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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Is Friday, 05/30/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple Of technology, the fortress
Speaker 1:of The capital of capital. It's brutal. Job.
Speaker 2:I'm traveling. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm good. I miss you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Me too. I feel so
Speaker 1:close, but so far.
Speaker 2:It's brutal. Sleeping without an Eight Sleep. It's the punishment worse than death. It's a true torture.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 2:It's the worst. It's the worst. Anyway just wrong. Exciting exciting week, short week with the with the Memorial Day holiday, but I feel like we did a good job making up for the lack of major tech news, the lack of major announcements from AI companies. Although WWDC is coming up next week, which should be interesting, and that's where I wanna start because, John Gruber has been writing about Apple for years during frying Fireball.
Speaker 2:He has a show called talk show that he does at WWC, and it's very interesting because he was one of the first people to do a talk show and interview show in the Vision Pro with, in VR. They bring the Pro cameras, and you can stream it, and you can watch it in the Vision Pro. He went all in. He's been writing positively about Apple for a long time. Of course, a couple months ago, he wrote something is rotten in the state of Cupertino, talking about the the the difficulties with the rollout of Apple intelligence.
Speaker 2:And brutal. They, they didn't completely rug him, but they didn't sign up fully. So last year, the talk show live from WWC twenty twenty four, had Craig Federighi, Greg, Jaws, and John Giandrea, Apple's head of machine learning and AI. And this year, he invited them all and they said, no. We don't want to participate.
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. No way.
Speaker 2:Which is rough.
Speaker 1:They took it they took the rotten post They took it It
Speaker 2:hurts. And so, I mean, I was just reflecting on, like, what this means. Obviously, we want to invite we want to, you know, interview these folks. And so I I just kind of had this realization that truly Apple intelligence is one of the most underrated products of all time.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. It's and people are critical of it because it's Apple, they're Yep. They always achieve perfection.
Speaker 2:But I think they did. Think they did it.
Speaker 1:We use and love daily, right? When you text me, John Yep. Text me this a couple paragraphs, right? Yeah. Some cool idea.
Speaker 1:I actually like that Apple botches the summary because it inspires me to think, what would John think in this circumstance?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Would John want me to think that he was saying before Apple kind of in. And so I think you're totally right. I think Apple Intelligence, criminally underrated.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:Honestly, John, I would take it a step further. Please. Just eliminate all original, all the original text of every message in iMessage, only provide back and forth sort of ping pong summaries, kind of like a game of telephone in some way. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just let Apple intermediate everything because
Speaker 2:100%.
Speaker 1:You know, if
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I think a lot of people were critical of the Genmoji campaign, but as as someone who's sponsored by Adquick, we love out of home campaigns. And I think that that was also something that with the long arc of history, we'll
Speaker 1:look back on as an iconic campaign.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It was contrarian.
Speaker 1:Up there with 1984.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:And so many of these other, know, the iPod campaign, Yes. So these type of iconic imagery. Yes. And we spent a lot of time talking about the Genmoji campaign, right?
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 1:did. Many people would say all attention, you know, even though we had some critiques, but all attention is good attention
Speaker 2:and when you I think that's part of the show is like, yes, you could say we were critiquing, but a lot of the show is humorous, and so Yeah. I would now, my message to Apple is like, those critiques, those were the jokes. This is the serious part.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, I'm serious and I'm saying, they've never done anything wrong. Everything's perfect and I want it in a way. So let's let's make it happen. But, you know, the funny thing is that I was actually obviously, we're we're we're kidding around a little bit, but, I was I was reflecting on the fact that I am actually more bullish on Apple than John Gruber right now because after the State of Cupertino came out, me and you were talking, and I was taking the position that like, Tim Cook, of how he handled the supply chain and the tariff stuff, that was actually He made
Speaker 1:it all back in one trade.
Speaker 2:You made it all back in one trade, and so you know, I think that yeah, the Apple intelligence thing, it hasn't gone perfectly, the execution, I mean it's still a massive company, they're doing great, and I think that there's a world where they land this in a very interesting way with partnerships and they open things up, and there's some really, really interesting outcomes that could happen.
Speaker 1:So anyway Yeah, the question is for Grubber. How much angrier does he get at Apple as he gets less and less access, right? They awaken, you know, a monster, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you'd think that you'd want to have him come on and kind of ask the hard questions and make your case and win him over, you know? Have a long standing relationship. Also, you say Grubber? It's definitely Gruber.
Speaker 1:Gruber, sorry.
Speaker 2:I like Grubber though. That's great. Yeah, was talking to Ben Thompson and saying like he's kind of relieved because this was going to be one of the harder interviews because the expectation would be that he asks, like, the hard questions. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that he actually pushes them because he he has been a although he's obviously been very it's easy to be pro Apple over the course of of his career because Apple's been on an absolute tear. And so if you're if you like, the correct analysis of Apple at every point in the last two decades has been the stock's about to rip. And if you just kept saying you were right again and again and again. It sounded like you were glazing or being shilling, but like, you were also correct, and people look back and they're like, forget that's
Speaker 1:good journalism. Buffett bought Apple when it was already the most valuable public, valuable company in the world.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:Was not a, you know, there were people making that same trade.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just thinking, oh, I should just buy the biggest company. And Buffett was basically making the bet that it was undervalued at that point massively, Great.
Speaker 2:Well, really quickly, we're gonna do some ads. We're gonna tell you about Ramp. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more.
Speaker 1:Whole lot more.
Speaker 2:Place. We love Ramp. I'm gonna get to see the Ramp founders this weekend, which should be a lot of fun. Anyway, let's rip through some news. I wanna give a little update on, like, what did happen this week, because there were a bunch of small stories, nothing really big that became the current thing, but but we should rip through this.
Speaker 2:So, Elon Musk's Neuralink raised, $600,000,000 and 9,000,000,000 valuation. This feels like old news to me. I don't know if that's just because I've been hearing through this through the rumor mill, but, very excited for what they're building. We talked to Ashley Vance a little bit about Neuralink and the progress, and it's kind of underrated because the first the first time it happens, it's like a miracle, with that one Neuralink patient, but there's been a few, and Ashley Vance has actually gone and interviewed others. And, everything that I've seen is that this project moves slowly like many, like SpaceX, where there's regulatory concerns and FDA approvals, but the foot is not off the gas, and like Yeah.
Speaker 2:It just continues to grow. So The
Speaker 1:thing that stood out to me here is Neuralink raised $43,000,000 in November 2023.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like the fact that there was an Elon company with this much potential in the private markets being valued at 5,000,000,000, you know Yeah. Roughly two years ago is actually crazy. Granted the round was effectively like an additional tranche that had been part of an earlier Yeah. F f round. But but still, you know, not not a bad bet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But just like insane concentration talent. I mean, talked to the Teal fellow who was working at Neuralink, and like, that's the DNA at that company. And it's it's pretty remarkable to see. Like, obviously, all the focus is on like super long term brain computer interfaces, but when you talk to the Neuralink team, they're they're much more grounded in the immediate effects of what the technology can do, which is, like, there are a lot of people who are paraplegic.
Speaker 2:Actually a lot of people that get in pretty horrific accidents, like they're doing like cliff jumping or skydiving or something, and something goes terribly wrong, they break their neck essentially, like sever their spinal cord, and then they just cannot access their limbs, and, but they're alive, and they're gonna live out their life, and you give them the access to play video games, which is Yeah. The most beautiful gift you can give someone, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Totally. And so, yeah, it's always super inspiring, and I'm sure we should talk to some of the Neuralink folks at some point. What was the name of the
Speaker 1:Thiel fellow who was at Neuralink? Do you remember?
