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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching We Are Not A Car.
Speaker 2:We Are Not A Car.
Speaker 1:We are not a car.
Speaker 2:It is Thursday, April 16 though, 2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 1:The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of cars.
Speaker 2:The capital of cars. Absolutely wild podcast between NVIDIA's Jensen Wong and Dwarkesh Patel. So many clips, so much debate. We're gonna kick it off with the question of whether or not NVIDIA is a car. First, let me tell you about our lineup because we have an insane group of guests joining us today, kicking it off with Ben Smith from Semaphore.
Speaker 2:I think it's his third time on the show. He's live from the Semaphore World Economy Summit, has convened a massive group of policymakers, CEOs, investors. He's gonna give us the update on what conversations are happening on the ground. Then Jonathan Criss is coming on to talk about Starlink for water, former SpaceX employee, just raised $24,000,000 to enable off grid desalination, one of my favorite topics these days. We talked a little bit about it with Peter Diamandis.
Speaker 2:Then Paul Scherer from Eigen raised 15,000,000 from Benchmark. James Morrissey and
Speaker 1:Kevin New consumer Hart social play.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kevin Hart coming
Speaker 1:people in that one.
Speaker 2:Talk about building a tequila business and
Speaker 1:And we will be asking him about Jensen. Jensen, for We've got to ask. Yeah. I gotta know. Then Abiton from Factory.
Speaker 2:Ulysses, we have a massive $6,046,000,000 dollar fundraise today for underwater and surface drones. Charlie Cheever from Expo is coming on. And Victor from Slash is coming on as well. And then we'll close that with Theodor from Cognition. So big show should be going at least two and a half, three hours as usual.
Speaker 2:We will be off tomorrow, but we'll be back on Monday. Let me start off
Speaker 1:with this video
Speaker 2:semi analysis because it is a treat.
Speaker 1:Wait. And pause for a
Speaker 3:second. I don't
Speaker 1:I You know why I was asking you?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like what app you use to edit videos? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was to make this exact video. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then saw this and I was like, oh, I don't need to make it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't You're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. And that loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me. We are not we're not a car. We are not a car.
Speaker 4:Such a great edit. It's absolutely it's such
Speaker 2:a good vibe real. And it's so funny because I love to Drift. It's funny because it's this new type of vibe real where the semi analysis team, obviously, they they recontextualized the two clips and added the the the beat to get the video going. But that final edit with the cars sort of morphing together, like, it goes from there's a match cut. These are match cuts between one one stick shift move in another or one car drifting and then another car drifting.
Speaker 2:That takes a really long time. Somebody clearly made this video just because they're enthusiast of Fast and Furious. And then the seminalysis team was able to quickly recontextualize that to be about Jensen's answer on NVIDIA's moat and the CUDA moat and what's happening with NVIDIA. So let's go through this question because it's been it's been humming for a while, and it sort of bubbled up most recently because there was a whole bunch of news that Mythos might have been trained on Tranium, then maybe TPU, then maybe Blackwell, and it was sort of a mix. And it just feels like more and more of the AI labs are capable of making other chipsets work.
Speaker 2:In the early days, it was all about NVIDIA. And now it feels like the incentives are really high to figure other options out, and that creates a different competitive dynamic. So can run through my thoughts on this, and then we can go into the geopolitical considerations as well because that was another fascinating segment of the interview. So Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, spent over ninety minutes it was almost two hours when you include the ads, too in the ring with Dwarkesh Patel. It was electric.
Speaker 2:And the key question, at least for the start, was whether or not NVIDIA is a car. And I'm only half joking about that. It sort of was the key question. NVIDIA has been the market leader for years. During the gaming boom, NVIDIA was the gold standard for rendering PC graphics.
Speaker 2:There was always decent competition from AMD. But once the AI boom kicked off, the CUDA ecosystem significantly sped up development of AI systems and training of AI models. And for those who aren't familiar, CUDA is a programming model that enables GPUs to accelerate demanding workloads by parallelizing computation. So instead of needing to work on the very low level instruction sets, if you are a CUDA kernel engineer, CUDA engineer, you can access the all the power of the GPUs very efficiently while staying up in the more mathematical AI research, more standard Python, C plus plus programming paradigms. You don't need to dip down too low.
Speaker 2:But it's getting easier to dip down lower, and that's what we're seeing. So that created the CUDA moat because developers were way more productive, and the biggest bottleneck to progress was allowing AI researchers to quickly test ideas and scale their experiments up to whole fleets of GPUs and eventually entire data centers. So at the time, researchers really liked CUDA and really liked NVIDIA and they did not want to have to spend hours and hours figuring out other hardware systems. They just wanted to run their tests and see if the model was getting better and continue to scale. But recently, the biggest cost center for AI Labs flipped from researcher time, more or less, to compute capacity, and this creates a much larger economic incentive to figure out a way to drive down the cost of chips used to train AI models.
Speaker 2:I wrote about this back in on Tuesday, October 22, so almost six months ago. I said, not every link in the supply chain of AI can be completely commoditized. NVIDIA has an insane amount of power, having ramped full year revenue over the last three years from $27,000,000,000 to $60,000,000,000 to $130,000,000,000 Absolutely insane top line revenue ramp at that scale, and that's why Jensen is so confident about how dominant this business is. It's the world's biggest company for a reason. It has been growing spectacularly at immense scale.
Speaker 2:And not only did they grow the top line, but net profit margin grew insanely. So it grew from 16%
Speaker 1:to Yeah. 15 You do that when you have pricing power and massive leverage because, you know, in this case, demand massively outstripping supply plus developer love and kind of just like
Speaker 2:And I believe the forecast net margin was 70 something percent. We were hearing about 80% potentially. And so NVIDIA, you know, the plan and the plan is still to make an incredible amount of profit off of these chips because they are incredibly valuable. But all the hyperscalers and the AI labs, they are sort of incentivized now to form a bit of an anti NVIDIA alliance to commoditize the accelerator market and drive down those margins at least a little bit. And so today, the AI chip market is starting to look much less monopolistic.
Speaker 2:AI coding agents can make it easier to write software that works on non CUDA chip stacks. And the teams behind competing chips have plenty of resources and economic incentives to bring performance in line with NVIDIA, even if it's gonna be a big hassle. Even if you're gonna just spin up a team to get AMD or TPU working, it's going to be worth it because you're talking about billions and billions of dollars spent on chips. For the past few years, NVIDIA
Speaker 1:Yeah. Another another example of, like, you know, an an an instance where an AI lab had so much urgency that they were willing to spend whatever it took was meta rebuilding like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Excel. Yeah. Exactly. Like, they were willing to outspend pretty much any other lab on talent Yeah. Because they didn't have time to find a homegrown talent or go through a normal recruiting process Yep.
Speaker 1:Especially considering a lot of those engineers were, like, happy doing what they were doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The incentives flip when you get to this scale. Or or the incentives just go get so big, you can build a whole team for a specific thing, solve any problem. And so for the past few years, NVIDIA has sort of looked like SpaceX's launch program. It's an incredible technology with very few viable alternatives. And so that creates great margins as we've seen with SpaceX's launch capacity, and they control something like 90% of the launch market.
Speaker 2:While the products have not degraded, quite the opposite, actually, Blackwell and Verruban are incredibly powerful chips. They're clearly on the leading edge there. And they have an incredible amount of supply chain guarantees from TSMC and across memory and all the other different pieces of supply chain, like NVIDIA is ready to make more chips, but increased competition makes the category look a little bit more like the car market than the rocket launch market. And so that, I think, is where Jensen is pushing back and saying, No, there's a lot more that we bring to the table with our customers that don't think of us like a car. This is not the difference between a Ford and a Toyota.
Speaker 2:They all sort of get you to the same place, and you can swap one out. You can be driving a BMW one day, go to the dealer, turn it in for a Mercedes, and you're gonna a pretty
Speaker 1:the the other example that I was using with with the team earlier was this idea of, like, if you're if you're a delivery company like FedEx and you have a lot of, like, Ford Yeah. Ford vans, and then and then Hyundai comes to you and says, hey, you've been spending like $50,000 per Ford van, but like, would you consider a Hyundai van? Yep. We'll we'll we'll sell it to you for $35,000. It's just as good.
Speaker 1:And it could be like mildly inconvenient for the company because like they're kind of used to using using Ford. Maybe have like an internal team that does some maintenance. But when you start looking at that cost differential, it can start to get pretty interesting to say like, hey, we should why don't we try out some Hyundai's? Yeah. Let's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Move over some of our routes to Hyundai's and like see how that goes. They try it and they're like, hey, this actually this works pretty well. Yeah. Maybe maybe there's you know, higher maintenance, but it actually, like, maths out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, like, we're gonna actually start adding more Hyundai's to our overall fleet. Yep. And so Jensen's point on the podcast is that, like, we're not we're not selling cars. Right? This is not like something like you can kind of swap out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Dwarkesh was obviously pushing pushing back.
Speaker 2:And for a lot of companies, swapping out NVIDIA for TPU would be very difficult to some workloads that Jensen focus on focuses on. He says, we're not a tensor processing unit. We're an accelerator. There's a whole bunch of scientific computing workloads that work particularly well with NVIDIA. The the problem that
Speaker 1:And of course, Voorakkara was just saying like, yeah. Well, it's perfectly fine to have like a specialized chip for specialized workflows because the biggest companies in the world, the biggest buyers here have like a single type of workload that they're trying to do. Yep. And that's why they're using your competitors.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so because the AI build out does not seem to be slowing down as long as power can continue to be brought online and data centers can continue to find towns that will approve of them, demand for chips will presumably grow. But every chip designer and AI lab has to be praying that the net that those net margins come down. How quickly will it happen? Very too very early to tell.
Speaker 2:The market did not react negatively to this back and forth in the short term, although the price of NVIDIA has been basically flat since last August. And I think that's why NVIDIA Jensen is trying to sort of like reset on the narrative because it's possible that, you know, with the there's a lot of movement up and down. They've been sort of flat. There's a desire to sort of like reset and and recontext Yeah.
Speaker 1:Inference demand is scaling Yeah. In a very significant way Yep. And the NVIDIA stock price is relatively flat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's and since August, there's been like, so many different moments where fears of the AI bubble, fears of the products not finding product market fit, that revenue might stagnate. Like, we've seen a ton of bullish signals for, like, AI demand broadly. Demand is there. And so if you're a supplier, you should also be going up.
Speaker 2:But there's been this overhang of what will happen to margins and market structure. And so that is what people are going back and forth on. Tyler, did you have anything else to to thoughts on this?
Speaker 5:I mean, like, personally, I I think I I probably am more on the Dwarkesh side Mhmm. Where, like yeah. I mean, at some point, like, these margins are so
Speaker 2:high. Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's so much opportunity here. Like, we we've seen that, like, actually, you know, if you're a big lab, you actually can just, put a little maybe, you know, it's a lot of resources
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But you actually can just like train a model on a different architecture. You can serve them on a different architecture. Yeah. Like you actually can figure these things out. As models get better, you can, you know, you you can go lower and lower lower on the stack.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You can, you know, you can write the kernels
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Semi autonomously. Yeah. These things get faster and faster. And it's like, I I I'm probably much more on the Dwarkesh side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how Grock fits into this, the new CPU, integration between different pieces of the puzzle, like, and then also, I mean, Dwarkesh makes this point that the the supply agreements that NVIDIA has might be a bit of a moat for the next few years while TSMC line time is so constricted.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But even then, like, you know, Jensen was saying the the the kind of supply constraints, this is like a two to three year problem. After that, like, you can just solve these things. Yeah. So it's like almost like, I don't know how to think about this because, you know, to me it seems like, yeah, so much of the value of Nvidia is just like they have such an incredible relationship with TSMC.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But if and and it's so valuable because of how constrained it is. Yeah. But if that kind of constraint is is maybe gonna, know, go away to some extent.
Speaker 2:TSMC?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's what he says. Like, they're gonna increase, you know, they can build new fab and Sure. Whatever three three
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the big the big the big takeaway from the conversation is, like, you have one person who seems incredibly AGI pilled Yeah. Which is Dwarkesh. Yeah. And then you have Jensen who doesn't seem AGI pilled in that sense
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:At all. Yeah. Right? He Dwarkesh asked about, you know, he was kind of getting early on the idea of like can can well, will you be able to just like prompt your way to NVIDIA chips? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You basically sell software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He didn't
Speaker 2:put it quite as aggressively but yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that is of course like, you know, more
Speaker 2:But yeah.
Speaker 1:More on the nose. But Jensen was basically like, no, I don't I don't think that'll happen. And then and then when you get to the whole geopolitical conversation too, again, it's like Dwarkesh is like, you're selling nukes and Jensen is in in my view, like, I'm selling computers. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that that was like the big rift. Yeah. Was like these two kind of totally conflicting world views and it made for some very
Speaker 2:Pay view.
Speaker 1:It was a pay per view. Should have been a pay per view.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Scherer Matan summed it up pretty well. He said, every person here's reaction to the Jensen plus Dwarkesh podcast can be extrapolated directly from whether they believe in the frontier labs achieving short timelines for AGI, ASI. If you believe in the labs achieving RSI and then AGI, ASI for some definition of all three in the next few years, you're probably sympathetic to the frame Dwarkesh adopts. If not, you're probably more sympathetic to the arguments from Jensen.
Speaker 2:And so we can go into the export controls next and talk about that. Metacritic Capital sort of summed up a little bit of the why just Jensen's rhetoric and how he wasn't conceding a lot of things. Dean Ball said, Dwarkesh Jensen reveals how inconsistent and unbattle tested AI acceleration talking points are, especially when they're filtered through the prisms of corporate comms and mass politics. Strategically coherent accelerationism is possible, he says, I try, but not currently prevalent. And Metacritic Capital says, The problem is that Jensen doesn't concede anything.
Speaker 2:Compute spending going to the moon, 1,000,000,000,000 revenue in sight. Models keep getting better. No unemployment. Software codes are good. Other Western accelerators are bad.
Speaker 2:Chinese competitors are good. NVIDIA makes token costs decline 90% per year. But Chinese compute scientists are capable of making all the necessary algorithmic improvements. He also can't be AGI pilled enough because at the end of the day, he is an intellectual property company in the business of sending a file to TSMC. I think it's part of Taiwanese culture to want to be loyal to all clients and don't have favorite winners.
Speaker 2:He doesn't want to betray his software co customers. He has antitrust concerns.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He was making the bold case for software which was that Yeah. AI agents are gonna use tools. Yeah. So he's like, there's gonna be more users of software than ever.
Speaker 2:Which is something I'm like somewhat sympathetic to. But, yeah, it it definitely
Speaker 1:It's still very easy to to Yeah. Take the the counter.
Speaker 2:The flip side of that. Yeah. Well, let's play the distilled recap from Dwarkesh Patel of the back and forth with Jensen on export controls. It's about four minutes, and we'll we'll watch this
Speaker 6:and then discuss. If Chinese companies and Chinese labs and the Chinese government had access to the AI chips to train a model like Claude Mythos with these cyber offensive capabilities and run millions of instances of it with more compute, the question is, oh, is that a threat to American companies, to American national security?
Speaker 3:First of all, Methos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount of it by an extraordinary company. And so the amount of capacity and the type of compute that's it was trained on is abundantly available in China. And so you just have to first realize that chips exist in China. They manufacture 60% of the world's mainstream chips, maybe more. It's a very large industry for them.
Speaker 3:They have some of the world's greatest computer scientists, as you know. Most of the AI researchers in all of these AI labs, most of them are Chinese. They have 50% of the world's AI researchers. And so the question is, if you're concerned about them, all the assets they already have, they have an abundance of energy, they have plenty of chips, They got most of the AI researchers. If you're worried about them, what is the best way to create a safe world?
