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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. Today is Thursday, 10/30/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance,
Speaker 2:the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Meta missed earnings yesterday.
Speaker 2:Due to a one time tax hit?
Speaker 1:Yes. Not a not that big of a deal, honestly. Meta post record revenue, but warns of expenses. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Meta reported record revenue in the third quarter, but the technology company warned of accelerating capital expenditures around artificial intelligence, sending its stock down 7% after hours trading.
Speaker 1:If you're worried about expenses, you gotta go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, baby. It's now a $1,700,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:Not bad. But we are in the age of three, four, five trillion dollar company now. It's crazy times.
Speaker 2:There's a club above. Stand out for me, reels at north of a $50,000,000,000 run rate.
Speaker 1:Crazy. Which is more than all of TV combined. Right? Something like that? It's close.
Speaker 2:No. I think
Speaker 1:TV. Television advertising, like linear TV advertising is is in that range or it's like creeping up on it?
Speaker 2:In 2024, television advertising spending in The US was expected to amount to approximately $60,000,000,000. I mean,
Speaker 1:they're within striking distance. Let's hear it for the meta team. Remarkable. So there was this onetime tax charge of 15,900,000,000.0 that crushed net income. Spending on AI researchers has also been crazy recently, and CapEx is growing a ton.
Speaker 1:They're gonna hit 72,000,000,000 this year. I'm good for my 72,000,000,000 over at Meta.
Speaker 2:Not bad. The ad load, just anecdotally, is up tremendously. Yep. They're now doing, four ads where they used to do one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think there were almost five. Like, you can go in between stories and get five in a row or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in between two stories, you can get up to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Five individual ads. So Yeah. Gotta pay for all that CapEx somehow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The core business rocks. We know this. 51,200,000,000.0 in revenue this quarter. They were up 26% year over year.
Speaker 1:And there's just so many dials that the Meta team can get slightly more dialed every quarter. You can get more users, more time on the platform from those users, more ads, more targeted ads. There's all these small tweaks that add up and wind up compounding. So my bigger question today is what happens to the advertising cash machine once you're two decades in? So Google went through this transit transition on 10/02/2015.
Speaker 1:And at the time, I feel like most people thought it was crazy. They rebranded. They went from, Google to being called Alphabet, and the idea was that they were gonna have other business Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna have other we're gonna have other things.
Speaker 1:And, you know, focus is usually pretty valuable. And at the time, people were like, well, you can't even keep Google Reader online. You can't even get a chat app up to date. You can't you can't win in social networking. You had to shut down Google Plus.
Speaker 1:So what are you thinking you're gonna go build a self driving car, an AI team, or a new cloud platform? Like, this is crazy. Yep. Just put the 10 blue links in the back. But looking back on it now, it feels like Alphabet totally deserves the broader name.
Speaker 1:The company is more than just Google Search Box, certainly more than 10 blue links. Google Cloud is material. DeepMind is material. Waymo is material. There's the business side, Google Apps for Business.
Speaker 1:All of these are both key to the future value of Alphabet, but also key to just running the business today. The interplay between these divisions creates a ton of value, but more importantly, I don't think these businesses, at least most of them, would exist if they hadn't grown up in a cash rich environment. Like, I don't I it's just so hard to predict in 2009 How much capital is it gonna take us to build a self driving car network that we'll be able to launch in San Francisco and barely be profitable and then probably be another decade?
Speaker 2:Strange strange comp here Yeah. Is YC I don't know. It's some years ago at this point. Was trying to understand what what the factors that contributed to the breakout successes. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And one factor was founders having wealthy parents. Mhmm. So the founders felt like they take these really massive high risk swings Mhmm. Because they weren't they weren't going for a base hit. The founders like, if I make like a few million dollars if I make a few million dollars, it doesn't change my life.
Speaker 2:Right? Trust is is is well beyond that.
Speaker 1:I gotta go big.
Speaker 2:And so I gotta go big, willing to like look silly for a long period of time, willing to, you know, just stumble around as long as it takes to hit it really big. And and certainly, you know, a number of the things you just outlined, wouldn't have been able to be, maybe would have died as traditional venture businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this is what I was writing about with with one x, the robotics company. Extremely difficult to understand. Are we three years away from that business really working financially? Are we ten years away from the business really working financially?
Speaker 1:There's a lot going on, but Google was able to just hold on to Waymo from 2009 to today, sixteen years. And, they're probably still losing money on it. I mean, they're they're, like, unit economics are decent in one specific market. It's gonna be a long time. I would
Speaker 2:say definitely elision going on.
Speaker 1:I mean, they can actually do stuff. But every time they announce something, you know they stream it, they gotta get on restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multistream, and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign in with Google since talking about Google. So I wanted to look at some parallels between what's going on with with Google who's been on a tear and now has this, like, all of a sudden pretty diversified business.
Speaker 1:There's this meme here of the Ninja Turtles where
Speaker 2:On the account, Alpha Betting.
Speaker 1:Yes. So the search giant, the cert the cash machine of the of the ads business is taking the other bets as their children. And now as search becomes less relevant potentially in the age of AI, well, what does Alphabet have? They have Google Cloud. They have Waymo.
Speaker 1:They have Maps, Gmail, Chrome, DeepMind, Google AI. Like, it's a stack lineup. And so, yes, even if search does get old
Speaker 2:I love how YouTube is doesn't even isn't even serving of its own Ninja Turtle.
Speaker 1:No. And you'd think YouTube would be a huge one here. And that one seems, YouTube seems extremely resilient in the age of AI. It seems like the place it's a social network. It's gonna it's gonna stick around.
Speaker 1:And and there we really haven't seen any I mean, we've seen the Sora stuff, but the the no one's everyone uses ChatGPT and says, oh, wow. Yeah. This is definitely gonna replace some of my Google searching
Speaker 3:for sure.
Speaker 1:It's kinda searching Google for me and then just giving me the results. Yeah. One's saying that about Sora. No one's saying like, oh, I don't need to watch Doug Demuro anymore or whatever
Speaker 2:for Yeah. And I mean, I I I think one of the you know, right now, you're seeing more AI content on YouTube, but it's still created by independent channels. Yep. There's a world in the you know, YouTube pays out a huge amount of its revenue today to the creators on the platform. There's a world in the future where YouTube just generates the the the video, the content Yep.
Speaker 2:Itself through, you know, it's it's very AI products. For sure. It never actually has to pay out creator. Yeah. Because it's just
Speaker 1:And that's actually better for YouTube in many ways. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so content creators content creators today are worried about being disrupted by other people using AI Yeah. To make content. Yeah. They're not thinking about the platforms themselves that know exactly what Yeah. The kind of content that people like and would be able to over time produce it themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But aggregating that demand Yeah.
Speaker 2:Aggregating attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The yeah. Yeah. The value is is aggregating this is the, is not aggregating the supply side. It's the demand side.
Speaker 1:This is the aggregation theory. And so if you want to if you can aggregate a bunch of people that open apps and are in the market for video, you can serve them up, like, mister beast video or Doug Dumero video, or you can serve them up AI could generate content, you still make money because you have aggregated that that, that demand, not supply.
Speaker 2:Doug DeBero would be a good guest. We are working on it. Great point.
Speaker 1:Okay. Now three, two, one. Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
Speaker 1:So the Google story is very interesting because, really, for the last decade since 2015 when they rebranded as Alphabet, I feel like they were not getting a lot of credit. People were like, oh, yeah. Like, Google, it's like the kind of the place where you sit on the you rest and vest. You sit on the rooftop. You're not really doing anything.
Speaker 1:And then now everyone's waking up to this idea that it's like, woah. They have, like, four monster businesses. And, yeah, there's a ton of gravestones in the graveyard from various note taking apps and chat apps and Google readers over there. But overall, they wound up building a very diverse, very valuable business where even if Waymo's not cash flowing a ton, is it worth a $100,000,000,000? Does that add to their $3,000,000,000,000 market cap materially?
Speaker 1:Probably. Right? So also raised, like, a venture round
Speaker 2:not too long ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think it actually has, like, a public mark now, which is interesting. But my question is, how do we take this and we and we bridge it to what's going on at Meta, formerly Facebook, in October? I guess October is the month where you rebrand your company. Facebook did it.
Speaker 1:Google rebranded to, Alphabet in October 2015. Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021. And people, I think, overly were overly narrow about framing that transition about specifically VR, specific specifically virtual reality, the metaverse, everything that Mark Zuckerberg was investing in after the Oculus acquisition and the meta horizon worlds and VR. Obviously, that was a piece Interesting that
Speaker 2:I feel like the name Meta has aged pretty well. I agree. Even though it was ultimately somewhat, like, an embarrassing overinvestment Totally. At the time. Totally.
Speaker 2:So the name aged well even though the activities that were driving the name change did not.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I think it was just it was just important for for Mark Zuckerberg to send the message that
Speaker 2:we're not any single app.
Speaker 1:We're not Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. And we're not even just social networking. Like, we could wind up with a hyperscaler cloud platform.
Speaker 1:If there was, like you know? Yes. You have AWS, GCP, Azure, and then you also have, like, meta cloud platform. People would be like, yeah. That makes sense, and that's a couple $100,000,000,000 business, and they figured it out.
Speaker 1:Right? And so that rebranding, it did it did definitely set them up for a new a new era, but also just the ability to to place other bets like, what Google did once they became Alphabet. But, so it's interesting to see, like, how will you know, like, what will those bets look like? Because AI is obviously just a sustaining innovation for Meta. It's a similar thing to YouTube.
Speaker 1:Right? And machine learning's been been generating value in ad targeting for over a decade.
Speaker 2:Like Sustaining sustaining in many ways, but the the potentially disruptive Mhmm. Component is that people are using LLMs in social ways. And so as as people spend more and more time talking to LLMs, that is time that they are not in meta Platforms products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe maybe on the, like like, the personal interaction side, like, really parasocial stuff.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. That's I'm But for the users, like like, you know, there there are users out there Yeah. That used to spend five hours a day using Meta products and now are
Speaker 1:any of those, though. I mean, you look at the overall usage numbers. Yes. You're getting thirty minutes to chat GPT, but you're not seeing a blink on it's people are like there's they're doom scrolling Instagram, and then they're also chatting with four o. Right?
Speaker 1:They're doing both.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe. But at but at the end of the day, I mean
Speaker 1:I I I agree. Like, it could potentially be a headwind long term. And that's and that's obviously why
Speaker 2:I'm just saying, like, Mark certainly, like, sees ramping attention and use user minutes on Totally. OpenAI products. Totally. And it's a concern. It's a risk.
Speaker 2:Not not quite as material Yep. As, for Google. But
Speaker 1:And so the yeah. The question is, like, can Meta, MSL, TBD Labs generate some sort of chatbot that's at that's at four o level, frontier level? Doesn't need to be superintelligence necessarily immediately, but just something to sort of stem that bleeding in the way that, Gemini and AI search mode, AI mode in Google Search, and the AI search overviews sort of stemmed the bleeding from, okay. Well, do I need to just stop using Google Search for knowledge retrieval? If you if if you're like, am I do I need to stop?
Speaker 1:May maybe you can pull some people there. But, I mean, Meta does even though there's, like, all this chaos around who they're hiring and they're laying off their old team and they're building this new team, they're spending so much money. It's not like they're new to this. Like, Meta started using, machine learning for ad targeting all the way back in 2013, two years before OpenAI was founded, four years before the transformer paper. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, this is not a new technology for Facebook. They've been using this in their core infrastructure for, over a decade. But the there's this question of what is Mark Zuckerberg's track record when building or buying successfully in new markets? That's where it gets really hard. Obviously, Instagram, WhatsApp, great results, but certainly much harder in VR.
Speaker 1:And, also, you know, whatever the next next thing is, it's much less clear.
Speaker 2:He has a track record of being amazing at at cloning
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Incredible features and products and buying incredible features and products. Yep. There's no obvious track record of zero to one innovation.
Speaker 1:And some some of this stuff has just been blocked. Like, he I I I believe he wanted to buy Unity game engine. Yeah. And back effectively, like, get into the gaming world in in one way or another. And, of course, some of those games would be instantiated in VR or instantiated in meta properties, but, but I I believe that was blocked or that didn't get through FTC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so
Speaker 2:A a, you know, an environment that doesn't allow him to buy great companies is It's cryptonite. Great.
Speaker 1:It's his cryptonite. He's nerfed. He's definitely buy. He's nerfed.
Speaker 2:He's one of the m and a goat.
Speaker 1:He is one of the m and a goats.
Speaker 2:His power level
Speaker 1:seems too high. Way different than Google. And it's interesting because on the face of it, Google and Facebook have similar backstories, similar cultures, you know, young founders who, who built up these tech companies. They're only seven years, eight years apart from each other when they started. But Google had a very different culture.
Speaker 1:You know? It's a PhD research project, sort of an academic campus when you're walking around. The the mission is organizing the world's information. It's, like, very nerdy, and that obviously translates to, hey. How do we organize the world's information?
Speaker 1:Let's create a mapping product, Google Maps. Okay. What do we do when we have all the maps? Let's try and drive around a car on
Speaker 3:it, and
Speaker 1:then they get self driving cars. Right? And it's like, it's a little bit harder to jump from, like, our mission is to bring people together so we're generating AI or VR, which feels like the opposite direction. And so I don't know. I feels like there's always been a little bit more tension on the mission related to where the other bets go.
Speaker 1:Whereas, you organize all the information, the organizing the world's information, like, you you might say, how does a self driving car fit into that? But I can totally say, here's exactly how it fits into it. Yeah. I can't say that. It's much harder.
Speaker 2:What's Meta's mission? Monetize the world's attention?
Speaker 1:No. Bringing people together. No. And the thing is bringing people together
Speaker 2:To build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of products that feel like they might be I would love I would love
Speaker 2:for Mark to just go supervillain mode again. You know, he he he he's he's he like, at some point
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It could make sense from a calm standpoint to lean, you know, in Totally. The opposite direction.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right now Totally. That's not the strategy. But if you just said, our mission is to monetize the world's attention. That'd go pretty hard.
Speaker 1:I think stock pops 20% today. I
Speaker 2:think so too.
Speaker 1:You wanna build it back up. Monetize the world's attention.
Speaker 2:Stock's down 10% today, but Could
Speaker 1:be up 20 tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Update update update on Halloween. Oh, spooky. Spooky.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Spooky. I like
Speaker 1:that we're going into spooky earning season. Before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Yeah. And so overall, you know, it's easy to look back with 2020 hindsight on Google and be like, wow. It all made sense.
Speaker 1:They they were these academics. They wanted to organize the world's information. They wound up building AI. They wound up building Waymo. They've they've been very successful there.
Speaker 1:Who knows what's gonna happen with Meta? I I I do think that there is there is an open question about how does Meta square the the grounding of the mission into whatever comes next. Because if you're if if there is a big business to be built in antipersonal and truly, like, antisocial networking, you kinda gotta square that with the mission. Right? And so maybe you do need to maybe you need to shift away to some sort of newer mission, something different.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you need
Speaker 5:to Apple
Speaker 2:Apple should probably update their mission to making phones that are performant but break easier.
Speaker 1:Have you have you actually read Apple's mission ever? The the Apple mission
Speaker 2:We gotta do we gotta we gotta do a segment called ranking big tech's mission statements.
Speaker 1:We definitely do.
Speaker 2:Apple's mission is to bring the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software, and services. Is that actually? That is like the that's like the the least inspiring mission statement.
Speaker 1:They've they've gone so Apple strives to bring the best personal computing experience to student educators, creative professionals, consumers around the world. There was an older mission statement at some point. Like, post jobs era, there was one that, like, literally had, like, TM for, like, we make the iPad, which is the best, like, tablet computer. And it was just like a list of products that they had. It was like
Speaker 2:deep Apple's mission is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good.
Speaker 2:That's that's better than the than the AI overview of of of of anyways. Yeah. I I I think the mission statement's probably underutilized as a as a mechanism to increase your stock price. Because authenticity authenticity is like a powerful thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, overall, I I I just I think, you know, the the the there's a lot of questions about, like, what is MSL building? What is TBD Labs? What is superintelligence? How does this all fit together?
Speaker 1:I don't think anyone doubts that Meta can benefit from just improved machine learning systems, improved AI features all over all over the ecosystem, all over the family of apps, all over the core apps. The question is, like, are any of the are any of the side projects gonna become monsters because you're kind of in the side project era now that you're 20 years old?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Good
Speaker 2:good point. But, yeah, get you know, another shout out in in the 2022. Reels was at a $1,000,000,000 run rate.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And by the 2022, a $3,000,000,000 run rate. '23, 10,000,000,000. And the 2025, 50,000,000,000. So the growth is absolutely incredible. And and, yeah, credit credit to Meta's, you know, entire team for just ridiculous execution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Google really crushed it. Google's parents says spending on AI development may reach 93,000,000,000. They're higher than Meta's 72. Google parent companies Google's parent company reported a 16% surge in third quarter revenue with growth advertising and cloud computing units helping to finance robust artificial intelligence spending.
Speaker 1:Sales reached a record 102,300,000,000.0. Sundar was just like, Is that good? There was I mean, he he almost posted like that. Like, the post is like, hey. We did our first $100,000,000,000 quarter.
Speaker 1:Not and it's completely posted q
Speaker 2:three earnings.
Speaker 1:Insane that is. That's so, so massive. Shares rose 5% in after hours trading. I think it's up a little bit more now. Net income was 35,000,000,000, a 33% increase from the same period a year ago.
Speaker 1:Like other large tech companies, Google is pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI development. I mean, what a remarkable result. You know, there was so
Speaker 2:much Our friend
Speaker 1:so much fun around here.
Speaker 2:Our friend Logan Kilpatrick, of course Yeah. Works at Google, replies to Sundar and says, Google is the most incredible business in the world.
Speaker 4:He just said that?
Speaker 2:He just replied to Sundar and said that. That's awesome. I I I have to I have to agree. I have to agree with Loews.
Speaker 1:We are very proud to be sponsored with them by, by partnered with them, by the way. Google AI Studio. You can create an AI app, an AI powered app faster than ever. You can get started. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you.
Speaker 1:You can get started at a i.studio/build. And Talk about a domain name.
Speaker 2:And this is I didn't ask Logan if this is cool, but if you run into any issues with with with Gemini, you can just DM Logan. He'll be your personal tech support.
Speaker 1:And if you just
Speaker 2:respond quickly, DM me, then I'll DM
Speaker 1:him the same day. You're famously a you're famously a a a.com respecter and a good domain respecter. Google has gotten to a level where they're buying whole TLDs. Are you familiar with this? Like, .new.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I believe they own .Google. And so if you go to I think if you go to com.google, it resolves or something like that.
Speaker 1:I think they bought .Google. Maybe I maybe I don't get that right. Www. I gotta look this up. But they they they've been on a tear.
Speaker 1:If you go to docs.new, you just get a new Google doc, which is cool. Anyway, let's let's move on to some timeline. Let's move on to some news. Tyler, what's new in your world?
Speaker 7:I mean, most of the big news, I guess, was the OpenAI IPO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. $1,000,000,000,000. And and that's from, Reuters. Correct?
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 1:Do we know like, was that just leaked to them, or does can you just call them? Should we call Reuters? Hey, TBPN. We think it might be worth a trillion. R e e t.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know where this was Open. Originally reported. But
Speaker 1:OpenAI lays the groundwork for Juggernaut IPO at up to a $1,000,000,000,000 valuation. Three people familiar with the matter said. So, they got some reporting. They got a scoop. The company has looked at raising 60,000,000,000 at the low end and likely more.
Speaker 1:They cautioned that talks are early and plans, including figures and timing, could change depending on business growth and market conditions. CFO Sarah Fryer, who's been on the show, has told some associates the company is aiming for a 2027 listing. Boo. Play the went well. Let's get it happening earlier.
Speaker 1:Some advisers predicted could come even sooner around late twenty twenty six. I want this IPO to happen tomorrow. I think it'll be the most entertaining news item ever. To actually get to dig into an s one, to actually look at the financials. Like, there's been so many leaks, so many so much speculation to actually get
Speaker 2:We can do our first twenty four hour show.
Speaker 1:We should. We should. I mean, realistically, we should be there in New York City the day of talking to all these people, everyone involved as they go out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it says they're gonna they're planning to file in the back 2026?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it'll be a while. There's still a lot to do, a lot to build. I'm sure that they want visibility into what's the impact of Sora on the business, what's the impact that.
Speaker 2:I saw another post that that that was I don't think it's in the in our stack, but it was something to the effect of, like, you know, how Mhmm. Depending on where Meta's market cap is at the time of the OpenAI IPO will be, like, potentially, like like, it will be an interesting comp because you're gonna be able to look at a business that's, like, they're, you know, at scale Mhmm. Like, profitable Mhmm. Still growing very quickly versus OpenAI, which we know will be losing, you know, tens of billions of dollars at the time of the IPO. Yep.
