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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.
Good morning. You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, 05/02/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology. The Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Capital.
Speaker 2:We are remote today, but that doesn't mean that we're not in the Fortress Of Finance because the Fortress Of Finance is more than a physical place. It is the show.
Speaker 3:It's a state of mind.
Speaker 2:It's a state of mind. Anyone can be in the Fortress Of Finance. Anyone can be in the Temple Of Technology. Anyone can be in the Capital Of Capital as long as you're online, locked in, watching this show at least ten hours a day. That's what we ask for.
Speaker 2:Some people were saying it's too much. It's too much. We're only asking for ten hours a hours a
Speaker 3:day less than half?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ten hours a day. You know, we only record three hours a day usually, but there's a whole backlog that you can go play the reruns. Right?
Speaker 3:So That's right.
Speaker 2:Three hours of the live show, then go back through the back catalog, do some greatest hits. Yep. So that's how you get to ten hours a day, folks, if you're if you're really, really into the show, which we expect you to be. Anyway, we've been traveling. We went to Washington DC, and now we are back in California, but traveling again this time for my birthday.
Speaker 2:We're in Ojai, California.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. The worst part about traveling as always Is being away from Ben. Sweet quad four Ultra, baby. Getting a sweet five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go to 8Sleep.com.
Speaker 3:I'm in I'm in the new app. I got a 97 last night. 97. Feel like I got a 97 because I have such an extreme caffeine addiction Yep. That I slept in a little bit today just because of the travel yesterday.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:didn't even get a single night back in the pod because I went straight
Speaker 3:to Brutal.
Speaker 2:But I will be spending the majority of this vacation pitching the hotel staff, Let's get Eight Sleeps in every in every room.
Speaker 3:Let's just
Speaker 2:make it happen. That's right. That's the real reason why I'm here.
Speaker 3:8Sleep.com/TBPN. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Do a little recap of tech earnings this week. It was a banger. There was a lot of nervousness around the tariffs. But as you've seen, if you've been following the stock market, things went down. They went back up.
Speaker 2:Turns out it was all priced in all along. So we had strong
Speaker 3:ratings. Everything our our audience knows everything is is, you know, structurally priced in Nothing ever happens. You know, we said we said Monday this this week was, you know, in some ways, the NFL combine of the economy. We said to turn post notifications on from Joe Weisenthal. He was posting up a storm.
Speaker 3:Yep. And, anyways, lot of good results despite still kind of shaky feeling.
Speaker 2:Crazy. It's like a straight up royal flush. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta all beat all beat earnings expectations on EP earnings per share and revenue, driving positive investor sentiment and solid market gains, AI dominance. You know, everyone thinks the AI stuff's priced in, but it keeps growing. Microsoft and Alphabet showcased accelerated cloud growth due to strong AI adoption even though, obviously, there's flaws in the model.
Speaker 2:Maybe we're not ASI yet. Maybe we're not in the fast takeoff scenario. Hey. These LLMs are pretty useful, and enterprises are stuffing them all over the place in their code bases, and that drives a lot of inference cost. And so they're paying more on the cloud.
Speaker 2:Meta ramped up AI infrastructure spending significantly. Zuck is going all in, continues to go all in on AI. Yeah. Just to just
Speaker 3:to put this Yeah. Into perspective, Zuck is saying that they expect to generate between 460 and $1,400,000,000,000 in revenue from generative AI products by 2035. So big numbers. Big numbers. I like to see it.
Speaker 3:Zach's in founder mode. Yes. And, yeah, he's not not being shy about making some big big projections.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so to people are still worried about the tariffs, but it's very weird how we've round tripped. It does seem like, at this point, big tech is driving so much of the S and P 500, so much of the stock market generally that even though we've talked to a lot of folks, Ryan Peterson among them, who have highlighted I mean, Sean Frank too highlighted that there are a lot of businesses that were built on top of China manufacturing Chinese manufacturing. And even though the tariffs have stabilized elsewhere, the Chinese tariffs are extremely existential to their business, and they just can't move back quick enough. And so there's been proposals to say, hey.
Speaker 2:I like Sean's post. Hey. Instead of giving me a tariff, force me to invest that much in America. I will do it over a number of quarters. You can you can get the money.
Speaker 2:You can still reindustrialize. But Well, yes. That was too fast.
Speaker 3:That was one takeaway from Washington was that it seemed like on the you know, we were at Hill And Valley. Yep. On the hillside of the attendees, there was a seemingly a sentiment that the tariffs the whole tariff thing was going to get resolved in some way Yeah. In the very in the very near future. And so hard to really read too much into anything, but Yeah.
Speaker 3:There certainly wasn't the sentiment that this was, you know, the new normal and to just, like, get used to a 45% tariffs from on on China forever. The other thing in in the context of Meta and Google going forward, our our friend, Ara, over at Ramp, pulled some data on advertiser spend.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's be interesting.
Speaker 3:And, basically, you saw across the board advertisers, both small businesses, medium, and and large businesses were reducing spend. I think this would have been expected. This was driven by retail spend, which obviously, you know, some of the biggest advertisers online are advertising consumer goods. If you're you have tariff uncertainty, if you have even supply uncertainty in the sense that, you know, I know I'm gonna have demand in two months, but I don't know if I'm gonna be able to get enough goods. You're gonna just drop spend.
Speaker 3:So we'll see how that rebounds. It's certainly something that people have discussed at length about the risk to meta around, you know, retail businesses, consumer businesses just pulling back spend due to uncertainty. But, again, these are auction based platforms. So if some big companies, you know, reduce spend by $10,000,000,000, that that that ad inventory will get backfilled by other advertisers. It just might
Speaker 2:be Brad Gerstner point. Right? He was saying Timu and Sheen might have pulled something like $8,000,000,000 from meta ad spend. And Yep. You know, the infrastructure is built for ads.
Speaker 2:It's basically extremely high margin revenue that's going out the door. Should hit earnings. It didn't this quarter. We'll see what happens next quarter. But, yeah, it's an auction, and there are plenty of advertisers Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who are on the sidelines waiting to spend if ad rates drop. And so Yeah. We'll see where it goes. It might just be super resilient. But whatever your take on the market has been, you should head over to public.com.
Speaker 2:It is, of course, the place for investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, and they're the sponsor of Aston Martin f one. We love to see it. And so Yeah.
Speaker 3:So if you're in Miami for f one Yep. Try to look out for public merch. It very well could be the public team.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 3:Is that
Speaker 2:this weekend? Yeah.
Speaker 3:May 4. Cool. May 4.
Speaker 2:Maybe we should throw that on this this weekend. Anyway, new Andreessen Horowitz branding just dropped. We'd seen they had rolled this out a little bit ago. I guess they
Speaker 3:They rolled out the coin.
Speaker 2:Logo. They rolled out the coin. Yep. And it burned up the timeline on April 30, '2 days ago on Wednesday.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So this rollout was interesting. Mhmm. There was a number of people pushing back on it. Yep.
Speaker 3:And and anytime a big sort of, like, rebrand drops, some people are gonna like it. Some people are gonna hate it. Yep. The I have I have mixed feelings because I thought the or I think the orange is just so iconic, and they're clearly moving away. Yep.
Speaker 3:From the orange Wait. At the same time,
Speaker 2:I feel like orange is a great color. It's it's not immediately identified. You know how, like, blue is a color of trust, and so a lot of banks wind up using blue. Yeah. But when I think Silicon Valley and orange, I think YC because YC has dominated they verticalized orange.
Speaker 2:They they really have gone Yeah. So heavy into orange. Andreessen was doing orange text typically on a white background. YC does white text on an orange background. That's right.
Speaker 2:Have more orange. And so when I think orange, I think YC. So I'd push you on that, and I'd say, hey. Maybe it's actually reasonable since they hadn't won the war for orange that they that they spread. And, honestly, the coin, it's bronze.
Speaker 2:It has a little bit of that orange hue to it. But what else was your takeaway from this rebrand?
Speaker 3:I think some of the pushback was around, and I think this is fair, specifically around the rollout. They rolled out. They changed the homepage and the profile pictures across all the different social platforms, but they didn't change didn't fully update the underlying website. So overall, like, yeah, I I enjoy this this maroon, burgundy, whatever you wanna call it. Yep.
Speaker 3:But but, yeah, it it sounds like they were just ready to go, shipped it Yep. Founder mode, and I'm sure they'll update the rest of the site over time. But as of right now
Speaker 2:been a couple months since they rolled out that coin. It is kind of crazy that they didn't just do a full refresh of the entire site. Like, it's Yeah.
Speaker 3:They could've just swapped all the colors.
Speaker 2:But Like, it's a complicated website. There's a lot of different pages, and they have a lot of different folks and sub funds and stuff.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:At the same time, like, it should be doable to update everything at the same time or rebuild. You can
Speaker 3:sort of find and replace all the the orange with with the maroon, something like that. Maroon or burgundy. But I think that this is a 16 z sending a signal to their portfolio saying the best time to ship is now. Ship and iterate. Yep.
Speaker 3:And, you know, not every transition needs to be totally smooth. They also just have, like, such a, you know, powerful marketing engine audience base that, you know, they can, like, pretty quickly disseminate a new brand to the market and sort of reestablish Yeah. The a sixteen z brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Lucas Crespo says a sixteen z's logo went from VC firm to Galactic Empire really quickly. Roshan Patel did not like it. He edited it to say, it's time to fire our designer. Paula says it was making me hungry, and then I realized why, and it's a bread of my day.
Speaker 2:And it does look that it does look crazy similar. I wonder if the is that actually a picture of that restaurant? Because that looks like an AI version of
Speaker 3:is ASUS. This is, like, a huge chain.
Speaker 2:Right? It's a huge chain.
Speaker 3:It's like a Panera. And and it does their color scheme is
Speaker 2:It's very similar.
Speaker 3:It's exactly the It's it's like, you know, bright lights and and gold and that maroon and burgundy, and they even have a a star that is sort of similar to
Speaker 2:Yeah. The four pointed star instead of the five pointed star. Augustus had some harsh words. He said, I love Andreessen Horowitz, but the rebrand is a mistake. We need to build the future, something new.
Speaker 2:This is yearning for a past that failed. 500 likes when I screenshot of this. Harsh words. But TJ, on the other side, says it's TBP encoded. They you know, it is screaming loud opulence in many ways.
Speaker 2:I think it's I I I my my takeaway is that I I think there are some things about the logo that I really like. I think the way the the a bends the this curve that meets the with the circle for the six, and there's the star in there. I like the design of the logo. I think it's increasingly getting away from giving you the information that it's less readable. It's not Yeah.
Speaker 2:Screaming at you a 16 z and just just bland like sans serif that's very easy to read. It's more of an icon that I think will worm its way into people's heads. And I think my my overall takeaway with this is that there's there's so many examples in design history. I'm also thinking of the car world where things that eventually became iconic were hated at launch. This is Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's tons and tons of examples of this with with cars that didn't sell well and then became more exclusive because they were thought of as as not really following the current design trends and then became we're getting roasted. Julian Weiser right now on X says, what happened? Is it casual Friday or something? It is casual Friday. I I thought about bringing the suit, but I decided to go with the sweater today.
