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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Two WWCs ago, we were talking about Apple Intelligence, and it's all finally coming together. The package is finally being delivered. I think the response has been really good. Some of the guys on the team have been watching WWC already. We have a bunch of folks calling in to discuss WWDC throughout the week.
Speaker 1:But let's give you the high level first, go through some of the immediate reactions, and then, of course, we'll be covering that throughout this week. So Apple's Annual Worldwide Developers Conference started today and it runs through Friday. Tim Cook just kicked it off with an opening keynote. The theme for this year's conference is All Systems Glow. All Systems Glow.
Speaker 1:Interesting. We're finally getting answers about what the next version of Siri will look like. I think expectations in a weird place, like they're high. Everyone's expecting like this next version of iOS, which is what they're demoing. That's the main thing of the software version.
Speaker 1:This isn't an iPhone event. This isn't a hardware event. This is WWDC about the software. Everyone's expecting that the software will go through an actual transformation, and the next version of Apple software will be good, and people will be talking about how good it is because they will deliver on a bunch of things. At the same time, expectations aren't so high like going into Apple Vision Pro, where people are expecting a breakthrough that no one no other company has ever done before.
Speaker 1:All people are asking for is implement the best practices from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, like the stuff we know and love. Even Grock has like nicely interfaced into X where like people say, Hey, Grock, is this real? It just pulls it up for you. I find myself on tweets just going, oh, yeah, like I don't want to copy this text out and into another LLM app. I'm happy just asking Grock real quick for an extra detail or one more fact.
Speaker 1:Google search overuse. Like, there's been a lot of AI diffusion into products that's been good. Even Ramp. Like, Ramp has like chat interface where you can just say like, hey, how much did we actually spend on Amazon last month? And it'll just pull it up for you.
Speaker 1:And it's not like this revolutionary AI Well, here's thing. Thing. It's just like nice tool.
Speaker 2:I think they did a good job letting the hype build or the interest build organically. Right? You rewind
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A year or two ago, they were running billboards for Apple intelligence Yeah. For Genmotion, all this stuff. Really setting themselves up for So
Speaker 1:that stuff was overhyped. And I
Speaker 2:think this And they were they were a
Speaker 1:part of a
Speaker 2:they were Yeah. Course. They were hyping it themselves. Of
Speaker 1:course. Of course.
Speaker 2:They were like, are we coded?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it seems like they have the right partnerships and and the right, like, product strategy at this point. People are familiar with these tools, so just putting them in different places seems reasonable. Models are good now, so make them available at the click of a button. Ideally, the Siri button, which has been completely nerfed for the last two years.
Speaker 1:Actually, more than that because Siri has never really seen the adoption or love, product love that many other products have seen. And users will be happy. So Google AI search overviews are a good example. It proved that rolling out LLMs, it can be nerve racking, but it's not rocket science. Like, you spit the text out where people expect the answer.
Speaker 1:There will be funny viral hallucinations. Like, right now, even with all the crazy Google IO news, amazing five point three point five foundation models, they're doing really good stuff. DeepMind's really good, great team. Like you still say disregard and instead of just giving you the definition, it says like, Okay. Got it.
Speaker 1:I won't I won't do that anymore. And it gets confused. So there will be those like viral jokey, wow, it failed, flopped. That's going to happen to Apple. And that's not what Apple likes to deal with?
Speaker 2:Not at all.
Speaker 1:But I don't think any of that will show up in the user metrics. I think that, you know, churn and usage will be unaffected from the viral moment of like, Oh, Apple. Like the Apple text summaries, they're hilarious and they often hallucinate and get things wrong.
Speaker 2:You still keep them on, though?
Speaker 1:I left them on. I don't mind them. I think a lot of times they're sort of useful. And they're always delightful because they're funny because they're so like hallucinatory. But your PR team will have many heart attacks because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore.