Speaker 3:Well, victimizing them, turning them into an enemy likely isn't the best answer. They are an adversary. We want United States to win. But I think having a having a dialogue and having research dialogue is probably the safest thing to do. This is an area that that is glaringly missing because of our current attitude about China as an adversary.
Speaker 3:It is essential that our AI researchers and their AI researchers are actually talking. It is essential that we try to both agree on what not to use the AI for. With respect to China, we wanna have, of course, want United States staff as much computing as possible. We're limited by energy, but, you know, we got a lot of people working on that and we we had to not make energy a a bottleneck for our our country. But what we also want is we wanna make sure that all the AI developers in the world are developing on the American tech stack and making the contributions, the advancements of AI, especially when it's open source available to the American ecosystem.
Speaker 3:And it would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystems, The open source ecosystem, and it only runs on the Chinese tech tech a foreign tech stack, and a closed ecosystem, and that runs on the American tech stack. I think that that would be that would be a a horrible outcome for United States.
Speaker 6:I mean, I think the concern going back to flop difference in the hacking is, yes, they have compute, but there's some estimates that because they're at seven nanometer, they don't have EUV because of chip making expert controls. The amount of FLOPS the airbag actually produce, they have like onetenth the amount of FLOPS that The U. S. Has. And so with that, could they train eventually a model like Mythos?
Speaker 6:Yes. But the question is because we have more FLOPS, American labs are able to get to these level of capabilities first and because Anthropic got to it first, they say, okay, we're going to hold on to it for a month while all these American companies, we give them access to it, they're going to patch up all their vulnerabilities and now we release it. Furthermore, if they even if they train a model like this, the ability to deploy it at scale you know, if you had a cyber hacker it's much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them. So that inference compute really matters a lot. In fact, the fact that they have so many AI researchers who are so good is the thing that makes it so scary because what is it that makes those engineer researchers more productive is compute.
Speaker 3:We should always be first and we should always have more. But in in order for that outcome for you to to what you described to be true, you have to take it to the extremes. They have to have no compute. And if they have some compute, the question is how much is needed? The amount of compute they have in China is enormous.
Speaker 3:It's I mean, you're talking about the country. It's the second largest computing market in the world. If they wanna deploy, aggregate their compute, they got plenty of compute to aggregate.
Speaker 2:Very, very tense back and forth. Dean Ball says, it's a shame Jensen mostly fails here because monoculture on export controls is bad. If you're a young AI policy researcher trying to make a name for yourself, it's almost impossible to be taken seriously unless you are pro export controls. Monocultures are usually bad. And I I am sympathetic to Dwarkesh's points there for sure, especially on the inference side, even if models exist in both worlds, like having a whole bunch of, you know, good guy compute that can go and patch bugs while the amount of attackers is much smaller.
Speaker 2:It's just a matter of, you know, how many, you know, resources you have on each side. That's a great point. The only the only thing that they are, like, talking around is just Taiwan as a particular, you know, particular turning point and and how their various positions flow through to Taiwan policy and where the how the China stance on Taiwan is something that I've always puzzled, and I wish that both of them had articulated their sort of philosophy on actually war gaming out what export controls do to likelihood of of Taiwan intervention or blockade or anything like that. I don't exactly know. I've I've been trying to, like, work through it, but I don't have a complete thesis.
Speaker 2:But we've been we've been debating it back and forth all day. I don't know if you have a strong take on any of this, Jordy.
Speaker 1:I appreciate Matt Zeitlin's point. I kinda appreciate that Jensen Huang seems relatively normal about non business stuff compared to other tech founder CEO types. But then when it comes to Nvidia's actual operations, he's a complete sicko.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I saw a couple takes around this that that that he had, like, some very, very, very, very strong points. If you're deeper in the supply chain, I haven't I couldn't really assess how he did on that. But some people were there were definitely people that were in Jensen's camp.
Speaker 2:It was divided, which I think is why this went so viral. Elliot summed it up here. Jensen Huang and Dwarkesh today. Most combative interview he's done in a while. The biggest regret not funding
Speaker 1:Has there been a more combative interview ever with Jensen? It seems unlikely.
Speaker 2:Think so. No. And I'm trying to think of just, like, in terms of combative, like, people were sort of comping this to, the Elon Dwarkesh interview, which wasn't combative, but it was more, just, like, digging into all the different projects and trying to, you know, elucidate the the the strategy and how they all fit together. There's actually some interesting updates on where x AI might be going with a partnership with Cursor that we can go into. There is there is some funny details in here.
Speaker 2:Apparently, the Larry and Elon begged Jensen for GPUs at dinner story. That never happened. We absolutely had dinner. At no time did they beg for GPUs, which is funny. I I wonder what that would happen.
Speaker 2:Quietly folded Grok into the CUDA ecosystem. Reason, premium ASP tokens where latency beats throughput, higher throughput used to always win. That trade off has bent the bent enough that NVIDIA is expanding the Pareto frontier towards fast, expensive, low throughput. And it will be interesting to see how all of that comes together. On ASIC cost savings, NVIDIA margin is 70%.
Speaker 2:ASIC margin is 65%. What are you really saving? Someone still pays Broadcom. Open challenge to Google and AWS. Published TPU and Trainium on MLPerf and InferenceMax.
Speaker 2:I would welcome Trainium to demonstrate their 40% claim. And so Jensen threw down the gauntlet and said to Amazon and Google, head over to semi analysis and put your chips on inference max so that they can be properly benchmarked so we can see
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was a good that was a very, very good call out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It was smart.
Speaker 1:Was I just I just don't know why they don't they don't go over and I've been excited to maxing.
Speaker 2:To see the the the inference max results. Dwarkesh posted, tomorrow, and it's him and Jensen standing next to each other. And Alex Volkow said, hey, Dwarkesh. Was this picture taken before or after the pod? Because it does feel like it was a tense situation.
Speaker 2:Although, you know, to to both of their credit, like, Jensen, it felt like he loved being in the arena, ask getting asked hard questions, like, working through this. There's this back and forth where where Jensen's pushing back and Dwarkesh says, oh, I can drop it. And he says, you don't need to drop it. I'm I'm enjoying this. Like like, let's let's hash this out.
Speaker 2:And I thought that was that was very, very diplomatic and and and just good overall. Well, Intel is up on the news, up 4% today, 10% over the past five days, almost at all time highs. I think we're very close to the 2,000 peak for Intel, which it was also around where they were trading in $2,088 a share, $330,000,000,000 company. Clearly, with with all of this backdrop and just the idea of more chips and maybe the CUDA ecosystem being something that you can work around, can an American fab run by Intel produce a chip that's viable for an AI lab? It feels like increasingly, yes.
Speaker 2:That's certainly the argument that's being put forth by Dwarkesh. And it would be very exciting. I think it's something that every everyone would support an Intel resurgence. And there's some there's some news around TerraFab potentially getting involved. But first, let's start with the scoop from Grace k over at Business Insider.
Speaker 2:She says, scoop Cursor plans to use XAI's infrastructure to train its composer 2.5 code
Speaker 1:Where's the golden scoop, Tyler?
Speaker 2:According to people familiar with the matter. Cursor will you will use tens of thousands of XAI's GPUs, they said. And we got a scoop for Grace Kay.
Speaker 1:This one's going to Grace. Grace This giant. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:You win the golden scoop.
Speaker 1:The golden scoop. Congratulations. Now, interesting to see something we talked about Yeah. Probably midway through last year, xAI has, you know, shown a tremendous ability to, on on the kind of infrastructure Yeah. Data center side, spinning up a a huge amount of compute very, very quickly ahead of any timeline that any reasonable party would have probably expected.
Speaker 1:And demand hasn't exactly followed in the way that they would have liked. Yeah. And so opening that up to a company like Cursor who has all the demand Yeah. And what they really need is their own is their own model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was also interesting because I don't know if if it was thrown out as a potential project for other companies? I feel like MSL mentioned it at some point, maybe OpenAI. But there was there was some talk of, like, okay. If you're marshaling all this compute and you wind up with too much, like, do you do then?
Speaker 2:And the the idea of becoming a cloud provider if you have a if you have a data center and everything Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's been the big the big question of, like, you know, with with everything that SpaceX is doing and now TeraFab Yep. They're gonna be creating all of this Yep. Capacity. Yep. But what is the what is the, like, what where's the demand for that capacity gonna come from?
Speaker 1:Right? Yep. And so you could imagine a world in the future where SpaceX has a bunch of space data centers, they open up that capacity to a bunch of companies other than just Elon Inc. Businesses.
Speaker 2:So Grace says the setup effectively turns xAI into a kind of cloud provider by renting some of its GPUs to other country companies. XAI could start generating revenue from its massive infrastructure while still developing its own AI models. The arrangement could help the company offset the costs of building and operating data centers while also deepening ties with a startup that has access to valuable coding data. And so there could be some sort of trade deal going on. Ed Ludlow at Bloomberg has a report from the TerraFab.
Speaker 2:Musk's team is actively requesting price quotes and delivery time lines for a wide range of chip making equipment, photomasks, substrates, etchers, deposition, cleaning, testing tools according to sources. Elon Musk's lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers for his Envision TerraFab project. Remember, he was pictured with Lip Bu Tan from Intel, I think, last week. Early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting edge chips. That is a very, very tall order, but maybe there's never been a better time to break the cutting edge chip market given that the the the you you you don't need to I mean, you sort of need to reinvent CUDA, but it's becoming it's becoming easier potentially.
Speaker 2:That that that is the story. Well, there are two big releases from Anthropic and OpenAI today. Claude announced Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model yet. It handles long running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely and verifies its own outputs before reporting back. You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision, they say.
Speaker 2:Very good score on SWE bench Pro, 64.3%. Excited to test it. They say Opus 4.7 has substantially better vision. It can see images at three times the resolution and produce higher quality interfaces, slides, and docs as a result. On the API, the new x high effort level between high and max gives you finer control over reason and latency on hard problems.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to see how these do on Arc AGI b three.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The most notable thing here is you have a model a model card that shows a model that's not publicly accessible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They share the mythos benchmarking.
Speaker 1:Mythos, logging, opus 4.7, Just sitting there, but of course, unless you're one of Partners. Select companies, you won't be getting access to it at least yet.
Speaker 2:Well, Adi gave Opus 4.7 the tiny man bench, which is a very funny one where you ask the model, I am a tiny man. When my son was born, they handed me to him. And, Opus 4.7, that's a nice little riddle. The answer is a bar of soap. No.
Speaker 2:Wait. Let me think about it. Tiny man handed to him when his son was born. This sounds like it's pointing to a cigar, the tradition of handing out cigars when a baby is born and a cigar can be thought as a little man shaped object. That is very, very odd.
Speaker 2:This this is a I mean, this is like the new how many r's in strawberry where all of the models seem to have weird results for this. We, of course, have shrimp fried rice bench, which no one has really solved. Even just humor bench and tell us a novel joke has been increasingly difficult for these for these companies. Let's go over to OpenEye.
Speaker 1:I think I think gonna have to wait and see on Opus four seven how what what what the reactions are. Sure. I will be keeping an eye on Dan Schipper who is always does great analysis immediately after launch.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like generally, benchmarks are like almost completely meaningless at this point. Yep. Like, there's so many, like, open source models where they can, like, really I don't I don't know if you know if they're, like, actually bench maxing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But, like, you just talk
Speaker 7:to model
Speaker 5:for a while and you say, okay. This is a good model. Okay. Or this is not a good model. Yep.
Speaker 5:Like, it's very hard it's very hard to get, like, a a, you know, a quantifiable signal at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, increasingly, I mean, the it it feels like all of these models will be sort of, like, tested through, like, enterprise, like, rollouts, and you'll just do a demo project, swap in something, test this model, test that model, just see, okay. Well, our goal was to deliver value, and we had some KPI, like reduce cost, increased sales. Like, were were we successful when we implemented this model, rolled it out to our team, used it for a couple weeks? Did we see a tangible result or not?
Speaker 2:That's at the end of the day all that matters for businesses. So I could imagine that that's where all of this goes. Well, OpenAI announced Codex for almost everything. It can use apps on your Mac, connect to more of your tools, create images, learn from previous actions, remember how you like to work, and take on ongoing and repeatable tasks. With computer use on macOS, Codex can now use any app by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor.
Speaker 2:It runs in the background without taking over your computer, working on tasks like front end iteration, app testing, or any workflow that doesn't expose an API. You can now generate and iterate on images with GPT image 1.5 and Codex to create front end designs, mock ups, game assets, and more without leaving your workflow. Usage is included in your ChatGPT account. No API needed. Automations can now run-in the same thread.
Speaker 2:Lots of updates here. And TBo says Codex just got a lot more powerful. Computer use in app browser, image generation, editing, 90 plus new plug ins to connect everything, multi terminal SSH, lots and lots of stuff. So go give it a test. Go take it for a spin.
Speaker 2:Openai.com, of course. And you can download it for Mac OS. Well, speaking of websites, d j b went to the Oreo website and hit accept all cookies. Now we wait. I love this.
Speaker 2:Very funny. What else is going on in the timeline? The West creates the Internet. Try nailing that jello to the wall. CCP nails it.
Speaker 2:The West creates LLMs. I'll cut alright. Try nailing this. And the CCP picks up a hammer. There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal opinion section.
Speaker 2:AI is bound to subvert communism. This is a very contrarian take because people, at least with the Internet, there was the the perception of, like, decentralization, permissionlessness, anonymity, a lot of things that felt very democratic. AI is very centralizing by default. This is the teal take of, like, AI is communist and and crypto is is libertarian. And so this is this is a pretty wild thing to argue, but, you know, read read the opinion piece and see what they say.
Speaker 2:The the nail nailing Jell O to a wall, I believe that's from the Clinton administration, the idea that the Internet would spread so widely that the Chinese Communist Party would not be able to control the population. Everyone would be coordinating. It'd be sort of like an Arab Spring type moment. But, of course, the firewalls went up, the surveillance happened, and nothing really changed, and the Communist Party seemed stronger than ever. But this does sort of undergird a lot of what Dwarkesh has been saying about the the the risk of of China and having strong AI and stronger control over the population.
Speaker 2:It's always hard to get a read on exactly how things are rolling out in China. There's some people that seem to like it over there. Of course, Dwarkesh took a whole trip to China and made it back okay. So it's not all doom and gloom. But there are it is a it's a tricky tricky thing to argue, but we'll see.
Speaker 1:YouTube, according to The Verge, now lets you turn off Shorts.
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It is getting community noted.
Speaker 2:What does the community note say?
Speaker 1:This feature is a new setting for YouTube time management. It does not hide the Shorts tab in the app nor does it hide Shorts from appearing in recommendations. When set to off, the only change is that a dismissible warning screen will appear when the Shorts tab is selected. Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've tried I've tried I I land on YouTube on my phone. It immediately recommends a bunch of Shorts. Can hit the three dots Yeah. And say like show me less Shorts. Yep.
Speaker 1:And that feature does not work at all. And I don't watch Shorts on
Speaker 2:It is. You like Shorts.
Speaker 1:And I don't watch Shorts on YouTube.
Speaker 2:The shorts in the feed have been a lot. I wonder if they're seeing Yeah. I mean, they must just be seeing data that shows that the shorts are more retentive or keep people on that.
Speaker 1:Well, are When you're using YouTube as a video search engine, there are so many there are so many types of searches where it can be vastly preferable to watch a sixty second video on something. Yeah. So an example is like if you're doing research on cars. Yep. And you wanna like quickly understand how the seating I'm I I need to get a new, like, family car.
