Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Today is Thursday, 02/20/2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you all today. We're breaking down some new humanoid robots.
Speaker 1:They're not terrifying at all. They're absolutely horrific out of a horror movie. We're breaking down Satya Nadella. He went on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast. It was a fantastic breakdown.
Speaker 1:He also announced a new quantum computing unit. From there, we're breaking that down. We're going into the history of Nikola, the trucking company, the electric truck company that just went bankrupt today, and telling you the whole history of that company. And then we're gonna break down the timeline, run through some posts on acts, give you a bunch of fun hot takes. We're discussing, seed stage VC, Google AI agents, the new Apple iPhone launch, a bunch of good stuff for you guys.
Speaker 1:So stay tuned. Thanks. And,
Speaker 2:should we go through some of the posts?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, so they they they follow it up, and they do give a little bit of explanation here. They say, the protoclonal is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 myofibers, and 500 sensors. And so I think that, you know, whether or not you think complete replication of the human is important in robotics context. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a
Speaker 1:lot of questions about, like, hey. Do we even need to give them legs? Like, maybe if they were running around a factory, they can turn, like, throw some wheels on them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Uni tree one that's, like, dog shaped Yep. Will just be flipping. But it also
Speaker 1:has wheels, and it can do all these things. It can stand up, but then it can go four legged. So I think I think, like, if you're starting from scratch, thinking about first principles, you would actually kind of refactor some of the problems from a human, and give it more arms or less arms depending on what the job is.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Don't wanna be, you know, don't wanna be, full of hubris, but, maybe we are perfect. We might be goaded.
Speaker 1:We might be goaded. Yeah. The the bipedal
Speaker 2:The bipedal. The
Speaker 1:bipedal form factor.
Speaker 2:It did evolve over millions of years, allegedly. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, Scientists said. Let's go to the bro scientists. Well, let's go to Samoyed online. Samoyed says, yep, boss. The promo video is going great.
Speaker 1:We got the twitching humanoid robots strung up on a meat hook and flickering lights. They'll love it. It's Amazing.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just working exactly as intended. This got 70 k likes and another 2,000,000 views.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. This did get another 70 k likes. So, yeah, a lot of these views have to be driven by tweets because it's so easy to go viral.
Speaker 2:Views is Lot of quotes. Tough to do.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And then Atlas, good friend of the show, chimes and says, terrible quad insertions, and the delts are hardly capped. Midsection just Yeah.
Speaker 2:We need to be so so Alice is absolutely right. You need to be evaluating humanoid robots as though they were going for their IFBB pro cards.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You know? Exactly. The these presumably, there will be humanoid bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting competitions. Yeah. And it's important to, like, put them, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, really try to try to put them up against the best humans in
Speaker 1:the class. Close to Sam Soulek by any means.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I Yeah. Even even opposite shade. I'd like to see them give the clone a spray tan.
Speaker 1:You know? Like, give
Speaker 2:it, like, a Sam Solar spray tan.
Speaker 1:Just super dark.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super dark.
Speaker 1:Multiple layers of spray tan for sure. Give it a face, some smiling white teeth. Yeah. You know? Then
Speaker 2:yeah. We wanna have humanoid AGI until one of these wins the Arnold. Yes.
Speaker 1:Like, that's the only That's the real benchmark.
Speaker 2:That's the benchmark.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't care about the MLBU or Chatbot Arena. I care about the Arnold.
Speaker 2:That's a Coogan code coded post.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And llama hears a 60 gram protein diet, never reached failure, barely even tracks, reps, sets, or weights, thinks creatine is illegal.
Speaker 2:Got them.
Speaker 1:Not gonna not gonna make it on that. But, you know, we're talking about ways to get attention. Obviously, viral videos work very well if you have a viral product like a synthetic humanoid that's super creepy. But sometimes you don't, and sometimes you just need advertising. That's why we wanna talk about AdQuick, big sponsor on the channel.
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Speaker 2:And what I wanna add here is AdQuik can also help sponsors get very, you know, sort of brands get very creative. Oh, yeah. So, this is sort of dark, but you know how the cartel will sort of hang up, you know k. Bodies over, you know, overpasses.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe from that format.
Speaker 2:Clone could hang their their their, humanoids from meat hooks like they did in their video. Just hang them from, like, overpass on the one zero one. Right?
Speaker 1:I think there's a collab in the future. There's a
Speaker 2:great collab there. But, yeah, if you wanna if you wanna get creative, hit up ad quick, and, let's get back to the show.
Speaker 1:So Packy McCormick says, Jesus Dworkesh Patel is cooking because he launched a new podcast with, Satya Nadella. And, it's it is crazy seeing how far this podcast has has has come. DoorDash has done Zuck. He got the exclusive for the llama three release, and that was fascinating because the New York Times wrote a piece about Meta launching llama Yep. But they didn't get an exclusive interview or a real interview at all.
Speaker 1:They just got a statement.
Speaker 2:It it really is the the death knell of traditional media. Totally. Basic value is that they would get the exclusive.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And now that you have trillion dollar company CEOs Yep. Realizing that they can get more impact Yep. And still get the news out on the New York Times by going to somebody who's who's much more likely to be friendly and not try to sort of position them negatively. And so is in here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just focusing on that.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:You know, Dwarkesh is not like, oh, like, you know, talk about your relationship with Sam Altman. He's like, let's focus on on, like, the reality of what's happening here. And the New York Times would just take it to this place Exactly. That Satya doesn't wanna go. Nobody really wants to go there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, let's just focus on the matter at hand.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the TMZ.
Speaker 2:Like, Dwarkesh is not Dwarkesh, by nature of being an AI oriented podcast, he does not need to do clickbait in order to you know, he doesn't need to to try to make it more dramatic than it is to get listens. Like, every single person that that, you know, is is relevant in AI is, like, going to at least figure out what they talked about here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so Satya really did break the news about Microsoft's new quantum computing project on the Dorkesh Patel, podcast, which is incredible. And there's a little summary here by, Prakash, Adapai. Satya is out.
Speaker 1:TLDR. Microsoft doesn't believe in AGI. They're wary of overinvestment, and the OpenAI partnership is over allegedly. AI and AGI are overhyped. Satya says us claiming us self claiming some AGI milestone.
Speaker 1:That's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10% GDP. I love this. Yeah. We've talked about this before, artificial economic intelligence.
Speaker 1:I was trying to coin something around it, and I was basically just saying, like, I don't care about any of the evals. The eval is the economic output. And Yeah. Sato did a better job condensing
Speaker 2:it than I did.
Speaker 1:But, really, like, that is how you measure the value of AI is what it
Speaker 2:is doing. That's something that everybody like, it's very, as somebody who will be a you know, Microsoft, presumably will be one of the most powerful companies in AI just by nature of the the over investment in Totally. In in compute, and positioning. It's very smart for Satya to say, you know, what I actually think is most exciting is the excessive GDP growth, which will create massive surplus in our economy and enable everybody to benefit from it even if right now they're just, you know, watching BrainRut slop on TikTok. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So, like, even the people that are just doing nothing to be participate in this sort of broader technological trend, if this plays out, they will benefit from it massively, and I think that's beautiful. That's capitalism at its best, baby.
Speaker 1:It's it is. It really is. Is, Satya goes on to talk, about he's very negative on more CapEx spend spend from Microsoft. If you look at the industrial revolution, there was a lot of money lost, which is hilarious because everyone say, oh, this is the next industrial revolution. I wouldn't
Speaker 2:say he's
Speaker 1:He's like, I don't wanna be the person that over invested in the wrong type of windmill. Or So
Speaker 2:so this, I think, was in response to Dwarkesh saying, hey. If the if the if we can get to 10% GDP growth, which would basically be five x ing our current growth, which would be tremendous, Dworkesh was like, why don't you spend 10 times more Yep. On data center build outs? And he and he basically said, well, we're kind of, like, scaling it appropriately. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like finding this balance between you don't wanna have oversupply Yep. Of of, you know
Speaker 1:because I'm excited to be a leaser. I build a lot. I lease a
Speaker 2:lot. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so he's he's saying here, he's fine if if other people overbuild because he'll come in and say, well, we have basically all this demand. We'll help we'll we'll basically buy you know, we'll sort of, you know, make long term commits to your compute, and then we'll sort of chunk it up and sell it,
Speaker 1:you know, to In consumer, in some categories, there may be some winner take all network effect. ChatGPT is a great example of an at scale consumer property that already has real escape velocity. In enterprise, buyers will not tolerate winner take all where the buyer is a corporation, enterprise, and IT department. They will want multiple suppliers. That is what will happen even on the model side.
Speaker 2:And so this is why, this is we've we've talked about this a bunch of times on the show. Our sort of generalized belief that Elon thinks the value he was able to catch up with XAI Yep. In terms of, like, general model capabilities, at least, like, within within the ballpark. He still clearly believes that, you know, he he it seems obvious that he would like to control ChattGPT as a consumer product company. Right?
Speaker 2:And he sees that as potentially being, you know, this trillion dollar company, and now there's all this FUD. Like, you know, a lot of people like to say, oh, OpenAI is Yahoo. You know, look at look at their market cap. But, you know, I think there's a strong case for, you know, a a dominant consumer, you know, new consumer app company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Prakash, closed that with five opinion, sections or maybe four takeaways. Satya is calling the bubble in the build out. The crazy people like governments are entering the game. He's happy to lease from them when they overbuild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So he's talking about spend is capped.
Speaker 2:He's talking about, like, a a country, you know, like Malaysia who's like, we should get in the data center game and then and then realizing, oh, we actually don't have the the technical expertise to efficiently deliver this compute to end consumers. Yep. Okay. We should just partner with Microsoft and kind of let them, you know, operate it. Yep.
Speaker 2:And Microsoft is happy to take over that supply.
Speaker 1:And then Adipay goes on. He's disappointed in the eight in the OpenAI partnership. Satya sees them as having built a great consumer app for themselves with dominance in the category, but models for enterprise usage have gotten commoditized, which is kind of interesting because it's like, yes, you are disappointed, but, like, it only because you didn't predict that, I guess, which is kind of odd. He's so done with the AGI talk. If you can't get to 10% global growth, your AGI talk is meaningless to him.
Speaker 1:I love that. And then the last thing, he's backing Microsoft from the CapEx precipice. It's funny because he certainly did make Google dance, but now they're committed and now they're committed to insane CapEx, but he's out of here. Yeah. One of the most meaningful Dwarkash interviews so far.
Speaker 1:Making
Speaker 2:Google dance.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a good phrase.
Speaker 2:I mean, it does not feel like, the the the my you know, Satya is in a different league than than Google's leadership at this point. Like, it's just Yeah. Seem you know, I'm sure that they'll say, hey. We should get our guy on DoorCash. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 1:yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's it's has Sundar done it? I know he's done some interviews with a few people.
Speaker 1:I mean, he's done some with, with, MKBHD, but I just don't see Sundar pushing as much. And, also, it's a very different organization where the founders of Google are still dipping their toes in every once in a while. Like, I firmly believe Bill Gates has not been back, like, you know, hey hey, Sachi. I got an idea for you in years. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Definitely not.
Speaker 2:So Sundar has not been on Dwarkesh. Oh. And what was his last, like
Speaker 1:We need to build, speaking of our next, next sponsor.
Speaker 2:Can can Sundar is Sundar the guy to go on a two hour podcast, or is he more of the is he more in Kamala mode? Mode? Kamala mode.
Speaker 1:Manager mode? Yeah. Maybe. I mean, he should figure it out, because it's an important skill set.
Speaker 2:CEO can't go on a two hour podcast, you're cooked.
Speaker 1:You know how during the, during the election, I said that there was the the Coogan parlay, which was you you bet on Polymarket for, Trump to do over three hours on Rogan. Yeah. For Kamala to do under two hours on Rogan, she wound up doing none. And then whoever does the longer Rogan interview wins the election because I had this whole podcast election thesis. I wanna see on on public, a basket of of tech stocks for where the CEO has done an hour long plus interview on DoorDash.
Speaker 1:I wanna own that basket, the new QQQ.
Speaker 2:Oh. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Basically, if you're running a
Speaker 1:public company spot up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:If you're running a public company and you have the chops as a CEO to duke it out with RoarCash for a couple hours
Speaker 2:I think the podcast Put that in the basket. Index. Yeah. Yeah. CEO index is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, carps carps done them. There's a lot of people that have done them. So, that takes us to our our next sponsor, Public, investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industrial industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.
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Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I have a chart here on the next slide, which is Microsoft's past week. And you can see, they he goes on to our cash. He, announces this new, quantum computing thing that we'll talk about, and the stock popped up 2%. And so, the the company has been doing phenomenally, and shout out to Satcha, the absolute dog. Let's go back to his, discussion about AGI and that 10% milestone.
Speaker 1:I think there's some interesting, quotes here because Duarkesh pushes back. And so Satya is saying, you know, us claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical bit benchmark hacking. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10%. And then Duarkesh says, hey. Look.
Speaker 1:If the world's growing at 10%, the economy is 10 a hundred trillion globally. If the world grows at 10%, that's an extra 10,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're investing 80,000,000,000 as a hyperscaler. That's not that much money. Shouldn't you be doing 800,000,000,000 if you really think in a couple years we could be growing in the world economy at this rate? So, you know, revealed preference Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's he's gonna be like, look. Masa thinks you should do 500. Yeah. What are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's basically what he asked, which I like. Because it's like, this is a this is a this is actually a hard question, but it's not framed as a gotcha or some sort of, like, you know, negative thing. It's just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey. This is actually the real question that we should be discussing. Yep. And Scott Jeff says, that's correct. But by the way, the classic supply side is, hey.
Speaker 1:Let me build it, and they'll come. That's an argument. And after we've all after all we've done that, we've taken enough risk to go do it. But at some point, the supply and demand have to map. That's why I'm tracking both sides of it.
Speaker 1:You can go off the rails completely when you're hyping yourself up with supply side versus really understanding how to translate that into real value to customers. That's why I look at my inference revenue. That's one of the reasons why, even the disclosure on the inference revenue, it's interesting that not many people are talking about their real revenue. But to me, that is important as a governor for how you think about.
Speaker 2:So he's like, hey. Microsoft, we tell
Speaker 1:you how much money we're making from inference, and that's the real value of AI. It doesn't matter how much you're spending training the models. It matters how much money is being generated from the usefulness of those models.
Speaker 2:Like, that is the big risk right now. Like, the the risk for the hyperscalers is is not is not getting in the general route like, not having a generally accurate demand prediction. Right? So if you way overdo it, you're gonna get crushed because people just say, look. You know, these guys can't accurately predict Yep.
Speaker 2:Or or utilize the supply they're bringing online. And then the the other side is probably what Satya would prefer, which is, hey. We we went big, but not big enough, and we're trying to race to kind of fulfill that. Right? And especially now with Elon showing how quickly you can build these massive clusters Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, 200,000 GPU cluster, and he's ramped wanting to ramp to a million Yep. As soon as possible. So it just shows.
Speaker 1:And and I think it goes back to Google. Like, we saw in, Google's cloud, earnings report that they were capacity constrained. And so Yeah. I think they missed earnings on Google Cloud because they weren't able to deliver services. But I think that Satya's saying, hey.
Speaker 1:Were were they capacity constrained on the training side or the inference side?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Because those tell two different stories about the actual value. Because a whole bunch of companies can go raise a lot of money and show up at the hyperscalers and say, hey. I need I need $10,000,000,000 worth of, worth of training compute right now. And that's not the same as $10,000,000,000 of useful AI and product GDP growth. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, training does not necessarily get us GDP growth. And so, Satch is really throwing the gloves down saying, let's see it. Let's see GDP growth. Show me something.
Speaker 2:Love it. AI. It's for the people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. And that's exactly how we should be thinking about this stuff. Yeah. It's so good.