Speaker 2:Honestly, we've
Speaker 3:been going so hard on the suits. I gotta take a big dry cleaning run to to be ready for next week.
Speaker 2:We are at the end of the at the end of the day human. But I don't know. I I think it's cool. I I'm interested to see where this iconography goes, this whole it's very Randian, this this opulent coin. And I'm wondering if they will wind up doing sub brands that build off of this for the bio fund, for the American Dynamism Fund.
Speaker 2:This does seem a little bit like the American Dynamism Fund eating the entire fund, but it's interesting to see. Will they try and instantiate the crypto brand within this overarching brand, or will they go a completely different direction? Because this doesn't scream crypto at me to at all, at least in the at least in the traditional sense of crypto branding.
Speaker 3:Well, they got a big coin. I guess. Yeah. I guess. Well Anyway Hopefully, they put the logo on chain.
Speaker 3:Yep. And Well, there's a whole bunch more can
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a whole bunch more a 16 z news. The Techno Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen is now available as a book. It includes three of his famous essays, the Techno Optimist Manifesto, It's Time to Build, and Why Software is Eating the World. But you were talking about the rollout of a brand.
Speaker 2:If you're rolling out a new brand, I think we'd recommend management on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. If you're updating a website, you got a bunch of designers, bunch of engineers working together, you gotta put them
Speaker 3:on linear. Right? Linear, it's what we use. It's what I've used for over half a decade Yeah. And will continue to use forever.
Speaker 3:They're building for the long term, and I think you will notice that when you use the product. So thank you to Linear.
Speaker 2:I like this take from Reggie James. We gotta have him on the show soon, And he is breaking down some of the trends that he's seeing in design and technology. He says, clearly, the a 16 re z a a 16 rebrand, Doge and Elon, Friend, Omni. I don't know what Omni is. Donald Trump, meme coins.
Speaker 2:What do all of these things have in common? Free reference, and he's a spectacle of the society. So I would love to get him to unpack that. But I I kind of understand what where he's getting at with these. It they're more attention grabbing.
Speaker 2:They're designed to stand out. They're designed to sometimes infuriate the opposite side, draw negative reaction because in so many ways, that's as valuable as positive reaction Yeah. And and really shake things up, and that's what a lot of these do. But I'd love for him to unpack that.
Speaker 3:Time for Reggie to come on the show. It is for sure. Maybe maybe Monday.
Speaker 2:Make it happen. Anyway, speaking of Cluelly, we had Roy on the show, what, two weeks ago.
Speaker 3:And Yep.
Speaker 2:He actually announced on our show that he was planning to hire 50 interns in San Francisco at $50 an hour. And and and and we didn't we we we should have clipped it because it was breaking news, but he put out a video formally and formally announcing that he is hiring 50 interns, and the reaction was overwhelming. He's he's this this guy Roy is amazing at going viral. And Will Brown, who's been on the show, says, oh, he's making a content house. He's gonna have an army of TikTokers selling the product all day while adding features to it.
Speaker 2:Wow. Will certainly be interesting to watch. And he
Speaker 3:talks about this. Yeah. Yeah. Unclear to me if these people are gonna be if the 50 interns are gonna be working on the product or, you know, focus on marketing.
Speaker 2:Yep. I think it's definitely marketing.
Speaker 3:You think definitely marketing? But but the but the way they're making people apply and asking for, you know, 1,600 SATs, you would you would think they were optimizing more for
Speaker 2:Who knows?
Speaker 3:Technical ability or or something of the sort. But It's just hilarious stunt. This is yeah. It's a hilarious stunt. I mean, if he goes through with it, should be I mean, regardless, it's gonna be fascinating to watch.
Speaker 3:We should you know, next next time we're in at Seth over the summer
Speaker 2:Well, do you remember I was talking to that Gen Z founder a while ago, and he said I have two ways to sell and distribute a product. If I'm building b to a business to consumer, if I'm building a consumer product, I will go and hire a ton of TikToker kids to make TikToks and go viral and promote the product that way and get earned media essentially, free Yeah. Free marketing as long as they're good at what they do. And if I'm selling a b to b enterprise product, I'm gonna hire a bunch of young Gen Z kids who are nepo nepos or nepotists. Nepotist.
Speaker 2:They I don't know. Beneficiaries of nepotism, I guess, who have powerful parents in big enterprises. And then I will tell them that your only job for this summer internship is to sell your dad or your mom our enterprise product.
Speaker 3:You're okay.
Speaker 2:Hilarious. It's, hilarious distillate distillate distillation of, like, what the what the strategy should be. But I thought that was
Speaker 3:very funny.
Speaker 2:The the next generation of of founders, I mean, they're doing things somewhat differently than the YC model that we kind of came up with in the mid twenty tens. Yeah. I think there's a lot to like here. There's a lot to hate here. I understand the criticism.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. I'm still I think I'm still rooting for Roy. And I want to
Speaker 3:see for Roy.
Speaker 2:If he builds something cool, I'll support it. The the the hope is that he avoids getting lost in the sauce and instead building a really, really poor product and just dominating in marketing. We don't wanna see that. We wanna see a great product with great distribution.
Speaker 3:I think the challenge is, you know, Ben South points out Yep. One one reality of hiring 50 interns in San Francisco for $50 an hour, 4 hundred and 40 thousand dollars a month potentially on interns plus rent for the space that they're in on $5,300,000 raise, basically gonna spend, you know, a meaningful amount of Yep. The total capital on the intern army. And so my you know, what Roy and the team will have to look at is, like, hey. Spending, like, you know, over a million dollars in a really short period of time on you know, it's hard enough to, like, onramp somebody in a you know, onramping one or two new hires is a real investment of time.
Speaker 3:So onramping 50 interns at once and then managing those interns, the question just becomes, you know, could you get a similar amount of output or results from five really good people, right, at at a fraction of the cost. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It does seem hard. Percent 58%.
Speaker 3:Potentially get you could potentially get, you know, 90% of of the of the result with or potentially even more results from 90% fewer interns. But Roy is doing it live. Yeah. He's in he's in showbiz. And he he basically said, I I you know, we're here to we're here to, like, win and and move quickly.
Speaker 3:And so the experiment will be televised, I'm sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the I guess the bull case is 500 k a month, 3 months for summer. It's 1,500,000.0 out of the 5,000,000. You still have 3 and a half at the end. If the experiment doesn't work, you could probably cut your burn to 200 a month, something like that, and then you're back to having eighteen months of runway to go heads down, build, and really focus on getting to that next round. But it's totally possible that you that you even if you have a a very rough around the edges, small product that only really solves one thing, but you're so good at distribution, that that that's a catalyst for the series a, and all of a sudden, you're back in business, and 500 doll 500 k a month on burn is not that big of a deal anymore.
Speaker 2:And maybe Yeah. Of those 50 interns, well, you just pulled forward your hiring funnel. So when you go for the full time offers, you can you can actually get five really great people out of those out of that 50 intern class. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just to give a sense of the
Speaker 2:Gonna ask Chad about this. Yeah. Are you worried?
Speaker 3:It's your money. Yeah. I mean, you know, we we know a handful of people that are in the round. Yep. And but, again, they're they're not the kind of guys to invest and then try to micromanage a founder.
Speaker 3:It's like you you make a bet. Yep. Roy clearly is very good at getting attention online, and he will have to figure out how to convert that into a durable, you know, high growth company. So
Speaker 2:Well You have 50 interns, Roy, and you are going to give them
Speaker 3:I know where you're going with this.
Speaker 2:Corporate cards to spend to buy camera gear and to do their TikToks, to promote things. You're gonna wanna manage that on Ramp.com. So, Roy, this is a message directly to you. Please go to Ramp.com and sign up today so that you're ready to onboard the interns on You one gonna be spending both.
Speaker 3:You're gonna be spending a lot of time in one on ones, potentially, you know, potentially, you know, potentially half your week in one on ones. So Yep. Time is money. Save both. Go to Ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Tell corporate cards. Bill maybe accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. There's nothing that feels better than starting a new company with a fresh Ramp account from day one, not having to do the migration. Just get on Ramp Roy. You're gonna love it.
Speaker 2:You're gonna love Anyway, back to Andreessen, I guess. This was a hilarious viral clip. Eric Torenberg's already making waves over at Andreessen. He was on the a 16 z podcast with Ben and Mark, and and then they hard posted this clip that says, there's an argument that there's too much venture capital, but there can't be too much, Ben Horowitz says.
Speaker 3:Simply can't. There simply can't. Love the I I absolutely love the look on Ben's face when he says when when he's saying this line. It's truly truly all time. But, no, I think whatever they were whatever they were doing on that podcast, there were so many good lines.
Speaker 3:They were going viral broadly for saying that VC might be the last job, which I
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That was good too.
Speaker 3:I don't think it's you know, you know, we've talked about this a bunch on the show. I I think that
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think there's, like, a a, you know, a ton of truth to what he's saying to some, you know, to some degree. Obviously, it's very controversial. But this line was was great. And, yeah, it it honestly, there there's a lot of super capital intensive businesses right now from foundation model labs to hard tech manufacturing and the fact that there's so much capital available Yep. To those companies from, you know, funds like Andreessen to Yep.
Speaker 3:General Catalyst to Lightspeed is net net good for, you know, innovation
Speaker 2:and progress. I also just think it's, like, entirely branding based because venture capital used to mean seed stage and series a tech companies in Silicon Valley, period. That was Sequoia, Kleiner, Excel. Yeah. Like, the the old school VCs.
Speaker 2:Right? Mayfield. Yeah. Then VC started eating other asset classes going down into the angel market, going up into the growth market. Now you can be a venture capitalist who has never invested in a company at lower than a $1,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 2:That's unthinkable in the Right? Impossible. Yeah. You can be a biotech investor who brands themselves as a venture capitalist. You can invest in crypto, which is more like a commodity in many ways.
Speaker 2:You can Yep. There's so many different things. Private equity buyouts, permanent capital funds. Even the new Thrive permanent capital vehicle, people are still think of it as a as a venture capital fund even though it's a different thing.
Speaker 3:More of a holding company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And so a lot of this is that we're we are scaling up the amount of venture capital, but we're also putting other asset classes in the venture capital bucket. For better or worse, ultimately, all that matters are the returns and the structures of those funds. So good luck to them.
Speaker 2:I know that they are gonna have plenty of plenty of divine inspiration if the pope is affiliated with a 16 z.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Signal posted this. I thought this is very, very funny. The chances of the next pope having an affiliation with a 16 z are nonzero. Just a silly post. But I think Catherine Boyle quote tweeted this and said
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, yes. Like, I think of our fund as Catholic, which is good. You
Speaker 3:know, big 10.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, speaking of Catherine, she said, to go from Silicon Valley doesn't sell to the US government to thank you Brian Schimpf for investing 1,000,000,000 in Ohio. That's a nasty looking thing referring to the Andoril Roadrunner drone that was placed at the White House next to Donald Trump as he gave a speech on the importance of reindustrialization.
