then should you have named your book the
Speaker 2:Chip race.
Speaker 1:Chip race and then that would have sold like 1%
Speaker 2:of copies.
Speaker 3:Is it a war
Speaker 2:or is it a race? Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's so tough. I mean so many of the loudest voices in our industry are beautifully conflicted because they run multi billion dollar businesses that are dependent, you know, future fundraising, current fundraising is dependent on certain narratives. And so it's hard to figure out what's what's real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Yeah.
Speaker 4:As it relates to, like, the, like, the the China stuff?
Speaker 2:Not just that. Even even just, like, the progress of models, how much we should be spending, when AGI will arrive, when super intelligence will arrive.
Speaker 1:AI war versus AI race. Right.
Speaker 2:Because if if you brand it as a war, then all of a sudden it's it it it it brings in a new level of funding. You know, there there's all sorts of downstream implications of, well, you know, it's really important that we get the AI doom question right and so we need to over Or it's really good that we win it's really important that we win the geopolitical battle. And so we we we it's okay to overinvest in this case. You know, it's it's all about just like justifying different levels of underwriting. And when you add one of these infinite numbers, you can say 1% chance of infinity is still, you know, I'll pay any price.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I I guess I guess my my friend is just way more optimistic. Like, I don't understand, like, why can't we just invest because it's cool? Like, it's it's it's but like like like, I like I like we we like stuff that Elon does.
Speaker 4:I don't own a Tesla because I like my my cars to go boom. Right? So but it's still cool. Like, why can't we just be cool? Why can't it just be, hey, this is awesome.
Speaker 4:This is like moving the trajectory of the human race to something even more amazing. Seems like we're getting there. Or Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it seems like we're getting there. Mean, I don't know if you saw Nat Friedman's post, but, you know, he was saying he started at Meta, and he's gonna just build some cool stuff. And I'm
Speaker 4:like, yes.
Speaker 2:Like, that sounds awesome. Because Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of AI products, but
Speaker 1:a lot them discover the great lost wonders of history.
Speaker 2:I hope so. I hope so. Better. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by, Aaron. This is always always
Speaker 1:a pleasure.
Speaker 4:What are
Speaker 1:you doing for the fourth?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are you
Speaker 1:doing for the fourth?
Speaker 4:No. I don't like to work. I can, do something with, like, my church. And, I usually my my house is a third space. So for, like, the community.
Speaker 4:So it's very on the other side of this is, I built it in my I built it in a custom house. And so, like, it's a big basically, like, I don't drink, but it's like a big beer hall essentially from front to back. Wow. So so we usually post something. It's like, I don't know, maybe three or 4,000 square feet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's
Speaker 4:just a big open room with, like, a kitchen, dining room, living room, outdoor space.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 4:cool. So we usually, like, host stuff, and people, like, use use my house, to do that. So I I think, this goes back to the the, you know, the human element. Like, fundamentally, innovation is supposed to be ethnomorphic. It's supposed to be make humans better.
Speaker 4:That's why people pay for it. Yep. And there's certainly negative downsides of this, and we have to mitigate those downsides. But you always should start from the the phrase, so what, or go go read Thomas Soul about can you even regulate downsides without creating a secondary effect of mitigating upsides. And and I mean, I I think that from many people are projecting lots of things in AI that they could just get from just, like, being in community and just, like, having friends.
Speaker 4:And and, like, y'all have your Asana workout. Yeah. Yeah. You're, like,
Speaker 2:Sure for mail one. This.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Like, you you you like, so much of the projecting of internal problems people have into technology, one if they had a friend Mhmm. And they resolved their loneliest academic, they had a good family, they surrounded by a religious community, you know, particularly Christianity. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:There are a lot of these things kinda go away, where you can just look at a technology and look at innovation from where it is, which is like, this can just be awesome. It doesn't need to kill us. It doesn't need to start a war. It doesn't need to be AHI, ISI. All those are certainly things we can talk about.
Speaker 4:But to overextend
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You dig into that person that's arguing that, there's typically as as, like, a a pathology built into them that Yeah. Yeah. Is projecting externally when it's just like, hey, dude. Like, do you just, wanna hug? Like, you just, like, you just wanna, like, what you wanna hang out, like, with your pool or, like, go to CrossFit or something, like Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then and then it kinda, like, you know, fades away because there there there are many things in the world you should not care about. And and I don't. Like, I get asked too about things, I'm like, I don't really care about that. Like, it's not something I wanna talk about. And and because you care about less things is key to joy.
Speaker 4:Because less things means you're actually more responsible for more things, which means you can be happy because you could see your work go into something that has output. But there's when you become unhappy is when you see all this crap happening around you, and you get worried about it, and you do something about it, and you really can't. And, really, it's like you're there's just things you just shouldn't care about. And then you're, like, free
Speaker 1:I hate to cut cut you off, but I'm sensing a TED talk.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. We'll do we'll
Speaker 1:do a TBPN talk, very soon.
Speaker 3:We'll talk
Speaker 1:to fantastic weekend. Great seeing you as always.
Speaker 2:See you soon.
Speaker 4:Hey. See you guys.
Speaker 3:See you, man. Bye.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of fantastic AI products, go to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on
Speaker 1:g you like you if you like winning, don't get in a bake off with fin./cbpn.
Speaker 2:Well, next guest is Bridget from Founders Fund. Welcome to the stream, Bridget. How are
Speaker 3:you
Speaker 2:doing? Busy time in oh, wait. Okay. So can you say where
Speaker 1:you are?
Speaker 3:I was on, it was a
Speaker 12:different format. You guys were in the old format.
Speaker 2:So We were. Yeah. New studio. We are now in Hollywood Future
Speaker 1:Capital Media. Media. Yeah. And entertainment. Future Home
Speaker 2:and Media. But speaking of future homes, where are where are you right now?
Speaker 3:So I'm at EAT CC
Speaker 2:in Framingham. That? You're so you're you're literally doing the meme. You're a venture capitalist, and you're you're in France.
Speaker 1:Right now? At a conference.
Speaker 3:Oh, oh, yeah. At a conference conference. At a conference.
Speaker 2:One one hour conference, seven days on the beach. Is that what's,
Speaker 3:like, what we're going on?
Speaker 4:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:It's it's productive. It's productive.
Speaker 2:It's productive. Okay.
Speaker 3:Well, she's
Speaker 12:working. Here. Yeah. I don't know why they have it in France. But Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Last year, it was in
Speaker 1:know why. It looks
Speaker 2:beautiful. It is beautiful. And all the budget capitalists will be there anyway.
Speaker 1:All the events with the
Speaker 3:ocean backdrop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. Give us the what actually happens at an event like that? Is it people kind of voting on direction of the technology?
Speaker 2:Or is it just like pitch Yeah. Meeting founders building on top of stuff? What
Speaker 4:what makes Yeah.
Speaker 3:I would say it's like it's sort of
Speaker 12:a mixture of everything. I would say like these conferences probably originally started because the crypto industry is, like, just so decentralized, like, for lack of a better word. Mhmm. And everyone lives in different places. So I think originally, it was, like, for kind of, like, like minded individuals to meet up.
Speaker 12:And Peter actually used to go to some of the really early ones called like FC Financial Cryptography. And then they slowly evolved into like ETCC. There's like Token two thousand forty nine. And it's just a good way to like see everyone in person. Like, obviously in person is so much better than Zoom.
Speaker 12:People in crypto are just so distributed. Like, they're not really concentrated in one city. Maybe New York now, but it's still kind of like, you know, since The US isn't like insanely regulatorily friendly yet, like, people are everywhere.
Speaker 6:So No. I feel
Speaker 2:like there's very serious projects in San Francisco, New York, Puerto Rico, Singapore, and Dubai, which is, like Yeah. All over the world.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah. But Joey and I try to do, like, one on one meetings most of the day and, like, because if you just get caught up in events, it's easy to just do a bunch of events and, like, not actually get anything done.
Speaker 12:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We we we've gotten SteamWorld a few times. We're not crypto native enough to know the full calendar, and we'll try and book some crypto people and they'll be like, are you crazy?
Speaker 1:We accidentally held our crypto day.
Speaker 2:We were doing the Bitcoin thing and we just didn't know. And we were like, well, Brian Armstrong is coming on. So, you know, if he's not going to this thing like
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But we actually had some folks from the conference hop on which is cool and wound up working up well.
Speaker 3:That's good. It was
Speaker 12:like 2AM our time or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and getting Murt on the street. We had Murt yesterday, and he's always great because, you know, always traveling across the world.
Speaker 2:I wanted to get the update on the the stablecoin world. What's interesting? Is the game over? Circles out. It feels like the legislation's passing, but what are you seeing?
Speaker 2:Is there are there still investment opportunities? Are there still opportunities to build? Or is it the time of the enterprise SaaS integrator in Web two?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. Yeah.
Speaker 12:I think stablecoins are definitely the main character right now. Like, there's a new announcement every single day with something stablecoin related. Like, it's very hype y. It's very in the meta, but I think, like, for good reason. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:I was joking with Joey the other day. It's like, stablecoins are basically the the part of crypto that has found the most product market fit. Mhmm. And it's just like a tokenized US dollar Yep. Which is, like, kind of ironic because the original
Speaker 1:American.
Speaker 3:Step in
Speaker 12:a crypto until, like, we're gonna rebuild the financial system. Everything's gonna be Bitcoin denominated. Like, we're gonna do you know, basically recreate. And now we just have, like, the tokenized US dollar Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, everyone was complaining about volatility of the meme coins and the crypto community said, fine. We'll give you something with zero volatility. Are you happy now?
Speaker 12:Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, it feels like some of that hype I wanna get into the the tokenized private assets Yep. Totally. Tokenized stocks as well. But before that, Sax came out and posted that there there was a certain concession in the stable coin bill around stable coin issuers not being able to pass yield back to Yeah. Holders.
Speaker 1:Could you could you dive into that a little bit? Because that was I felt monumental. But
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think
Speaker 12:that was something that the banking lobbyists probably snuck into the bill. And the bill was, like, a Herculean effort even to just, like, pass the senate. Like, it got blocked once.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Just to, like, get it, like, to the senate was, like, basically, like, an insane task. And I think, basically, the gist of that is, like, if too much money flows out of banks and into, like, stablecoin issuers, like Circle or, you know, there's going to be, like, a million in The US probably, that's money flowing out of, like, the traditional financial system. And then basically, like, net new money cannot be created via loans because stablecoins have to be one to one backed with, like, T bills or cash and cash equivalents.
Speaker 1:So So stablecoins would kill the entire western financial system.
Speaker 12:Like, I mean, basically. And they make I mean, it makes so much sense because it's like, I like, I would rather hold my money in stablecoins. It's like one to one backed. It's very safe. And when you put your money in a bank, it's like people think it's safe and whatever, but it's actually, like, not that safe.
Speaker 12:Like, they're, like, lending it out, and that's how new money gets created, and that's how the economy functions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We all experience it with the SVV crisis.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 1:What's Yeah. And it's it's yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we all experience this firsthand. I mean, most people in tech with the SVB crisis and First Republic and the idea of FDIC insurance, and everyone kind of learns about fractional reserve banking at the worst possible time when there's a crisis. But you actually wrote an article all about how a stablecoin bank might be different. Can you take us through some of what you might expect?
Speaker 2:And and why do we I I feel like there's this whole crypto podcast called like Bankless and they're all like, don't have a bank at all. And that was a meme in crypto for a while.
Speaker 6:What And now the banks
Speaker 12:are gonna issue stablecoins.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the role of the bank going forward? What even what even is a bank?
Speaker 2:Like like, what why do we need that at all? And then walk me through the stablecoin bank idea.
Speaker 12:Oh, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 3:Let's see. Yeah. I think me and
Speaker 12:my friend Avi wrote the piece originally, like, early this year. We basically were looking into this act that didn't end up passing. It was called the Credit Card Competition Act. Mhmm. It had, like, a 3% chance of passing the senate or something, but we were reading it.
Speaker 12:And, basically, what it did in practice, if it were to be, like, passed into law, would be to, like, allow or force banks to accept a network other than, like, Visa or Mastercard. So it basically create this, like, golden opening for a stablecoin network to come in and people to be able to sit pay with stablecoins and, like, all of these things. Because right now, like, banks are pretty locked into Visa and Mastercard. Like, they have a trillion dollars in market cap. Like, they're the de facto.
Speaker 12:And they've also been doing, like, fairly well on the Stablecoin side. Like, they're kind of, like, innovating actually, like, pretty well. So it's kind of like a regulatory thing where you would have to have, like, the CCCA, the the act I was talking about pass in practice for, like, a a stablecoin network to come through. And so that was, like, the first angle we looked at it. And then, basically, we were thinking about, okay.