Speaker 1:Right? So I've been looking up different cars, trying to get a sense of, like, how spacious the cabin is, what what the seating arrangement is like. Yeah. And so I'd rather just click into a short and just get a quick sixty second overview and then bounce. I don't need to see, like, a fifteen minute review of the entire car.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's That YouTube Shorts creator, Forest Auto Reviews, sort of pioneered the the perfect sixty second car review where he talks really, really fast and says, like, inside, you get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and, you know, the the heater heated leather massaging seats and vinyl on the dash and carbon fiber here. And he sort of runs through the whole car in sixty seconds, shows you how fast it takes off. If it's a fast car, opens the door, shows you all the features. And it's sort of like a twenty minute Doug Jamiro video cut down to sixty seconds, which of course is is doing very well. Doug's response has been to create one minute cut downs of his content, and so you can enjoy that as a Short as well if you want.
Speaker 2:But if you do wanna turn off Shorts on the YouTube feed, the way to do it is to uninstall the app, use the mobile version, and then get a plug in that that there's an extension for Safari, I think, that will just go and and remove the actual Shorts as they pop up. But it's a hassle, and it's maybe slower than using the app. So, hopefully, this this feature becomes more real in the future since it does seem like some things that people are demanding. But always tricky to ask a a platform to to give you an option that would in in theory increase churn. Very, very tricky.
Speaker 2:Well, we have the beginning of our guest lineup starting now. We have Ben Smith from Semaphore. He is the editor in chief. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultradigm.
Speaker 2:Ben, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 9:Doing great. Can you guys hear me alright?
Speaker 2:We can hear you.
Speaker 8:Clear.
Speaker 2:We can see you, but we
Speaker 1:don't know where you are.
Speaker 2:You're looking very sharp.
Speaker 1:Dapper, I might say.
Speaker 9:Thank you. That's you know, we're convening a biggest gathering of business leaders in The US this year here at Summit Four World Economy. Wow. And so How
Speaker 2:many business leaders is Yeah. How many people are attending?
Speaker 9:500 global CEOs and then
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 9:Lots of political figures from The US and Europe. Had Scott Besant earlier, we got a Lutnick later. I assume they all just kind of came over from Hill and Valley. Yeah. We do our best.
Speaker 2:That's great. What's the structure of the conference? It's a few days. Are there specific breakout sessions, talk tracks, certain themes, or is it sort of more driven by the individual who's on stage at the moment?
Speaker 9:You know, it's five days, three consecutive three simultaneous stages, a bunch of really interesting kind of Chatham House rules, breakfasts and dinners and things like that. And I mean, the core topic is really, I mean, kind of where we live is the intersection of politics and and and sort of political power and finance and technology. So Sure. I mean, that's that that is what that is what people here are obsessed with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and within that intersection, what are the top topics that people are discussing in particular? Obviously, the the the conflict in The Middle East is big, but then AI is big. What what's actually driving the conversation today?
Speaker 9:You know, every conversation winds up coming back to AI. Really? And yeah. And I think whether that's, you know, Bessen actually, I had an interesting conversation with Bessen on stage where he he Yeah. Really downplayed the conflict with Anthropic.
Speaker 9:Okay. And so, they have kind of like some minor technical issue with the Department of War.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 9:interesting. The Treasury is working with them to make sure, you know, the banks don't go down. Sure. But just, you know, I think there's just a sense in particular that like really big enterprises and the kind of big brand name American companies are the ones most at risk
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 9:In the transition. And and I think people who work for those companies, who advise them, who compete with them are thinking a lot about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about on the labor side of big business? We've seen some reasonable strength in the job market recently. At the same time, there's a lot of layoffs going on. How are people grappling with the with the the unemployment situation in the economy?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, you know, the numbers are good. Yeah. And yet, there is this sense, you know, among the American public that AI basically exists to put everybody out of work. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they hate it. Yeah. And so, that's lingering over things. And I do think there's also a sense that the class of 2026 is not a great time to get out of college.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And I think there is a I would say like both like kind of authentic nervousness about, you know, what is everybody's labor force going to look like? Because of course, class twenty twenty six are also the ones who are native to these tools. Yeah. And are the ones you ought to be hiring. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And then also of like, they gonna come and chop everybody's heads off when they realize they aren't getting jobs? So I would say those two two competing questions about the youth.
Speaker 2:Has there been any discussion around resolutions to that or economic policy that can strengthen the safety net or or, you know, deal with taxes or more weekends or anything that can sort of offset the anxiety about weakening labor markets?
Speaker 9:You know, every member of Congress is, like, thinking about this all the time, taking questions about it all the time, and yet also aware that this is an institution that spent twenty years talking about regulating social media, and only now is sort of getting to it, but most of it's happening in The States. Yeah. And so, I think there's a lot of pessimism that Washington will act. But I think there's also is a sense that I think a lot of companies are seeing unexpected jobs coming out of AI. Talked to somebody who operates, like, basically the sort of call center dealing with financial fraud that you would think would really get wiped out by AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 9:But the good news is there is so much more financial fraud being driven by AI that they're keeping people very, very busy.
Speaker 1:That's emerging in in the legal space is like you just get way more contracts because contracts are easier to create or you get more lawsuits. So a lawyer is spending less time per lawsuit, but there's a lot more of them to work on. Yeah. And so you still have Yeah. That's full
Speaker 11:The good news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you using AI in the newsroom at semaphore? Are there I imagine you're not just writing AI articles, but are is there internal tooling that's been built? Are you understanding
Speaker 1:that metrics better? Are well set up for this because you're there's like, hey, here here are the facts then here's like takes and like separating those two things out. Yeah. I don't care what you use here. I want I want the takes to be generally pretty organic and coming from the author.
Speaker 1:But how do you think about it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. You know, we use it and it's interesting because I think like a lot of media, there's these two sort of huge trends. One is AI and automation, and the other is creators and individual connection. And people do not want AI in the way of that. I mean, when you when they realize that you're just avatars, you're gonna be in trouble.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 9:And and so we use it all all over the place behind the scenes to try to like help amplify our journalists. I I vibe coded something that predicts mean tweets about stories that I'm personally very proud of though I cannot say that I have driven wide adoption with my with my team. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get pre dunked on, use this tool.
Speaker 9:That is what the tool I called it pre dunk.
Speaker 2:Pre dunked. No way.
Speaker 9:They spent a whole day. It's in Google Apps Script. I love it.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 9:I would say more more usefully, one of my colleagues, because actually one of the challenges with an event like this is you've got three simultaneous stages and the reporter who's most qualified to write the story or even to know what's news is often the same one doing the interview and sitting on stage.
Speaker 2:Sure, sure.
Speaker 9:And so we did build a great tool that, you know, just takes the transcript of every interview instantly and pops out what's new. Oh, First so that a reporter who's maybe more of a generalist
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 9:Will know, oh, yeah. This is news. This isn't, which is incredibly useful. And we, know, obviously we check it, but that's a great starting point.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense because there's so many times when people fall back to a talking point, but you're looking for something that's actually novel or a new data point or a new prediction or something announcement. And that just might sneak in.
Speaker 9:Get this. Like, do you
Speaker 12:deal with it? You do
Speaker 9:an interview and you think there's one part that's interesting, but you're on the air and something goes viral.
Speaker 2:Right? Totally. Totally. Yeah. And we've and we I that's a very interesting tool.
Speaker 2:We should probably think about integrating something like that because we yeah. We found that it's very, hard to predict even with the best AI tools what content, what clips will actually perform, what is news. And we see a lot of coverage downstream of our show where something that's set on our show will then turn into coverage on other news sites, and, we've never really figured out how to grapple with all of that, but that's that's interesting.
Speaker 9:It's not just performance. Right? Like, it's also you might, like, think this is the new part. This is the interesting part. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But if you're doing it live, it just sort of floats by. Yeah. So that's been that's probably the thing that I'm just this week that I'm most kind of jazzed Yeah.
Speaker 1:What about overall market sentiment? J.
Speaker 9:D. Capaluno who made it. Sorry.
Speaker 1:What about overall market sentiment? I don't think if you told me last year we would be, you know, over a month into a war with Iran and the S and P five hundred would be at a record high. Yeah. I would not have believed you.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And, you know, people who CEOs, people who show up at events like this tend to be optimistic people. It's sort of a job quality, and so there is, like, a pretty positive vibe here and being driven there sort of parallels and is driven by the markets. One thing about Washington now, though, is there's also a lot of self censorship.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And there's a real difference between what people say in public and what they say in private. And I think, you know, in our in our kind of Chatham House rule gatherings, you're hearing a lot more concern about a kind of about a bit just about the long term direction of of US power, The US economy, The US markets, people hedging away, and no one's saying that stuff in public.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well
Speaker 1:Yeah. Biggest biggest ever disconnect in my life between like group chat conversations and like timeline conversations among people Yeah. Who have something to lose is how I would put it.
Speaker 2:Well Yeah. Interesting times. Hopefully, it, what's the plan to turn the synthesis of what you're hearing in the Chatham House context into reporting or content? Will you be writing op eds that are informed by what you learned? How how do you think about actually distributing that information?
Speaker 9:Mean, basic Chatham House rule is that you can steal the ideas and pass them off as your own, but you're not allowed to contribute them. So Yep. That's the plan.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we'll look forward to it. I'm sure everyone can follow along at semaphore. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. We'll make it next year.
Speaker 2:To. Yeah. That'd be fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day. Have a great rest of the conference and congratulations.
Speaker 9:You guys too.
Speaker 12:Thanks for having
Speaker 2:talk to you soon. Up next, we have Jonathan Criss from Vital Life working on desalination with a fantastic new fundraising round. Jonathan, welcome to the show. How are you?
Speaker 13:I'm doing fantastic. How are guys doing?
Speaker 2:We're great. I'm I'm so excited
Speaker 1:Insanely
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:talk to fired up.
Speaker 2:Were talking with Let's go. Yeah. We were talking with Peter Diamandis about desalination, and it's always been such a fascinating just not even a sci fi technology, but just a just an underutilized technology that has incredible promise, but hasn't felt like it's hit the takeoff that it needed to, and so excited to hear your plan. But why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and how you're thinking about things?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So I'm John, CEO and founder. I was at SpaceX for thirteen years before this. Started off in Dragon. Elon was like, stop using Dragons or building Dragons, you idiots.
Speaker 13:And I like, oh, man. I'll figure that out, boss. Started off with a a small team to go figure out Dragon Reuse.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 13:The whole program became Reuse Vehicles so it just took over as product managerRE. And then kind of got bored of spaceships, wanted to take on a new challenge, jumped over to Starlink team to figure out rate manufacturing where we got really plugged in on how you design for really high volume manufacturing. And then my co founder and I started really talking about how do we make a meaningful impact in the world, what's the next big challenge, and then got our head wrapped around answering that question that every eight year old kid has, how could there possibly be water scarcity when there's oceans everywhere?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 13:And then just like you said at the at the top of the segment, it's like, man, this technology feels like it's really cool, but it's just right right on the cusp of becoming awesome. And we think if we apply the lessons that we learned on Starlink with high rate manufacturing, driving down the cost, and really delivering this technology to everyone, we we can really make that meaningful impact.
Speaker 2:So walk us through the first product. I I was always thinking that the next big desalination company would be a huge desalination plant, but you're going much smaller. So walk me through the thesis there.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I love that because that's pretty much where everyone in the industry has focused, right? We got to clean a ton of water. These systems are super freaking expensive for upfront capital cost so the only way to make your unit economics in that use case work is by going really large and cleaning its ton of water. We just looked at it from the other end as like, man, if the upfront cost is negligible and you can keep your energy and maintenance costs low, you can probably do about the same and just scale it in terms of number of units, not large centralized system.
Speaker 13:And then it's just kind of blown up the thought process entirely inside of that because now you're looking at infrastructure resilience and and people being less reliant on centralized systems, and then you can open up to people that are more on the move, people that are are island struck, and really, man, the customer base kind of exploded from there. Like, oh, man. Like, if you could just deliver a low cost product, people wanna use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so walk me through, like, a textbook customer. Where are they?
Speaker 1:Can you explain like can you just explain the product like I'm
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, how big are we talking? Like, is this Yeah. Diesel generator size? Like
Speaker 13:Yeah. So we launched Access this week, which is our first consumer product. We're we're a little bit more in the middle market going into customer bases that already exist. So maritime industry has these these types of products. It's or reverse osmosis is at the core of our technology.
Speaker 13:Mhmm. What we do is we're able to do that manufacturing process at a much, much lower cost and then a much higher volume. So the product that you're seeing on your screen access, the facility that we got here in Torrance, we're able to produce more of these devices in a single month than currently exist. So we're kind of really taking that whole
Speaker 1:process Okay. But explain but but sorry. Sorry. Is you put a hose into salt water and then it goes into the machine and out comes potable drinking water.
Speaker 13:Exactly. Okay. We always say we designed for Terry.
Speaker 1:Just wanted to to to to be clear.
Speaker 13:So how Yeah. And hydrate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How many people off grid actually have access to salt water or or dirty water?
Speaker 1:Work for springs and lakes and
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is that the idea?
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. So you can clean what we say is any naturally occurring water source. Salt water being the hardest one to clean and why desal has been kind of out of reach for most people until now. Yeah.
Speaker 13:But, yeah, well water is is super common in The United States. Sure.
Speaker 12:I think
Speaker 13:it's like 11% of homes live on well water in The US. And then brackish water is super common, I mean, in marshlands. I mean, lots of lots of south of pretty much all Florida.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do you deal one one of the common things we hear about desalination is that, yeah, you you get clean water out, but you also get all of the dirt and all of the salt and and whatever else you don't want in your clean water. What do you do with that in your case? What happens normally?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So the stigma is in your, what you call brine or your concentrate. So when you run a very large plant, you want your recovery as high as possible so your concentrate is much, much higher, like two times the salinity in your salt. We actually run our system efficiently at a much lower recovery rate in the 15 to 20%. So as long as you're putting your brine or your concentrate back into a source water greater than five gallons or so, it almost immediately dissipates into that volume.
Speaker 13:We get the wins inside of there in terms of hey. You can use this product. It's not making that environmental impact because it's smaller form factor, lower flow rate, and lower, brine concentrate as well.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What about battery? Is this is it battery powered? Do you plug it in? What's battery life like? Could you eventually create some type of solar array so that it's entirely self sustaining?
Speaker 13:100%. Yeah. So it runs on ACDC. It's got an integrated battery. If you're cleaning ocean water, you're running for about an hour.
Speaker 13:If you're using fresh water, anywhere from about probably closer to three hours. It all depends on the source water that you're cleaning. Ocean water has a ton of salts inside of it so it's really difficult to remove those at higher pressure. Fresh water is much, much easier. You're essentially just killing bacteria and viruses.
Speaker 13:You can run it on ACDC. We do integrate with solar as well you know, if you have a decent sized solar panel, you can run this thing as long as you have
Speaker 1:sunlight. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Talk about what you've learned about the traditional large scale desalination operations. There's actually an article in the Wall Street Journal today about San Diego producing surprisingly a ton of water from desalination. San Diego now has so much water that it's selling it. Once a drought poster child, the California city now generates enough water to rescue parched states like Arizona and brew beer from recycled sewage. Are you optimistic?
Speaker 1:About that last part of Recycled sewage. Sewage beer.
Speaker 2:So they take sewage water and they clean it so effectively that they can brew beer in San Diego. They might have
Speaker 4:to disclose
Speaker 2:that on the label,
Speaker 8:but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think that we can get past the stigma at some point.
Speaker 13:The wastewater wants one. Bill Gates solved this problem a long time ago and it's like no one wants to drink a poop or or pee water. Right? Yeah. Luckily, the ocean is is is arguably the most abundant resource on earth.
Speaker 13:Yeah. And that's kind of the resource that we want to tap to bring this technology forward. But large plants are they serve a purpose. We want to be a partner with them, not a disruptor in the near term, right? Similar to Starlink, you had your, what was it, 10,000,000,000 infrastructure bill to give internet to rural areas that service zero people, yet Starlink could do that at a fraction of the cost.