Speaker 1:So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple, I think, in this nondeterministic, stochastic AI era. But I think that they can get through it just by running best practices that have been established for a year or two years in the rest of the AI world. The other big questions that everyone's asking around open ecosystems. So will Apple lean into the OpenClaw Mac mini boom at all? That would be interesting to see, say, in the next version of the software that goes on the Mac mini, Hey, we're going to embrace OpenClaw.
Speaker 1:We're going to embrace AI agents. We're going to do things that make those tools more effective in our ecosystem. You already know and love the hardware. You're buying it nonstop. It's out of stock.
Speaker 1:But we could do more to lean into that community or we could do less. We could say, hey, we're going to shut it down. We're worried about privacy. These are the two tensions that they're going to have to deal with. Will there be a pivot around vibe coding apps in the iOS App Store?
Speaker 1:You asked John Gruber from Daring Fireball this when he joined the show on May 29. Fantastic interview. Had a ton of fun with the Gruber native. But it's a big question. And it's something that Apple is they don't really have to respond yet.
Speaker 1:They're pretty quiet when things happen. They usually go and solve the problem.
Speaker 2:And Oh, they really don't want to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But eventually they start. Like, they didn't want to talk about climate change, but then they did a bunch of things to get to like net zero and eco friendly buildings and solar panels on the roof and stuff. And then once they did, were really noisy about it because they were like, we are carbon neutral neutral or we will be by a certain date.
Speaker 2:And I think once they figure out how to make money on it, then they'll start
Speaker 1:Which they should. Which,
Speaker 2:yeah, I fully I will say, I fully support. Yeah,
Speaker 1:exactly. Will native iOS apps from other AI labs have more access to iPhone functionality? What's the pathway for ChatGPT interfacing, Claude, Gemini? If you're using those apps, how many hooks are there? Will they be able to siphon in your text messages?
Speaker 1:If you click, Yeah, I want to share my text messages, my iMessage with my app of choice? Or will you need to say yes every single time, which will be a huge burden to having that integration happen? There's a of social media apps that say, Hey, we want access to your whole camera roll. All of it forever. And that's somewhat intimidating.
Speaker 1:You get a number of different options. You can say, I want a temporary access. Just take this photo. You can't see my whole library. Now people trust many people.
Speaker 1:Maybe they just don't know, but they feel like they trust a lot of these maps. They just say, Yeah, yeah, take the whole camera roll. Sort of a crazy thing to do that they can just download your entire camera roll if you press that button, but people have. So what will the AI version of that be? And how deep will it be and how much will it build on top of the Siri intense functionality versus other APIs that are deeper in the iOS ecosystem.
Speaker 1:There's one last thing, which is we I mean, we talked about how Apple doesn't want to address eco stuff until it's like, Okay, we got it solved. And I'm wondering if in the coming years there's going to be pressure for some sort of response on the whole like bones are reducing the fertility rate stats because I don't know if you saw, but there was another research paper that was posted and Derek Thompson basically zoomed out and said that I wasn't convinced. And now he he is convinced that it's like up to 30% of the reason for the recent decline below two. And I don't know where you sit on it.
Speaker 2:Below the replacement rate?
Speaker 1:Below the replacement rate. Not good if you're a fan of humanity and having a high population. But that is something that you could see bubbling up to being something that big tech companies, social media companies, device manufacturers have to answer to when they're in like free form podcasts But you know that these companies are not going want address It's interesting. As opposed to the AI CEOs, they're like, Oh, you want to talk about killing everyone? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I'd love to The talk about for
Speaker 2:PM of Denmark or what country was saying. Yeah. It's time to return. I'd rather make
Speaker 1:No, kids she specifically said I would I'd rather let my kids smoke cigarettes than use an iPhone, which is crazy. But I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe the cure for cancer is right around the corner, but the cure for brain rot is not.
Speaker 2:It's possible. Yeah. It's such a different debate because clearly Yeah. A single drag on a heater Yeah. Is no good.
Speaker 2:Right? You're ingesting poison. Single Burning look at a screen, right, is not what is reducing the fertility Yeah. So anyways.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. Anyway, let's go to some reactions from WWDC. But first, I'm gonna tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 2:IPhone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna update your software tonight while you sleep. Next morning, iPhone says, I couldn't do it, bro. Just didn't feel right. The vibe was off.