Speaker 1:And so Dworkash goes on. He says, so if you really think there's some potential here to 10 x or five x the growth rate of the world, and then you're like, well, what's the revenue from GPD four? If you really think that's the possibility for the next level up, shouldn't you just, let's go crazy. Let's do hundreds of billions of dollars of compute. I mean, there's some chance.
Speaker 1:Right? And so Dworkesh is, like, doubling down on this question, good follow-up. And Satya says, here's the interesting thing. Right? That's not that's why even that balanced approach to the fleet, at least, is very important to me.
Speaker 1:It's not about building compute. It's about building compute that can actually help me not only train the next big model, but also serve the next big model. Until you do those two things, you're not gonna be able to be in a position to really take advantage of your even your investment. So that's kind of where it's not a race just to building a model. It's a race to creating a commodity that is getting used in the world to drive.
Speaker 1:You have to have a complete thought, not just one thing that you're thinking about. And by the way, one of the things is that there will be overbuild to your point about what happened in the .com era. The memo has gone out that, Hey, you, you know, you need more energy, you need more compute. Thank God for it. So everyone's gonna race.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's not just companies just deploying Countries are going to deploy capital, and they will clearly, and so I'm excited. And he's about to say, like, they were clearly, like, get and he's like, actually He's like,
Speaker 2:these countries are my pay pigs.
Speaker 1:And so I'm excited to be a leaser because, by the way, I build a lot. I lease a lot. And so he's saying, like, look. Yeah. Some of that CapEx spend's gonna go up, but, also, we're gonna be leasing because we don't wanna be holding the bag.
Speaker 1:And so there's there's a little bit of game of musical chairs going on with some of the build outs, little bit of nervousness. I don't know. He might be wrong. He might be under building. The the the the Pascal's wager for Yeah.
Speaker 1:AI build out at the hyperscalers for a long time was if you if AI is fake and you, and you overinvest, you still don't lose your job. But if AI is real and you underinvest, you definitely lose
Speaker 2:your job. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so just in terms of, like, you know, I want to I want to maintain my job, everyone had the same incentive of, like, we gotta go all in because there's no there's no downside here. Let's move on. He says, he's talking about how AI takeoff is a risk, and, and Siahta's and Siahta's bringing it back to like, okay, how would that actually happening? He says, to your point, I think that one of the reasons why I think about even the most powerful AI is essentially working with some delegated authority from some human. You can say, oh, all this alignment and all that, that's why I think you really have to get these alignment to work and be verifiable in some way.
Speaker 1:But I don't think that you can deploy intelligences that are out of control. For example, this AI take off problem may be a real problem, but before it is a real problem, the real problem will be in the courts. No society is gonna allow for some human to say
Speaker 2:AI did that. And that's why I've said that the you know, a lot of people say, oh, lawyers are cooked. Why are you gonna need Yep. Lawyers to, to do, you know, things when you could just ask an AI, hey, can you create this document and send it for signature, and boom, it's done. Yep.
Speaker 2:And people, I think, are still gonna wanna be able to say, like, we had a human sign off on this AI output. Yep. So lawyers might spend less time on individual documents. Yep. But they will probably do more they have a higher output because business owners, as an example, will do more legal work because it's cheaper.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And right now, all day long, business owners will skip a doc because they're like, oh, this person's just working. I like the small thing, you know, we don't need to put it in a contract. Like, it's not a big deal. Yep. But then as it gets easier to just, like, you know, basically chat GBT, hey.
Speaker 2:Can you make this doc? Freelancer agreement. Send it out for signature. Boom. It's done.
Speaker 2:Yep. It will just happen more. Yep. And so Same thing same thing with capital allocators. You know, these big endowments are like Totally.
Speaker 2:Cool. I'm glad your hedge fund is using AI to make investment decisions, but you better be signing off on, you know, the vast majority or any transaction over a certain amount. Because if you lose our money, like, we wanna know who's responsible and why it happened, and you can't just say, you know, blame it on your your Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna summarize that's that, experience we had with that young kid who was thinking about going into fund to fund management?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so we we met up with a with a listener on the show who goes to school at USC, which is around the corner from us. And, yeah, he he was you know, our our advice to him was generally, you know, he was saying just trying to get a sense of what jobs are still going to exist within the space. And Yep. We felt pretty strongly that, you know, specifically, he had an offer from a fund of funds to go join and and and go there.
Speaker 2:And I think our our advice to him was generally that job will still exist for, like, a number of different reasons, but you should still figure out how to use AI to be exceptionally good at your job to write software for the work that you do to just be even more efficient. Yep. And you should be thinking of it as how do I use AI so that I can manage, you know, exponentially more capital Yep. For my firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Basically, on day one, being the most junior employee at a company, historically, that has not meant you show up and you have 20 direct reports
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Unless you're, like, I don't know, like, a new unless you're it's like, oh, yeah. You're some new grad and you're hiring a bunch of people that are you're managing people that didn't go to college. But in most in most firms, in most investment firms, you come in, you don't have any direct reports, and after a few years, they give you one intern. And then after a decade, you have a team under you. But with AI, it's like, on day one, you can have 20 employees effectively, and you can have a Devon working for you and and a and a deep deeper
Speaker 2:It's actually a very interesting way. You're you're gonna have the younger generation who learns to manage
Speaker 1:They should be managers on day one for sure.
Speaker 2:Before they ever manage a human. Yeah. No. Totally. And it's and it's many of the same, like, workflows for managing people you can use for AI.
Speaker 2:It's like Yeah. Yeah. You don't wanna let the AI just run off for four days just like spinning their wheels, like, doing random stuff, spending money or time or inference. Totally. You want to have them execute something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give them quick feedback. Yep. You know? Make sure it's good.
Speaker 2:Make sure it's good. Have them keep going. Right? But then you're balancing that now. You can manage, you know, could be managing five or six
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ten, twenty agents at once that are all doing carrying out individualized tasks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, yeah. I mean, they talk about rogue actors a little bit and how some societies might allow for a fast takeoff. But again, I think that, there's there there's a huge pressure against that in the same way that we haven't had nuclear war even though, yes, there are some countries that are rogue states. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's enough pressure to globally. I don't think Satya wants to say that, but I do think that if there was some AI lab that was truly working on some, you know, killer AI Yeah. There would be a lot of pressure from the international community Yep. Militarily to stop that. Yep.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:it would be the same thing if you tried to build it in San Francisco. And at the end of the day, someone has to push the button to deploy the killer AI, at least initially. And, and that person wants to survive, and there's the threat of violence from governments. And so it's less of a risk than I think most people think. Anyway, I love this question, because it gets to the kind of just a really interesting narrative violation in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:Dwarkesh asks, Satya, is being a company man underrated? You've spent most of your career at Microsoft, and you could say that one of the reasons you've been able to hold add so much value is you've seen the culture, the history, and the technology. You have all this context by rising up through the ranks. Should more companies be run by people who have this level of context? And he says Company man.
Speaker 1:He says, that's a great question. I haven't thought about that way.
Speaker 2:We have to have a company man of the year award
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:This year.
Speaker 1:For sure. I think it is underrated in Silicon Valley, and I think, it's very it's very interesting. And so he says, through my thirty four years now at Microsoft, each year felt more exciting about being at Microsoft versus thinking that, oh, I'm a company person or what have you. So no ego about it, which is there's a huge memetic pressure in Silicon Valley to not be a company man. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it'd be better to run a $1,000,000
Speaker 2:It's almost to the point where people people don't real like, many people in tech, the things that they want in life Yeah. Are all achievable on a million dollars a year total comp sort of salary. Right? Yeah. Like, everything you could want, like the nice house Yep.
Speaker 2:The cars Yep. The the second home Yep. Kids in private school. Yep. It's all achievable on that.
Speaker 2:Yet they think that the only way they can get that is if they have some big liquidity event.
Speaker 1:I need
Speaker 2:a big liquidity event before I'm 30. Yeah. And I need another one, you know, and then I'm gonna do my big company, and then it's gonna
Speaker 1:be a big company. Who it is, like, life insurance.
Speaker 2:People, like how many of those people would have been a great PM at Meta and just don't realize the kind of compensation that you can get by just working up the org. Totally. And the excitement of working on products that instead instead of working on your, like, vertical SaaS app that has five users Yeah. Working on some you're working on a feature where you're, like like, people joke about, oh, you're just changing, like, the rounding on the button Yeah. The hue of the button.
Speaker 2:It's, like, well, that's pretty cool if you have 20,000,000 people clicking that button every single day.
Speaker 1:2,000,000,000 people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In case of
Speaker 1:meta Yeah. Like, two orders of matches to that.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying, even if you're working on, like, some obscure part of the settings app Totally. You're still getting millions and millions of clicks potentially an hour.
Speaker 1:Potentially adding more value than someone who's been Adding value
Speaker 2:to the world. Saving people time and money. Exactly. Time is money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:And so he says, I take that seriously even for anybody joining Microsoft. It's not like they're joining Microsoft as long as they feel that they can use this as a platform for both economic return, but also a sense of purpose and a sense of mission that they can accomplish by using us as a platform. That's the contract. I love that. That's a great distillation of what it means to, like, hire, and you can tell these hired well because of that.
Speaker 1:So I think, yes. Companies have to create a culture that allows people to come in and become company people like me. Microsoft Microsoft got it more right than wrong, at least in my case, and I hope that remains the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting that when you look at Apple, Google, and Apple, Google, and Microsoft now, they're all run by company men. Yeah. And and that's been and and the thing that, you know, we're we're seeing with Satya is Satya goes founder mode. Right?
Speaker 2:Founder mode is going on the up and coming AI podcast and being willing to talk for two hours about what you're doing. Right? Yeah. Sundar, on the other hand, you could argue, no. These guys are in manager mode.
Speaker 2:Tim Cook is over at the John Summit concert dancing, you know, instead of, you know, working on the next, computing platform and, like, you know, he's done a great job of of that type of manager at least to date.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, speaking of the next computing platform, the big announcement was, a new quantum computing chip. And so,
Speaker 2:That they had sitting on the desk. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Cool. Quantum computers you might have
Speaker 2:seen have
Speaker 1:been, you know, it's usually like this this superconductor, like frosty, high like, super cold, like, gold, like, crazy looking device in essentially a lab. Certainly not something you can rack on a server. Microsoft claims to have boiled it down to a point where, this could potentially be scaled into, you know, millions of qubits, which are quantum, which which we'll go through here. So, Elon shared a GROC analysis of quantum computing and the Majorana one chip, which is Microsoft's new quantum computing, quantum processing unit. So we'll give a quick overview of quantum computing.
Speaker 1:Imagine a computer so powerful it could solve problems that today's supercomputers can't even touch. That's the idea behind quantum computing. Unlike regular computers, which use bits that are either zero or one, quantum computers use qubits. Qubits are special because they can be zero, one, or both at the same time, thanks to a quantum property called superposition. This allows quantum computers to process huge amounts of information all at once, making them potentially game changing for tasks like simulating complex molecules for drug discovery, optimizing massive systems like traffic or supply chains, and cracking tough math problems.
Speaker 1:There's a catch. Qubits are incredibly fragile. They can lose their quantum state and thus their information due to tiny disturbances like heat or noise. This fragility is one of the biggest hurdles in making quantum computers practical. Now, Microsoft launched the Majorana chip, Majorana one chip, and it was funny because in the interview, Satya's, like, clearly heard all about the project for a long time, but he, like, didn't know the final code name because they probably have code names and then they're launching it.
Speaker 1:He's like, I think we're calling it Majorana. He kind of had to, like, check that.
Speaker 2:But That's founder mode.
Speaker 1:It's a new QPU, quantum processing unit, which could be the successor to the GPU, the TPU, and now the QPU. It's designed to tackle this fragility problem. It's the first chip to use a topological core, a cutting edge approach that leverages exotic particles called Majorana particles. These particles help create a special kind of qubit called a topological qubit, which is more stable than the qubits in most other quantum computers. Here's what stands out.
Speaker 1:Material. It uses a new type of material called a topo conductor. It's more stable, and it's more scalable. And so Microsoft designed this explicitly to support a million qubits, which is a huge leap. And at that point, you can actually start doing, like, real math and real problem solving as opposed to, a lot of the a lot of the systems that IBM and Google has worked for science project.
Speaker 1:It's like, oh, yeah. It's 10 cubits. It can it can theoretically do the hard math, but it can't practically actually
Speaker 2:solve it too. So many so many companies that had, what what was that AI project? I forget who he's in, but it wasn't started with a w maybe. And they're always saying, oh, it solved this
Speaker 1:There's D Wave.
Speaker 2:D Wave.
Speaker 1:And there was Rigetti.
Speaker 2:No. No. I'm not talking about Chip. It was, like, IBM what was IBM's big AI project? Watson?
Speaker 2:Watson?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Watson.
Speaker 2:Watson got smoked. Watson got smoked. Watson got
Speaker 1:smoked. Watson fell off. Yeah. And it Well, they crushed in jeopardy for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was a good stunt. It's interesting that that it seems like these big, you know, legacy computing companies had these since science projects Yeah. And they seem to be content with them being science projects and being this sort of marketing. Right?
Speaker 2:Because because Watson Yeah. I I haven't even seen anything about it in the last year.
Speaker 1:Well, now Watson is a is a consulting group that will help you implement Llama, essentially. Mogged. Mogged. But, also, as we've seen, there's a lot of money to be made in just Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:AI transformation.
Speaker 2:But Why have a decade plus long science experiment that you just end up as a consultant in finance model?
Speaker 1:Marketing it's a marketing project for your consultancy. Okay. And so I'm just saying And so Like When you call, you know, ExxonMobil and you say, hey, we wanna help you implement AI. Yeah. And you say, oh, what company are you for?
Speaker 1:We're like, IBM. We're the Watson Group. You remember the jeopardy thing? Yeah. We've actually partnered with Facebook and Meta to vend in one of the greatest LLMs at the lowest cost.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Not a bad pitch, not crazy, but the real reason why they missed out is that they weren't deep learning pill. They weren't scale pill. And, and and Ilya Sutzkever, like, the magic at OpenAI was that there were a ton of papers that were being released around the same time. He read the transformer paper and was like, this is it. And he identified that and was like, let's go implement this and let's scale this.
Speaker 1:And that was, like and that was just a very, very key thing. It is interesting that everyone else is catching up and Watson isn't, like, hey, us too. Because they could have done, you know, if they were cracked, they could have done, like, a deep seek thing or a llama fine tune or a mistrial.
Speaker 2:I would I also wouldn't be surprised if the best people at Watson got poached to go to the other
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, I mean, yeah. The the the company is not set up as a Yeah. As a research, like, software enterprise company anymore. It's very much a lot a lot of consulting.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's go back to, the Majorana chip. It relies on Majorana particles, which are fascinating because they are their own anti particles. This property makes them ideal for storing quantum information in a way that's naturally protected from certain airs. Picture it like this. Think of a regular qubit as a spinning coin that's easily knocked over by a breeze.
Speaker 1:A topological qubit is more like a knot tied in a rope. No matter how much you shake it, the knot stays secure. Interesting metaphor from Grok. Microsoft achieves this by using a topo conductor material that combines the properties of a conductor and a topological insulator. This setup allows them to create and manipulate major on a particles forming stable qubits.
Speaker 1:Why is this a bigger deal? Well, more stable more stability, faster progress, and Microsoft is super committed to this. They've been researching this for twenty years, and they've had a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:See, that's the kind of stuff, like, I wanna see the twenty years of research and then boom. We're gonna commercialize this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so they actually had some setbacks. In 2018, they published a paper on quantum computing, and they had to retract it. Yeah. Because this the there was so much pushback from the scientific community.