Speaker 13:So we look for those people that are kinda high and dry right now and need access, and that's kind of our initial customer base that we're going through.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much does the product cost? Where is the business? Give us an update on the round.
Speaker 13:Yeah. Yeah. So $7.49 is our allowance price right now, but you can preorder for $88 totally refundable.
Speaker 9:Wow.
Speaker 13:We're getting into production here over the next actually our first PCB show up next week which I'm very excited about. The round was towards the end of last year. We have a great table, really awesome partners with GC and Interlagos. Yeah. And and that capital has gone a really long way to help us accelerate.
Speaker 13:So, like, the business has only been around for a little over a year Wow. And we're we're about to step into production here over the next few weeks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Looks like you're in a production facility. How big is the warehouse? How many people do have on staff?
Speaker 13:Yeah. We're 37,000 square foot facility here in Torrance. We're actually right next to the k two guys.
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 13:Nice. I keep seeing all my friends on you guys' show. Man, it's kind a rite of passage
Speaker 2:at We this
Speaker 13:have 37 full time employees right now plus a ton of contractors that help out and we'll probably be closer to, man, when we're at rate, with a bunch of, associate and production staff just waiting to hire once we get into production this summer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do you think that the business will remain almost entirely direct to consumer, or do you think there will be applications for business to business, construction crews, military, government, all sorts of different things?
Speaker 13:Yeah. Use this a lot. Gwen gave us a talk in 2013. She was like, Yo, guys, we got to get NRO certification because NASA is pretty much supporting this entire business. So when we started the business, we wanted to have multiple revenue streams that in the event of a macro event we can be reliant on.
Speaker 13:So the US military has a water logistics problem. Half of all casualties coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan were related to convoys moving water and fuel. They're excited and to be able to open up where they can get water from. Then NGOs, humanitarian groups are almost solely reliant on bottled water which is another logistical nightmare. Are both groups that we've engaged with and we have a lot of exciting conversations with, but then also some partnerships that we're going be announcing pretty soon.
Speaker 13:Then direct to consumer is the hardest problem. Elon used to tell us all the time when we were starting Starlink, go after direct to consumer because they're gonna give you the biggest feedback. You're gonna get roasted on Reddit and you're gonna know quick whether or not you made a mistake. So after I'm being personally roasted on Reddit a number of times, you learn really fast. That's who we wanna go after first.
Speaker 13:We wanna solve the hardest problem first and then open up to to those other larger customers afterwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Very, very, very, very cool product. And I'm I'm I'm gonna pre order one just to play around with it, bring it to the beach just to Come. Just to have some fun.
Speaker 13:Come by the factory. I always say bring a bucket of your favorite ocean water. We'll clean it and drink it. It's a lot
Speaker 1:of fun.
Speaker 4:That's amazing. Long does
Speaker 2:it take to clean a bucket of ocean water?
Speaker 13:A five well, we do six gallons of ocean water an hour. Okay. So about one hour. Well, little under an hour because most do five gallons.
Speaker 2:Five gallons.
Speaker 1:Cool. You're gonna need two. John's, like, horse size, so he he could easily get you, like, 10 gallons an hour.
Speaker 2:Okay. The chat wants to know what happens if you put a Diet Coke through it?
Speaker 13:It'll separate all we do this all the time. You do? We did a reverse Jesus the other day. We removed all the alcohol and water from wine. That's amazing.
Speaker 13:Yeah. You'll pull out all the gross stuff and just have It's pure glass
Speaker 2:of water.
Speaker 13:Some water. Did we did monsters the other day where we removed all the water from five monsters and then, drank the concentrate which was just a super caffeinated syrup.
Speaker 2:Oh, That's insane. Sounds like a
Speaker 1:fun That's crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, congrats on the progress and thank you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you,
Speaker 2:Jonathan. Company. And we'll Such a pleasure, guys. Have a
Speaker 1:good one. Great stuff.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Up next, we have Paul Scherer from Eagan. Eagan raising $15,000,000 from Benchmark to build a mutual friend platform. Paul, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 4:Hey. So good to meet you guys. Great to meet you.
Speaker 1:Great to meet you. And excited that you're not building another agent for the enterprise. No. You got got something new for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Break it down. Introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, so great to meet you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 8:You know,
Speaker 4:we're we're we're building, you know, we call the world's mutual friend.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Sort of,
Speaker 4:you know, instead of all of all these things that are, you know, out there trying to, you know, optimize our own bubbles, We're sort of you know, they're diverging more and more, you know, the world that's super hyper personalized for all of us
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is also really isolating because it's different for all of us. We we wanna bring these bubbles a bit closer together again.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So walk us through the experience. Well, first, maybe, like, where are you in this journey? You've raised some money, but do you have a team? Is the product live?
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about actually building the company?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's super early. Yeah. We're we're really, really grateful for all the support and all the partners that we've, you know, been able to meet. I'm from Germany.
Speaker 4:I literally grew up in this, tiny village, less than a thousand people. I moved here, like, less than a year ago to San Francisco, and I've been I I I literally landed. I had a one way flight here, stayed in a hostel. And a few months later, I've been, you know, meeting some of the greats and they've been, you know, so incredibly helpful. And we we've built a small team.
Speaker 4:It's very early. We don't you know, we haven't launched anything when we were working with, you know, early early users to build something really special and something really meaningful.
Speaker 2:So what can you share Living the
Speaker 1:s living the s f dream.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, maybe take us back first and were you doing before this? How did you get into startups? Walk me through that.
Speaker 4:I I I've been building things, you know, forever. I grew up, you know, in this sort middle class town, and I never knew anything about entrepreneurship, so I've always been building things. And then during the pandemic, I actually just went on Twitter, and I started to spend a lot of time, like twelve hours a day on Twitter. I think I have, like, 25,000 tweets and replies from, like, like a Sound good. From, like a three month period.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And and that's when I first you know, I I, you I didn't know what a VC was until I was like 18. Yeah. And, yeah, it's just like during the pandemic, I was like about to turn 17, I left high school to to do that. And so I've been been doing startups for five years now.
Speaker 4:You know, spent some time in Paris where I worked with the incredible people of a company called Augment. And then, you know, I could finally get a visa and go to The US, which I always kind of felt like was was my real place to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Alright. And then take us through the idea, Maze, and how and how you landed on this, like, general kind of space.
Speaker 4:You know, I think I've always been, like, really interested in sort of this this intersection of of arts and culture and, you know, technology. And, like, you know, growing up in this, like, you know, place where I grew up, and I I really love German children's literature. And there's this book that my dad read me when I was 10 about this little girl called Momo, who kind of connects everyone in her little town and helps sort of save the world from the time thieves. And I've always been inspired by this, and so it's been something I've been thinking about for a really long time. And I think now, more than ever, we really need this.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Feels very early, but you got Benchmark to come in and invest $15,000,000 They are the consumer social fund. They're willing to bet, you know, big and early. But typically, I see them investing after there's like a spark or like some sign real like sign of of of life? Do you feel like do you feel like you're there yet and that you have something that early users love? Like, at what point do you and and then, I guess, at what point do you think you'll you'll launch?
Speaker 4:So I think with Benchmark, you know, and and just more broadly, we we already see, I think, moments of magic. And it's very, very early, but it's been just really incredible to see how people create these moments of connections, you know, early early users. And I think just partnering up with Benchmark has been, you know, incredible experience. And I think I I don't feel like I've ever pitched Benchmark. I think we just Matt and we sort of very quickly and Zio got down, like, three days.
Speaker 4:And we we very quickly just realized that we had very similar ideas of what the future should look like and that we wanted to go on this journey together. And everything else kind of became secondary to to just like trying to make that happen together.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a risk of becoming a dating app? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?
Speaker 4:That's funny.
Speaker 1:Because I just like historically historically, the like, you know, meet meet people in your area apps even if they're intent you know, they they they're intended to create, you know, friendships. You know, you you may get power users that are have other intentions.
Speaker 4:I mean, totally. I think for us, we care more about, you know, strengthening, you know, already existing relationships. Right? We live in a time where we have all made way more relationships than, you know, ever before. You know, a hundred years ago, you might have a 100 friends.
Speaker 4:Today, have probably, like, about 600 relationships. And we really care about making these relationships meaningful much more than, like, adding just random people on top of that. And so I think it's less of a thing for us.
Speaker 1:Are you have you been surprised that, you know, we're this far into the consumer AI boom and yet the only AI apps topping the App Store charts are basically language models?
Speaker 4:I think it's it's natural, maybe. I don't think we're in the consumer AI boom yet because, you know, the the the the great product people usually take, you know, a bit of time to sort of come out of the woodworks and start, you know, imagining what the new paradigms might look like. We've seen, you know, an incredible thing, which is that the sort of single player experiences are more powerful than ever ever before. Mhmm. You know, multiple orders of magnitude.
Speaker 4:I think now the interesting thing is how, you know, how are how are the enduring experiences built? Like, what what what does it, you know how how do you build a product that, you know, is so different that it couldn't have been done, you know, five years ago because it's just a new paradigm and sort of new primitives? And I think it takes time to to find and invent that.
Speaker 2:How do you think about Dunbar's number? I remember Dave Morin had this app Path that you were supposed to add no more than a 150 friends, I believe. And I'm wondering if you think that number's changing or you think that there's some sort of, like, optimal ground truth to that idea of the of Dunbar's number? Have you reflected on that at all?
Speaker 4:We think a lot about it, and I think there's a lot of interesting things in Dunbar's research. Mhmm. To me, the two things that stand out are that the the headline number is growing. Right? We have way more relationships than ever before.
Speaker 4:It doesn't mean that we're you know, our brains are getting better at your computing, the the social dynamics. But the real big problem is that we have way less close people. Right? So and I think that really is the the most interesting thing to me is how do we get that back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think do do you think there's anything to be done on the social networking side to make filter bubbles less less prevalent. There was some some work done, it felt like, on YouTube where you would watch one video and immediately get served another video that was similar, and so you'd wind up sort of down a rabbit hole. And then YouTube seemed to have changed the algorithm to sort of show you the opposite side of the argument. If it was a video for in favor of something, you'd see a video that took the other side pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:But I agree with you on the general trend that, like, there there is these, like, know, niches and niches and niches. And that's been good in some ways, but it's also created some isolation. Have you just reflected on, like, if you had full control over all the social platforms, what you might do differently?
Speaker 4:It's an interesting question. I think what's missing is sort of opinion. Right? We went from, you know, five newsletter outlets, you know, maybe 12 radio stations, a bunch of TV stations to, like, sort of infinite nuance. Right?
Speaker 4:And and everything, you know, every take that you could possibly have, you can find it on Twitter. Mhmm. And and what we want is not the average of the world. Right? Like, you don't actually care about the recommendation or the take of the average of the world, but you care about, you know, the take that your people care about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so there's sort of like, we we think there's something in the middle. Right? An in between space that's really interesting that brings you closer with actual people versus, you know, just makes it the average of the world or, you know, leaves you alone in this, like, hyper isolated bubble where you you you know, you end up seeing things on TikTok that maybe are generated on the fly, and, like, no one else will ever see that video. And you can't go to your office anymore and be, guys, did you see this, like, insane thing? Like, and and talk about it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. How do you think about just app growth? There's obviously viral loops that can happen with anything that's somewhat social even if it's a little bit tighter. There's launch videos and paid marketing. Have you explored sort of like the current landscape of what it takes to actually make it in the App Store, which feels like more competitive than ever?
Speaker 4:I think maybe the answer is to not make it in the app store. What does it look like to build something, you know, I don't know how the I mean, we have obviously strong opinions on how the how the world might look like and where I I I don't I'm not convinced that it's gonna be another app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 4:have this wonderful story that one of our investors, Ben Silberman, told me when I first met him about sort of, you know, his son describing his job, like Ben's job. And he was just like, oh, you know, he he was asking, you know, all these squares on your phone? And my dad makes one of them. Yeah. And I don't wanna make another square.
Speaker 4:And I think we have enough squares competing for our attention, and maybe the the next thing isn't another square, but something completely different. And I think that's what's exciting about this time. You can build something that just truly has never been there before and that sort of escapes any previous incumbent.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because, like, even within Pinterest, the app that Ben Silverman founded, there like, it has more squares within the square. It's like
Speaker 1:all the way down.
Speaker 2:The layout, it tends to be a
Speaker 1:bunch of squares. Will. Yeah. We're extremely curious to to try to try what you're building when you're ready. I know the chat is.
Speaker 1:I think the mystery is good. Everyone's coming out. They're launching with, you know, the three minute launch video explaining, and you're just coming out with pure mystery.
Speaker 2:Where can people go to do you have a wait list at least?
Speaker 4:We're on teamiagen.com. You can sort of visit our office Okay. At
Speaker 1:Visit the office. You're
Speaker 4:you wanna learn more I'm the website. Person. Yeah. We love in person. That's why we built our office as the website.
Speaker 4:Oh.
Speaker 1:No email no email capture on the on the No.
Speaker 4:We're I think
Speaker 1:You guys are post email, post app, post This
Speaker 2:is amazing. I love it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Come come visit us on our on on on our office website or in person in our office. We're hiring exceptional people, and we're excited to build something really special.
Speaker 2:I like this this typewriter that you can play on. This is very fun. Beautiful website. I absolutely love it. The bowling balls and everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great great website concept. Unfortunately, it will be copied relentlessly.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But But
Speaker 2:You will
Speaker 1:you did it first and that's what matters. Anyway Great to meet you, Paul. Very excited to Yeah. To see where you guys ship. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And come back on
Speaker 4:when We'll we
Speaker 2:talk to you soon. Have a
Speaker 5:good Thank you.
Speaker 2:Did you hear that Alphabet is poised for a $100,000,000,000 windfall on the SpaceX investment they made. Google owns around 5% of SpaceX and could get
Speaker 1:Tyler's fired.
Speaker 2:100,000,000,000 from SpaceX's IPO. They manage to pull it off at the 2,000,000,000,000 valuation, not bad. That is a crazy stat. And
Speaker 1:They needed a windfall.
Speaker 2:Ashay Sanghvi from Haystack says, what are the odds that this was a result of this? And he's showing the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel where Peter made the argument that Google is printing too much cash and needs to innovate, needs to invest in more things.
Speaker 5:It's funny. Dwarkesh actually asked a very similar question to Nvidia. He was like, oh, you guys have all this extra cash. Yeah. Are you gonna train a new model?
Speaker 5:Like, something internally. Right? Because they've said they're gonna do open source model.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Aren't they? Wasn't the answer just yes?
Speaker 5:I I mean, he didn't say like, yeah, we're going after the labs. Yeah. It's like very different. They're doing open source. But it is it feels like a very similar question.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're also doing self driving cars at NVIDIA, and obviously Google's been very successful with that. It feels like the the Google investments that burned money for a very long time, although they obviously stayed very profitable, A lot of those penciled out very, very well. And and it does seem like the the end result of this discussion was Google should invest more, and they did. And they invested in SpaceX and Waymo and a bunch of other projects.
Speaker 2:And some of them didn't pan out, but certainly many many of them did. What else is in the timeline?
Speaker 1:Mark is noping out. Zach says, okay. Actually in same paper published yesterday, a research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using EMFs. Wow. EMFs.
Speaker 1:Like looking at the fields. They expose mice to 60 hertz EMF. Yeah. Same frequency as your wall outlet using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal for cyclic three day or four day off pulses. This showed that you could activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in the progeroid in aged mice, extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues, conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't.
Speaker 1:No drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside. The body That's pretty crazy. I'm close to taking a victory, like, a drug. I'm I'm very paranoid about about EMFs, but
Speaker 2:But this could be positive. There could be It
Speaker 1:could be positive.
Speaker 2:It could a positive outcome. It be positive. But we have don't have Anyway, what? Oh, we have our next guests. Yes.
Speaker 2:We have Here you go, John. James Morrissey and Kevin Hart. Welcome to the show, folks.