Speaker 2:I don't. We, I mean, we interviewed 20 Like,
Speaker 1:20 back to back. But that was that was one of my favorite moments of the week.
Speaker 2:I Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:That the his philosophy of
Speaker 2:So funny.
Speaker 1:Just trying to get two times cooler Yeah. Over and over and over. And you stack a few two x, you know, wins like that back to back, starting to get pretty cool. Yeah. I thought that was an amazing philosophy of life and he was just skill maxing Yeah.
Speaker 2:To the I mean also his definition of cool, I kept expecting it to be like, and then I hit the gym, and then I learned to race hard.
Speaker 1:Now now he's like
Speaker 2:Not cliche at all.
Speaker 1:Building a trumpet from first principles.
Speaker 2:Extremely cool. It's genuinely Yeah. Anyone can can hit the gym and learn to do a kickflip, but Yeah. Build a
Speaker 1:trumpet. He'll get to that. Those are, those are, they're they're Down
Speaker 2:the road. For sure. Down the road. Anyway, other fundraising news. Rilla raised $25,000,000 from Sequoia to automate general ledger systems using AI for accounting departments.
Speaker 2:Sequoia's been big on this application layer, value accrual in AI in the application layer. Obviously, they have Harvey. They're in some of the foundation models, but they're also looking for bets in, in kind of every vertical SaaS category now, so this kind of makes sense. The the the partner at Sequoia that did the deal said, the general ledger is the beating heart of the finance function, and so asking a company to remove it is kind of open heart surgery. So interesting to see how this actually interfaces with some of the other Sequoia bets because they're in ramp and they're in other companies, but there's certainly more stuff to do, inside the enterprise, and there's a bunch of different places.
Speaker 2:So, a $25,000,000 bet makes sense there. What else is going on? Horizon three AI raised a hundred million dollars from NEA at a $750,000,000 valuation. AI startup, Chalk. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lots of size Gongs this week, honestly. A Databricks competitor raised a $50,000,000 series a from Felicitas at a $500,000,000 valuation. There's a bunch of other stuff going on. Databricks, we've talked about the Neon deal, but it's becoming more and more finalized at this point. There's some venture fund news.
Speaker 1:Enterprise There's also Clark Yep. Led by Brad Mhmm. Meneses? Meneses? Yep.
Speaker 1:The first AI agent to build internal enterprise apps, raised $60,000,000, which I think we may have covered, but I wanted to give Brad a shout out because I wanted to give him get him on the show this week Yep. But we didn't end up having the time, but shout out to Brad and the whole team.
Speaker 2:Yep. So the the big news in the technology world in The Wall Street Journal this week is this Google lawsuit that's been going on for a while. Judge considers curbs for Google in AI arms race. And this is kinda interesting because this started around Google search monopoly, which has been well documented. Obviously, they own like 90% of the search market.
Speaker 2:They own Chrome, and they're the default on Apple, and they have that, you know, very lucrative deal for Apple where they pay, I think, over $10,000,000,000 for it to be the default search in Safari.
Speaker 1:Isn't it 20,000,000,000?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a lot. And it's just pure profit for Apple. It's pretty awesome. So lawyers are making closing arguments Friday and will
Speaker 1:remark entry trustees. Twenty billion in 2022. So it may have ticked off from there.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Size gong. Major size gong. Every size gong. Size gong.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for the Apple shareholders.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You love it. And this is why this is why you can't critique Apple. There's just nothing to critique because they're printing. They're absolutely printing.
Speaker 2:They, I mean, truly, they set themselves up with the perfect platform, and so whatever happens next, they make money. Like, they didn't it could be in search. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They they have the $20,000,000,000 search deal with Google, and because of that, they can offer Genmoji for free out of the box. Incredible. It's just that incredible consumer surplus that they're able to, you know, deliver.
Speaker 2:So US District Judge Amit Mehta on Friday questioned how far he should go to limit Google's monopoly in Internet search, including putting curves on how it competes in artificial intelligence. Meta's query came at the beginning of closing arguments in the final phase of the justice department's antitrust lawsuit against Google. The judge questioned how questions underscore how much rivals such as OpenAI have already changed how people access information on the Internet. Meta earlier found that Google is a monopolist in search and that it abused its power to maintain dominance. But the government's proposals for improving competition include curbing ability Google's ability to promote Gemini, its AI product that competes with ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:I wonder if that's part of the story around Gemini being hard to find. Like, there's this constant critique on X that that Google has incredible models, incredible products, but they're just not distributing or surfacing them the well. And I wonder if it's less of a product management mistake, like the product manager made the wrong decision, or the lawyers came in and said, Hey, if you I know that the product management best practices would be to roll this in, but if you do that, we're at antitrust risk, so we have to make it harder for you to sign up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, this proposal from Judge Mehta is a proposal. Isn't, wouldn't the strategic thing at Google is to just say like, well, we're going to promote this as much as we can until we're told we can't, right?
Speaker 2:No, so yes,
Speaker 1:I Or you think they would preemptively?
Speaker 2:And maybe an idea of like, if the speed limit's 60, you go 59, but I think internally at some of these companies that have been really scarred by anti trust and legal battles, sometimes the legal department says the speed limit's 60, product managers, everyone's going 45 because we are actively being tailed by a cop. They don't have their lights on yet, but but they could turn those lights on. You know how people, like, you know, start going five under, 10 under when there's a cop behind That's I think that might be a little bit of a dynamic at some of the big tech Yeah. I think Bill Gates talked about this at Microsoft, how part of the reason why he transitioned out and Balmer came in was just he got so tied up in antitrust legislation and antitrust fights that it became like a soul sucking job, and he couldn't do the thing that he wanted to do, which was just like build computers. And so there's this interesting dynamic where you could imagine a lawyer saying like, I'm going to get fired if we get a massive lawsuit or something like that.
Speaker 2:And so to protect this, I'm okay with us growing a little bit slower. I'm okay with these new products being, and it's because they're not comped on, did you deal with the innovator's dilemma and find the big next wave, right? They're comped on how bad are things in the courts right now. So I, and also if you're a product manager and a lawyer on the team comes to you and says like, legally, I'm recommending that we don't do this, it's very hard to push back on that. It's not the same as the dynamic between a designer and an engineer, where the engineer might say, oh, this is like maybe better from an engineering perspective and it's more of a discussion.
Speaker 2:I feel like when the legal team shows up, it's usually like they are issuing a, they're dictating what will happen and most people are just saying, okay, well, legal said we have to do it this way, so we're gonna do it this way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I
Speaker 2:don't know. The interesting dynamic here is around, like the case specifically is not directly shaping how Google deals with generative AI and their new products, but it could have knock on effects because they are proposing the forced sale of the Chrome browser preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default search engine and requiring it to share data with competitors. And now this is obviously bad for a number of reasons, but, the interesting thing in the context of AI is that they, like all the data that goes into Chrome and Google Search from these extra search, it's not just about running more ads, obviously it is. Obviously, if they're paying Apple twenty billion, they're probably making 40,000,000,000 in ads off of those searches or something like that, right? But that's also really, really valuable data that they're going to be using to train the next generation of Gemini, and so if they lose a little bit of that edge in the flywheel to something like ChatGPT where people are going back and forth and the data flywheel is spinning up faster at OpenAI, that could actually put them at a place where the data is compounding slower, and so they're not able to stay on that Pareto frontier of the best model at every single price that they've been so happy with.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing to me is, have you heard the story of how Google originally built the algorithm for auto
Speaker 1:by the way. Yeah. I I don't think this would be the case for for our audience, but Mhmm. Safari apparently has 90% of the the browser market share on iPhone. I imagine a lot of people listening have Chrome installed and prefer that, but
Speaker 2:I use Safari on iPhone.