Speaker 2:And, of course, we'll have an amazing growth story and a bunch of narrative and things like that. But we'll still be the comps are gonna be absolutely wild if it if it's landing in that one to, you know, one plus trillion dollar range.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to some timeline. Suspended cap says makes no sense what the f Meta is spending all this money on. You've spent 70,000,000,000 on reality reality labs to make the Ray Ban vision. Are you serious?
Speaker 1:And people are critical of Apple and their hardware efforts. Give me a break. And investor Nick says investors need to punish Zuck like they did in 2022. And suspended cap says, he won't blink this time. This is too big.
Speaker 1:He's effed. I don't know. He does have one of the biggest cash machines in the entire world, in the entire history of business. There's a lot of cash, and there's it's it's worth remembering the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel, where Peter Thiel sat down with Eric Schmidt, I believe, at a wired conference. Maybe it was Forbes, and they debated what big tech companies should do with all the cash they're generating.
Speaker 1:Before we continue, before I finish this thought, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together, gets started for free. And Can't
Speaker 2:believe you interrupted your own thought.
Speaker 1:And so and so, I was listening to Sharp China with Bill Bishop last night, and he and he his dog came in and he mentioned the farmer's dog, which is like the brand of dog food that he feeds the dog. And he was like, this isn't like TVPN. We are doing 25 ads in the middle of the show. And I was like, you are doing ads. Anyway, yeah.
Speaker 1:The question was, like, Google has all this money. Why do they have this growing cash pile? Why can't they find something to do with it? And it's interesting looking back on it now because Google did wind up giving a lot of cash back. They they weren't able to find a place to they they truly had too much cash to do.
Speaker 1:They, like, they invested so much in Waymo and so much in DeepMind and so much in Google Cloud and, and and a ton of other projects. And at the same time, they still had money left over. And so they were still doing, I think, stock buybacks and dividends throughout that whole process. And so it was it it like, Teal was kinda proven right that Google was sort of out of ideas or or the big tech companies or the technology industry broadly was was really out of, ideas. Then, of course, AI comes.
Speaker 1:Now we're sort of, you know, vindicated. Hey. There is this new thing. We can invest. Let's let's draw down on the cash flow.
Speaker 1:People are skeptical about it, but at least it's happening. But the question is is what is Zuck thinking? Because he's definitely in the mode of, like, I got this cash machine. Let me invest my cash flow in new data centers, in new AI training processes. We are.
Speaker 2:A right to to look at this and say, like, Meta Platforms is Yeah. One of the greatest businesses of all time. Yeah. And you have and and the CEO's a little crazy. Like, he's a bit of a wild card.
Speaker 2:Like, he has, like, obviously, has an all
Speaker 1:of the big tech companies.
Speaker 2:No. I I I disagree. Okay. I think if you look at I think if you look at Sundar, I think if you look at Satya, I think if you look at the the guys that are running
Speaker 1:What Bezos? I'm thinking Bezos because they had a cash machine with Amazon. What did he do? He didn't return a dime of capital and had had gross Yeah. Net profits of like zero for a decade.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But AWS. AWS. Yeah. And the last time that that Mark invested this heavily in something
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It did not deliver ROI. Sure. And so I think people are just a little bit scared. That's why the stock's more volatile. That's why it traded down
Speaker 1:10 This is this is there.
Speaker 2:Google is up. Google's up 10%. Yeah. Microsoft traded down briefly after after earnings. But but ultimately, I think you have if you're if you're investing in this company Yeah.
Speaker 2:You have to be you have you have the the the the sort of protection knowing that this is fundamentally just a fantastic business.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And you can you can pause, you know, they can sort of pause this like crazy spending at any point. But, again, Meta can. Yeah. But Meta hit the hit a they're they're doing a a bond offering that got announced this morning for $25,000,000,000. And that's after they did another, they did another deal with Blue Owl for, like, something like $30,000,000,000 couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2:And so, Zuck is levering up. He's going all in. Mhmm. And investors need to be tolerant of of that risk. And there's plenty of people that are gonna say, well, it's fine.
Speaker 2:I'd rather own, you know, Alphabet. I'd rather own Microsoft, etcetera.
Speaker 1:BUCO Capital bloke is also, seems like he's on your side here. He says, excited to buy Meta in the five hundreds. The stock, of course, is trading in the 6 hundreds. So he's joking.
Speaker 2:Currently at $666 a share.
Speaker 1:That's a is that a good thing? Is that a good omen? Is that is that a good symbolism?
Speaker 2:It's a devilish omen.
Speaker 1:It's rough. And and Buco Capital says, own the only challenge will be having the courage to do it when it gets there. And he shares a pretty good visualization from Gemini of what's happening right now. Mark Zuckerberg is in some sort of convertible driving off a cliff, wearing a VR headset with piles of
Speaker 2:Wall Street in the back.
Speaker 1:Flying out the back of the I mean car.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I think this makes him look really sick.
Speaker 1:It does. And this is exactly what I want out of a big tech CEO. I want risk. I want risk. And I and I don't know.
Speaker 1:I I feel like you're making a ton of good points that I agree with this year.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying, to be clear, that I'm not riding with Zuck. I will always ride with Zuck.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying I understand why people are like, you know what? I'm gonna I'm not I can't really stomach, you know, a drawdown. Some people are gonna just rotate into Yeah. The other hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying yeah. Tyler, what do you think?
Speaker 7:I mean, I people were calling for Sundar to be basically fired for, like, a long time. I know. Until, like, basically this year. Yeah. So I I feel like you're you're exaggerating how much, like, Google has been, like, this, like, winner the whole time.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. I completely agree. This is my point about when they when they rebranded to Alphabet.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone was like, you're not gonna cure cancer and create self driving cars and also build AGI and build a cloud platform.
Speaker 7:People are still saying Sundar, like, should not be CEO.
Speaker 1:Ten years. For ten years. Yeah. People were saying, like, it's not really working. And now finally, people are like, okay.
Speaker 1:It actually worked. You have a diversified business. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Breaking news. Yes. This is gonna rock your world.
Speaker 1:No
Speaker 2:way. Taylor Sheridan and Peter Berg team on Paramount and Activision's Call of Duty movie.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's
Speaker 2:go. Hit the hit the gong for that. The creators that made Yellowstone, Hell or High Water, and Lone Survivor, Ants
Speaker 1:I'm so excited for the Call of Duty movie. You know, they should also make a Vanta movie, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. That's incredible. Wait.
Speaker 1:So what what we need to get someone on the show who understands media because I like, this all seems like it's happening very, very quickly.
Speaker 2:We understand neo factual media, new media, corporate media, leg new legacy media.
Speaker 1:No. I don't understand.
Speaker 2:Neotrad media.
Speaker 1:The neo conglomerate is entirely new to me. I don't understand what Ellison's doing. I don't understand what Taylor Sheridan is doing in reaction to it. It seems like this is a reaction. Basically, Taylor Sheridan left Ellison's new empire, left Paramount and said, hey.
Speaker 1:I'm out, and I'm going over to NBC Universal. I'm riding with the Comcasters. And and and now he's saying, I'm making a Call of Duty movie. Is this is this is this all tied to
Speaker 4:his I'm watching
Speaker 1:him leaving headed to leaving Ellison, Or is it something else? I don't
Speaker 4:know.
Speaker 2:This I'm sure this was in the works for a for a while.
Speaker 1:Potentially. Was it? I don't know. There there have been, like, a flurry of Taylor Sheridan, like, little leaks and news items because it seems like he's in he's in a negotiation with with David Ellison over I mean, he was until he laughed, but he's still with he's still with Paramount at least for, you know, a couple more months, maybe a couple more years. He still has projects in flight.
Speaker 1:You can't just, like, you know, completely dip on your on your production company. But we really should get someone on the show to figure that out. Let's go to more haters, more, you know, posters in the timeline from Jay Boulthard. This AI stuff is so dumb. Zuck is repeating the 2022 sinking of a great money machine in Meta with wasteful spend.
Speaker 1:The metaverse sucked, and AI is nearly as dumb with all this CapEx as investors tell him they're sick of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And part of part of part of part of the the the I think part of the blowback here is that the first AI product that Meta announced from their new team was MetaVibes.
Speaker 1:Incredible moment.
Speaker 2:And, I know you're I know you've been putting in hours and hours a day on the MetaVibes app. Yeah. But that didn't send a strong that does not inspire confidence. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Because it was they if they had launched Sora Yeah. People would have been saying like, wow. Yeah. They're absolutely cooking.
Speaker 1:And I think there's two audiences that the Meta Vibes app didn't hit with. One was, okay, the extremely online technical teapot, whatever you wanna call them. Those folks are like, well, this looks like white labeled mid journey because it kinda is, and the app just doesn't feel, like, super polished or, like, crazy. Oh, wow. I've never seen these, like, UI paradigms.
Speaker 1:So there's that. And then there's the the the, you know, the the teapot critique of, like, infinite jest and slop and all this stuff. So, like, they weren't hitting with, like, the insiders. But then simultaneously, it's not like you walk down the street and you were like, oh, wow. Like, this is actually breaking through with just, like, everyday random people in the way that threads has.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know. Maybe in a year, we'll be like, oh, wow. They actually figured it out. They funnel a ton of people to Meta Vibes, and it's as successful as threads. That would be impressive.
Speaker 1:It won't. It seems like a tall order.
Speaker 2:Yep. It won't be.
Speaker 1:It won't be.
Speaker 2:The but but the the thing about Sora Yeah. That stood out, and even though I'm not bullish on Sora as a media consumption platform.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It it had this innovative super viral feature that was fresh and new. And so if I think I think if Meta had launched that
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Everyone have been like Oh. 100%. Like, you spend the money. Yeah. But when the
Speaker 1:because at least you're on the frontier of the slop. Like, you're you you have the you have the purest slop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it and it, you know, Sora benefits Instagram weirdly because people are creating more content over there, and it's driving engagement.
Speaker 1:But And also just the Sora app. It didn't inspire confidence. The idea of Cameos and putting those things together Yeah. And the way it was like like all the little details. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was like, okay. This is unique. And then and like there's clearly a ton like
Speaker 2:Cameos suing OpenAI? Like Cameo, the the celebrity video
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Via celebrity video platform suing OpenAI over the feature, which Mhmm. Don't know, like
Speaker 1:Do we or just the name?
Speaker 2:The naming. The naming. Mhmm. The naming of the feature, which feels like feels like a stretch to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. The other thing
Speaker 1:The the problem with with brand names is if you create a name that is too descriptive of what you do, you can't, you can't trademark it. So if if if we were to call this, like, the news show, we couldn't we couldn't we couldn't have any intellectual property around that.
Speaker 2:Did you see this this engineer said a couple days ago, just submitted my resignation from Meta. Some might say that one year at the company is not that long, but I survived like three rounds of layoffs. So I think it's fair play. For what it's worth, my team is great and it was an overall positive experience. But there are other better places to build AGI, which hopefully won't be used for stepmom chatbots and infinite slot machines.
Speaker 2:Wow. Scathing.
Speaker 1:I wonder what the play is. Do you think that's like grow your account so you can be a founder, launch something? The whole I don't know. The the slop, it doesn't seem I don't know. It's tricky.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:Zuck is certainly not I don't think gonna take his foot off the gas yet. No. No have to get the vibes will have to get about 10 times worse.
Speaker 1:New Reality Labs hardware shipping every year. Like, like, there was massive pushback in the in the stock, like, sold off by, like, 50%. It was, like, really, really rough for a while.
Speaker 2:And Wasn't it wasn't didn't it trade down to something like like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, $300 a share or something.
Speaker 2:No. I think it was I mean, so
Speaker 1:Yeah. Look at the look at the five year chart. In '20 at the bottom of 2022, it $90 a share.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. Rough.
Speaker 1:And it was up at 300. So it it it traded from from almost 400 to 90, which is down 70%. Like, that is an insane drawdown. And then it just built right back up, and it was bigger than ever. And so I don't know.
Speaker 1:I feel like people might be filling out apology forms for him at some point even though it looks rough right now. Just something's gonna wind up clicking, and, also, the core business is just gonna keep ripping. So you just get so many more shots on goal. It's just an endless an endless, you know, stream of shots on goal when you have a cash machine like the family of apps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, the stock's up 20% in the last six months, even even Yeah. You know, factoring in this 10% drawdown.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think I think investing in AI is not the craziest thing you could do in 2025 as a hyperscaler CEO. Yeah. Anyway, Polymarket has some OpenAI IPO market up already. So no IPO by 12/31/2026 is already at 55%.
Speaker 1:We will certainly be tracking this. But if they do get out, the, the market is pricing right now between 1 and 1,250,000,000,000.00 in market cap, but 6% chance that it's up at 1,500,000,000,000.0, which would be crazy to go out at. Not technically the biggest IPO of all time. I believe that belongs to Saudi Aramco. So oil is still dominant relative to AI, but still would be one of the most insane tech IPOs in history, obviously.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:Quickly, before we move on, graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 7:Did you wanna watch this video?
Speaker 2:Toby, yesterday Oh, yeah. Responded. Wait, Lutke? Yeah. Toby, we we covered his post where he said having some AI follow you into into your Zoom meetings or Google Meet for taking notes is the digital equivalent of showing up to a meeting with your fly down.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I said I never let them in. I just let them sit there in the waiting room. Oh, I forgot. Sorry. He responded and said, I'm actually very pro meeting recording and AI summarization, but I'm not okay with bots joining as fake humans to accomplish this.
Speaker 2:It's a meeting between you and me, not you and me in some startup's viral growth strategy. Granola is great. Gemini does this well in Google Meet. HyperNote is great and fully local, but use them with consent. My tweet is about how ridiculous and self important it looks when you show up to a meeting with random bots as entourage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think,
Speaker 1:I I I do remember seeing there's a viral screenshot of somebody who showed up. Is this the screenshot where somebody brought, like, five bots? It's just hilarious. Entourage is actually kind of sick. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wait. Tyler, this would be a good hack project. Like, viral entourage on your on your calendar that when you join a meeting, it just joins with, like, 25 other people. And it's just like it just takes your name and just automatically does, you're chief of staff, you're head of security, you're PR person, you're secretary, you're driver, you're dietitian, you're, and it just joins every meeting with 20 different bots and just makes you look super important online. Maybe it'll happen.
Speaker 1:We should move on to this video Jensen Huang.
Speaker 2:Oh. CEO of invention. Right? I was gonna go I was gonna go for that, the guy from from Snowflake.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let's watch the the the Jensen video is only seven seconds. So look at this.
Speaker 1:He's having beers with some absolute dogs. He's hanging out with the CEO of Samsung, the CEO of Hyundai hanging out in South Korea. Just having some beers, crushing some beers with the boys. This is how you do it. People will call it a top signal.
Speaker 2:I think This is gonna go so hard in a top signal vibe real that we will definitely create Yeah. When the time is right.
Speaker 1:But I mean But for now have been crazier top signals. And when NVIDIA was at, like, half the market cap is at now, Jensen was signing autographs. People were
Speaker 2:like, signing signing a woman's shirt.
Speaker 1:Might have done that too. I don't know. But it was a crazy moment, and everyone was like, this has gotta be it. So I think Jensen is just consistently putting out crazy clips that read his top signals to confuse the market, keep you guessing.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. He said, doubt doubt me again.
Speaker 1:He also says that Korea has the best fried chicken in the world, taking shots at colonel Sanders. Rough out here for America.
Speaker 3:I don't know why Korea has the world's best fried chicken, but Korea has the world's best fried chicken.
Speaker 7:Let's go.
Speaker 1:The best fried chicken in in
Speaker 3:America is Korean.
Speaker 2:Oh. Woah.
Speaker 1:I have had Korean fried chicken. It is delicious. Something about the sauce is really, really good. Also, Jensen Huang in South Korea says, are there any NVIDIA investors here? The audience cheers and says, that's why Korea is rich, baby.
Speaker 1:Let's play this one. Play it loud. Do we get it?
Speaker 3:Nvidia investors. That's why Korea's so rich.
Speaker 1:He's got bits.
Speaker 3:He's got bits.
Speaker 2:He's feeling good right now. I mean, on on your 5,000,000,000,000 day, I mean
Speaker 7:I mean, come on.
Speaker 2:Let him let him have a little fun.
Speaker 1:What are gonna do? Have some fun.
Speaker 2:Let him have a little fun straight after GTC.
Speaker 1:It's it's so wild that they hit 5,000,000,000,000 yesterday, particularly because they don't they don't report earnings for another, like, two weeks. So, like, basically, every other big tech company is on, like, the October 28, October 29 cycle. So as of tonight, after Amazon and Apple report earnings, we should we we have, like, the book closed mostly on all the mag seven except for NVIDIA. But NVIDIA is still in the news. And so, Alphabet got crammed to the business section.
Speaker 1:Microsoft got crammed down to the business section. Meta made it to the front page of the journal because they sold off. But NVIDIA got the full chart of their progress. They got the the Glazinator 3,000, the a one from the Wall Street Journal because they just hit 5,000,000,000,000. And they have this interesting chart of how many days it took NVIDIA to create a trillion dollars in market cap.
Speaker 1:The first trillion took them six thousand one hundred and thirty eight days. The second trillion, they did it in a hundred and eighty days. The third trillion in sixty six days. Then the fourth trillion was in two hundred and seventy three days, and then the fifth trillion in seventy eight days. So from six thousand days, took him twenty years to make that first trillion.
Speaker 1:They say that the first trillion is the hardest.
Speaker 2:They they do say that.
Speaker 1:But then the next one comes in just sixty six days or seventy eight days, which is remarkable. So he is, he's on a tear, and congratulations to Jensen Huang and all the folks over at NVIDIA for, powering this AI revolution. Absolutely crushing.
Speaker 2:Pull up this video of the snowflake CRO Mhmm. Doing a little street interview.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Excuse me, sir.
Speaker 1:How old were you when you became a millionaire? This guy. Yes, This guy.
Speaker 4:I've just
Speaker 9:been getting your Instagram feed.
Speaker 1:How old were you
Speaker 8:when you became a millionaire?
Speaker 9:Oh, boy. Four years ago?
Speaker 2:Okay. Pause. This is Pause. Pause.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. So who is this guy again? He's the he's the the CRO of of Snowflake, which, like, Snowflake's been, like, a $100,000,000,000 company for a while. Right?
Speaker 1:Snowflake market cap. I thought it went out, like, years ago. I mean, maybe he wasn't liquid. It's $91,000,000,000 market cap company, and it's down too. Like, like, it was
Speaker 2:creating higher. So there's there this was the the line that people were most confused about because I don't I don't wanna I don't wanna, like try to guess this guy's age too, you know, I won't pretend to know exactly, but I assume he's in his forties, maybe his fifties. Yeah. He was at VMware for ten years as the vice president of, US enterprise sales and then the senior vice president general manager of Americas. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, and he was also the president of Broadcom for from November 2023 till now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like an absolute dog.
Speaker 2:And became the CRO at Snowflake, this year. But still, everyone, I think, is shocked of, like, how how he didn't, you know, possibly pull together
Speaker 1:a million A million dollars.
Speaker 2:A million dollars by somewhere
Speaker 1:Twenty five years in enterprise technology. That's what it says. Twenty five years. Like, what is he spending his money on? He must be just, like, obsessed with buying depreciating cars.
Speaker 2:That could be it.
Speaker 1:Maybe he gets a new Bentley Continental GT every year like clockwork. Maybe he's the one that's buying all the Lamborghini Urlins.
Speaker 2:Buying multiple. Maybe he doesn't like to drive the same car twice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? That must
Speaker 2:be gets a fresh car.
Speaker 1:That must be it.
Speaker 2:I don't like to drive cars with more than 20 miles on the odometer. Yeah. So I'm just gonna cycle it out. I'll take the lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Every 20 miles They say once you drive it off the lot, you lose half the value.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a it's the price I'm willing to pay.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Because I gotta keep my net worth under I gotta keep it at 6 figs.
Speaker 2:To inspire
Speaker 1:It's got to six figs.
Speaker 2:It clearly inspired him to grind harder. He's a Sierra at Snowflake.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. No. This must be this must be some sort of he he misspoke, because that
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's let's play the play the rest
Speaker 1:of it. This does not make sense.
Speaker 8:G, what do you do in tech?
Speaker 9:CRO for Snowflake.
Speaker 8:Did you guys just go public?
Speaker 9:We went public five years ago Congratulations. COVID. Couldn't ring the bell,
Speaker 5:so this is
Speaker 8:our Do you recommend entrepreneurs take their company public? Because there's a risk there as well when you bring in all is cool. Alright. What do you think He does not
Speaker 1:do thirty seconds. He definitely does another, like, five minutes based on the edit.
Speaker 9:Cash flow is everything until profitability comes. Then you get S and P 500, and you get a whole different kind of return on
Speaker 1:What does that mean too?
Speaker 2:That's always been That I
Speaker 3:I felt
Speaker 2:a whole different kind of
Speaker 1:Do I not understand that?
Speaker 3:In the
Speaker 8:What did you guys do in revenue this last year?
Speaker 9:So we're gonna exit this year probably just over about 4 and a half billion.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Disclosure. That's disclosure that he's not supposed to make.
Speaker 9:Keep track of us. He's no
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 8:Have some good equity in the company?