Speaker 12:What about, like, from a consumer banking perspective? And it basically would function the exact same way as a narrow bank would where they're just it's just a stablecoin bank. Like, your deposits are held one to one backed. They're, like, backed by T bills, and it's super safe. But, again, it's like if all of that money were to flow out of the traditional financial system and banks and into this, you know, this is why the narrow bank could never get a master account.
Speaker 12:They can never get a charter. And they never actually got a meaningful amount of deposits because it's like a threat to the Fed and like to The US economy essentially, if it got, you know, in aggregate, like, a ton of deposits.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah. And that was kind of, like, the way it would trend, I think, if it got a master account. So
Speaker 3:yeah. But a stablecoin bank, I mean, I
Speaker 12:think it's something that, like, needs to exist. Like, it it just makes so much sense, and the banking system is incredibly antiquated. Like, it's actually not safe as we've seen. Yep. And so but yeah.
Speaker 12:I I don't know. A lot of the banks are trying to explore stuff around stablecoins. Now JPMorgan is trying to pilot, like, a tokenized deposit program. Fiserv is trying to launch a stablecoin. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And yeah. And, like, honestly, the incumbents are doing incredibly well. Like, Stripe acquired Bridge. Stripe acquired Privy. Stripe via Bridge launched their own stablecoin, USDB.
Speaker 12:So it's kind of one of those things where, like, you wanna see all these, like, net new winners be created, but also, like, Stripe and a lot of the traditional players are are are kind of crushing it. So it's interesting to What
Speaker 1:about stocks on chain, private company shares on chain? What are you what are you tracking there? Was a bunch of memes this week. We talked about it with with Merit a little bit, but I'm curious what you're expecting. It it just seems like there's, funny enough, a massive amount of demand for US regular, publicly listed US stocks just tokenized on chain.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 12:Yep. Yep. Totally. Yeah. So I I actually went to the the Robinhood event where they announced, like, the private company shares and and then tokenizing equities.
Speaker 12:And, yeah, I think, basically, like, if you're tokenizing equities, it makes a ton of sense as a regulatory arbitrage, like, to to deliver these equities to people outside The US that have historically had a hard time getting them. But, like, for people in The US, it actually just makes sense just to, like, use the traditional, you know, equities market and just buy them from your bank account. And then I think on the private side, yeah, Robinhood talked about what do they do? Like, SpaceX and OpenAI, I think. But, again, it's really it's it's difficult to issue private company shares.
Speaker 12:Like, we you you saw, like, the OpenAI response, I'm sure. It's just one of those things where, yeah, it it it's hard to custody them, where are they living, what happens, like, when you redeem them. Mhmm. And it it it kinda it kinda becomes foggy. So that's why I think, like, unless it's, a regulatory arbitrage, at least for tokenized equities, it it it makes more sense for outside The US than inside The US.
Speaker 12:But everyone's doing it now, like, Kraken issued x stocks. Let's see. Obviously, Robinhood, Coinbase is trying to get into it. So, I mean, again, I think it makes sense. But within The US, it's probably, like, a a a less interesting market because our system works pretty well as is, I would say.
Speaker 12:And then I also think, like, most interesting thing about, like, issuing these things on chain is is native issuance, Such that basically, like, instead of, like, wrapping, you know, Apple stock and then issuing it on, say, Arbitrum, like Mhmm. You just, like, natively like like, let's say just like a com like, don't know, like, Mertz company just, like, goes public and you natively issue those shares. And such that you don't have to, like, wrap and unwrap, add an extra step where you're taking, like, counterparty risk, you're taking custody risk. There's more fees involved, and you don't actually own the underlying. Like, you're trusting someone else to own the underlying.
Speaker 4:So I think that's just The point
Speaker 1:of crypto was trustless systems.
Speaker 12:So Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Goal. But, like, if you
Speaker 12:wanna, like, natively like, Tether is doing, like, tokenized gold, right, where it's like, that's the only asset that represents their gold, is that tokenized gold. It's not like they issued it, you know, on, like, the CME, and then they wrapped it in, like, tokenized Interesting. So I think, like, if you have that extra step of tokenizing, it only makes sense as, a regulatory arbitrage. Otherwise, you should natively issue it. And I think native issuance is gonna become more and more of a thing, and that's gonna drag the rest of the financial system kinda on chain.
Speaker 12:That's Vlad's vision too with Robinhood. It's like if a lot of these companies if you can find a structure that works for, like, OpenAI, SpaceX, you know, all of these, like, private companies, and you just, like, have them, like, natively issuing shares of their own that represent, you know, some kind of stake in the company in, a clean-cut way, then you don't even really, like, need to go public. Right? Because, like, that's kind of, like, your trajectory of, like, letting outside
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is interesting the strategy of trying to force the conversation and then potentially force the partnership by just creating these things. Right? Republic was coming out. We had Ken on and he was basically saying, yeah, some people plenty of people aren't gonna like this but we think it's sort of the natural evolution and then and then, you know, we'll we'll see what what actually pans out.
Speaker 2:Well Yeah. I'm sure you have a big day of yachting and wine tasting tomorrow. Right?
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 2:I mean meetings meetings.
Speaker 1:Business meetings.
Speaker 2:So we appreciate you staying late to hop on the stream.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:Great to catch up.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to soon Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the fourth in France.
Speaker 2:Yes. If you're looking to get a good night's sleep head over to 8sleep.com/tbpn and get a new pod five. They have a five year warranty a thirty night risk free trial and free returns and free shipping.
Speaker 1:We are ready for our game with an 89.
Speaker 2:Congratulations Jordy. A sound board for you and let's bring in our next guest, Price from Open Ledger embedding accounting in your platform. Fast. Price, how you doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 1:Did you hire Soham? No. Did you interview him?
Speaker 13:No. Not me neither.
Speaker 1:Well, check spam. It it tends to be a bull signal. You might have haven't reached
Speaker 2:But yeah. Yeah. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 13:Nice. Hi. I'm Price, cofounder and CEO of Mledger. We're building embedded accounting an embedded accounting API that help helps vertical SaaS platforms embed full accounting suites into their products instead of having to build a general ledger from scratch. 70,000,000 people are running businesses of all types, and no matter what type of business they're running, they all have to do their accounting.
Speaker 13:And so, they're turning to a lot of modern platforms like Shopify, Mindbody, and served service titans run these their platforms. But most of them still don't have accounting features, and the ones they do are usually duct taped together. And so what we've built is a set of APIs and components that makes it much easier for these platforms to embed a full accounting suite inside their product for their end users to use.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So is this b to b to b software? Yeah. I love it. We're adding an extra layer of
Speaker 1:b to b. Great. Why'd you pick an an easy problem like accounting infrastructure?
Speaker 13:Well, I I I don't see it as an easy problem.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. It's totally I'm totally kidding.
Speaker 2:It seems extremely hard.
Speaker 13:I'm I'm I'm I I get it, though. I get it, I think at first glance, it seems like a very simple company in a lot of ways, but
Speaker 1:I think it's don't to be clear, I don't No.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. Was joking.
Speaker 1:It's it's a simple complicated. It's simple idea, extremely complement to actually create.
Speaker 2:Totally. Because you have to create so much flexibility for each different client. But, yeah. What what was
Speaker 1:And we had we had a a CEO on from from Anne Brook that does accounting Just for farms. Just for farms. Yeah. And she said it took them like, I think two and a half years to like build the core accounting sort of engine.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Yeah. So so so what have the trade offs been as you've as you've built the product?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So we went all all the way down to the ledger level and built our own ledger database. That that's what we build all the functionality on top of for reconciliation, and then the actual embedded accounting API itself is all built on top of that general ledger level. And so that took a bunch of time, but we really wanted to save folks who you know, that exact situation you mentioned, folks who are building these custom accounting products that provide so much value to end users, finding a way to really take that those core things that don't change between accounting systems and turn them into, infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own products.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What's the go to market like? How do you actually bring on these businesses? Is it power law distributed? Do you need to just get a few really huge companies on the platform, or are you trying to go super broad like Stripe where kind of everyone's using the product?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So I think that's how we we really got our start, and that's how our first clients are larger power law as customers. But, what we're looking forward to is this, this deeper thesis that we've been building around is this idea that accounting data is basically the best substrate you can get to put at the base of a vertical vertical agent for business. Right? And so as folks are building more types of vertical agents that are, working with financial, APIs or payments and things of that nature, having accounting data reconciled into a book or a chart of accounts and building on top of that is one of the best places to sit because that information is essentially like memory for a company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's the reason that every board meeting starts with, like, let's look
Speaker 3:at the let's look at
Speaker 2:the finances of the business because that that, you know, that is the map of the territory. And then then you can dig into specific things. That makes a ton of sense. In terms of agents, it seems like you don't actually need to do all the work of maybe discovering the correct patterns because your clients are working on top of you in that regard. Are you using artificial intelligence at your company?
Speaker 2:Has there been different trends that you're tracking that are improving the product on your end yet?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So what we're really excited about right now is really weaving it inside and through the the way we're building our general general ledger architecture so that it can automate a lot of those, those those bookkeeping tasks that that really are a big part of accounting and turn that into infrastructure that can quietly sit inside of a product rather than having so much human in the loop input. And Yeah. I think that's really what makes this part of what makes this a really exciting opportunity and different from a lot of other embedded payment or fintech features is that we're essentially helping to automate more of a service as well alongside a suite. That's something that a lot of platforms previously were helping their end users and customers, like, hire bookkeepers or accountants to sit alongside them.
Speaker 13:We help kind of add that almost as an extra feature that they can sell alongside their suite.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? No. Very cool.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm excited about all the different features and functionality that you can build on on top of OpenLedger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we've seen such a big trend in vertical SaaS and all the different, different b two b players. It makes sense that there would be, you know, an enabling technology here. So thank you so much for stopping by. This is great.
Speaker 3:Great to hear from you, Price.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 13:For you guys. This rocks.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Have a great day. Cheers. Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing
Speaker 1:You better
Speaker 3:take seriously.
Speaker 2:Industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions, folks. Head over to public if you wanna buy stocks the old fashioned way where you actually own the stock. It's
Speaker 1:pretty cool.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of Being
Speaker 1:a shareholder underrated.
Speaker 2:Yep. Underrated being Being a shareholder is underrated. Well, we have our next guest
Speaker 3:Not quite
Speaker 1:yet. To the studio. Okay. Four up so we can do a little bit of timeline there.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, we could tell you about Adquick. You could take a four up and put it on a billboard, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of advertising. Only Adquick combines technology.
Speaker 2:Out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. You saw us deploy ads in the real world. We did an out of home campaign in New York and the response to that has been remarkable.
Speaker 1:It's been really fun.
Speaker 2:It's been a way to
Speaker 1:Running by it, taking pictures.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's been a way to to reconnect. We've gotten so many text messages from people who are less online, family members, all sort. It it really cut the Out of home is just built College
Speaker 1:friends.
Speaker 2:It's just built different. Yeah. Mean, you you you gotta do a lot of different marketing strategies. There's a lot
Speaker 1:of things.
Speaker 2:Out of home should be a piece of that.
Speaker 1:Is incredibly underrated. I expect a a, people to just start doing the one up no no launch video. Just big one on one billboard.
Speaker 2:That's the way to do it.
Speaker 1:Very efficient.
Speaker 2:That's the way to do
Speaker 1:it. It's very efficient.
Speaker 2:Well, do we have time to dive into the business of Formula One? Or, Jordy, you wanna check on our next guest? Because, I saw f one last night.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tell it give us give us your review.
Speaker 2:It was incredible. It was one of the best movies I've ever seen. I'm really sorry because we wanted the whole crew to come and but I I, you know, I was catching up with friend, you know, a college buddy, and a former guest on the show as well. And, it just kinda came together. But saw it in IMAX, highly recommended.
Speaker 2:The entire film seemed to be shot in IMAX, which I have no idea how they did because half the shots are from the perspective of a Formula one car, and so they must have mounted some massive camera rig on that thing. But it was beautiful. Hans Zimmer delivered an absolutely incredible score. I've been listening to the theme to f one religiously as I drive at just Okay. You know, five over the speed limit.
Speaker 2:Right? Sure,
Speaker 1:Matt. You sure you wanna put that on the record? I I heard that you drive always perfectly Yep.
Speaker 2:One under.
Speaker 1:At the speed limit.
Speaker 2:One under.
Speaker 1:You've cap your car. Yeah. You you actually hacked it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I kinda take the Nvidia approach to driving. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic movie. Highly recommend it. Lots of great sponsorships. Lots of great ads within the movie.
Speaker 2:Shark ninja's in there. Got a bunch Shark ninja.