Speaker 1:And so, the article highlights potential applications. They're gonna work on self healing materials, sustainable agriculture, safer safer chemical discovery. And going forward, they still have to scale up. Going from eight cubits to a million is a massive engineering challenge. It's not just about adding more cubits.
Speaker 1:They all need to work flawless.
Speaker 2:We're we're we're focused on doubling here.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They're focused on going eight to a eight to a million.
Speaker 1:But all the best all the best, you know, projects are. But let's go to nature. So I believe Microsoft published their paper in nature, and there was some pushback, and I have an article here from Nature that will kind of show, you know, a little bit of truth zone on Microsoft claims. We'll see if we agree with it or not. We'll let you be the judge.
Speaker 1:So he says, Microsoft claims quantum computing breakthrough, but some physicists are skeptical. The tech giant aims to make topological quantum computers that will reach useful scales faster than competing techno technologies. And so machines based on topology promise to be easier to build at scale than competing technologies. So again, it's not that they've built the million qubit machine yet. They're just saying, hey, the tech tree has been going this direction, and we think if we go in this direction, it'll be a faster shortcut to the quantum computer that we want that will actually be able to, like, you know, simulate the universe essentially.
Speaker 1:Like, the the qubit, the the whole thing with quantum computing is that, like, you can do such complex, like, you break encryption, but you can do such hard computing problems that you can actually, like, instead of just physically, like, modeling, like, the pen dropping, and and it's like, the pen has a weight, and it and there's like a force. It's like, you can model each atom in the pen. And and it's like, yeah. No problem. Like, sure.
Speaker 1:That even though that would be like,
Speaker 2:sounds good, boss.
Speaker 1:Insane amount of of of calculations. So the announcement came in a February 19 press release containing few technical details, but Microsoft said it has disclosed some of its data to selected specialists in a meeting at its research center in Santa Barbara, California. Would I bet my life that they're seeing what they think they're seeing? No. But it looks pretty good, says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford UK who was briefed on the results.
Speaker 2:It's gotta be such a crazy dynamic doing this frontier research in a space like quantum computing. And any day, you don't know if you're gonna wake up and and your and your nemesis is gonna, like, publish this sort of groundbreaking piece. Yeah. And you have to sort of react to it, but you gotta be, like, somewhat supportive because you wanna you you you ideally want the space to be pushing forward and getting more investment.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But then simultaneously, they're you know, you wanna be the guy that, like, has, like, the the the breakthrough that really matters.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So he's like, yeah. Like, it seems seems legit. Yeah. Wouldn't bet my life on it. Yep.
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:And so, as I said, at the at the same time, the company published intermediate results, but not the proof of the existence of topological qubits. And so big question on what was on that chip. Because it's kind of the classic, like, there, and, I got the thing and who knows if it's working and it's not working. And it's like, why did you why did you instantiate in the physical world? Like, clearly from a marketing perspective, the reason that you say, like, I'm showing you the iPhone is because, like, it's real and you can buy it.
Speaker 1:And, like, Steve Jobs pulled it out of his pocket and was like, this is a real thing. You wouldn't you won't believe it.
Speaker 2:Beth brings a chip around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Beth Jesus does this too. I think Beth Jesus is in one of these, tweet threads being like, why is this a big deal? Like, I don't care about this. It's heating up.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, in the markets, generally, quantum computing has become very hot. There's a lot of SPACs that were down, and now they're popping again. And so I'm sure we're gonna be hearing more about this. The very interesting thing is that most of the techno optimists Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna pull up on public. What what was the,
Speaker 1:Look at Vergetti computing.
Speaker 2:Vergetti. I think
Speaker 1:that's probably a good one. D Wave, I think as well. But, it's very interesting because you can look at all of this. It's like one of those things where people overestimate what can be done in a decade and underestimate what can be done in a century or or, overestimate what can be done in a year or underestimate what what can be done
Speaker 2:in a decade. Yeah. Regretti is all over the place. They're up they're up 16% this month, but it's been it's been Heatnap. Up 700 the past quarter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I told
Speaker 1:you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:10 x.
Speaker 1:So what's the market
Speaker 2:cap now? They're, 2,680,000,000.00
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Losing 60,000,000 a year on 11,000,000 of revenue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, they can't possibly have revenue because they haven't created a quantum no no one has. Like, it's it's not like there's no work to be done. It's a research organization now, but you're betting that they will be one to commercialize. And if they do, it'll be extremely valuable. So good luck to them.
Speaker 1:Wait. What what you got?
Speaker 2:Somehow up that. Yeah. I I misread it. It's it's 960% over the past quarter.
Speaker 1:So it's 10 x over the last quarter. Wow. Yeah. Not bad.
Speaker 2:It's $270,000,000
Speaker 1:company, and now it's a $2,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, other, you know, companies, you know, Satya sees this and says, okay. This is a new bar now. I need a 10 x Microsoft in the next quarter.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:What would you have to what would you have to announce? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You would have to announce we solved quantum computing. Yeah. But I mean, to my earlier point, like, a lot of really smart tech people that I talked to do say, yes. Like, this is the century where we will solve quantum computing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gonna take a long time, probably longer than we estimate. It's hard to hard to exactly, you know, you know, forecast it out. But Yep. When we do, it will result in crazy, crazy new abilities.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. One one one guy I was talking to, very successful founder, was like, so million cubits, you know, quantum computer by 2040, '20 '50, talking to somebody else. And then he was like, yeah, maybe. And then he was like, so Dyson sphere by 2100? And he was like, yeah.
Speaker 1:That sounds about right. And it was, like, so casual, but I was like, that sounds crazy, but also, like, that that things are really accelerating and we're building crazy stuff. Like, you know, you think about a hundred years before, we we can talk to the computer now. Yeah. Hundred years ago, we didn't have computers at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. It was like, you know, it was like, trains are cool a hundred years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Trains are still cool.
Speaker 1:Trains are still cool, but
Speaker 2:not space ships. We don't need more of them, but Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go through other, interesting hard tech demos that kinda went off the rails and landed one guy, I think, in jail. And this one. We're moving to Nikola, and, we have a chart here from, the the stock is all over the place. The market cap is at 40,000,000. They declared chapter 11 bankruptcy today.
Speaker 1:They were in the Wall Street Journal. And so, we're really off.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that there's somebody out there that's still buying Nikola shares today because it's still they declared bankruptcy, but, obviously, you can still trade it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So somebody out there is watching some, like, slop YouTube video of, like,
Speaker 1:Nicola being the future.
Speaker 2:And and they're like, oh, this company seems really cool.
Speaker 1:A lot of slop. Yeah. But at their peak, they were in the multiple billions market cap, and they've dropped significantly. Let's give a little bit
Speaker 2:of overview. They popped. So in in June of twenty twenty
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Few months after the pandemic started, they went public at at, around $20.20 $20,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:20 billion.
Speaker 2:But they pop they they didn't go public. They didn't crack, so they SPAC.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. SPACs are normally like 4,000,000,000 companies. And this is five times fast.
Speaker 2:But the but think about the the pop on on so many of these.
Speaker 1:I know. I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Looks like a meme meme coin chart.
Speaker 1:It really does look like a meme coin chart.
Speaker 2:And and And it had about as much tech as a as a meme coin.
Speaker 1:As a meme coin. Yeah. And what a silly name. It's like Tesla already exists. Let's make a company called Nikola.
Speaker 1:Clearly, people will think it's it's literally meme coin. It's like how there was, like, you know, there's Trump coin and there's Melania coin. It's like, oh, like, let's just Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or whatever. Yeah. Hillary Clinton coin or whatever.
Speaker 1:Or even after Dogecoin, they were, like, cat coins and, you know, they were, like, the monkeys and then the dogs and then the owls and all sorts of stuff. People know when there's attention, just farm a little bit, sneak a little bit off the side. Yeah. Proven proven, path. So this story starts back in 02/2009.
Speaker 1:Trevor Milton, the CEO of Nikola, he had a project called Dehybrid for swift transportation. It fails amid accusations of misused funds, hinting at future deception. In 2014, he founds the Nikola Motor Company after selling D Hybrid, touting revolutionary hydrogen electric trucks with hefty seed investments. 2016, the Nikola one truck is announced with claims of thousands of reservations and technology years ahead of its competition.
Speaker 2:What was the Nikola one truck? Was it actually, like, a commercial? Semi semi,
Speaker 1:like, a 18 wheeler type truck? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's so funny because the strategy of saying, hey. We have this, you can reserve it for either no dollars or a hundred dollars. Remember the cyber truck? It was, like, a hundred bucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had numerous friends who were, like, oh, I just threw one. I, yeah, I
Speaker 1:threw a hundred bucks.
Speaker 2:Because the novelty of being able to say, like, Yeah. Yeah. I I pre ordered
Speaker 1:$100. I think you have to put down, like, 50 k Yeah. Which is, like, a wildly different bar.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But for that buyer, it's yeah. True. Market change.
Speaker 1:But but, like, they hadn't announced pricing. So I I guarantee there'd be there's, like, a massive price elasticity to, to, you know, electric car preorder deposits. So if the Roadster was a hundred buck down a hundred bucks down and they were like, hey, maybe it'll cost $50 and it'll be better than a turbo s. Like, people would definitely be jumping in at 50 k. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're like, hey. Maybe it'll be 50 k, and you only have to put a hundred bucks down now. Like, even if it came out at 200 later, people would pre sell a ton, which could be good for just establishing demand. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:And just for context, I think, like, to to put in some of these, like, preorders, like, I think the humane pen, even at their price point, got, like, 7,000 preorders. So so, like, they couldn't even get preorders based on a device that didn't act you know, the humane device didn't work reliably. Yeah. We'll get to that. But, anyways, back back to trucks.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, December 2016, they unveiled the Nikola one prototype despite obvious signs it was not fully functional, I e, visible external power cables. So people are like, wait a minute. There's a there's a cable coming out of this car. You haven't untethered this thing.
Speaker 1:And in January of twenty eighteen, that's a that's a year year later.
Speaker 2:It's funny because it actually wouldn't be that damning if they were like, hey. We're gonna make the car roll uphill because then you could say, well, we don't have the battery set up yet, but we gotta connect to do basically an extension cord. Yeah. It's like a vacuum. And then we're gonna get the bat we're gonna the engine's going.
Speaker 2:Now we're gonna get Yeah. The motors working now. But but instead, they, you know, put it in motion. Two years later, all Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Basically Yeah. Year and two months. Yeah. So they do the rolling truck video. Promotional video shows the truck, quote, unquote, in motion, but it was later revealed to have been rolled downhill to simulate
Speaker 2:the car. Towed it to the top Yep. With a tow truck. Yep. And then rolled it down.
Speaker 1:What's funny is, like, is, like, I'm sure if you're building a car, there is a process where you go from, like, we're in the clay, you know, the clay, like like, where they carve out the design.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Then it's like, hey. We have CAD designs. Hey. We hey. We we fabricated, like, the external shell.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey. We we fabricated, like, the the the wheels and the transmission and the axles enough that it actually moves. And that could have been just a cool thing if they didn't lie about it and been like, look. Yeah. It's not actually working yet, but we got it rolling at least.
Speaker 2:It's just funny because They didn't say they had
Speaker 1:to lie.
Speaker 2:You presumably could have got the rolling truck video in the first month Oh, yeah. By just building out the frame, putting wheels on it Yeah. You know, getting
Speaker 1:I mean, there are, like, kit car guys that can do that in their, like, garage on the weekend where there's some cool ones.
Speaker 2:There's some great videos of people making, like like, things that look like Porsches that are just totally fake.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You've seen the, the the, for the Fiero, the Pontiac Fiero. People put body kits on that to make it look like a Countach because it was a mid engine sports car from the eighties by Pontiac, but it's like, you know, ten ten ks or something. So you can just mod it, like, crazy. This is hilarious.
Speaker 1:In May of twenty eighteen, they sued Tesla for $2,000,000,000 over design features. An action scene is both bold and bizarre.
Speaker 2:2,000,000,000. Just like The company that the company that names themselves after a derivative of Tesla then goes back and sues Tesla.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like, you'd think you'd be getting sued.
Speaker 2:Bold and bizarre.
Speaker 1:Egregious. Nikola
Speaker 2:I'll say the whole
Speaker 1:thing the
Speaker 2:whole thing. Nikola, bold and bizarre. Bold. If that was there if that was there.
Speaker 1:To boost credibility, they refund all preorder deposits despite not having delivered a product, probably just because they raised some money off of the off of the off of the preorders, and they didn't want the pressure from the consumers. April 2019, Nikola World Spectacle. Spectacle is just not a good name for anything. A lavish event unveils multiple prototypes and secures a high profile order from Anheuser Busch. So they're they're, you know, they're deal guys.
Speaker 1:They're making deals happen, I guess, but rough. Milton purchases a $32,000,000 Utah ranch and, and public offers proposing a Tesla pickup design draw increased scrutiny. And so by November of twenty nineteen, people are getting real suspicious of this guy. He's he's, you know, suing Tesla, launching these weird truck videos where they're kinda fake, and then also says, like,
Speaker 2:the guy who was just suing them for $2,000,000,000 is now giving them design, saying, hey, Tesla. You guys should make this. Yeah. Wild.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Kinda think so. Do you see the next one? The Nicola Badger. Do you wanna read this?
Speaker 2:February 2020. So this is this is a few months before they spack. The, the company unveils the Nicola Badger pickup with over the top features, including a built in water fountain from fuel cell exhaust. Can you imagine?
Speaker 1:It is, like
Speaker 2:I mean, as a father, I do like trucks. Yeah. I mean, you're in a
Speaker 1:filtered water game, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Why not? Yeah. As a water fanatic Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe we need to hook the Aurora up to the exhaust of the the cooling of the turbo.
Speaker 2:It's funny. This truck looks like I've got it pulled up right now. It looks like a complete knock off of the Tundra meets a TRX. Sure. And, a water fountain using the the dispensed fuel is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So funny. But but, again, great viral story, little feature. And, you know, to be fair, like, the Cybertruck and other Tesla products have had similar things like that. Like, the model x has the gull wing doors that are, like, total showstoppers. And it's, like, you could just do minivan doors on those, but it's actually more expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell me. The minivan doors. The, the the one thing about minivan door I mean, all these types of doors, having kids, I got I got a Mercedes van because I realized being able to just sit Yep. Stand
Speaker 1:And just put the kids straight in.
Speaker 2:Put the kids straight in with the seats. Yep. But then the doors, you're always kinda worried, like, are they gonna get Yep. Anyways, I I thought that was very smart. E Elon has always been able to thread the needle and the Tesla team around Yeah.
Speaker 2:Novelty Yep. And and actual And use. Function utility. Totally. Because, like, think about
Speaker 1:One by wire.
Speaker 2:Another feature
Speaker 1:in fire truck is very gimmicky, but it's also amazing because you're in this huge truck, and you just move your hand, like, two inches, and you're turning.
Speaker 2:And then Tesla also does, like, the the novelty of, oh, we're gonna make, like, a fart sound effect
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. The car and,
Speaker 2:Nikola could never. No. No. No. Never.
Speaker 2:So June 2020, the frenzy begins. Nikola goes public via a SPAC, skyrocketing value despite having zero revenue as investors buy into the hype. So immediately, can see on public go go you know, basically pumps to $20,000,000,000 Yep. And then just, drops basically every single day for the next, five years. I'm sure they had I gotta look.
Speaker 2:They they had some they had some, balances that different
Speaker 1:points. Mentioned here.
Speaker 2:Who's that? Hindenburg. You wanna read it? Anyways, so in 09/20/2020, they had backed in in March or or June. Sorry.
Speaker 2:So just a few months later, GM announces an 11% stake. So they they take a public, you know, position in this public company and plans to manufacture Nikola trucks only for Hindenburg Research to expose a series of deceptive claims. So terrible look for GM. Sounds like they didn't do a lot of technical due diligence.