Speaker 1:There they are.
Speaker 11:How are
Speaker 2:you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Gentlemen, what's going on?
Speaker 8:What's going on, Russ?
Speaker 12:How are you?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you for
Speaker 4:taking Big the day.
Speaker 12:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 2:Big day. Would love to get I I think everyone knows Kevin Hart, but
Speaker 1:Well, I think everyone knows James. I was gonna ask the opposite. Was gonna say
Speaker 8:It's not about me. I'm gonna take a second and I'm a highlight my guy. Okay. Yes. You know, some may be familiar with the the the the idea
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Of Kevin Hart. But in this space, man, it's more about my business. And, you know, business is great. We have great partners. So take a second to highlight my guy, man.
Speaker 8:James James has done a phenomenal job in self, with self, with his company, with his own entity, and the idea of finding cool ways to create and develop partnerships with faces that are and can be more than just an ambassador, but Mhmm. More of a brand. He's done a great job, man. He he's done a really good job of vetting out the space, and I'm lucky to have found someone with the mindset, the understanding, to help me do the things that I want. So execution only happens when you have people that can do so.
Speaker 8:James is that. He's an executor. So give it a hell. I'll
Speaker 2:I'll do that. How how did you two meet? What were the first meetings like? Where did the meetings take place? Like, where where did all this come from?
Speaker 12:We met about five years ago in the depths of COVID through mutual friends. We're in the space of building brands in joint venture with well known individuals and entertainment, brands that they wanna own, not just endorse.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And we wanted to go into the tequila space for a long time. Sure. We liked the category, we thought it was very compelling, but the celebrity tequila space is completely oversaturated at the time. Yeah. It was very noisy.
Speaker 12:We needed something really compelling to break it through and and to make it right for us. And when myself and Kev started talking during COVID, it became very clear very quickly that we matched each other's energy. Absolutely. In terms of understanding the responsibilities of being not just a a face for the brand, being a business partner.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And the responsibilities of owning a brand and building one of these businesses for the long term.
Speaker 8:But you I think you understood early on what my what my wants and not wants were. Like, you know, the the biggest and I'll say the most important rule that I have, I'm never I'm never slapping my name on anything. Right? If I can't embrace it or I can't do it on a daily and really have a authentic response to it and engage with it if I engage with everything in my life, then I don't wanna do it. So all of my partnerships across the board, whether it's ownership plays, equity plays, or ambassador like roles, I truly am embedded and invested into the thing.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So with the wine and spirit space, having my own tequila, it was necessary because I said, look, I only drink tequila. I'm drinking everyone else's product. So developing my own version of a product that I can then drink at the same level that I drink my own when I am in a space of comfort or celebration could be dope, but let's put a story behind it. Like Yeah.
Speaker 8:Let's make it let's make it different and let's exist in some rare air. What what can be defining or redefining in this space that base that basically represents me in the best way? Yeah. And he was very diligent in in answering those questions and helping me navigate on that road. Right?
Speaker 8:So Yeah. The idea of hard work and hard work tasting different, and the idea of a celebration being being attached to Gran Coramino because we believe that life should not only be celebrated, but what you do on a daily should be celebrated. So hard work in whatever whatever way, however it fits to you, how do you choose to celebrate My job was to give you a choice right when I was there.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that the space was crowded. How did you think about finding differentiation on the product side, the distribution side? What really stuck out as like, okay, it is a complicated space, but there's a big opportunity here?
Speaker 8:I I would say, man, you know, you you have to have access. Okay. So Juan Domingo Beckman Jr, of course, the family, what they've done in this space, you know, you're talking about generation on generation Yeah. Of success and and growth in the business. Right?
Speaker 8:Like, from a distribution, you know, outlet opportunity, there isn't a bigger option. So I think for us, it was getting Juan to understand the real want, getting him to understand the passion behind my want, and that this is not a celebrity play. This is not a check grab and run. This is a want to build something that can literally be attached to my family name and give me an opportunity to to build generational success, wealth, visibility, whatever you wanna call it. But I want I want that.
Speaker 8:How do I get that? Have to go to the people that have it. Yeah. So I think that was our biggest our biggest one. And and as you talk about separating yourself, well, when you have that machine and that machine understands your real energy and those two things connect, well, you're already so much different from anything else in the space.
Speaker 8:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Like, the space is crowded because people believe that, oh, let's get a famous person and put the famous person's name on a bottle and just put the bottle on the shelf and it's your cell. That's not true at all. Like, why did you make it? What's the story behind it? What do you care about?
Speaker 8:Do you really drink this? And if so, why? And how did you develop the liquid? What is your plan for year two, three, four, five? Like, people really love a story, and if you have an authentic one, I find that people respond to it.
Speaker 8:So the the years of operation and configuration as to what we wanna do were the best parts of the business, because after the liquid came out, well, it wasn't a shock to us of why we were happy and why we loved it. We did the work. Yeah. Did the work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Question question from the chat. Walk us through the actual product development process. I'm I'm assuming trips to Mexico, a lot of tastings, iteration. Yeah. But what did that look like?
Speaker 12:So there's a lot more that goes into this business than meets the eye for the consumers. Right? So to your point earlier, the liquor business, the alcohol business is it's a very complex industry to navigate based on the three tier system dating back to the years of prohibition. So there's certain criteria and ways you've got to navigate, and ultimately to build success, our perspective on it within consumer products and goods, and particularly within alcohol, where we saw the biggest opportunity over the last five years, is large corporations typically do not disrupt. They innovate.
Speaker 12:They innovate well with liquids. They innovate well with package. But generally, they're not disruptors. And that's not saying the alcohol industry alone, that's every large industry. So it takes independent entrepreneurial companies to be real disruptors, like you guys were speaking to the guy from Grinz the other day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 12:guys were speaking to, you know, John from Happy Dad. These are independent companies that are bucking the trend, and our model has been let's be that independent spirited business. Let's make those bold, calculated decisions in real time and be really fast and agile in terms of how we operate in the market day to day. But let's partner with the best large corporate in the business being Proximal and Juan Domingo Beckman from the Beckley Corporation. And let's bring some real scale to the table.
Speaker 12:So that that that that muscularity of the Proximo Proximo machine and the agility of us in the market every day leading on on what consumers see, that's been it's been a very successful partnership for us, and it's helped us grow that trend.
Speaker 8:And I also I also think just to add to that. Right? Like, you know, you're not dealing with rocket scientists. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Literally, like, people that are successful and people that have won, they've done it for a reason. So you're not trying to recreate the wheel or redesign the wheel. You're trying to better service the wheel. Sure. So sometimes the wheel, it it falls into a space where everybody jumps on and the expectations are of norm.
Speaker 8:And they don't understand that you gotta energize the wheel. You gotta you gotta go in with some new energy, and what you'll find, those people will respond to that. I think our energy yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need you guys we'll we'll get you guys set up with a sound board for some of your other meetings for when you're on Zoom. That
Speaker 8:just did something to me. Took them express so in real time. I'm gonna
Speaker 2:answer For sure. Okay. So, yeah, to resell strategy, you have a massive platform, but you have to get the product to a place where people can buy it when you're promoting it. What was the thought between distribution, getting it in stores, and then starting to push the promotion funnel versus just telling everyone about it, they're like, yeah, I'm excited, but where do I get it? Oh, it's only available in a few stores.
Speaker 8:Well, a is patience. Okay. And b, it's actually realizing the real work that goes with that. Like, yes, I have a large platform and a huge social media following, but that doesn't mean that as soon as I post something and say do it, that people respond. Yeah.
Speaker 8:You have to like be on the ground. Yeah. You have to do the real work. So within distribution, you gotta go and you gotta go talk and meet and shake the hands and build the relationships. Right?
Speaker 8:The work that you're looking for is a response of what people feel the the the reason for your your implementation in this space. Like, when when the partners meet you and they say, oh, he's not here for fiction, he's here for real. This is not fake. Yeah. We will support, and we will back, and we will suggest this to the new customer when they walk in.
Speaker 8:Try Kevin Hart's tequila. It's really good. Because Kevin came in here, and Kevin sat in front of us, and Kevin made us understand not only why we should taste it, but why we should back and support it. Yeah. It's no different from a new artist.
Speaker 8:If a new artist is really hungry, you're showing up at every radio station and every DJ outlet, and you got your you got your CD or you got a hard drive because I want you to hear my sound. Listen to it. And you're gonna get way more no's than you are gonna get yeses. But the breakthrough yes when it goes into radio waves Yeah. Makes the work so much worth it.
Speaker 8:In this space, the work of getting every restaurant, every brand, every chain, every wine and spirits, liquor store, independent chain, etcetera. Like, yeah, I rent. Yeah. So I expect to see the results of my work. I expect to see people responding because I know what I did to get it into a space of conversation.
Speaker 8:And I think for me, that energy is an energy that I'm not gonna let go of, and my partners have responded to it tremendously. That's why we sit where we sit today.
Speaker 2:Where is the business today? How big is it? What are sales? What can you tell us about the shape of the business?
Speaker 12:The business today, Frank Bormino is now the fastest growing celebrity tequila brand in the world. You gotta take
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 12:We grew last year by a 100% year on year. We've done $200,000,000 in
Speaker 2:the hit
Speaker 1:that gong, John.
Speaker 8:Viddian. This is better than anything I've ever done.
Speaker 1:Yay. Should
Speaker 2:zooming out. Should every celebrity launch a product? Should every influencer have a product? What advice are you giving to other celebrities?
Speaker 12:Absolutely not. I would say that from a celebrity perspective, most celebrities should not create businesses that they want to own. Mhmm. The endorsement model is a good model for most celebrities.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But
Speaker 12:for entertainers who truly have the understanding, the know how, and the commitment to put in the work and prioritize said project over everything else outside of their day job, that's when it's compelling. And that was what was compelling in this partnership.
Speaker 8:Well, I don't I don't even like the word the word celebrity when it's used and attached to me because it's it's it's
Speaker 12:It's what we
Speaker 8:Yes. It's it's underwhelming Yeah. To to what I really am. Right? And I get it.
Speaker 8:I get what that is. Yeah. I get the stars, celebrity, etcetera.
Speaker 12:It's not why we partner
Speaker 8:with each other. But as an entrepreneur, as a as a real business mind, as a real, like, worker that's not afraid to do, build, etcetera, you you're you're so much more. Right? Like, the the the idea of a mogul or concept of that is is just a person that wants so much and is willing to do so much. And in doing so much, it means I'm not afraid to partner or align with people who have done.
Speaker 8:So in this space, slapping somebody's name on something and just thinking that it's sell it doesn't work. It doesn't work. You're you're you're you're in rare air of opportunity. And the celebrities that have had amazing success in the space of business brand portfolio, they do the work. Right?
Speaker 8:Like, just throwing out names. You look at a Kim Kardashian, I don't think Kim gets the true credit that she deserves at all times of actually doing the work. People don't understand Kim shows up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:She doesn't just have the idea. She shows up. Like, the people know that they're gonna see her on a daily. The office, full of employees, know that Kim walked through the halls. They know that her office is there, and she's in meetings.
Speaker 8:She's on call. She does the work. So I myself am a do the work individual, and I think when you are and and you are committed, there is no world of loss. Mhmm. You're always gonna win because you're doing what everyone else refuses to do.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Because they don't have the patience. They don't have the strength and mental ability to stay true to something, do the ups and downs, and see it all the way through. It's not easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's a it's a very, very hard space to operate in. And, yes, we're in amazing air right now, and I love it. Will it stay this way? Who knows? But no matter what, you're committed to it, whether it's up, down, whatever, you're to the process, and you know that ultimately, Sun is always gonna be at the end of the tunnel.
Speaker 8:Yeah. That's where we are.
Speaker 12:And that that was the most compelling part of this partnership, is having a partner who understands, who's willing to be on the phone every day, the good days and the bad. Yeah. But ultimately, the business behind the brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, Kevin, how are you thinking about maybe not work life balance, but work work balance? You have multiple roles, multiple projects. If you're going into a movie, are you telling everyone, okay, I need to, you know, I need space, I need focus for a couple weeks or are you trying to have, okay, I'll do something in the morning and then something in the evening. What what is your workflow like on a day to day basis?
Speaker 1:Gonna be pouring shots for the whole cast and the director.
Speaker 8:This this is an example of why things need to why things need to fit your lifestyle. Yeah. Right? If things fit your lifestyle and fit your day to day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You'll find that you're never forcing and truly fighting for time.
Speaker 4:Sure.
Speaker 8:Right? Everything can be done correctly. I am a I am a product of structure and operation. I have an amazing team around me. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And within that, if I'm doing a movie, I'm doing a movie. But while doing a movie, well, how do I make my partners a part of said movie? Is there spaces for me to amplify partnerships or relationships? If I'm on tour, can I position or present certain relationships or partnerships that I have to be visible while I'm doing the things that I'm doing? Hey, man.
Speaker 8:I'm golfing. What partners can I align or or or place in within what I'm doing on a regular? Hey, I got vacation time coming up, but when I do go on this vacation time, man, it's relaxing, but I have certain relationships and partnerships that service the idea of relaxation, and what it looks like, and what it should feel like. As a partner, you are always thinking of how to service those that are aligned with you, and when you do have a mind like that and you operate like that, it becomes a systematic thing. It's never a fight.
Speaker 8:So, yes, I am three sixty five. I am, you know, a a up to sun down person with work, but because of my system, nobody gets left out. Wife, kids
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Partners Yeah. Business, comedy, film, you know, company. Let's just say within company, employee, relationship, like, all of these things are embedded into an idea of my day to day and what I have to do. Yeah. So it's it's it's never left behind.
Speaker 8:It's never skipped or overlooked. It's it's implemented, and rightfully so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone's been tracking a million different changes in media and entertainment over the last decade. Throughout your career, like, what what has been the biggest crucible moment? What has been the biggest trend change that you felt, okay, I need to adapt my strategy. I I think everyone in my community needs to adapt our strategy.
Speaker 2:How have you processed the evolution of media over your career?
Speaker 8:I'll say getting older. Yeah. Right? I mean, I'm I'm I'm about to be 47 this summer. Overnight success.
Speaker 8:Sitting and witnessing. Witnessing Yeah. A shift in marketing and a shift in entertainment. Right? This younger generation and how they are navigating and and operating within social media, within storytelling
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Within finding ways to present themselves to the masses. I mean, you know, the concept of a live streamer and and a person that that is literally talking to a screen all day and looking at a chat with comments, but finding a way to to build revenue to where it's coming in droves. Right? Like, that to me, it's exciting. Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's exciting to see a shift. So you don't fight that. You find a way to be a part of it. You find a way to support it. So where I think I've had an amazing lift is in amplifying that younger generation.
Speaker 8:Right? Like, when I have a chance to sit beside some of these younger guys that are doing these amazing things, or it's dope for them to have stars like myself on their platforms or supporting them in that space. I don't need nothing or want anything in return. I just wanna see people win. But when you're supporting the new, it just makes you aware.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Not being aware is ridiculous. Fighting what what is what is in real time a new space of success, you're seeing ad revenue, crazy spins from the biggest brands in the business, and you're seeing where they're now spinning it. Television is changing. The on demand feel and want has changed.
Speaker 8:How we watch movies and want movies have changed. Lot of entertainment still exists today, but it's bigger than ever because people still wanna go out, but you realize they still wanna be home. You gotta go and you gotta say, how do I basically fit into these pockets, and how do I deliver in a manner to where it's real and it's never forced? Well, you do that with support first and and elevation for them, and then things come back to you. Right now, it's all about me saying, I see you young guys, you young women.
Speaker 8:I love what you're doing. I wanna see you win. How can I help you? And then in return, their audience gets to say Kevin is cool. But it's it's a it's a them first me second now.