Speaker 1:Safari guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I use Safari. It just feels like it's the default. I've tried to use Chrome and the iPhone keeps like pumping me back. Oh, do you want open this in Safari? And I've noticed that with the cookies, if you're logged in in Safari and then you're on the X app and you open a link, that will open a Safari web view.
Speaker 2:It doesn't open a Chrome web view, and so the Safari web view, it's like an iOS code module. If you're logged in in Safari, that will stay logged even when you're in the Safari web view inside of Instagram or inside of X. And so that extra benefit is enough for me to use a second browser, even though on my desktop I use Chrome. And like I'm losing that connection. It's like I want the mobile experience to be really cohesive.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if that's just like boomer mode, but it seems to be working for me.
Speaker 1:We need a boomer sound effect. Yeah. So anyways, going back, you said the Justice Department, which brought the case against Google in 2020, has proposed forcing the sale of Chrome browser preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default search engine. The department says the uncommonly harsh remedies are supported by a legal standard created when the US government tried to break up Microsoft over twenty years ago. All three of the DOJ's major remedies are aimed at helping generative AI providers take share from Google, says Paul Gallant, a policy analyst for TD Cowen.
Speaker 1:The government hasn't met the standard of proof for obtaining such drastic remedies. Google's lawyer, John Schmittelin argued Friday, the Justice Department didn't prove that Google's exclusive contracts with device makers such as Apple were the primary cause of maintaining its monopoly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We, I, I gotta say
Speaker 1:you still You gotta be happy if you're, or if you're Sam or Arvin from Perplexity right Given that the DOJ is explicitly stating we are trying to help generative AI providers take from Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes sense. The data flywheel is interesting. I gotta tell a story of the original Google auto complete algorithm. This was prior to transformer based language models. And but they needed a way to autocomplete on Google search as you type.
Speaker 2:It fills it in. And what they found to be the most effective dataset was let's say you're searching for something like, how to take the train from SFO to San Francisco, and you type it incorrectly, you misspell San Francisco or you misspell SFO or something, what they found is the best way to to generate a massive dataset of auto completions is just look at when someone types one thing, and then they type a similar query immediately after within the next, like, one minute. And because if Google fails and gives you, and doesn't understand the query, you'll typically, the human will go and correct the query and be like, oh, I misspelled San Francisco. I need to spell
Speaker 1:it Yeah, interesting.
Speaker 2:I will go spell it correctly, and, but how do you send that signal to Google that what is the correct way to spell San Francisco? Or what is the correct search term? What is the right way to phrase this question? Well, were able to create this massive data set just by looking at like one query A, query B, and then just telling you, are you sure you don't want to just do the next query immediately? So it's the same kind of predictive text, but when you're at Google's scale, that has incredible value, and you can imagine that having a big data flywheel potential at Google as they scale up generative AI.
Speaker 1:So anyways, Judge Mehta said he expects to issue a ruling in August. Google, which has roughly 90% market share of online searches, proposed a narrower set of remedies that would modify its exclusive agreements with Apple, as well as Mozilla and Android to allow for more competition. It has said it would appeal the judge's ruling. Sounds like whatever, whichever way it shakes out.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's so there's so many different things going on.
Speaker 1:Here's the interesting thing So Google's already paying Samsung and Motorola to pre install Gemini on devices. Which is interesting. Potentially a counterpoint to what you were saying earlier around, you know, wanting to be, if the speed limit's 60, stay at 45. Yeah. This feels like, you know, basically being like, hey, the speed limit is 60 here, but it's 80 over here, let's go 80, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm surprised they even have to pay them because, like Samsung and Motorola build off of, build off of Android. So you would think it would just come preinstall as, like, a default Android app. But I'm sure that there's a debate because Samsung probably has their own foundation model and and and could auction that off. And so it's kind of up for debate. But that certainly wasn't the case with, like, the other stock features of Android.
Speaker 2:There's there's so now with the new ones, they gotta they gotta figure out the the deal. But, yeah, there there there's so many interesting things going on with Google with, like, absolute dominance in video generation, absolute dominance on on YouTube. Like, the YouTube model just seems like stronger than ever and compounding and compounding and like not going anywhere, like just the absolute best business model. And then some weakness in search, which is obviously huge on
Speaker 1:Well, the funny thing is you could imagine you could imagine search is getting more competitive, naturally, right? As people use LLMs to do things that they would traditionally use a regular search engine for. And you can imagine two years from now, the Department of Justice taking this massive victory lap being like, you know, we created competition in this market. Mhmm. You know, we we did our job.
Speaker 1:And it ultimately was just from the creation of new technology that Google itself has played a big role in creating. Yep. So I'm I'm much more in favor of letting the best technology win and the best teams win. And it's unclear to me right now if there really needs to be any meaningful intervention.
Speaker 2:Well, if you have the best technology, you need the best design tool, go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com.
Speaker 1:I've been seeing a bunch of people starting to use Figma make realizing how powerful it is.
Speaker 2:Starting to take hold.
Speaker 1:I will try to pull
Speaker 2:I have the post in here somewhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll we'll get to it later, but it's very cool to see.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Angela Liesh h o l y s h I t, which we will not say on the We did say that word. Just got in just got access to Figma Make Beta on our team account, I'm totally mind blown. These are mocks that we one shot prompted, and it's interactive. Buttons, tabs, prototype works, and all the React code is there to copy and paste into an application.
Speaker 2:That's very exciting. Congratulations to the team. Very, very cool that they're getting this out into the world. Anyway, other deals that are going on. The Ray Ban maker, how do you pronounce this?
Speaker 2:S l I just know it's Luxottica. Luxottica. Luxottica.
Speaker 1:I know. I had seen Essilor
Speaker 2:Essilor, Luxotica, is buying Optegra in a medical AI push. So, Luxotica partnered with Zoc on the meta Ray bans, and they're getting more into AI and smart glasses. Interesting to see. Optegra
Speaker 1:operates eye hospitals in The UK, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and The Netherlands. So interesting. You think of Luxottica as a consumer product but this is a very different kind of business to integrate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's such a different approach to the Meta Ray Bans. Like the reason, it made so much sense for Luxottica to partner with Meta on the Meta Ray Bans because it's a fashion item. Like, you put it on your face and
Speaker 1:Meta doesn't need to recreate an iconic silhouette.
Speaker 2:It's really, really hard. Yeah. Know, yeah, iconic silhouette for sure. And Meta, I mean, the Quest looks okay, but it has not reached anywhere near the kind of final form factor that the iPod had or the iPhone had, like the silhouette, as you mentioned. And so to jump into and it's on your face, so it's not even something that's like, oh yeah, it's a little bit of an awkward device, like it looks like a wallet, but I put up with it because I'm only using it when I pull it out.