Speaker 9:We're doing okay.
Speaker 8:We're doing okay. As somebody who's an executive at a billion dollar
Speaker 4:company By
Speaker 9:the way, I watch you all the time. Congratulations on all your success. You're an executive at a
Speaker 8:billion dollar company. The best financial advice you can give to the younger generation. Best money advice you can give to the
Speaker 2:This guy this guy shouldn't be giving financial.
Speaker 1:Don't understand this. Alright. Step one.
Speaker 9:You can save your way to being financially secure in the future. You've gotta build up wealth. Don't worry about w twos. W two is
Speaker 1:not necessary.
Speaker 9:W two maybe
Speaker 1:thirty years to next
Speaker 8:five to ten
Speaker 1:years, are you shooting? Million dollars saving. This is crazy.
Speaker 9:Five years is tough to predict, my friend. In this world,
Speaker 1:this is actually hilarious.
Speaker 9:Twelve to eighteen months, that's all you got.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Okay. That's right. Give me the twelve next months. What's the number one thing people need to be adopting in their
Speaker 9:business right now? They're gonna be
Speaker 10:using He's
Speaker 1:he's still going. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds.
Speaker 9:Accelerate revenue. It's all about moving fast.
Speaker 8:Do you think if business owners aren't leveraging AI, they're gonna
Speaker 9:be left behind? Absolutely. Why? Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 9:If you're
Speaker 2:not on
Speaker 9:the Internet, wave your debt.
Speaker 8:It's gonna replace Uber drivers.
Speaker 9:Potentially could. Self driving. It's gonna change the world.
Speaker 1:So funny. Oh.
Speaker 2:Wild, wild interview.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So they had to file an emergency eight k disavowing unauthorized statements. The projection exceeded the official guidance by a $100,000,000. So, they they they said that they were projecting 4,400,000,000.0. He rounded up to 4.5, and, that's a no no.
Speaker 1:So he got himself in trouble. Stay safe out there.
Speaker 2:I just don't understand how he has on his on his LinkedIn. He has president at Broadcom full time since November 2023. He's not listed on the Broadcom website.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:It is one of the funniest Maybe he's
Speaker 2:kind of like so hump rick style moonlighting
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Over there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who knows? We have the founder of, founder CEO of Whatnot coming in the studio today. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:In about twenty minutes.
Speaker 1:About twenty minutes. We have Grant. We're very excited. People have been debating Whatnot because it sort of came out of nowhere as this, Decacorn ecommerce company. Chris Pike, former friend, former guest on the show, is is taking shots on the timeline, putting the timeline in turmoil, calling it unregulated gambling.
Speaker 1:Well, we're gonna get to the bottom of it. Is it gambling? Is it not? He says he feels like someone needs to write a deep dive on this, but, we will dig in. I'm not exactly sure, but we'll we'll we'll try and understand the business, how they make money, how it all works gambling.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you go buy a watermelon, you're like, I don't know. That's actually It looks pretty good.
Speaker 1:You can't crack it up.
Speaker 2:But if I once I cut it open, once I get home and cut it open, it might not be the best watermelon.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:But it looked good. You're trying to knock on it, you know? You're trying to feel out kind of the vibes of the watermelon.
Speaker 1:Do that with pumpkins right now around Halloween.
Speaker 6:That's right.
Speaker 1:Halloween's coming out. People are gambling on pumpkins. It's gonna be rotten inside. You gotta play the game.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Play the game on the field.
Speaker 2:We, drew over on X Mhmm. Released a video. I guess he says Amazon will sue me for leaking this. He says worth it. New new
Speaker 6:This is
Speaker 1:so funny. Putting the tiny Amazon package in the missile launcher. It just and I love how it just demolishes the door. It just completely destroys the door. Like the door just gets like broken into a million pieces.
Speaker 2:And this is innovative because how everyone's experience is right. Even though Amazon gets it right to your front door Yeah. It can still be kind of mildly annoying Yeah. To have to go out and carry boxes in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. First world problem. Yeah. But this solves that.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yes. You need to replace
Speaker 2:the door once a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people were taking shots at at at DoorDash with the new DoorDash robot. Will it get into your door? Well, here's answer. Maybe maybe it needs a missile launcher on it.
Speaker 1:I also love that this video it it looks like it's it's in part a real video. Like, those first frames with the human hand, that looks like they actually built the missile, and then they switch over to just a three d render. And so there's, like, maybe no AI here, but still some CGI. It's, it's very, very hilarious. So funny.
Speaker 2:Should we move into some of the more neo neo reactions? Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But first, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data. Get expert level level insights in seconds.
Speaker 1:The julius.ai. Yes. Me after loading the dishwasher instead of paying a robot $20,000 to do it for me, and it's Trump holding a ton of cash. Very, very funny. Also, people are planning to drip them out with gold chains or silver chains, and I think a fade on here too.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:very funny.
Speaker 2:Rob. I mean,
Speaker 1:underrated, the idea that if you get the one x robot, I wonder how much you'll actually be able to dress it. Because at a certain point, you like, you can't put a body kit a crazy body kit on a Tesla because you'll just block the cameras and eventually you'll you won't have self driving. And I wonder
Speaker 2:Chrome hearts all over my knee.
Speaker 1:Yeah? You're going to? I think that but I think it's gonna trip and
Speaker 2:it's gonna be
Speaker 6:out of no.
Speaker 2:No. No. One t shirt?
Speaker 1:One t shirt? I don't know. You get a baggy t
Speaker 2:shirt there. Handle one one baggy t. Yeah. If it can't handle
Speaker 1:It's just you're gonna have to pay for two Chrome Hearts t shirts because you have to you have to send one to the teleoperator Because the teleoperator doesn't feel the exact weight of the Chrome hard
Speaker 2:They need to they need to make immediately make an account dripped out neos, and it's just a daily feed of
Speaker 1:The vibes around this company are just great. It's such a moonshot, and it's like and and it's it's so capital intensive. It's so difficult. But I think everyone's having fun with it. I'm gonna give you actually dropped a whole video.
Speaker 2:Rob, we gotta pull up this video. Rob Rob Fruit. He says 20 k to simulate the experience of a roommate with a ketamine problem.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Now, this is what we were saying that that that we were saying on the show yesterday. It's like, hey, Neo, you know, clean up all those wine glasses. And it's just like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just smashing everything. I mean, it's gonna be crazy.
Speaker 2:Neo, get ready to be good at cleaning up glass.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:For sure. That is that's really the final challenge for humanoids. Yeah. Cleaning up glass. One of the greatest challenges for humans.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cleaning up glass.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's a mess.
Speaker 2:It's like a it's an adventure.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 2:mess. It's a stakes game.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the like, some of the anecdotes from this robot are gonna be hilarious. There's gonna be wild stuff. Well, if you're looking for a robot to generate some media for you, head over to Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place, developing fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.
Speaker 2:Another post here with Neo with got the Glock out. Now tell me where the seed phrase is. Gotta make sure that the just another reason why they put the experts locally.
Speaker 1:You definitely have to arm them. This is important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Should should humanoids be able to open carry?
Speaker 1:There's no Corridor Crew video about this that went super viral, Boston Dynamics. They made a whole series out of it. All CGI, but they took, renders of real Boston Dynamics robots and put them in, like, shooting ranges in this whole environment. They tell this whole story, and it just goes viral constantly, people think it's real even though it's CGI.
Speaker 2:What were you saying about MKBHD?
Speaker 1:Oh, MKBHD put out a video about Neo one x. And and he's he's beating the drum of, like, this is teleoperation. It doesn't count. And he's, like, he's going pretty hard on them. He gives us some caveats, and he says, you know, hey.
Speaker 1:I wish, I hope, this does work out. But some other people were kind of, levying the critique, on him that he's not in the arena, not trying to build things. But, I mean, at the same time, talked about this yesterday. I think MQBHD really has seen a number of these consumer. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and He's been
Speaker 2:burned on on He's been burned on a con things. You know, multi $100 devices that should be a lot easier to deliver a great customer experience.
Speaker 4:Totally.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's fair for him to be concerned Yep. About a $20,000 product that would like, probably I I I'm every day, I'm more bullish on one x. Yeah. I think I think they're they have a great understanding of the Internet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're folk they've been focused on like a specific use case, the home for a while. Yeah. They're focused on teleoperation which is the right thing to be focused on. Yeah. Because even if it only is good at teleoperation forever Yeah.
Speaker 2:That still could be valuable. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm bullish as a futurist. Yeah. Yeah. Not as a consumer Well, yeah. Consumer reports.
Speaker 2:And I think that everybody should be going in this with the understanding that you are participating in trying to pull the future
Speaker 1:I agree. Forward. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it seems like I don't I they I don't know if they're calling it a beta, but it feels like you should go into it assuming it's a beta. What are you laughing at? Didn't you have a joke? Did you ever post your joke? At least tell your joke on the on the stream if you didn't post it.
Speaker 2:I'll tell my joke.
Speaker 1:Tell your
Speaker 2:A woman shoots her one x neo then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next, she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. How can this be?
Speaker 1:The what what was the what was John posting about that before?
Speaker 2:The woman John John Palmer. This was inspired by John Yeah. John Palmer's post last week of, like, the AI agent being like, this is not my son. You know?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:A a father and son create an AI agent company that gets to $20,000,000. They go to San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wait. A father and a son a father and son build an AI agent. The father tweets that they have 10,000,000 ARR, and the son is rushed to San Francisco to pitch the C dram. At the pitch, the VC looks at the boy and says, I can't this I can't fund this boy.
Speaker 2:He is my son. So the answer, of course, to my riddle Yes. A woman shoots her one x Neo then holds him underwater for five minutes. Next, she hangs him right after they enjoy a lovely dinner. The answer to the riddle is, of course
Speaker 1:Turbo Puffer. Search every bite. No. Serverless vector in full text search build from first principles on object storage fast, 10 x cheaper, extremely scalable. What's
Speaker 2:cliffhanger. No. She killed the robot but is hanging out with the operator.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. At at first, my read on it I mean, my read on it was just like, it's ridiculous, and it's a play on that whole, like, riddle that, confuses LLMs generally. I mean, there there's some very funny examples of those. It's the strawberry thing all over the all over again.
Speaker 1:It's just very easy to confuse these things.
Speaker 2:P e cooper over at x went incredibly viral. 25,000 likes. 25,000. Views saying my neorobot after I learned piloting them is mad chill.
Speaker 1:It's not gonna be a third world or remember.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be an American teleoperated Yeah. Robot.
Speaker 1:What what is this Will Menidas post? He posted this neorobot in this, like, in this image, And I understand it's photoshopped in there, but I don't understand why it went so viral. People really like it.
Speaker 2:What is
Speaker 1:this a reference to?
Speaker 2:It's some I mean, you scroll down, Brandon Jacoby is
Speaker 1:posting You think it's this?
Speaker 4:Think it's that
Speaker 1:they don't know?
Speaker 7:But it's such a real image. Have you seen the original image?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the a frat a frat guy.
Speaker 1:What is
Speaker 2:the image?
Speaker 7:No. It's like a guy who's staying there and he like I don't he just like I don't know how to describe it. He's like looks all run down and everyone's like looking at him funny. Okay. I I I think the the it's kind of just like the Ghibli thing where it's like, oh, that's an image I recognize.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, I don't I I don't understand this image. I just don't look at that many photos of people drinking on porches, I suppose.
Speaker 1:But, you know, to use their own. I guess, what is in
Speaker 2:to that. Dev had an absolute banger. Wait till you find that MF 20 k clanker in your kitchen acting too friendly. Ridiculous. And I guess you you followed him after this post and he says, damn, after so long.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's funny. I got caught following him. But I did like this post and I was like, I gotta follow this. There's a dev. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Wait. After so long, you you don't you're not that big of an account. I feel like I'm not that behind. I don't know. I'm glad I found your account though, Dev.
Speaker 1:You're very entertaining.
Speaker 2:You guys found each other. It's very sweet.
Speaker 1:Oh, Jordy already following. Okay. It's me, you, David Holes, for the followers I know. And Jaya Seed, very funny. And I like that Dev replied replied to the post banger.
Speaker 1:Just giving yourself a pat on the back is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Okay. Eric Katana has a less less not so PC post in Is it gay to have sex with a female robot teleoperated by a man?
Speaker 1:Elon Musk comes in with a crying emoji. I don't know. We'll leave that to the philosophers, I suppose. We'll need a whole new branch of philosophy.
Speaker 2:Eric Katana Eric Katana replied and said, Elon, what what did you mean by this? Which is optimist's new hand upgrade includes 22 degrees of freedom. What does it mean? Perfect. Did
Speaker 1:this did this Tane post get deleted? I don't know where this one went. I'm I don't know.
Speaker 2:Let's let's move over to some BubTalk. We have a post here from USB with a clip from the legend Fred Wilson.
Speaker 1:While we pull that up, let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioning, chat you the tea, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Let's play the clip from Fred Wilson.
Speaker 11:So the thing about bubbles is that there's there's two things I think that people need to remember about bubbles. First of all, bubbles provide the financing for new revolutions. What's that? And
Speaker 1:Like that book you described, I love revolutions.
Speaker 11:And and they provide it at at inflated valuations so people can I mean, look at what OpenAI and then Charing
Speaker 3:through how they're doing? They're raising
Speaker 11:money at astronomical valuations and then throwing all of that money building training new mosh.
Speaker 1:Right? What a legend.
Speaker 11:We can say they're overdoing it. This reminds us of the telecom overbuild of the late nineties, whatever. But the net result of it will be there will be advances that would not have been possible without that investment mania. So that's one thing to remember about bubbles. Second thing to remember about bubbles is after the crash, there's there's a renewal.
Speaker 11:And so if you can just ride out the crash and then stick with it, things will be even better afterwards. So well, so the thing about bubbles is that there's just two things I think.
Speaker 2:Basically, just survive.
Speaker 1:Survive. Getting the winners. Ride in the winners.
Speaker 2:Invest in the companies that are durable and multi generational.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Skip the others.
Speaker 1:Skill issue.
Speaker 2:Skill At all.
Speaker 1:Just Fast. Just don't make mistakes. Just don't make mistakes. Use Google AI Studio the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Create an AI powered app faster than ever.
Speaker 1:That's the second time I did that.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we stick around. Dean Ball says, my sense is that selling Blackwell chips to China would quite possibly be the most unpopular tech policy move of the Trump admin, especially on Capitol Hill. It's plausible that the long term, really even near term result will be much more compute regulation.
Speaker 1:I like the Skydeen ball. Tyler, do you know ball?
Speaker 7:I think you've already made this joke. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but have you have you gone down the ball rabbit hole? You read
Speaker 2:I've read
Speaker 7:some of his his longer post.
Speaker 1:He's coming on the show tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Pretty spooky day to come on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is.
Speaker 2:That'll be an interesting
Speaker 1:It'll be very fun. Interview. Yeah. I I feel like the wait. Didn't Trump went to China just yesterday.
Speaker 1:Right? Or or where did he actually meet Xi Jinping? I don't remember. Going to China. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. But he but he met with Xi Jinping and immediately let up
Speaker 2:South Korea.
Speaker 1:Oh, South Korea? Okay. Oh, Jensen's there too. That's fun. I I have no idea anymore.
Speaker 1:I I feel like if you were if you were if you were anti selling GPUs to China on the basis of AI doom, you have to update towards it's actually kinda chill to sell them to China. Right? Like, debate this with me. Wait. Okay.
Speaker 1:Doomer The reason the one of the reasons people said, let's not sell GPUs to China was if they get GPUs, they will get superintelligence. They will steamroll us. They will be all powerful, and superintelligence will be communist. It will be state capitalist. It will be not loving free speech.
Speaker 1:It'll be all the things that are un American and we don't like. Then the last couple years have happened and played out, and it feels like the fast takeoff scenario feels less likely. And so that should update you to be, like, a little bit less worried about it. No?
Speaker 7:Less worried. I mean
Speaker 1:about selling to China because it's not nuclear weapons. It's not the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 2:It's It's nuclear slop.
Speaker 1:It's slop. It's erotica. It's but it's also great knowledge retrieval, really cool image generation, really cool audio generation summaries. Like, it is definitely a great productivity tool, but it's not going to be, okay. They have it.
Speaker 1:They got the GPUs. They got, you know, a GPT five level model, and now America just loses. Like and and China is just dominant. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I I think, you know, the the leap we'll take is that it's still, like, we're I don't think in his scenario, like Mhmm. The labs haven't even been nationalized yet. Mhmm. He's, like I I don't think the capabilities right now merit the nationalization.
Speaker 7:Yeah. But I think a lot of people still think that, like, it's like, you know, two more years then we'll be at a point where, like, it would make sense for there to be, like, major geopolitical conflict just over the AI question. So I I I don't think it's, the the people who were super, like, bullish on that idea, I think, are still, I don't think they've been fully, like, disproven yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. It seems like well, I mean, we'll have to talk to more people about, like, how that's shaping up because there's also the weird dynamic of, like, even if we wanted to sell Blackwell to China, would they even buy it? Because they seem very interested in their own supply chain.
Speaker 2:I think I think they can do both. You know? They can buy Blackwells today, and they can still
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, the more you buy, the less incentive you have to build locally. Like, that's just true. Like, we buy solar panels here. There are no good solar panel companies, sir.
Speaker 2:I don't know. There aren't. They're probably not.
Speaker 1:Like, America has been like, yeah. We're buying them so cheaply. Like, how do you get a company off the ground in a market that's just getting destroyed? We ran this example with with GoPro. Like, America had a company there and got steamrolled.
Speaker 1:And so it's like, you need to be overinvesting like crazy, and America just doesn't have the appetite for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'm I'm just saying China has
Speaker 1:Has more of an appetite.
Speaker 2:To have a, you know, entire industry Yeah. You know, backstopped and, know, money losing for a sustained period of time. Yeah. Couple more posts before we bring in Grant. Zero Hash, we talked about this briefly yesterday.
Speaker 2:Mastercard is set to acquire crypto startup zero Hash for nearly 2,000,000,000. Imran Khan over at Alliance says, Zero Hash powers most crypto to fiat on off ramps holding money transmitter licenses, and MSB licenses across The US. Most on ramps you use today likely run through Zero Hash. This is a pretty big deal. So Mastercard, getting into the game.
Speaker 2:In other news, Kimball Musk says, please vote your Tesla stock. There is no one remotely close to my brother and no CEO CEO on earth that would accept this package. It is a massive win for you as a shareholder every way you look at it. Elon says, thanks, bro. These are these are the original technology brothers.
Speaker 1:What is oh, you're true. What does he mean by no CEO on earth that would accept this package?
Speaker 2:I can give some more context. So Gavin Baker says my firm, Atrades Management, will be voting in favor of Elon's performance based compensation package. I would prefer that every company I invest in have a comparable plan. Sure. I believe shareholders should generally support thoughtfully structured performance based packages because they incentivize CEOs to create transformational growth and value.
Speaker 2:The basic logic of these plans is the CEO gets 10% of the incremental value creation if they 10 x the stock with a two x hurdle. So shareholders get a 900% stock increase and the CEO gets an incremental 10%. The first Tesla plan incented Elon to 10 x the value of Tesla. He achieved all the milestones and may never be paid for this. The Axon plan incented Rick Smith to, greater than five x value of Axon he did.
Speaker 2:And when milestones aren't met such as Farfetched, the CEOs don't receive the payouts. The new Tesla Tesla plan is arguably better than the first as it also includes financial and technological milestones in addition to market cap based incentives. And again, so Atreides is riding with the brothers.
Speaker 1:Yes. But what do you what do you think Kimball means by saying no CEO on earth would accept this package?
Speaker 2:Like That basically
Speaker 1:that I I completely agree with the first part. There is no one remotely close to Elon for Tesla. Like, I'm totally in on that. I'm in on the idea of incentive packages. I like
Speaker 2:that as the structure are so aggressive that most CEOs don't think they would achieve them. Hence, they would
Speaker 1:accept them. Yeah. They'd be like, no. Pay me How about
Speaker 2:how about I do 10 k? How about yeah. How about I get
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:Okay. Compounded 10%
Speaker 1:a year. Yeah. How about do this for that? Like, if I go to the CEO of of Target or something and say, like, okay. You won't make a dime unless you 10 x the stock.
Speaker 1:They're gonna be like, what are you talking about? No way. Yeah. That makes sense. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about Linear. 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 start building. Let's go to Cheng Lu. Have you heard this Scott Forstall stands?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of Scott Forstall stans out there. He was the senior vice president, iPhone software. Thirteen years ago, he was apparently fired from Apple after the disastrous launch of Apple Maps. What mapping app do you use on your phone?
Speaker 2:I am an Apple Maps guy.
Speaker 1:Me too. I use Apple Maps well.
Speaker 2:Have been because I used to be
Speaker 7:I switched to Apple Maps, but only, like, a year ago. Yeah. But then I was on Google
Speaker 3:Maps.
Speaker 1:I was on Waze, and Waze was incredible because you'd find all these, like, secret behind the scenes Waze. And then I think a lot of local neighborhoods basically said, like, hey. We we actually live on a on a nice quiet street. We don't want Waze funneling a thousand cars through our neighborhood during rush hour. So can you route around us?