Speaker 3:We got a
Speaker 2:bunch of great stuff. Highly recommend seeing it in theaters. By way, go check it out. F one with Brad Pitt. We'll be
Speaker 1:on Fantasy.
Speaker 2:We have our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are doing? Could you guys introduce yourselves? I wasn't we weren't fully expecting to.
Speaker 2:We're excited to have you all here. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Of
Speaker 7:course. So, I mean, maybe just to start out, my name is Jacob. I'm very excited to be here at the temple of technology, the Fortress Of Finance, capital
Speaker 1:of
Speaker 7:capital.
Speaker 1:Let's go. The ultra dumb. Very early. Early supporters. We'll never forget you.
Speaker 2:We we we will remember.
Speaker 3:It's
Speaker 7:great to finally have So just quick background. Yeah. I'm currently a student at Stanford Cool. Along with Jack Whitaker, one of your old interns.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 7:And then, right now, I've been, working for a lot of guild for the past wow. It's like, I think, four or five months now.
Speaker 10:Very good.
Speaker 7:And what I'm gonna be talking about today with Ophira is Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. First. Fit Fit Check? What what is this jacket? Yeah.
Speaker 4:What's this jacket?
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. No. This is, a Sun Microsystems jacket that we got from
Speaker 1:the old
Speaker 7:c suite, one of my coworkers, the Cleveland mafia of Anne, me, Peter Thiel, a bunch of other folks. There's there's a bunch of Sun Microsystems merch. Okay. Yeah. So every time I wear this, I think that's that's kinda what you need if you're going to a pitch meeting, if you're fundraising.
Speaker 7:This instantly gets you into
Speaker 1:It's a letterman jacket of our industry. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's great.
Speaker 3:I know
Speaker 7:it doesn't have Java on the back, but it does have Java on here.
Speaker 2:So Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Incredible.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. K. So give us the yeah. Yeah. Give us the story.
Speaker 1:And then, Ofira Oh, sorry. Quick intro as well would would be great.
Speaker 3:Hi. Yeah. My name's Ofira, and we're gonna be talking about large language model art. Mhmm. I actually I I invented, making artwork with language models like ChatGPT, and Jacob has a really exciting project around that.
Speaker 1:Please. Wait. Break it down.
Speaker 4:You you
Speaker 3:and you you
Speaker 1:You're draw
Speaker 3:something on you there.
Speaker 1:You're you're the creator of AI art. Break that down.
Speaker 7:Yeah. One of them. Yeah. No. She's ridiculously I I'm gonna gas Sofia up for a moment.
Speaker 7:Please. She invented a large portion of modern AI ASCII art and is probably the world's best jailbreaker. OpenAI holds these competitions pretty regularly, like, every couple months or so. They invite people from all around the world to jailbreak their models. Usually, can't get past, like, one or two of the tests out of, like, a 20 testing.
Speaker 7:Ophara just regularly wins them, breaks everything. Like, it's something where I was talking with Ben Mann, who's one of the Anthropic cofounders. And even when we were discussing this, he's like, yeah, no, like, there's still a lot of red teaming and CBRN, which is chemical, biological, radiological nuclear threats that, like, these artists in their communities, they just break through everything. Like, you can spend all the like, I don't care what kind of MIT PhD. Like, hire everybody.
Speaker 7:Like, doesn't work. Like, they're just they're killers.
Speaker 3:That's why Before that, feel safe for You know what? I was using the same techniques to make artwork. So back when Microsoft Bing came out in, like, summer of twenty twenty three, I got, like you know how you guys read poetry books sometimes and the poems are, like, arranged in these beautiful shapes? The words have, like like, this gorgeous shape of tree. That's what I do with language models.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. So I actually first discovered that they could do that in the first place, and I've made a whole beautiful art form out of that.
Speaker 2:This is not diffusion based image generation.
Speaker 3:No. No. This is Using And this is the language model doing it.
Speaker 2:Yes. And so
Speaker 3:just the Exactly. It's showing it's actually a very interesting capability because it's showing spatial intelligence Mhmm. Despite all it's doing is predicting the token just like like you would normally get a chat reply.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:But it's doing it in these gorgeous shapes that very often actually reflect the content of the words.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've seen someone put out a benchmark for having LLMs, basically interpret secret messages in are you familiar with this? Where you draw, you basically write out a sentence in a square box and the LLM gets really confused even though the human can one shot. It's kinda like a Arc AGI for this type of thing, but it's very fascinating that you're able to get good results because I thought that that's a place where LLMs were particularly weak, but it seems like you've been be been able to break through.
Speaker 7:I think they also like, one thing to note is that they don't naturally they're naturally not very good at this. Like, I think if either of you like, both of you, feel like are fairly AI fluent. But if you tried to go out and do this, I don't think that you would get terribly interesting results at first. There's a lot like, to get some of the artworks that are featured on beautifulaiart.com going right now, showing showing my stuff our But Yes. To go to go buy this, I usually like, mean, Oferrah can speak on this.
Speaker 7:Like, you want, like sometimes it's like thirty, forty, even like hundreds of prompts that warm it up and go into these very weird places of distribution since if you think of modern language models, they're pre trained on the entire internet.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So the odds of like if it is on the internet, you can probably make it. So for people saying like, how do you make this art? How does this happen? Like if you just have creative enough prompts that go on for pages at a time, like, you can just find anything on the Internet. You can make all sorts of ridiculous stuff.
Speaker 7:And that's how
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Honestly, I think you can get around these, these jilt kind of, like, these safety measures and so on is that if your disc if your training distribution is the Internet, like, on the Internet, you can just you can go and find.
Speaker 2:So give me the give me the announcement. It sounds like you mentioned selling art on the Internet. Have you processed your first sale? How much do these things cost? How many sales have you done?
Speaker 2:Can you give us a number? I I'm I'm I'm itching to ring the gong for you.
Speaker 7:I'm actually gonna check right now.
Speaker 2:Pull up the Stripe dashboard.
Speaker 1:Let's see it.
Speaker 7:Stripe dashboard. It looks like we already have six orders.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. There
Speaker 1:we go. That's
Speaker 2:great news. Well, we'd love to have you back on when you hit a thousand sales or take it to the moon or put it
Speaker 1:in the what'swhat's.com. Are you gonna add a bunch more artists over time? What does it look like?
Speaker 7:I think that my original thought was that first, all of these great artists, we just have to put something out there. We just have to ship keep shipping. So goal of today was launch, have all the payments set up, have all of the drop shippers so that way
Speaker 4:Cool. We don't
Speaker 7:have to worry about inventory, about, shipping costs, etcetera. And yeah. No. A bunch of people from the NFT community have reached out. The crypto community has been pretty good to us.
Speaker 7:I think that adding more artists is definitely on the list.
Speaker 1:There we
Speaker 7:go. You know, Farrah can talk about this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I wish, like, I I just came on the show, like, I I found out about an hour ago maybe, so I you guys are gonna admire my telephone today. So this is actually a poem by a historical artist named Aldis Huxley called the crystal cabinet.
Speaker 2:Okay. Cool.
Speaker 3:And it's it's you can see, like, it's in the shape of a wing.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 3:And it's very beautiful, and it was interesting. I I actually prompted a Claude Opus three by Anthropic to do that. And it's very interesting. So it's a whole conversation as Jacob describes, and you actually say, like, can you make this more like the shape of a wing, for example? And, again, even though this is, like like, I can picture that in my head because I'm a human, but somehow the model is able to gradually refine the shape more and more like that.
Speaker 2:That's very, very cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Very cool. Well, look
Speaker 2:forward to following along. Thank you so much for stopping by. Anyway, do you have a closing anything you wanna say?
Speaker 7:A closing remark, think, is something for people to keep an eye out for. Oferrah can speak on this as well. But Grimes is making a movie about the AI artists. Oh.
Speaker 2:That's fun.
Speaker 7:And that's how part of, like, the impetus for launching this is that, there's, filmmakers from Cairns, that are right now filming Ophira, Janice, some of the other artists Cool. I'm gonna feature.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Our our friend our friend filmmaker Matt Zien, who we actually met through Grimes, is a huge fan of this artwork and a big supporter of it Awesome. Is is hoping to film an independent documentary about Mhmm. Kind of first contact with the AI models because so many of us have had, like, weird weird experiences. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, you chat with it, and it's not like talking to a computer. It's like there there's a little something going on there. Mhmm. So this is going to be kind of a I I would call myself, like, kind of further on the the edge of that.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:It'll be about how we interact with models. So stay tuned for that.
Speaker 7:We'll wear TBPN merchant at we'll be first TBP on a cans.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Fantastic. We'd love to see that. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'd love to
Speaker 1:have you on the road. There's so
Speaker 2:much to chat about, but have a great day.
Speaker 1:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about Wander.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better.
Speaker 1:We dropped that video into the into a timeline in turmoil.
Speaker 2:It was a timeline in turmoil.
Speaker 1:And it stood out. It was a bit of a timeline cleanse.
Speaker 2:We did well. We did well. It was a lot of fun. It's having a long life on Instagram right now. It it did well on X and and I've been enjoying getting it into the hands of the Instagram audience.
Speaker 1:Before our next guest
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I just wanna say happy birthday to John Exley.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes.
Speaker 3:He is
Speaker 2:Happy birthday, John.
Speaker 1:The most positive person been very helpful
Speaker 2:in the chat. Met
Speaker 1:and Very regularly. Unofficial moderator.
Speaker 2:There's 77,000 people on the stream. And so, I think we'd be melting down without him. So, he's been a
Speaker 3:huge asset.
Speaker 2:Thank you and happy birthday to John.
Speaker 3:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Anyway, we have our next guest, Orin Hoffman in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Welcome back to
Speaker 1:Welcome back. To you again.
Speaker 14:Excited to be here. Second time guest.
Speaker 2:Yes. How are doing? I had a question for you. Do venture capitalists take their own advice?
Speaker 1:Apparently not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It down
Speaker 14:me. Or all hypocrites.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why I I I wanna hear your your the the examples that you have for situations where VCs give advice, but then don't take it themselves. And then I wanna go into kind of the meta level of, like, why is this happening? What is driving that dynamic? But first, kick us off with some concrete examples of VCs giving advice, but then not taking it themselves.
Speaker 14:Yeah. I I think first of all, just my high levels, venture capitals are just really not that ambitious. Like, they're not nearly as ambitious as, like, someone who runs a private equity firm. Like, the level of ambition is probably, like, 10 x higher on private equity than it is in venture capital. And so in private equity, you might be, like, really building, like, an amazing company that you're trying to take public
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:That you're really trying to take over the world. Mhmm. Venture capital is, like, you're just kind of, like, you're you're just okay with this, you know, essentially, just a
Speaker 2:a little Yeah. Is that because of duration?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And on the company side, you're you're kind of, you know, there are certain investors that take a more hands on approach or maybe they're on the board. Mhmm. But it's somewhat you've it's it's sort of culturally, you're sort of leaving it up Mhmm. To the founder and and fate to some degree after you write
Speaker 3:the check.
Speaker 14:It's it's essentially it's a lifestyle business. Sure. And so the venture capitalists always derive lifestyle businesses, but they run them one themself.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 14:They they often say to founders, hey. You know, you should have one CEO, but most venture capital firms have, like, four CEOs. Yeah. And it's, like, hard to make decisions. They'll say take dilution, but they don't take dilution.
Speaker 14:They'll say things like, you know, merge with other companies. They never do merge. They almost always say, hey. It's a good thing to go public, but you never see them trying to take their own company public. Like, Bill Gurley or, you know, Brad Gerson are not taking their companies public, but they always give advice to take you know, and they have big companies.
Speaker 14:They run big, you know, fairly large companies. They could have taken it public, but they don't but, you know, they'll say board governance, but they don't have their own board governance. Yep. So, you know, just there's whole host of things where the venture capital will say one thing. And then, of course, they sell, like, well, you should have a differentiated product.
Speaker 14:But most venture capital firms, you know, they're just selling money. It's commodity. And so it's very hard to differentiate. You just have all this competition. You know, if if competition is for losers, well, like, venture capital firm is, like, the most competitive place where you have some of the most smartest people competing against you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There is some way
Speaker 1:the partners are the product. Yep. And there's only one Orin Hoffman. And there's only so so you're differentiated by by the the the product that you're providing is in some way yourself plus the money. Yep.
Speaker 1:And so That's right.
Speaker 2:That's But what about what about some of the rumors that firms like General Catalyst or Andreessen Horowitz might actually go public? And if you look at the way Marc Andreessen's been building his business, it does feel like he if someone's gonna turn a venture capital firm into a Blackstone like, you know, financial institution, it certainly seems like he's trying to do that.