Speaker 2:Like, no, these are going be on your face all the time. They need to look good, the Ray Bans are so iconic. Made a ton of
Speaker 1:sense for And they're able to draft off of Ray Bans marketing and brand they have A$AP Rocky as their creative director. There's real momentum there. Yep. They don't need to reinvent fashion while they try to create a new technology platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. But it's a little bit different when you're talking about, like, medical AI, where I think you would think that, like, a branded product would be a little bit less important, but I guess Optegra operates a network of over 70 eye hospitals and diagnostic facilities across The UK, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and The Netherlands. Its offering comprises opthalamic treatments and effective vision correction procedures supported by artificial intelligence in the pre and post op phases, the transaction details were not
Speaker 1:You wanna know something interesting? What? Since doing the show, my eyesight has actually gotten better.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:And I think it's because we spend a lot of time looking at screens, probably isn't good, typically it's screens that are Far away. Guests on that are far away. So my vision is actually getting better. Narrowing violation, but
Speaker 2:I didn't even realize you could, I thought your eyes only got worse. I didn't realize you could get your eyes better. You're like going to the gym for your eyes basically.
Speaker 1:Well you can, you can, yeah, you can effectively work out your eyes. I guess that makes sense. Just a get into routines where they're either looking at their phone, computer. Sure. And there's not a lot of like, you know, intensive exercise at other sort of consistent ranges, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2:interesting. Anyway, report from the information says every VC backed IPO in the past twelve months has been a down round.
Speaker 1:A lot of silence. Yep. This moment of silence is brought to you by Adquick. Of home advertising Advertising made easy and measurable. Back to the news.
Speaker 2:But there's an interesting wrinkle here. So there's some good data in this article by Corey Weinberg in the information, and, there's also some good news, which we'll get to. So, when banking app Chime goes public next month, it will mark the eighth straight venture capital backed IPO in the last twelve months that has been valued less than it was in private fundraising rounds. Chime was in was valued at 25,000,000,000 in 2021, but its bankers have been discussing pricing its shares at roughly an 11,000,000,000 valuation. That's a pretty significant down round less than more than 50% off.
Speaker 2:Start evaluations are far lower than several years ago. So a lot of these companies, they raised big rounds during the ZERP era. Now they gotta get out, gotta get liquidity, and so they're willing to take a little bit of a haircut in trade for actually being able to do some distributions. Because even though the most recent backer might be taking a little bit of a haircut, a lot of the early backers are still like, well, yeah, I invested at 10,000,000, I'm happy with $11,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:So an example is like mean, founders are
Speaker 2:happy, the employees are happy.
Speaker 1:4Runner did the seed round. They probably invested in a bunch of other rounds. Yep. But their entry is so low that I imagine they're gonna do fine Totally. Even if it gets priced at 11.
Speaker 2:Kristen Green's on the minus list for that specific deal. Yep. Among others, but, yeah. Many investors are facing losses when companies go public at lower valuations. Yes, but, like, again, these are later stage investors that might where even the LPs might have the the the assumption that they'll hold a little bit longer, and that's what this article gets into.
Speaker 2:So quickly, let's go through some of the IPOs that have gone out and where they're where they're pricing. So Chime was $69 a share in 2021. Upcoming, we know that it's about down it's down about 50%. Circle, last private round is was at $42. The IPO is predicted to be at $26, so down 38%.
Speaker 2:Hinge Health went from 77 in September of twenty twenty two to 32, down 59%. That's a pretty steep haircut. MNTN, which was actually fared a little bit better, just down 30% from peak.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Etoro So crazy that
Speaker 2:that 60 six percent. CoreWeave down 15%. Although, I I feel like CoreWeave has has lifted. ServiceTitan down 16%, Tempest down 35. Now there are a couple, Ibotta and Rubrik did pop after the IPO or or at least, priced higher than the previous round.
Speaker 2:So let's hear it for Rubrik and Ibotta. But what's interesting is that, the information shares some data on companies that went public at discounts to the last fundraising tended to perform strongly in the public markets. And so Reddit went out at a lower valuation than their previous private market round, but then they went up 221% since IPO. Same thing with CoreWeave, went out at a slight haircut to the last private valuation and is now up a 64%. MNTN is also up 63%.
Speaker 2:ServiceTitan up 59%. Tempest up 47%, Hinge Health up 22%, eToro up 19%. And so it's not all bad news, and there might be some sort of narrative where, you know, there's been this there there's been this story of the ZERF era that the private markets went crazy, that the valuations were super, super high, like crazy revenue multiples. And so you go out to the market, you talk to your banker, and you go do your IPO roadshow, and you say, hey. Look.
Speaker 2:We're taking our medicine. We are going out at a price that is a discount to our last private valuation, but we've grown so much. It's been three years. The business was sound. These businesses weren't frauds.
Speaker 2:They weren't bankrupt. They weren't, like, no users. They were just a little hotly valued for a while, and they say, hey, retail or whoever's buying in the IPO, we're giving you a discount to what the investors paid in the last round, and then that sets them up for an actually like new resets the valuation, gets them into a liquid position where they can actually grow and build up earnings, beat earnings a couple times, and then go on an absolute tear, a generational run potentially. Generational run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's It's good. We, you know, having a number of IPOs end up, you know, you want the retail or institutions coming in to not get hosed every single time, you know? Yeah, totally. And
Speaker 2:And if, yeah, I mean, that was the other story of the ZERP was that there were a lot of SPACs that went out that went way down. And so it's almost better to go out at a discount and then build back up, especially if there's a hold period, lockups for various investors, like you want to be growing in the public markets. You don't just wanna get out a super high valuation
Speaker 1:You an example, a company that went out in December eleventh of twenty twenty, Airbnb
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. Is actually, if you just bought the day that it went out, you'd be down 8% after five years. So again, priced very efficiently. It did pop. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But then it's just been effectively flat to down since then.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, if you're thinking about taking your company public anytime soon, you gotta get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 1:Make compliance a joy, John. They make it a joy. It used to be painful. Now it's joyful.
Speaker 2:It's joyful. Go to vance.com. Another big read in the, in the information about Jensen Huang. He used to delegate politics until Trump's return. We've been talking about Jensen going on an absolute tear, going to all these different conferences
Speaker 1:This picture is
Speaker 2:pretty much everyone
Speaker 1:This picture is actually a while.
Speaker 2:Visits and a budding relationship with president Donald Trump to reopen a path to China, which demands his attention too. So big big questions about how NVIDIA can maintain some position in China while, obviously, there is a decoupling going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting to see. I was too fixated on this image
Speaker 2:Oh, which
Speaker 1:is iconic. That's right. Albeit a bit silly. Yeah, since the start of this year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has been thrust into an unexpected new role, chief lobbyist for his company, forcing him to carry its hopes, suggestions, and pleas directly to President Donald Trump. Many of Huang's conversations with Trump have happened at Mar a Lago, Trump's residence and private club in South Florida, and Huang has made far more visits there than have been publicly reported according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Speaker 1:Indeed, these, or how do
Speaker 2:you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't even how say that.
Speaker 2:But the next line is interesting. Nvidia executive to remark on Wong's absence from the company. We see a lot less of Jensen. He's been traveling to Florida a lot. But I mean, to
Speaker 1:make perfect people This is what we were commenting on even a few weeks ago of just, I mean, this guy's conference schedule alone, ignore the lobbying, is, you know, feels like a couple a week, sometimes more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it makes sense because, like like, as we saw with how Tim Cook handled the tariff situation with Apple, even if there is going to be a decoupling, having insight into how that will unfold and what the speed limit will be in one month, in six months, in twelve months. Like, we know Jensen's gonna go one under, but what is the speed limit gonna be so you don't get caught with buying a car that goes 200 miles an hour and the speed and the speed limit's 65. So, I'm I'm sure it's I'm sure it's top of mind for him, but it also seems like there's there's the flip side of this. Like, this this is this story is being told from the perspective of, like, the bear case of, like, China going wrong for NVIDIA.