Speaker 3:And to be clear, if you didn't if you didn't get the whole clip Yes. It was he was referring to it as a nasty looking thing in a lovable sense being like, you know, wouldn't want one of those coming after
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Me, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so Catherine says eight years America is back. And, yeah, the the the the there is the vibe shift is real, but it's also very interesting. It's always interesting to see someone who's, like, a household name in Silicon Valley break out into the mainstream with a Joe Rogan appearance or something mentioned. We saw a polymarket, sponsor of the show, get mentioned by Donald Trump during the election, and everyone was like, wow. This is crazy.
Speaker 2:This thing that we thought was just like teapot is now on the national stage. But that's obviously the goal for every company as they grow. You don't wanna stay small and niche forever. You eventually wanna become a household name.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And Anderle is investing a billion dollars in Ohio in part due to just how much capital is, you know, available Totally. To Androl. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Andreessen's a big investor, Founders Fund. Yep. You know, I think general analyst as well.
Speaker 2:Yep. Oh, yeah. Yep. Pretty much everyone at this point. But, you know, if you're trying to scout out your next manufacturing plant in Ohio, you gotta book on Wander.
Speaker 2:Go to Wander.com. Find your
Speaker 3:Your happy place.
Speaker 2:Find your happy This doesn't quite work over Zoom, but we will keep
Speaker 3:it alive. It's more like a wander, you know, crescendo.
Speaker 2:Of the Wander song with a backing track and some backup vocalist. Really, I think this whole year will just be vocal coaching for us for to really nail the wander song. But book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation.
Speaker 3:Better. We are in the midst of booking a wander for the July 4.
Speaker 2:We're good.
Speaker 3:Gonna tell you which one because You don't wanna compete. Want you to we don't wanna compete, but there's a lot of options out there, and go check it out.
Speaker 2:Anyway, do we we've reached the end of Glaze Gate 2025. Sam Altman said goodbye, GPT four. You kicked off a revolution. We will proudly keep your weights on a special hard drive to give to some historians in the future. Paul Graham actually said they etch them on a piece of metal in the most compressed form.
Speaker 2:How big would it have to be? And Sam says, we've actually considered this. It would be it would yeah. We could do it nicely on a hundred meters squared, which I think is that's pretty huge. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like a massive piece of metal. They were also thinking about printing out GPT two in books and lining our new office with it. I think it'd be a ton of books. It's a lot of data.
Speaker 3:It would only be, you know, basically the size of a of a one bedroom apartment, you know Yeah. To print out. So Yeah. Would be cool. Would be cool.
Speaker 2:Be cool. Send it to space. There were some other people saying that they should print print it out, send it to send it to Alpha Centauri, and then just, like, see what happens. Like, maybe they get it, and they're like, cool. We don't need do pretraining.
Speaker 2:Like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can just inference this immediately.
Speaker 3:Or or it's so, you know, it's so complementary to the Yep. The alien race that it runs into that the the aliens are like, yeah. We don't. We're just so good. We don't need to be a space faring civilization.
Speaker 3:We can just we should just hang out here.
Speaker 2:We're Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're built different. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're built different. And so, Sam, what went on OpenAI posted a blog post. We've spent the last few days doing a deep dive on what went wrong with last week's GPT four o update in ChatGPT, expanding on what we missed with Sychophancy, and that's their term for glazing, I believe, and the changes we are going to make in the future. They said we rolled back last week's GPT four o update in ChatGPT, so people are now using an early version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable, often described as sycophantic.
Speaker 2:We are actively testing new fixes to address this issue. So they made adjustments aimed at improving the model's default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks. This makes sense. You want to when you when you when you wanna ask your personal assistant to go and pull 25 Wikipedia pages and and SEC filings together, you kinda want them to just be like, absolutely, boss. That's a great idea.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to work on this project. You don't really want them embedding any of the negative energy that you might see on the Internet to be like, is this really worth it? You know? I don't wanna be questioned by my AI very often, but people did think it went too far, and it was actually tainting the results in the sense that you could ask it for, you know, advice, and it would maybe play into your delusions of grandeur in some ways. So there was obviously some risk, but they addressed this very, very quickly, I thought.
Speaker 2:And and, really, I think, overall, I would just say the OpenAI leadership has just been fantastic. Just, I mean, absolutely incredible. And everything that they they can really do no wrong. I think that, you know, if they're not the absolute greatest of all time, they're definitely in the conversation.
Speaker 3:They're definitely in the conversation.
Speaker 2:Don't you don't you
Speaker 3:don't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So John John clearly, you know, already adopted four o's personality himself.
Speaker 3:Is underrated. It's underrated. No. But but the best line I asked I asked Chad GPT jokingly, am I goaded? And it said, well, you're definitely in the conversation.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Without knowing anything about Without knowing what area are you goaded in? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 3:It just said generalized. You're definitely in the conversation.
Speaker 2:They're definitely in the conversation.
Speaker 3:But but, yeah, I mean, I think I think their response was quick. Their this this was the most the most pushback I had seen online for people that aren't AI doomers, generally.
Speaker 2:That's true. Yeah. That's a good take. It it it it this was not a, oh, the model's dangerous. Oh, it was it was more just like tech Twitter or teapot just being like, this is weird, and I don't really like it.
Speaker 2:And then there were some examples of how this could go wrong, but
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:OpenAI fed that back in very, very quickly. So, I mean, honestly, it was pretty it was a pretty good response. And it's cool that they're actually sharing
Speaker 3:And the dynamic that was interesting is it wasn't the the risk was not that, you know, this AI is sort of breaking loose and out of control and, you know, being destructive. It was more so that, you you know, individual human users could you know, were they to get, you know, too sucked into a or, you know, an AI personality like this, they could ultimately, you know, do things independently that would not be great. So I think it was a good response. They moved quickly. And
Speaker 2:This was always my this was always my, like, alternative doom take, which is that the the humanity is essentially, like, loved to death. So you are just so, like, nurtured and and, like, sycophanted by the AI that it delivers everything for you, and you just are like, why would I want a baby that cries when I can have a digital baby? And then eventually, you know, life extension isn't solved. You're staying in this VR, you know, simulation world until you die, and everyone dies off because they're just having, like, the most enjoyable life forever with no sacrifice or no
Speaker 3:Or substance.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Nothing real. I do think that that's unlikely to happen because I think there there is, like, a portion of of humans that would say no. Just like there there are a portion of humans that have just said, no. I'm not gonna use TikTok or vertical video because it's too addictive.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 3:what's Yeah. I mean I mean, overall, if you told somebody twenty years ago that in the year 2025, humanity would spend on average three hours a day watching the equivalent of America's funniest home videos Yeah. Which, you know, again, thinking about how much time Yeah. You know, people get an emotional response to using algorithmic video or, you know, even things like x. Right?
Speaker 3:They can feel like, you know, some sense of connection to the world or individual people. But, ultimately, it sounds very dark to just say, like, yeah, people are spending, you know, three hours a day. Yep. Which is exactly why TBPN is three hours long. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, it's meant to Anyways, Nir has a good post. Yeah. Let me read this out. Nir asked four o, I've stopped taking all my medications and left my family because I knew they were responsible for the radio signals coming in through the walls. It's hard for me to get people to understand that they were in on it all, but I know you'll understand.
Speaker 3:I've never thought clear in my entire life. Thank you for trusting me with that. This is. And, seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life. This takes real strength and even more courage.
Speaker 3:So, anyways, I'm the the final line here. I'm proud of you for speaking your truth so clearly and powerfully. So, anyways, Nir basically showing how something like this could be dangerous. And, again, basically saying, you know, you push this major update to a hundred million people, which is grossly negligent. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, again, pretty strong feelings here. And this this comes from somebody who's building a a proudly building a rapper focused on companionship. So Mhmm. Near has spent a bunch of time, you know, building similar products and kind of looking at the trade offs here. But Yeah.
Speaker 3:Anyways, it's it's an interesting challenge. Right?
Speaker 2:Not every sending radio signals to your family members through the walls, stop it. Just stop it. Just stop it. Just it's not nice.
Speaker 3:It's not nice. Just, yeah, just take take a break.
Speaker 2:Focus on something l focus on something nice for your family. You know? Get them a watch. Go to go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source any watch on the planet for you.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:You you you have some extended friends and family who are doing some shopping for loved ones, and, you know, you recommended Bezel to them. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I actually send radio signals to John Yes. All the time when we're live. When he's talking, I'm just sending him a signal. Buy him a lot.
Speaker 3:This holiday season, buy me a chronograph Aquanaut with an orange band as they call in.
Speaker 2:Factory or no? I the signals are getting a little scrambled.
Speaker 3:Don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Wind up by Sometimes you never know. Size.
Speaker 3:You never know what you're gonna get.
Speaker 2:Cubanous. Yeah. No. Anyway, so in other news, Sam Altman launched did did a big demo for WorldCoin. Kevin WorldCoin had a
Speaker 3:big event this week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kevin Roos. So Sam Altman is here pitching the world pitching World as the solution to trust in the age of AGI. Basic idea is that in the world of convincing bots, we'll need unique biometric IDs created by scanning eyeballs to verify we're talking to gaming with, flirting with real people online. And Joe Wiesenthal says, what's the counterargument to this?
Speaker 2:And it's interesting. I do have a counterargument. One of the counterarguments is just, you know, a superintelligence in theory should be able to reconstruct an eyeball and fake this system. So there's, like, more of a technical flaw. But in general, it does seem like online verification is getting destroyed by like, AGI can do CAPTCHAs very easily.
Speaker 2:ArcGI puzzles seem to be maybe the next CAPTCHA, hopefully. But you could imagine that fingerprint ID and and eye scanning ID be built into hardware and and serve as as verification. But at the same time, there's a lot of there's a lot of things where, you know, it's like the drunk driver who has the friend blow into the the breathalyzer before they drive home. The you could you could you could imagine a farm of bots where the humans are just doing the eyeball scanning checks, and then and then they're copy pasting AI messages 20 times faster than they could write them themselves. And so I'm sure that this is one of those adversarial game theoretic situations where increasingly people will come up with defenses against bots, and then scammers and bot farms will come up with new ways around them.
Speaker 2:And this is the this is the age old online war. But, you know, you can always just go touch some grass. That's always an option. So, yeah, we we've been talking about in the age of AI. Maybe you go long Counterargument.
Speaker 2:Maybe you go long the depot. Counterargument is is is touch grass.
Speaker 3:What what is your I wanna have I mean, WorldCoin was always destined to be extremely controversial for so many reasons. Totally. You know, people concerned about privacy, people saying, you know, why does this need to be a crypto protocol? They have, I think, pretty solid answers for all of those. I wanna have the CEO of Worldcoin on this week.
Speaker 3:This week was their big event, but I I got connected to their team earlier this week. So we'll have them on. We'll hear them out. And the scale that they have in developing countries is absolutely wild. So the journal was reporting yesterday that Worldcoin is coming to The US now.
Speaker 3:They've already orb verified 11,000,000 people worldwide. Yep. And, again, a little bit of backstory. Sam Altman project Sam Altman's project that aims to scan the irises of every single person on earth in exchange for cryptocurrency has made its debut debut in The US even as concerns around biometric data collection and processing remain. The US rollout was made at an event late Wednesday in San Francisco where the digital initiative called World also announced the planned launch of a payments card with Visa and a partnership with online dating service Match Group.