Speaker 14:I would agree. I would agree on that. So I would say, first of all, if you think of interest in Horace, they have they have at least they have two CEOs and not six.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Right? And they clearly only have two, and they're clearly the CEO, and they're clearly running the firm. So I would say they are way more ambitious than almost every other venture capital firm. General Catalyst, like, own, like, a hospital
Speaker 3:now. Hospital now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 14:So right? So, I mean, they're they're definitely leveling up the level of ambition.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 14:But still, just if you just look at venture capital versus private equity, just if you just think of, like, the top venture capital firms versus the top, you know, private equity firms and just do a comparison for each one on one, like, it's it's just it's just a 10 x different scale in private equity. Maybe venture capital eventually get there, and and interest in Horitz could definitely be one of those firms that they get there. But today, like we're the also ran of the, and the ambition level is just so much lower.
Speaker 2:Okay. Ambition level, do you think it's because it's kind of a prerequisite if you're gonna be a VC that you're already rich?
Speaker 3:Well, the other thing the other
Speaker 1:thing is the thing
Speaker 2:is the ambition is go into private equity and they like they're grinders and they grind their way up and so they build that muscle. Whereas a lot of VCs, they don't kick it off with grinding in VC. They're, like, grinding as a founder, which is arguably the hardest thing you can do, eating glass, staring into the abyss. They get some liquidity event. They do a rest invest for two years.
Speaker 2:Then they go into VC, and by then, they've kind of come down off of the mountain of like grinding misery. And then they're like, okay, I'm like somewhat retired now.
Speaker 1:Well, there's also the different types of ambition. There's I wanna 10 I wanna have a 10 x fund. Yep. But you could be off of a small base. Could be a $20,000,000 fund.
Speaker 1:And then there's I wanna have a trillion of AUM which no VC has BlackRock has 10,000,000,000,000 of AUM. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's levels and I do think you there's a bifurcation of certain VCs just wanna put up good numbers and have a little lifestyle business and Yep.
Speaker 1:Deliver great returns for LPs. Others that have wildly different and bigger in some ways ambitions and that they wanna have hundreds of billions of AUM and I think that they will get there. But I think what you're saying is there's maybe not enough investors that or or too many too many people are just not actually wildly ambitious at all. You know, they're like, I just wanna three
Speaker 14:x. They're running a three x. Business, which is totally fine. Yeah. And, obviously, they're building they're they're they're hopefully doing the the venture companies are doing good in the world.
Speaker 14:It's not like they're not doing good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:They're doing They're they're out there doing a good thing and but we just we're just tend to not follow our own advice.
Speaker 2:Okay. Now let me let let I if I come to you and I go to the the the the the Silicon Valley market and I say, I'm I'm gonna do it differently. I'm taking high dilution. I'm gonna take this company public. I'm starting the a venture capital firm that will scale.
Speaker 2:Is that even a viable strategy, or is there some sort of, like, market dynamic that prevents that from even being possible?
Speaker 14:It it it might be very hard given the constraints that other people wanna put on the market and stuff like that. And and different people have tried. So, obviously, we we saw SoftBank try and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Maybe kinda pull back. We saw some other folks who did have a different level of ambition.
Speaker 2:The crossover investors.
Speaker 14:Yeah. And and some of the Tiger was ambitious. Have kind of fought against it. Mhmm. It's it's it's tough.
Speaker 14:And the the venture capital market itself is very small. Mhmm. So it's, you know, it's a private equity market. It's just a much, much bigger market, especially when you talk about things like private lending. You know, Apollo is just a much bigger sandbox that they can play in than at least Andreessen Horowitz today.
Speaker 14:It doesn't mean that will change because the the venture capital market is getting bigger. And, of course, Andreessen Horowitz is gonna move it to other things. They'll move into wealth management. They're gonna move into a lot of other adjacent things over time. So that's really the way.
Speaker 14:It's like you you you you get this niche in in venture capital, but that niche really can't be that big. And then you'll have to layer on other things to to grow. Just like any other company, if you're if you're Facebook just for Harvard University, there's only there's only how big you can grow.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Even for all the universities, universities, there's only how you you've got to move into other markets if you really wanna become a great company.
Speaker 2:So many VCs are big poker players. One of the major tier one firms should open a casino. And just start rolling cash games
Speaker 1:And have rules, no crying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No crying
Speaker 3:in the
Speaker 2:casino. Open a literal casino.
Speaker 3:And that's the way to do it.
Speaker 1:If you start crying, booted.
Speaker 2:You're booted. Yes. This is great. Well, but please, we'll we'll have you back on the next time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Should be
Speaker 14:in more time.
Speaker 2:Right? To noodle on
Speaker 1:this What you doing for the Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are you doing
Speaker 1:for France?
Speaker 14:I'm in I'm in Wisconsin for the fourth.
Speaker 1:Oh, there we
Speaker 2:go. Staying in America. Let's hear it. Let's hear
Speaker 3:it for capital allocator. Yeah. For
Speaker 2:the fourth.
Speaker 1:That is that's American dynamism in practice. Yes. Staying in America for the fourth.
Speaker 2:We salute you.
Speaker 8:Absolutely. Great to see
Speaker 1:you, Orin.
Speaker 14:Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the holiday.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Next, we have Mehran Jalali. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I think we've got through all of our ads. It's just rough.
Speaker 2:I like doing ads. And now we're now we're out of them. Well, we have one more graphite. I had I don't have it the deck, but graphite dot dev code review the agent AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality
Speaker 1:software Cursor, ramp. Started Asana. For free For sale.
Speaker 2:At graphite.perplexity. And we got our next guest in the building. Welcome to the stream. Mehron. Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Speaker 8:Mehron or Mehron. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mehron. Fantastic. Give us the update. What are you up to? Where are you in the world right now?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I'm in San Francisco. I'm back in San Francisco. I was in Belize for the past two weeks doing the scan there.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 8:That is complete. Preliminary results are super, super cool.
Speaker 2:What were you scanning for?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Give us the whole backstory. Yeah. Tell us for like the initial post.
Speaker 1:It was maybe six months ago
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:That we saw. So this has been in the works for a while. K.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically, the Mayans, they cleared out forests to build some of their cities and settlements. And so when they moved or they died or in any way they vacated their cities, trees ended up growing back over them.
Speaker 8:So if you look at it from the satellite, the it's just completely green. It's just completely trees. But beneath the trees are these, like, magnificent pyramids or roads and buildings and whatnot. And so and they're invisible from space, and they're invisible on the ground because it's just so hard to traverse these rainforests. And so what I'm doing is we're flying planes with very big, very strong late LiDAR scanners under them, and we're scanning these trees.
Speaker 8:And while most of the canopies are just completely full of trees because, you know, it's a rainforest, some of the lasers make their way through. And then you classify the points, you remove the trees, you look at the ground, and then, you know, if we discover something like a pyramid or roads or structures and stuff, we know that we found something that no one's seen for the past, you know, thousand, two thousand years or whatever. So, yeah, LIDAR scanning forests to find civilizations.
Speaker 2:Did you find anything?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What'd you find? Yeah.
Speaker 8:So doing two scans this year, 400 square kilometers in Belize, 600 square kilometers in Mexico. The Belize one's done, but only, like, a third of it has been processed so far. Super cool. There are some there are pyramids. There are, like, hundreds, maybe even thousands of buildings.
Speaker 8:Wow. Hundreds of kilometers of roads. You know, things that no one has ever seen, you know, since a thousand, two thousand years ago.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. What Tell me about the tell me about the the the economic model of your entire operation. You're flying planes. You've got Yes. Lidar scanners.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 8:It's a nonprofit. So Okay.
Speaker 3:I mean, so what what got
Speaker 8:me interested in this was I saw this But there'll a
Speaker 2:for profit spin out at some point and I could get I'm working on some Units. We're gonna Give
Speaker 1:me some units. Tokenize the Mayan ruins.
Speaker 8:Yeah. The capped LiDAR unit. No.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 100 x around What
Speaker 3:kind of
Speaker 8:interest in this was I saw this cool paper over Thanksgiving or so, funnily enough. That was about how some conservation efforts scanned some trees in some forest in Mexico, and then these archaeologists removed the trees and they found stuff underneath. And so I decided to see, like, oh, like, if if you can spot, you know, random archaeological sites without even explicitly looking for them, I wonder, you know, have they been doing more? But and the answer is, you know, archaeologists have done some of this stuff in the past, but ultimately, there's just not a whole lot of money in archaeology. I mean, you know, it's not it's not a very, like, well funded thing.
Speaker 8:Like, it's like, maybe all the money going to archaeology on an annual basis is the same as, like, you know, a series a or series b or something. And so and and it's, like, massive economies of scale because you're flying planes. You know, the more you can fly them, the more you can, you know, divide your total cost by. There are these, like, extremely expensive, like, million dollar lidar scanners. And, yeah, I mean, you know, the the main costs are basically the plane and the lidar scanner and the crew to go and actually do the scanning.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So where where do you go from here? What's the next step?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So still the data has yet to be processed. The the processing is basically figuring out what points belong to the ground, which which ones belong to the trees, removing the tree ones, taking the ground ones. And then while, like, you know, the the naive visualizations are, like, striking, like, know, you're seeing, like, this huge pyramid or whatever, ultimately, the archaeologists draw the most interesting inferences. Like, you know, is this actually super novel to us?
Speaker 8:Like, sure. Like, this is no one's seen this before, but, like, did anyone expect this to be there or not? So give the to to process the point cloud, give the data to the archaeologists. They make their inferences, but my goal ultimately is to scan all of this area. I mean, ultimately, I think, you know, we need to put more money into archaeology.
Speaker 8:I think there's really cool stuff to do with tech in archaeology. We need more tech talent in archaeology. And my goal is essentially to use these results, you know, get like, publish them, all that stuff, raise a lot more money, and do, like, a significant larger scan next year, like, 10,000 square kilometers at the very least next year. And within a couple years, you know, finish all of Central America, then move to the Amazon, then other interesting archaeological projects like, you know, scanning coastlines, stuff like that. So I just
Speaker 1:Anything to anything to scan in in America considering it's it's the fourth tomorrow?
Speaker 3:In The US, I you know, the the the thing is the thing
Speaker 8:that's interesting to me about Central America is that they they actually had, like, massive pyramids and stuff. The US and the Amazon, like, there is stuff there, but, ultimately, the and and the Amazon, at the very least, they didn't have stones. So everything that you find are, like, dirt mounds, which are cool. Like, the fact that they're there, like, in places that seem so hostile to life kind of in general, you know, like, just raining nine months a year or whatever school. But, there are like dirt mountains and stuff in The US and the Amazon as well.
Speaker 8:But at the moment, my interest mostly in Central America, think. There was like, you know, 50,000 square kilometers or so there to scan and I plan on scanning all of them first and then and then others.
Speaker 1:How are how are the local governments in in these areas? Are are they excited about what you're doing? Are they are they are they Yeah. Emailing you for updates? Hey.
Speaker 1:What what did you find?
Speaker 8:Well, when I was in Belize and I was talking to the, you know, the people in the city, they were super excited. You know? They they're proud of their history. They find their sites cool. They find that, like, other people are interested in them.
Speaker 8:They're very cool. And I think that people are super excited. The governments are also very excited because, you know, this boosts their tourism. This boosts their national heritage. It shows that, you know, were once great celebrations here and, like, you know, that's something to be proud of.
Speaker 8:And they're also wary because the problem is that there's a big looting problem in these countries, especially countries that, like, don't have, you know, so much money dedicated to Archaeology to protect all of the sites. And so they're a little worry worried about the data privacy and stuff related to this stuff because, yeah, like Totally. Know, when you're earning, like, I don't know, like, $10,000 a year when that's your GDP per capita and you, like, find, like, a jade mask worth, like, you know, 200 k in in on the black market. Like, there's a strong inside of us, so they're trying to prevent that. And so, yeah, I mean, we've been working with the governments to assure them about the data privacy.
Speaker 8:But, generally, like, they're super excited about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I can imagine.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about Eldorado?
Speaker 8:You know, huge if true.
Speaker 3:If Big
Speaker 1:if true.
Speaker 2:I mean, what is the lore? What is are there any are there any folks out there that still believe it's out there? Is there any like like, what what is the what is the historical narrative, and then what is the modern narrative?
Speaker 3:Well, I
Speaker 8:I I think the meta point is kind of that things like El Dorado, things like Atlantis, like Noah's Ark and stuff are, like, kind of how a lot of people get interested in archaeology initially. Like, they're like, you know, we're gonna find Noah's Ark in Turkey. And then you look and you're like, oh, well, you know, huge if true, but I don't know how much these these hold up to some scrutiny. And then you're like, okay. Like, what are other, like, more practical things that we can do?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So yeah. I mean, huge if true, but, like, you know, most likely not true. But it's it's good that these persist because it gets some people interested in archaeology.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about other things that we should be scanning for? I mean, if not gold, rare earth elements or top of mind, maybe there's a secret chip fab somewhere we could grab.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Like data centers.