Speaker 2:But there's also the flip side, which is, like, Trump is clearly reopening relationships with new countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar potentially, and those are new markets as the diffusion rule gets rolled gets phased out. And that those are major, major drivers of GPU buying. And if there's a stargate in every new country that Trump visits and opens up diplomatic relations with, you know, rolls out some trade deal
Speaker 1:Another 50,000,000,000 for Jensen.
Speaker 2:To
Speaker 1:the the other thing is Jensen is continuing to embrace, and Nvidia are continuing to embrace China. Mean, they're setting up new, they're investing more Yep. In this facility in Shanghai, more into on the ground R and D. So it doesn't feel like, while Jensen is having to sort of massage the relationship with the White House, he's not pulling back from China in any meaningful way that I can see.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is, like, we were talking to Aaron Ginn about this idea of, of standardizing on the American AI stack. Yep. And we were only talking about the jump ball countries. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like Saudi Arabia is gonna want GPUs. Those are either gonna be from Huawei, Ascend chips or NVIDIA. There's really no one else in the conversation. They're either gonna be running Lama or OpenAI code or DeepSeek and Manus. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is like, is there a world where standardizing on the American AI stack in China is the right move? That's a very controversial thing to say or even explore, I think. I probably default against it, but I wonder if there's some sort of some sort of good ending there where where keeping China rely reliant on American technology is actually better than them developing their own tech tree. Like, outcompeting outcompeting Huawei in a free market could work.
Speaker 2:I I I'm I'm, like, 1% on that, but I wanna I wanna hear from other people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, Jensen is finessing the situation. Looking right now at the Polymarket, largest company end of twenty twenty five. Nvidia is actually in the lead right now at a 30 No way. 37% chance with Microsoft at a 36% chance.
Speaker 1:Wow. So
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:Pretty, people believe in the leather jacket man.
Speaker 2:Anyway. Let's take a quick second to tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to linear.app.
Speaker 1:John asked me this week if we could also use Linear to plan and track our workouts.
Speaker 2:We're gonna do this.
Speaker 1:So, we're gonna do this.
Speaker 2:Didn't ask you for permission. Told you what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:But, you know, using, you know, bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, I'm sure Linear would say, you know, that's not a core focus for us.
Speaker 2:Small market.
Speaker 1:Small market, but, you know, I think we can show them that bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, you know, an entirely new opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the next big TAM expander for them, especially when you think about how Linear has agents. You're gonna have an agent constantly going out there, finding the next trend in science based lifting, figuring out exactly what workout you should be doing, building that into your Linear plan. Then you show up to the show up to the gym, just open your Linear app, start checking off the issues. Oh, put in a ticket. Oh, my delts aren't three d?
Speaker 1:My tracks
Speaker 2:aren't eating my head? Okay.
Speaker 1:Kari's gonna text us and be like, guys, guys, I know it's funny, but please don't tell the market that we're getting into bodybuilding. But we can use it's a it's a it's an open ended tool, and we're gonna we're gonna push it to the limits.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Other news in the information, VC funds are for sale at a discount. We were talking about this a little bit. 2025 was supposed to be a year of cash windfall for venture capital backers as companies that had delayed going public finally made the leap. We were tracking some big, deck of corns that had hired CFOs that had previously taken companies public.
Speaker 2:The IPO window was supposed to be opening up. The market was ripping. Then we had the tariffs news, and the mark and the and the IPO window kind of shut a little bit. Now it's opening again, but there's still, you know, more demand than ever for liquidity.
Speaker 1:And the taco
Speaker 2:meme looks like some funds are trying to sell.
Speaker 1:The taco meme is really putting, you know, putting us in a precarious position that that Trump always chickens out. Whichever journalist Trump about that to his face, you know, could be responsible for another freeze in the IPO markets, but hopefully not. Yeah. So.
Speaker 2:So the information rights, that hasn't happened with the rollercoaster stock market delaying many anticipated IPOs. LPs and VC funds have been finding new ways to cash out of their stakes in private tech firms. Some are selling their ownership of VC funds. The VC funds in turn have been putting their own startup stakes up for sale. That means ownership of hot startups like Stripe and Databricks are sometimes up for grabs.
Speaker 2:The takeaway, Nokia pension plan plans to sell, Nokia pension plan sells VC fund stakes. Lee Fixel's family office sells dozens of early early stage fund stakes. Buyers hunt for fund stakes at steep discounts. And so this is kind of like a macro version of what Jeremy Kaffan is doing, right, instead of targeting a single company, targeting the actual fund stake. And we also heard a little bit about maybe there would be pressure on, some of the some of the educational higher ed LPs.
Speaker 2:Like, if they're under pressure, like nonprofit, for profit conversion, like Harvard is kind of going to war with Trump administration, would that lead to them needing to pull back from VC? We haven't really heard that or seen that, but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It would be interesting to see these changing hands. And I wonder I wonder what ultimately holder will be. You could see someone creating kind of a roll up SPAC, or you could see someone creating a new fund, but these ideas of continuation vehicles are not entirely new.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, it's it's not, I mean, it's it's totally normal and healthy for people that hold certain assets to be willing to sell them at a discount to what they believe the the future value the terminal value of them will be. And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It just historically wasn't as common in venture because it wasn't as mature of an asset class and there was, you know, faster timelines to liquidity. But to me, all of this is normal.
Speaker 1:It would be more concerning if if, you know, you know, I'm sure there's funds out there that, or LPs that would love to sell stakes in funds that don't, there's no actual ultimate buyer. But but if you're in quality funds, there's always gonna be some ultimate value for the for the LP stake. So Yeah. It's just good to see
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wanna talk to someone who's running a company that's, that has a a material stake from VC fund from an early vintage that's well beyond the ten to twelve year hold period because I remember talking to a founder who had sold a number of businesses, and he was he was very successful in kind of telling this this this nightmare scenario where you you raise in 2010. Your company's doing fine, but you're not IPO ing. And then the venture fund that you raised from needs to distribute shares. And so all of a sudden, you wind up with, like, 500 different individuals or LPs on your cap table because the fund because the shares have been distributed, and then you have to go public or that changes the way you're you're you're seen by the SEC.
Speaker 2:And I've never heard of that actually happening. It's always just been this hypothetical nightmare scenario. But I wonder if there is something real to it, if there was ever a real problem, or if it was instantly solved by roll up vehicles and kind of continuation vehicles or something like that. But I'd love to dig into that more. I don't know if you ever run into that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's one solution. Can always sit a single entity, but
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Sarah Guo is highlighting some possible topics for the AI engineer keynote, which I think we'll be covering next week. I thought it was an interesting overview of what the hot topics are in AI right now, because we've moved past kind of the AGI doom scenario, and, we're getting into, like, the next era of of of discussions, and we've been talking a lot of the about these. We're kind of putting together an informal AI day next Thursday, trying to book more people around AI that day, but we will be having an official TBPN AI day soon that we will announce.
Speaker 2:But here are some interesting possible topics. AI native UX, not chat skins. Vertical AI surge, health care pharma, we're certainly seeing that at Sequoia. Multimodal frontier video, three d audio, obviously, v o three driving a lot of that. Retrieval and long term memory.