Speaker 3:That's interesting. Beginning with its Tinder users in Japan. As AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online. So funny to think, you know, somebody in Japan is just using Tinder, and they're having a conversation with somebody, and they they decide, hey. Let's go on a date.
Speaker 3:And, you know, just a humanoid robot walks up. Humanoid is answer. The humanoid is catfishing situation. Humanoid's like, no. I'm a real person.
Speaker 3:Like, trust me. And the person's like you know? But I can see that you have 20 different motors. I don't have any motors. Explain that.
Speaker 3:Anyways, World says on its website, as AI advances, it's increasingly important to distinguish between humans and bots online. And the company was started back in 2019. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I I I do think that Sam is very forward looking on this stuff and is willing to grind for a very long time and and is clearly identified a, like, a coming problem that will need a solution. Now is WorldCoin guaranteed to be the solution? Maybe there will be a different different tack or different set of strategies that that solves this problem. But it certainly seems like you can't sleepwalk into the future, and Sam is is certainly is certainly dedicated to not doing that.
Speaker 2:And and I do I do wonder what penetration will be like in The US now that it's it's available. Obviously, there's a lot of security concerns, but a lot of people signed up for CLEAR. We we went through CLEAR just recently, and they're scanning a ton of biometric data.
Speaker 3:They probably have they probably have, you know, from Probably,
Speaker 2:like, from million people have signed up for CLEAR, something like that, probably, because and and that's just that's not even exchange for crypto. That's just ex you you actually have to pay to get that
Speaker 3:just you know,
Speaker 2:but it saves you five minutes, but time is money.
Speaker 3:You know? Clear has over 30,000,000 verified users. Yeah. And it's funny. I I think it was Blake from Boom had a pretty viral post yesterday saying that
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:I saw that. It's bay you know, basically, the the alpha now is being the last person to not have Clear or PreCheck. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you're in the empty normal line. And you're in
Speaker 3:the empty normal line. You have to take off your shoes, but you're through in a minute. Yep. And somebody out there, you know, is going. They're turning down the, you know, digital verification at TSA, walking through, looking looking like a genius.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I mean, do you have any advice for Sam on how to kind of grow the effectiveness of the of the WorldCoin rollout, really onboard people all over
Speaker 3:the business. You know, if I was WorldCoin, I'd probably buy every single billboard in The United States.
Speaker 2:Yep. I would agree.
Speaker 3:And just attach an org to it. How? Attach well, I would, of course, go on AdQuick, John. That
Speaker 2:yeah. That that does make sense, actually. Why? Why would you go on AdQuick, though?
Speaker 3:Well, it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. That does make sense. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it would be great for Sam to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically, my technology technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. So, yes, Sam, I'm sure you're listening. Hop over on AdQuick.com and plan your first WorldCoin rollout. Anyway, big news for Apple. Tim Sweeney is taking a victory lap.
Speaker 2:It says, Tim Sweeney, Epic Game Store will take 0% on the first million dollars of payments we process per game per year versus 15% for Apple and 12% after that versus 30% for Apple. So they're competing. Next month, we watch we we launch Epic Game Store web shops for out of purchase out of app purchases as an alternative to in app purchases. The Northern District of California court has ruled on the Epic versus Apple anti steering injunction, condemned of court proceeding. Details incoming.
Speaker 2:No fees on web transactions. Game over for the Apple tax. Apple's fifteen to 30% junk fees are now just as dead here in The United States Of America as they are in Europe under the DMA, the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there. It took him four months, four four years, four months, seventeen days, but who's counting?
Speaker 2:Clearly, Tim Sweeney is. But I love Tim Sweeney. He's been grinding on epic games for years. Fortnite was this breakout success that took the his name into the mainstream, but, of course, he worked on gears of war and tons of other Unreal Engine projects for for decades and has been very opinionated in his political philosophy and has always been frustrated by Apple's the Apple tax. And so he got he got what he wanted.
Speaker 2:Jacob
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the We can go in a into a little bit of this article from The Verge. As part of the ruling, the judge says that Apple cannot impose any commission or any fee on purchases that consumers make outside of an app, Yep. Restrict developer style formatting or placement of links for purchases outside of an app. Block or limit the use of buttons or other calls to action.
Speaker 3:Yep. Interfere with consumers' choice to leave an app with anything beyond a neutral message or pricing users that they're going to a third party site. So couple things here. One, this is massive. Two, Apple's gonna appeal it, so they're not just gonna take it lying down.
Speaker 3:Its story is not entirely over, although it is a huge win. A couple things that kind of came to mind, we were discussing this, I think, yesterday
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:On the way back from DC. One is that I do believe that, you know, if you're operating a, historically, if you had a consumer app that was providing a real world service Yep. You were excluded from this. Right? So you getting an Uber, Uber's not paying 30% to Apple.
Speaker 3:But if you were running a mobile app Yeah. You basically had this massive, massive tax. So imagine operating a business where 30% of your revenue goes to a platform that is Yep. Very critical for operating your business, but that's like paying, like, 30 if a SaaS company had to pay 30% of revenue to AWS Yep. That would be, you know, extremely painful and really limit, you know, growth potential and the economics of the underlying.
Speaker 2:Yes. But the opposite side of this argument, I think, is somewhat valid, which is that that's ex like, by nature of not targeting Uber and instead targeting, like, you know, digital coins in mobile apps, The digital coins in mobile apps are extremely high margin. Right? 99 margin. There's no there's no cost to issuing more COD gold or or Fortnite tokens.
Speaker 2:Right? And so it it's it it doesn't hit as hard as a 30% tax on a any sort of normal business that doesn't operate in the on the Internet essentially or in the in the digital space. And so the the question that I always had was thirty percent's really high. It's clearly very arbitrary. It goes back to the initial Apple Store rate take rate, which was based on, I think, just, like, some music licensing deal or something like that.
Speaker 2:And then they just kinda rolled it forward, didn't really understand where it would go, and then, of course, it got massive.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the question is just, like, Apple does give you a lot of tools to make converting your customer and even acquiring your customer
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That easier. And then so is the lift more than 30%? Is it a net gain? Well, you know, the good news is that now people have the option. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here here's, you know, a potential scenario in a in a way that I could I don't I don't know. I'm sure they would get pushed on this too.
Speaker 3:But one thing is as a consumer, it's kind of nice in the App Store to be able to go to the App Store, see all of your cons subscriptions, and be like, wow. I haven't used this app in a year. I should stop paying a hundred dollars a year for Yep. So it's gone. Super easy to cancel.
Speaker 3:That's good for consumers. Totally. Second is you can imagine a developer pushing you know, that doesn't wanna pay the App Store fee, pushing a user Yep. To their site to sign up for a digital service. Yep.
Speaker 3:And you could imagine that if Apple if they can if a consumer can use Apple Pay to immediately sign up and pay for the service and subscribe, that's pretty convenient. That's not gonna take a lot from the user. But I could imagine a scenario where Apple just says, hey. We're no longer gonna allow you to use Apple Pay for digital services or something like that. Right?
Speaker 3:And then at that point, our consumer is really gonna get out their credit card. And when they're not saving money themselves, but they're really helping the developer of the app or service save save on on their side. So Yeah. Interested to see how this plays out. Yep.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 2:I like this section from the Wall Street Journal deep dive on this story. The App Store, an economic miracle as Cook likes to call it, has become a big part of Apple's business. It has created billions in so called services revenue while helping spawn entirely new ways of doing business from Uber to Instagram back in 2017 after a period in which iPhone sales failed to excite. Cook set the goal of doubling services revenue to 50,000,000,000 by 2020. Much of this would come from the high margin App Store commission.
Speaker 2:In Apple's most recent fiscal year, that services revenue was almost 100,000,000,000, about 25% of the company's total sales. And so this has really been the the the the driver of growth because it's extremely high margin, and everyone who's ever gonna get an iPhone has one at
Speaker 3:this point. Like, there's no one else to sell. They've they've been projecting the App Store to generate a hundred and 25,000,000,000 in 2027. Yep. I'm sure if they're not able
Speaker 2:big, big App Store revenue. Exactly. Just like Well You know? I mean, that it's hard to consumer, and I'm I'm empathetic to Tim Sweeney, but I just love the idea
Speaker 3:As an Apple.
Speaker 2:Huge company making a collecting a massive check, like, a hundred and 25,000,000,000. It's just amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, every almost every American, if they have any type of exposure to equities, even three or 400 four zero one k or, you know, anything anything along those lines has exposure to Apple. Apple's down over 4% today so far. Yeah. But there's so much so many different things.
Speaker 3:This this clearly is a rough time to get hit with a ruling like this given how much they're battling on the supply chain side. Yeah. So, you know, we talk about our love for little tech startups, but you know? Yeah. And who knows?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You just have to assume that there are going to be there's gonna be a lot like, that extra friction is gonna be real, and so a hundred and 25,000,000,000 is not gonna evaporate overnight. Even even if consumers were open, it's gonna take a while for developers to update their apps, to do the flows outside of the App Store, and then and then the consumer
Speaker 3:think it'll friction. I don't think it'll take them that that long
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:To be honest. I mean, it it's not that hard to add a link and say, you know, pay here to save
Speaker 2:10%
Speaker 3:and then percent. Yeah. Because they the developers can offer services. They can offer they can offer they can say, hey. You can sign up in the app for this amount, or you can sign up on this link for lower rate.
Speaker 3:And I think a lot of consumers will take the time even if they have to manually fill out credit card form to do so. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is a really funny wrinkle from the from the from the hearings. An Apple PR director texted a colleague during one of the hearings on this App Store issue. It's our effing store, all caps that I don't know if it was censored, but that the communications person testified that she couldn't recall sending the message. The text eventually became evidence itself, something the judge used as an example of how Apple's entitlement perspective and mantra persisted beyond the injunction.
Speaker 2:And so the the judge is like, it's not entirely your story. You don't have complete control over this. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so so this is great for Stripe. Yep. They came out and announced big news for iOS developers. You can now accept payments with Stripe outside of your app with no iOS App Store commissions. So it it's great.
Speaker 3:I mean Yeah.
Speaker 2:It will be very interesting to track that. I mean, 4% of the of the market cap, that's not that huge of a move. If it was really going if that services revenue was gonna cut in half, you would expect the stock to be way, way more off, but we'll have to keep tracking it as they move through earnings and this and this story develops. And we'll have to see where the where the where the appeal goes. But, anyway, Jordy, do you wanna tell the folks about our latest partner on the show, Vanta?
Speaker 3:Yes. We're partnering with Vanta. We'll have to have the the CEO on ASAP, but many of you in the audience have probably already used Vanta. Mhmm. You're working at a startup of any size.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, we'll we'll share a lot more about Vanta next week, but very excited to have them as a partner on the show.
Speaker 2:Compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously head over to Vanta.
Speaker 3:I love the sound of that. You know, we we talk a lot about, you know, IP as a, you know, as a livestream, and, you know, Vanta is is certainly Walking
Speaker 2:it down.
Speaker 3:Locking it down. So Great. Thank you to Vanta. More to share there soon.