Speaker 1:This is something that I didn't know was so common, but I think everyone's been in this position, which is like a funny thing. I think it has to do with how how much the battery is charged. But lots of low hanging fruit, hopefully resolved in WWC. I did see a whole bunch of stats about just little performance gains, 30% faster opening of the lock screen, 30% faster on opening this app and just little optimizations that I think will go a lot further. When we talk to Mark Gurman, he talks about how like the AI features are too abstract.
Speaker 1:People want battery life, cameras, beautiful screens, fast, like they want the basics most of the time. And so I think this is time to chop it.
Speaker 2:It would be funny if they effectively threw up a model card and they're comparing it's
Speaker 1:like They actually sort of actually actually 22%.
Speaker 2:Percent better
Speaker 1:That's on sort of what they do. You know the Bento box, right? Bento box with like how many cameras, megapixels, flops and how powerful the GPU is, how many cores are over here, how much storage it has. Like that graphic is their model card. We were riffing on this earlier, like when a product ceases to be sold on brand and is instead sold on performance, that's usually Margin compression.
Speaker 1:Usually margin compression, like you comp it to cars, like if you're purely buying on like range and price and speed and horsepower and seating arrangements, that feels much more commoditized than you got to have a Ferrari because it's a Ferrari. Don't ask about the specs. And I think for the Luche, this is the first time that people were talking about like, oh, 0 to $60 in 02/2005 for that price isn't actually that good. It's like that's not the conversation you should be having about Ferrari. You should just be like, it's a Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Next question. Like, do you want one or not? Hilarious post from Sam Henry Gold here, of course, in jest, but they put up a Apple press release in the newsroom. Apple announces the death of Mark Gurman.
Speaker 2:It is done.
Speaker 1:It is Apple today announced the completion of operation One More Thing, a multi year initiative to permanently end the unauthorized disclosure of Apple's pre released product information by Bloomberg Intelligence reporter Mark Gurman. Gurman, who had for sixteen consecutive years obtained and published accurate details about Apple's products before their announcement, has been neutralized. Operation One More Thing was completed on schedule, on budget, without complication. They're not that aggressive towards Mark Gurman, but he is probably a thorn in their side. And here he is.
Speaker 1:He has a live blog up, live blog for WWDC. Go check it out at bloomberg.com. Eric Souffert is leaning in. Why is he leaning in? Because Mark Gurman says something about WWDC.
Speaker 1:He says, In addition to the focus on AI, Siri and major quality and performance improvements across the operating systems, I'd expect two other focal points today, privacy and safety features. I imagine Sufort is leaning in because privacy, safety features, not great for ad monetization. Usually, you're hiding more information. Tyler, what's been your reaction generally? Take me through whatever.
Speaker 3:Is. I've I've been watching the livestream. It's it's still going on, so there's there's still releasing stuff. But I I would say just on that point, they've been like
Speaker 1:Have you been watching or have you been studying?
Speaker 3:I was studying. Like, every every time they talk about a new feature Yeah. With AI, they always say, like, this is on a private cloud. Mhmm. This is like not public.
Speaker 3:This is like extremely secure. So they're they're really pushing on that point, I think.
Speaker 1:What does private cloud mean?
Speaker 3:I don't know. They're talking about like their own foundation models, I think. So they're trying to emphasize that.
Speaker 2:So said the word Gemini. I don't know if
Speaker 3:they said it, but it was on screen.
Speaker 1:So so it's Oh, okay. It seems like they have the ability with their deal with Gemini to basically white label, fine tune, mid train, do whatever they need to and then resell that with their own branding. That's a great deal. My question is like, who's inferencing that? There's a billion iPhone users.
Speaker 1:And if they're all pushing the Siri button all day long and they're anywhere near the frontier, that's a significant amount of inference. Has Apple built some sort of secret data center that can serve that? Are they saying private cloud and really it's like a corner of GCP? Is it a bunch of Mac Minis wired together? Like, what did they do to actually build that private cloud?