Speaker 2:I saw a funny take that somebody was like, we've we've switched from retrieval augmented generation to agents. And the person was just like, no. Like, you're you're still augmenting the retrieval with text. Like, it's the same, like, it's the same buzzword, but it's like, you you kind of you gave it a new buzzword, and there's a lot of, like, this buzzword recycling going on. Synthetic data flywheels, obviously super important robotics as we talked to Rob Taves about yesterday.
Speaker 2:Will be interesting to see if there are hard caps on how far synthetic data takes you in different scenarios. Closing the autonomy gap, robust agentic workflows, we're certainly seeing that with some of these agents that seem super promising but don't quite get there, but at the same time, we've seen major breakthroughs with deep research is, I think, the first real breakthrough agent.
Speaker 1:What's your take for I I had a a funny experience last night. As I was going to bed, turned on my Matic robot.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And was telling it to mop and vacuum and mop. I turned it on. It was like seventeen hours remaining because it needed to like basically vacuum the whole house and then like figure out which areas to mop or whatever. It was this thing is just gonna run all night. Was like, feel like I should pay you or something, Matic.
Speaker 1:It's kind of weird that you're doing all this work. And then I actually, I woke up in the middle of the night to the noise. It was outside my bedroom and I was like, okay, I'm actually, and then I actually went and turned it off. But it's interesting to think, you know, we've had people on the show talking about this concept of like ten minute AGI right now, where you can like, you know, have an agent do an incredible amount of work for ten minutes. But, you know, getting to this point where you can give an agent a task and then have it be so robust that it can just operate autonomously for hours and hours and hours and hours and, you know, even days.
Speaker 1:And I think that's where things are gonna get really exciting on the, you know, purely digital side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I saw that video that the team sent of the Matic robot cleaning our studio and I was very proud. It it was handling the cables pretty well. I was surprised by that.
Speaker 2:Usually would throw
Speaker 1:them think that the cables would would would would defeat it but but no way. Yeah. Cell scale digital twins and programmable biology. Excited to hear more
Speaker 2:about Yeah. Still seems a little bit early from the folks we're talking to, but obviously exciting. And the the
Speaker 1:Jacob from New Limit
Speaker 2:had a pretty I think did really well.
Speaker 1:Had a pretty solid Yeah. Case for for some of this stuff and and sort of their edge on the data side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Compute geopolitics, world models. We're having someone next Thursday talking about world models, and Fei Fei Li is also working on world models, is very interesting. And then RL environments that general that actually generalize. All cool stuff.
Speaker 2:And you know what else is cool? NumeralHQ.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark a.
Speaker 1:Benchmark series a. We just had somebody send us a a cold email earlier. I didn't get quite a chance to look at it, but they included, they said they typed a sentence and then said benchmark series a.
Speaker 2:Really? That's amazing.
Speaker 1:I love it. Good way to signal that they actually listen to the show. We got a post here from Matti Pally. Maddie Pally. I threw this in this morning.
Speaker 1:In thirty years, I'll probably be up to some boomer stuff like, no son of mine is marrying an LLM. Marriage is between two humans only. And my kids will be like, OMG dad, you're so robophobic. Since 17 Like
Speaker 2:crazy real. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, it's funny that even, even the kids that are being born today will very likely have conversations like this, which is absolutely wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like this homies in the chat will be dropping nice AIGF, no robo. Ridiculous. Anyway, speaking of other robo nonsense, Mike Solana. We were supposed to have flying cars, and his recent his recent calls is just robo callers getting spanned.
Speaker 2:I know
Speaker 1:it's like
Speaker 2:It's like six calls in the span of five minutes. It's so brutal. Brutal. I I there is a there is a service. I don't I don't know if I should directly plug them.
Speaker 2:No More Robo. There's a couple apps that you can get that you can install, and there's also the iOS functionality to reduce. If you go into, like, the phone app, you can you can tell it, like, hey. I, like, really wanna screen calls. And then also, I think I have my phone in do not disturb all the time, and you can only get through to me and actually, like, ring the phone if you're in my contacts list.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, you have to text me first. And so, like, there's a whole bunch of things that you need to do to kind of prevent this from being annoying, but it's still just, like, ridiculous. My my take was we really need to come up with a, a new phone number system that's like a like a crypto address, like a hash, where because there's only, what, like 10,000,000,000 phone numbers. And so you can just robocall them all, and it's not that expensive to do if it every call is 1¢ or whatever. You can just call every human and just test them all, and I'll test every number.
Speaker 2:But if you had like this really complex hash where there's now like quintillion possible phone numbers, it's like, yeah, it's probably gonna be hard to remember, but once I give you my number, you're gonna be able to call me, and I'm not just gonna be able and people aren't gonna be able to randomly guess my phone number. So I don't know. We need something because it's bad. What's your take?
Speaker 1:Need something. Yeah. I just don't pick up the phone unless it's somebody I want to talk And then I pick up as fast as I can. This ad went pretty viral from Zoran mom Donnie. Yep.
Speaker 1:He's running for mayor of New York. Yep. And he's got a bold pitch, freezing the rent.
Speaker 2:Price controls.
Speaker 1:Price controls. You love it. I saw somebody compare this to, you know, somebody running for like student body president or whatever, and they're just like, free lunch. Free lunch for everybody. Know people say there's no free lunch, but we're doing free lunch.
Speaker 1:If I'm elected, free lunch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So tech was pretty against this. Patrick Collison, posted just a really quick screenshot of ChatGPT. It says AI is getting pretty good.
Speaker 2:He says, does rent control tend to help or hurt cities? Summarize your answer in one objective, pithy and blunt 280 character assessment. And the response is rent control is a short term shield for incumbent tenants and a long term poison for cities. Caps freeze rents for the lucky few who but choke new construction, shrink supply, jack up market rents, misallocate housing, and shift costs onto everyone else. Good politics, bad economics.
Speaker 2:And so this is kind of the general consensus that, like, rent controls are bad. I wanted to offer some some bull case for this. So, first off, people are saying, oh, prices are gonna go up. There won't be any new construction. Housing prices are gonna go up.
Speaker 2:But if price controls really spread and then there's a kind of cultural revolution type like mass famine and the population declines by like 90% because everyone's dying, well then there might be so much housing that the price of housing falls for the remaining that made it through the Even
Speaker 1:below the original Prices
Speaker 2:fall, yeah, exactly. And so counterintuitively, it could be an interesting way to drop prices if you're okay with everyone dying of famine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Zoron just might be thinking in decades while everyone else is thinking more Exactly. And then the other bull
Speaker 2:case is if you hate New York and you're pro California, pro LA, like we're we're pro Hollywood, I don't really care about New York City, so I might be donating a ton of money to this guy to try and destroy New York City so that everyone, all the best people in New York have to move to Hollywood and hang out with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if you have SFVCs and New York VCs sort of, you know, basically funding politician that they think is most gonna damage that startup market to try to Yeah. You know, get themselves a little edge.
Speaker 2:This is basic game theory, right? Basic game This
Speaker 1:guy Nikita Beer I saw in the comments on Zoran's post saying that, you know, he said that housing should be free, you capitalist pig. That's true.
Speaker 2:Didn't go far enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, didn't. Zoran really got mocked by Nikita.
Speaker 2:That was rough.
Speaker 1:And the silence from Zoran on Nikita's response has been deafening to say the least. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so silly. Anyway, we got to tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, multi asset investing, industry leading yields trusted by millions. Let's go to Dalian. He says, as a private pilot, my favorite part of this season of the rehearsal is that while it's an objectively hilarious show, Nathan Fielder is also pointing out an incredibly critical pilot training issue that seems to be a regular contributing case to crashes cause to crashes, including the DCA crash. And, Christophe asked him what the pilot training issue was, and Delian said, first officer's not being comfortable with pushing back against a captain they think is making a mistake.