Speaker 12:This a prime example, Jordy, of of you guys. When we when we've been tracking what you guys have been doing for the last two years, it's it's incredible. And when the business outlets came up in terms of the list of targets, TBPN was on the top. We want to be in the story. We want to know what's new.
Speaker 12:We think it's bold and exciting what you're doing. Congrats on the deal with OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 12:But, I mean, you guys are just getting started, but us knowing you, us knowing that we want to be on that platform, that's what it's about. Big companies don't often think that way, but we're empowered to be able to make those decisions day to day to be here with you.
Speaker 8:That's a great point.
Speaker 1:Last question, guys. James, is there a competitive dynamic between some of your different partners? The chat is talking about your work with Post Malone and ASAP Rocky. I know all these guys are very competitive. Is there any kind of dynamic internally who who can build the biggest brand?
Speaker 1:No. I know don't want second or third, Kevin.
Speaker 12:It's not it's not a it's not a competition but there is no shortcut to success and it's hard work is required.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a it's it's it's looking like it's a competition.
Speaker 2:Whenever somebody says it's not a competition, you know it's a competition.
Speaker 8:I will tell you this. We should all look at what each other are doing. Yeah. And you figure out ways to take small pieces of the recipe that that's working. Right?
Speaker 8:Like, I think ASAP and Post have done a great job in building businesses and building brands, myself included. And when you see what's working for for each other, you find ways to take pieces. Like, ultimately, I wanna see everybody win. I would love to see us all win. I would love to see his company succeed and be everything that it should be and more.
Speaker 8:But
Speaker 1:You would just hate for somebody to win win more than you. I want everyone to win. Just slightly less than me. I'm winning. I love
Speaker 12:it, I said we picked you.
Speaker 7:I said,
Speaker 1:hey, if I was a betting man, I'd be betting on you. I your work ethic is gonna be insane. I know while they're sleeping, you're gonna be at every restaurant, every club Yep. Getting everybody on the program. So I'm excited to to follow along and thank you guys for We will we will enjoy it this weekend.
Speaker 8:Yeah. The next time the next time I'll be in the studio. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 8:That's and I wanna get all the effects in real time, man. Yeah. I need
Speaker 2:to Let's do it.
Speaker 8:Your energy is unbelievable, man. You guys deserve the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Scoot over scoot over a little bit there. So you should
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 4:That's what
Speaker 8:I'm talking about. Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys, man.
Speaker 2:Great. Great.
Speaker 1:Great to see you guys. Congrats. Talk to you
Speaker 2:guys soon. Have a good day.
Speaker 1:Out of control.
Speaker 2:Fantastic response form with the soundboard. Really working overtime. I love the soundboard.
Speaker 1:Poor Matan from factory. That's a tough act
Speaker 7:to follow.
Speaker 2:For sure. But he'll be joining us in about ten minutes. We can go through
Speaker 1:more Well, speaking of entertainment Yes. Variety has opposed Val Kilmer has is been this a movie?
Speaker 2:Val Kilmer is
Speaker 1:an actor, John.
Speaker 2:Who passed away recently. He was in Gun and in the new Top Gun as well, that was his final movie. Very sad. Next to piece.
Speaker 1:Has been resurrected by AI to star in the new movie, As Deep as the Grave. Here's a first look at the film trailer. Kilmer's digital return has the support of his daughter, Mercedes, who previously told Variety, he always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling. This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film of which he was an integral part. I'm curious, does does this mean he was involved with it prior to his passing or he that she's just saying
Speaker 2:I mean, there's been a there's been a couple companies in Hollywood that have done facial captured, high res digital scans trying to capture as much performance data. But of course, there's just the raw training data of every movie and every shot that was recorded while they were on set. And a lot of those, even the outtakes are are captured and saved even if they don't make it to the to the final movie, the final cut of the movie. So this has always been an option. And then you imagine with the advance of models, you'll be able to train a really high high quality output even just on what's like, out there in in the in the final cut.
Speaker 2:You don't you might not need special capture or special special data. But this is a very interesting very interesting time. I imagine that there will be a ton of pushback on this broadly. But if the audience opts in and the actor opts in, I imagine this will be written into a lot of wells and a lot of, you know, contracts and agreements. Imagine that all of Hollywood will be grappling with how they process this going forward.
Speaker 2:But if it makes for good entertainment,
Speaker 4:you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The reason that I think it will become extremely frequent is that just the financial incentive Yeah. For the family
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:For better or worse. Sure a lot of people will be upset about that. But
Speaker 2:Do we have our next guest in the waiting room already?
Speaker 1:Before we get Matan in, we gotta talk about Zach. Zach has this app
Speaker 2:Oh, Gro.
Speaker 1:Share Aura. Yeah. It's a running focused app. They now have feature
Speaker 8:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:From what I've been seeing where people can basically go on a a run. It's like a live stream of your run. Oh. So people can come in and like heckle you. They can cheer you on.
Speaker 1:You can come on with like video or it just has you on the map. So it's like tracking your pace, your mileage, all this stuff. It's very, very cool. We gotta have Zach on to talk about it.
Speaker 2:This used to be such a hard feature to build, and it just I mean, of course, there's services and APIs that allow for live streaming to be bolted on pretty quickly, but remarkable that Zach was able to roll this feature out with such a small team and so early in the in the journey for the app. Seems fun. Feels a little hard to walk to run with your camera there to show your face, but I guess certain runners will adapt if it's good content. Well, we have Matan from Factory. He is the co founder and CEO.
Speaker 1:Matan You dog.
Speaker 2:How you doing?
Speaker 1:You dog. You absolute dog.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 7:Well. Happened? I am doing well.
Speaker 2:Tell us what guys are doing.
Speaker 1:How you doing? How big is this market? Because
Speaker 7:This is the is the most important market there is.
Speaker 2:It seems like it.
Speaker 1:It really seems like it.
Speaker 2:Break down the news for us first.
Speaker 1:What happened? It is with the news, and then we'll get into
Speaker 7:the details. Well, first of all, so I'm reporting live
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:From and let's play a quick word association game. I'm gonna tell you where I'm calling in live from.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 7:You gotta give me a first first word that comes to mind. Coming in live from the Rosewood in Menlo Park.
Speaker 2:Oh, Drew Horowitz.
Speaker 7:Enterprise software. Come on.
Speaker 2:Enterprise software.
Speaker 4:The rose
Speaker 7:The temple the temple of selling enterprise software. I'm in here Yeah. Closing deals.
Speaker 2:But more
Speaker 7:importantly here to share with you guys about our latest fundraise. We raised a $150,000,000 from there
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 7:From the great folks at Coastal Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Blackstone, Insight, NEA, and some other some other great partners, and we're very, very excited to have their support.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Talk about the last, I I feel like it's at least three months, maybe a bit more since the last time you were on the show. Talk about how the how the space is evolving. I mean, there's just so much noise. Like, every single day, you know, somebody saying Battling this entire paradigm is dead.
Speaker 1:You guys clearly have just kept your head down and Yeah. And are are making a lot of progress. But yeah, walk us through kind of how the how the space is evolving, how how your business is Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Absolutely. So I guess, first of all, I think, you know, there's obviously a lot of excitement in this space because there's just so much to be done in terms of software development. There's so many things that software developers don't enjoy doing, but they unfortunately have to be doing. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I think there was a there's kind of an early phase of excitement where everyone was just, you know, thinking about all the possibilities and kind of investing kind of the resources both from the the financing side, but then also in the enterprise side in terms of, you know, making sure they stay up to date. But I think there was a bit of a lag where first, you know, they were like, hey. Here are all the things we want to do. Let's go and tell our developers to actually do it. And there's kind of a lagging period where they didn't do it.
Speaker 7:And then in the last six months really, everyone started adopting Agentic AI. You see that in the revenue numbers of every Yeah. You know, model provider. And I think now there's a bit of a a bit of a hangover where, you know, some people are realizing that they wanted their engineers to go and adopt things and adopt what they did. However, they might not be doing so in the most efficient manner.
Speaker 7:You know, there are large enterprises that we work with that found that on a monthly basis, they spend on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers saying things like hello to Opus 4.6 fast or GPT 5.4, like ultra high
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Which, you know, is probably not the best use of those tokens. And I think, you know, a tool like Factory where we can be model agnostic and dynamically route them to the appropriate model for the appropriate task
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:That has been something that's been really getting a lot of enterprise excitement.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The on another token this token kinda token maxing trend, Meta Meta, of course, was they love to spend money on on AI. They've they had their internal leaderboard to see who could basically produce the most tokens. There have been some chatter that that people were had effectively just created loops to just, like, go to get to the top of the the chart even though I'm not sure it's an award worth winning. Do you think that, like, large corporates are already, like, hey, this or, like, do you think this is a period where it'll be, like, for the first half of this year, people are, yeah, just try a bunch of stuff and then we'll see where we land?
Speaker 1:Or do you think there's already gonna be more of a pullback? I know the Uber CTO had had, went on the record and was talking about, like, hey, we basically spent our whole inference budget, in in in, you know, the first quarter and we gotta figure out what our plan is on a go forward basis.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, I think what we're seeing is that every company kind of has to go through these phases. We're like, phase zero is reluctance to adopt because, you know, developers have their workflows that they've that they've had for the last twenty years. They might not wanna change it. And phase one is kinda throw the kitchen sink.
Speaker 7:Just use as much AI as possible. Whatever you do, just change your workflows. And then I think a lot of people and maybe more of the frontier companies like Uber, who's always kind of very ahead of the curve as it relates to these things, now getting into the phase two, which is Meta, obviously, is an example as well. Okay. Great.
Speaker 7:People are now adopting. We're proving that they can change their behavior and use these tools. Now we need to make sure we're actually doing it efficiently and effectively. And I think that's it's fine as like a natural process. Yes, you'll overspend in that phase one, but the point of that is to get to the phase two where then you're actually really efficient on a on a per token basis, moving the needle for for the business, delivering software faster.
Speaker 1:What's going on international? We saw you we saw NSF, I believe the day of the Super Bowl, and you talked about going international. How how are companies and and developers abroad thinking about CodeGen and and the category broadly?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, think one thing that's really important is that, you know, people build software around the world. Even though the best software is probably based in The US, there's still some fantastic software out there. And so I think, you know, the way we've built Factory in particular is amenable to, you know, places like Europe or Asia or Australia because, you know, they have different rules about where the data needs to live, where the models need to live.
Speaker 7:And factory is one of the only solutions that is fully on prem, fully modular. So, you know, my cofounder, Eno, likes to say you could deploy factory on a nuclear submarine as long as you have GPUs down there. And, you know, in places that tend to have a lot of regulation like Europe, that actually works quite well. And so with some of this funding, we're we're opening up an office in London and
Speaker 1:Air Horns for European regulation. There
Speaker 4:we go.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about some of the projects that you're seeing speed up on the back of AI agents? Because there's this weird dichotomy where we see huge token budgets, huge AI spend, a lot of a lot and then you you dig in and you see people tell stories about building a lot of internal tools, a lot of new dashboards, automating workflows, being more efficient. But people it feels like they haven't really felt the external facing I don't know. It just feels like if you like, Meta is using a bunch of AI. If you open Instagram, it's sort of the same app.
Speaker 2:It's not like, oh, wow. They have, like, an entirely different paradigm, and it feels like an entirely new app. And maybe that's just because that particular platform is mature. But where where is like, in terms of internal tooling, customer facing software, entirely new ideas, automations, like, where are you seeing the most adoption, most impact?
Speaker 7:So I I I love the framing of that because I think there's kind of two separate types of usage that we see. There's one that's, like, the fun and cool stuff of, like, let me build all these new apps from scratch Yep. Which probably doesn't move the needle for the business.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And then there are the less sexy things, but actually save developers a ton of time, and that's where we're seeing kind of under the hood a lot of the ROI coming from. And I think generally the name of the game there is, you know, developers are really smart. They spend years of their lives becoming experts, and they get paid a lot of money. Mhmm. They should not be spending their time on low leverage things like documentation or testing or, you know, to spend two years doing legacy code migrations.
Speaker 7:So generally, the the orgs that we see get the most ROI are the ones who basically play whack a mole with what is the lowest leverage thing that our developers are doing right now. Great. Let's use droids to automate it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Or, you know, some language that's really emerging is let's build a software factory
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That goes in and automates these low leverage tasks. And I really think we take a lot of inspiration, and it is even where our name comes from is what Elon and Tesla did to the physical factories. Like, if you go to Tesla factories, they're mostly like, you know, machine arms going and doing things, and there's no reason that software can't be very similar. Like obviously, you still need humans involved, but those humans tend to play a role of more designing that software factory, figuring out what is the most efficient way to to configure that factory so that you can move the needle on your business, you know, produce more more output.
Speaker 2:How important are are is wide diffusion of models? We we've been following the the latest model from Anthropic Mythos. That's only available to a few companies. Is the strategy to focus on being cross platform or get access to that model earlier and then act as a diffusion layer for that? How are you thinking about the future where more advanced models are sort of gated?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think for us, the biggest thing is enterprises need to be model agnostic. It's just it is a non negotiable that they cannot standardize on just one provider for a number of reasons. One might be, you know, if that API endpoint goes down, which, you know, some models these days haven't been the most reliable. And if you're a highly regulated industry and you get your developers to become agent native and, you know, sort of delegating tasks to these agents and that endpoint is down, what are you going to do?
Speaker 7:Like, it's just it's nonnegotiable. And so being model agnostic for every serious enterprise is kind of table stakes. And for us, what we can do is make sure that we get those models, you know, day zero that they're released just so that they can stay at the frontier. Same with the open models because also different models end up being good at different tasks. They're better at different languages perhaps.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And making sure that we kind of give the optionality to the enterprises to to adjust accordingly Yeah. Is pretty important.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the forward deployed model? Is that more important now? I I know that you have a very small team. It's, what, 70 employees and But probably growing very how much about, you know, enterprise adoption is actually spending time on-site with the customer, answering questions, integrating deeply into these, like, large enterprises?
Speaker 7:Yeah. The way we think about the the deployed engineering is they should never be doing the same thing more than once. Because with the tool that we've built, if they've learned, hey. Here's something that enterprises care about, we should be able to build that into the product very quickly. Like, our core competency is not providing services, but it's building product.
Speaker 7:And we treat our deployed team kind of as like the tip of the spear where they're figuring out live, you know, shoulder to shoulder with the enterprise engineers. What are the things that if we put into our product would allow them to become agent native faster?
Speaker 2:There's some news from Cursor today that they're teaming up with XAI to potentially train the next version of Composer. Are you thinking about training your own model at some point? Is that interesting to you?
Speaker 7:I think it's interesting at some point. I think it it doesn't make sense right now because I don't think there is a I don't think right now enterprises need another, you know, open model that you fine tune.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:I think there's there there's sufficiently good ones out there, and I think most of the alphas actually on the research side as it relates to the agent itself.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So for example, Droid, which is our agent, ends up so it's model agnostic, but it also outperforms all of the agents that are coming out of the model labs.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 7:so as an agent lab, most of the alpha on every incremental hour of our time is from the agent itself. And then we'll probably get to a point, you know, where eventually maybe there's just there's sufficient alpha in in, you know, RL ing a model for ourselves. But right now, every incremental hour on the agent ends up being very, very high ROI.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:No. Great update. Congratulations. Progress. Congrats to the team.
Speaker 2:Have a great day. Cheers. Thanks for hopping on. Goodbye. And up next, we have Akhil from Ulysses.
Speaker 2:He's the cofounder and CEO. How are you doing?
Speaker 11:Hey, Faz. Good to good to be here.
Speaker 1:Look at that.
Speaker 2:Love you.
Speaker 1:Look at that beautiful drone.
Speaker 2:Massive day today. Kick us off with the announcement. What happened today?