Speaker 1:Shouldn't call me back first.
Speaker 2:They saw they went and visited the ranch in Utah, and they were like, this ranch is awesome. The tech must be I wanna
Speaker 1:hang out with this guy more.
Speaker 2:Tech the tech must be great. Shortly after, Milton resigns amid mounting evidence of fraud, and the GM deal is dressed dramatically scaled back. Oof. Yeah. I'm sure they still, like, had their position Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, hopefully. And then at that point, like, this is so long ago, like, a little under five years ago. And so there's all this legal fallout, July 2021, still, like, the the absolute top of the market. Milton is indicted on multiple fraud charges in October 2022. He's found guilty and sentenced to prison with hefty fines.
Speaker 2:They're clearly clawing back. You know, I'm sure a lot of I'm sure he did various transactions over time, that he benefited from personally. Nicholas settles with the SEC for a hundred and $25,000,000 over misleading investors. So they had raised, I'm sure, billions of dollars through through their public offering. And then in February 2025 today, with production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished reputation, Nicola files for chapter 11.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, wish wish the story had a better ending, but, it's it's honestly in some ways amazing that they, are, made it so far even after their founder, you know, went, was was out of the picture. It's crazy. On public, they have there's been $27,000,000 of volume today. Woah. So is this I'm I'm trying to understand who's buying the stock at this point.
Speaker 2:Do they feel that I mean, who knows. Right? I just
Speaker 1:It's so bizarre. I mean, this is just such an interesting company because I because they still have
Speaker 2:or they still are loaded up with debt. Right?
Speaker 1:So Similar to Theranos similar to Theranos, like, this is this is one of those companies that I feel like was, like, an open secret in Silicon Valley that everyone knew that this was fake.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, there was never a moment where people were like, oh, maybe this will
Speaker 2:work out. Like, I'm I'm reaching the best. Tesla was losing engineers to Nikola.
Speaker 1:That never happened. And also, there were never VC funds piling into this. I just pulled up Crunchbase, and, it was the US Department of of Energy, CNH Industrial, General Motors, California Transportation Commission. So, like, the guy was clearly just really good at rizzing, like, non financial investors who don't do this stuff. And I'm sure that if he if this, if this founder walked into, like, a holy Trinity firm and tried to pitch this, they would have gotten laughed at.
Speaker 2:At this time, the other car manufacturers didn't really have a strong EV strategy. Mhmm. It did make sense from a narrative standpoint that there would be a commercial, you know, commercial focused version of Tesla focused on trucking.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Everybody knew that Tesla would eventually do this, but it wasn't a priority for them. Right? And so from a narrative, it all made sense. That doesn't mean that they can actually execute on that narrative and and capture value based on that long term trend. And and who knows?
Speaker 2:You know, I I know Amazon has EVs now, but it doesn't seem like EVs have gotten that sort of widespread commercial. They haven't had the level of traction that that EVs have had in the commercial market.
Speaker 1:Yep. So, Milton is indicted as CEO on multiple fraud charges. This is around twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. And in October 2022, he is found guilty and sentenced to prison with heavy fines. Nicholas settles with the SEC for a hundred and 20 5 million over misleading investors.
Speaker 1:And, just now, the reason we're covering it today is that it's basically the end of the road with production delays, financial struggles, and a tarnished rep reputation they struggled for. And so he's they filed for bankruptcy.
Speaker 2:He's gonna be out of prison in 2027.
Speaker 1:Let's get him on the show.
Speaker 2:I mean Like, Connor laughing.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe, you know, this is another thing. We believe in redemptive justice. Right?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And, you know, if he does his time, the main thing is I wanna see some banger deep tech analysis. I want him to come out with some ground I want him to hit the books.
Speaker 2:I wanna be the Dylan Patel of the EV the commercial EV space Yeah. Handwrite analysis Yep. On happenings. Prove that
Speaker 1:you're the real deal
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not just a charlatan. Come out with some some groundbreaking research. Show me that you've at least read every book about battery cell technology. He's 42.
Speaker 2:So he's not even gonna be 50 when he gets out.
Speaker 1:That'd be great.
Speaker 2:He's born in 1982. That'd be great. Little bump in the road. And, Get
Speaker 1:him back in the game.
Speaker 2:Get back in action.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love I love a comeback story. America loves a comeback story. Let's see. So another green green energy unicorn died Wednesday as Nicola Corp filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Speaker 1:The 11 year old EV maker aspired to be the Tesla of trucks. They went public through a SPAC. They got, they they they benefited from the Green New Deal. That's a $27,000,000,000 market valuation at the time that was greater than Fords. What a coincidence.
Speaker 1:Wow. Lots of people trying to get shot at Ford's at Ford. Ford gets
Speaker 2:I mean Ford's Lindy. If they're gonna be around longer than
Speaker 1:they would
Speaker 2:have a If Ford had a Satya, that that is a hundred billion dollar company.
Speaker 1:For a while, there was a there was, like, a grandson of Henry Ford running the company, Bill Ford, which is awesome because their because their tagline was built Ford tough, and his name was Bill Ford. Bill Ford tough.
Speaker 2:I love Ford. I love Ford for I I love Ford as a first name. Yeah. I I Oh, that's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:On on our list for, you know, the next the next sun, Ford Hayes. It's a good sounding name.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'd I'd love to see Ford make a comeback.
Speaker 1:I had a Ford Explorer at one point. That was a great car. The Expedition's fantastic. Ford GT, fantastic. Mustang, also great.
Speaker 1:You know, these are great cars, but let's bring them back. Supposedly sophisticated investors were taken in by its marketing hype. General Motors took the 11% stake with CEO Mary Barra hailed as an industry leading disruptor. It was supposedly sophisticated. It was dis it was disruptive in a different way.
Speaker 1:They posted a video on Twitter of its model truck appearing to power effortlessly down a flat road with the caption, the Nikola hydrogen electric trucks will take on any semi truck and outperform them in every category. Weight, acceleration, stopping, safety, and features all with 500 to a thousand mile range. It would that would be revolutionary if true. It wasn't. According to a 2021 federal fraud indictment of founder Trevor Milton, an inoperable prototype was towed to the top of the hill, then Nikola employees released the brakes so it looked like it was cruising along, all while the door was taped shut to keep it from falling off and its batteries were removed to prevent the truck from catching fire.
Speaker 1:Rough. After taking investors from a ride, mister Milton was The
Speaker 2:only ride they they actually went on.
Speaker 1:Good writing. Good writing. Good pun.
Speaker 2:Journalists are underrated sometimes. Or what they're not.
Speaker 1:Who is this? This is Wall Street Journal opinion section. It's great. California regulators and the Biden administration tried to boost the electric truck market with mandates and subsidies. The Inflation Reduction Act included a $40,000 tax credit for buyers of electric trucks.
Speaker 1:EPA rule last spring requires that electric truck models make up 25% of long haul tractor sales by 02/1932. Man, talk about a bull case for Tesla now. It's crazy. Another electric truck maker, Lordstown Motors, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. Fisker failed last June.
Speaker 1:Rough time. The British electric bus startup Arrival sold its assets. Lots of bad stuff going on in the EV truck market. Power law rules everything around me. That's the story here.
Speaker 1:Anyway
Speaker 2:Great opportunity, though, for one of our our listeners to become a hero. Come in, pull them out of chapter 11. Yep. Run it back up to the top. Yep.
Speaker 2:You're definitely gonna get you know, you could this could be turned turned into a meme coin. Turn it
Speaker 1:into a meme coin. Yeah. And we were saying
Speaker 2:earlier just continue it.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:Trevor's gonna
Speaker 2:try and come out of the clink,
Speaker 1:hit the ground running, build a new company. One thing in the clink So they're
Speaker 2:gonna be a young man.
Speaker 1:In the clink, bed's famously uncomfortable. Maybe he needs an Eight Sleep. That takes us to our sponsor Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. What a Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience.
Speaker 1:You can get one at 8Sleep.com, and we have another post from Eight Sleep. They, formulated an sleep elixir with valerian root, nature's secret to winding down faster. You can check that out at 8sleep.com as well. And so And, we love Eight Sleep, and thank you for that.
Speaker 2:Note on they they set up a URL, 8Sleep.com/tbpn.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool. That's great.
Speaker 2:Say, TB approves the pod, which is the name of their product.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:The pod approves so they could just say the pod approves the pod.
Speaker 1:We we And I have we have
Speaker 2:a quote up here that says you can't publish fifteen plus hours a week of live content without being at peak performance. We simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without Eight Sleep. And if you wanna win as bad as we do, you can't afford to not sleep. Made a whole landing
Speaker 1:page. Oh,
Speaker 2:that's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He said we simply
Speaker 1:show that.
Speaker 2:We simply wouldn't be able to do what we do without Eight Sleep. And if you wanna win as bad as we do, you can't afford not to sleep on the pod. So, check it out. Same same pod that Huberman uses.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2:And Rob over there. They're absolute boys.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to some drama between Salesforce and Microsoft.
Speaker 2:You know we love drama
Speaker 1:on the show. It got spicy.
Speaker 2:I love when I love being air on being air violence. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love it. Marc Benioff and Sata Nadella have been going back and forth. There's article in the information breaking it down, but first, I wanted to pull up, what the stock has been doing. So we went to public.com. We looked at Salesforce.
Speaker 1:They're up 20% in the last six months. Market caps, $310,000,000,000. It's a big company. Big, big, big, big, big company. CRM, big business.
Speaker 1:But they but they own everything now. They own Slack, and they're trying to get everyone to upgrade to, Slack AI. Have you been getting those notifications?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen Slack.
Speaker 1:Oh, man. Like, whenever you're in Slack
Speaker 2:now because I think it's a
Speaker 1:Every there's a model that pops up. Request AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:David Sachs launched, like, a Slack competitor that leverages AI?
Speaker 1:Didn't he build the, like, a like a Like a Slack for Slack? Like, that was his main thing. Right? That he sold to Microsoft?
Speaker 2:I almost clicked on David Snacks. It's Snacks. Which is a parody account. Well Sacks what Sacks pulled, his chat.
Speaker 1:I I was thinking of Yammer. Like, that was the company he did after PayPal. And he sold that for a billion dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he, last year, he announced an AI powered work chat app rivaling Slack
Speaker 1:called Blue.
Speaker 2:Anyways I
Speaker 1:didn't know about that. Interesting. Okay. Well, anyway, let's go to this article in the information. Salesforce in talks with Microsoft, Oracle, and Google about cloud deal to handle AI.
Speaker 1:Salesforce Marc Benioff has long been a vocal critic of Microsoft. A couple years ago, he accused the company of violating antitrust laws and how it sells software bundles. More recently, he slammed its artificial intelligence chatbot for giving inaccurate responses and being difficult to use. I think he dropped Clippy as a pejorative. It got spicy.
Speaker 1:We love Clippy. I think it was in Aspen or Sun Valley. It was an iconic moment. But that history hasn't stopped Salesforce from including Microsoft in negotiations it's having with several cloud providers, also including Google and Oracle about a major new cloud agreement. The deal is likely to be worth more than a billion dollars over several years, said a Salesforce manager with direct knowledge of the deal.
Speaker 1:And so, here's the takeaway. Salesforce is in talk with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for a big cloud deal because they need AI inference, of course. The deal could be worth more than a billion dollars over several years, and they're currently on AWS, but they're bidding it out according to this reporting. But we'll see what Benioff has to say. Salesforce wants to rent the servers to run its customer management, AI agents, and other applications, a sign of how new AI products are expanding Salesforce's computing needs.
Speaker 1:So obviously, Salesforce is stuffing AI in every single product they own. They need inference, and they need more servers. So they're going to the hyperscalers, and they're bidding it out, allegedly. Salesforce already uses AWS in addition to Google Cloud and its own data centers. So we don't know who is the who's emerging as the favorite to win.
Speaker 1:He also didn't specify the size and scope of the agreement. A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment, but the agreement will be in the same range as Salesforce's past agreements with AWS. The negotiations which haven't previously been reported signal Salesforce's shift to public cloud providers for more of its computing needs. They're getting out of the data center building, business more or less. That that that's Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the shtick here. Salesforce has told customers that eventually it will sell its applications through all major cloud providers. AWS didn't comment. Oracle didn't comment. Google didn't comment.
Speaker 1:No one's talking to
Speaker 2:the information. Commenting. And The information is commenting, though.
Speaker 1:The information is commenting.
Speaker 2:Stop them.
Speaker 1:And we'll go to Marc Benioff because as soon as this dropped, he said, the story and the information is incorrect. In 2024, Salesforce explored a fourth deployment option for our customers alongside our existing choices, proprietary data centers, AWS, and Alibaba cloud. Last year, we decided to extend our partnership with Google, giving customers the option to deploy Salesforce customers, three sixty apps, Hyperforce, Agent Force, and data cloud on Google's platform in future Salesforce releases. So he's coming out and saying, hey. I'm not rugged AWS.
Speaker 1:I'm expanding. I'm not switching.
Speaker 2:Yep. And I mean, some of these quotes are just damning. I mean, he's saying Clippy was a disaster. Copilot is a gimmick. Yep.
Speaker 2:He's saying, I think this Copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them. So he's just publicly
Speaker 1:dragging them. So what's going on here? It seems like it seems like the information is trying to, you know, sell a little chaos.
Speaker 2:Over at over at Microsoft, Frank Shaw says, Mark has no idea what he's talking about. This is 2025 I love this. Right after he says, I think this Copilot thing has been a disaster. Yep. And Charles, who's over at Microsoft says, one of the execs there working on Copilot, he says, this is a big moment for Salesforce because CRM is not gonna be the future for customers.
Speaker 1:Brutal.
Speaker 2:It's going to be the strategic imperative for customers. I think that's why you see Salesforce taking jabs at Copilot because there's that pressure is very real, and it's here. So that was just, this month in February, 2025. So so going back and forth. And forth, not mincing words.
Speaker 2:We love I mean, we we called that we need to get people in tech need to get more, you know, fired up. Combative. Combative. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:More physical more physical altercations. Yeah. I wanna see, oh, Marc Benioff and Scottie Nadella were leaving the club after an altercation. The shirt ripped. And, honestly, if you're
Speaker 2:a senti, one of the best things you can do is go prison mode and take shots at a take shots at the big dog. Right? Go take shots at a Yeah. At Benioff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is like the East Coast, West Coast rap battle.
Speaker 2:They say, hey. The lineup this year at Dreamforce sucks. Sucks. Slop. Slop.
Speaker 1:Slop. You just got a dream slop.
Speaker 2:This wouldn't even be on the, you know, you know, the this wouldn't be on what what are some of, like I've I haven't been to Coachella in so long. I forgot about their
Speaker 1:your stages. Yeah. This wouldn't even
Speaker 2:be at the side stage
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At twelve noon Yeah. On Friday at Coachella. Yeah. This doesn't even make, you know This
Speaker 1:is garbage.
Speaker 2:The do lap. It's not going on the do lap. The do
Speaker 1:lap. I
Speaker 2:don't even know what that is, but I get it.
Speaker 1:From context.
Speaker 2:You've never been to Coachella?
Speaker 1:I've never been to Coachella. Wow. I've been to Outside Lands and maybe a few others, but
Speaker 2:I'm not big I'm not even
Speaker 1:a festival guy.
Speaker 2:Sometime I'll have to talk about, going to I've been to both weekends of Coachella in the same year, which which is dusty. Dusty. Dusty. That actually kicked off my, original fitness arc.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:That was the catalyst. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think we I think we did mention that one at one point. And so, yeah, the information is, sowing seeds of descent between the hyperscalers. I'd love to see it. There's a Hyperforce rewrite going on. This is interesting.