Speaker 2:I think this is funny because I I was watching the show the first couple episodes. I haven't finished it, but, the like, he identifies this, and he's, like, half joking, half serious, but telling he's just like, no. It is real. It's real. And so, it's this interesting way where I I actually could see this comedy show having an effect on FAA regulation and, like, actually increasing safety.
Speaker 2:Like, he's doing He's doing good for the world through his comedy. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It is everybody should go and watch it. It is some of the most entertaining, probably the best show I've seen this year.
Speaker 2:I'm Yeah. Was watching a little bit of the original first season of Nathan for You last night, and I was crying laughing about when he goes into that interview and he has the comedian telling him what to say. And he's like, oh, yeah. Like, my mom passed away. And the guy asks him, like, how?
Speaker 2:And he just says, like, in the war. He's like, in what war? Like, the Iraq war? And he's like, what are what what branch of the service was she in? And then he has to say he was his mom was fighting for the Iraqis in Saddam's army.
Speaker 2:It's just like absolutely
Speaker 1:insane I went back and watched. I I don't remember what season or episode it was, but there was the bit where he's helping, he's giving advice to a woman who has a pet shop, who wants to increase So he goes and helps, and he basically gives the advice to the woman that, what's the right moment to try to get in front of a future pet owner or somebody that's about to buy a new pet? And his idea is to go to a pet and get the biggest possible tombstone. So he works out a deal with the owner of the pet cemetery, where he basically gets the guy to agree that for like a thousand dollars, like one time payment, he can erect like, you know, a like six foot by four foot, you know, tombstone. And so it's just like this pet cemetery.
Speaker 1:Like, we're sorry for your loss. Like, this tombstone is brought to you by, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:Very, very on brand for us. Pro pro advertising for sure.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That's great. Yeah. It's a classic show. Go go go watch all of
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. The other show, now that we're talking about it, Mountain Head
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Releases, I believe on Saturday around 5PM. It's by Jesse Armstrong, who obviously created Succession. Mountainhead is, seems to be based on the All In podcast, loosely, but it's a group of billionaire friends get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis. So I'm looking forward to I'm looking forward to watching this over the weekend.
Speaker 2:Sounds amazing. Let's go to this post from Kevin Kwok. He says, when exactly did the flip happen that all announcements have to be videos? That flipped really fast. What do you think?
Speaker 2:It was the it was us? Did we do it? Can we take a victory lap?
Speaker 1:Mean, we've been doing video announcements for for years. Arti on it. Big deal. Yeah. We we used these heavily in 2021, but I also feel like they were popular then.
Speaker 1:Also still think there's incredible alpha in just creating an amazing text post. Can get the same it it it doesn't give you the level of, like, depth to, like, really deliver brand, I think, in the same way that a video does. But I honestly think a extremely well written text post, assuming you can even there's potentially a hack to just include a lot of em dashes, so you get a bunch of comments from people being like, you use ChatGPT for this. And then that will actually boost the post and the algorithm. So there's potentially alpha in plain text, you know, write it yourself, but make it look like it was, you know, fully AI generated.
Speaker 1:But these things these things flip back and forth. I definitely see videos now where I'm like, okay, this is based on, like, the 2023 Yeah. Launch meta. Yeah. And, yeah, I'm excited to see what comes down the line.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the new meta, that that, like, comedy video from that YC company
Speaker 1:that Steve and
Speaker 2:Ripley and Deal, that was fantastic. But that was And the other one that was really good was from Zipline where it didn't have the same, like, hard tech, insane, like, free bird kind of, like, vibe real with American flags. It was this, like, sun drenched, high saturation. It felt like it was out of a Linklater film, and it was just this beautiful pastoral illustration of what life could be with zipline, and I thought it was really beautiful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the I think where I would like to see video goes is go are if you don't have any if if you're not trying to make people feel something, just explain really clearly what you're doing in a text post. Yep. Don't try to things like Vibrio. If you're trying to entertain, inspire, etcetera, like if that really is your goal, then video can be the right form factor, and we saw that with that sort of humorous video from the YC company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then there was another company called Spawn that went super viral a while back for basically saying that they took the team and just lived in Europe for a few And that was one where I couldn't really quite tell if they were being serious or joking, and that's part of maybe what made it go so viral. And then you have the Cluely. Yeah. Where where you can go make, you know, you can go make half a million dollars a year making videos at Cluely. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Great great opportunity.
Speaker 2:Potentially clickbait. Who knows if that's real, but certainly entertaining. I think the the question of, like, the vibe real is like, it it it worked for us early on because we were trying to create a brand specifically, and I think a lot of companies they obviously, like, a brand is important to every company, but, like, I would say, like, most b to b SaaS companies are not necessarily brand led or they're not exclusively brands versus if you are building a fashion or media or or nutrition company or something that has, like, badge value that like, expressing the brand and building the brand world. We have this example of, like, of, like, you know you know it's a brand when you can immediately say, like, what is the car associated with that brand? The the classic example is, like, if Nike built a hotel, you would know exactly what that hotel would look like.
Speaker 2:It would have posters of Michael Jordan on the wall. The gym would be Like, you know, you could buy the shoes there. It it it it would feel Nike branded. Now, if Hilton made a shoe, you'd be like, what does that mean? Right?
Speaker 2:So Hilton one hundreds. But like, does Hilton really need a brand as big as Nike or as clearly defined as Nike? And so for it, it's kind of like, if you're building a product that's not necessarily needs to be brand led forever, you don't necessarily need to ape into, let's do a brand vibe reel to really tell people what our brand is, if it's gonna be just like, just a software company and the value prop is what the value prop is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:Anyway, nothing has a clearer value prop than Eight Sleep. I've been missing mine while I'm on the road. It's pain, but you can get yours at EightSleep.com. They have a five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.
Speaker 1:Code.
Speaker 2:How did you sleep last night, Jordy?
Speaker 1:I was Historic numbers? Historic numbers. Eight hours, eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Ninety nine.
Speaker 2:Huge.
Speaker 1:Huge. Congratulations. Yeah, that was despite being moderately interrupted because I let my Matic work too hard overnight, but I did that to myself.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. Well, we have a post from AdQuick, then we'll give you an ad read for AdQuick. AdQuick, they have a new Adquick copilot. You can generate AI ideas for your out of home campaigns.
Speaker 1:What's interesting Adquick.com. What's interesting about this to me is Adquick obviously has a has you know, you can go into their application and Yep. And figure out how you basically build a campaign off of that. But Yep. A lot of my experience with out of home is like, you want it to be conversational.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay, here's the general areas where we wanna be. What inventory is available these dates? Okay. What does that inventory actually look like? What are are some examples?
Speaker 1:And so you can build a campaign in a sort of conversational way, which which makes a lot of sense. So go check it out. Even if you're not ready to run a campaign, it's a good idea to get a sense of of what these will actually look like, what budgets will look like, and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and like, just strategically, this is like the classic AI cherry on top business. They're not pivoting to AI, they're just giving people a different way to interface with their proprietary data set, right? Because Yeah. This is something that you can't just go to Chattypetit for because they have have billboards. So home advertising made easy and measurable.