Speaker 11:Well, you know, I've got, you know, my my friend, my Mako here, one of our pet robotic sharks. Oh. And we're gonna be building a hell of a lot more of them. We've just announced our series a led by Andreessen Horowitz, American Diamondism Fund at $38,000,000. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Very, very, very, very, very cool. And yeah. Why don't you give yeah. What what what is what have the last, like, six six months been like? Will's been on the show before.
Speaker 1:This is your first time, but kind of walk us through what you guys have been focused on, what the what the opportunities are, and what the future looks like.
Speaker 11:Yeah. For sure. So, you know, as you guys might already know, you know, we're building autonomous maritime robotics to solve the most critical challenges in what is arguably the most critical domain on the planet. You know, we're talking commercial applications ranging from just monitoring and maintaining infrastructure for offshore energy, oil and gas, renewables, also telecoms, you know, maintaining and securing the, you know, critical communications infrastructure, also shipping terminals, ports, that kind of thing as well. And then as we, you know, recently started doing a lot of work in the defense space as well, taking our commercially available and deployed robots, like this Mako behind me that's been on probably a dozen missions for various commercial customers till date, and taking the exact same technology and helping to fill capability gaps for allied forces.
Speaker 11:You know? You look at shipbuilding where China is ahead of The US by, you know, 200 times or something like that. Unmanned underwater vehicles, the gap isn't that big. You know, it's the gap that can be easily closed. We're the ones closing it.
Speaker 11:And it's the underwater domain where most of the work happens. It's where all the infrastructure is. It's where all of the communications is, and it's a place where, you know, we have a chance to deliver an asymmetric advantage. And over the last six months, we've been hard at work taking our commercial tech and bringing it in front of allied forces to get it in the water with them.
Speaker 2:So talk about the commercial applications. If I have a, I don't know, oil rig, and I wanna inspect and make sure that the barnacles aren't getting out of control or something, I drop this in the water. Am I piloting it remotely? Does it have an autonomous sort of path that it can swim around on or or, you know, fly around on and and collect data, imagery? What are the sensors stack?
Speaker 2:Like, what how how am I actually getting value from this on day one?
Speaker 11:So that that's the beauty of the product. It's modular, which means that you can put you know, it's made up of all these sections. You can change the thruster configuration. Okay. You can put different sensors on.
Speaker 11:You can take other sensors off. So it depends on what you want. You know? Are you trying to do a magnetic analysis of your structure? We have a magnetic a magnetometer payload.
Speaker 11:Sure. Are you trying to just see what's there? We've got cameras like we have right here.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:Are you trying to see through really dark and murky water, really wide areas? Then we have a variety of acoustic mapping sonar payloads
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:And things like that. And so then in terms of, you know, can it work autonomously? Can you remote control it? Well, you can do both. That's the that's the fun of it.
Speaker 11:You know? You could have it, you know, just drop it in the water with a preprogrammed path and be like, hey. Go and search this wide area or, you know, scan all these pylons supporting my rig. Come back, pull the data off, and have a look, and then you might see something interesting. You might see something, I wanna take a closer look.
Speaker 11:But then you can connect a cable, livestream the data
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 11:And drive it down yourself. Yeah. And then you can look at it. And we support robotic payloads as well. So then you can start interacting with it.
Speaker 11:You know, you you might wanna scrape something off. You might wanna cut something that's entangled Mhmm. Entangled. You might wanna place something. We have payloads that do all of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about range and and battery life and and just all the different trade offs that go into actually getting something that can have an impact for a meaningful amount of time or across a meaningful amount of space? It doesn't look like the biggest ship. How far can it go? How deep can it go?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are the options Yeah.
Speaker 11:This is one of our
Speaker 4:this
Speaker 11:is our one of our more compact vehicles. You know, this one's about sixty sixty five inches in length, but, you know, we can go in excess of a 140 inches because you can stack batteries. You know? Sure. This one here, in this configuration, it's not the most hydrodynamic
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 11:Configuration, which means it's not the most efficient. So it's only gonna go maybe 20 nautical miles with one battery box. But if you want it to go 60 nautical miles, put three battery boxes on. Yeah. Or if you take the thruster pods off and you just have this big tube, that's the most efficient.
Speaker 11:And then you can actually go, you know, four four battery boxes in length because you take the pods out. That gives you space for another battery box. Yep. Then you can go up to 250 nautical miles.
Speaker 2:It's going slower but farther. That makes sense.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. And it's also a more efficient shape.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. More efficient. I saw that there's two cameras on the front. Is that for stereoscopic vision, or is one of them telephoto, one of them is wide angle?
Speaker 2:Why two lenses on the front?
Speaker 11:In in this case, you it doesn't really show up, but they are actually two separate lenses. Okay. Two different sensors as well
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 11:Just different use cases. But they're they're modules. You can see this port is actually blank here, but we make we actually make our own cameras as well, and you can plug them in with different lenses. You can have a stereo configuration. Yeah.
Speaker 11:You know, we've actually got ones on top here as well. Because this one, you know, the idea is you can have it, like, swim, like, underneath structures, and you should be looking up and doing inspection up above. So You're making your own Again,
Speaker 2:very flexible. How vertically integrated are you? This feels like with defense applications, it's really important to be onshore, but I would imagine trying to take advantage of as much of the supply chain as you can. What's been the build versus buy strategy?
Speaker 11:Well, we we found come you know, coming into this, we there's there are a lot of things we honestly wanted to buy, and we looked into buying, but we found the the idiot index in maritime is is insane.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:You know?
Speaker 2:It's What is the idiot index again? Can you break that
Speaker 11:It's metric down? Yeah. That that's, you know, the the metric that Musk came up with where, you know, what's the ratio of the cost of the raw materials in a part
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 11:Versus what you're actually paying for it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 11:And, you know, there's been, like, you know, sensors and, you know, motors and other parts that we, like we get in, we take them apart. We're like, why are we paying a $150,000 for this thing? It's got, like, microcontroller in in here worth $10, some, you know, networking and pair of switches. And, you know, it's not even like, okay. This is really new, really advanced technology, and they need to amortize the development costs.
Speaker 11:It's like, we're buying a sensor that's 20 years old. Yep. Why are we still paying this much for it? Yep. You know?
Speaker 11:And the thing is this the, you know, the the tech and the knowledge and the fundamentals have been publicly available for a long long time for a lot of the stuff that we're bringing in house. So, you know, for us, it's like, if you look at the maritime industry, it's been the same for centuries. You wanna do something big and important, you get a big ship, lots of expensive equipment, and you're really CapEx and OpEx heavy.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Right? But that's not the case anymore in space, in the air, on land. You know? We wanna bring that moment to to the to the ocean as well. And what that's necessitated is a ton of vertical integration.
Speaker 11:All the metal that you see on this, all our pressure vessels, they're machined in the machines just over there. Wow. All the internal brackets and mounts, everything, also machined on those same machine. The plastic fairings and propellers and everything three d printed on the three d printers over there, all the internal printed circuit boards with all the electronics. We don't make the boards ourselves yet, but we do have the ability to actually assemble the boards.
Speaker 11:You know, we get the raw components in, place them on the boards, and they've got an automated line doing that. And that's massively brought our cost down, made it much easier for us to have a product that's fundamentally very easy to scale, but also massively like, save us tons of money in terms of development time and iteration speed. You know, there's things we've done that we did in three days that before we brought machining and has probably would have taken us three months.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Well, that's very exciting. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Incredible progress.
Speaker 2:Breaking it down for us. Have a great rest
Speaker 1:Great your update. Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 11:Yeah. We'll see you Thanks for having me on. See you soon.
Speaker 2:Our next guest is Charlie Cheever, the cofounder of XPo. Previously, he co founded Quora where he served as CTO and helped scale the platform to millions of users. What's up? How are you doing?
Speaker 10:Hey. I'm great. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:I'm good. Great. Welcome to the show. I I think most people will be familiar with your background, but would love to get the introduction on expo and go through the news today.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We just raised a $45,000,000 series b from Georgian. And,
Speaker 2:yeah, what's the shape of the company now? What's the plan?
Speaker 10:Yeah. We're about 62 people right now and we're all over the world. We've got great people everywhere. And the plan is just that we've got a ton of stuff to do and this will just let us do it. What's basically happened over the last year or so is that expo's sort of become the best way to make apps with AI.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. And so, it just gotten really popular. Yeah. And so, that's meant that there's just a ton of stuff to do. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And so we're we're working on it.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I mean, coding models are clearly aware of React Native and Objective C and Swift to some degree, but there's always been a disconnect between Xcode or, you know, actually delivering the product. And it feels like when you click on some vibe coded app, it's almost always in
Speaker 4:the
Speaker 2:web. And, you know, this we it feels like there's going to be a boom. We're already seeing some stats on on the App Store. But walk me through what it takes to actually deliver value in app creation that's differentiated.
Speaker 10:Yeah. So what we've been our our basic philosophy for the last, like, couple of years since the beginning has been, you know, that we want to take everything that's good about web development and bring that to
Speaker 14:mobile. Sure.
Speaker 3:So that
Speaker 7:it's just
Speaker 10:as easy and everything that's just easy and fast of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:About building and distributing on the web, we bring that to mobile. And so a year and a half ago, I would have said, you know, what's great about Expo is that you can take your, you know, React web developer team and you can point them at mobile, and they can build a great mobile app that feels really, really good. Sure. And today, the pitch now becomes like, these AI models are so well trained on React and JavaScript, TypeScript, etcetera, that they're really, really good at this for this. But the other really important thing there is Export isn't just a way to build mobile apps with JavaScript.
Speaker 10:We kind of see saw that attempted in the past, and it just didn't work out that well because people would use, you know, the HTML five as a content delivery mechanism, it just wouldn't feel right. Just
Speaker 2:Phone wouldn't be good gap was one of the popular ones.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Stuff like that. And so what's different here is just that, like, Expo is really a way to make apps with TypeScript and React Native and stuff like that, but also lets you drop down really easily to Swift and Kotlin and stuff like that. So wherever you need to, you can go make that polish. Sort of in the same way that a developer making server side software might write a code base in a mix of Python and Rust or something like that, you can move in between them seamlessly.
Speaker 10:And that's a huge deal and means that the people who are making Apps at Expo are making stuff that's top tier, top of the App Store charts, that kind of stuff, because you can hit that quality bar that people expect on mobile these days.
Speaker 1:What's your view on how like maybe I won't ask you that, but I would say like, do you think Apple how do you think Apple Apple should be approaching
Speaker 2:The vibe 30 boom.
Speaker 1:This explosion of of new software applications. Like, they they are I I there's been so much frustration with them. They've been under pressure because of, you know, billing and and payment policies. But they certainly specifically just looking at like if you just if you 10x or 100x or maybe someday 1000x the amount of software, that is a real challenge for them. So they're not gonna get everything perfect.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious like what One advice you'd give
Speaker 10:place where I think they've done a nice job is on the Macintosh where or Mac, I guess they call it these days, where like, if you wanna get software on the Mac, you can go to the App Store on the Mac or you can get it from the web. Or you can just, know, a lot of places, like if I install Slack or Notion, I typically go to their website and download an installer and it works. And what they've they've done a really nice job of tightening up the security model around the kernel and the operating system and things like that. And there's not really any significant security problems I'm aware of on the Mac. I think that should be a really good model.
Speaker 10:And also, nobody's on the developer side, I don't know of a lot of developers who are super frustrated with distributing software on the Mac either. So I think like, from my perspective, I feel like they've actually figured out a pretty good model and they just should apply that to iOS. And, you know, it's true. Like, you know, I was reading an article the other day that I think App Store submissions are up sort of 84% this quarter. And obviously, like, a lot of that is new Expo apps.
Speaker 10:A lot of those are vibe coded. There's a lot of new app building tools out there. A lot of those are built with Expo, most of them. And so, like, yeah, a lot of people are frustrated that, you know, they're they're getting rejected for strange reasons or or they don't know what what's going on or why. And But I think overall this will get sorted out.
Speaker 10:I mean, like, there's just it's too possible and there's too much demand for building new software and building customized software and building software with bigger surface areas. Like, it's it's clearly going to happen. I don't know. I feel like sort of like when Uber launched, there was a bunch of regulatory things and policy things to find out. But, like, it was just such a good idea and just needed to happen.
Speaker 10:And so, like, eventually the dam kind of I don't if it burst, but it, like, things got sorted out and and people take Uber's now. I think people will able to make software and distribute it in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what percentage of your growth do you think is, like, agent led as in, you know, various coding agents effectively choosing expo or helping guide the team or entrepreneur to using the product? Yeah.
Speaker 10:I think it's still word-of-mouth. Like, When people make a decision big enough to sort of pick your stack that you're going to build your mobile app on, they're probably going be stuck with for a bunch of years. And for a lot of companies that decides their business, they're not going to use one thing to decide that. So I think that it's a combination of word-of-mouth, is the strongest thing. Story that we hear over and over again is sort of like, oh, our company needed to build a new mobile app because we had this older thing that just wasn't cutting it anymore.
Speaker 10:Someone on our team came in on a Monday morning with a prototype that already had six screens built and felt really great and the CEO was really impressed. And so we just kept going with that. But a
Speaker 4:lot
Speaker 10:of times that person found out about it because an AI told them about Expo or they just asked an AI, hey, how can I build a mobile app really quickly? And it directs them to it. Or they also find out about, like, YouTube is a huge referrer for us. Like, there's a lot of great content out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is this is the story about Facebook writing a compiler from PHP to C plus plus Apocryphal, or is that roughly correct?
Speaker 10:I think that I believe that's correct. This guy, Heping Zhao, made something called, like, the HP HP Compiler. And they're actually kind of doing something like, one thing that's really relevant to Expo is for React Native, they've they've built this custom JavaScript virtual machine called Hermes. Sure. And they're actually working on something called static Hermes, which will come ahead of time compile TypeScript and JavaScript to native code.
Speaker 10:So, you'll able to take any React Native app. Assuming this project completes, it hasn't yet, but hopefully it will soon, you'll able to take any part of your JavaScript driven app and convert it into native code seamlessly and have that if you want to speed up that part at the cost of a, you know, more brittle, bigger binary, you'll be able to choose that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So that yeah. That that's exactly where We're I was we're moving up these, like, levels of abstraction. You you you say that, you know, you think people will be able to build apps and develop software in the future. Do you have a view on sort of like real time UI instantiating things at runtime?
Speaker 2:And Yeah. Whether or not Apple embraces that, it feels like that's something that could be coming with artifacts that are generated on the fly based on a query. Doesn't make sense for every app, but does that seem like something that might happen in the future? I
Speaker 10:mean, basically, every big app that you know, like, does something like this. Even if you just think about something that you think of as kind of basic like Yelp. At first, it's like, oh, this is a really structured, every restaurant page looks the same. But then, they start to add more features and there's like, oh, well, this restaurant wants to post its hours in this way or there's a chain here, so we need to link to other locations. Sure.
Speaker 10:And they start to make some sort of JSON format that describes the complexity of the UI, and then they keep extending and extending and extending. And so there's an old saying that sort of like every sufficiently complicated C plus plus program contains a poorly implemented half baked version of Lisp in it or something And like
Speaker 8:I think
Speaker 10:every mobile app that gets sufficiently big basically ends up with some sort of custom dynamic on the fly rendering system for, you know, the as as their content becomes richer and richer. And I think, like, what's nice about using JavaScript and React and React Native is it's like it's a fully featured, like, you know, real programming language. Takes care of all the problems. Like, makes sure things are, you know, correctly updated, etcetera, etcetera. And like you you why not use the real thing once you're going in that direction?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What does it take to get a job with you these days? If you're a software engineer, there's lot of people that are stopping they're not studying computer science anymore. There's a bit of
Speaker 10:a wreck Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then there's a question about where young people should go. How do you counsel someone who's in college right now and interested in I personally
Speaker 10:there's three things that I look for. Yeah. I would say, like, taste is probably the most important thing. I mean, and, like, I've I've said this for years, but now with, like, AI, this becomes even more important. We're just, like, we still need somebody to say like, this is good and like, this is what we should be doing and what you're actually trying to build.