Speaker 1:And it kind of put everyone back on the normal routes. And
Speaker 2:I just always liked that you could see the maps on your home screen without unlocking your phone. Yep. And that was enough
Speaker 1:for me. I agree. I agree.
Speaker 2:Stuck with it. Even though sometimes it would take you on a little bit of a goose chase.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Goose chase. Well, ways
Speaker 2:And I also ways I I was never a fan of the goose chase. I'm like, I don't I don't want to You're anti goose chase? Like, in the Waze context.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love a Waze goose chase.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna go on a street race through a bunch of 25 mile an hour. No.
Speaker 1:The best is when you're on Waze. I no. I agree with you. But the best is when you're using Waze, and it's like, hey, you're on the freeway, but why don't you get off and get back on the freeway seven times over the next six miles so you can save 45 seconds? It's like, Waze.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna do that. At one point, Waze,
Speaker 2:You really they really should have a slide, like, an like an aggression slider.
Speaker 1:They basically do. So if you go into the Waze settings, there's one where it's like, okay. Avoid avoid toll roads. It's like, I understand that. It's like, if I'm driving across the town and I don't wanna pay $5, like, I wanna save money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Avoid toll roads. Then one was, like, avoid freeways. And I don't know. I guess it's, maybe if you get motion sick or something, you don't wanna be on freeways.
Speaker 2:I met I met someone recently that that doesn't drive they they didn't grow up in LA. Yeah. They moved here. And they just avoid all freeways. So they only take street laws.
Speaker 1:I mean, the self driving cars often avoid avoid freeways because higher speed accidents are are more risky. But so for a while, I don't know if this is actually in Waze, but there was a moment where you could go in and check, I wanna avoid toll roads. Two was, I wanna avoid freeways. And three was, I wanna avoid dirt roads, which was hilarious because I can just imagine driving through Los Angeles. And all of a sudden, it's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:If you cut across this person's front lawn, you can save thirty seconds. And so Front lawn. Don't know. Hot take is that Scott Forstall like, Apple Maps was this kind of disastrous launch where it it really didn't work as anywhere near, Google Maps. But but eventually, they turned it around, and Apple Maps became a really great product for the iPhone.
Speaker 1:And Cheng Lu says, as someone with a bit of insider info, sorry for baiting, I can tell you that the current trajectory for Apple would likely have been better off if he ended up CEO. Look up his background and interests. I'll forever be a forced all simp. The guy can code and coded the right things. And so, it's very, very interesting
Speaker 2:that I wonder what he thinks about iOS 17.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it like, you can you can run this counterfactual and and say, okay. You if you put the software guy in charge, maybe the software is better. But what does that mean for the hardware, the supply chain, the trade war? Like, would Scott Forstall have been able to get through the crazy trade war?
Speaker 2:I mean, Tim Cook I don't know. Could have been a goated COO right hand to Scott.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true.
Speaker 2:But Maybe you wouldn't have maybe iOS 17 wouldn't be such a dumpster fire.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's that bad, actually.
Speaker 2:I I I it it it I I get multiple times a day a reminder of how how how bad
Speaker 1:I think I think it will I think you'll get used to it over the next, like, six months.
Speaker 2:I've gotten used to it, but I still Yeah. Yeah. Can appreciate how bad it is. But we have Mark Mark Gurman's coming on the show next week. Yes.
Speaker 2:And I'm excited to talk with him about it.
Speaker 1:Well, we have our first in person guest of the day. While he hops on the show, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Great to meet you. Likewise. Good to meet you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Can you
Speaker 2:Fellow LA technology brother.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Not many of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not many. Here. I'm gonna have you press
Speaker 2:right there.
Speaker 1:That's good. Perfect. Why don't you introduce yourself and and kinda describe the shape of the business today? And then I'd love to go back and kind of hear the whole the whole entrepreneurial journey.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I'm Grant LaFontaine, cofounder, CEO of a platform called Whatnot. Whatnot's a livestream shopping platform Yeah. Online marketplace. The way to best way to think about it is we sort of enable anyone to create like a digital brick and mortar store.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So as opposed to, you know Interesting. You know, any seller can come on. They can then sell through live video, which means you sort of like this. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You can stand up, you can be in your store, you can walk around your store, sell goods, sell anything. And so we have people on the platform selling comics to paintings Mhmm. To plants to women's fashion, everything in between. And it just ends up being, you know, an incredibly good way to build a business very similar to like a brick and mortar retail shop online.
Speaker 2:It's so interesting that that digital commerce has just and doesn't look like yes, there's items Yeah. On the storefront that you can buy. But imagine if stores had no employees in them and you couldn't like in real time quickly ask Yeah. Ask a human like, hey, like, you know, what size do you recommend here? Or do you have this?
Speaker 2:Do you have this in another you know, all these different things that ultimately drive, like, higher purchase volume in a retail setting that we just generally don't have online but do exist on whatnot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the take me back to the start of the company. What were the what was the competitive landscape like at the time? What was the was this something that was like working internationally? And you were like, oh,
Speaker 2:think that could Of course. That was the whole that was the whole thing. It was like everyone was like looking China and and you look at how some of China's retail giants got started. It was like selling fruit and vegetables. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like in live and and something that Americans just don't understand at all, you know, buying like bananas through like basically a farmer who's just like, yeah, check out these bananas.
Speaker 1:I actually imagine you buying bananas through I would I would do that. Malibu.
Speaker 2:But anyways, but yeah, walk us through kind of like Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was the early days
Speaker 2:of discovering kind of the opportunity.
Speaker 3:Yes. So one of the funny things with us is so the live shopping market in Asia is like monstrous. Yeah. You know, like nearly a trillion big
Speaker 1:for a long time?
Speaker 3:So I think it took off in like a little after 2015 or so Okay. And it's just like ramped to a get started?
Speaker 1:What
Speaker 3:year? So we started Whatnot in 2020.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. So there was like some there were examples out there Yeah. Like this can work.
Speaker 3:Although we had no idea. Yeah. We literally had no idea. So when we started Whatnot, was me and my co founder Logan Yeah. And we were working at some bigger tech companies.
Speaker 3:We both started businesses before. We're like, we like to build. Yeah. Like, that's sort of the thing we enjoy to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we're like, we don't like what we're doing now. Let's go build something new. Yeah. And we were both really into buying and reselling things online, collectibles. So, you know, at one point we were selling sneakers and, you know, in that whole world.
Speaker 3:And I I had my first business was when I was seven and I started selling Pokemon cards online.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:I love it. I was selling DJ equipment. He was selling skateboards.
Speaker 2:Last YC batch, we we were asking every founder that we interviewed
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, how they started their first what what their first business was and a lot was like somewhat collectibles. It was like
Speaker 1:running Fortnite servers, collectibles, Speakers. About, I don't know. I I have kids. I don't know if you have kids. I wanna get my kids to like do business online ASAP.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. People that don't people that are like, I wanna start a business but I don't have an idea.
Speaker 3:It's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Business is just making something for one price
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Or buying something for one price and selling it for a higher price.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is just business. Yeah. They're just sneakers sneakers or collectibles cards, It's just very simple.
Speaker 1:So so I feel like a lot of the a lot of the media platforms, they'll start with just like the idea of, like, I wanna share photos online Instagram, or I wanna have a place to host video online, YouTube. And then over time, the commerce aspect comes in and becomes more feature rich, whether it's, you know, tagged products with affiliate codes or your sponsored content or an ad network. Like, how how mature was your thinking when you went to write, like, the first pitch deck or the first did you go through YC? We went through YC. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the YC application, like And
Speaker 2:did you apply with this idea or did you guys like take a little bit of a
Speaker 3:So I'd say we had like a quasi pivot Sure. Which was so early on, the thesis was there's something around collectibles and social commerce Yeah. Because a lot of why you collect is not necessarily for the object, but to sort of hang out and talk to people over about your interests. Mhmm. And so our initial pitch was basically a social commerce like marketplace for Funko Pops, which are like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Little vinyl dolls. Yeah. And that was it. You can That's what's in the YC application. Okay.
Speaker 3:And we didn't have any idea we were gonna do video.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It sort of looked like a standard marketplace with a follow button and a cool handful of features.
Speaker 1:So was it creator led in the sense that I, as the collector, come and share pictures and inventory and details about particular products that I have in stock?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It would basically be that. Okay. So you like, you'd have a profile. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You could follow it. You could post your stuff. There's DMs.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 3:You could chat with people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And how many investors obviously, you managed to pull around together, but how many investors passed because they were like, sorry, I'm not backing your like niche toy marketplace.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's it's funny now because the amount of money we've raised is like ungodly large. You know
Speaker 2:But not even not even Large numbers. Not even not relative to the valuation. I mean, you've raised, like, just under a billion dollars. You're sitting at 11,000,000,000. It seems like
Speaker 1:Also, the stakes right now for for raising an ungodly amount of money are, if you if if your business doesn't work, does everyone in the whole world lose their job? And as long as you're not there, like, have fun.
Speaker 2:Or people are like, I have two GitHub stars on my projects. I'll take 2,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:But yeah. So so so when did this when did the video aspect come in? What were the what were the thinking? And, like, how did you how did you think about the first design and then start iterating?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I'd say, like, I'm a purist when it comes to building product, which is like you, you know, stay stay close to your customers, you talk to your customers, and you figure out the problems they have. And so as we were building our Funko Pop marketplace, we just knew everyone on the platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, we knew all the sellers. We were friends with them.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And we could see them hacking sort of social media video in interesting ways, in particular trying to run like auctions in live video.
Speaker 2:Oh. Yeah. So they'd going live on Twitch or other platforms and then and then selling on whatnot.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what we Okay. Well, the fir the actual real initial example is we were, following I was following a seller on Instagram, and I tapped into their Instagram live, and they were trying to hold auctions in the comments. And the latency on Instagram live video, least at that time, was like thirty plus seconds. So they basically have like put up the item, run a clock, and then once the clock stopped, they'd start taking the bids in the comments.
Speaker 3:And I invited my co founder in, we got into a bidding war, and it was just like really fun. And we're like, why has no one built
Speaker 1:It's sort of broken.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, what why has no one built mobile video auctions? Just sort of felt obvious. Yeah. And then
Speaker 2:People don't realize unless you've bid on an online auction, you have no idea how thrilling it is. So I've I've I've I've I've, bought cars on on, bring a trailer. And once you start bidding, it is just there's nothing more entertaining on the entire planet.
Speaker 1:More I get to know you, the more you're like, actually gamification really works on me.
Speaker 2:It it does
Speaker 1:work on me.
Speaker 2:No. It's just it's it's it's incredibly it's incredibly fun. And and that's even in the context of Bring a Trailer which anybody that's used Bring a Trailer like maybe that uses goes on the site all the time Yeah. But they're like, this is so underdeveloped in comparison to every other application that I use. And so even just the dynamic of like bidding against someone else and looking at their bidding history and saying, okay, like, this guy just bids a lot.
Speaker 2:He doesn't actually buy cars. Okay. This guy's bought like six cars in the last six months. Like, I've got a real real competition here. So That's amazing.
Speaker 2:But I still yeah. It's still the percentage of people that have actually like done like bought things online via auction I think is relatively it must be relatively low still.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and so so yeah. We basically
Speaker 2:How quickly did you ship the the your version of the live auction product after that? Four weeks. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Correct. They were good APIs around that time. Because I remember there wasn't Clubhouse doing live audio and they were partnered with some new company that was able to kind of do it like turnkey?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was this company Agora, I think.
Speaker 1:That's it.
Speaker 3:Clubhouse was using. We actually didn't again, we made a bunch of mistakes.
Speaker 6:We didn't
Speaker 3:know anything about China. Yeah. Didn't know anything about the low latency live video APIs. Yep. So we actually stood up our own, like, low latency live video surfing infrastructure.
Speaker 3:Wow. If we hadn't, we probably would have built it in a week. Yeah. And it was not very good.
Speaker 1:But, like, good enough to get it.
Speaker 3:Good enough. And the product was so clearly had product market fit. Yeah. I'm not entertaining as you guys can tell. And I did the first livestream because we,
Speaker 1:you know,
Speaker 3:we gotta, make sure it works. K. And I sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops in two hours.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 3:And so you're, unentertaining human being sells that much. We basically dropped everything the next day and we're, we don't know what this is but this is This is really fun. This is it. Drop everything. We're all in.
Speaker 2:Yep. Okay. And Yeah. And and and $5,000 doesn't sound like a huge amount of money. But when you look at that in the context of an individual seller that probably has decent margins on that $5,000 then they start realizing, I can do this every single day, and this quickly just becomes like a real business Yeah.
Speaker 2:Out of like could be out of nothing.
Speaker 1:So from there, help me understand the growth mechanism. Is it people screenshotting and sharing to other platforms? Are you running ads? Is there a referral program? Is there SEO?
Speaker 1:Like, what's the flywheel? Because it's Well,
Speaker 2:part of it because I I imagine, like, the people that are obsessively buying, like, Funko Pops are, like, pretty like, they know where they're being sold. Right? Like, these people, like, it's not like like Well, same with g g three r s's.
Speaker 1:Like, people know I'm gonna go find that and bring a trailer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There are there hand handful of other platforms. Okay. Yeah. It's like people that are obsessive about a category are gonna know all the surface area where selling is happening and just go to where the inventory is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is is that roughly?
Speaker 3:That that yeah. That's roughly correct. For for, you know, for almost the first three or four years of the business, we basically just focused on collectibles and enthusiast categories, which we sort of broaden out, maybe, like, if you're into cars and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And it was fundamentally because these categories people like to talk about Mhmm. What they're buying, where they're buying it. And so we lean for the first four years, we basically just grew through referrals and word-of-mouth.
Speaker 1:Was it pretty smooth
Speaker 2:for was it like with the investors once once the product clearly working? Because I remember there were so many VC like think pieces on live shopping and how it had broken out in China. And I imagine when they met you, they were like, Li Sanaghai. Like, I finally I finally but there was also there was also like in the early days, like, remember there were I I won't there there was like there was like PopShop was also very hot. I think they raised around from like Benchmark around the same time as you guys.
Speaker 2:So it seemed like very competitive at the time.
Speaker 1:Also, Amazon owns Twitch. They have selling infrastructure. Like, there were lots of reasons why someone else might do this. The classic like, what if Google builds it? What if Twitch does it?
Speaker 1:What if someone else does it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'd say probably at least for the even the first couple of years after we did live, we weren't, like, particularly hot. Yeah. A lot of people, like, looked at the side that we started in, which was, you know, all collectibles, and then sort of compared it to Asia. And they're like, is that really the same?
Speaker 3:So, like Sure. You know, lot of it was people holding you know, doing auctions and they're not showing their face on camera. They'll just show, like, the Funko Pop.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:And so the and a lot of the other companies
Speaker 2:That's like they'll put the product out and wait till it sells and then put a new one up there?
Speaker 3:Yeah. They'll, like, talk to you and you'll just, look at the product and you can yeah.
Speaker 2:And meanwhile in China, if people haven't seen these videos, it'll be like they'll they'll show, like, it's they'll just take a product, hold it up, move on. Take a product, hold up, move on. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we have those we
Speaker 2:have those people now.
Speaker 1:It's crazy that that works at all. Like that feels like such a worse experience than just an ecommerce app with like a bunch of drop downs and filters. If I'm
Speaker 2:I don't know. Something something about seeing a product in real life like, makes it I I think it inspires, like, some element of, like, trust even than just seeing, like Yeah. A digital, you know, photo or render.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I what we see is that people start to build relationships and trust the seller. Mhmm. So as opposed to, like, in the previous e commerce world is where is it coming from, who you don't know Yeah. People come to whatnot because they build a relationship with the seller.
Speaker 3:It's sort of like, I don't know, a local shop where you go and meet someone, talk to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so it just builds a lot more trust in the system.
Speaker 1:So in that sort of like, I it's if it seems like there were a few years where, like, you weren't as hot as, like, maybe you should have been. Was that driven by just not fully monetizing as well as you wanted or, choppy growth? Were you cyclical at all? Was it, the interest rate, like, to the crisis and SVB collapsing that, put a damper on the hype? Or was it all pretty smooth?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because I because because my my memory of of the whatnot hype cycle was like, okay. Wow. This company has like a massive valuation, but I've never used it. And I think that's what a lot of people like recognize.
Speaker 2:Like people are like, unless I'm
Speaker 1:using It's it every unless I use it.
Speaker 2:But you guys had this insane valuation and then every once in a while, you're not you don't go on a lot of podcasts. No. At least I haven't I haven't heard you on one before. But like, you just pop up with like a massive up round and then it just pop up with another massive up round. And so I guess like, I I what we're trying to get out I think is like, has the growth been like relatively like consistent and smooth or has it been like unlocking new categories, unlocking new use cases that have just really continued to to drive the business?
Speaker 3:In in general, it's been pretty smooth. We had one slow patch probably coming out of COVID where growth during COVID, if you were like a consumer
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Entertainment company Yeah. It was just eat no one had anything to do. And so I think we were sort of lazy in our growth motion because it just basically, we didn't have to worry about growth. It just sort of like Boom.
Speaker 2:Happening happening to to you. You.
Speaker 3:And and then we had to get a little bit more deliberate. But don't think we've ever grown under, like, you know, top line sales. I mean, revenue's probably never grown under 90% a year
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:In the entire history of the business. That's amazing. And so it's been pretty good. And there's when people like, there's moments in times where people get excited. So for a long time, we're like, oh, this is niche.
Speaker 3:It's collectibles.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And then we got fashion going and And I'd be like, oh, that's exciting.
Speaker 2:That's a big catch.
Speaker 1:And is fashion driven mostly by reselling existing inventory or are are you partnered with specific brands or fast fashion companies? Like So what's the shape of the market?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's it's pretty diverse. Mhmm. So there's some brands selling now. There's brick and mortar jewelry shops selling.
Speaker 3:Sure. I would say the dominant sort of theme in in fashion is probably like old season inventory
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Or Overstock. So people and the reason it's it's really great is it's great for whoever owns that inventory because they can collect higher margin by selling it on whatnot. If you're
Speaker 2:And that's buyer the individual brand?
Speaker 3:A lot of times it's it's
Speaker 2:Somebody who goes to
Speaker 3:the businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like TJ Maxx style stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So people getting access to TJ Maxx style inventory and it's multi brand. It'll be like Lululemon, but, from last year and so you're
Speaker 2:It's gonna like buy 60% less
Speaker 3:or something. Yeah. 60% less and the deals are incredibly good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people are kind of building their own business on whatnot from from scratch but then scaling to a point where they kind of have an operational relationship with different brands and they have a whole kind of strategy and probably pretty stable earnings as a creator.
Speaker 2:What's the competitive landscape been like over the last couple years? Because I know it's been widely reported that TikTok's been willing to just burn billions of dollars trying to get shopping, working on their platform. You have there was another one, I can't even remember the name that popped up with crazy incentives that was like, I don't think it was live but what what's the one that Flip. Flip. So Flip popped up and they were like, free money Mhmm.
Speaker 2:As a service. We're just gonna get and that that was like I remember people were like people would send me a text and it's like, just sent you $200 on Flip. And so I'm like, this can't go that's not gonna last that long. And so you've had a number of people kind of like, you know, trying to at least like enter this like overall kind of like entertainment meets commerce market. But how how have you got it sounds like it's just been continuing to execute against your roadmap.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're pretty like, as you said, we sort of don't go on much podcasts and, you know, maybe we'll pop up every once in a while with a fundraise. We just try and stay really heads down
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And just deliver. Our thesis has always been it's gonna be a competitive market, and so how you're gonna distinguish yourself is consistent delivery and then, you know, continuing to add value to customers every day. And, you know, our belief's always been there's room for a purpose built platform here. Like, say, TikTok, amazing product, but people are going there to, like, watch videos, not necessarily shop. And I think that pattern's really hard.
Speaker 3:So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose built to be world class at shopping and sort of, you know, shopping meets entertainment. And I think over the past six years, we've sort of largely proven that out.
Speaker 1:Is there a mister beast of whatnot? They're true power law creator that's just a whole order of magnitude above everyone else in terms of seriousness and operational excellence, size of team, like that type of thing?
Speaker 3:There there are a few people who are like think Whatnot's very similar to other entertainment platforms. So I spent like six years at YouTube.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, it is power law oriented. Yep. And so the handful of people who are in the tippity top tier
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:You know, you're looking at operations with, like, 100 plus employees at this point. So pretty big. That's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why do people say whatnot is gambling? It feels like collecting things that just like I mean, obviously, there's a little bit of risk you buy GT three RS and you find out that it is a broken, you
Speaker 2:know Yeah. And I think to be more specific, people are saying, like, certain sellers on Whatnot are focused on
Speaker 1:Mystery boxes?
Speaker 2:Card, you know, mystery boxes. Right?
Speaker 1:Like like the power packs from GameStop and Yeah. I've seen a lot
Speaker 2:of stuff. So you you you would have to like also say that yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do do you have like policies around it? Do have a personal stance? Like, how how does that all help?