Speaker 1:Because even if they did it, even if they did it and didn't show up in the CapEx numbers, didn't show up in the any of the SEC filings, like it would show up in the emissions data and the ESG numbers because unless they have some crazy solar nuclear powered facility, where is that inference coming from? I imagine some of it can be done on device. Jonah. That's exciting.
Speaker 2:Jonah says on device.
Speaker 1:Can it all be done on device?
Speaker 2:Like Tyler.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Groxin says
Speaker 1:I know also brought up
Speaker 2:rate limits and a subscription plan.
Speaker 1:Okay. Did you
Speaker 2:see that? Yeah. I'll look
Speaker 1:for that. I mean, you don't have rate limits or subscription plan if it's on device because why would you? And then also, you would never say private cloud if you're doing it on device. You would just say it's on device. Of course, it's private.
Speaker 1:So private cloud. Cloud means not on device. It's in the cloud. And so I obviously Apple has a lot of data centers. They have a lot of cloud capacity across their productivity suite.
Speaker 1:Where are the photos stored? In iPhotos, like obviously those are stored in the cloud. They have a lot of storage. Like everyone gets two terabytes when they get a phone. So they clearly have a lot of data center capacity.
Speaker 1:And they've done a lot to make that ESG compliant. But I'm very curious about where that goes over time. Anyway, we should move on to the news from Friday. The stocks are already back up. But first, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So
Speaker 2:One more thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Apparently
Speaker 1:One more thing. One more thing. One more take from Jordan about Apple.
Speaker 2:Jane What's up? Says Apple concedes on liquid glass design compromising for usability
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And shares a couple screenshots here. And so Wait.
Speaker 1:So they're going deeper in Liquid Glass or pulling back?
Speaker 2:Pulling back.
Speaker 1:I I saw the new the new Apple Maps icon and it looked pretty good. It it had a little feature of Liquid Glass in there. I thought it looked cool. I did hear people complaining about the new Mac operating system being like too too bright or too dark or something, like some contrast issue. I haven't noticed it, but it was something I saw people complaining about.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Friday was a big day in the market. We were off, but the news kept moving, so we're covering it today. The Labor Department reported that The U. S. Added a seasonally adjusted 172,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.3%.
Speaker 1:So on the cover of The Wall Street Journal, U. S. Hiring gathers steam, third straight monthly increase, slight decrease from the previous month, which was slight down from the previous month, but still in adding territory in the hundreds of thousands. So the bubble popped. The bubble popped.
Speaker 1:Friday was the worst day for the Nasdaq in more than a year, 4.2% down. It's over. But good news is that today, we're back. We're up 1.5% now. It's officially two Oh, thousand we're
Speaker 2:back to
Speaker 1:people ask what year it is. Reinflating. It's No. No. It's not reinflating.
Speaker 1:We're building back. The bubble popped. It's 2003 now. It's not '99. It's not 2000.
Speaker 1:It's 2003. We're well past the bubble Okay. It. Right? So But actually, quick explanation of what happened.
Speaker 1:So The US labor market is really picking up. A hundred and seventy two thousand seasonally adjusted jobs added in May. Third month in Decent a amount. Decent amount. Our A lot of health care the
Speaker 2:World Cup.
Speaker 1:Yes. And a lot of travel and and workers related to the World Cup stuff that's going on. Tourism. This is terrible news for all those black pilled AI leaders that have been praying, manifesting job losses despite their Herculean efforts. They can't get the unemployment rate to go up at all.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. Been saying 10%, 20%, 50%, a 100% of all jobs are going away. Good luck. Yeah. You're gonna have to work harder because The US economy is undefeated and the American worker is undefeated as evidenced by this latest jobs report.
Speaker 1:AI job apocalypse is canceled at least for the month of May. We will see where things go, of course, of course. But it is good news. We want hiring. We want jobs to be abundant in our society.