Speaker 2:Data centers. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:About No. I'm expecting you to find my own data centers.
Speaker 2:Yes. And what do think There
Speaker 1:was a Jensen back. There was a Jensen of that era. That would
Speaker 2:be truly huge if true.
Speaker 8:Well, I I think we should scan the Amazon. I mean, there's like been really interesting stuff there. Like, the early people that, like you know, the early Europeans that went there, they reported, you know, like, ten foot tall naked women that are, like, shooting arrows, which is how it got the name Amazon. You know? So it'd be cool to maybe fact check this, but, like, even if this is not a real, like, there's probably some stuff that this was based on.
Speaker 8:It would be cool to look for Atlantis. You know, huge if true. I think we should scan all the coastlines of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Caspian, you know, because there are probably so many cities that are that are now underwater. I'm Iranian. I would love to do archaeology in Iran as well.
Speaker 8:You know, there there are so many civilizations that that, like, you know, are mentioned in Sumerian history, but, like, we have no traces of except for, like, you know, that we know there was a powerful king there. So there's there's a ton of archaeological mysteries, but, like, kind of the bits versus atoms thing is also true in archaeology, where, like, the atoms part of archaeology doing fieldwork, doing digging and stuff, that hasn't really changed in hundreds of years. But there are, like, interesting opportunities and bits now of, like, you know, Nat Friedman's Vesuvius scrolls or, you know, doing lidar scanning using satellite imagery, stuff like that. And, like, those are kind of the lower hanging fruits. The more we can do remote sensing, the more we can do scalable things, because that's the lower hanging fruit.
Speaker 8:And then, yes, like, making really educated guesses about, like, where something like Atlantis might be and, like, doing work there. But I'll
Speaker 1:I'll Do do you find it do you find it funny or fascinating that that being an explorer is, like, super contrarian? Like, we have this idea that that the world is fully discovered and, you know, we we've we've mapped every coastline. So there's nothing else to Like
Speaker 8:high school career fairs, like no one's saying, oh, you can still discover things, which is like, oh, what gets me interested? Like, I didn't know this was an option. I don't know if it's contrarian. But, like, yeah, I mean, not many people are doing it. I would love
Speaker 2:if there were more people doing it. There was more interest.
Speaker 8:There was more money in this. But, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1:Well, you're starting the exploration industrial complex. You're the first of the of the modern era.
Speaker 2:That'd be great.
Speaker 14:I I I think
Speaker 8:when the results come out, I'm like, they're gonna be super cool. And, yeah, it's it's gonna get a lot lot of people a lot more interested in this sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Very cool. We'll come back on whenever you have updates. We we should do the next one from the air, ideally, in a starlet powered
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 8:the the plane's flying at, 500 meter taking the sharpest turns at Acanis. It's not gonna be a pretty sight.
Speaker 1:Well, it'll be fun. Anyways, thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thank you
Speaker 1:very Yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you for having me. A good Bye.
Speaker 3:Thanks. Up
Speaker 2:next, we have Kushal from Extend app coming into the studio. We got some Gong worthy news, baby.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? It's Gong time. It's Gong time.
Speaker 2:Jordy, I'll
Speaker 3:let you
Speaker 15:What's up, guys?
Speaker 1:How are you? Good to
Speaker 3:see you.
Speaker 2:How much have you raised?
Speaker 3:Good to
Speaker 15:see you too. What's up, guys?
Speaker 2:Give us the news on the fundraising front first, and then we'll figure out what you do for a living. I
Speaker 15:just answer customer support for a living. That's what
Speaker 3:I do.
Speaker 1:Oh, you gotta get on Fin. Founder. Fin by Intercom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Fin by
Speaker 4:the Ash.
Speaker 1:Then you can just go to France. Yeah.
Speaker 15:There we go.
Speaker 1:What's going on? What's the news?
Speaker 15:What's up, guys? Great to meet you. Well, we recently announced $17,000,000 in funding across our seed
Speaker 2:and series a rounds. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:With authority. That one felt good.
Speaker 2:Okay. Now the less important news, what does the company do?
Speaker 15:Well, we also filmed a pretty kick ass launch video to go along with it too.
Speaker 1:I saw that.
Speaker 15:Was fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was great.
Speaker 1:So is this like some type of new, like, fax machine company? You're doing document processing? What what are what are you building?
Speaker 15:Yeah. Yeah. So my name is Kushal. I'm the CEO cofounder of Xtend. And at Xtend, we're building a modern document processing cloud.
Speaker 15:So, you know, we work with companies that just get a ton of PDFs and unstructured documents. Right? And we help them ingest and process that. So we really work with, you know, cutting edge AI teams, data teams, technical teams, whether they're trying to build AI agents on top of that data, new products with that data, automate, you know, manual back office work with that. We really give them all of the infrastructure and tooling they need to go after that.
Speaker 2:Is the actual physical document ingest problem solved? Is is Iron Mountain just dominant there? Is there no need for actual new scanning? Have you scanned every document in the world by now?
Speaker 15:Not even close. It's actually funny. One of the first customers I talked to back when I was getting the company started off the ground, it was a large health care provider in Milwaukee, believe it or not, in the the middle of the country. And I talked to them. I'm trying to pitch them, you know, LLMs for document processing, and they're like, this sounds great.
Speaker 15:Come back to us in two years once we, you know, have digitized this mountain of, you know, lockbox warehouse of PDFs and boxes that are stored in our backyard. So not quite there yet, but I think we'll get there pretty soon.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about the tech stack. Is OCR traditional OCR pipelines, there, like, dead at this point? I've heard about some people that will, you know, send a PDF to Google for OCR, get a big messy bucket of text, but at least it's in text format, and then run that through an LLM to just kinda clean it up. What's the state of the art?
Speaker 15:Yeah. You know, what's really surprising is so much of the world still runs on these PDFs and Excel documents, and they just end up being the system of record for such mission critical data. If you think health care, you know, finance, supply chain, it's just all powered by PDFs. I think people's mind would be blown if they knew how much of the global economy just runs off of PDF files. And the problem has been around for a long time.
Speaker 15:Right? I think OCR at this point is decades old. You know, funnily enough, we we have a a bunch of hoodies for the team, and we have the OCR patent printed on the hoodies. Oh, yeah. Just as a little testament to it.
Speaker 15:But it's, like, forty, fifty years old at this point. Right? But it's really accelerating now. You know? I think more documents are gonna get processed in the next six months than all of history combined since the PDF file format was invented.
Speaker 15:And I experienced this myself. You know? I actually built this back at Brex in in 2018. I was an early engineer there. And then we did exactly what you were saying, OCR a document and then just run it through a ton of painful regex to try to, like, pull out these targeted data fields, and it was so painful.
Speaker 15:Yeah. And fast forward now to today with LLMs, and the capabilities are just so much higher, and the demand for document processing is through the roof right now.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say what what what talk about kind of the demand. I I I know you got a bunch of pretty incredible customers already.
Speaker 15:Yeah. I mean, we have a privilege of working with some awesome folks from large enterprises like Square, you know, that are trying to do a ton of use cases around financial statement ingestion or Flatiron Health who have billions of pages of patient medical data all the way to cutting edge startups like, you know, Brex and Mercury and Checkr and many others that are all using us in production. And we have incredibly high retention, ton of folks that kind of refer us to others and and come inbound, and we're growing the team to to keep up with it. But the demand has been pretty intense. And I think what we've kinda seen is that as these models have gotten better, it's sort of increased the possibility of what you can go and do.
Speaker 15:But for very mission critical use cases, where even, you know, 99% accuracy, for example, is not good enough if you're trying to do mortgage processing or patient health care intake because the downstream impact of bad data is so catastrophic. Right? Mhmm. And so we really focus on these, you know, pipelines and industries where you just cannot get it wrong. Accuracy, reliability, you cannot get it wrong.
Speaker 15:And that cons that, you know, constraint puts a ton of complexity on the problem, and that's kinda where we go deep. And that's why we have a number of customers that kinda try to do the model approach and then come back to us in three months, six months, and they sign up for extend and pay for extend despite the models having gotten exponentially better over the past couple of months.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I mean, what the models are getting better, but what models are you actually using and for what use cases? Because I imagine that the price difference and the time cost of using a heavy duty reasoning model versus a really quick optimized, like, you know, four o level model has gotta be pretty different. And then is tool use at all in the mix with some of these? Because I can imagine as clunky as Regex is, every once in a while, you might wanna have a layer of Regex validation on top of things, right, just to make sure.
Speaker 15:I think you're getting at a really key point, which is there's very few use cases, which is like, here's a document. Extract this data. Because for any mission critical pipeline, you have the entire end to end system you have to build of classify the document because that changes the schema and then split the document up and then actually parse it to make sure you can handle these tables that span 10 pages. Right? And each one of those kinda adds complexity to the axes of cost and performance and latency, and you kinda need to have all three of those.
Speaker 15:Right? Not a single model is gonna be great at all of them. And really why customers end up buying us is because they don't wanna be locked in to one model. And we give them all the tooling to figure out, hey. This initial triage step, we wanna use a really cheap, fast, you know, low latency triaging classifier.
Speaker 15:But then for this really complex table, we do wanna use a really powerful reasoning model.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:And we kinda help them integrate, build, and build all of that end to end.
Speaker 2:Talk about where the data is winding up. Are you seeing more clients demand that you map the documents that you're ingesting all the way to a relational database like Postgres or something? Are people just saying, hey, just give me a blob of JSON. Stuff it in MongoDB. Do people want a CSV file that's on AWS or s three or something?
Speaker 2:Like, how do people want the data finalized from you?
Speaker 15:Yeah. If you I mean, the flexibility is kind of the name of the game, and that's why we provide options for all of that. Mhmm. Some people that are trying to build, you know, AI agents on top of it, they'll want the JSON payload, but then also put it into a VectorDB. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 15:Some other folks are gonna want to actually index that in, like, Elasticsearch if you're trying to do text experiences on top of it. Sure. Other people that are, like, just automated mortgage processing, for example, that'll just go, like, structured data points into a DB that then they can take action on. So we kinda give them the data, the raw data, and then get out of their way so they can figure out, you know, where to do and what to do with it downstream.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how real are I mean, there's there's there's this narrative for a while. Like, oh, enjoy the VC subsidized era. It's like the early Uber days. All the LLMs are cheap, but they're gonna be really expensive.
Speaker 2:How real is it that LLM inference can be a material cost for a company like you that's kind of reselling inference? Not to degrade what you're doing, but, that that's a piece of your business. Part of it. You have a cost that's inference, and then you're earning revenue from the value that you add on top of that versus a start up that's buying from you. How how big are these line items?
Speaker 2:Are we talking, you know, something that's material to SG and A for a company? Or or is is intelligence, like, basically too cheap to meter at this point?
Speaker 15:Yeah. It's a great question. And it really depends on the use case. Right? And our contract sizes range from you know, we work with small startups paying us a few $100 a
Speaker 6:month Mhmm.
Speaker 2:All the
Speaker 15:way up to large enterprises that pay us 6 plus figures a year. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 15:And it kind of varies all across the board. But, know, we we haven't played the unit margin game where we're trying to, you know, give away a dollar for 90¢ or anything like that. We have positive unit economics on on all across the board. Because really what we benchmark ourselves against is what is the cost of bad accuracy in your downstream product or your user experience? What's the cost of six months of edge time?
Speaker 15:And at the end of the day, those end up outweighing a lot more than, you know, potential percentage differences on, like, the LLM cost themselves, especially as they've continued to come down. You know, there were some things we couldn't do from a product perspective eighteen months ago that now we really can just because it's so much easier to make multiple LLM calls and do things more agentically in an end to end system.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:No. Very excited for you. This is amazing. Clearly ripping. I can
Speaker 2:I can I can sense I can feel it in the voice? Yeah. Yeah. It's going well.
Speaker 1:There's nothing better than than seeing yeah. You you you know, a lot of people raise the series a. Not everybody has this level of of of pull from the market. So Yeah. I'm sure you'll be back on for a a b in no time.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 10:Can't wait.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Cheers. I feel like that could be very valuable for you. You could maybe use extend to take ingest all the registrations from the g 60 threes from g wagons and all the service records.
Speaker 2:And then you could have one database for all of them that you'd query across
Speaker 1:the years. I was gonna say, I mean, we produce a lot of documents Yeah. On the show and figuring out how to process these bad boys.