Speaker 1:Salesforce has already rewritten the code for its applications, databases, and other operating systems to run on AWS services in a project called Hyperforce, the AWS the AWS version of Salesforce's applications became available in 2020. Salesforce intends to make the same applications available on whichever cloud provider it picks in the current negotiations. While Salesforce incurred a significant upfront expense in developing Hyperforce, making it available on another cloud wouldn't be as costly since roughly 80 to 90% of its code built for AWS would run on other providers. Interesting. So customers of Salesforce wanna run on their own clouds.
Speaker 1:Salesforce needs to do deals to make those clouds happy and get them, going. And, Benioff wants to keep everyone happy and wants to be able to play all of the different hyperscalers against each other without I mean, you can do that
Speaker 2:if you're throwing billions of dollars around. Every single one of these hyperscalers has, like, a sales team dedicated to Salesforce Yeah. And they're trying to win said business. Yeah. But there's there's been air on been air.
Speaker 1:But he has been nagging Microsoft a lot, and so that's gotta make that negotiation harder. And they also have the most competitive products, so doing a deal to
Speaker 2:to What's Microsoft's CRM product? Do they have I mean, they have a they have a product for everything. It's Yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess the XL, but I
Speaker 2:they they have a they so Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five is their CRM.
Speaker 1:I mean, the big I think the big war is, you know, Slack versus Teams. Teams really crushed Slack. And I don't I don't know how you would value Slack as an independent company now post acquisition, but Salesforce bought Slack. And, whether or not that was a good deal for Salesforce kinda depends on Teams execution, and Teams has become really popular because it's bundled with, like, the Microsoft Office that goes into, like, so many different companies. Well, speaking of software to help you run your business, this show is, of course, supported by Ramp, our good buddies over at Ramp.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna give you a I'm gonna give you an example. So we launched PMF or Die on Monday.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, turns out running a twenty four seven livestream with multiple camera feeds, multiple audio feeds, hundreds of, you know, concurrent viewers streaming on multiple platforms. Very hard. We had to tap in a guy named Sam Sheffer.
Speaker 1:This is very hard.
Speaker 2:At Humane. He was at Humane on Monday. Humane gets acquired by HP. He decides I'm not gonna go into the AI printer business even though I kinda we we've talked about this. We want a better printer.
Speaker 1:I'm excited for better printers.
Speaker 2:But, so I talked to Sam this morning. I was driving to work. Yep. It was 05:30AM. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so he's coming online. He's on the East Coast where, you know, Tyler Gold introduced me. Yep. I'm like, dude, like, you gotta help us out. Like, we need we need to level this up.
Speaker 2:Like, we've we've got all these viewers. Like, I think PMF or Die has product market fit in the sense that, like, viewers are super excited about it. Sam's like, I'm down. I gotta go pick up, like, you know, basically, like, my exit package. But after that, I'll go.
Speaker 2:And so he rolled into the PMF or Die stream today, and and right as he was headed over there, I just made him a card on ramp. And I was like, if you need to buy any supplies Do it again. And so he gets the invite, downloads the app, adds it to Apple Pay, and he can now buy products on our Ramp account That's right. Even though he's like a, you know, a contractor. Right?
Speaker 2:So, that level, like, the that that used to be, like, so annoying of, like, okay. Go and and and get the receipts, and we'll reimburse you or we'll pay you. So Yeah. Yeah. Just so fantastic.
Speaker 2:And, Ramp gets it done. Let's go into Let's
Speaker 1:go to the the the timeline. I wanna do this Eric Stromberg post on boot scaling. I thought this was interesting you flagged this. He writes a little screenshot essay. Eric, if you don't know him, he was a bedrock with Jeff Lewis, absolute dog of a capital allocator.
Speaker 1:And Eric writes, traditionally, startups raise millions of dollars to start in hundreds to scale. Today, AI is giving everyone an army of agents to design, engineer, and build on their behalf. Perhaps AI will deliver so much leverage that founders will raise only one round and be done. Profits will fund from there. This is a comforting idea for seed VCs, but not right.
Speaker 1:If you can reach 1,000,000 of ARR in ninety days from an apartment, why raise seed money? Instead, I expect a different strategy to grow, boot scaling. Founders will bootstrap at the start leveraging near zero cost of experimentation. They'll only raise after achieving product market fit and building conviction in a venture scale business. At that point, they'll use capital to scale distribution.
Speaker 1:Yep. Boot scaling allows founders to avoid early dilution while later securing capital to win versus well funded competitors. A prior generation has proven this model works, and he flags a few here. Atlassian founded in 02/2002, they first raised money in 2010. They raised 60,000,000.
Speaker 1:Qualtrics founded in 02/2002, they first raised in 2012 for 70,000,000. GitHub, founded in '27 or 02/2007, first raised in 2012. 1Password, found in 02/2005, they raised in 2019. Unity, they they started in twenty two thousand four, they didn't raise until 02/2009. And so a lot of these companies that build for a long time independently, and then they start doing the growth rounds while skipping those early seed series a rounds.
Speaker 1:This shift will reshape reshape the landscape of seed VC. Those stuck in existing structures and clinging to old assumptions will lose to those who adapt. So Yeah. Break it down. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1:I thought that was the Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, the the obvious example here is PMF or Die. Blake came out, built a few sort of these, like, AI native apps, like, generated so much revenue that he's now building his fourth app in, like, two years Yep. Which he's announcing on PMF or Die tonight.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, he did not wanna raise money at all for this business because he's like, I have the cash. Yep. I don't really need to spend that much money. I have, like, the equip like, just by using Cursor and some of these other AI tools, I have the equivalent of, like, a bunch of developers that are on demand. And so he's very ambitious with this next business.
Speaker 2:Like, he wants to, you know, he's gonna I'll let him announce it tonight, but it could easily be a multibillion dollar company. He will get to the point where, you know, he could say, yep. I'm gonna raise, like, $20,000,000 at a 200 post and sell 10% of the company. But it's very possible we're gonna see a lot more of these businesses that just basically never raise. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. And, that's not necessarily like, the the good thing for VCs is there's still plenty of businesses. It it actually frees up capital for VCs to invest in these sort of capital, CapEx intensive businesses, defense tech is
Speaker 1:a good example. Model companies too.
Speaker 2:The the foundation model
Speaker 1:AI is bifurcated. It's like the consumer app companies that are building AI companies need no money to start,
Speaker 2:and then they
Speaker 1:need money to scale distribution. And then the foundation model companies need a billion dollars upfront to do the training run. And then once they have it, they've kind of cornered the market, and they have the commodity, and then they can just sell it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I see more rounds happening where it's, like, kind of these y c style rounds where it's, like, hey. We need 500 k so we can so, like, if you're working somewhere and you wanna quit your job and still be able to have, like, decent health insurance maybe. But it's really more so the the the, you know, these companies across the board are just getting way less, you know, capital intensive. And then simultaneously, attention is free now if you understand algorithmic feeds.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Like, PMF or Die, another good example. We spent $3,000 Yeah. Producing a video. It should have, like, a million views at this point. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Super high leverage. And so, yeah, if you're a CBC, how does that change your strategy? Do you, do you need to, do you need to go and convince someone who doesn't really need money just to get you like a little allocation? Maybe you're the only person you're putting in, you know, maybe, maybe the initial dilution is 1%, but you got your 1%.
Speaker 1:Like you're an angel in a larger round, but there just isn't that lead anymore?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Or or are you just, out of the game and and focusing on growth growth fundraising?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, VCs will still have the, you know, basically say sell 10% of your company to me because, like, I'm going to go to bat and help you win, right, with distribution Sure. On x, you know, LinkedIn, etcetera. Those are maybe tougher sells right now, but that's why YC's product, which is which is you have to figure out what product to make and you have to make your product, but we are gonna help you figure out how to make a company, which is really the product of YC.
Speaker 1:And also the pressure cooker. And the pressure cooker. Value of of YC is you're sitting there listening to some generational entrepreneur. Mark Zuckerberg's on stage, and you look over and the guy next to you is coding on the laptop, and you're, like, like, I should go ship a feature right now. Like, people are grinding.
Speaker 1:And that and that pressure of seeing everyone else, all your competition move super fast makes you wanna move faster. So
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it it it YYC has a bunch of interesting value ads that don't really come in the form of just the money. Yep. It's fascinating. Well, if you have a money if you have a business that's throwing off a lot of cash, highly recommend you pick up this beautiful car posted by Joe Wisniewski, one of my favorite builds for a VIP, a PTS nine eleven s t with 55,600 and, $860 in CXX options.
Speaker 1:Break it down, Jordy. Why did you wanna cover this on
Speaker 2:the show? So, this guy, Joe, talked to him before. He works at a dealership, I think, in, like, potentially Memphis.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:I forget exactly, somewhere, on the other side of America, but he basically, I think he sources the best Porsches, AMGs, Bentleys in the entire country, and so he's constantly sharing these incredible examples. This is one of the best, that silver on, tan interior, the sort of heritage interior, I think is just fantastic. So, need to get one of these in my garage at some point. But if you're in the market, go hit up Joe. He's also got an Instagram account with, like, some of the best car content.
Speaker 2:And he wears a suit when he's talking about these cars. Right? So he he respects the cars and says, I'm not just gonna, you know, film this, you know, slot video. I'm gonna, anyways. So That's great.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, let's go to this, next post by Ash, untapped market. No one has my current dream project, opposite of friend.com, pendant named foe, LLM, text to speech, computer yells at you. Adversarial computing, guys. It's on the come up.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is sort of what friend
Speaker 1:Yeah. Friend is very adversarial.
Speaker 2:Adversarial, but it's like, hey. You know, save save my life kinda thing.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. That's funny. Chimes in. He says, POV, you're smiling for a picture, but unaware that they're debating how to build a computer that yells at you. I love it.
Speaker 1:That's so funny. Yeah. Very, very, lots of fun opportunities. This.
Speaker 2:I think I think that the the adversarial friend dot com is probably friend.com.
Speaker 1:I agree. I agree with that. But I I I think that there there is something beautiful in here, like the story that we kicked this off with about the the the horrific humanoid robot as opposed to the friendly ASIMO humanoid robot. The the the the computer that yells at you, that is a viral concept. That will get a lot of downloads or installs or people testing it out.
Speaker 1:They'll get you a lot of attention. And then from there, you can kind of figure out, okay, what's the real product here? What really has product market fit? And friend.com certainly did that with their market entry. Let's talk about Apple.
Speaker 1:This week, they launched, the iPhone 16 e. It's $599. This is a big jump up from the $4.29 SE. Mark Gurman has, had the scoop and then the breakdown. Here he says the it it has an action button is in a 28, two hundred 50 six, and 512 gig options, black and white color options, IT, iPhone 14, and iPhone SE are discontinued.
Speaker 1:Preorder start on February for release, and the c one Apple modem is official. And this was a big, a big story, although it was kind of buried. Mark Urban says, the c one Apple modem, which is a, the cellular modem that actually connects to the cellular network. Normally, these are made by Broadcom, I believe. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is a monumental technical achievement because there's a ton of intellectual property. They're not just, like, hard it's, like, it's as it's as complex as making, like, an NVIDIA GPU, apparently. Yeah. And so he says a several billion dollar effort that has been in the works for seven years. In the end, it gets two sentences in the press release and fifteen seconds in the announcement video.
Speaker 1:Apple is clearly downplaying this intentionally.
Speaker 2:Daniel knows what it do. Yeah. Beth says why.
Speaker 1:And Steve Sposkey says patent cases hinge on how significant a feature is in the whole. Injunction depends on novelty and criticality. The more words, the more to hang in the inevitable q QC litigation on. And so, Steve is saying, hey. And Steve Sadowski is very sharp.
Speaker 2:I think he's at Andreessen, but he was, I think at Microsoft for a
Speaker 1:long time. And he understands this stuff really well. And he was saying that, basically, hey, they they built this modem. It works, and it's gonna be able to connect the phones to Starlink, do a whole bunch more stuff. It's just retooling their supply chain, gives them a huge advantage on on the supply side.
Speaker 1:But they're gonna get sued. And so they can't make too big of a deal out of it because if they do, the
Speaker 2:the lawsuits are
Speaker 1:gonna come for them. That that's the thesis here, at least what people are thinking.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's another con there's a little bit of extra context here. C one was birthed from Apple's one billion acquisition of Intel smartphone modem biz in 2019. C '1 is going to give Apple more leverage in carrier negotiations because they said, hey, Verizon. Like, we we we can be independent.
Speaker 1:We can use Starlink. We can use whatever. And it will allow deeper device integration and better better battery life. So, you know, they'll be able to have a % battery life right up until they've released the phone.
Speaker 2:Break your phone.
Speaker 1:On the day yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Apple Silicon team is consistently under
Speaker 2:I'm so used to the landline mode now. Yeah. Apple landline. Apple landline.
Speaker 1:I like this one.
Speaker 2:I actually would like an Apple charger made from Apple that's one of those, like, stretchy landline type of things. You know? Yeah. So you can Maybe people used to walk around the house. Yeah.
Speaker 2:HP. Give me the
Speaker 1:give me the give me the printer, the AI printer. Give me the AI landline. These are the things I want here. We got the Polycom on this on the table, but let's move on to, a promoted post from bezel. You can shop over 22,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by bezel's team of experts.
Speaker 1:A lot of people probably don't know this, but when you buy a watch on bezel, the person who's selling it doesn't just ship it to you. They actually ship it to bezel first, and then people at bezel verify that you're getting a real watch.
Speaker 2:I've been Which is really the space. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fortress. And, there's just guys nerding out all day long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, you know, just making sure that the watch you actually get is legit. And they catch a shocking number of Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:There's so many fakes.
Speaker 2:Fakes
Speaker 1:floating around. For some watches, and I saw a, like, in Google Shopping. It was, like, you know, Patek Nautilus, $300. And you click on it, and it's, like, it's from, like, a knock off website. I'm like, how is this even, like, on Google?
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Obviously, Google Google clearly has not made an effort to catch Nearly enough. Fake watches. Because if you look up, yeah, if you look up Patek, Aquanaut Yeah.
Speaker 1:They'll pull up a Some sketchy website.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It pulls up these watches that are just objectively, you know, obviously not real. Yeah. And, Google's happy to put them in front of you.
Speaker 1:And so, when you buy a watch on bezel I'm actually going through this right now. The seller shipped it to bezel. They received the watch, and I have the update. They've started the authentication process. And so it's very fun.
Speaker 1:You get a little Domino's pizza tracker, and you get to see exactly where it is in that process, which is very fun. And I also wanted to go through this fun, little post that they, ripped explaining the perfect three watch collection. Say less. They argue that the perfect three watch collection is a steel sports watch for the everyday flex, a dress watch for closing deals, and a wild card because it's fun. Here's what they're going with, and let us know in the comments what you think about this.
Speaker 1:They recommend for the everyday, flex, a Rolex Submariner Hulk, reference 116610LV.
Speaker 2:Which matches our new Color. Color. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You might see it in the corner. We're using a a beautiful, is that a Kelly green? I don't know. I don't even know what that
Speaker 2:It's a great question.
Speaker 1:It's built like a tank, water resistant to 300 meters for all the diving you'll never do. Yep. I need I I need to relax
Speaker 2:the next time I go bat diving.
Speaker 1:I actually scuba dive a lot. And somehow it goes with everything even though it's bright green for the dress watch.
Speaker 2:Under like, can we figure out how to
Speaker 1:do it with a pod? You could do it if you had a rebreather setup.
Speaker 2:Scuba diving Oh, yeah. In a in a tux. Yeah. Underwater pod.
Speaker 1:This would be potentially viral. Yeah. The the dress watch, they recommend the Cartier Tank Louis, reference WGTA011, arguably the Cartier to have. The Tank LC is pure old school elegance. It this is timeless sophistication at its finest.