Speaker 1:And so, in general, it's good news. I believe the jobs report, I don't think the numbers are going to be massively revised down. I think that they're generally accurate and track with the ADP numbers and a lot of other numbers. So I think the jobs are really being added. They're not in all the most critical industries.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of nuance there. How long will it go on? But in general, the economy is healthy. But inflation is rising. The closing of the Strait Of Hormuz has spiked the cost of gas and overall prices have been increasing more quickly than the Fed would like for some time.
Speaker 1:Even before the Strait Of Hormuz, inflation was running a little hot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well above the 2% target
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:For basically as long as I've been an adult.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so this makes the likelihood of a rate cut more unlikely. In fact, it looks like we might be in rate hike territory soon, which is of course not good for tech companies that have earning forecast that stretch out into the next decade. So the silver lining in high rates, if you want some copium, is that at least the Fed has something useful in the tool chest in case the economy does slow down. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, we're running hot. We have high rates, at least there's room to cut to 3%, 2%, 1%, zero if the market's selling off, if the unemployment rate's going up. You have something in the tank. Whereas during COVID, like the rates were already There so was a lot of unemployment all of a sudden and it was just like stimulus, spend a bunch of money, you know, send mail everyone a check. There wasn't that much that the Fed could do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was a time that we couldn't imagine this level of speculation in the markets at something like a at where rates are right now. Right? Yeah. People that were sort of Totally.
Speaker 2:Born in the Zerb era
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With with all the speculation right now is Yeah. By itself Once the rates Yeah. An argument to raise rates Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even further. Totally. Well, yeah. Once the rates spiked off of like like that 3% jump like the end of ZERP, it was like, okay, like there will never be froth again, certainly. Certainly, like tech stocks will never
Speaker 2:see A friend of new mine, Blake, made bumper stickers that just said, please God, just one more bubble.
Speaker 1:And God delivered. Okay. So, the other story. VC Horror Stories. This was kicked off by Greg Eisenberg.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize that he was the one that started this whole thing and kicked the hornet's nest and everyone came out of the woodwork with their VC horror stories. He said he had a big discussion about founders' bad experience with venture capital and a number of high profile firms' VCs caught strays. Merkor CEO Brendan Foti detailed what he calls the Sequoia scam, which is something interesting we should actually dig into. Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, accused Vinod Khosla of offering to invest in his Series C only if he would fire a few of the people at the pitch meeting who had just left the room momentarily to go to the bathroom. See, there was a separate so Greg Eisenberg I was really crossing wires here because Greg Eisenberg is the one who says he says, I was once pitching in a boardroom at a top three VC firm for a $15,000,000 Series A.
Speaker 1:That's pretty easy to narrow down. But anyway, he says, 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep because some of the top like, you know, FF doesn't have 12 GPs. They don't really do partner meetings like this. So for $15,000,000 Series A.
Speaker 1:So even if you put them in the top three, you got can't catch a stray here. Anyway, one of the GPs fully fell asleep out cold for thirty plus minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone kept going. Then separately, Matthew Prince
Speaker 2:Okay. Founder or or an operator falls asleep in the office because they're so tired because they're grinding so hard and they're a hero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is what when falls asleep in the in the factory, it's no big deal. But when a VC falls asleep, it's the end of the world.
Speaker 2:We're aware of some static in the Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think we got a new mic line, but I'll try not to touch it and we'll see what happens. So there's lots of chatter about the VC horror stories. Certainly a discussion worth having. You you got to keep them in check.
Speaker 1:But Silicon Valley has always been so high growth and positive sum that relatively good behavior is usually the equilibrium. It's pretty rare that you get a really bad VC. Because even when a startup fails, investors can't write off the founder entirely because they might start the next generational company. And so they might wind up giving on a non VC friendly sort of acquihire because they're like and help or like help them land a paycheck somewhere, get a job, serve as a good reference, maybe even fund the next product in the next because they're just like, This is an iterated game and we don't want to have you on our bad side forever. Now, that doesn't mean don't like they can't pass.