Speaker 2:Because gamification too is like that is something that sellers want. They're like, make it easier for me to provide an entertaining shopping experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So first off, there's no gambling allowed and whatnot. Right? Like flat flat out flat out like it's illegal and whatnot.
Speaker 3:Okay. You know, our trust and safety and customer experience team is probably our biggest team at the whole company. Okay. So we do take this stuff like very seriously.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for no gambling. We love that. Let's hear it
Speaker 2:for trust and safety.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for trust and safety. They work really hard. We know it's a serious expense. Very good.
Speaker 3:But yeah. So none of that's loud. Sure. I I think, you know, people open packs of cards. It's fun.
Speaker 3:Opened packs of cards when I was a kid. Sure. I sold Pokemon cards when I was a kid. So we try and give sellers the flexibility to run their business in the right way Sure. While making sure it's safe for customers and we don't nothing illegal is allowed Yep.
Speaker 3:To stop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so there are there there is an element of randomness if you're selling just like I I used to buy the booster packs of Magic the Gathering cards as a kid and like sometimes you get something that's a foil or something. But that's very different than putting money into the whatnot platform, participating in some sort of ecosystem, and then pulling out dollars directly. Yeah. Like, that's what gambling would be.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes
Speaker 2:a of sense. Thank What you categories are you guys working towards that you're kind of most excited about? You said you unlock fashion.
Speaker 3:So the one the future category I'm most excited about, it's still early innings, is food and drink.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 1:Some like It feels like really hard to sell online.
Speaker 3:Well, so it it would be in a static world, but in a video based world where you can like, you know so like the we have a there's a farm outside of San Diego who sells organic citrus.
Speaker 1:The bananas. Yeah. Back to the bananas.
Speaker 2:Back to bananas.
Speaker 3:And so, like, I'll order from them, and, like, the next day at my doorstep will be, like, organic tangerines and things like that. And so I'm, like, I'm really into I'm a foodie. Yeah. Think I everyone increasingly is more conscious around what they eat, where they get their stuff from. And so I think being able to eventually, you know, get fresh meat from a farmer, get fresh fish from a lobsterman from Maine, there's a bunch of stuff we're gonna have to figure out logistics wise and and and all sorts.
Speaker 2:That's like Food is crazy.
Speaker 3:But but wouldn't wouldn't you rather like see it get caught and then at your doorstep the next day?
Speaker 2:Yeah. With Starlink with Starlink, the fisherman's gonna be out there and be like, alright. I'm just pulling up a crate of crab.
Speaker 1:Who wants
Speaker 2:it? Who wants it?
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:And then he pulls it up and and there you go. Yeah. That that's I can see that. I can also see There's so many other categories of like collecting. I I don't know if these are popular yet, but eventually I could imagine like a wine wine collectors going on there and Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wine is something that you want if you're buying it. Like unless you're like a just an insane expert, you probably want somebody like part of going to a wine shop is being able to talk to the, you know, associate there and they can talk through like the origins and the winery and what made what made, you know, a certain case of wine like special, things like that. So wine makes sense. Think other categories of like collectible alcohol, like, you know, whiskeys and and things like that. What about cars?
Speaker 3:Cars. We love dreaming of the day to do cars. Yeah. I've wanna do cars for a long time. We'll eventually get to it.
Speaker 3:The the truth is we're growing so fast, and so we're having to, like, make sure the core user experience is really good before we can get outside of
Speaker 1:our system. Rigid are you? Because, Twitch just has, you know, like, just chatting or, like, IRL for, it's a catch all. If you're not playing Fortnite or Minecraft, they have a catch all. And then people kinda go and innovate in that category.
Speaker 1:Why is it just like I will get deplatformed if I try and sell my car and whatnot? Or is it just like you're not ready to say, like, it's actually a good experience but it is possible to do?
Speaker 2:Cars are tough too because Oh, I I completely agree. Of, you know, you can buy a new car. Yeah. Could be a lemon. You can buy Totally.
Speaker 2:You know, an existent, you know, it's a used car and Yeah. You know, even after, you know, on Bring a Trailer, there's like, you buy it and then you can get PPI. You win the auction Mhmm. Then you're getting the the the PPI done. And then at that point, you can back out.
Speaker 2:Yep. You don't get your, like, I guess, like, fee back. But Yeah. At least there's like some protections there. So when you up the when you up the price, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, a thousand x, it just gets
Speaker 3:So theoretically today, if you adhere to our platform policies, you'd be able to do it. You could. Theoretically, it's it would be almost impossible
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Because you have to
Speaker 1:be able to
Speaker 3:pay for it with your credit card. You'd have to be able to, you know, like, ship it in two days. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, I will be driving
Speaker 2:So it's this like challenge accepted.
Speaker 1:Cannonball across the country.
Speaker 3:We have sold some cars and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:There's have been more for, like, collectible cars for specific events. So, like, the creator of Spawn sold, like, the Spawn mobile. And so we we just did some custom stuff there. But it but in practice, if we saw people starting to sell cars, they'd likely butt up against some of the just general policies And we have so we we have to go and make the platform suitable for it.
Speaker 2:How's it like is the majority of the team in LA?
Speaker 3:So we're all over the place now. So the
Speaker 1:Are you a true COVID company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're a true we even before like, we started a handful of months before COVID and our initial team, there's our designer was in Italy Yeah. Two engineers in Brazil, and me and Logan in LA. Wow. And so we've always sort of been distributed on the introvert.
Speaker 1:Did you go to YC up in the Bay?
Speaker 3:We did go to YC And up in the then we couldn't raise money, and so we moved to Phoenix.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Because we had like no money and we just ran ran the company from our garage in Phoenix. That's And then
Speaker 2:I would I would off air, I would love to see who passed.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Because
Speaker 2:I mean, even to to a lot of people's credit, I mean, I saw Sheel from BTV posted yesterday, like, if I got pitched whatnot and they were selling, like, dolls, I would have, like, almost certainly passed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Look, you would have the only way you would have ever invested in whatnot in the early days was if you knew me or Logan deeply and had worked with us. Mhmm. Because that's the only thing that would have given you confidence. We always had the confidence because we, you know, we thought we were capable of doing a lot per period of time, but we're not.
Speaker 3:I didn't know that many people. I hate networking, and you're coming here with, like, a Funko Pop thing. Like, so, like, I totally Do I harbor, like, a little bit of, like, you know
Speaker 2:Well, you're getting the last laugh.
Speaker 3:But but, you know, like, I I still think it's early, so I I don't even worry about it.
Speaker 1:I just
Speaker 3:sort of, like, blinders on, we gotta deliver. But, yeah, unless you knew us, you would have sort of been a fool to invest.
Speaker 1:How did the Logan Paul investment come around then?
Speaker 3:I think we got introduced to him through Andreessen. So Andreessen did our series a and then helped, you know, get us connected. And he was really into Pokemon cards at that point in time. So And it's sort of like a natural fit. He's, you know, been on the platform a handful of times, and and and so it was a a good add on Yeah.
Speaker 3:Investor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was reviewing his post talking about the investment, and I was like, that makes so much sense because he's been so immersed with even early stage. Like, Vine was so primordial in terms of, like, what TikTok became. He's been so early to all these platforms. Makes sense that he could see the vision better than a lot of other people.
Speaker 2:How how international is the business today?
Speaker 3:I think we're in nine countries now. So I think we we got into international maybe about two and a half years ago. It's it's a it's a really big focus for us. The international business is doing very well, and I think you'll see us continue to expand.
Speaker 1:This year, we're Going on the offensive. Are we going to China? We're taking the fight with them. We're going to TikTok's front door. Know, think to answer your unnoticed.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll go anywhere where we think we can add customer value.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How how crazy is the Lububu side of the business been? We we covered it at What is the Lububu? So so we I think we literally By the time we did a deep dive on it, I think we like may have like top ticked that that trend. You don't know. May maybe they're still growing as fast as they were, but
Speaker 3:I mean, was pretty much came out of nowhere and then was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on whatnot. It still is, I think. Wow. Annually? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Annual. Annual. Annual. Like, if you were to
Speaker 2:You're like, no, daily.
Speaker 3:No. It's it's it's it's pretty big. You know, I I I think it's just like fun, you know, you sort of get a box and you see which one you get. And it's kind of quirky and weird. So it it had Yeah.
Speaker 3:It like lends itself to making content and so it sort of takes off.
Speaker 1:What's the relationship like with the company behind Labubu in that case? Because I can imagine that they wanna capture some of the value created by the gamification, and they have the ability to sell directly, and they they they might even have the ability to auction things off. Like, they want efficient pricing. And so how how does the relationship work between you and, like, the originator of the collectible?
Speaker 3:I think it it just depends. Yeah. You know, there are some collectibles companies we work with directly, like I think we're working with Marvel and we've done a bunch of stuff in the toys and
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Comic space. We haven't specifically worked with Lububu, honestly. I think Lububu stuff took off to such large degree even though, like I I again, I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's still not like catching up.
Speaker 1:Holy, you know.
Speaker 3:So no matter what, they were gonna sell a gajillion Lubumbus.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And so I think they were just trying to make sure manufacturing hits and the product is still good. So Totally.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:What before you jump off, what what does the next, like, couple years look like?
Speaker 3:I think it's a lot of the same stuff. One, just continue to make the buyer experience better, the seller experience better. You're gonna see us get into more categories, more countries, and then make sure we build the products for more and more types of sellers. So more investments in brands is is definitely in the cards very specifically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where where does AI play a role? Do you need, like, a traditional machine learning system for recommendation algorithms, or is there a role for generative AI in this business? Or is it more just like you're using, you know, tab completion models to write speed up the developer productivity of the company?
Speaker 3:I think everyone's like, there's there's the obvious spots where, like, yes, everyone uses cursor
Speaker 1:True.
Speaker 3:And, you know, whether you're an engineer or not, you can prototype and build stuff faster. Sure. I think we're seeing obvious applications in CX and trust and safety. Mhmm. Really good at, like, detecting context.
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 3:In core ranking systems, I haven't seen anything yet that's, like, much better than the state of the art machine learning models. Sure. So I'd say we're at least in core ranking systems, probably not a lot of LLMs. We're starting to use it more for like content understanding. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's very good. You can take a live stream and like, tell me everything about this live stream to feed into the ML models. Yep. So I think for us, we're just trying to be world class at using LLMs to solve our customer problems. So we're making deep investments, but it's, you know, wherever we can solve a problem.
Speaker 1:Where does the community stand on AI generally? Are they like anti AI because it needs to be like a, you know, old fashioned collectible? Or do they see it as an opportunity? There will be new IP that comes from some kid prompting a model and then create some collectible phenomenon?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, I I think people still wanna interact with people at the core. Yeah. So in some in some ways, whatnot sort of anti AI in that it's like about the human experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think anything that undermines the human experience will always have a little bit of a knee knee jerk negative reaction. Mhmm. And so for us, again, I think customers don't care if you're in tact, they care if you're using AI. But, you know, everyday customer who uses whatnot doesn't care. So Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's more behind the scenes stuff where we can make their lives easier. So you're a seller. Can we tell you what are the the the five major things happening with your business or, you know, generate tips for you or make it so you can list products really fast. We get all the context from them. I think that's sort of where
Speaker 1:we're applying cohort it. Of folks that just I mean, like, there are obviously tons of people that just watch Doug DeMiro videos because they're interested in cars and they never buy a car on cars and bids or they never even buy a new car because they're just happy with their car, but they like him and they like him talking about cars. And are there are there users on whatnot who don't really buy stuff but watch a lot and just see it as like some sort of meditative, you know, content?
Speaker 2:Parasocial.
Speaker 1:Maybe parasocial but also maybe just like it's kind of like background TV and they're just like enjoying learning about different products and understanding the market.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So unlike any given day Yeah. The vast majority of people who are watching do not purchase anything.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the average person watches eighty minutes.
Speaker 1:Eighty minutes.
Speaker 3:Eighty minutes a day.
Speaker 1:Eighty minutes a day. That's so much.
Speaker 2:Hit the gong. That's crazy. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:It's really good to meet you. Good meet guys. Welcome when you have news. Anytime you wanna pop your head up and announce a
Speaker 1:new Yeah.
Speaker 3:Alright. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm glad that we're here.
Speaker 2:Stay hanging. Hanging out.
Speaker 1:Eighty minutes a day. Wow. That is a lot of minutes.
Speaker 2:I need more minutes in in the day.
Speaker 1:Sorry, Sam Altman. Good luck with your thirty minutes a day of ChatGPT usage. Whatnot's got 80. Get those numbers up. Time to get those numbers up if you're if you're building anything except whatnot apparently.
Speaker 2:Tyler, can you find out the day that we did our, Pop Mart deep dive?
Speaker 1:Yes. I need to know.
Speaker 2:Because
Speaker 1:I also need to tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. Oh, there's there's this funny funny thing. So there's the ProFound and, like, GEO is is is actually in the timeline. And, of course, we are partnered with ProFound.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, there there's the conflict of interest here, didn't we you know, you gotta get through it with a kid gloves. But the the the founder of Amplitude, a YC company, Spencer Skates, he posted too many VCs or funding AI companies that should be features. 12 plus startups have raised 72,800,000.0 in the last few months for AI visibility, basically SEO for LLMs, what ProFound does. We built it in three weeks with three people and shipped it for free. And he's going back and forth with David Burton who says, I personally demoed 12 SEO for LLM products.
Speaker 1:Wait. And 11 out of 12 sucked. Did you see this?
Speaker 2:First, don't don't we have to talk about James's reply? Oh, yes. That was Almost almost ratioed Spencer. James James replied, lack of focus kills, and he just shared amplitudes.
Speaker 1:I I'm I'm not a fan of that. I think it's not golden retriever coded. It's not too
Speaker 2:It was pretty hardcore.
Speaker 1:It's a little it's a little too hardcore for me. I think you gotta you gotta put on the kid clubs when you're dealing with somebody
Speaker 2:who's but to me to me, one one thing that stood out about Spencer's original post
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Spencer's wife, by the way, did the series a of whatnot.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. Incredible Who's that? Investment and skates.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:Friend.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:But they said 12 startups has raised 72,000,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In the last that just doesn't feel like that much for a category that could be drive, like, billions and bill like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. We've talked to a bunch of these different companies. It feels like it feels like a lot for one sort of, like, thing all at once. It is interesting because I mean, feels like a ton compared to like how many weapons companies were being funded when April started.
Speaker 2:Of two that is profound.
Speaker 1:2 thirds of the dollars. Yeah. But not of the number of startups.
Speaker 8:Sure.
Speaker 1:And so it is it is just, interesting that it feels like a it feels like a niche.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but but, yeah, for for all of venture, if something's a good opportunity, expect, like, at least 10 funded
Speaker 1:I mean, I would expect that there are at least 12
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:New, like, CRM companies out there. Of course, we are part partnered with Adio, Customer Relationship Magic, the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And so but it was just funny because David Burden is, like, putting all of these AEO companies in the truth zone. But Ahmed Omar says, which one works? And he said, profound.
Speaker 1:But I didn't buy because pricey and still too black box for me. But, he he was, you know, very interested that he
Speaker 2:Yeah. And this is this is effectively why this is why I Yeah. I where one of the reasons I invested in ProFound myself was Kareem over at Ramp. Yeah. It was just like, this is what works for us.
Speaker 2:That was that was enough of a of a cosign for me. Tyler, did you find out when we covered Pop Mart? Yes.
Speaker 7:It was August 29.
Speaker 1:Is that the top? Oh my god. Wait. Did we perfectly top ticket? Yeah.
Speaker 1:August 29? Really?
Speaker 2:Not perfectly. That's good. But August it it actually peaked on August We are. '26. And so this is a good learning.
Speaker 2:If we ever start talking about Something cool. Toys.
Speaker 1:It's not cool anymore.
Speaker 2:Collectible toys. Just know that we are probably talk top ticking it. Yeah. If we're talking about some trend in technology four. We're probably like Sure.
Speaker 2:Twelve months twelve months at least before the top.
Speaker 1:For sure. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. First, how'd you sleep last night, Jordy? How'd you sleep on your mean, knee? I my handicap Head just over to Eight Sleep doc think I
Speaker 2:got decent.
Speaker 1:Got a pod five. I did not do too well. I got six hours of sleep. Got a 79. I think you might have beat me today.
Speaker 2:See, the fact that you can get six hours and put up a 79 when I got seven hours and ten minutes and put up an 81, it's like, I'm gonna have Matteo reset this.
Speaker 1:You I think it's a skill issue. You're just not focusing on sleep. Like, so you're like waking up in the middle of the night and stuff. It's not good. Drew being our
Speaker 2:next guest? Let's do it. I'm excited to talk to Chris.
Speaker 1:Do it. I'm gonna let you take the intro.
Speaker 2:Chris, welcome to the show. Hey,
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you. I will give some quick background. Chris, you, were the c, senior adviser to The US Department Of State, office of the special envoy for critical and emerging technology from 2023 to 2025. You're a Foreign Affairs Officer for the US Department of State, the Bureau of Arms Control Verification and Compliance from 2015 to 2023. And in 2024, you were the Deputy Senior Director for Technology and National Security on the National Security Council at the White House.
Speaker 2:And there's a bunch of other stuff that seems equally, significant and important, but I, we can get into it. It's great great to have you on the show. I'm sure it's been a busy, busy busy year for you. But why don't why don't you give a quick introduction on on your background and anything I may have missed?
Speaker 5:Thanks a lot, guys, and and really appreciate you having me. Yeah. So I, as a longtime civil servant in the government and the State Department, I was detailed to Biden White House from 2021 to '24. From '22 to '24, I was I was on the National Security Council, and I broadly had the giant technology portfolio the whole time and oversaw that they had to cut all of our the Biden administration's critical and emerging technology related work from the White House. Then I went back to serve the Trump administration for a good chunk of time this year and recently left government.
Speaker 5:So really appreciate you guys having me, especially on today where obviously we had a big a bunch of big developments kind of overnight with the president meeting with Xi and the kind of trade deal of which technology is obviously a very major portion.
Speaker 2:Okay. So before we get into what's happened in the last twenty four hours in the last week, like, can you give kind of your view on this year and how a lot of these different you know, how how the trade war has been kind of evolving, in your view?
Speaker 5:Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think the administration has very much kind of gone back and forth on where they are in China policy. I think that you obviously have had enormous you know, threats of tariffs and moves to kind of really kind of separate The U. S. And Chinese economies on pretty fundamental levels.
Speaker 5:On the other hand, I think you haven't actually seen a lot of implementation there. There's a continued desire to talk with the Chinese. And when it comes to some of the technology protection measures, where I think the Biden administration was more focused, it's been a little bit more stop and go. I think that, you know, generally, since the first Trump administration, there has been a big pivot in Washington to move towards a, you know, away from the policies of China of, let's like, deepen integration in order to kind of get them to change and towards a more competitive stance. I think the first Trump administration really kind of initiated that.
Speaker 5:It was very much built on by the Biden administration, particularly in the semiconductors and AI spaces, where I think there was a pretty very conscious decision. I know there was a very conscious decision to really separate those supply chains, and saying in those areas have to maintain as large of a lead as possible. It doesn't mean in every single one, but in the especially critical ones like advanced chips and AI. And then the Trump administration then, I think, took this and initially escalated with enormous tariff threats on China across the entire economy. The Chinese, I think, have very much taken to heart their the lessons from the first Trump administration that what you have to do is punch back and punch back hard.
Speaker 5:And that has resulted, I think, in a little bit more of a detente, actually, than we've seen over the previous few years, where I think The United States has been able to kind of slowly ratchet things up. The Trump administration has ratcheted things up a lot, so did the Chinese, And I think both sides have now kind of pulled it down a little bit.
Speaker 1:It does feel like the the renegotiation of US China relationship starts in 2016 with the new Trump administration. Hundred year marathon by Michael Pillsbury is an important point. That book, it seemed like it sort of went viral on Capitol Hill. There's also the rejection of American tech companies. But what what else do you think kind of led us what was, like, the inciting in event if there was one in, this beginning to discuss a renegotiation in US China policy?
Speaker 1:Is it Xi Jinping becoming effectively a dictator for life? That kind of changing the perception of, like, okay. Well, they're not even going they're not even trying to go for democracy. What what other kind of, like, moments in history do you, think of as the defining moments in the renegotiation of US China relations?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think that's right. I I think that China has has kind of well, China has fundamentally changed under Xi. I think there's some some realization here that that some of the promises of of China political change in China and and market based change are not gonna happen. There have been very much market based changes in some senses.
Speaker 5:Right? They actually are are much more deeply integrated into the into the economy. But it hasn't changed the fundamental, you know, integration with the Chinese state and their companies. And from that flows kind of national security considerations. And I think, you know, Xi has obviously taken this in a in a in a much more authoritarian direction.
Speaker 5:And one can argue whether or not that was there all all along. And actually, maybe it was something that people missed in the 2000s. But I think very much in the mid-2015s, like you said, around 2015, 2016, people were starting to realize that we have to change course. And particularly, I think, in 2017, 2018. And look, the the the initial Trump campaign, I think, really did change the narrative on China.