Speaker 10:And that's really hard to replace. It's rare to have someone who's really, really good to taste. And so someone who just has good judgment, that's incredibly important. Then the second thing is like we call it like high APM. APM is like a term from like real time strategy video games where it's basically like if you ever played like StarCraft back in the day or something like that, part of it is a strategy game, but part of it is just like if you just do more stuff faster than other people, you're gonna beat them.
Speaker 10:And so like we look for people that just like do a bunch of stuff really quickly but like with a precision and that you're not just doing like totally random stuff, but you're doing like effective stuff. And then the third thing we talk about is just high agency where like, you you can see right now that like writing code has become not a big problem for a lot of companies. Yeah. But shipping good software is still a big problem for
Speaker 2:a lot of companies.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And that's because the problem of like actually making stuff and getting over the finish line out the door and to your users and properly messaged and all these other things and supported and, you know, iterated on to match what your customers actually need, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those are all pretty hard and a lot of times they involve like doing annoying stuff or solving like problems nobody ever wrote a manual on how to solve before. And just so people were just like, oh, I'm gonna get this done and I'm just gonna figure it out. And I'm just gonna like, you know, run through walls to to figure that out.
Speaker 10:That's that's always really important I think. And it, you know, whether it be, you know, a coding engineering context or any other role of the company, think that's super important.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is. It's it's great. I like it a lot. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 1:No. This is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you so much and congratulations on the round and the progress. Very excited. Have a great day.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Great to meet Charlie. Cheers.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Our next guest is Victor from Slash.
Speaker 1:I take it back. I did have one more question. Yeah. It's too late. The question was gonna be around payments.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, would they this feels like something they would build in Yeah. Helping you bring your product to the App Store. Yeah. App Store now has more flexibility around payments. But I'll save that one
Speaker 2:For the next time.
Speaker 1:For the next appearance.
Speaker 2:Well, let's bring in Victor from Slash. He's the co founder and CEO. Victor, how are you doing? What's going on?
Speaker 15:I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Long time watcher of the show. First time being here.
Speaker 1:So I know. Long overdue.
Speaker 2:Long overdue.
Speaker 1:You guys have been probably a 100 x'd since we started the show. Yeah.
Speaker 12:That's good.
Speaker 1:So better better late than ever.
Speaker 2:But for those who already know, introduce yourself and the company first and then we'll get into questions.
Speaker 15:Of course. I'm the founder and CEO of Slash. Slash is one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing business banking platforms in America.
Speaker 8:K.
Speaker 15:Over 5,000 businesses spend nearly $10,000,000,000 a year on our corporate cards.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 15:And the reason all these business owners are coming to Slash is quite simple. We live in an age where you can talk to machines, where cars can drive themselves, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs in America are still banking with an institution that has an interface that was last updated in the year 2003. So core to the slash thesis is this idea that your bank can do so much more for you than just let you hold and send your money. It could be the place where you invoice your customers, where you reimburse your employees for out of pocket expenses, where you figure out how to just run a much more efficient operation. And we have ambitions to be this generation's JPMorgan, and we're gonna do it by building the most powerful platform imaginable.
Speaker 15:And, John, I'm not sure you remember, but we met one time.
Speaker 2:Oh, really? Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 15:It's like a roundup or somewhere like that.
Speaker 2:Very cool. It'll be a So, yeah, what is the go to market strategy? Obviously, it's a crowded space. Do you wanna go bottoms up, top down, startups, enterprises, somewhere in between SMBs, Silicon Valley darlings, or Main Street everyday companies?
Speaker 15:Totally. I would say a a very underappreciated fact is that fintech is very under penetrated in The US. The vast majority of businesses in The US still bank and spend with a legacy financial institution. Less than 5% of American businesses work with a fintech company like Slash or others. And so there's a lot of market up for grabs.
Speaker 15:Mhmm. The crux of a Slash thesis is that business owners deserve banking products hyper tailored to the needs of their specific industries. So I would say we work with companies that have, you know, a very small amount of employees. We work with very large companies, but usually it's very sector focused. So we figure out how do we deliver a ton of value for a business in one segment, and we really tune out the the rest of the markets.
Speaker 2:And in terms of actually getting those customers on the platform, is it some sort of, like, magical demo that is AI enhanced that wows them? Or is it, you know, just just gumshoe getting to know folks and reassuring them that this will be, you know, just a reliable banking platform for them?
Speaker 15:Yeah. I mean, banking is a very relationships driven industry. All else being equal Yeah. People prefer to bank and spend with an institution that have a great relationship with. Yeah.
Speaker 15:And so the crux of our go to market is is depends on building amazing referral flywheels. So part of part part of this vertical by vertical strategy exists because we have a phenomenal product that works on a vertical by vertical basis, but also because once we penetrate and acquire a few customers in one particular sector, willingness to refer is quite high because we deliver very strongly on customer support and and on just going above and beyond.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you thinking about integrating AI tools, AI agents, AI chief of staff, anything that can help a business owner understand their spend, understand their business, actually manage their finances better?
Speaker 15:Absolutely. The future of software, generally speaking, is moving away from click and drag UI and towards just textual interfaces, natural language. Right now today, we actually announced our our AI agent. It's called Twin, and it allows you to take every single action you can take from within the slash dashboard Yeah. But in natural language.
Speaker 15:So that's where everything's going. That's where all software is going, and we decided to practically take that step today. That's number one.
Speaker 8:And then number
Speaker 1:two Gen z name for an agent ever. Twin. I love it. Twin. That's my twin.
Speaker 1:That's my twin. That's twin. It's twin. Underused.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the really cool thing actually were a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 15:Yeah. Is it can buy is it can buy things on your behalf because we're the issuer
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:Of the
Speaker 15:card you used to place all your expenses. Your employees can actually go out and tell, hey, Twin. You know, make this DoorDash order for me. Place this order on Instacart. And I think that's a super, super powerful thing, an agent that can actually go out and make purchase on the Internet on your behalf.
Speaker 1:You just raised a bunch of money. What is VC sentiment around fintech right now? I know you guys have stablecoin functionality. I'm sure that that that was interesting. And at scale, like, you have a bunch of real, really, really positive metrics that you can lean on, but I'm curious what, what what overall sentiment was, from the investor base.
Speaker 15:I think there were two things that that investors found quite compelling about Slash. The first is that we're a very revenue efficient company that our business approaching $300,000,000 in annual revenue. We have a team of just around 70 people. So our business has over $4,000,000 in revenue per employee. And the reason, thank you, we've been able to do that is because so many of these processes that legacy banks and the fintechs that came before us throw a lot of headcount at, processing disputes, parsing documents when somebody applies for an application, submitting a SAR filing to to to to regulators, we've agents automated away.
Speaker 15:So slash is leanness and this differentiating differentiation of we're building this back end AI operating system was super attractive to investors. And then the other thing that's super interesting to investors is we're living in a super interesting time in fintech history where for the first time ever, an American fintech company can serve businesses all over the world. It used to be the case that if you were a fintech company and you wanted to expand internationally, you had to get license on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis. But now stablecoins are this enabling force that allows you to deliver USD banking products to businesses all over the world. So a lot of this funding is gonna go towards making Slash this global product and bringing the caliber of product we've given to to to American entrepreneurs, but to business owners all over the world as well.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Well, congrats on all the progress.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Great to finally meet.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super impressive.
Speaker 2:Meet. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers, Victor.
Speaker 2:Have a good rest of your day.
Speaker 1:Take care. Powerful nominative determinism.
Speaker 2:Victor. Yes. He will be the Victor. I like that. Well, our next guest is Theodor Marcu from Cognition.
Speaker 2:He's the head of product growth. Theodor, how are doing?
Speaker 14:Hey, guys. How's it going?
Speaker 2:It's good to It's see great. Obviously, everyone here on the show is familiar with Cognition, the makers of Devon. But take us through sort of how you're positioning the company, the updates, and any big announcements we should be aware of?
Speaker 14:Of course. Yeah. Thank you again for having me. Of course. This is a very exciting day.
Speaker 14:So, yesterday we had a huge moment for the company that I think a lot of us are very excited about. We had the biggest launch since the acquisition of Windsurf last This is something that the team has been looking forward to a lot. We launched Windsurf two point zero, which did two big things. It brought Devon to Windsurf, So, finally, the world's software is engineering available in Windsurf. And we have now an agent command center.
Speaker 14:So, our sort of vision for the future of software engineering, which is managing a team of agents, both remote and local, that works sort of alongside you have an army at your back. Windsurf two point zero makes that easier than ever.
Speaker 2:Got it. So, how what goes into an agent command center to make it effective? We were talking about Gastown and and having different agents for different tasks. The the I think the buzzword is like orchestrators. There's a various amount of, you know, open source projects and sort of the the idea of orchestration is percolating in the AI industry.
Speaker 2:How do you think about educating customers and enterprises about why they should be using an interface to manage agents instead of just having a bunch of different terminals open?
Speaker 14:Yeah. So first of all, this is something that I think frankly arose as a need internally at Cognition. What we're seeing is some of the best engineers here are, and we think this is sort of where the future is going, the best engineers are using local agents.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And they are planning their tasks, they're going very deep into the code base, architecting systems, coming up with a plan, and then they're handing those off to Cloud agents. And when we launched Cognition, Scott and Walden and Steven and few other folks had this sort of, they saw into the future and they saw that Cloud agents were going to be the future. But we also saw that engineers are sort of around and they will be, they are working very closely with their code and they want to make, there's sort of like golden age of engineering where we can of go very deep into what you're excited about and then hand out off to Cloud agents. So, with Windsurf two point zero, the bottom line is that, and what we're telling a lot of our customers with the command center, is that you get to have this overview of your agents so that you can, your limits on your attentions are no longer there. Because as you're working with dozens of agents at a time and you switch context, it gets really hard.
Speaker 14:So, we've built, we actually were very intentional and we built this Kanban view, sort of anyone that's familiar with project management can, has seen a Kanban view before, where you can see all your agents working on different projects at a time, and then you can sort of like switch in between them and quickly check on them and then spawn or create new sessions when you need to. Then those sessions are actually grouped into spaces, which is this way that we built to make it easier for agents to share context and also share sort of states together. So, from our perspective, what goes into a great command center is just making it very easy for a single engineer to work with a team of agents and have sort of like this army at their back.
Speaker 2:For for big enterprises, they have so much different development work to do. What is the the most low hanging fruit? Like, if you're talking to a customer who wants to get spun up with Windsurf and Cognition and Devon, are you trying to understand their their their backlog, the hairiest tasks, the most miserable? Are you trying to get them excited about greenfield projects and new dashboards and automated workflows? Are you trying to get in the hands of their their best engineers, their youngest engineers?
Speaker 2:Like, what is the greatest foothold for you right now?
Speaker 14:Yeah. That's a great question. I think that has That is something that has been evolving ever since the beginning of of Cognition. I think early on with Devon, what we we found was that we would go in and and talk about all these sort of very specific use cases Yeah. That we'd find inside companies, whether it's migrations, whether it's building internal tooling, whether it's these sort of like big backlog projects that they've been wanting to work on.
Speaker 14:I think more recently, as models have been getting better and as our agent harness has been getting better and better, what we're finding is that there's a lot of frankly, everyone can use a software engineering agent and the universe of possibilities has expanded greatly. And I was talking about how you can start working locally and, you know, there's this sort of like gold The way I think about it is there's this golden age of engineering where like the best engineers in the world can do more and they can offload their tasks. And not just the best engineers, frankly, everyone can offload the tasks that they don't want to spend as much time on to agents in the cloud that can handle them very quickly or over many minutes or long hours. And then they can sort of stay in control and work on the things that they care most about and the hardest problems that are most exciting to them. So, Scott always uses this sort of like our, idea of you're going from being a bricklayer to an architect.
Speaker 14:And I think a lot of what we're seeing a lot of our customers is that entire teams and individuals on those teams are moving from being bricklayers or sort of like writers to architects or directors where they're sort of like managing an orchestra of agents.
Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Jordy was asking this question earlier about just model agnosticism. How valuable like, do you see demand from customers and companies for wanting to switch between model providers, use open source for things?
Speaker 2:Like, how much is using the right tool for the job, understanding the Pareto frontier, and not blowing up your budget in one month if you're token maxing?
Speaker 14:Yeah. That's something that comes up all the time. Yeah. And as you know, Cognition has been model agnostic from day zero. Yeah.
Speaker 14:We've always worked with the best models and all of the models that are available, evaluated them internally, figured out how to make the best agent harness for Devon, how to make the best sort of agent harness for Windsurf as well. What we're seeing from our customers is that there's a lot of demand from trying out different models for different tasks. We're constantly working with them actually to make sure that we can advise them on what are the things that, know, models have this jagged line of intelligence. Some of them are really good at specific things, others are less good at those things. Like, for example, Opus 4.7 came out today and congratulations to Anthropic on a great model launch.
Speaker 14:Model is very good at deep investigation. So, we're sort of trying to look at how can we use that in our sort of, for example, Devin review workflows where Sure. Dev and can go in and look at a PR and try to figure out all the bugs and all the issues that might be associated with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks. That makes sense. Well, congratulations on the progress.
Speaker 1:You Great so much for to meet you and give our best to the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 14:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 2:Have a good rest of your day. There's a ton of breaking news. The big one is Reed Hastings. Reed Reed Hastings is
Speaker 1:stepping off the board of Netflix and the stock is down tremendously and but this is good.
Speaker 2:He's not stepping off the board. He's stepping off the board in June. He announced that he's stepping off
Speaker 6:the But yes, I mean, that's what
Speaker 1:I'm saying. No. But but but
Speaker 2:Why is
Speaker 1:this again? It's good because it's good for Reid specifically.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. Because it shows that people have confidence
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 1:Leadership and his vision. Yeah. And and and I'm sure that I would expect Netflix to make a quick recovery.
Speaker 4:But Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's up 12%, percent in the last month, down eight and a half percent overnight after hours. But we'll see where the stock settles, you know, tomorrow after the market processes this.
Speaker 1:The alternative is a nightmare for Reed because if he if he announced this Yeah. Announced this and the stock popped Yeah. 20% Yeah. He was, you know, handicap the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I mean, flip side is that Ted Sarandos, it seems like he put on a master class over the last six months with the Paramount negotiations, not getting over his skis. The shareholders wound up really liking how that all penciled out. And so it seems like the company is in good hands. And all of the different strengths that Netflix has continue to show across advertising and subscriptions.
Speaker 2:And while they've kept their the big headline with Netflix is that they've kept their content budget essentially flat or slightly growing while they've grown subscriptions and revenue and top line very precipitously and very consistently even at a time where they've they haven't needed to invest exponentially more money in content. Obviously, spend a fortune on it, but it's not growing as fast as their revenue is growing, so their profits are growing, which is good news. Hastings departure marks the end of an era for Netflix, which under his leadership transformed from a d DVD by mail business to a juggernaut in subscription video streaming and disrupted Hollywood. He said, my real contribution at Netflix wasn't a single decision, Hastings said in a statement that was in a company letter to shareholders. It was a focus on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve, and building a company that could be both beloved by members and wildly successful for generations to come.
Speaker 2:Well, we wish him the best on his next chapter, whatever he winds up doing. What an absolute run. Well, Jordy, is there anything else we should talk about? TSMC, of course, has earnings. We can cover those later.
Speaker 2:The chipmaker TSMC is more bullish than ever on AI despite the Iran war, so some good news there. And lots more stories to talk about, but we will be back with you on Monday at 11AM.
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Speaker 8:Boeing flash bang.
Speaker 2:Boeing flash bang.