Speaker 1:And so, there's basically this wide gap that I'm seeing in these discussions where there's VC pitch horror stories and then VC horror stories. And I have much less sympathy for the former. Like, don't really care about VC pitch horror stories all that much because you could because just
Speaker 2:because a lot of founders will have 50 meetings for financing. Yeah. You would expect at least a couple Yeah. To just be terrible. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? The person didn't know who you were, didn't read the materials ahead of time Yeah. Was rude.
Speaker 1:And you might want that person Didn't
Speaker 2:show up. Like, you
Speaker 1:might want a checked out VC who's just going to let you cook. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, I see this purely financially. My team crunched the numbers. I'm in, but like, don't count on me to value add.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm not gonna be in the weeds with you every day. And then there's a different there's a different VC who's like, I'm gonna be in the office. I'm gonna be your backup.
Speaker 2:The best VCs will not even tell you, oh, I'm gonna be grinding for you every day. I'm gonna be helping you get on
Speaker 1:just your be accurate. Feet.
Speaker 2:They'll tell you Let's tell my one of my favorite VCs in the world just says like, I give you money
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then I will help you raise more money. Yep. And that's the only thing I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1:And that's fine.
Speaker 2:And I'm gonna be your friend. Yep. We'll get dinner now and then. Yep. But that's what you can expect from me.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that's exactly what he gives Yep. Founders. And so everyone is like, this guy is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then there's other there's other firms that say, we'll help you with go to market and they will. There's other people that say, we will help you with marketing and they don't. And you just want to be Yeah. Transparent and accurate there.
Speaker 1:And so, like, as a founder, your job is to sell equity from time to time. Your job is to find buyers for that equity investors. Some companies
Speaker 2:actually only do that. That's true. Actually They
Speaker 1:stock get the product occasionally. So your job is to find investors who want to purchase that equity with cash, VCs. You need to reference, check them beforehand, make sure they're fit, think through their competitive investments, keep them entertained and awake during the pitch. VCs shouldn't be disrespectful, like literally falling asleep is. But this is the far this is far from the worst thing that regularly happens in the course of growing
Speaker 2:We pitched for Figma's seed round in 2013. Most folks didn't get it but everyone I met was super nice to me. Yeah. It's so funny when you when you compare when you compare VCs to the other, like I said, the other kinds of calls you have. Yeah.
Speaker 2:VCs are probably like generally way nicer. Yeah. Right? Like a a customer is less likely to like be overly friendly if they're not interested in what you're selling. Right?
Speaker 1:They're like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is like doesn't really seem like a, you know, doesn't really seem like a fit. Yeah. Brandon from her core, former guest and friend of the show is has bone to pick Structure. With Structure.
Speaker 2:Everyone. Yeah. He's coming after YC. He's coming after Sequoia.
Speaker 1:He is.
Speaker 2:He says, in the last six months, I've seen half a dozen rounds where Sequoia invests in two tranches. Everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. Founders misrepresent this to their employees and then shop it to angels too. Sequoia's blended price is completely deceptive, less than 50% of the one projected
Speaker 1:Yeah. To the so so they'll they'll invest at half 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000, two tranches and then the founder will go out and say we raised a 100,000,000 at 1,000,000,000 when really Sequoia got in at the blended price. Right? Now, that's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1:And that can make sense for both sides for a variety of reasons. You don't want to misrepresent that though. If you go and misrepresent that to another investor and you don't tell them the actual structure of the deal, that can be securities fraud. That is a major risk. But that's not on the VC.
Speaker 1:Like, the VC should not go to another investor and say, Oh, yeah. We just did the full deal at $1,000,000,000 They should give that context. But that doesn't
Speaker 2:it's seem like it's on on founder in the same
Speaker 1:thing. This is like classic, like, all the crossover funds are doing this. Tons of funds have done this. This I mean, also, this isn't some secret. Like, you go back to the original Sequoia YouTube investment memo and it's trashed and structured.