Speaker 5:I I think that's that's, you know, pretty indisputable. On certain things, I think they were we were starting to see a little bit of a changing narrative towards the end of the Obama administration. Like the last week of the Obama administration, they put out a big report, the President's Council on, PCAST, President's Council on Science and Technology, put out a big report on the importance of maintaining a domestic semiconductor industry, which was the first time they'd really talked about that. And then obviously, you know, with the CHIPS Act in the coming years, that became, you know, the major focus. But I I think you have to give the Trump the first Trump administration credit for for really changing the policy.
Speaker 5:And and the the Biden administration very much continued that. I think the approach was, you know, maybe not to have a a massive confrontational policy across the economy, but to say in the areas that we care the most about, we are going to take pretty, you know, actions that four or six years ago would have been unprecedented to separate ourselves. And that was we are in a very different place because of that. I think we'll see kind of where we go going forward. It's a little bit of a the the last last, like, couple weeks have introduced some some more complicating dynamics, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of those was, the rare earth, elements debate. Have has America been blindsided by the importance there? Were we miscalibrated on exactly how much leverage they had? Like, how much that poker chip is worth on the poker table of this trade deal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because there was a point where people are like, wow. They're already using that that that play. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Taking away the passports of the researchers and then also just banning exports, really crippling our ability to build with, those rare earth elements. But is that something that we've known about for the last ten years, or or has this been a surprise? Or is this like or or or is that just like one of the many chips that we expected to be played the whole time?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, people in Washington clearly knew that the Chinese had dominance of rare earths. You'd have to kinda be under a rock to not know it. But I think you're totally right that that no one really did anything about it. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and part of that is that, look, it's hard it's so hard to get things done in Washington. Yeah. That's about right. It's hard to get things done, and it's hard to get things done that are like, you know, you'd need a lot of investment and a lot of coordination, and like, massive resourcing and coordination is exactly the thing that's really difficult to get things done in Washington.
Speaker 2:It took less to really make a move. Right? And be materials.
Speaker 1:Oh, he did. Yeah. He did do that smack. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's like that I think that's a big Yeah. Biggest success out of out of out of all of them. Totally.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And and I think look. Washington is actually can be good at responding very quickly in a crisis. Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 5:Like, Operation Warp Speed was very effective, for instance. But, obviously, it took until there was a pandemic for for us to do something like that. So I I'm hopeful that now people will take this very seriously. I I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see legislation on Capitol Hill that's actually resource this. Even though the administration, I think the administration is focused on it now and takes it very seriously, they're also, you know, really need to get money, right?
Speaker 5:Exactly how that money manifests, whether it's equity investments or loans or some kind of you know, other Defense Production Act authorities or something else. Like, there's going to have to be some government dollars here. We're certainly going be stretched a long way, but we're going to have to do that. I think just to your original question, though, the thing that surprised it I think people were very surprised that they played this card as expansively as they play it right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? And go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Continue, and then and then I wanna get into kind of the last twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The surprise on the playing the card early.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I look. The fact is this move was way disproportionate to anything that we had done. Effectively, it was saying, you know, the there was this affiliates rule that The United States put in place, which basically fixes a big loophole in export controls. Like, the way that the way that export controls work is every single company has to actually be listed on the control list to be to be controlled.
Speaker 5:And if the subsidiary isn't listed, then you can export to them. That's not the way that sanctions work. The way that sanctions work is if the company is listed, then every company they own is sanctioned, and you better not work with sanctioned companies because otherwise you're violating sanctions. For various arcane, you know, reasons that have
Speaker 1:to with simple own goal there.
Speaker 5:Exactly. Exactly. So we basically put in place a a regulation that said, hey, we're going to fix this really obvious loophole that is being blatantly exploited that also is just very logical. And the Chinese response to that was to go way over the top and say, we're going to cut you off from all the rare earths and, you know, threaten your entire economy. They didn't think that was proportionate.
Speaker 5:I think what they were trying to do was send a signal that we won't tolerate any additional export controls on, any entities in China, and we want any additional restrictions on our access to technology, we're going to go over the top. It was really risky for the Chinese because The U. S. Does have big leverage over the Chinese, too, right? There's two things that they're extremely dependent on for us that, you know, we could cut them off from.
Speaker 5:The first is the US dollar, right? Their financial, you know, system is is still very reliant on the dollar. Obviously, they're trying to extricate that. That would have enormous implications, but they're reliant. What would that look like?
Speaker 5:Sanctions on banks or something like that. Like, think it's something that Chinese fear quite a bit. Now, to be clear, I'm not advocating for that and that would be a really significant move, but just it's something that would be a it's a lever that we have. The second is semiconductors, right? They're not good at, they have limited seven nanometer, can't do anything beyond that, and they're very all their whole industry is very reliant on chips made with US tooling and so on.
Speaker 2:Okay. So I wanna get way more into chips, but to kind of ground the next part of the conversation, like, catch us up to speed on the on what what you kind of what your takeaways were and what we know out of the meeting in South Korea.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I think, basically, the the deal was sort of a a freeze for freeze. They agreed to freeze implementation of their massive escalation
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Rule. We agreed to freeze escalate we agreed to freeze our affiliates rule. So I think you think of it as largely it locks in the status quo for the duration of the deal. There was various other things that it resolves that are recently created issues. The Chinese agreed to buy soybeans, and we reserve resolved various actions, etcetera.
Speaker 5:It did it did not you know, we avoided some of the worst case outcomes. There was no agreement to send, you know, our most advanced chips to China. There was no we didn't accept, a Trojan horse package to, like, hey. We're gonna build a bunch of, you know, KDAL and BYD factories in The United States, which would have been very bad for U. S.
Speaker 5:Battery and and, you know, auto industry in the longer term. But I think China really does feel emboldened right now because they kind of punched us in the face of the rarest rule and our our you know, what happened was we both deescalated a little bit. We'll see what happens going forward, but the status quo to a degree benefits China. They're trying to buy time. They're trying to circumvent our controls.
Speaker 5:And if we're not willing to kind of continue to engage in this in this kind of technology protection effort, then every day, the Chinese get a little better at working around our controls. So
Speaker 2:What what can you say about, or or what are you what what's your read on the actual dynamic between Xi and Trump? Like, I feel like these two guys have been in the game for a long time. I have to imagine my my part of me wants to believe that they enjoy the this, like, you know, deadly dance that they play with each other. But maybe that maybe they're just, like, deeply frustrated.
Speaker 1:Putin and Xi Jinping kinda be like, yeah. We might live forever. Yeah. You think you're gonna make it to one sixty, bro? It was like he's like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. I got some scientists that are cooking up crazy stuff. I love that this is like hot mic. Who knows if it's real? Might be a psyop, but I like to imagine that they're just, you know, growing down.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Well, yeah, what do you think?
Speaker 5:I will say, it that was not the first time I've heard what I've heard, you know, leaders of countries speak to the desire to live to a 150. Here's some interesting things. You work at the White House, and I have heard that before. Not from them, but
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I'm taking up what you're putting down. That's great.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But no. I mean, look. I think that that China Trump's obviously coming at this from from, you know, this deal making perspective. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That's not surprising. And obviously, there's, you know, political dynamics here on top you know, both because I think there's threats to, you know, the Chinese the Chinese kind of both pose threats to hollowing out industry, but also are are kind of doing acute things to cause pain to some of Trump's political base. Like, I think that the soybean and things like that are
Speaker 4:Yeah. Doing
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 5:On the other side, I think that, you know, Xi is very much seeing himself as managing the the relationship for the long term. I mean, what hovers obviously over over all of this is is Taiwan as well and the desire to kind of slowly move The United States away from Taiwan, which is ultimately his, like, long term historical perspective and goal. So in some ways, they're coming at this from a little bit opposite. I think Xi is from the much, much longer term angle and Trump from a a shorter term angle. But I don't think they necessarily have hugely different perceptions of the, you know, broader dynamics at play here.
Speaker 2:Okay. So on the on the chip front
Speaker 1:We we we would okay. Yes. So so so we got the rollback. Yeah. Let's move on to chips.
Speaker 1:Sorry.
Speaker 2:So I I don't even know. Maybe it was two, three, four weeks ago at this point, but somewhere in the last, like, month or so, they were basically like, we don't want any of your chips at all. And and I didn't really know how much to read into that at the time. People It seemed like the team
Speaker 1:wants NVIDIA chips, but
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:The CCP said
Speaker 2:So so if you're an
Speaker 4:AI You
Speaker 1:gotta justify why you'd want NVIDIA chips over Huawei chips. We're working hard. Let's support America.
Speaker 2:Let's support Chinese wants to build up, you know, real national champions that can get to the cutting edge Yep. Or leading edge. And at the same time, the AI industry wants to be able to make as progress as they possibly can.
Speaker 3:Of
Speaker 2:course. And, you know, what was your read when that news broke? And then, how much do you think they're still kind of gunning for Blackwell grade chips?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So number one, I think they are you know, the the Chinese will take all of The US chips that they can get in a in a vacuum. Mhmm. Like, I I I I think that there's some negotiating ploys here, And I think I think they were holding the h twenties kind of hostage because they wanted to to turn the tables on us and get us to give them Blackwell's, which which obviously didn't happen. There is a possibility that there's the information filtering up to Xi is saying, actually, we can do this ourselves.
Speaker 5:You shouldn't take these.
Speaker 2:And that would be like Huawei being like, no, give us just keep the money coming back to us so that, you know, we're close and we'll be a lot closer in a few years if we can, you know, take those dollars, reinvest them, etcetera.
Speaker 5:That's right. But the problem is, like, there's just no way that China can meet their domestic demand with Chinese chips alone. I mean, if we can have all sorts of debates about Chinese production numbers, and I'm happy to engage in those, but fundamentally, The United States cannot meet demand for our own AI ecosystem with with, you know, all of the production in the world and all the best companies. So obviously impossible that China, who has a much more nascent ecosystem, is heavily restricted on tooling. And I think all the estimates of their seven nanometer production capacity, not to mention, obviously, they don't have any five, four, three, two production capacity, is you know, somewhere in the realm of one twenty fifth to one one hundredth of The United States.
Speaker 5:Like, there's just no way that they can fill their domestic demand with Chinese chips. So any effort to say we're going to not take any US chips is going to inherently hobble their AI industry. I mean, guess at some point, if you're very close, the marginal value of that would be such that you're willing to take it. But I think, you know, just given the dynamics we're broadly seeing with US AI companies, I'd be very surprised if they were they were actually, when the cards were down, we're gonna retract NVIDIA chips.
Speaker 2:Is Jensen being in South Korea at the same time just a coincidence, or did he do you think he'd you know, he he sort of planned around that?
Speaker 5:Do you think anything with Jensen's a coincidence these days? No. I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Look. No. It makes sense. Look. There was mean, he's he's basically summit.
Speaker 5:He's the CEO of the biggest company in the world. Like, he should be there regardless.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's running a he's basic NVIDIA is basically a country. I mean, they're they're Both are true. Market cap is, you know, bigger than
Speaker 1:Their market cap is equivalent to twice Canada's GDP. Something like that.
Speaker 2:It's it's greater than Germany's
Speaker 1:GDP. Remarkable. Not that you can really compare those. It's kind of Apple stories.
Speaker 2:But You wrote a piece that you published last night around why Chinese car investments are a national security risk. Would love for you to kind of like give us a preview on that front.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, point we were making there was a lot of rumors in advance of the summit that another thing that the Chinese were dangling, which did not come to fruition, was saying, hey. You know, appealing to the dealmaker element of Trump and saying, hey. We'll give you a bunch of investment in The US in exchange for, you know, whatever, even as part of the deal. But that's kind of very obviously is a Trojan horse.
Speaker 5:We very much restrict Chinese investment in critical industries in The U. S. Via the CFIUS process right now. And obviously, particularly given the rare earth controls, you would think that that would I think it has shown that we really can't be dependent on China for critical supply chain. So if we were to have BYD factories, like I was saying before, like BYD factories or KADL factories in The U.
Speaker 5:S, that's not that's that is just as bad as relying on on Chinese graphite for batteries.
Speaker 2:Right? So we So when you when you say Chinese investment in The US, you mean them setting up local factories, which is different from making equity. Yeah. Yeah. Because China wants us to make as many equity investments in their companies as possible because that gives I mean, about DJI is a good example.
Speaker 2:There's American venture capitalists that were in DJI. They have huge returns just like sitting there. They now have an incentive to say, hey, we shouldn't we shouldn't ban DJI. Like, it's not a problem that China can fly, you know, millions of drones over over all of our cities. Just just worry about something else.
Speaker 2:We saw this with I mean, we saw this with bite we saw this with ByteDance Yeah. Too. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. That's right. And there's a whole separate conversation on kinda outbound investment and what we should think about with with US investors investing in China. And then with inbound investment, the question is, what are the risks that Chinese and not passive investment, that's very different, but active investments and particularly setting up large facilities in key supply chains, what are the risks here?
Speaker 5:And the trend we've seen over the course of multiple administrations has been to take those threats much more seriously. So I think that's a positive thing. I think that the other thing the administration is going have to really think about is, know, first of all, what are the investments we need to make in those supply chains if we're not going to accept that and we're going want to diversify not just from, like, Chinese batteries, but also, like, all the way down the Chinese battery supply chain? What does that mean? But also, we have to think about kind of what are the sectors where and this is where we got to the car.
Speaker 5:Was what happened with cars and we talked about it in the piece. What are the sectors where just having large scale deployment of kind of connected Chinese products in that area poses a risk? And I think there was a recognition in the Biden administration that actually electric vehicles in general having if 20%, 30% of the cars on the road were Chinese and could theoretically be like switched off by Beijing. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, they could cripple our transportation infrastructure overnight, right? That that that is something that wasn't a that was unacceptable. So we've effectively banned Chinese cars, but did it before there was big market penetration. So I think we have to kind of think about what are the other like, I think there needs to be some pretty hard conversations on robotics. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what do you think about UniTree just selling humanoids on walmart.com?
Speaker 1:We were thinking about buying one here.
Speaker 2:Because because I've I I I've been very vocal over the last year as long as we've been doing the show that, you know, I think it's super disappointing that we let, you know like GoPro should have been the dominant American drone company and there's a longer list of companies that could have made great products in that space. Maybe people would have to pay slightly more, but we just let DJI flood. From from what we know, DJI was just willing to lose money for a very, very, very, very long period of of time in order to just take market share. And so when I think about humanoids and, you know, I don't I I I'm not gonna put a a unitary robot in my home. But if they're the cheapest and, you know, if they're at the kind of the leading edge right now, there's a scenario where we just let them flood The United States with humanoid robots and maybe they're adding value in home or in factories and different settings.
Speaker 2:But then, it's just obviously like you just lit watch any sci fi movie and you can understand, like, the potential, like, national security risk of allowing robots that can be teleoperated to, you know, just proliferate all over the country. And so it just feels hopefully, that comes up at some point in some of these discussions of just, hey, maybe we make the call to not allow this to happen like it did with drones.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think we we just have to have kind of class based regulations on these things that says anything that fits these parameters. You know, a robot in your home that's capable, that has
Speaker 2:Like a pickup equipment
Speaker 5:and audio, yeah, and can like has mapping technology and maybe has, yeah, it has some kind of appendage. I don't know, you could figure out a way to do It just cannot be sold in The United States if it's from a Chinese company. Or Chinese, Russian, North Korean, like the broader set of actors. The only category of items that we've done that for as a class is vehicles. But I think that needs to be we need to think about it.
Speaker 5:We have the tools to do it, and we need to think about what are the areas where that pose kind of similar risks.
Speaker 2:And you're worried that we'll wait until there's a robot uprising do something like this? I mean, you said earlier, like, The US is really good at reacting in a in a crisis, and I just hope I like, at some point, like, if I'm China and you're letting me sell humanoid robots into your country at scale and you're a political adversary, like, I'm laughing. I'm I'm laughing at you. Like, it just seems like totally unserious.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think it is easier to do these types of things before there are huge market impacts. So part of the reason that the cars move was doable was because, first of all, like, industry was very supportive. Right? We had Detroit banging down the door, being like, this is we're gonna get killed by the Chinese.
Speaker 5:But second in the same way they are with tariffs. But but but second of all, the market penetration of all the Chinese car companies was very close to zero still, partly because we had such significant tariffs, although those were going to become muted in effect. So if you have an area where it's still pretty nascent, it's doable. And think about
Speaker 2:I Humanoids are perfect. Like, the second Exactly. Humans are that have spent $20 on a humanoid and they're like, I'm not
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 2:Like, I wanna buy the next version. I like this one. You know, it's not like we've we've now seen the Chinese can build, hit consumer products. There was a long time where people didn't believe that was true, but clearly with TikTok and DJI, like, it's no longer a debate.
Speaker 5:And DJI is a great example because, you know, DJ it's much more complicated to do this for UAVs right now because DJI is everywhere. Also, all sorts of state and local and municipal governments even the federal government still uses DJI drones. They have such dominance that even if we did do it, we would have to do some kind of mitigation steps even to implement it if we did it today, which maybe we should. But it's just it's massively complicated. Whereas if you do it nasonally, it's just if you could just kinda cut off the appendage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I anybody that that disagrees about the national security risk here and the potential downsides, Like, can't believe that like, if you believe that Israel was able to run like a decade long operation to get pagers, like, sold into the right group of people that they could then carry out this, you know, coordinated action
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And then you think it's safe to just let robots from an adversarial nation flood our country, like, I don't know what to do. I think you're just
Speaker 1:You're lost.
Speaker 2:Blissful. What?
Speaker 5:And we would they won't let us develop the domestic robot industry unless we do something like that too. Right? Like, they will consistently undercut us and we'll never our companies will never get mature enough where they'll be able to benefit from the economies of scale where they can even remotely compete with the Chinese
Speaker 2:and said
Speaker 5:they're gonna be a 100% off.
Speaker 2:We were having this debate before you not debate, really, but before you got on. It's like, I believe that China can simultaneously buy as many leading edge chips, Blackwell's, whatever whatever we'll give them, and simultaneously provide the the long term capital to allow their own industry to catch up on whatever time scale it needs to catch up on? Like, what is the tolerance level
Speaker 1:Basically, is is it possible for us to run the Chinese playbook against them? We subsidize Blackwells, flood their markets with Blackwells, and then they can't go down the learning curve with SMIC and SME and Huawei. And then at the last second when they're super dependent, we pull it back when we need to right before, I guess, ASI hits or something like that. That's the basic thesis debate.
Speaker 5:I mean, I think two things with that. One is that history would show that's never something that the Chinese are going to accept. Right? They they they've never been okay being reliant on any western technology of any significance. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:They also, you know, we we've been very clear about our intention to keep this dominant now. I think you can't put that toothpaste back in the tube. Like, they're gonna go we we saw they were going all out in indigenization at you know, back in 2020. Yep. It's even more the case now.
Speaker 5:Their constraints are not desire or cash. They are actual access to equipment and tools, we're lucky that the SME and, you know, not just lithography machines, but also etching deposition machines like anything, all the kind of really advanced equipment is among the most complicated technology in the world.
Speaker 2:We can assume that they're actively that they have, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of people that are tasked globally with just collecting as much information as they possibly can to reproduce it locally.
Speaker 5:Yeah. The only reason this works with chips is because this is the most complicated equipment with the most complicated supply chains on Earth. Right? Like, an EUV lithography machine is literally the most complicated machine ever made by man. So therefore, it's possible the Chinese can actually indigenize every single thing on Earth except this.
Speaker 5:Like, that is a logically consistent outcome. The other thing I would just say with respect to your your your thesis Yeah. Is if that was the play, the more effective way to do that would be to cut them off from everything completely, but then tell them you can have it via US cloud because then you can cut it off at any moment's notice. You could debate if that's a good idea or not, but like chips are gonna be a lagging effect. Right?
Speaker 5:It's gonna be two to three years until all the GPUs kinda go bust or Or
Speaker 1:get depreciated
Speaker 5:or you need to Exactly.
Speaker 1:It's interesting.
Speaker 2:What what, what is the most current debate on the ground in Washington around, like, Blackwell specifically?
Speaker 5:So there is a question of whether or not we should ship them, but actually, the more pertinent question is is there's a piece of legislation called the GAIN AI Act that's moving on the hill that actually the Senate passed as part of the NDAA, that must pass annual defense bill, and is being debated with the House right now. And it's sponsored by Senator Banks. And basically it says he's a Republican from Indiana. And basically it says, look, we're not going to weigh in on the question of whether or not we should ship chips to China. That's a separate question.
Speaker 5:But regardless of where you are on that, American companies should get priority access before Chinese companies. And it basically requires before shipping any chips to China that are controlled and authorized, it requires American buyers to get right of first refusal, which I think is a from my perspective, is a pretty logical approach. Whether or not you support or oppose AI chip exports to China, saying that America should have them first is logical. It also does one other thing, the most recent text, which exempts trusted U. S.
Speaker 5:Exports to trust trusted U. S. Persons to anywhere other than China from license requirements. The reason this is important is actually there's a lot of pending deals in The Middle East right now from U. S.