Speaker 2:It's almost like they come from the computer and the Internet and they could just remain there and yet we print them out because it's fun. Anyway, what else is what else is in the news? What else is important to cover today? We have a few few We have one more in your view today.
Speaker 1:Got Avlok coming on in just a little bit. Daniel Daniel, Growing Daniel was chirping.
Speaker 2:Any breaking news?
Speaker 1:He says watching the SoHam interview and I can already tell people are gonna see this interview of a legendary liar talking about his legendary lies and be like wow I kind of believe him. You can label the tin poison and people will still eat it.
Speaker 2:Label the tin poison?
Speaker 1:Yes. You can label the tin poison and people will still eat it. Sure. Says it's you you had said at some point it's tough because someone who would lie about having multiple jobs might come on here and lie to us. Is he
Speaker 2:quoting me here?
Speaker 1:He seemed quoting you. He seemed sincere. He did seem sincere. It's very possible that he's a a legendary. He's a 10 x engineer and also a 10 x liar or a 100 x liar.
Speaker 3:Well, proof's in the pudding,
Speaker 5:you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, it's very obvious that I I wouldn't recommend a portfolio company hire this guy. I think it's possible he goes and works somewhere and just does a great job. Mhmm. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.
Speaker 2:You might hire
Speaker 1:him We need a prediction market.
Speaker 2:In your literally in your house.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but but the pushback
Speaker 3:there is there's
Speaker 2:So you gotta have him in the office, but then you gotta live with him.
Speaker 1:And he But
Speaker 2:he's gotta be very hacker
Speaker 1:house. Maybe he just is, you know, he sets up his desk and he's just still moonlighting, you know. Think he might be, might just be built for moonlighting. Also was It's
Speaker 2:a dev shop.
Speaker 3:He also was What's
Speaker 2:the dev shop thing he's
Speaker 1:would he would routinely miss, you know, miss deadlines and then use various excuses He
Speaker 2:uses
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 2:when
Speaker 1:the the India Pakistan stuff was happening. Was telling people, you know, they shot a drone ten minutes away, guilt tripping people. So It's rough. Terrible behavior.
Speaker 2:It's a buyer beware situation for anyone who's employing him.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You know what you're getting yourself into, you gotta be careful and make sure that that aligns. And ultimately, the value of what you're paying, what's the value he's delivering? And you just know, okay. Could be could be some volatility in that. But he's more of a known quantity now.
Speaker 2:And we learned a couple of things, at least got him on the record. So, you know, if he goes out and moonlights again, everyone will be able to point to that interview. Be like he said he wasn't gonna do it. And he did it.
Speaker 1:Mostly. Somebody was saying a fake SOHAM fake SOHAM account was saying, Elon can work at nine startups. Yes. Jamie Dimon can be on the board of multiple companies but when you do it, it's a scam. And then Austin says, so tired of this argument.
Speaker 1:Working at multiple companies was not the problem. Many people have side gigs or contract at many places. They just don't lie about doing so. So that's the key thing. Jamie Dimon is not sneak sneaking on to other boards.
Speaker 1:Elon's very public about his different companies. Yep. And it's all about just avoid lying. Just don't lie.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's what
Speaker 1:he said. So Han probably coulda had a had a cracked dev shop. But he chose to lie. So hopefully, he course corrects.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. We will see. We will let the timeline decide. We will let I'm sure the timeline will not let up on the memes and the jokes and anything else that's
Speaker 3:going
Speaker 2:on. Oh, well. Should we should we go through some f one stuff? So f one has made an annual sponsorship revenue of more than $636,000,000, which I believe is is of significant multiple to the amount of money that they were asking for for actual
Speaker 1:TV rights.
Speaker 2:TV rights.
Speaker 1:I think they wanted 200,000,000 ESPN
Speaker 2:million. Ball. For the right to to distribute that and show that as content. But the ads inside Are generating well
Speaker 1:beyond that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So between 2019 and 2024, Liberty Media says f one series annual sponsorship revenue more than doubled to 636,000,000. At a team level, total sponsorship revenue increased by 60% to 1,300,000,000.0 over the same period. So Liberty Media is selling f one sponsorships, but then the teams are also selling sponsorships.
Speaker 1:There's levels.
Speaker 2:The sport is bigger than it has ever been in its seventy five year history, and everyone wants a slice. But how can sponsors stand out and justify the cost when demand is so high?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I they haven't announced their new media rights or TV rights deal. But given how much they're doing on the sponsorship side, I wouldn't be surprised if they just go for Max eyeballs
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And kind of take it at at somewhat of a Not necessarily a loss, but understand it won't be the profit center that it maybe once was. Because if you actually look at f one viewership, that that was TV rights in The United States. Sure. They wanted 200,000,000. No.
Speaker 1:ESPN wasn't interested in doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess this is
Speaker 1:global sponsorship. Previously previously in in twenty twenty twenty three onward, they were paying between 75 and 90 a year. And they just don't command the live US viewership to to really justify that anymore, I guess, or or even beyond that despite the sports popularity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. Apparently, brands are picking teams based on, like, the unique personality of those teams now. So give this example, the team's distinct personalities can be a big draw for sponsors. Heineken began sponsoring Red Bull in 2017 just a year after the Dutch brewer started its long standing series level partnership with f one.
Speaker 2:The deal with the team is effective because both are nonpremium brands in a sport dominated by luxury car manufacturers, says Hesse, who has previously worked for both. Looking up and down the grid at the time, they wouldn't have sat anywhere else. And so there's the official, like, drinks car of f one. And, if you're selling alcohol or energy drinks, you head over to f one Red Bull plus, what was it?
Speaker 1:There's the steak. Stake has a
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. You love this
Speaker 1:thing. Collaboration.
Speaker 3:It's like
Speaker 1:It's like in certain. It's the Sauber Stake f one team. The Kick Which
Speaker 2:is Kick is is the streaming platform for Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Kixalber. But without further ado, let's bring in Avlok. He's got a q two update for us. Great to see you. What's going on?
Speaker 2:You on
Speaker 1:the show. Back. How are doing? Welcome back.
Speaker 10:Thank you. Been great. Been great. Q two was awesome.
Speaker 2:Break it down for us. What was awesome about it?
Speaker 10:I mean, overall, there's just a lot of optimism. Maybe I'll just take from the top and and what we're seeing ecosystem wide and then what we're seeing in our data. I mean, look, ecosystem wide, we're just seeing exits across the board. M and a is up by a huge margin. IPOs are up by huge margin.
Speaker 10:And so what we're actually seeing is a lot of exit dollars coming through, making its way back to LPs, and that ends up flowing its way back into Venture, because all of Venture's power law. As you have some of the best companies go public, get acquired, all those always float right back in, and they go right back in and get recycled back into Venture. And I think we just sort of hit the perfect storm, in q two where a lot of optimism is there. Obviously, a lot of exits, you know, a lot of it's been reported. You have Circle.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:You have, Scale dot ai, and a bunch of other companies. And these exits are massive.
Speaker 2:They're
Speaker 10:huge. And so the LP dollars, the returns that LPs are getting are also massive. And what we're just seeing is those dollars come right back in, and they just get reinvested back into emerging managers and some of the scaled up, scaled up venture firms. And so the the thing that was actually shocking to me personally, you know, you can kinda feel it. So I invest, of course, and you can kinda feel it in the deal velocity and the and the rate at which, companies are growing.
Speaker 10:Like, the revenue growth is real. But what we saw in our data was the LP dollars to micro VC, emerging VC. Think of these as, like, managers with a $100,000,000 fund size, $2,000,000 fund sizes, was up 50% quarter over quarter, almost 50%. So that's
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 10:In one quarter, it was like a giant increase that, you know, for many quarters, it was sort of the the value of debt.
Speaker 2:There was
Speaker 3:a yeah.
Speaker 1:There was a very dark, dark period Mhmm. Where you
Speaker 10:saw we we track that. We we track those dark periods actually in our data too. It was like we have the boom times and the bust times.
Speaker 7:And for a while, there were a
Speaker 10:lot of the bust times and but we're just seeing a lot of optimism coming in, and it's it's actually really, really great to see. And I think some of the data that was circulating around, x over the past few weeks was around the emerging the death of the emerging manager class. And I just think that data is actually wrong. It it's coming from PitchBook, and PitchBook's data is very laggy. They don't actually have information on this super class of venture.
Speaker 10:Yeah. They don't have a real time view of it. AngelList does, and so we see we basically see it all. And that's great. Lot lot of optimism.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and the emerging managers that were steadily deploying over the last couple years during that dark period are the ones that are now, I'm sure, you know, showing, you know, tremendous markups during this time, which will hopefully catalyze more investment as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much of the liquidity is psychological for LPs versus actual dollars going back into LP pockets, and then they just need to redeploy them? Because there's something about, like, if you've been in some fund for years and years and years and the marks and they don't really feel real and then all of a sudden you actually get a check. You're even if that's only 10% of the money that you put in or 10% of what you commit in the next fund, it kind of feels like, okay. This is the this is working at least.
Speaker 2:I'm ready to go back in versus just, okay. I actually need to deploy new cash because I have cash on my balance sheet now.
Speaker 10:It depends on the type of LP. So if you are a more of a traditional larger asset
Speaker 3:allocator Mhmm.
Speaker 10:You have strict requirements on amount of money that goes into public versus private. So that is a little
Speaker 3:bit
Speaker 10:stricter. But you have a large swath of capital that comes from noninstitutionals. Like, you've got family offices, individuals, a lot of a lot of wealthy individuals. I just saw a report the other day. The number of millionaires in The US have gone up considerably.
Speaker 10:For them, it's all psychological. A lot of it's psychological. Even if you get 10% of your capital and 20%, 30%, it feels real because venture is it's a weird asset class when you think about it. You basically invest in it, and you're we don't know if you're gonna get liquidity for ten, fifteen years depending on where you invest. But when you start seeing that cycle of liquidity coming back, all of a sudden, you gain confidence not just in the asset class, but also the manager that you're backing.
Speaker 10:And so we do see a lot of that. So that that that that's what the reflexivity is that we're seeing on the platform where, you know, you have Nasdaq that was up 18% year over year. And even venture dollars deployed as an overall ecosystem is up, like, 30 percent year over year. But within the micro VC, emerging VC area, it grew 50% quarter over quarter. Right?
Speaker 10:So there's this reflexivity of excitement, because you're starting to see the dollars come right back, and people are looking at going, this is real. These companies are real. It wasn't just, you know, in their minds, like, propped up valuations, which was a lot of the narrative, I would say, for the past, two years post SERP. And the thing that also
Speaker 1:It's it's interesting to think about people that maybe invested in the first six months of AngelList being a platform. And then Mhmm. Maybe they just made a couple investments at the time and then checked out for a decade, and then suddenly they get an email. And and it's like Yeah. It's a liquidity event.
Speaker 1:It's like, woah. Maybe maybe maybe
Speaker 3:I should
Speaker 1:pay more attention here. Yeah.
Speaker 10:We we actually have that. You know, there there there's this thing that happens with banks sometimes and, even crypto platforms where people have money, and they're, like, trying to get in touch with them to take their take their money. It's pretty significant in some cases. And so, yeah, we have cases of that as well, which is, hey. You have a return.
Speaker 10:You probably want this. This is actually pretty significant. Yeah. So we see we see that.
Speaker 2:What do you think about potential new sources of liquidity coming into the LP pools coming into Venture?
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I saw some news about some crossover funds potentially lowering the requirement, to invest in the fund maybe down to from like a million dollars down into like the single digit thousands or maybe 25,000.
Speaker 1:Code two. Code two had a 50 k
Speaker 2:Maybe a separate fund. And so Mhmm. Don't know if you don't know if that changes the requirements around around in what what's it called? Professional investor rules? No.
Speaker 2:Accredited investor rules?
Speaker 10:Accredited investor rules.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but but we're we're seeing, you know, private company stocks go on chain and potentially be traded on consumer retail stock apps. We're seeing lower, you know, lower hurdles to get into venture funds. It feels like there could be a wave of kind of sort of, like, retail ask liquidity coming into venture. Do you think that narrative is real?
Speaker 2:How early are we in that? Do you think that could be a significant shift in the dynamic of early stage investing?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Short answer is it's real. Mhmm. And AngelList is also working on something around there, and we'll have something more to announce. The the way to think about it is venture has never actually been connected to the public markets directly.
Speaker 10:Right? It's always been Yeah. Venture dollars get invested in the companies. Those companies maybe ten years, fifteen years later, maybe never, right, but, go public. And that's when, people in the public markets, end up, investing in those companies.