Speaker 1:Like they've been doing this for twenty five years and it's just like nobody read nobody read the manual or something because like if you actually study and no ball, like you would know that structured investments exist. At the same time, I don't put it on every employee who's getting stock options and thinking about the heat on a company and every journalist to understand that structure. So there is there is an impetus and a responsibility.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very aggressive and unnecessary to call this
Speaker 1:a
Speaker 2:quote, Sequoia scam. Because Brendan also replied to his own tweet saying just thirty minutes ago after the post had gone viral. In fairness to Sequoia, this is common practice in the industry. It's really like on that 1,000 likes on
Speaker 1:the other one. Brutal. Travis Kalanick said in 02/2001, I intercepted a partner at a VC who was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus from the passenger seat. At one point, he grabbed my laptop, placed it on his large belly, which was pressed against the steering wheel and rapidly flipped through the slides himself.
Speaker 1:February hit different.
Speaker 2:I wanna know how the story ended.
Speaker 1:Did did he invest or not? But did he
Speaker 2:pull out his checkbook?
Speaker 1:Because maybe he was like, you got me, Travis. You know? Hey. We actually had a plan to test this theory. Tyler, do you wanna take us through it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, so I I was just looking at this. I found a study. Yes. Basically, it was they took a bunch of of older men, 66 to 83.
Speaker 1:This is actually
Speaker 3:They put them in a room
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Where it was kind of a slightly dim room.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:There's not a lot of like
Speaker 1:offices. They're very Yeah.
Speaker 2:They sat in there Cloudflare's s one. And then and
Speaker 3:they basically tested to see how long would it take them to fall asleep. And so the median was thirty six point nine minutes.
Speaker 1:I feel like Okay. So So
Speaker 2:if you've here's the thing, know, pitch
Speaker 1:Usually an hour.
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes, I mean, if it's an early pitch, early conversation maybe is thirty minutes. Maybe. If it's going well, it starts to drift over.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But that's the danger zone.
Speaker 1:Danger zone.
Speaker 2:From a
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:From a
Speaker 1:a is the lesson. Is the lesson for founders. If you Yeah. Have a boring business if have a boring and you're pitching a VC who's an older gentleman, you gotta keep the pitch meeting to less than thirty minutes. You gotta bring the air horn.
Speaker 3:In that story, it also said the older gentleman was in a Herman Miller chair, which we know are quite comfortable.
Speaker 1:Those are quite popular Silicon Valley, too.
Speaker 3:Compounds the fact. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that's an elite
Speaker 1:Sleep set. Spot for a nap. That's an elite spot for a nap.
Speaker 2:Chair was arguably designed for office naps. Yeah. No one's getting like real work done
Speaker 1:I think so. In a hurtful color. I think so. So, yeah. I I did this one's tough because it's easy to just jump right, Ah, I'm in Matthew Prince's camp.
Speaker 1:Ah, I'm in Vinod Khosla's camp. Also, Vinod didn't fall asleep, so it's all moot. But we know we know the secret. It's the air horn. Bring the air horn.
Speaker 1:No one's falling asleep. Problem solved.
Speaker 2:Tyler had a good story when when they were building Divvy. Oh, yeah. They pitched Rajeev Misra Mhmm. In the SoftBank Redwood City HQ. And then Masa in Tokyo soon after, it was absolute cinema.
Speaker 2:Poppins in smoking of vape, loud Doing coughing both crazy.
Speaker 3:To throw us off.
Speaker 1:Wait. What? The intentional coughing
Speaker 2:Assistance whispering in Rajeev's ear. That's a power move. That's power move.
Speaker 1:You gotta respect that. See,
Speaker 2:that's a post singularity job Yeah. There.
Speaker 1:For sure. Come in, whisper into the person's ear. It's good.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So the most asked in mind questions ever asked in Tokyo, Masa starts the meeting with you have ten minutes. We flew like twenty hours.
Speaker 2:See, that's just a great way to get You
Speaker 1:got to the the power play, Tyler. Sorry, buddy.
Speaker 2:You got I think you just I think got that's just a great way to get really get to the meet right
Speaker 1:I think so. Quickly. I think so. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TBPN today.
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