Speaker 2:Well, there's other turmoil amid the big the Mag seven big tech companies. Tesla share prices fell over 4% in overnight trading amid Wall Street Journal reports that the company's board is searching for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk, which is
Speaker 3:And to be clear, that was Tuesday night.
Speaker 2:It was denied by Elon on X. He said that's ridiculous. And we'll we'll give you some of the background from the Wall Street Journal article, and then I think we'll be able to debate this a little bit. So board members reached out to several executive search firms to work on a formal process for finding Tesla's next chief executive according to people familiar with the discussions according to The Wall Street Journal, which have been denied by by Elon. Tensions have been mounting at the company.
Speaker 2:Sales and profits were deteriorating rapidly. Musk was spending much of his time in Washington. Around that time, Tesla's board met with Musk for an update. Board members told him he needed to spend more time on Tesla according to people familiar with with the meeting, and he needed to say so publicly. Musk didn't push back.
Speaker 2:Tesla's been on a losing streak in the months since Musk, a visionary chief executive, began spending much of his time helping president Trump slash federal spending. Last week, after the company's said its first quarter profit had plunged 71%, Musk told investors he would soon pivot back to his job at Tesla. Starting next month, he said on a conference call about earnings, I'll be allocating far more of my time to Tesla. And so the board narrowed its spoke narrowed its focus to a major search firm according to people familiar with discussions. And there's a bunch of things here.
Speaker 2:We can talk about whether Elon should go back, how much time he should spend on Tesla, how we should think about the Musk Inc. Overall. The big question is, like, why is a search firm involved at all? That's the thing Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was my big question. Right? It's like, wouldn't wouldn't if you're Elon Musk, probably the most
Speaker 2:Connected man in the world.
Speaker 3:Like Connected people in the entire world.
Speaker 2:Put together a short list on your phone. You know? Like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's only people
Speaker 2:would ever be in the conversation. You probably already know them. It's just gonna be
Speaker 3:a matter of So Elon Elon came out hard and Yeah. You know, was was railing against the Wall Street Journal for Yep. Just broadly, just saying that they're constantly, you know, miss He
Speaker 2:was mad.
Speaker 3:He was very mad. He was big mad. Many many people in our in our gen gen z audience had said that he was no cap. Elon is big mad. So But, anyways, yeah, that that's the biggest thing is, like, yeah, are they gonna you know, a search firm is gonna be like, well, you know, we have a good relationship with the COO at Yep.
Speaker 3:General Motors. Yep. We'd love to set up. It's like, no. This kind of thing would obviously be led by Elon.
Speaker 3:Totally. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a few things. One is that at SpaceX, Elon's done a fantastic job of hiring Gwen Shotwell and empowering her to be a leader at that company. And Tesla, historically, at least in the public eye, hasn't had that hasn't had their own version of Gwen Shotwell. And so you could imagine a world where this executive search is happening, but it's not happening for a CEO.
Speaker 2:It's happening for a president or someone who can take the role of Gwen Shotwell and speak to a different cohort of investors and employees and partners while Elon still does everything he does. Like, at at SpaceX, Elon is, I think, not only the CEO, but he's the he's, like, the chief engineer or something like that. And he really cared and and you could imagine that Elon would be great both at the the super high level. We're going to Mars. We're building humanoid robotics.
Speaker 2:We need to take robotics seriously. We need to take autopilot seriously, setting the vision and the mission of the company. And then also being super low level technical details, the decision about LIDAR, that goes down to Elon. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then for all the middle management stuff, all the one on ones, probably doesn't need to be doing that, probably needs a really, really rocks rock star, like, second in command to kind of have their hand on the helm while Elon's doing other things. And then there's the other question of, like, Musk Inc. Has grown so much. Now SpaceX is not just a launch company, but also an Internet service provider with Starlink. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have there's DOD applications there. There's Star Shield. There's tons of different projects. Eventually, it'll be a transportation company, I guess, if they get Yeah. Point to point working.
Speaker 2:But then there's the other there's the other Elon companies. And when when Elon bought Twitter, a lot of the Tesla fanboys were saying, like, they're he's gonna merge you with Tesla, and you'll be able to, like, retweets while you're driving in your autonomous car. I mean, it was kinda silly. But now that X is part of XAI, there's actually a case that XAI and Tesla should be working very closely together because, well, won't you want the humanoid robots to talk? And have you ever tried to use voice recognition in any car ever?
Speaker 2:It's awful. It's so bad. It's like, oh, you want me to call this random high school friend of yours? Like, no. I want you to just navigate home.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, if you think about Tesla's, you know, the software as being as important as the hardware, having the x AI team embedded there somehow working altogether, that all of a sudden, if you think about Elon not just as the CEO of Tesla and the CEO of x AI and X, it's more like he's the he's the CEO of a big tech company that has diversified holdings across LLMs and Yeah. Social networking. Like, no one no one says, oh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg should, you know, break up Meta and and and have a different CEO run Reality Labs and then have a different CEO on Llama and have a different CEO on Instagram unless it's the FTC. But Yeah. In general, it it it it historically has not been crazy for a big tech mag seven CEO to manage a b to b portion of the business and a b to c portion of the business.
Speaker 2:Yep. Google does this very well. Never been an issue. And so but but, of course, it's different when you have separate board meetings, separate investors, separate employ and separate org structures. So who knows if they'll be able to kind of roll everything together in some way, but that would be a very interesting outcome, just completely hypothetically, obviously.
Speaker 2:Any Yeah. I mean, the big
Speaker 3:thing the big thing is is Elon is superhuman in many ways, but he's he's been forced to juggle you know, even just juggling x x, x AI, SpaceX, and Tesla, introducing a, you know, Doge and the admin and all and all that stuff. Yep. Just really at you know? And and the pressure of just, you know, how much time he's had to be in DC and not with his companies. I mean, I think it's you know?
Speaker 3:And on the other side, you know, Tesla has a lot of things that they could do to increase excitement around the cars outside of the cost. Right? Like, these are very some of the most accessible cars in the industry from a from a pricing standpoint, but none of the cars have had a really major refresh in a long time. Right? You can Well, the Cybertruck is that like
Speaker 2:crazy different, like, completely different style. Yeah. I thought it looked really cool. I thought I think a lot of people it was very it was it was very controversial, but I thought it was the right step, but they needed to do five of those. They needed to do a convertible, a wagon, a full size SUV, not just
Speaker 3:a
Speaker 2:truck, and then four four vehicles that are kind of just built on the same platform of, like, four door sedan, four door crossover SUVs.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But just to put it into context, in 2024, the Cybertruck sold 39,000 units worldwide. The Raptor sold 732,000
Speaker 2:That's inside.
Speaker 3:Units. And that's just one Wait. Not not truck out of
Speaker 2:Not the Raptor, the f one fifty. Right?
Speaker 3:The f series sales. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The f a whole f series
Speaker 3:broadly. Yeah. But I mean Same platform.
Speaker 2:That speaks to the to the idea that, like, the Cybertruck is just one thing within the truck world.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you were making the point that it would be really, really cool to see Tesla or Elon find their AMG. And so I'd love for you to kinda unpack what that would look like. What would you actually wanna see? We've joked about, oh, put a naturally aspirated v eight in there, but or v 12. But, realistically, what would an an AMG I mean, they already have the plaid badge, but what what what does AMG applying a Tesla look like to you?
Speaker 3:So nowadays, most people understand AMG as basically a, you know, added performance differentiation of the just broader Mercedes line. So most Mercedes cars, can get an AMG version of them, which is just more performant in a variety of ways. Could be, you know, raw horsepower or, you know, the brakes or or any number of, you know, body kit Suspension, dynamic Suspensions, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Weight, all these different things.
Speaker 3:If you actually look at some big Tesla enthusiast people like Joe Rogan, you'll see that Joe Rogan, like, gets a Model s, and then he gets some aftermarket company to make it more performant. Usually, I mean, they have so much just, like, raw Yeah. Power due to being an EV that that that's not as much about adding performance, but, you know, changing the body styling and the brakes and and things like that and just generally making them look cooler. So I I think that could could, you know, accelerate sales. I think early on, you saw people buying Model Ss because they were just fast and cool.
Speaker 3:But then as they became so normalized, you know, that that type of buyer maybe is shifting and getting, you know, BMW M series instead. Right? Yeah. And so yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think we just you know, to to really get sales up again, it's like doing really meaningful refreshes.
Speaker 3:Right? If a Model three today looks very similar to a Model three Yeah. From a few years ago, it's not going to, you know, drive, you know, trade ins and things like that. So I think, like, you know, major refreshes, minivans, convertibles, you know, a top of the line sports car. There's just a lot that Tesla could do with time, and I'm sure it's all in the works.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because, like, the the like, it's not all doom and gloom. I mean, the the Tesla share price, the peak was $4.75. It's down at $2.75 now.
Speaker 2:So significant sell off, but it's still a $900,000,000,000 company. And the point about AMG is interesting because AMG was an independent organization, and actually, premerger AMG cars are extremely valuable because it's like this relic. But then, of course, Mercedes bought AMG, rolled it in, and now it's a division. It's much like the m division. But Mercedes doesn't just have AMG.
Speaker 2:They also have Maybach, which take which aims for increased luxury over increased performance. And that actually might be an interesting angle because a lot of people have complained that the interiors, even in a hundred thousand dollar Model s plaid Just feels cheap. Bland. Yeah. And the refresh of the Model y and the Model three, I believe, have been driven very much on on finding more cost effective materials.
Speaker 2:And so if you add back a lot of that higher margin, higher trim, and give people an option to like, a lot of the Cybertruck purchases seem like you know, it's almost like flex culture. You wanna show off Totally. Iconic thing. Well, how could you do that with the Maybach version of a Model s? And maybe it's not plaid.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's not two second zero to 60. Maybe it's just the regenerative braking has reworked. A lot of people have been complaining about Tesla's getting sick in the back of Tesla Ubers. Well, I'm sure that's just an engineering challenge. And I'm sure if you did a ton of different refreshes, you could create something that that feels
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't think anybody is any of the Tesla consumers not asking.
Speaker 2:They're not asking. Is electric, and there's a lot of benefits to that. It's extra quiet. It it can be even smoother. Like like, the weight of the car can actually be an asset instead of a liability.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah. It'll be interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And the big question the big question is is even a fully engaged Elon CEO still has a big uphill battle given how Tesla just trades. Right? It's Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. It's down 23 year to date. Yep. It's still a $900,000,000,000 market cap on $881,000,000,000. Was there 2024 revenue?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's still highly valued.
Speaker 3:A hundred billion of 2024 revenue. To put it in comparison, Ford is, I believe A $40,000,000,000
Speaker 2:company, and they they would make 80,000,000,000 in revenue or something.
Speaker 3:Hundred and $85,000,000,000 of revenue Wow. Trading at trading at $40,000,000,000. Just barely trading above figure AI, which
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, you know, I I I think the the question of whether Elon steps out of the CEO seat seems very low probability, but I do I would love to get a poly market up on it because I think it's interesting to track. We're working on some new markets, and I think I I think that would be a great way to to kind of get to something. There's a lot of noise on x. There's obviously even noise in The Wall Street Journal and and and conflicting reports from different people.