Speaker 5:Data centers that are trying to make billions of dollars of deals in The Middle East. Those are subject to license requirements. There is a lot of negotiations on whether or not those can go, and they've been held up for a long time. But this would say, as long as the government certifies them as a trusted U. US person, then they're subject to a couple standard restrictions, like they keep 50% of their computing power in The US, then they can go without US government approval.
Speaker 5:So really basically trying to prioritize US customers in any decisions vis a vis Chinese companies, and also US companies vis a vis any decisions on the international AI build out.
Speaker 2:Do you think Jensen will be happy with that?
Speaker 5:I think Nvidia has been pretty public of their their opposition to the bill. But, look, my response
Speaker 2:is just they want they don't they just want the flexibility to do deals effectively? Like, because it because it's it's not a secret that NVIDIA, like, they have a Shanghai office and r and d center, like they're trying to I I've joked that Jensen is, you know, the juggler, just sort of like juggling a bunch of different, you know, national interests always. And I guess that's his duty to to the to the shareholders. But what is their specific do you do you know what their specific opposition is?
Speaker 5:I I think I mean, any regulation is is generally opposed, and I think there is they're they're concerned it would kind of hamstring their their operations or result in kind of bureaucratic complexities that actually would prohibit them from selling anything to China even if it kind of was prohibited. I I I guess I I think that there is this is a good faith effort to to work to develop a system that would that would allow that if that's the administration's policy position to do so. I think my response generally would like, if the the question is really, is there a supply shortage of GPUs or not? Right? Because if there is, I I I think it's pretty clear with Blackwell that there's more demand than there is supply, then I I think that US companies probably it that it's not surprising to say that the US government for the US government to say that US companies should get priority over these over foreign companies for these chips.
Speaker 5:If there's not, then the bill, in theory, would have no impact on their on their ability to sell them to others. Now, certainly, I think there's tweaks to the language and things that people would be I know that Senator Banks and his staff are happy to work with industry on, but that's the intent here. I'd hope that we could come to a resolution there.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Really enjoyed this conversation. Come on again soon. I'm I'm Yeah. We'll, we'll reach out.
Speaker 2:I'm sure there'll be much more to talk about in the near future.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic. Thank you so much, Chris.
Speaker 5:Thanks, guys. Appreciate you having me. Look forward to talking more in the future.
Speaker 1:Cheers. See you later. Bye. Let me tell you about public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing.
Speaker 1:They got industry leading yields. They are trusted by millions, folks, and our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Max June Strand from Legora into the TVP and UltraDump. Boom. Max, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:I'm great. Good to see you. How are you?
Speaker 1:Congratulations on all the progress. Introduce yourself, the company, and then give us the news.
Speaker 6:Of course. I'm Max, student strand, CEO, cofounder of Legora. We're an AI powered workspace for lawyers. We just closed our series c. I founded the business back in spring twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise?
Speaker 2:How much did you raise? John's ready. John's ready.
Speaker 4:A 150,000,000 and I want
Speaker 1:You can't even I can't even hear the numbers. Pictures from I got all
Speaker 6:of these pictures back from the gym this morning from Stockholm. They had bought this huge inflatable unicorn. Maybe we can send you something to see how it literally takes up half the office.
Speaker 2:Amazing. And
Speaker 1:I added it to
Speaker 6:the 15 calendar so you can you can book it.
Speaker 1:Are are you a YC company?
Speaker 6:Yeah. We were in YC winter twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1:Winter twenty twenty four?
Speaker 6:Wow. Yeah. Winter twenty four.
Speaker 2:That's eighteen
Speaker 1:months. Must be one of the fastest growing YC companies of all time. That's I think so. Actually crazy.
Speaker 2:Month in
Speaker 6:SIV to SIR SIV from
Speaker 1:That's impressive.
Speaker 2:So the VCs, they'd said, we need 10% max, and you're like, best I can do is, eight eight point three. I can't Yeah. Don't know how Yeah. Is this round
Speaker 6:actually, three? This one was easier to negotiate than the first one I did with Benchmark. When I did the the one with Benchmark, we sat down. We took an Excel. Chetan put in some numbers, and I went, there's no way, dude.
Speaker 6:And he goes, I've never done a deal where I didn't get 20%. And then we started going down on the, like, point decimals, and I think we landed on something like 18.51%.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 2:was extremely
Speaker 1:You got it off just a little tiny bit.
Speaker 2:It was good. He broke his rule for you.
Speaker 1:So Okay. So how how are you we we've talked to a bunch of
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Me give some context here because a good friend of mine is a lawyer and and the firm he's at, he's he's on there like tech kind of advisory. I don't know. Whatever whatever, you know, big law. And he's been evaluating products. And about a year ago, he like was not impressed at all.
Speaker 2:And when I Yep. Saw him, I saw him last week and he was telling me that, he now is seeing AI tools do, he called it like a $100,000 worth of like diligence in like ten minutes. And he was, like, huge wake up call. He was, like Yeah. Thinking about, like, he didn't he didn't even think his firm would be able to evolve to that even though he Really?
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:Even even though and this is a big, you know, big firm, but he, he was like, clients are gonna realize, like, what's the game has changed, like, very quickly, and not every law firm is gonna be is gonna react, quickly enough. And so, yeah. Kinda wanna get
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wanted wanted to get the update on, like, just how much has changed kind of over the last year because there's product innovation that's happening, and then there's just, like, the models are getting better, and they're both feeding into each other.
Speaker 6:Yep. Well, I I kind of view it like this. Here's the model capabilities, here's the product capabilities, and here's the people capabilities in terms of using those products and getting the most out of it. So there's a huge sort of gap still to be filled in terms of what people are using the products for. I mean, back in 2024 when we were part of YC, I mean, Liguara was a glorified GPT rapper with sort of good rag, good citations, you know, solved compliancy, and and data issues.
Speaker 6:But now I I think your friend is right. The products have moved from being a conversational simple AI into something that solves much more sophisticated tasks. And it looks very differently across transactional work or in litigation or in in house work. If you take due diligence as an example, I mean, it's effectively the exercise of looking through a large number of documents and understanding what is within those documents. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think LLMs were better at reading than writing initially, which is is
Speaker 1:quite an
Speaker 6:important distinction. So we came at this whole problem very much from the review angle. I think some companies I mean, look. We were not the only ones who realized that legal and LLM was going to be a nice marriage. They came at it from the thing, like, research angle or drafting angle, which was much, much harder to build a good company on in the early days.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And I think now what's happening is I mean, I don't know how many apps you use on your phone. I use maybe five. Yeah. And what's happening is the lawyers don't want to learn 20 different point solutions.
Speaker 6:We're bringing everything into one suite. And then with things like MCP, we can actually also allow the really sophisticated law firm law firms to bring in corpus of their own bespoke tools and capabilities, which I think gives a much richer environment.
Speaker 2:I I have a very painful lesson around diligence, which is why I care I'm very excited about this technology. There was I worked on a deal last year, you know, before we started the show, and, we were in diligence on this company. And, there was a single document that killed the deal, and the lawyers had already racked up like like, a 100,000 bill before we before we before we found it. And it ultimately meant that all, you know, that all all the parties, walked away. But we were still sitting there with, like, this massive bill, and it was just, like, unbelievably painful because it wasn't even complicated.
Speaker 2:It was just the business was incredibly old, and there was just this one deal that they had done, like, a decade ago that meant that that it was just, like, kind of dead in the water.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean I mean, what's what the tech allows is that you can also do a DD on the cell side before you even put the documents into the data room, and you say, hey. Let's go open it up to the other side. Right? Like, it it's it's it's funny that it's called a data room.
Speaker 6:Right? Because it used to be a physical data room with a bunch of boxes. You would go into that room. You would open it up. You would start reading all the documents.
Speaker 6:Then we got control f, and you could start control f ing for different change of control clauses. And then came the early versions of the sort of AI systems where, actually, the seed for what became Legra was founded back with the early BERT models, if you if you remember those. And you have to fine tune the system to find specific provisions. And now what's cool is you basically just ask the query in natural language, and the system understands it. So you can even go in there and say, a scale of one to 10, how much of a smoking gun is this document?
Speaker 6:And the AI will just respond and provide its reasoning. So I think in in the in the comment that you made, will some law firms disappear? Absolutely. I think law firms will go through a huge wave of consolidation, frankly, because they've never had tech and sort of real scalability as a weapon. And I mean, you have the big four in auditing, and tech has been very good for auditing.
Speaker 6:It's very good with numbers. It's very good in finance. Tech has never been good at language until our language models. And so now I think you'll see increasingly firms leverage these things to not only sort of out deliver their competitors, but also to out price them, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So faster. So is the is the solution for law firms, you think, transitioning to kind of value based pricing flat flat, you know, more like project fees? Because, you know, if you compare this to, like, the creative world, like the best logo designer in the world is not gonna charge an hourly rate because they might be able to make that logo in like thirty minutes. Right?
Speaker 2:And so if they charge like you can't charge like a $100,000 hourly rate, but companies will pay a $100,000 for a great logo. So is that Which
Speaker 6:is correct. I I I think that's correct for a lot of work. I don't think it's correct for all the work. So I'll give you an example. When we negotiated this term sheet, we were working with Goodwin and our friend our and our partner, Craig, there.
Speaker 6:And when I need his expertise to help me negotiate the term sheet, he's worth a lot more than his hourly rate, which is Yeah. I mean, arguably already high, but it's worth a lot more than that in that specific case. But when his team is reviewing simple documents, maybe that's not worth as much if AI can do that. So I almost viewed it as if AI can do a specific piece of task, it will do it. The only question is, like, when does that get transacted?
Speaker 6:And I think you'll see value based pricing in taking a portion of the deals that, like the best law firm in the world, arguably, is Wachtel, and they don't do hourly rates at all. They just say, this is the price to win, and you pay them. Right?
Speaker 2:And they
Speaker 6:get a portion of that. Now but I'm also actually seeing another way where really big companies, like the big tech companies, are going to law firms and saying, hey. We're gonna pay you $200,000,000 over the next two years, and we want you to do all of this work. Can you do it? And the law firm is then forced to say, are we gonna turn down $200,000,000, or are we gonna figure out a way to do that?
Speaker 6:And, of course, then tech will be part of that answer. So I I actually Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's about creating the right incentive to adopt the tech versus, like, currently, some firms are gonna resist it and being like, I actually like doing diligence the old fashioned way where we could get Right. Three people to spend, you know, all these hours. This was super fun. I'm super excited for you guys. I have a feeling we'll have you on a lot more in the near future.
Speaker 1:Just remarkable progress.
Speaker 2:Wish we wish we had more wish we had more time.
Speaker 1:But I love it's a CYC company winning and I rarely see one winning this hard. This is incredible.
Speaker 2:This hard. This fast. I I gotta give a shout out.
Speaker 6:Like, we since we started in Europe, we just launched in The US back in March. So since then, we've scaled the team to almost 50 people, and it's, like, the growth that's coming in The US is frankly why we're doing the
Speaker 1:round. Congratulations.
Speaker 6:Thank you so much, guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Christina from Vanta. She's been on the show
Speaker 2:multiple times.
Speaker 1:She's back. We're getting an update. How are you, Christina? Great to see you. Thank you for supporting us for this entire year.
Speaker 1:It's been fantastic. You've been on a tear. What's new in your world?
Speaker 12:Well, I got a hat in the mail from you all, and it's great. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, you should have gotten a jack you should have gotten a jacket too, but the team may have sniped it. Oh, no. The jacket never the jacket never showed up.
Speaker 12:Jacket never showed up, but, like, really really into the hat, so thanks for that.
Speaker 1:I'm glad. I'm glad.
Speaker 12:Things are going well. So little bit lot of AI going on with everybody as you're probably talking about. Getting excited for Vantacon, the security and compliance event of the season.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 12:And just did some surveying of security folks about how they're feeling about AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were talking to the CEO of CrowdStrike yesterday. Very interesting nuance. Some there's basically, like, AI generated viruses now where, the actual code that hacks the system is generated on the fly by a generative AI model.
Speaker 2:And can do reasoning. Yeah. So your malware
Speaker 1:It's gonna be great.
Speaker 2:I'm sure. Can think like if you
Speaker 1:danger. I'm in danger is what I feel like. But but but how are people feeling? What are you learning from the customer base, from the folks that you're talking to on the ground?
Speaker 12:Yeah. So we, talking books on the ground, then we also surveyed thousands of security leaders around the world.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 12:And the results actually super, super encouraging on the AI front.
Speaker 4:That's good.
Speaker 12:Actually even guessed. So we found, like, four in five security leaders are using or plan to use AI agents Mhmm. To prevent against those sort of attacks. Sure.
Speaker 2:So the solution to the attack to the AI agent attacks is is good guys.
Speaker 12:More AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes. Of course.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Long tokens. Yeah. So there's that piece. And then we found, like, kind of a similar percentage, but 70% of folks are letting those agents give input on security strategy.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And it's like giving it to a person who's considering it except
Speaker 5:like Sure. Sure.
Speaker 12:We're in we're in, like, default let the agent talk to your folks and influence them
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Versus, like, default skepticism. And, again, this is among security folks.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 12:I was actually pretty impressed with this.
Speaker 1:How how do you have a sense of, like, how token intensive some of these processes are? Because I imagine that, like, one of the things you could do is just the benefit of AI is that it doesn't mind working twenty four seven for months on end. So you could just say, actually, go through every single line of my code base one by one and then just, you know, see, does this does this seem like there could be a vulnerability here? And just generate tons and tons of, you know, ideas, and then we'll have a human filter through what it thinks could be vulnerabilities.
Speaker 12:Yeah. So okay. I saw your interview with Alex in Americas yesterday, and I think we're, like, seeing something similar where it's just, like, paralyzing.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 12:And we're, like, oh, okay. Go off. Run. Take all the tokens. Like, see what you come back with.
Speaker 12:Yep. And maybe it's something, and then I just did two things at once. And maybe it's nothing, and then I'm, like, I kinda just did the one thing, and I have to
Speaker 10:move to the next task.
Speaker 12:But, like, I'm in I'm in the spot I am. Yep.
Speaker 5:And so
Speaker 12:we are seeing, like, a ton of paralyzation at work here. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What, yeah, what what what else is, is empowering people on the on the AI side in in security compliance? I can imagine that, like, you know, when we're talking about the technology, we talk about, oh, the future of the agents will just be able to do it. But then when we talk to people on the ground, they're like, I'm just using ChatGPT to do my homework, or I'm using it to get educated. And I feel like there's a whole world where we go and we rebuild the compliance training processes in an AI native way.
Speaker 12:In a not awful way? Also
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a lot of times pretty awful. I've been through a few of those where you're clicking a button and watching a video and you need to move the mouse. Is there progress there? How fast is that rolling out?
Speaker 1:What what is the future of compliance training look like, you think?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Okay. Compliance training in particular, think a ton. And to your point, like, adaptive and compelling and not the, like, watch a video that feels, you know, at best stuck in the nineties. There's probably worse things you could say about it.
Speaker 12:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Just like where does this work? Yeah. Yeah. We see folks doing, like the phishing email was, like, always the classic thing, but now it is just they're they're really good because it's also like, oh, let me scan your email inbox and be like, what do you actually reply to? Oh.
Speaker 12:Not just like, I'll send you the, I don't know, TVPN newsletter and, like, try to or fake that and try to get you to click on it. Like, it's it's super personalized, so there's some cool there. To your other question, my model of this kind of an overall, but I definitely see it in security and compliance to steal from Tyler Cowen is like centaurs. And so it's like AI plus person, and we're at that stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Right? And we'll be at that and maybe, you know, AI will take it all the way like the way it did with chess.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But even with chess, there was like a multi decade, you know, AI plus person stage, and I we're seeing a lot of that with our customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic. Jordan, thanks.
Speaker 2:What, we were asking, the CrowdStrike founder about, like like, basically, was he surprised that we haven't seen, like, a Gen AI induced, like, high profile security incident yet? I don't know if I'm Like a SolarWinds. I'm sure what yeah. When when you attack. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's your, you know, Sorry. How how how concerned are you about about that sort of, like
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? But even the AWS Industry shaking. Was not a generative AI driven problem. It was just DNS configuration on a database.
Speaker 12:Okay. So, actually, like, building off of that, I think I don't know. Probably pretty soon, but I don't think it'll be some, like, crazy complicated attack. Like, a kind of you know, it'll be like, oh, you left your database unlocked. It's, like the classic Equifax thing.
Speaker 12:You know? And it's like, maybe AI spotted that.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 12:But, like, you kinda did the equivalent of, like, well, you left your front door unlocked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just another another lesson.
Speaker 1:Just, like, go back to the basics, drill the basics, human in the loop. There's definitely the the the centaur error is gonna be here for a long time, I believe. I completely agree with you
Speaker 2:on that. Last question. Wish wish we had more time today. Like, how how are you how are you and your team thinking about head count planning over the next
Speaker 1:Oh, man.
Speaker 2:Over the next two years?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's a great question.
Speaker 12:It's like all I'm doing right now. Yeah. In, like, an AI sense and a business Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, just not even in an AI sense, but just, like, it's a new it's a new world. It's a new world. We see we see public company CEOs doing layoffs and saying, we're doing these layoffs because of AI and maybe some of it's because of AI, but, you know Yeah. Others is just it's a really
Speaker 1:good car totally good. Not gonna really grow headcount, and he thinks he can massively grow revenue without actually scaling up the the the the talent pool that much.
Speaker 12:Government contracts are amazing. The way we're thinking about it is, like, somewhat or, like, AI won't take your job, but someone using AI might, like back to the same thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And so have a bunch of stuff. And that's that's like our framing inside the Fantons. Books work at Fantas, whatever. And we have a bunch of stuff both to like encourage and teach and be like, this and then this will be a core expectation of your job. And so, like, that kind of model going forward and filtering on it and hiring and, you know
Speaker 2:So you're telling the team, like, you should have three three at least three bots join every Hangout that you do that are all summarizing all summarizing the meeting notes and and and competing to summarize the meeting notes the best. I
Speaker 12:saw this too. I yeah. I'm I don't know. I would I'm a note taker and, like, notes make me pay attention, so I, like, can't use those meeting recorders because then I stop paying attention. And I'm just like, I know this.
Speaker 12:Not everybody is like this, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Yeah. A lot of it depends on, like, the actual use case. So if you're in some sort of meeting where you need a full transcript, that's probably different.
Speaker 1:But, you know, certain types of meetings, it's gonna make more sense.
Speaker 2:Vanta should make, like, a really menacing agent that joins and is, like, watching watching out.
Speaker 1:Make sure there's no funny business going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:See some words, it'll, like, pop up at you. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join, the show today. We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Catch up.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your
Speaker 12:having me.
Speaker 2:Bye. Talk soon. See you.
Speaker 1:Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any walk
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:We'll bring in.
Speaker 2:Quick fire drill, for the team. Is Elan from Nivan in the in the in the waiting room yet, Ben?
Speaker 1:We have because I know we
Speaker 2:have a couple more.
Speaker 1:But Fireworks AI
Speaker 2:I know
Speaker 1:in the restroom waiting room right now.
Speaker 2:Okay. But, team, think about ordering here because Ilan
Speaker 1:We have a special we have a special situation because Nivan is going public
Speaker 2:Today.
Speaker 1:And the IPO's timing might be Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just wanna be cognizant of his timing. So
Speaker 1:So we will have the production team working on that.
Speaker 2:Bring in Lynn.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in Lynn from Fireworks AI into the TV panels room. Welcome What's going on? Show, Lynn. How are you doing?
Speaker 10:Hi. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for taking the time. Big day. Would love to get your introduction to the company, how you're framing your business relative to everything else that's going on in AI. It's such an exciting time. And then, we'd love to go into the news.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Definitely. So Fireworks, we are a AI inference platform Yeah. With application specific inference. Okay.
Speaker 10:So here's how we think about inference differently Yeah. That we do not think about inference as we buying compliances at home. For example, we buy a refrigerator, use that for ten years, and then upgrade to the next one. Yeah. We believe model should be continuously becoming smarter and smarter and learning and adapt into the application.
Speaker 10:So every single application developer, they should have their own model. They shouldn't use off the shelf any model other people use and become a model API wrapper. Instead, models should be part of their product design. And the model is like, we raise child, it will continue to learn and be smarter and be more specialized in solving particular problem really, really well. So that's kind of inference platform we provide with smarter model, faster model, and a much more cost efficient model for every single application.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean, you're competing with am I crazy? Are you competing with, like, AWS, Azure? Like, these are the biggest hyperscalers. They are somewhat model agnostic but serve up inference as APIs. Like Lin's competing with everyone.
Speaker 1:Is this the craziest?
Speaker 2:Coming for everybody.
Speaker 1:But but, mean, what take me a a click deeper on the actual strategy. Is it just that there's so much demand that you can go in, go and satisfy the the extra demand, or do you think you're building something that will just be completely differentiated from the hyperscalers forever?