Speaker 1:Perfect for closing deals, sipping Negronis, or just reminding people you have taste. I love the Cartier Tank. I think it's a fantastic watch worn by Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali and, Jackie Kennedy, and it's just a fantastic watch with a beautiful history. And for the wild card, they recommend the IWC pilot's watch chronograph Top Gun. Big, bold, straight out of a fighter jet.
Speaker 1:This Top Gun chrono's lightweight ceramic case laughs at scratches. The military aesthetic means business, and the flyback chrono is just plain old cool.
Speaker 2:And so Great option for a hard tech, deep tech founder.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:You don't know if you're gonna end up in an Apache that day.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just to make sure that you pick up
Speaker 1:a, an IWC pilot's watch chronograph, Top Gun. And so There
Speaker 2:you go.
Speaker 1:Jordy, you're you're working on a watch collection. What do you think is gonna be next? Any any teasers?
Speaker 2:I actually need a I need a You
Speaker 1:need a dress watch. Tank would be great. I still think, JLC Ultra Thin would be really good. Yeah. I think, there's a lot of good options.
Speaker 2:Or or of of of some sort or Yeah.
Speaker 1:But anyways, I think the two two two is the Vacheron that you're gonna wind up with.
Speaker 2:That's that's the only one that I actually want. Like, sometimes in life, you have Yeah. You you sort of justify, you know, purchases that are adjacent to the thing that you actually want. Yeah. But you need to just
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:Look in your heart and understand what it is you actually want and figure out a way to get that thing.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Well, let's go to Zach. He says, the mission of Oura, make it easier, more beautiful, and more customizable to share your workouts with the world. Hundreds of millions of people use apps like Strava, Nike Run Club to track their workouts. Tens of millions use apps like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok to share their workouts.
Speaker 1:His goal is to start giving creative tools so that second behavior sharing, becomes an art form of its own. And as a byproduct, I believe if you make training more creative in public, athletes want to train more.
Speaker 2:So Zach is, based in New York City operating under, the the PMF or Dime mentality right now working on Aura, which is a new app. John already said it, but it's basically think about, yeah, a a workout app that makes these sort of beautiful graphics so that you can share your progress. A lot of running is a sort of, like, communal activity. Everybody's sort of pushing themselves independently. And Zach has, you know, a million plus followers on Instagram, wants to build a product for himself and them to just be able to share their their, training more, and I'm super excited to see it.
Speaker 2:I don't run much myself. We should go over to New York and just go for a run with Zach and just get absolutely smokes. But we're getting a treadmill in the cage for PMF or Die. Okay. And so we'll have to have Zach go on a Oh, that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. App in there. So Thank you. Love to see it. Excited to see Zach roll this out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So good luck to him as he builds this app. We love to see it. Let's go over to Andreessen Horowitz. Chris Dixon was on a podcast with their, head of growth, David George, talking about what will happen in the world of AI just to the Internet and just to websites, which I thought was very interesting.
Speaker 1:Because everyone jumps to Terminator or complete job loss. Chris is thinking in the future, but not so far in the future, about something that seems like a very real possibility. So he says, what happens to the billions of websites if they aren't getting traffic?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:AI isn't just disrupting search, changing the Internet's economic model. For decades, websites provided platforms with content in exchange for traffic. This was the covenant as he puts it. AI flips this. Content fuels its model, but traffic doesn't always flow back.
Speaker 1:So historically, on the Internet, the beautiful thing is that if you had great content, the traffic would show up. The Google search crawler would find you. You would go viral on LinkedIn or Facebook. Stumble upon. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Stumble upon. Twitter used to link out. Yeah. Those things have stopped, and then the LLMs, will just, give people answers directly. So as users turn to AI for answers instead of the traditional search, control is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant systems.
Speaker 1:He's worried about the future of the Internet and what this shift means for creators. To address this, he asks, what new incentive structures or architectures should we be thinking about? And so he's not saying, hey. We gotta ban AI. He's just saying that, you know, there needs to be a new deal for content creators, and what does that look like?
Speaker 1:Whether that's, whether that's a content we talked about this, like, the content licensing model from the LLM. Like, if you are really great at crafting recipes at a superhuman level, you craft them, and then, yes, you only get one hit from the OpenAI scraper, and one hit from the anthropic scraper. But that one hit is then you're basically on, like, a YouTube style creator fund where they split the profits with you, and they're saying, yeah, we're taking your content. We are training our model on it. But when we when someone asked for this recipe, we used 50% of yours and then 50% of someone else's.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna send you, you know, a couple cents for every query that we turned over. And Yeah. There's this abstraction layer, but we're still paying you somehow.
Speaker 1:And that would definitely, keep the economic model in place. Yeah. I'm sure Chris, as the head of Andreessen crypto and massive crypto investor, former number one on the Midas list, has a bunch of ideas for how crypto can be involved in that. He doesn't explicitly break that down in this clip, but you know he's thinking about that as well. What was your take?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I'm excited to see, you know, crypto is entering a new regulatory regime. Right? Start starts with a bang Yep. A few days before David Sachs gets, into his official position as as crypto czar.
Speaker 2:We have presidential meme coins coming out. And so this new administration will, seemingly be getting, you know, trying to get innovative around, the actual regulations that have been, in many ways, forcing the cryptocurrency industry to orient around meme coins. Right? If you can't invest in value because, oftentimes, you know, many of these tokens couldn't be tied to cash flow or anything like that. So if that changes, which, you know, we're we're all sort of waiting around to see, there's gonna be so many new, actual ways for, companies that operate on chain to, like, generate revenue outside of trading.
Speaker 2:And so, Andreessen crypto has been making a bunch of bets, like, sort of betting that this will eventually happen. Mhmm. And, I'm just excited to see, like, you know, I I expect that, Chris Dixon is, like, actively working with Sachs and and many of the other people, you know, in the White House admin to try to figure out how to influence this policy to fully unlock crypto's potential. Right? Because it's been handicapped for years and years and years by, the regulatory environment, and not not not allowing, like, the the the most exciting use cases to flourish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I always think it's interesting Chris's, framing. Like, he is, somewhat an early entrepreneur, in, like, kind of post .com era, started two companies, sold them both, has been deeply involved in, like, the early Internet and these, like, weird like, he I'm pretty sure he did the Oculus seed deal or, like, a very early Oculus deal. He did some drone company, Skydio.
Speaker 1:He I I I sat on a board with him for a number of years, worked with him very closely, and, really enjoyed that. And he also backed Kickstarter and a bunch of, like, crazy like, he's really close with Fred Wilson and the USB guys. And so he's he sees the Internet as something that's valuable by itself, like, to humanity, and he has a real reverence for Internet communities. A lot of his investing thesis early on was, like, find, I think he had some quote, like like, what people do on the on the Internet on the weekends will be your job in five years. Something like that.
Speaker 1:And, I thought that was very interesting. And so he's he's very, driven to maintain, what is great about the Internet. Well, anyway, let's go to how startups are changing. Anthony Papliano says, the real flex is raising as little money as possible for your startup and succeeding with the smallest team necessary. I thought that was interesting post because are we in the business of flexing?
Speaker 1:Like, does it matter? Does it matter if you build a massive business with 10,000 employees or a hundred employees? Like, I I I guess it's it's always impressive when you see a high revenue per dollar or revenue per employee number. But at the end of the day, market cap is the only thing that matters, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, like
Speaker 1:and, like, durable market cap and durable value and durable cash flow and how you get there. Like, Amazon has an order of magnitude more employees than Google, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Because Amazon employs people that do pick and pack.
Speaker 2:I think the revenue per employee is always a fascinating metric to look at. It's always it can be very impressive if you look at Tether. Right? I think they do, like, $8,000,000 of net income per employee or something
Speaker 1:like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's like multiples of what
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:BlackRock does with these sort of more legacy financial institutions. And you see Cursor with 30 employees Yep. You know, multibillion dollar valuation. Merkle. So I, I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:I I, you know, I I think that, but but, you know, I think pomp is probably just, like, baiting people a little bit here. Yeah. And ultimately, it shouldn't be what what you fixate on early. It's how do we build a really massive durable company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Many paths to success. And it kinda depends on what kind of company you wanna run. Like, some people want to have the small like, David Holes, Midjourney. He hasn't raised a lot of money.
Speaker 1:He hasn't hired that many people. Clearly, he wants to run this lab and this product that's, like, very dedicated user base, very profitable. But he's not he's not, like, in this take over the world, like, raise as much money, do the deal with Masa, build the Yeah. Data center, like, immediately. I think he's he's building what he wants, and it's more about finding the ikigai or, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The life's work that aligns with you. But anyway, let's move on to wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. Hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:It's a vacation home, but better. Head on over to wander.com. They're given $400 off your spring trip with spring four hundred. And there's a beautiful photo of a wander in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. I've never been there, but that looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:So It's crazy that
Speaker 2:that check it out. Like, every single one of their homes looks like that. I know. We wanna so I really wanna partner with wander for the for the you know, if we do an a season two of PMF for tonight, they have this private island somewhere in Florida
Speaker 1:That's yeah. You mentioned that. Be absolutely
Speaker 2:perfect to, you know, pick up the Drawbridge Yeah. Lock them on the island. Yep. If you wanna leave, you can. You gotta swim Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, a few miles. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's perfect. Perfect. Head on over to Wander and and check it out if you're looking for your next vacation home while you're traveling. Did you see this one from Overfit Quantitative Strategies? Great meme account.
Speaker 1:Good watermark on this. I don't know if we can pull this up here, but it says, choose your Silicon Valley think boy. Mark writes more manifestos than gender neutral communist undergrad. It's time to build, but not in his backyard. He's a techno techno optimist.
Speaker 1:He shills meme coins. Brian injects injects his son's blood to stay eternally young. Gurn, lives in the woods and on a 12 k income. Sammo, San Francisco's Rasputin. Andrew, cumulative probability's final boss.
Speaker 1:Yes, Anan, no coffee, no alcohol, no medication in the morning? Meditation in the morning? Do you enjoy life? It's very I don't know. I don't I don't even understand that.
Speaker 1:Naval writes Facebook captions, but for millennial tech bros instead of boomers. Mark, his career at Oracle taught him that software can be a more profitable racket.
Speaker 2:Paul, what's he gonna
Speaker 1:be in founder mode?
Speaker 2:His reading, Naval's reading list is the airport books hall of fame, which is I feel like part of that is when he recommends a book, it probably goes into the airport Yeah. Because he actually does have a massive audience. But who knows?
Speaker 1:It's very silly. Very, very silly. But, you know, you love to see some Wojax from the guys you know, and,
Speaker 2:and love. The guys you know and love.
Speaker 1:And a lot a lot of good a lot of good content from these guys. I don't know. I think this is a fun, silly little, silly little post having fun. Poking fun. Poking fun.
Speaker 2:I'm having fun.
Speaker 1:The legends in Silicon Valley. You go on door dark Door cache Door cache, and you're drowning in e girls, he says. Anyway, let's go to Trey Stevens. He is hosting an event in San Francisco. If you're in there, you should check it out.
Speaker 1:He says, a little over two years ago, Marky Wagner and I published an essay in Pirate Wires Child entitled Choose Good Quest that blew up way more than I was expecting. I was also surprised that more than a few readers were able to read between the lines to see the theological underpinnings of the central argument. I'll be giving a talk hosted by Acts seventeen and Gary Tan on the evening of March 6 in San Francisco, in which I'll draw out the explicit theological message and its implications on how we think about our quests in tech. Invite link in thread below should be fun. And so if you're in SF, go check it out.
Speaker 1:I think it's $50 to attend and, some absolute killers in Silicon Valley attending this. I talked to, Trey's wife yesterday who is organizing the event, and, the lineup for the speaker series is fantastic.
Speaker 2:And just the people that'll be in this room could probably put together a $5,000,000,000 round with a few techs. So, good room to be in and, fantastic topic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is a very it's a great post if you haven't read it read it. The the the good quest idea is, trying to answer this question of, yeah, what what should you do? Where where where do you fit in within the messy world of Silicon Valley?
Speaker 1:Is it, an employee at a company that's, working on something that you really think is extremely valuable? Is it founding a company? Whatever you you choose, he kind of lays out a framework for thinking about that. And it's, it's a rallying cry for Yep. For young, for young folks in Silicon Valley, and I I really enjoyed the piece.
Speaker 1:So go check it out. Let's go over to Guillermo Rowe Rausch. I need to learn how to pronounce his name. Guillermo Adversal. We love him.
Speaker 1:He says, inherent to founder mode is the courage to be disliked. For a founder, the mission, customer, and product reign supreme. Effective leadership is not about making everyone at your company happy or producing the average of everyone's opinions. It's about doing what's right. Great post.
Speaker 2:Great post.
Speaker 1:Very inspiring. We love Guillermo. Yeah. I mean, that really is the the distillation of founder mode and also going direct. It's like this authenticity and not being afraid of cancellation or just negative
Speaker 2:That's the that's the pressure being a CEO. You're trying to make, your your team your customers happy, your team happy, the media happy, you know, other shareholders, whatever, you know, partners, infrastructure providers, like, you're never gonna make everybody happy. And so he's saying, don't try to make everybody happy. Try to try to do what's right, you know, generally for the company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and, you know, usually, it'll net out to, being what's right for for everybody else in the long run at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I loved Juwan from Ramp chiming in here. Well said, Guillermo. Many people dislike me probably because I'm so founder mode, because he's he's been posting, day 99 of asking Ramp for a raise. And
Speaker 2:He's getting the raise.
Speaker 1:I I think once he gets to day 90, we need to get Ramp to put him in the cage. Put him in a cage. If he can livestream for ninety days and add a million of ARR to Ramp, then he gets his raise. But I think the first ninety days of asking for a raise were just the warm up for him. Totally.
Speaker 1:He's not grinding hard enough. You're unnoticed, Juwan. Good luck. Let's go to Andrew Ross Sorkin. Have you read Too Big to Fail, the book, or seen the movie?
Speaker 1:It was adapted to a movie. It's about your documentary. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Ross Sorkin, mass monster.
Speaker 1:Noted noted mass monster wrote
Speaker 2:Too Big to Fail. Run at the Arnold.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see it. Let let let's watch Andrew Ross Sorkin get diced.
Speaker 1:Let's see him I wanna see his traps hitting his head, some Death Star delts.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dust star delts.
Speaker 1:I wanna see him on some gear, get some d ball, some Anavar, some tasks, some traps.
Speaker 2:Andrew, come on the show. Let's talk about your stack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's get you too big to fail. But, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin's a fantastic interviewer. And the book is fantastic if you haven't read it. It's a breakdown of what happened during the housing crisis, the two thousand eight global financial crisis.
Speaker 1:And he's been working on a follow-up book, 1929. For the past eight years, he's been working on a follow-up to his book, Too Big to Fail. He's been he he it's written, as what he thinks of it as a sequel a prequel, a nonfiction character driven behind the scenes account of 1929, the year the most infamous market crash of all time happened. It'll be out in October, but you can preorder it now. I will definitely be, reading that.
Speaker 1:That sounds fascinating. I know That's a good breakdown. The great depression, and I know about 1929 and a lot of the anecdotes. I don't know the character driven story behind it. I can't name the guy who lost it all or the person that made it through.
Speaker 1:It's very abstract to me. And so I'm sure this will be a fantastic read. He's a great writer, great reporter, and, you know, go check it out if you're looking for your next book. Let's go to, VC Braggs. You wanna review and check out this one?
Speaker 2:I had to throw this in.
Speaker 1:Leaked image of the latest humane ink product from from HP printer division. You put on the pen, and it tells you the toner is low. This would be helpful for us because our toner is low all the time. Okay? Enough trash talk about printers.