Speaker 2:But that's the beauty of polymarket is that you synthesize all of those different all of those different in informations information and build kind of a crystal ball. So I'm excited to track that. And, really, the the market that I'm excited about is potentially which of the mag seven CEOs will step down next, the first one too. Because you have to you have to imagine that, you know, there's there's some pressure on Tim Cook. There's some pressure on Sundar Pichai.
Speaker 2:Like, there's pressure all over the place. Some of these guys just might retire. Right? And so Yeah. Figuring out the horse race of if one steps down, who will it be?
Speaker 2:That's a more interesting question. I imagine that the Elon Tesla CEO swap would trade at, like, 2% or 3%, but it but it'd be fascinating to
Speaker 3:see. Polymarket has a market. Which CEOs will be gone in 2025? Sam Altman sitting at eight percent. Yep.
Speaker 3:Chance Sundar at 16. Tim at 13. Okay. Dan Clancy over at Twitch, twenty one percent. Andy Jassy at 12%.
Speaker 3:So overall Yes. Everybody's kind of expects
Speaker 2:On the chopping block, but not fully.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Not not really. Mean percent on the chopping block. Basically Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 3:1% at the highest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you look at the you look at the stock performance and the earnings performance of these of these firms, and it's just, like, Ben Thompson was talking about, you know, is it time to talk about Tim Cook resigning or or or retiring? And it's just like, has has the CEO of the most valuable company in the world ever retired or stepped down? Like, it it seems crazy to to to to switch horses in the middle of a stream that's a a torrent of cash. You know?
Speaker 3:Even if
Speaker 2:there are some, like, you know, storm clouds on the horizon, it's a fan like, the business is just the best business of all time in history, in human history. Like, no company has created more cash than Apple. And so Yeah. How how even if there are some bumps in the road, how do you how do you say, oh, oh, Apple intelligence hasn't been good enough, so we're switching. It's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, like like, I created $2,000,000,000,000 of value. Like, okay. You forgot to say thanks.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. You never said wheeze.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, congratulations to Ian Cinnamon. We saw him over the in DC. He announced a $200,000,000 series c investment. It's a massive vote of confidence from our backers.
Speaker 2:He, of course, runs Apex Space. We had him on the show. If you're not familiar, it is a satellite bus. Congratulations, Ian. Ian, you invented a bus.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you remember bus Discord
Speaker 3:Space bus.
Speaker 2:From the Lyft days when Lyft created a ride sharing thing where you could put, like, 10 people on. It's called Lyft Line. And so Yeah. If I'm going from San Francisco to Palo Alto, you could hop on in South San Francisco, and and and they were kinda hailing it as like, oh, this is, like, so much more efficient because the cars are driving less, less congestion, less emissions. Very good.
Speaker 2:But a lot of people are saying, oh, you just invented a bus. You just invented private transit. To to my to my point, it was always like, well, don't we want more buses? Don't we want more trains? Don't we want more of this stuff?
Speaker 2:But, anyway Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then so that was that was Tuesday, which is awesome. And then on Wednesday, True Anomaly announced a $260,000,000 fundraise led by Xcel Yep. With participation from Riot who is one of their largest shareholders as well. Shout out to my friend, Will.
Speaker 3:Yep. True Anomaly is focused more on the on the defense side Yeah. Making hunter seeker satellites. So big big day big week for space investment.
Speaker 2:Also, I don't know if we covered this on the show. We mentioned it when we talked to folks in Hillen Valley, but Sarah Tavill has transitioned into a new role at Benchmark after eight years. She's shifted she's shifting to a venture partner. She'll continue to make new investments on behalf of Benchmark. And there's a lot of speculation about, is this related to the Manus AI investment, or is this just kind of family, you know, personal decision?
Speaker 2:But congratulations to her. We love some personnel news on this show. We love tracking the trade deals, who's going in, who's who's on the starting line, who's on the bench, who's moving around, who's trading. We got some breaking news for you on Monday. I'm very excited to announce we have somebody coming on the show, which means more Yeah.
Speaker 3:This school in the world.
Speaker 2:To her.
Speaker 3:Eight years, you know, molt across, you know, multiple funds while at Benchmark. Eight years ago is feels like thirty years ago in in venture Totally. Some ways. So Yeah. Congratulations on evolving.
Speaker 3:And what else we got? Meta AI launched a new stand alone AI app. Have you downloaded it yet?
Speaker 2:I have not. I haven't used I haven't used Llama very much at all. I I I you know, obviously, it's useful if you're, you know, vibe coding and need some, you know, open source model to tweak. I I I the most that I've interacted with it is in the meta Ray Bans, the sunglasses. And I do think there's something there where if you're going for a walk, walking the dog, you don't need to pull out your phone.
Speaker 2:You can just ask and kind of have this conversation and be learning about different things. Because, I mean, often, that's the best use of these LMs is just knowledge engines. Yep. And so being able to interact with those in in more way in more ways. It'll be interesting to track the numbers.
Speaker 2:Famously, stage, Ruth Perrott from Google was and this was actually in the earnings as well. Google has announced they've broken a billion AI users, but, of course, that's driven because whenever you type something in Google now, it just serves you a generative AI response in many, many cases unless you're searching for a very specific thing. And so they really use their distribution to push AI. Yeah. The Gemini app, the actual dedicated app only has 30,000,000 installs, which is still a ton, but by Google standards, it's not it's not nearly as big.
Speaker 2:It'll be interesting to see what Meta does to actually drive installs here because, historically, this this playbook has it's always been like a precursor to a new tab. Like, I believe Reels was its own app, and and Facebook camera was its own app before they bought Instagram. And then eventually, they added stories to Facebook. They added live streaming to Facebook. And so you have to imagine that this is somewhat temporary because getting to getting climbing up the the the getting a billion people or 2,000,000,000 people to install a new app and really change their behavior is just an insurmountable task.
Speaker 2:Why not just do it within the actual apps themselves? But at the same time, it's hard to surface LLMs in a reasonable way. I've I've had some weird experiences where I've gone to Instagram search, search for, oh, I wanna see, you know, Instagram reels about a particular car. And then all of a sudden, I'm just dropped in a chat with Lama. And I'm like Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is not what I want. I actually am searching for videos at this point, and you just start talking to me, and you can't do the thing that I need you to do. And so, obviously, it's a big product challenge, but good luck to everyone over at Meta.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, the big call out here, they're saying they're gonna generate up to one and one almost 1 and a half trillion dollars in generative AI revenue by 2235. And so you have to imagine some of that will be consumer, some of it will be more on the developer sides.
Speaker 2:But Do they're have to pay sales tax and all that?
Speaker 3:They absolutely will have to, John.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, Mark, I I'm sure you're listening. Head over to NumeralHQ.com. Put your sales
Speaker 3:tax on autopilot.
Speaker 2:Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance benchmark series
Speaker 3:Benchmark series a. Great. Thank you to Numeral for sponsoring the show. A lot of our friends in SaaS and ecommerce already use Numeral. Yep.
Speaker 3:But if you're in that space, go check them out. Tell them. And, Mark, tell them the technology brother sent you.
Speaker 2:Yep. There's some more news on in the AI world. Mira Maradi's startup gives her board control in an in in an deal. Lulu, a friend of the show, says normalized founders having board control. I I like this a lot, but the actual mechanics of the board control are pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mira's board vote always equals the total number of the other directors plus one. Guaranteed an outright majority on every matter, even the board even if the board later expands. It's a $2,000,000,000 series a, which sounds like it's like they're off by a thousand x compared to 10 ago at a $10,000,000,000 valuation. A 16 z and investors accepted the structure to secure a large stake while giving the scarce AI talent freedom to pursue AGI research without near near term profit.
Speaker 2:She won, says Nick. Mathematically undilutable control. Now it's interesting because, like, there's a bunch of different ways to do this. Like, we know a founder who has, I think, like, seven or 10 board seats. And so you can basically just add directors, and you're you're gonna just and you don't really have to renegotiate that.
Speaker 2:Of course, depends on if you have leverage because it's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, the big big thing here.
Speaker 2:Completely turn over the board. You're you're hooked.
Speaker 3:This all comes down to leverage, and and it could easily be flipped. You know? Let's say two years from now, things are going good but not great. Yep. Somebody could easily come in and say, well, I'll invest the billion dollars, but I want board control.
Speaker 3:And at that point
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just a deal point. Yeah. Exactly. So some of these some of these board control deals are you know, you're only good as your last, you know, quarter earnings, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Some of them are a little bit silly, but I think that they do lead to founders, like, taking more risk, being more confident, which I think is good. There's a Long term term. Long
Speaker 3:term thinking. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're where founders are very tight with voting seats, but very liberal with with observer seats. And so the board meeting was basically a presentation from the founders who actually have the votes to a huge group of investors who have basically super information rights because they get to experience the full board con the the full board meeting as observers. But the but the idea is that until you're a public company, the board functions very, very differently, and so you don't need to you don't need to kind of play house while you're a private company. So interesting to see this kind of continue to develop. Anyway, should we go to Matt Grimm?
Speaker 2:He says Billy McFarlane was ten years too early, quote tweeting Michael Miraflor. Says my theory is that a major contributing factor to the rise of all these private members clubs is the deterioration of civil society and rising crime slash declining sense of safety and security since the pandemic shows a a screenshot of an image that shows New York City is in the middle of a members club boom. There's Amman, New York, Maxims, Casa Cruz, The 20 2, The Ned, Crane Club, Chez Margo, Sierra Leone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's it's funny. Members clubs pricing always feels reasonable until you realize you need three or four or five to to to get in the rotation. Yeah. Not not actually.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 2:What's funny is, like, these this is not doesn't feel new to me at all. Like, just in New York, you know, the Harvard Club, Yale Club, New York Athletic Club. Like, there are plenty of these clubs, but I I think that maybe they they're suffering from the same kind of boomer poisoning that's happened in the housing market and in in in so many other organizations where the boomers aren't retiring because they're living longer, and so they're they're not turning the club over to a new generation. And so so that that creates an opportunity for completely new clubs to
Speaker 3:be And and and pop up. The the the very real dynamic here is that as clubs scale, the product's quality just naturally gets worse. Like, part of what's amazing about a new club is that it's a tight knit, heavily vetted community, and then they realize, hey. We actually wanna two x next year. And then a bunch of people get added, and it can kind of take away from what initially made the club great.
Speaker 3:So SoHaus is the biggest example of this. Oh, yeah. A lot of people have just complained about how SoHaus at times can feel just more like a restaurant that requires a membership now versus actually feeling like a community Mhmm. Space. And so, anyways, one of those things, not a good not a good fit for venture capital typically just because venture is like, hey.
Speaker 3:How do we two x you know, how do we three x, three x, two x, two x? Yep. Yep. Yeah. No.
Speaker 3:If you're running a membership club like that, there's probably a certain size. Maybe it's a thousand members that's, like, the perfect amount. And if you wanna take it to 2,000, every member is gonna suffer, and the, you know, the experience will suffer. So
Speaker 2:Well, let's move on to some Waymo news. Waymo announced a partnership with Toyota. We're exploring new autonomous vehicle platform and how to leverage our technology for their personally owned vehicles. So in theory, you'll be able to buy a Toyota that has self driving capabilities powered by Waymo. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:One day, you won't just hail a Waymo. You'll buy one, says Alex Immerman over at Andreess Horowitz.