Speaker 10:But what's never happened is venture or dollars going into venture funds coming from the public markets. And what you're seeing is you're starting to see a lot of these different experiments, and people crying this out. CO2 as an example, and there are a couple of other funds as well. And the accredited investor rule that you're referring to is, you can only take on, 99, nonqualified purchasers in a fund. Qualified purchaser effectively, you have $5,000,000 in assets and above.
Speaker 10:So if you have less than that, then you can only take on take on 99 of them into a fund. So that's what actually keeps those fund sizes pretty restricted.
Speaker 2:Got
Speaker 10:it. But you can register your fund, and you, are effectively under different regulatory regime, and you can take on a lot of investors at once. Right? But that's takes time. It's expensive.
Speaker 10:And all it depend also depends what SEC regime you're under, right, and what the goals are of the administration in power at that moment in time. And right now, the goal of the Trump administration is capital formation, the golden age, right, the golden age of America. And so what's happening is everything is optimized towards new startup formation, more capital coming in. And so you're seeing a loosening of restrictions or a reinterpretation, if you will, of some of the SEC rules to allow for this to happen. Right?
Speaker 10:It's actually not even new laws. It's just most people don't realize this. The SEC
Speaker 3:look at
Speaker 1:them differently.
Speaker 10:They just look at them differently. It's a it's interpretation. Right? It's they they they look at the law, they can interpret it and write their own rules based off of it. So a lot of that is changing in real time.
Speaker 10:And so that's leading to funds like the co two fund and a few others. So it's real. It's happening. I think venture is undergoing a pretty significant shift. It is not the same as it was five years ago, ten years ago.
Speaker 10:You're you have a very large number of these micro funds, emerging funds, and then you have the mega mega funds. Right? And these mega funds are not the venture funds of yesterday. Right? These are full blown sophisticated financial asset allocators that some of them are now getting into roll ups.
Speaker 10:Right? And that's a whole separate strategy that that comes from the private equity world. And so we're in the midst of a massive change within within venture.
Speaker 1:How do you think about new products and experimentation? We've seen AngelList doesn't have the same luxury that Robinhood can do, which is run some crazy experiment in in Europe and make companies, you know, OpenAI was posting yesterday that they were frustrated with with what what was going on there and that they didn't endorse it. Obviously, you guys have to maintain and build trust within the venture community and part of that is kind of balancing the desires and and of a bunch of different kind of players. So how how do you think about kind of innovating? Because at the same time, it is core to AngelList like Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The initial platform was an innovation. Right? And then the RUV and the and the and the rolling funds and and things like that.
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's it's actually really simple for us. There is a through line that has never changed for AngelList since the very beginning, which is the founder is at the top of the pedestal. So everything we do, we always ask, is this what the founder would want? Right?
Speaker 10:And if it's not good for the founder, it's not good for the startup, we just don't do it. And so this even applies to innovations like the rolling fund. We ultimately asked, hey. Is this gonna drive more capital into early stage founders? And if the answer is yes, great.
Speaker 10:We're gonna do it. We're gonna pursue it. If the answer is ever no or we're not quite sure, we just won't do it because founder trust is everything. And, ultimately, we're here to make sure that we increase the amount of innovation in society, and that always comes from ambitious founders. And so that's actually been a very easy thing for us to do.
Speaker 10:It's also why we never really went into, secondary markets. I mean, you'd think AngelList with our entire portfolio and everything would be the first to get in there. We never did because there's always this question of, well, are they like, are we adding more work on their plate? Right? And having been a founder myself multiple times and, also having been in that seat, the answer is it's just a distraction.
Speaker 10:Right? Like, you're busy running a company, building a company, recruiting, dealing with a thousand fires at any moment in time. And so, it's been it was easy for us to not fully pursue that path. But any new innovation we have, we always ask that question. Is it is it good for the founder or not?
Speaker 10:If not, we won't do it. And that's just a through line all the way up to the as a board, we we view it that way as well.
Speaker 1:That's super key. And when you look at many of the new experiments that are happening, they don't they don't pass they don't pass that test. Still, it'll be interesting to see to to to to watch and and witness. It I I've been interested to see if if some of these experiments can can end up kind of forcing innovation or change. But again, that's still not that's still not the role of of someone, know, AngelList shouldn't piss off every Fortune 500 CFO or every late stage company.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, it's not just not a good not a good business practice, given Yeah. Given your basis.
Speaker 10:I think there are some cases where you actually wanna push the Overton window. Right? I think that's what you're referring.
Speaker 5:It's just like,
Speaker 10:can you push the Overton window and make something normal? And so with that in mind, I'm actually very I I love all these experiments that are actually happening. In fact, right now is such an amazing time in venture and startups and starting a company having you know, even even Robinhood's Robinhood experiment is amazing because we have a chance to push the Overton window. But where it is today, that that particular one is very fixed. I I don't see a way around that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's how how are you thinking about the angel list kind of core business and scaling the team? We were talking yesterday. There's a lot of signs of wild top signals right now between these AI hiring packages and and different valuations and and the list goes, you know, Soham working six jobs.
Speaker 1:Right? They're they're all across the board. Meanwhile, Satya is scaling back on some new data centers. He's, you know, doing kind of routine layoffs. It feels like he's not letting at least Microsoft get too exuberant in this moment even though there's a lot of I'm curious what your approach it it has been and and will be for the next half of the year.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So as context, AngelList has been profitable for for a little while now. And so a lot of the way we all yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we had to cut
Speaker 3:you off.
Speaker 2:We didn't catch this.
Speaker 5:Hate to
Speaker 1:cut you off, but we love profitability.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1:We need
Speaker 8:a Gong like
Speaker 2:that in
Speaker 10:the office.
Speaker 2:Random. Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 10:And so, you know, we've actually always approached it approached headcount and and people in the in the in the company as, do we really need this next person, and how is it how are they actually gonna move the company forward? So none of that's actually changed in how we're approaching any of the new bets that we have. The the bar has actually increased now, which is, hey. For this next new person we're bringing in, are they truly curious to work with AI tools and the models? Do they really understand how their job has completely changed?
Speaker 10:And if not, we probably shouldn't bring them in because, as as you both know, knowledge work has completely changed forever. Right? Whether you're in sales, marketing, definitely coding. Right? Yep.
Speaker 10:And so you want people, who are naturally curious and are naturally leaning into these new tools. And the reality is, the amount of headcount needed to continue to scale will go down over time. And so that's how we've thought about it is you just bring in people who are naturally tuned to this way of working because we're in the early innings right now. It's, like, so early in terms of how company is gonna be formed, how team's gonna be formed. Do you even have your traditional functions anymore?
Speaker 10:Sales, marketing, yeah, engineering, product design? I don't know because Yeah. People are starting to blend skills very, very fast. And so we're in such early stages that you almost wanna rewire your culture right now. I think every company should rethink whatever culture they had and rethink however they form their teams.
Speaker 10:You may need to blow it up because what's gonna happen is I'm telling you that, I've been watching some of the newer founders that are just graduating from school. They operate differently. They're Yeah. Like, you know, I I recently, for the first time you know, I I came to tech in 02/2009. For years, I didn't feel like, oh, I'm kind of a part of an older guard, if you will.
Speaker 10:In the last twelve months, there was a distinct change in San Francisco. I'm like, these new founders just offer
Speaker 1:I'm a veteran now.
Speaker 10:Yeah. A veteran. I never felt that. I never felt that before except for the last twelve months where they are very capable, very creative. They were just born in a different era.
Speaker 10:They don't have any of the hang ups of how things used to be done about a decade ago. And I I think the I think it's very important for any company that's been around for even five years or seven years or ten years to just rethink the entire company from the ground up at this point. Otherwise, they're gonna get completely demolished.
Speaker 1:Totally. Well, always great talking.
Speaker 2:Always fantastic.
Speaker 5:We should
Speaker 1:make this let's schedule it quarterly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's get the next one on the calendar ASAP. Have a great rest of your day. Enjoy July 4.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Thank you. You too. Thanks, guys. Soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Up next, we have we have two more guests. We're going long before the July 4. We gotta get an extra couple minutes in. Who we got, Jordy?
Speaker 1:We have added a new guest. This was very last second.
Speaker 2:Hey. It
Speaker 1:is great.
Speaker 2:We're here. Welcome to the stream. You're live.
Speaker 1:This is Nico. Nico. Hey. What's up, guys? How are you?
Speaker 2:Break it down, introduce, shortcut.
Speaker 1:Nico managed to go viral yesterday
Speaker 3:Let's let's go.
Speaker 1:On a timeline that was in turmoil. That's insane. You you did. You were up
Speaker 2:against some serious
Speaker 1:competition. Haven't I haven't been been able to watch the video yet, so you're gonna have to bring break down the whole thing for us. But you introduced Shortcut, the first superhuman Excel agent. And when I read this line, I was like
Speaker 2:Shots fired at Copilot. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Well, the the When I read this line, was like, oh, yeah. You should just build agents on top of Excel where people already You don't need to reinvent Excel
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And build agents.
Speaker 2:Can Love it.
Speaker 1:So anyways
Speaker 2:But in your words, what do you do?
Speaker 9:Yeah. What's up, guys? I'm Nico from Fundamental. I'm one of the cofounders here, and we just released Shortcut yesterday. And and Shortcut is a bench is essentially the first superhuman Excel agent.
Speaker 9:We actually benchmarked it against Gemini Copilot, Genspark. It's really not even close. What we have to do now is scale capacity. It's about four times better than Gemini, even in the limited stuff that we were, like, allowed to use for Gemini because we just know it couldn't do And, yeah, we're scaling up capacity now. I'm actually about to drop a million dollar check on scaling up the infra, just
Speaker 2:to Woah. Okay.
Speaker 1:There we go. Physical Did write it out? How much are you, Chuck?
Speaker 9:I might do it just with posterity. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You need a you need a million bucks.
Speaker 1:You need a comically large check.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know, like
Speaker 1:one of those.
Speaker 2:Drop it off. You know? One of the hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Go go give it to
Speaker 2:Andy Jassy. Here we go.
Speaker 1:But, awesome. So so, is this the the second, you know, to talk about maybe step back fundamental? Is this Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Sure. So Fundamentals Research Lab, we're in Menlo Park now, but we actually shut down our lab at MIT where my cofounder was a professor
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:About eighteen months ago. And the mission of the company is to build digital humans. Back when that was like a crazy, deranged thing to say. But from a computational neuroscience perspective, it basically means giving AI more than just intelligence, but like a fundamental understanding of life, ability to perceive and experience emotion, grounded interactions in the world, long term autonomy.
Speaker 1:Naturally, start with Excel, the foundation of modern life.
Speaker 9:Well, you know, it's a perfect storm that we're doing in Excel. I cut my teeth, like, on Excel. I get my knuckles bruised for using the mouse. And then I found my way into a research lab. And the reason it hasn't been done yet is because the people who are capable of doing it are just so out of distribution for, like, regular people that Excel hasn't been touched until now.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk to me about actually building this thing. I remember, like, Cap IQ and Bloomberg had, like, VBA plug ins for Excel. There's some pretty crazy stuff you can do under the hood of Excel. It is very modular.
Speaker 2:I don't know if that's changed with Excel going more cloud native, but, you know, Microsoft talks a big game about Copilot. Are you worried about getting steamrolled? Is there a way that you guys work together? How does that dynamic play out? And how are you actually building this thing?
Speaker 2:Cause we've seen, like, clearly just a screen recordings. Right? And that's a different vector. There's other LLMs that are just, like, using the, like, they'll integrate with any IDE by just using the, the the ADA features, like the accessibility features to just scrape the text out.
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 9:Of course. Course.
Speaker 2:But how are you working
Speaker 1:through that?
Speaker 9:So for context, the reason we're doing what we're doing now is because we actually set the state of the art in OS world, which is the Compute Use Benchmark. This Compute Use will, sweep benches to software engineering.
Speaker 2:Oh, very cool.
Speaker 9:But we wanted to go tackle it in a much deeper way as if we had full access to the machine interface.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So what that means is, like, can you write your own code essentially to do what you wanna do? And to do that, you actually have to own the machine interface. So we couldn't build exactly on top of Excel. What we actually wanted to do was recreate it entirely with feature parity. And then from there, the big question is how we're doing this.
Speaker 9:I don't care to give away a little bit of
Speaker 3:a secret. This is being done through cogen at runtime,
Speaker 9:which is a totally new paradigm for cogen. It does cogen's not about writing your own tools to store in your code base. Right? It's about, like, giving the AI the ability to do what it needs to do as it has to. Interesting.
Speaker 9:So it's writing all of it. It's essentially writing its VBAs as an ease.