Speaker 1:Printers are back. This is important technology, folks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We got a I I hope that they roll this out. I mean, it's actually it's actually smart for HP to say, hey. You know, a lot of these other companies I'm I'm sure a bunch of the best people at Humane are already taking offers from a number of great companies, but still for Humane to add Yeah. The the Humane product, while it didn't solve a critical need for consumers Yeah.
Speaker 2:It was very cool tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, the tech itself was great. And so, I'm excited to, see what they do.
Speaker 1:Great great
Speaker 2:display. Maybe this was maybe this was HP's way. They they probably know at this point that we run on a Brother USA printer. This is their way to kinda just, like, get on our radar and say, hey. Why don't you bring your post over to to a powerhouse HP printer?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll give you a pin that allows you to, you know, better interact with your device.
Speaker 1:I mean, what is the bull case for the HP Humane acquisition? I think there's probably two that I can think of off the top of my head. Maybe you can think of a few others. One is, you know, there might be some sort of industrial or b to b application where you go and you give these pins to a workforce where they're in a medical environment or industrial environment, and there need to be hands free. And you sell these pins into this one workforce, and it's highly highly specific.
Speaker 1:And so I'm I don't know. I'm imagining, like, I pick up an Amazon package, and then the the micro projector just projects exactly what I need to do with it onto the package. I don't know. Something like that.
Speaker 2:We know that they actually got bought by the print like, it wasn't actually No.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. The the people are just they got bought by HP.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And HP is just known for printers now, but they do make other stuff. Like, it's Hewlett Packard. It's like a big company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, the other thing is that, if they're
Speaker 2:doing still make computers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. And the other thing is that they might be in an IBM type arc where they're going to wind up doing more consulting. And They
Speaker 2:actually have some good looking desktop computers.
Speaker 1:Let's go. And and if I'm if I'm working with HP on some sort of project and you're saying I have two options on your staff, one is the person who designed the latest HP printer, and the other person is the person who designed the the humane pen.
Speaker 2:So I actually have I
Speaker 1:think the design language is better on the pen.
Speaker 2:I have hp.com pulled up. They have What do they have? Their printers, which they highlight first. So clearly important. And they have their PCs, desktops, and then they have monitors and accessories.
Speaker 2:So it's totally possible that what Humane built is actually super relevant to their monitors, their, like, cameras, mounted cameras. Right? You could imagine a world where you just go like that, and it, like, shuts your computer off. And, like, Humane was, like, focused on Yep. Using gestures to control devices.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so stuff like that, I it would be cool if I go like that to my app. You know, maybe I can, maybe I can't. But just being able to go like that, turn off my computer, you know, clap, turn it on, all the stuff that Humane was kinda working on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I heard some theory that they the the the company was bought for a hundred million. They might have had around a hundred million left in the bank because the company kind of failed pretty quickly post launch. And so it's possible that it was kind of, like, almost more like an acquihire, and you just get a bunch of people that are, you know, surely they didn't they didn't solve the overall product in a way that was cohesive, in a way that could actually gain traction, but they clearly have great people who work on projectors, great people who work on batteries. They have great people who work on all these different things, and so you can deploy those people into the different arms of HP.
Speaker 1:And it seems like it could be a good deal. And one of the one of the humane guys is working on PMF or Die Now, which is great.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 1:HP couldn't lock him down.
Speaker 2:That's why shutdowns are good sometimes because it frees up super talented people to just go work on new things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe, maybe HP should, start a live streaming division.
Speaker 2:H b. They need to promote. If you want to sponsor a live stream where where guys code all day long and work out shirtless and jeans Send a printer. P m f or die.
Speaker 1:Send some printers over.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's great.
Speaker 1:There you go. Well, speaking of gadgets, these ones didn't fail. Nat Friedman says, what's your favorite new gadget? And there's a couple interesting ones on here. Unify AI Key is the top result.
Speaker 1:Locally embeds your camera feeds. Not yet mind blowing, but that's a software update away. And he and Nat Freeman says he got one of those and it's really promising. Kyle Russell, buddy of mine says, still still the Ray Ban Meadows he got last summer. So he's a DAU of those, I guess, or regular Yeah.
Speaker 1:Driver of those. We both kind of churned from them, but I I I think we're pretty, optimistic about them as a product long term. And then, there's some other people that chime in. One guy says a dad bike, the Tern GSD s 10. It has room for the kids in the back, which is kinda cool.
Speaker 1:And it also has electric boost. Thought that was fun. Matt Mullenweg chimes in and says, really digging the Daylight Co, like a Kindle meets iPad, allows for lifestyle.
Speaker 2:I'm actually I'm an investor in Daylight. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You said it was pretty good. Right?
Speaker 2:We gotta get one for the set. It Basically, mimics paper really well. It's the same feeling of using a Kindle. Yep. But you can navigate the Internet, have a browser, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Spencer Bratman says, the things he uses, daily are an ember mug. Have you ever seen those?
Speaker 2:I've been in Driesen ember mug. Oh, you do? Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have air he has his AirPod Max, Eight Sleep, of course. Love it. An Aura frame, which is kinda cool. It's like a picture frame that you can upload photos to. A juicer, vision he uses the Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:No way. I'm surprised by that. Whoop, pretty good for tracking sleep. Haven't seen that. Another Daylight Co shout out.
Speaker 1:This hackable e ink watch is kind of interesting. The s q f m I watchy. Not to use as a watch, but to wear it at night to detect movement past a certain hour and wake me up more naturally. Cheap, easy to code. It's a little bit hacker stuff going on there.
Speaker 1:I thought that was fun. It was a good, like, little, hey. Let's get some community engagement from Nat. And, you know, I'm sure Nat's cooking up the next idea for, you know, some sort of side project. Put some put some kid on it.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to Nikkita. Nikkita Beer says, ladies and gentlemen, the king has been dethroned because Grok AI is now the number one app in the App Store under free apps, all apps, and is one above of chat is one above chat g p t. And he attaches a meme, from a, high school yearbook quote that says, it is not enough that I should succeed. Others should fail.
Speaker 2:And this is from Kevin Chang, the guy, one of the one of the guys leading the charge at XAI.
Speaker 1:Wait. Really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No way. Real quote.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. I had no idea that that was actually him. That's so fun. And what
Speaker 2:I love about the screenshot, deeps DeepSeek's nowhere to be seen.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They're probably thinking about, I gotta get on intro. I gotta hire, I gotta hire Nikkita. That'd be funny. Number one again. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I love it. And, we gotta get Nikkita on the inside.
Speaker 1:And so, how, the the the there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of back and forth here. The App Store ranking doesn't mean anything, and they're just pure vanity. And Nikkita says, wow. Major buzzkill, man. So interesting to see.
Speaker 1:Obviously, we've talked about how the Apple app charts are momentum driven. So it's unclear if if Grok usage really is higher than chat g p t or or getting close, but, certainly, there's a lot of momentum. They just launched Croc three.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of big news. So I'm 90% certain Nikita helps works on xAI or advising them as well. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Well, let's
Speaker 1:go back to seed investing. Delian has an interesting post here. He says, doing VC full time is a bad setup for seed investing. If you have a company you're working on, anytime you spend on VC, you're trading against your life's work. So you spend time only with the four to six companies a year that truly matter.
Speaker 1:If full time, WTF do you fill your day with? A lot of meetings. Probably. Fire. What do you think?
Speaker 1:This is another, pitch for, you know, moving away from full time seed investing, running around, spraying checks around Silicon Valley. What do you think? Is it possible to do it full time well?
Speaker 2:You know, I think that if you are a VC operating with little to no brand, which is 99% of, venture capital firms,
Speaker 1:right,
Speaker 2:where they technically have a website and a brand, but they're not being sought out by the generational founders. I think this works really well for founders fund where when founders fund bids on a company, they can bid lower Sure. Than everyone else, and the founder is still like, yes. I wanna work. You know, I just went through that with a company with one of my portfolio companies that I did, I did the pre seed.
Speaker 2:And when they're raising their series a, they were even before they started the process being like, whatever price founders fund bids, you know, within reason, we're gonna take it. And they had other tier one offers. Right? And so there's, like, a certain, I think, you know, you're on the inside. Yep.
Speaker 2:So you'd be a little too conflicted to say this, but Founders Fund is in a unique position where I wouldn't recommend necessarily the part time strategy to a no name CVC who's got $50,000,000 to deploy. And it's like, hey. You probably should be spending all your time trying to meet founders that aren't coming to you. Yeah. I think I I think the the
Speaker 1:the other takeaway here is just that, one of the ways to bootstrap a brand as a seed stage investor is to build a great company. Yeah. Because then all of a sudden you're meeting founders. They're coming to you for advice and just through the founder network, founder to founder conversations, and then you can write seed checks. It doesn't need to be full time.
Speaker 1:And then over time, you can kind of scale that up and take it more seriously. And that's cert certainly been Delian's experience at BARDA. He's met everyone that's relevant in the space industry and seen all the deal flow there. Because even if you even if you don't even think of him as a as a VC, you're gonna wanna reach out to him just as a a fellow, a fellow founder in the category.
Speaker 2:Same advantage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Big advantage.
Speaker 2:So Helps when you're putting devices up into up into space.
Speaker 1:Space factories. I mean, there there's a lot of advantages going on there. What was funny here is, Joe Morrison here chimes in and says, your best posts are the ones where you're a little self loathing. And Dalian's like, what are you talking about? Like, this this is actually, like, he's not gassing himself up.
Speaker 1:He's gassing himself up. He's basically saying, like, I'm doing it perfect.
Speaker 2:I'm like, goat it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he's saying, like, don't even try and compete with me.
Speaker 2:I love someone else's comments. I'll take the other side. The odds you'll find and lead the seed round of a generational company while working sixty plus hours a week operating are dramatically lower. Dalian just says look forward to comparing, contrasting our approaches at the end of the decade.
Speaker 1:Do not do not try in Dunk on Dalian. There's just been a, it's been a graveyard on x this week of people that tried and got smoked. It's very rough. But, yeah, I mean, when you're a seed investor in Ramp, it's, it's pretty pretty easy to drive solid returns. He's got a whole bunch of great seed stuff.
Speaker 1:And he's like the main he he he does does a lot of seed stuff. It's great. Well, let's move on to Kim Kardashian. This is crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's a violation.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, SKIMS has grown into an absolute powerhouse closing in on $1,000,000,000 in d to c revenue and has raised $730,000,000, most recently at a multibillion dollar valuation. Kim owns 5% of the company after raising so much money. They recently did a partnership with Nike. The business is on a tear, But Daniel here asks, absolutely wild to me.
Speaker 1:I get it. Amazing and valuable brand. But is it worth it when you own almost none of it? She owns $200,000,000. So the question, Jordy, is, is is it worth it to have $200,000,000 What is $200,000,000 worth?
Speaker 1:I think it's worth $200,000,000. Yeah. And so, I don't know. What's her opportunity cost? Is she really is she really putting more than $200,000,000 of effort into this project?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't think so. So I think, absolutely, it's worth it.
Speaker 2:It's more of this perception that people see SKIMS as a proxy for Kim Kardashian's brand, but the pushback there is that if you if you talk to SKIMS customers, they will say these products are just better than other products that I can get, and it's at a point where, you know, you could argue that, Kylie, Kylie Jenner's products, people wouldn't care to use them as much Yep. If there wasn't her association.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Kim, SKIMS and Kim Kardashian, I think it's different in that they make really good products.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:She's nonoperating. She's sort of the face of the brand, and it's gonna net out. Like, if you're gonna make hundreds of millions of dollars for being the face of something, that's better than doing a bunch of brand deals for Yeah. Nike and Lululemon and Alo, and it's it's gonna net out. It's gonna net out fine, but it's it's still the the idea that, you know, there's been a lot of press recently around these creator driven Yep.
Speaker 2:Holding companies and this idea that, just having a big audience will allow you to build a big company in an inexpensive way. But Kim Kardashian basically has one of the largest single audiences and the most consumer influence of any person in history. Yep. And she still needs to raise $730,000,000 to achieve what maybe she didn't have to, but she's done that. Yep.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, it just goes to show that, you know, I I've I've talked to a bunch of founders recently that that think, oh, I'm just gonna work with this one influencer, and it's gonna, you know, dramatically change my business. Or I'm I I my cofounder's got, you know, 200,000 followers, and it doesn't mean anything because you tap that follow the following pretty
Speaker 1:quick. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, very quickly. Yep. And so She
Speaker 1:is big enough to actually get market entry. Yeah. But if you run the numbers on the dilution here, you know, seed, series a, series b, series c, 20% dilution rounds, let's assume. She got diluted maybe 75%. I I don't even know.
Speaker 1:But, that means that she still only started out with 20% of the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I still think that's a phenomenal trade. I don't think that's crazy because she's in a non operating role. And what would it take for her to make $200,000,000 in profit otherwise?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, we got we learned a little bit from the Ethereum Max thing that I think she she gets paid about a million dollars per, like, one off brand deal, like, post or something like that or, like, partnership. And so you're talking about 200 of those. There's only two hundred days in the, you know, two hundred business day, two hundred and fifty business days in the year. Like, all of a sudden She
Speaker 2:can't do a post
Speaker 1:that you get
Speaker 2:a million dollars a post. No. Certainly not.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. Certainly not.
Speaker 1:And so even though she's, like, a huge figure, like, this is a great way to monetize her audience, it looks way better for her brand because it builds her brand as a cofounder, as a businessperson. It it it's more aligned. She only needs to focus on the reputation and products of one company. Whereas if she's if she's advertising for six different brands, what if one of them has a scandal? What if one of them is making a product that's low quality?
Speaker 1:All of a sudden, that robs hers. She can just put all of her all of her eggs in one basket more or less. Obviously, she's doing stuff.
Speaker 2:She had her I
Speaker 1:I think it's a good strategy.
Speaker 2:She had her private equity firm that, you know, had a huge fundraising target, didn't come close to achieving it. I think they made one investment in a, like, a hot sauce or, like, a Okay. Some hot sauce company. Yep. But this goes to show that, like, maybe even the strategy of this creator led private equity firm was not even that good of a strategy.
Speaker 2:If if if if if a if her primary company had to still raise hundreds of millions of dollars, then maybe maybe it's not enough like, maybe it's not enough to be differentiated as a, you know, private equity firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to x. We got some fundraising news. Katie Roof has a scoop about x. They're thinking about a new financing round that would value it at $44,000,000,000, same as the take private price in 2022. Elon Musk has never done a done down round, not about to start in 2025.
Speaker 2:So so this this, earlier this week on the show, we were talking about, if you looked at x.cominvestors, Washington Post would pull up, Google's like, Gemini would pull up a summary
Speaker 1:and say all their money.
Speaker 2:So and so lost 700,000,000. Sequoia lost x, you know, 200,000,000, etcetera, etcetera. And they didn't ever lose the money. If they would have lost money, they would have sold it.
Speaker 1:Right? Andreessen. And so
Speaker 2:now they're gonna be back up. Yep. It was great for the employees. X x had marked down their valuation internally. Interesting.
Speaker 2:So the employees were getting their
Speaker 1:Options lower.
Speaker 2:Their options So they just bought dollar. So they just they're gonna get a nice pop out. And, I'm sure that Elon will start to allow employees to sell, you know, do these sort of, you know, do these sort of, you know
Speaker 1:He's very good about laddering up the valuation, doing the secondary sales, making sure everyone's taken care of. Like, he is very, very good at that. And, yeah, I mean, it's it's interesting because, the media was very anti Twitter acts saying, it's not gonna it's gonna fall apart. Everyone's gonna leave. There's gonna be no users.