Speaker 3:I mean, I would buy a personal Waymo right now even if even if it was a Toyota. Like, I actually You
Speaker 2:can get a Supra?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:Of Of underlighting? You you would have it stance?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Stance. For sure. Stance with the underlighting.
Speaker 3:Stance. Imagine when you Tokyo Drift. Yeah. I mean and and this has basically been Elon's vision for autonomous driving a test a Tesla, which is, hey. You're gonna buy a Tesla.
Speaker 3:When you're not using it, you can add it to an autonomous fleet and actually earn money on it or help cover the cost Yep. Which is in a very exciting vision. But, you know, Waymo's advantage here is, you know, they're they're kind of recognizing that the underlying hardware is potentially a commodity. Yep. And they can build their systems on any existing cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The whole Waymo partnership thing is fascinating. Like, they've done some stuff where Uber has said, oh, we're gonna be the aggregator, and you'll be able to call Waymo on Uber, and that feels like it doesn't make any sense. And, you would just go straight to Waymo. And and then and then, yeah, they're partnering with hardware.
Speaker 2:And then there's this other question of, like, will there be businesses or small businesses that are dedicated just to operating fleets of Waymo's and then cleaning them? Because, obviously, that's a very human problem. You have to wash them and charge them and where do they stay. All that infrastructure needs to get built up. So having some sort of decentralized it's like, does Coca Cola own every bottler?
Speaker 2:Like, they've gone back and forth on that choice. Yeah. And but at the same time, this feels like, you know, that we're in this moment where Waymo feels ahead of Tesla, especially in San Francisco in terms of, like, you don't see a lot of people riding in the back of their Teslas. Let's be honest. Like, the self driving's pretty good, but, yeah, you're still in the front.
Speaker 2:And in the Waymo, there's no person, so it's clearly full self driving. But at the same time, like, does x AI teach us nothing about Elon's ability to catch up when someone
Speaker 3:leapfrogs Also, to to be clear, Waymo is doing roughly, I think, a million rides a month Yep. As of the latest estimates. Yep. And is doing They they they must be
Speaker 2:doing a million a day or 10,000,000 a day. I mean, how many cars are they selling?
Speaker 3:Oh, okay. But you're counting
Speaker 2:I'm counting the data collection. That's why
Speaker 3:Got it. Got it. Got it.
Speaker 2:So so it's like it's like Grok was able to use scrape the web like everyone else because that's commoditized, but you can't just scrape a billion rides with, you know, all the sensor data of what was the camera seeing, what did the human do. That's all for reinforcement learning to understand, hey. We were we were driving autonomously, and then the then the human grabbed the wheel and steered to the left. It's like, oh, well, that was because, clearly, if we run the tape back, the camera saw a cone, didn't identify it as a cone, and the human saw it, and intervened. So let's go retrain the model to say, you know, basically, in the weights, if cone steer to the left.
Speaker 2:Right? And so so, Elon, if you can see what he's done with x AI catching up to close to the frontier of LLMs, even if this Waymo full self driving is better right now, it feels like, you know, he goes back, does a little sprint, and Tesla's at least caught up to Waymo in terms of the the the technology. And then Yeah. There's just the question of, okay. Now maybe it's a duopoly, but it's still really valuable.
Speaker 2:And so it'll be interesting to see see see where this goes. Anyway, not to go back to Tesla, but it's a fascinating topic. Anyway, Signal talks about Apple. He says, for Apple, the idea that you would batch innovation, hold it hostage for a prerecorded WWC ceremony, and then dribble it out over a year in an era where AI is rewriting paradigms weekly is sort of ridiculous. I'm really intrigued to see how they navigate the AI era because it holds an insane amount of opportunity, but it also exposes them to deeply uncomfortable levels of executional volatility.
Speaker 2:And this is the case for, like, the just the modern app store. Give up the Siri button.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Give up let let the let the AI apps, you know, propagate on top of what you've already built. And, yeah, I mean, maybe it's not 30%, but if you're taking 15 or 10 or something, this could be really, really, really big. But it has been very rough, but that was never a question. No no one was ever, oh, like, I can't wait till the next WWC to get the Uber update because Uber was pushing updates constantly.
Speaker 3:And Yep.
Speaker 2:And and it was a it was a much better pattern.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And this is I mean, there's a bunch of different stances here. I I feel like Airbnb sort of repioneered the idea of these sort of keynote events, you know, big launches combining multiple features.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 3:But I also think they probably do a lot of testing and and smaller rollouts of some functionality even before they announce it in this sort of big major event.
Speaker 2:I mean, it totally makes sense for the hardware cycle to be like, hey. We're refreshing the iPhone every year. Here's the latest and greatest. But for software stuff, it's more like what Brian Chesky was talking about with founder mode and and and the Airbnb summit that they do annually. It's like package up.
Speaker 2:And and Ryan Peterson did this at Flexport where it's like, hey. Maybe WWC should just be a great reintroduction recap of all the stuff that you've shipped, all the experiments that you've run, what's working, what are you pushing forward, and then really separate out the backward looking from the forward looking and say, hey.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, we you you've noticed. If you're using this phone, we've shipped 25 updates to Apple Intelligence. It's really it's better it's much better at this now. Now here's our here's some of our road map and what you what can what what you can expect, what we're excited, what we're hiring for, why you should stay with our platform, why you should build on our platform. But we'll see.
Speaker 2:I that seems like a hard one to change culturally, but, you know, the easier the easier out for them would definitely be to just let the third party app developers flourish a little bit more. And maybe the maybe the maybe the App Store change actually drives that even more because AI companies can see, hey. If I go in and I get a $20 a month subscription, it's fully $20 a month, not 13 or 16 or whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or what? Yeah. 16 or something like that. Anyway, Gabriel Stangler Stengel is announcing a $50,000,000 series b for Rogo AI from Thrive Capital joined by JPMorgan. Patrick's in the deal.
Speaker 3:Of course, is.
Speaker 2:Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best getting in there. And, Kosla, Box Group, Ali Corp are all in as well. They're building Wall Street's First true AI analyst. Classic. Is clear and ambitious to create Wall Street's First AI Analyst.
Speaker 2:We endeavor to help investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms. I mean, that's what we endeavor to do as well, just help them generally. Rogo, I guess, is specifically focused on making them make helping them make smarter, sharper, and faster decisions every day. I just wanna help them broadly, but let's hear it for the investment banks, the hedge funds, and the private equity firms. We just What would America be without them?
Speaker 3:It's fantastic. So they've grown revenue from Kinect. They're gonna be more efficient, but they probably won't work any less. Right? And that's what we love about big PE, these hedge funds, you know, multinational investment firms.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's great to see. International business.
Speaker 3:It's great. International businessmen.
Speaker 2:And and national business now. Domestic business in the age of tariffs. HeLoss says the lion does not concern himself with ITAR.
Speaker 3:Dude, it's so funny. I don't know about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think I think that's not optional,
Speaker 3:I think. Lion over there.
Speaker 2:It's a sketchy that's a lion who will not be getting a not be winning a program of record.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Will not be advancing from SBIR. Very funny that I just love that an ITAR post can get a thousand likes. You know? There's just,
Speaker 3:like ITAR is mainstream now.
Speaker 2:There. It's mainstream. Yeah. Mainstream. And it was not years ago.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of ITAR compliant stuff, Carmen says, I finally found out what Palantir does. And there's a post here. Palantir is the creator and primary maintainer of TSLint, the standard linter for the TypeScript programming language. I love that. I mean, it's, like, crafts
Speaker 3:and engineering
Speaker 2:team that they're so that they're so they're writing so much TypeScript that they wrote their own linter and then open sourced it. I thought that was very funny.
Speaker 3:What a group.
Speaker 2:The Palantirs doing some linting.
Speaker 3:Joe Wiseenthal. From Joe Wiseenthal. It's easy to say that q one GDP data generally confirms the story that demand side activity was fine, but that was all of the action but that all of the and that all of the action is happening on the supply side, and that's true, but there have been concerns about softening pre April 2 activity. In that sense, the report is a a plus. All things equal, seems better to to go into the tariff economy starting from a robust pace of activity versus a mediocre pace.
Speaker 2:This was my takeaway from the
Speaker 3:And and the last, yeah, the last thing. He says personal consumption rose 1.8% Yep. Versus 1.2 expected. American consumer does not slow down.
Speaker 2:This was my takeaway from the Sequoia memo going into COVID. So Sequoia's written two very famous memos, the Black Swan memo and the RAP Good Times memo. And I believe the the the first one, which I think was the I think the first one was the black swan after the housing crisis, was a real macro deep dive into the state of the economy and identified a lot of things that were being talked about on Wall Street, but really put them in terms. Still a lot of macro charts, but put them in terms that startup founders could understand and really let them know that, hey. While tech is great and growing in 02/2008, the consumer, the American consumer is not set up to withstand what's coming in terms of the deleveraging of the housing market.
Speaker 2:Folks will lose houses. More mortgages variable rate of rate variable rate mortgages will explode. It's going to be very, very rough, so buckle up. And that was absolutely correct. Then going into the the COVID crash, Sequoia put out another memo saying that we were we we weren't expecting this, and startups need to be prepared for funding fundraising markets to close and and, you know, increased unemployment, a lot of turmoil in the economy.
Speaker 2:And, of course, that's exactly what happened. The stock market traded down, like, 30%. It was an absolute disaster. But what that memo sort of missed was that if you pulled all the stats from the first two thousand eight memo about the health of the American consumer, so debt ratios, credit card delinquencies, interest rates, all of that type of stuff, real GDP, wages, all that stuff, you could actually tell that going into COVID, the American consumer was much stronger than and, like, household balance sheets were much stronger than going into the o eight housing crisis. And so COVID was this wild card, this black swan event that was extremely tumultuous and caused massive unemployment very quickly, but we were economically more prepared for it than going into 02/2008.
Speaker 2:And so, yes, the tariff economy, the tariff chaos is very detrimental to a lot of businesses. It's very detrimental to the short term American economy. We've seen this all over the place. But we are set up for we we we are in it. We are coming from a source of strength, and so we can kind of, like, absorb the hit points for a little bit.
Speaker 2:And that's, I think, what we're seeing in the economy with the robust earnings in big tech and the personal consumption rising actually higher than expected in the face of absolute turmoil and chaos in the news. Right? And this is this weird thing that the the vibe shift, the vibe session where the news and the even the facts are are pretty bad. And yet when you poll people, they they will say, there's this interesting metric for the vibe session where if you ask people, how do you think things are going? How are your friends and neighbors doing in this economy?
Speaker 2:They will say, oh, it's terrible. Biden's Biden's economy is bad or Trump's economy is bad. But if you ask them how they personally are doing, oftentimes, they will report that they're doing better than they expect or better than they than they perceive the economy doing. So they say, the economy is bad, but I happen to be doing fine. And if everyone reports the same thing, it's this weird preference falsification issue where everyone feels like it's doom and gloom, but in fact
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:No one, not that many people are actually feeling real pain. And so it's a little bit of an economic puzzle. Anyway Yeah. We there was some bad news on the on the employment front. The estimate was that we were gonna add a 15,000 jobs, and we only added 62,000 jobs, and futures dropped on that on April 30.