Speaker 10:Right. So, we, currently, we are running very high traffic. We are processing more than 180 requests per second. That is an order of magnitude of, it's sitting in the ballpark of Google search traffic volume. We process more than 10,000,000,000,000 tokens per day.
Speaker 1:Okay. Based
Speaker 2:on Google's
Speaker 10:earnings call, that's similar to their that is, that is actually the same as, their, token Yeah. Processed from Gemini.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 10:So we process a large volume of data. And that means that just means open model has the future. And there are so many startups and enterprise, they reinvent the new user experience, and they want to have full control of of the model as their IP and have the model co develop, co evolve, co adapt into their product. And we see that as a future, and that's how we differentiate from product focus point of view. And we do not provide this inference one size fits all.
Speaker 10:We provide inference one size fits one specific tailored towards application.
Speaker 1:Are you GPU rich? Are you GPU poor? Is this, part of the, part of your strategy to, have GPUs available when your companies need them? Is that a differentiator?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I would like to say we design our product for GPU poor because, interestingly, we are at the beginning of S curve of huge AI native product explosion. Yeah. But product market fit today doesn't mean a viable business
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:In the sense that many of the we we talk we work with so many companies, they just couldn't scale to millions of developers or billions of consumers. They're gonna scale into bankruptcy. Fundamental infrastructure is so expensive. Even if they build the best product, has so much value. Yeah.
Speaker 10:They just wanna make a viable business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Scaling to bankruptcy is an iconic line.
Speaker 1:It's a great line, Lin.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna name there's one company that really comes to mind. Won't name them. Give us the news give us the news from today.
Speaker 1:On the fundraising side.
Speaker 2:And get that Gong ready again.
Speaker 1:That's what what happened. We congratulations.
Speaker 10:We raised our c o c.
Speaker 1:Yes. Give us some more details. Who who came in? How much? What is the valuation?
Speaker 1:What else are you sharing about the round?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We raised 250,000,000 co led by Lightspeed and Index. Boom.
Speaker 2:Love it. With
Speaker 10:Fantastic. Participation from Eventig and Sequoia.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. You could just call it a quarter billion now. You're getting the big number the really big number range.
Speaker 1:So Well
Speaker 10:Right. It brought us about our evaluation to $4,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:4,000,000,000.
Speaker 10:Wow. Really excited for all the customers, partners, and investors.
Speaker 1:And and quickly, how old is the company?
Speaker 10:We're three years old.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is impressive. Congratulations. Well, thank you for everything you're doing to power the AI revolution.
Speaker 2:Helping people avoid scaling into bankruptcy.
Speaker 1:That is
Speaker 2:that is that's
Speaker 1:be the company model. That's that's It's honestly one of the greatest lines.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be we're gonna be using that line quite a lot. So thank thank you for that. And It's good point. Meet you. Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 7:Congratulations. Milestone.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Having me.
Speaker 3:Have a
Speaker 2:good day.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Before our next guest hops on, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring reviews, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.
Speaker 1:Our next guest is from Nivon. We have Elan Twigg, the CTO and co founder.
Speaker 2:He is.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Get that gun ready.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Let's ring the gun preemptively.
Speaker 2:Preemptive hit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Now we can I love you?
Speaker 2:Now we can
Speaker 1:have a conversation. Champagne. Cheers. Cheers. We have we have happy dad.
Speaker 2:Nobody's joined nobody's joined drinking champagne ever on the show despite
Speaker 1:joining drinking champagne, I'm gonna have a happy dad from the Nels Boys.
Speaker 2:Do that. From
Speaker 1:This guy Frank John.
Speaker 4:Really long a really long day. So that's my last before the big party starts.
Speaker 1:So Well well well, congratulations live
Speaker 2:from the Nasdaq. How's how's the day how's the day been? And yeah, may maybe kind of back up a little bit and actually introduce yourself. I think people can probably tell what you're up to but
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sure. So my name is Ilan Twigg. I clearly like champagnes. I'm the CTO and co founder co founder of Navan.
Speaker 4:Navan is a travel and expense management company. We started more than a decade ago. Wow. Today we IPO'd. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Super pumped. Congratulations. It was a beautiful day. Yes, exactly. It's entire family, by the way.
Speaker 4:I think I I broke the record of the number of family members that joined me to the ceremony. No. It's amazing. Yes.
Speaker 1:It's so funny because the last time we at an IPO, it was for Klarna, Sebastian, who's a friend of the show. And he for him, it was it was just like another day. He was like, oh, yeah. I didn't even bring my family. I just kinda stopped by.
Speaker 1:I feel the company come back. But so every founder, every Wait. How many family members by
Speaker 2:the way?
Speaker 1:Like processes these things differently. It's always interesting to hear how people treat it.
Speaker 2:How many roughly? Yeah. Like thirty thirty?
Speaker 4:So No. It was just for my family, it was 17.
Speaker 2:Seventeen? Seventeen. 17.
Speaker 1:17 family members at the IPO. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:Really It's
Speaker 4:if I may say one last thing about the guests. So my parents were here, both of them. Sure. My dad turns 90 in two weeks. Wow.
Speaker 4:And he was here with me on the, yeah, on the stage. He was like happy.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think most of my excitement was watching them
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 4:Being so excited Yeah. Not understanding anything because they don't really speak English, but they kind of got the gist of what's happening and it was super exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's incredible. What take us back through I mean, I'm sure when you when you're looking back into like the depths of COVID, which probably it feels a long time ago, but
Speaker 1:I was traveling.
Speaker 2:You were in a business that was I imagine you you aged more rapidly than maybe Brian Johnson would like during that period. Yeah. Walk us through kind of some of the key moments Yeah. Getting getting to this point.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Maybe I should first tell you that before COVID I had black hair. It was all black. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Well, looks it looks good on you. More like a serious you know, Yeah. Now.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. I can fool people around me that I'm serious. Yes. No.
Speaker 4:You know, you run a company that the business model is you we make money when people use the platform. There was no monthly fees. There was no way you don't pay No
Speaker 1:long lock in. No enterprise contract.
Speaker 4:No enterprise contract. So and why? Because both my co founder Ariel Cohen and I, we had this philosophy that if the company generates money on usage Mhmm. Then the company will always be focused on making sure that people would want to use the product because it's a it's a great experience. And it worked well for us for the first five years.
Speaker 4:And then when COVID hit, no one was traveling and no one was using our platform, not because it was an inferior product, it was because there was a virus and no one could travel.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so we found ourselves with the the best product out there with zero usage and zero zero revenue. And it took six weeks from like, I don't remember the number, maybe a 100,000,000 to zero. Six weeks. So then what? Yeah.
Speaker 4:It was it was a very interesting point in time, but I can tell you that, you know, five years later, here I am with a glass of champagne. My parents were here. We were celebrating the IPO with a company that has way more products, a much more resilient business model, trust me, this time it's pandemic proof, so we are not going to go to zero. We'll go down, but not to
Speaker 1:zero Yeah.
Speaker 4:If it happens again. So we learn, you know, that's why we have gray hair.
Speaker 2:Battle scars.
Speaker 4:And yeah, it's a it's a it was definitely a challenging time, but but I think that, you know, judging by results I think that it was managed well. Obviously, the entire company, the entire management team, the board, we were all united around the decisions and here we are. So we're happy.
Speaker 1:How how are you we we were talking to Brian Chesky at Airbnb last week, and he was sort of mapping out his vision for the future of travel. This idea that as as we become more online, we also maybe wanna become more offline as well. And maybe we're we're traveling more as well as spending more time just online. How do you how do you and how do you internally in the company think about the future of just business travel, pleasure travel, just like the overall travel market?
Speaker 4:Right. So first I should tell you, you know, I'm the CTO and I love technology. I I mean, this is my thing. Really Yeah. Really love technology.
Speaker 4:When ChechiPT came out, I the first thing that I did, I bought like a $30,000 worth of a GPU. That's what I did. No way. And and I I built a PC. My co founder thought that he should fire me.
Speaker 4:It's like, you have a PC under your desk?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I said, yeah. And I paid for it. You don't you don't worry about it. I paid for it. And and then I started deploying LLMs on top of it, uncensored LLMs.
Speaker 4:I I dove deep into that and I really wanted to know the nature of these creatures, how they behave. Because if I were to deploy anything to production based on these creatures, I call them, I need to know who they are, how they behave. Will they lie, for example? Do they know what tarai is? Will they use it?
Speaker 4:No, they lie. Yeah. But forget hallucinations. They will also lie for other reasons intentionally intentionally, like they would they would not want to lose Mhmm. For example.
Speaker 4:And they would lie in order not to lose. Lots of discoveries. But ultimately it led us to, once we really understand the technology, how to deploy this thing to production and let it run completely unsupervised and do stuff for us. And I think the important thing is completely unsupervised. The first thing that we've done is we deployed Ava.
Speaker 4:Ava is our virtual travel agent. Mhmm. And she communicates with travelers as things happen when they need to book something or when there's disruptions and they need to push their travel by one day, cancel this leg, argue about the refund, etcetera, etcetera. And she would do all of these things for them. And it is all based on an internal framework that we built.
Speaker 4:We call it Navan Cognition. I really like the name Cognition. I didn't invent it. It was a professor from Columbia that we worked with. And why Cognition?
Speaker 4:Because it turns LLMs into a highly functioning cognitive system. So Eva today is completely unsupervised. She manages thousands of chats every day with a very, very high customer satisfaction that matches the human's level. And she offsets more than 50% of the incoming chats. She does not deflect, she solves.
Speaker 4:So I think our our approach to travel is we we look for ways to leverage technology to make travel easier so that people can focus on being there rather than getting there. Getting there is is just a noise that you have to, you know, it's a penalty that you have to pay. But the focus for corporate travel is to be there and to be fully there. And there's people outside trying to make me laugh from outside so, and I I'm a little bit
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you. I I I one one suggestion. I think if you make an agent, one of your, you know, your your baby creature and call it Twiggy, please. Microsoft has Yeah. Nivan needs Twiggy.
Speaker 2:You already went through one. You went through a rebrand. You were Trippactions. Yeah. Now you're Nivan.
Speaker 2:Want you to rename Ava to Twiggy. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I it's love Twiggy. I'll do my best. I'm gonna dream for that, really.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Cheers. Thank you so much for coming on the show on such a big day. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Such a monumental moment.
Speaker 1:And and please extend our congratulations to the entire family, all 17.
Speaker 2:All 17 and the whole team.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful moment. Just I hope a great you rest of the day. Great rest of
Speaker 2:your world.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much. We'll talk to I'm gonna party tonight. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you. What a
Speaker 2:what a legend.
Speaker 1:What a legend. That that that was one of the most legendary. For sure.
Speaker 2:That was tough to tough to follow. Yeah. We have Taryngeet coming in next.
Speaker 1:From Memo. I think that's how I pronounce it. MemZero. He's in the restream waiting room. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Great to see you. Thank you so much
Speaker 2:for hopping. Really really tough one to follow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The last guest at Ipeo, he has champagne, he's drinking.
Speaker 2:Raised a belly. It's crazy. But, I'm I'm excited
Speaker 1:for this. But thank you so much for hopping on the show. We're very excited to talk to you.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Like, thank you for having me. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah. Talk to me about the business. Introduce yourself in the business, and then I wanna go really deep into how, memory will actually transfer and and what the equilibrium of the market will be. But we can go into all the technical or or, like, market structure stuff after we kind of get the general news, where the business is, the shape of what you're building.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Thank you. So I'm Taranjit. I'm the cofounder and CEO of MemZero. MemZero is building memory for AI agents.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Right now, everybody is trying to create an AI app, AI agent, but there is a fundamental issue. All the apps are done because they are stateless. Yep. They don't evolve with you as humans evolve.
Speaker 13:Yep. We are trying to fix that. We are the so far, we are the most dominant player in the market with, like, 41,000 data stars, 14,000,000 downloads. And we recently announced our 24,000,000 funding led by BesiSec Ventures with Kindred, p fifty, and I c, and GitHub.
Speaker 1:Total agent nomination. Okay. So, I mean, I I I I gotta just jump straight into, the actual market dynamic because I I have to imagine that, right now, OpenAI is saying, where you're gonna log in with OpenAI, and we're gonna store the memory because we want you locked to us as much as possible. And for everything else, if we we wanna build it within the app, we wanna, you know, do we want one click checkout in the app. And if and if we're gonna send you out, you're gonna OAuth with ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:And so are you the Android to ChatGPT's iPhone, or is there a way that you can play together? Is there a data privacy thing where I can go to Sam Altman and say, hey. Look. I know I'm daily driving the ChatGPT app, but you gotta let me take my data with me, my personalization data with me, because I wanna go out into the open open LLM ecosystem and interact with things all over the place.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I think that's a really good question, and there are two ways to look at it. First, it's good that big labs are adding memory in their consumer. They're actually educating the market that memory is needed. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And they also realize that as models commoditized, memory is the next mode. Mhmm. And it's a matter of time that memory becomes available as an API. Mhmm. But, you know, developers who are building all sorts of cool AI apps are using multiple LLMs.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. So in that scenario, because memory is not just read only, it's also right Mhmm. You would want to decouple it from LLMs audio. So that's, like, take one. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Now the fundamental thing for why, know, you this is happening is, you know, we are going to a technological shift. So far, we have been interacting with click, swipe, and scroll. But for the first time, we are we and everyone on this planet is getting the ability to talk to software. You can chat with it. You can say a few words.
Speaker 13:It will say it back to you. So you as human I as human, we're accumulating rich personal context. Now right now, it's a handful of AI agents that we use on a day to day basis, and we use, like, Charge, GPT, Claude, and, you know, other apps out there. But five years down the line, it's going to be a lot of apps in our life. And imagine if I, as a user, or you, as a user, have to explain every app who you are.
Speaker 13:That's going to be frustrating for you. So in that scenario, we we strongly envision and we strongly will make this plan for AI kind of, you know, functionality out there. But then you as a user are empowered to carry to own and carry your AI memories across any app or device that you interact with.
Speaker 1:Okay. So if you're the plaid for memory and Yep. In the future, I am using I mean, this is a real story. Like, I use Gemini all the time for v o three. I also if I'm interacting with a YouTube video, I'll always go to Gemini for that.
Speaker 1:Gemini is faster in a bunch of different places, but I use the voice mode on Chatuchi BT. I also use Claude every once in a while. Like, I have little memories all over the place. And Yep. If I'm in the plat analogy, that's similar to having a Chase account over here, Morgan Stanley account over here, an E*TRADE account over there, a BofA account, a credit card, all these things, and I wanna bring those together.
Speaker 1:Is is that something that you imagine I'll be able to do when someone comes out with a completely new product that they wanna customize? I could go over we were talking to Adobe or something, and then I could say, yeah. I'm gonna auth with memo, and, and then I'm going to allow you to access my memories or my my, yeah, my memory in all of the other apps and and and port all of that in. Is that something that they would let you do?
Speaker 13:See, that's, that's the future that we feel is highly possible. They won't I I mean, like, big labs won't let you do because for them, memory is one of the modes. Right? Yeah. But if you consider from other side of users, then, like, you know, the world is not going to be just one app.
Speaker 13:The world is going to be multiple apps. Right? It's like OpenAI will be there, Gemini is there. Clot is there. Right?
Speaker 13:In that scenario, once so right now, it's like a technological shift. So you and I can relate, but not everyone on the planet. Right? Yeah. But soon they will relate.
Speaker 13:And because of this new interface of voice, like, I will feel like why do I have to tell this software again and again? Why is this software so dumb? In that scenario, I think, like, user should be empowered to own and carry their memories. So far, it has not been the case because it's just been, like, clicks, data, you know, your session history. But now you're sharing a lot of personal rich context.
Speaker 13:You should own it. You should be saying that, okay. I give my health care memories to this app. I give my financial memory to this this app, and they are in sync. I think that's a future that benefits everyone.
Speaker 13:Sure. At least everyone on the planet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is cold email underrated?
Speaker 13:I I actually changed my life because of cold emails. Like, I wrote, like, 200 cold emails to everyone almost everyone in Silicon Valley back in '23. I still write, like, a lot. In this round also, I still wrote, like, cold emails to angel investors. I think it's the most valuable asset for everyone out there.
Speaker 13:You should be writing more cold emails. Everyone should be writing more cold emails.
Speaker 1:I love it. Handwritten or AI generated? What's the take?
Speaker 13:No. I I still write, like, everything personally. I just take AI help to, fix, you know, some grammar or some structural issues, but should be personally
Speaker 2:The Yeah. The AI cold email. Hey. Saw you're in New York. Hope you like sun I bet you like Central Park.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you like Starbucks? Sounds hilarious.
Speaker 2:Anyways, congratulations
Speaker 1:Congratulations. On
Speaker 2:the fundraise. It's great great to meet you.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, get to use MEMZERO out there in the wild very soon.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
Speaker 2:I have the perfect post to end this go on.
Speaker 1:Hit us.
Speaker 2:Hit me. That is that Tyler's Tyler's app is broken. Oh.
Speaker 1:Taking shots. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 1:He's doing his best. Did you wanna do the virality equals taste one?
Speaker 2:No. I wanted to do Maytab says, I keep getting ads for cocaine on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Just using Linktree as a cloaking page kind of surprised this works. And to that I would say, how do you think Who's gonna pay for the CapEx? Right? You got
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. I see. You're bringing it back to where we started the show with net earnings. If you see this, you gotta you gotta assume, you know, the the, you know, whoever's running that ad advertising cocaine, they gotta pay a pretty penny. They gotta pay in their Facebook ads manager.
Speaker 2:This is so funny. There's a there's a reply here from this guy, Zach. What data does Meta have on you? And, Matab says, I was in LA for a day, I guess.
Speaker 1:This was a thing, this was a thing on on Facebook of people advertising drugs, and it is a game of whack a mole back and forth trying to catch people because the the lingo will change and the the way people are kind of dog whistling to each other that they have something illegal that they're selling. It's a it's a huge game of cat and mouse that the meta team is is kind of constantly working on. And you see those same kind of, like, breathless panicked news articles about, like, is Facebook like a hotbed for, I guess, cocaine in this case or or, you know, something else in, you know, variety of different, adult content or whatever. And, it's always this, like, dance of, like, how much do they or how much are they gonna invest in trust and safety? How many people are gonna be in the loop?
Speaker 1:How much AI are they gonna throw at it? How are they gonna get false positives? Because what if you're just posting a meme about Tony's not Tony Soprano. Tony Montana. Tony Montana.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Our favorite song that we used in our in our launch video. If we post that, there's obviously a reference to illicit substances in there. You want that to be flagged? No.
Speaker 1:Obviously not. And so, it's a it's a constant dance. But, very funny that someone actually slipped this through the Facebook's ad ad review team. I have a funny story about the Facebook ad review team. There was a time when you could straight up like, there there were companies there were companies that would basically go and find the individual ad manager who would approve, who would have admin access to the the Facebook side of the ad manager.
Speaker 1:And the company would go and put up an ad and try and get it approved, and it would get shut down. The ad would be like, Harvard scientists created this limitless pill that's used by Johnny Depp. It was always Johnny Depp, but it was always Harvard scientists. And it would be a picture of Johnny Depp looking great and then Harvard scientists, and it would link you to some scammy website that would sell you basically some fake, fake nootropic or fake supplement. And these ads were against terms of service.
Speaker 1:Like, it's straight up snake oil. Like, it it's not even like, there's no thesis of, like, oh, act it's actually good for you. It's just completely fake. But they realized that it would convert and it would be very high margin. And so what they would do is they would go to, the Facebook ad manager people, and they would try and bribe them and say, hey.
Speaker 1:If you go in and you approve my ad, I'll put a $100,000,000 of ad spend behind it and generate $200,000,000 in revenue. And if I can get that ad approved, if if you, as just the individual ad manager, can go and tweak the back end. And so the the there's like a constant war even inside the organization to make sure that nothing elicit is happening.
Speaker 2:I heard something interesting recently that there's a a a health influencer
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And people make AI videos of them just promoting random supplements Mhmm. On YouTube. So they make an AI video. Yeah. They'll post the video and in the in the in the description, they'll put links out to products.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 2:And YouTube does not it will not systematically identify the the content themselves.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's just they say that we support AI video. Sure. And so, this influencer is paying an another AI service to consistently monitor videos and then report them automatically.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:But they have to spend $10,000 a month
Speaker 1:It's $10 a month?
Speaker 2:On this service because it's super it's super intensive from a and and this influencer like needs Yep. To, so you could imagine somebody's
Speaker 1:Yep. I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. There's a yeah. It's a it's a constant war.
Speaker 1:It's a constant war.
Speaker 2:The solution to bad AI is good. Yes. Good good AI agents with guns, I guess.
Speaker 1:Give your neorobot a Glock. It needs to happen. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today. Thank you for listening to the show. We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:It's Halloween. We have a special show for you. Please tune in. Leave us five stars on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Speaker 2:Tomorrow is gonna be
Speaker 1:one for the books. Spooky. It be Spooky.
Speaker 2:It could be silly.
Speaker 1:Have a great have a good one.
Speaker 2:And I can't wait. Goodbye. Have a great evening.