Speaker 1:All the advertisers are gonna leave. Well, we got data from Ramp that, is it Ara Kharazian? He's their chief economist, and the economist at Ramp looked at the spend on corporate cars across all the Ramp data, showed that advertising on x is increasing. So that was another bull signal. Then we got the leaked financials showing that they might have over a billion dollars in EBITDA.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, you apply a 44 x multiple on EBITDA for a growing tech company. Like, that's not that crazy. And then we have that great post from Liran Shapiro saying, yeah, everyone was worried that x was not gonna even stay online. Well, now you click on x, and in one of the new tabs, you have access to a, cutting edge frontier model. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's just, you know, live streaming has been taking off. We've been doing really well there on PMF or Die, and all of my core tech friends are still there. Like, there's a lot of craziness, and the algorithm changes every week, but it's still fun. It's still the app that I open. And for a lot of people, that's what their experience is, and I don't think it's going away.
Speaker 1:And so I think Elon's got
Speaker 2:We are back.
Speaker 1:We are back. Well, speaking of PEMA for Die, I thought this was an interesting post from Will at shouldn't speak. He says, startups used to be two guys, a laptop, and a dream. Just now
Speaker 2:laptop?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just one laptop. Now he says, now it's 50 engineers, a hundred million dollars in funding, and a full time DC lobbying strategy. What happened, gang? And I just tagged at PMF or die.
Speaker 2:Deep tech happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Deep tech happened.
Speaker 2:Defense tech.
Speaker 1:And and AI, like, regulatory capture stuff happened and just the threat. I mean, honestly, a lot of this happened from Lina Khan. It was like, well, maybe you do need a DC lobbying firm if your plan is to sell your company at any point in time. Yeah. And there were just so many different things where there was now, oh, well, if you're not playing in DC, you're not in the big leagues.
Speaker 1:Maybe you need a government contract. Even if that government contract is gonna drive the most profit or the most revenue, it's gonna make people take you more seriously. The kind
Speaker 2:of the
Speaker 1:volunteer narrative pulls over. So there's a lot of different things that make sense and can justify 50 engineers, a hundred million in funding, full time DC lobbying strategy. But you can still just do the two guys, two laptops, and a dream, strategy if you want. And PMFirdi is a great example of that, and we see examples of that on the timeline every single day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The next post, from Santi Genghis shots. Yeah. If you can skip to that.
Speaker 1:So he
Speaker 2:says today was definitely a day of product. Progress coded, talked to users, got jacks, time with friends, more users for his, product, 11 master, PMF or Die, really helps you bring your a game, and, love to see it. We've seen a lot of people since, PMF or Die kicked off posting and just saying I'm locking in from home and just, like, putting this on. Because one thing is for certain, if you're building if you're solo building an app remotely Yep. The biggest downside, it's it can be a great lifestyle.
Speaker 2:You've Yep. Done it with I've done it. Everybody Yep. Many people go through phases where, they're just sort of building and, being able to turn on PMF or Die and just, like, feel like you're a part of something and and have that motivation is awesome. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's free to lock in. It's free to outwork your peers. Lock in. And we love to see it.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, we have the our Kharazian, post here that we should cover, because he has the actual real data on what's happening on x with advertisers. He says, advertisers were leaving x in January 2025. They came back in droves. Here's the latest from Ramp.
Speaker 1:Last month, 68% of advertisers increased their spending on x slash Twitter. If you're surprised about x's latest valuation, you need to look at this chart, and it's from Ramp. It says advertisers were leaving x in January 2025. They came back in droves, and you can see the trend month over month. Now people are ramping up.
Speaker 1:I'm certainly ramping up on x spend, and I think a lot of smart companies are because they realize that, the AI is gonna get better. The targeting is gonna get better. The audience is gonna get better. Everything is everything is getting better, so there's a good, opportunity. And at the end of the day, these advertising markets, they're just markets.
Speaker 1:So if there's cheap CPM somewhere, it's gonna get sucked up and hovered up by someone. And so that's the nature of these things. Let's go to Zoomer. Zoomer says, SF man hogging the umbrella while his fold out is left out in the rain. Sad.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, we need to bring back some, chivalry, some, hospitality, some manners. Don't hog the umbrella.
Speaker 2:You should be cut dead under an umbrella if your if your girlfriend, wife is using a jacket to
Speaker 1:cover yourself Yep.
Speaker 2:Terrible look. This is a career ending, you know, picture potentially. So, hopefully, the guy's not identified.
Speaker 1:Yep. You're
Speaker 2:on a doc. To fade into, the security.
Speaker 1:You're on notice. You gotta you gotta have better umbrella etiquette for sure. Absolutely. Better etiquette in general across across the Internet, across the real world. Hold the doors.
Speaker 1:Use the correct forks. Use good manners. Don't swear. What would your mother say?
Speaker 2:Don't say the s word, the r word, the f word.
Speaker 1:What about the c u c k word? I don't know if we should sense We don't
Speaker 2:say that on the show. Okay.
Speaker 1:But we need an alternative to that because I need to fill that in. Anyway, we're going to Robbie Shiffman, wrecking yourself. There we go. If you are building in any other industry than love or entertainment, you are wrecking yourself. You are building an abstract.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I fully believe that. It's great that that's what he's doing, and I think that's his life work, but, I don't know that that's the only option. But, you
Speaker 2:know, engagement new round at 500,000,000 confirmed. Confirmed? No. I mean, I I think I think Avi is, like, very convicted in what he's doing, and I think it's I think I think what he's doing building in both love and entertainment in some ways. Right?
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Building a a digital best friend is a good strategy. I think there's a very real scenario in ten years where a lot of people the average person is just working less potentially than they are now. We're we're already at a point where even though lots of people have jobs, they're still working less than they were thirty years than they would have been thirty years ago because half their day is spent on at work is spent on TikTok. Right? Like, imagine Jamie Dimon realizing realizing how much I'm sure I'm sure, like, they could see through the Wi Fi somehow that, like, 20% of all of our bandwidth is going to, like, TikTok or something like that.
Speaker 2:And he's probably just raging. Right? Yeah. But, but yeah. So so, anyways, we'll we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2:But, it's a good strategy to to a lot of founders don't know what they're actually selling. Yeah. So if you're working on a consumer app, are you selling, you know
Speaker 1:This is a good point.
Speaker 2:Selling, you know, a love, like something that's, solved for loneliness? Are you selling entertainment? And And I think for us, we talk about we are in the news and entertainment business. Right? So, like, we're here to deliver the news.
Speaker 2:We hope to do it in an entertaining way. Yes. There's other media brands like Jason Carmen, who's in the inspiration business.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:He's, like, focused on telling Yeah. These massive stories and following, you know, these trends and inspiring people. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, Jason, if you wanna throw in some, hot takes and some jokes in the next, documentary, we're available.
Speaker 2:We're available.
Speaker 1:We'll come spice it up. Spice. Just all of a sudden Spice up the dog. Serious interview with Elon, and then we're just there, like like, just, you know, chopping it up. It'd be great.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to Kip Mach. We said congratulations to Isaiah Taylor for raising the seed round for, his nuclear company. And Kip has been a huge supporter of the show. We've had him on before, but he shares an awesome picture. And he says, he's pleased to announce what I've been working on for the last year and looking forward to seeing this project through in The Philippines.
Speaker 1:So they signed, coordinated research project with the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute. Isaiah went all over the world trying to find a hospitable government that would let him build a, a nuclear reactor, very quickly and efficiently, and he found one in The Philippines. And everyone's excited for them to, repatriate this technology once they get it up and running, but, nothing to put a little fire under the US government's, behind, than saying, hey. We're gonna build it internationally if you don't let us build it here. And so you take this to the the, to INL or to the what is it?
Speaker 1:The IRC or, NRDC, the National, Nuclear Reactor. I don't know. The guys who approve nuclear reactors in The United States
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you show them, hey. We did it in in The Philippines. Let us do it here. It's a lot easier than saying, hey. We've never done it anywhere.
Speaker 1:So I love that they're moving quickly. I love that they're, globetrotting and, getting stuff done. So congrats to the, to the Velar Atomics team once again. And Jordy chimes in and says, absolute legend making us all proud. We gotta we gotta bring out more of those phrases.
Speaker 1:Some of those great phrases like gunslinger.
Speaker 2:Gunslinger. Yeah. Gunslinger is such a good one.
Speaker 1:These are some
Speaker 2:gunslinger. It's
Speaker 1:for sure gunslingers.
Speaker 2:Anyway we got a post from, Colin Dunn. I've talked to Colin a couple times. We actually have used, his app, Visual Electric, to, generate, generate, like, assets for the the show at various stages. Very cool product sort of takes a place of stock footage, allows you to just very efficiently generate, you know, images for various uses, decks, marketing, etcetera. He says Figma should use their $1,000,000,000 breakup fee from Adobe to buy Cursor.
Speaker 2:Could be their Instagram. Near comments, another friend of the show says, how do you come up with this price? I don't think that Cursor would sell for anywhere close to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:1,000,000,000, considering how much ax you know, their their growth right now and access to capital. But Colin would probably push back on that say and and say, like, Figma actually has access to plenty of capital themselves. They could probably there could probably be a price. There's always a price. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And people always forget with these mergers that if you like, Instagram, everyone says, like, oh, they, like, they they they they sold out for a billion dollars, and then, Instagram wound up being worth, like, a hundred billion. So they left a ton on the table. And that's a tiny bit. But if you get Meta stock in the transaction, then you see upside.
Speaker 1:And if Facebook ten x's, yeah, it's like you sold for 10,000,000,000 because you can just hold.
Speaker 2:Well, the other the other difference is Instagram had no revenue. Yep. And Cursor has over 9 figures of revenue. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very different.
Speaker 2:And so you could imagine that the the multiple they would get on that revenue with their current growth and how small the team is would potentially like, there's a world where Cursor would do a round in the next year valuing them at $810,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's totally
Speaker 2:possible. Yeah. Cool idea. I'm sure that Dylan would as as Dylan, I'm sure, has looked at a lot of deals like this. Right?
Speaker 2:Totally. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Nice. I I I do think something people miss is that idea of, like, of, like, viewing it more as a merger, you get equity in the combined entity.
Speaker 1:And if the combined entity really has a chance to make a serious run at a hyperscaler or a really massive hundred billion plus, you know, enterprise tech company, that could be very, very accretive for you even though you quote, unquote sold
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because you have stock in the new entity. And these all and these all stock deals are, like, partially stock deals can be heavily incentivized towards future growth if you're bullish on the on the partnership. And speaking of Cursor, we got Ben Lang saying from intern to cofounder of the fastest company ever to hit a hundred million in ARR, Aman Singer, Sanger. He's coding at Cursor. And just a few years ago, he was an intern software engineering intern at u.com.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Aman
Speaker 2:great name, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Determinism right now.
Speaker 1:He'll be definitely spending nights with the Aman.
Speaker 2:He followed me on x in 2021 while he was intern.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:I know. And so I told this guy
Speaker 1:it's so good.
Speaker 2:Next time an intern follows you, DM them immediately and say, I wanna lead your next round. For sure. That's a that's a takeaway. You do that a hundred times, you might get the next cursor. Maybe.
Speaker 2:Make it all back. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Should we close out with Zoomer?
Speaker 2:Zoomer. Second time on the show today.
Speaker 1:This is some news from Google. I haven't fully, done a deep dive on this. We'll have to dig into it. Anytime that there's these new AI announcements Google's
Speaker 2:so bad at my career at marketing. It's it's actually it's it's brutal.
Speaker 1:Because, like, they they did that they did that thing where they announced the the AI, and they sped up the demo. And so now they've, like, kinda broken trust, and no one you need to validate all these things. It's kinda unclear, like, how real is this. But Google AI certainly wants you to believe it's real, and we'll see. Today, we introduced an AI coscientist system designed to go beyond deep research tools to aid scientists in generating novel hypotheses and research strategies, learn more, including how to join the trusted tester program at Google.
Speaker 1:And so, Zoomer says Google's AI agent independently discovered a new leukemia drug that then successfully tested in vitro at clinical concentrations, a novel liver fibrosis drug targets, and, bacterial cell level antibiotic mechanisms. It looks like the novel scientific discovery line has been passed, And, Zoomer then follows it up and says, the Dwarkesh question of AI insight might has just been solved with a blackboard and a four loop. Interesting. So it's always hard to tell, like, you need the scientists to kind of weigh in on this and say, like, was this just brute forcing? Was this really novel discovery?
Speaker 1:People are obviously, you know, very hyped up anytime AI does anything, and, oh, we we we just crossed some touring test. We just crossed some new threshold. A ASI is upon us. Kind of unclear how big this is. Whenever I see one of these, I always look to well, did the market move?
Speaker 1:You know? What's GDP doing? Right? But eGDP is maybe a lagging indicator. But my question is okay.
Speaker 1:So there's a massive breakthrough. There's allegedly a massive breakthrough in novel scientific discovery. Right? Yep. What did the biotech stocks do?
Speaker 1:What would you expect them to do? Yep. And I watched this during when Google when Google at DeepMind, they solved the protein folding problem. That was one of the hardest, most intractable, computationally complex problems, figuring out how proteins fold, very important to drug development. It's something that is, is a cost center, I guess, in every drug development, every pharma company.
Speaker 1:DeepMind solved the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. The market didn't really move. And what it turned out was that, yes, it's a really hard problem, but, we have machines that do it, And we have, PhD students that can just kinda run the assays, and they and they do the x I think it's like x-ray crystallography or something like that Yeah. To to to to run the the the human based algorithm. And it it wasn't a fundamental change in the structure of the profitability of biotech companies.
Speaker 1:And so the market didn't really move. And so I haven't looked it up. I don't really know, but I'm I'm kind of waiting. But sometimes these these announcements go out, and it takes a while for the public markets to catch up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Trey also says it's definitely difficult to in the chat, he says it's definitely difficult to predict how this shakes out because the in vitro part is, quote, unquote, easy. Most of the failure happens after that. Yep. So a lot of the stuff comes out splashy, but then how does it actually roll out?
Speaker 1:Exactly. So big questions. We'll see. Obviously exciting and definitely, like, an important track to be working on, and very, very cool stuff. And I'm sure that from an AI perspective, this was a, you know, a state of the art, like, reasoning agent, a coscientist.
Speaker 1:It's great that they're building this in the same way that deep research was great and is still a great product. And I'm excited for this. I'm sure it speeds up people's work. But I'd probably pump the brakes on the idea of, like, this is some sort of fundamental shift in how we do science in the world, at least at this point.
Speaker 2:Well said. Well, speaking of science and health care innovation, our very own Ben Oh, yeah. Is probably coming out of surgery right now. Yeah. He has, emergency wisdom teeth Yep.
Speaker 2:Surgery. Had to get those removed. He's got plenty of wisdom, so we're not too worried about, a lack thereof. But Ben was an absolute stud this week.
Speaker 1:He was.
Speaker 2:He was basically in pain as of, like, Tuesday. Yeah. And it just got worse and worse and worse. Still came into the office.
Speaker 1:Crushed it.
Speaker 2:Still grinded through it. Yep. And, we're facing the why
Speaker 1:we did not do a Dom Perignon episode. We didn't think it would be fair to be sipping champagne without him, but we did hit 16 k on x. So thank you to everyone that's followed us. The growth has been outstanding. We've been really happy to watch
Speaker 2:this show. Ben is back in the studio, the Dom will flow. It will pop. We
Speaker 1:already have
Speaker 2:a bottle. Yeah. It's right there next to you.
Speaker 1:The bottle's ready to go. And so you can expect a Dom episode any day now, and I'm sure that'll be one of the more fun ones. Maybe we'll just do all timeline that day. Just rip
Speaker 2:Just a bunch of hot takes. Time safe.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:What if it takes flow? No. No. You don't wanna do
Speaker 1:a deep dive on a Dom episode. You kinda just have fun.
Speaker 2:Well said.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thanks for listening to this five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Check out all the sponsors in the description, and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Have a great Thursday.
Speaker 1:Watching and listening. We appreciate