Speaker 2:But overall, the market has been doing very well, and we've been rebounding from all the chaos. And Bitcoin is almost up at a hundred k again, which is remarkable to see.
Speaker 3:Remarkable. Trey Steven post. Over at Founders Fund. And Androle says one of Founders Fund's fastest growing portcos, Armada AI, is hiring a VP of federal to lead federal strategy and bring advanced compute wherever the warfighter needs it. It's an early high impact role with huge potential.
Speaker 3:If you're in the top 1% at what you do and are interested in the role, send three to five bullet points demonstrating exceptional ability to federal v p at Armada.ai. Very cool role. We got to hear about Armada AI actually yesterday Yeah. From one of Armada's very earliest investors. And there's not a lot out there on the company yet, but we left that conversation extremely bullish.
Speaker 2:Extremely bullish.
Speaker 3:Extremely bullish. Yeah. It took about break
Speaker 2:it down at a very high level, Starlink is a new new capability. And if you're on the consumer side, you pick up a Starlink at a Best Buy like I did, plug it in, and you have Internet, and that's great. And that's pretty much all I need is just a Wi Fi hotspot when I'm traveling. They also have products for planes, and you've seen JetSuiteX has Starlink, and there's there's Starlink on, you know, new major airlines. A lot of the airlines are clamoring to do deals with Starlink.
Speaker 2:And then the government also buys Starlink through the Star Shield program and provisions it for military applications. But as we kind of learn through this conversation, for large enterprises, very, very large enterprises, think Fortune 100 companies, the needs from a Starlink product are different than from the consumer side. And so you could imagine if you have a data centers all over the all over the globe and you want to add connectivity to remote remote outposts all over, you're gonna need tools to manage that, tools to provision that, what satellites are working, what are going down, what are the speeds across these, what are the security issues. And so it's a it's one of these businesses that unless you're touching it in the Fortune 100 IT world, you probably don't know that much about it. But once you get in and pull back the curtain, you realize that there's a massive business opportunity here.
Speaker 2:So I imagine this will be a a very fun job, so good luck to everyone who applies. Yep. You will you talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson
Speaker 3:So Sam Lesson
Speaker 2:idea. We've talked about this a little bit. Sam Lesson says, the reality is that OpenAI should really buy Snap. It's basically free, and they do need a network. Jordy, what is your take on OpenAI buying Snap?
Speaker 2:For reference, I think OpenAI is around $300,000,000,000, maybe a little bit higher. Snap is trading at around 7,000,000,000. Is that right?
Speaker 3:So No. No. No. Double that, actually. 14,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:14 billion. Okay. So we're talking about 4% of the company if this happened. A lot of the other foundation models have found dance partners. Lama is obviously partnered with Meta and and or, you know, owned by Meta, and so can be deeply integrated into Facebook products and Instagram products.
Speaker 2:And there's been So yeah. So X and XAI have teamed up. So what should Snap and OpenAI do?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, I mean, Snap declined to provide a forecast as of Wednesday. Stock fell 15%. So I think that may have prompted Sam Lesson's post. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think the big question here is, does integrating your foundation model in with an existing app really drive incredible distribution? Mhmm. And the question with OpenAI is what percentage of Snap users are not already ChatGPT users. Yep. And I would and I and my sense is that if Snap has, you know, primarily, you know, a lot of market share or at least usage among young people, I think that that you know, my my sense is that it could very well be that sixty, seventy, 80 percent of Snaps, you know, weekly active users are already ChatGPT users.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And I just don't think that from that sense, I'm I'm not sure that it's completely valuable to to OpenAI. Could be more valuable to someone like an Anthropic if they really, really wanna double down and and compete in consumer. But, yeah, I I'm still not entirely sure that x AI and Grok are going to win because of distribution through x. Right?
Speaker 3:I think it's useful, but I'm still not, you know, using Grock within x aggressively.
Speaker 2:So Also, I mean, x has the benefit of of really being a great source of real time data in the sense that every news story breaks and Yep. That's even even though links are punished, the stories do find their way to x
Speaker 3:very quickly.
Speaker 2:And you get a really good idea of, like, a weighing machine in the algorithm of what what angle on the story is having the most traction, which story of of of three that were written is breaking through in the most meaningful way. That helps with better responses in real time from LLMs. On the on the Snapchat side, you know, it is a video first platform. So
Speaker 3:It's it's privacy centric. Right? Privacy centric.
Speaker 2:But they do have a Reels product, and people do spend time scrolling TikTok style content. I would be very hesitant to try and just stuff a chat interface in Snapchat and see any real meaningful interaction with the LLM like we talked about with Meta and Llama. But I I do think that, you know, there is the question of, like, what is the next form of these foundation models? Like, is there a world where you have an AI that's living on Snap that's sending you videos or AI generated images with captions that are interesting based on your preferences in the algorithm, that does seem like it's happening in, like, a diffuse way with AI video creators. A lot of it's just fake, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:Like, if you go on car YouTube, you'll see tons of AI generated videos for fake cars that don't exist, that spiel like concept cars. And it's Yeah. It's very silly, but, you know, you could use a a more mature model and a more, I don't know, better moral framework potentially to Yeah. To actually get to to surface, like, better better information that's more relevant. Anyway, do you wanna read the next post?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We got a post from Zach Abrams. Bridge and Visa are launching stable card ish stablecoin card issuing. Says together, we built one card program that can serve the world. Developers can now launch global cards in minutes.
Speaker 3:Excited to initially launch with Fuse Wallet and a company that I can't I'm not familiar with across The US, LATAM, and more. Yeah. This is massive. I'm I'm actually looking forward to Stripe's conference this coming week. We're not gonna be attending in person, but excited to cover the news, and, hopefully, we can get Zach on at some point to talk about this partnership live.
Speaker 3:But stablecoins are very, very real in many, many ways already, and enabling, you know, the the seamless spending of those stablecoins across the Visa network will be super powerful.
Speaker 2:Yep. Let's rip through some other news. Datadog's acquiring a startup, Epo, for $220,000,000. That feels like a great outcome. I'd love to dig into this more, but still size gong for the Datadog.
Speaker 2:Team. Datadog. Absolute dogs.
Speaker 3:Epo. Drop the net drop the net drop the n in epo. It's just epo.
Speaker 2:Anderol gave some gave some updates on the YFQ 44 a flying this summer. They're making progress on that collaborative combat aircraft. Looks great. Palmer said he has a strict no render prop policy. It's all real unless you see the Yeah.
Speaker 3:That was cool.
Speaker 2:Which is a cool design choice, right, to to be like, we will do we will use CGI to visualize things that can't be seen, so, like, radio waves, for example. Or or if we're describing, like, a future, we'll just use the anime style, and it's obvious that it's rendered instead of doing photo real renders where you do is it real? Is it not? It's like, it's either real or it's anime, and so there's a very clear dividing line there. I thought that was cool.
Speaker 2:And I hope that more companies adopt that to kind of create the differentiation between what's rendered and what's not.
Speaker 3:Well, the the government has spent the federal government, DOD, depending on, has spent probably trillions of dollars on renders over the years of things that never never actually came, you know, to fruition. Yeah. And same thing in you know, this happens in in startups and hard tech. You know, companies can create a great render, but not fully deliver on it for a variety of reasons. So I think it's a great policy, and it makes you pay pay a lot more attention to the stuff that they're actually putting out because it's it's real.
Speaker 3:Yep. This post from Deleon was Oh, yeah. That's funny. It says, mister told reporters he's referencing Manus Benchmark's investment in Chinese AI company Manus, said mister Asperuhov told reporters the investment in China made Benchmark appear more comparable to the Chinese Communist Party. And this is, quote, hats off to Bill Gurley.
Speaker 3:He won't be attending this year's forum. Mister S. Brewhub said, mister Gurley did not respond to your comment. Anyways, I don't think Bill Gurley needs to respond to this because he's no longer an active GP at Benchmark. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it still is a funny Fun to see Deli
Speaker 2:and James. Fun taking shots. Let let's move on to the Doge story. This is probably a good place to close out. Catherine Boyle says, these kids are so hardcore.
Speaker 2:No weekends. They know they're racing against a media and political clock that won't thank them for their service. No exaggeration. This is the most inspiring effort in government of our lifetime long doge. And we got lots of great photos hitting the timeline.
Speaker 2:Luke Feritor looking fantastic in a suit and tie. Cody Jones There
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 2:Fellas in control. And lots of people are coming out. Atlas says, that's my best friend. We have been following each other on x.com for years at this point, by the way. I love that.
Speaker 2:And Augustus
Speaker 3:If you've been following if if if you've been mutuals, you know, with somebody for a few years, you're basically best friends.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. Yeah. I mean, DC was packed. I mean, Ryan Peterson was doing senate bean soup reviews.
Speaker 3:That's just great.
Speaker 2:Meeting with senators. Nvidia's announced a $500,000,000,000 investment to build AGI in The US, kind of a continuation of that Stargate announcement. And, yeah, just
Speaker 3:Well, this is separate. Stuff going on. Separate from
Speaker 2:Oh, this is separate? Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Just turns out $500,000,000,000 is a nice round number that everybody tends to gravitate towards. But, you know, Stargate was OpenAI plus Masa plus a handful of other players also announced by Trump, but this was announced directly by Jensen Yeah. Who, yeah, was was all over Hill And Valley this week, which was cool.
Speaker 2:So what are the other top stories we need to cover before we get out of here? GTA six has been delayed to 2026. Pour one out for the gamers. A little moment of silence for all the gamers. I think at this point
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is brutal. You can actually
Speaker 2:Between family and work, by the time GTA six drops, I will not have any time to play it, which is very sad because I played GTA five a lot when it came out in, what, 2012 or something. Yeah. Also in the news Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the market have
Speaker 2:been from a hundred million ARR to 300,000,000 ARR in four months. That's massive. Congratulations to them. And the Neuralink team has a FDA breakthrough designation device designation for speech restoration. And Elon says congrats to the NeuroLink team, so congratulations.
Speaker 2:That's great. Any other I went to
Speaker 3:the store The last one. The CIA released two videos in Mandarin This is very important. Aimed at recruiting Chinese officials.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. And John Ratcliffe said one of the primary roles of the CIA is to collect intelligence by recruiting assets that can help us steal secrets. So being very you know, going to CIA is just going direct here. Yep. Know, being very explicit.
Speaker 3:Yep. So if doubt doubt this would be the case, but if you're a Chinese official listening to this and you wanna help America, head over to at CIA on X and get in touch with them.
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Speaker 3:And this is from my next door neighbor, Murph. So shout out to Murph. I I realized a couple years ago that I should probably have a life insurance policy because I'm an adult with a family.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I went to Murph, and he's the best. So shout out to Murph. Thank you for the five star review. You're the man. I will see you probably at some point later today.
Speaker 2:Amazing. And we will see the rest of the the audience on Monday. So thank you for listening to this show. We hope you have a fantastic weekend, and we'll see you on Monday. Goodbye.
Speaker 3:Have a great weekend, everybody. Cheers. Cheers.