Speaker 2:I haven't used Microsoft Copilot that much, but I've noticed that the way Gemini is inner is is like surfaced in Gmail. It's very clear that it's not doing cogen. It's actually just taking text, dropping in an LLM. It's a chat interface and that's it. And so I can imagine that we're in we're entering the the v two of of, like, sidebar companions, and this feels very logical.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Even Gemini, if you actually look into the Sheets integration they have now, they are starting to do a little bit of Python integration. You they are doing some NumPy, some some data frame manipulation.
Speaker 2:Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 9:But they're much more hesitant to get there. And we were very hesitant to even call this Cursor for whatever.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure, sure.
Speaker 9:Because like, it's such a caricature, but there's a truth that's much deeper about how you do that. And it's actually about owning the interface, the same way Cursor had to fork Versus Code to own it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the demand. I replied to a comment of yours fifteen minutes ago, then a bunch of people are now replying to me saying, Can I get an invite code? So it seems like All right, all right.
Speaker 9:Announcement. Well, we got first of all, I went viral on LinkedIn. I didn't even know it was possible.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's give it up for LinkedIn. They're always Always getting better.
Speaker 9:We got about 7,000 comments now,
Speaker 3:and I've only given out about 50 codes. Woah. This thing is extremely token hungry. But I did just make code TBPN.
Speaker 2:No. There'll be 10 Let's go.
Speaker 9:Ten ten uses. It's probably eaten up by now.
Speaker 2:Go hunt it down.
Speaker 9:But, yeah, we are we are trying to get this out as fast as we can. That's why I'm writing these big checks for infra so that we can scale up capacity to serve. The only bottleneck is GPUs.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Incredible. Well, thank you for pinging us. Yes. This is awesome.
Speaker 1:Super exciting. Come come back on. I'm sure you'll be listening. So what what's the the next few months looks like? Is scaling shortcut?
Speaker 1:Or are you gonna
Speaker 2:Can I refine this a little bit? I wanna ask, Cursor, very ground up adoption from what I can tell. It's a developer who's at a big company, and they just buy it or install it, expense it, that type of thing versus going top down to, you know, I I imagine Goldman Sachs has a lot of people working in Excel. You could go to McKinsey. You could go to Goldman and say, hey, CTO, install this and let's do an enterprise contract.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about go to market?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, stupid answer is I'm doing a little bit of both and saying what's working. Sure. But it's pretty obvious that the same people who adopt AI in enterprise for Excel don't have the same risk tolerance or, like, the appetite to try stuff at the frontier that does software engineers, like
Speaker 10:for Yeah,
Speaker 9:yeah, okay. So and also my intention is that this bubbles up organically and that people bring it in, as opposed to me telling some VP, adopt this, you can produce headcount by 20%. Because that reality also can exist if I wanted to, right?
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Very awesome.
Speaker 1:Alright. We'll come back on soon. Thank you for the code. Hopefully hopefully, we get a shot at it before the
Speaker 2:audience says.
Speaker 9:I'll make
Speaker 3:you a
Speaker 5:special one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Congrats on the launch. Crushed it.
Speaker 2:You so much. We'll talk to you soon. And up next we have Flo Crevello coming back on the stream.
Speaker 1:So Hans former boss.
Speaker 2:Former So we opened the show with Soram himself and now we're going to a former employer to get his side of the story. And the question that I want to answer is that that point that Growing Daniel pointed out which is the question is, can
Speaker 1:he Is a pathological liar that's just gonna continue to lie and scam?
Speaker 2:Yes. Ken, is redemption possible? Yes. Is redemption possible? So let's go to Flo and get his take.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? Good to have you back on the show.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Thanks for having me. No. Redemption isn't possible. When people show you who they are, believe them.
Speaker 5:No. There's plenty of very honest people. Like, what are the odds that someone who's been lying compulsively and being being confronted about it for three years, like, two or three years. And, like, look, it's a it's a special kind of person too who can do this thing to people who trust them. Right?
Speaker 5:That they you have a relationship with an employer. You you know? Mhmm. And and I my understanding is that he basically has been averaging, like, getting fired once a month for the last three years. Like, it's a he's the kind of person who can do that.
Speaker 3:So he
Speaker 1:could have learned his lesson, like, two years, three years ago
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Like, the first time he was called out and and and
Speaker 5:Totally. Sure. Totally. I I wasn't I wasn't tuning in. I did I do I didn't hear what he said.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To me the to me the argument of of sound sounds like he has some situation that's bad. But it's not a justification to go steal money from a bunch of Silicon Valley startups for years and years and years and years and use them as a piggy bank to solve his own problem.
Speaker 2:So really quickly, how long did he work with you?
Speaker 5:Two weeks.
Speaker 2:Two weeks. And what was the result of that? I mean, I imagine you paid him for those two weeks of work. Did you get any good results?
Speaker 5:I am literally out of a meeting, like, an hour ago, Will. Engineer described his impact as negative. Negative. Well, because we we had to we had to onboard him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You had to onboard him.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. It's Okay. Wasted our time and money.
Speaker 2:Has he apologized to you?
Speaker 5:Not yet.
Speaker 2:Okay. He said he would apologize to everyone else. He would go on an apology tour. We'll see if that actually pans out.
Speaker 1:My my big my big question is is somebody like this, you could have them working in your office as a full time employee and they would probably still There's a good chance they would still keep doing this thing with people on LinkedIn
Speaker 4:that didn't
Speaker 1:see the whole SoHaan SoHaan gate.
Speaker 5:We never we never compromise on ethics. Like, that's just a thing I don't fuck with. Yep. He's gonna apologize. Is he gonna give the money back?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a good question. I don't know.
Speaker 5:Because because because stock is cheap.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a higher bar. If he wants to make a statement, that's what he would do.
Speaker 5:A 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. How do you prevent this in the future? How does Silicon Valley prevent this in the future? Obviously, the Valley is built on trust.
Speaker 2:This is a violation of trust. There's been discussions about, like, maybe we need a Reddit for are we dating the same man? Are we employing the same software engineer? Maybe we need an AI tool to, you know, check the GitHub commits and see that, oh, they're coming in at the same time every week.
Speaker 1:HRIS level. Yep. Like this this employee
Speaker 2:has accepted two offers in there. Instances of of Of rippling. Of rippling? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How how are we solving this?
Speaker 5:I I don't wanna over rotate on it. I think a lot of part of what makes Silicon Valley tick is its culture of of trust. Mhmm. You know, there's this whole game theory around, like, hawks and doves. Yep.
Speaker 5:You know? And it's it it turns out there is no stable equilibrium. You're, like, in a constant state of of of shifting. Because if if it runs a dove, then the the returns of being a hawk are very high. And vice versa, if it runs a hawk, then you can have these, like, clicks of doves that that start the building.
Speaker 5:So I I'm really careful not to tip Silicon Valley towards this attractor state of, like, the hawk. And, like, a lot of industries end up in this state of, like, low trust, and I really don't wanna do that. Like Totally. Look. You're gonna get screwed over, so often.
Speaker 5:We had a good laugh. You know, the memes are amazing. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I hope I hope your your viral posts at least drove a bunch of new sign ups, and maybe Yeah.
Speaker 2:I hope
Speaker 1:so. He back a little bit by
Speaker 2:some some customer acquisition. I completely agree. Like, yes, the handshake deal protocol is built on trust. Do some VCs violate it? Yes.
Speaker 2:Every once in a while, a team's a term sheet falls through. It's not the best thing that ever happens, but the alternative is so much overhead on everyone that it's probably worth taking the risk of, yeah, occasionally, the handshake deal is gonna fall through.
Speaker 5:You're gonna get screwed over every so often, and it's not worth over pivoting on it and, like, looking for your shoulder your entire life.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like he is he he's announced that he's taken a new role as a founding engineer at a single start up. He says he's not gonna work at multiple companies. It seems like the jig, even if he even if he is a pathological liar and continues to lie, like, people like, his his SEO is terrible now. Like, it will forever, like, be, like, very easy when you go to Google search for the person that you're hiring.
Speaker 1:He's like, oh, that's a different Sohan Parikh.
Speaker 3:There's a
Speaker 1:lot there's a lot of people name,
Speaker 2:and it's gonna be really complicated for him to get away with this longer. My question is, like, if, we we were we were kinda saying, like, the Soham Parikh dev shop makes much more sense here. Does that make sense to you? Would, like if he was saying, hey. I've been working at all these different startups.
Speaker 2:I'm starting a developer shop. And, yes, you can hire me, but I'm a contractor. Dev shops. Why why are dev shops bad for startups? Why would this not work for him?
Speaker 5:I actually think for him, the real move is to start a course on how to crack coding interviews because he's really good.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 5:Credible. He's he's actually credible. Right? So he can actually make lemonade here. Like, he should do that and he can make a lot of money.
Speaker 5:It's very high leverage.
Speaker 2:And he's actually that in
Speaker 1:the cold email strategy. Yeah. Yeah. He had a very dialed in cold email approach where he would be, you know, he'd be like, say something nice and really clearly I think he's product, I love building. The funny thing is in his message he said, he said, I'm pissed.
Speaker 1:And I was like About what? What? You're pissed you got busted? You kinda gave himself a
Speaker 2:little Yeah. Was saying like, oh, yeah. Like, I I'm gonna put, you know, there there's gonna be a great reversal here. And he came on and
Speaker 1:was Yeah. That's like tough.
Speaker 2:The mainstream narrative is basically correct about me. But maybe I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:The the redemption of being like, I'm gonna prove everyone wrong Yeah. By working at one company. It's like, you don't get you don't get don't get Yeah. Yeah. We don't give a second the fourth place trophy.
Speaker 2:You worked at one company. Yeah. That's funny.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, look. He's he's not sorry. He just got cut. Like, it's it's that's it.
Speaker 5:It's really simple. Mhmm. And and why do dev shops not work for startups? I mean, just like a it does. I'm a nerd when it comes to, like, the the the theory of the film because of my experience at Uber and so forth.
Speaker 5:Sure. There's a book that's called managerial dilemmas that explains why dev shops don't work.
Speaker 10:Okay.
Speaker 5:It's it's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But can you unpack it a little bit more? Because Uber is interesting because didn't wasn't the very first version of Uber done by a dev shop, and wasn't that part of the early early Uber low lore that, like, the code base was written in Spanish, and so everyone at Uber had, like, the Spanish to English dictionary there, which is hilarious because I'm pretty sure Google Translate existed at the time, but they still had the dictionary for some reason. It's like it's like amazing lore regardless of how real it is.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think people add a little bit to it. This is the first time I
Speaker 2:about Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But, you know, like, next time I hear about it, there's gonna be a guy with, like, a sombrero in the other.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Travis was was in Tijuana pulling random devs off the street. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They really, really amp it up. The apocryphalness of the story just needs to grow and grow and grow. It's a tall tale at this point.
Speaker 5:The the reason why dev shops don't work is because there's, a complicated there's a complicated game theoretic argument, which goes, basically, the reason why you employ people is because they know things you don't know. And so there is a an information asymmetry, which always makes it possible for someone to cheat because they can basically bullshit their, like and and you see it with engineering all the time. It's like, oh, this is so complicated. You thought it'd be a day, but, actually, it's gonna be a month, and you have no clue. You have no way to verify, And this is inevitable.
Speaker 5:Like, the reason you hire them is because there is this information asymmetry gap because otherwise, might as well just do it yourself. And so, basically, it is in a way, it is always possible to cheat, which is why we are not fucking around and hiring people who do cheat, because there is no way you can always prevent them from cheating. If he doesn't cheat by doing this, he'll cheat by doing something else. So there is always a way to cheat. So you could say that to some extent, not cheating is irrational.
Speaker 5:You can't cheat. You can't get away with it. He's made millions. He's made so much money. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, you can't cheat. You can get away with it. And so in a way, you've gotta solve for the equation where it's like, I can't cheat. I can make a lot of money. I can get away with it.
Speaker 5:Nothing is ever gonna happen to me, but I'm not gonna do it because of x. And you have to solve for x. That's your job as a founder. You're like, why would you act rationally? And the way you do that, thankfully, is you you we we have that that that bit that you can flip in our brains as humans.
Speaker 5:We have these tribal prosocial tendencies that are like, I don't wanna cheat because I like these people or because I'm I'm budding to the mission, which is why they always say every startup is like a religion. Like, the mission, the culture really matter on the camaraderie, really matter as a startup, and that's what you lose when you have dev shops.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. The the to to be even more specific, the dev shop gives you a scope. They say it's gonna take me x y z time to do roughly this or maybe they're on a retainer. And then if they come back to you the next day and they say, well, actually, it's gonna take more time and it's gonna be more money. Well, an employee is gonna say, well, it's gonna take more time maybe, but I'm not gonna necessarily charge you astronomically more.
Speaker 1:Right? I'm just a salaried team member and because they have that equity compensation as well, they're bought and and and hopefully bought into the mission.