Speaker 2:Go to Adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:See you. We need a massive
Speaker 2:sized gong, Jordan, for Michael Dell. Shit. Absolute gong. One of the greatest to ever do it. In q one, we received $12,100,000,000 in AI orders, surpassing the total shipments for all of fiscal year twenty twenty five and leaving us with a backlog of 14,400,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:If John, if you were here, I'd be hitting the size gong, I'm just hitting it Virtually.
Speaker 2:In the
Speaker 1:air here. Pretty amazing. Interesting story. I didn't realize that Michael Dell was back in the is he Oh, yeah. Is he back in the weeds?
Speaker 1:Oh, he's c I didn't how did I not realize that
Speaker 2:he was You gotta do a whole whole whole take private, go public again. He's been he's been on absolute tear.
Speaker 1:Wow. Wow. Dark horse. Dark horse. So cool.
Speaker 1:On his LinkedIn, says, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. Forty one years, four months.
Speaker 2:He started when he was like 18 or something. 19.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:So good. Incredible.
Speaker 1:Congrats to the to the Dell team on the milestone.
Speaker 2:Congrats. Yeah. And and makes sense. I mean, they don't they don't fabricate GPUs. They're not in the energy side, but, obviously, they're building large racks and servers for AI.
Speaker 2:There's a boom, and they're taking advantage of it. So makes sense. And we're seeing that with, like, Cisco too. Remember we were talking to Kevin Wheel about how Cisco plays a really interesting unique role in the AI boom. It's a company you haven't heard about for a while, but networking gear is obviously extremely important in AI context as you're networking together all these data centers.
Speaker 2:And so Cisco is also a beneficiary of the AI boom. So, diving in, revisiting these companies that are so, so historically significant is fascinating. There's a great founders episode on Michael Dell that you should go check out if you wanna hear about Michael Dell's approach to entrepreneurship. So check that out. I I don't know if we can sing.
Speaker 2:I I think singing over over Zoom just doesn't work, so we're just gonna have to say wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander of inspiring views, hotel curated amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. We'll be back on Monday On the show.
Speaker 2:A full rendition.
Speaker 1:We have to go hit the track with John Andrew too.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. I wanna see I wanna see how he performs. Laguna Seca, you think?
Speaker 1:He's a dog. He's an absolute dog. I think he keeps his track cars in Texas, if I remember correctly. But anyways, that will be a great story when the time comes.
Speaker 2:Got wander in Texas. Go visit him. Race him.
Speaker 1:We got a post from Chris. How is
Speaker 2:Chris Pike?
Speaker 1:Pike. Pike. Pike. He has a new post. He dropped the end of software on 05/31/2024.
Speaker 1:Yep. He's got a new post called The Dawn of Infinite Code. And I mean, he plays X on
Speaker 2:Bill different, I was about to say. He posts the link, and it works every Still
Speaker 1:does numbers. So he has a new article, The Dawn of Infinite Code, all started off. It says San Mateo, Two Thousand And Five, Three Founders add an upload button to their video hosting website in an office that smells faintly of pepperoni. Everywhere 2025, a person types an idea, presses enter, and a network of agent agents compiles, tests, and executes. In the end of software, I I pos positive Considered.
Speaker 1:That large language models would drive the marginal cost of software towards zero, just as the Internet did with content. A year later, that forecast is playing out. Code is beyond trivial to generate. The question now is how we deal with the oncoming flood. The pattern is familiar.
Speaker 1:When YouTube launched in 02/2005, its first video, Me at the Zoo, seemed immaterial. This was the harbinger of doom for the media industry, but that was a point. It proved that content had become too cheap to meter. Now the dam has broken with code, prompts produced prototypes that once required a team in a sprint. As transformative as broadcasting from your bedroom was, anyone can now ship their ideas.
Speaker 1:And you know what immediately comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Is we have somebody visiting us at the studio today that built an entire app based on TBPN yesterday. Just randomly had the idea and sent it to us this morning. I think it's it's at TBPNGuests.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:TBPNGuests.com is amazing, cool looking website that ranks every single guest that we've had including gives you time stamps and breaks down the topics that it covers. So very cool. This was built yesterday. Extremely impressive and probably wouldn't have been possible to build something as as cool and beautiful. That would take a lot
Speaker 2:longer for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So anyways, continuing Chris Pike's post, he says, web two point o gave everyone a single verb upload and it vaporized newsrooms everywhere. AI gives us a new one, describe, and the 500 person single feature company goes poof. The work shifts from syntax to intent. Instead of writing software line by line, we define what it should and let models handle the show. And what about distribution?
Speaker 1:Don't software companies have robust sales and marketing teams? Yes, as newspapers with paper routes and circulation numbers, when free competes with free for distribution, paid distribution loses badly. At first, these models will rely on a set of default environments and stacks determined by a legacy training set. But defaults change as options multiply the decision of where and how code runs will be handled by algorithms. We already accept this logic elsewhere.
Speaker 1:TikTok decides what we watch. Spotify decides what we hear. The system is opaque. The results are good, so we scroll. When the flood of code arrives, we won't ask for explanations.
Speaker 1:We'll reward speed. Convenience will outrank transparency. The systems that earn our trust through responsiveness will hold the power once reserved for operating systems. As cost curves come down, we chase scarcity up the stack. It starts with compute, still mostly centralized but already seeping to the edge as local models take up residence on laptops and phones.
Speaker 1:Above that lies context, the habits, preferences, and history that let a model anticipate us better than any public corpus ever could. And finally, trust, credibility earned over time determines whether an agent has the right to choose on our behalf. Once we arrive at full trust, active choice becomes a burden. Do you want to continue?
Speaker 2:Children after twenty ten have never opened a newspaper, so they may never open applications. History shows the vessel always fades once the payload can flow without it. Newspapers yielded to websites, CDs, to streaming software in its current uncircumcised form is circumscribed form is the next container on the chopping block. When logic can be summoned and stitched together on demand, the container evaporates and only capability remains. That's the real end of software, not the death of code, but the moment the container dissolves, utility unboxed everywhere and all at once and all at once infinite capability, infinite code.
Speaker 2:Very interesting. Yeah. I mean, it it's, yeah. It's a fun narrative. I wonder where if there will be there there's a big question about, like, discovery.
Speaker 2:How will people discover these vibe coded apps? Distribution seems to be king. We saw that with Levels.io. Like, was able to vibe code. He had a very different outcome from the random vibe coder who wants to share a link on on X, unless you're Chris Pike, apparently, and you're not shadow banned from boasting links.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, good links will break through, of course. And, of course, you can always do a, you know, a viral video that that announces your website and pitches it and then gets people to go there even if they have to open up a new tab. But, distribution will be king. So, get ready to to optimize.
Speaker 2:And the value of the prompt will be will be important, like the the the value of actually, coming up with a unique idea, something that creates value even if the instantiation of that value happens very quickly via vibe coding.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Check it out.
Speaker 2:And I wanna close out with this post from Guillermo Rao, the founder of Vercel, who's been on the show. The only the only durable moat in technology is relentless execution, and we got Molly O'Shea in the comments, or violent execution. I like that. But this this relates to the previous, Chris Pike post. Right?
Speaker 2:That that as as the barriers to entry come down, the winner is the one who executes relentlessly. Right? Yep. And we see this all over the place.
Speaker 1:And I would I would put an image in people's minds. Relentless execution is like a golden retriever chasing a tennis ball. Right?
Speaker 2:That's a good
Speaker 1:metaphor. Matter what is in their way, no matter what, you know, gets in their path or presents challenges to getting that tennis ball, they're going to relentlessly charge at it until they get it and bring it back to you. And that is kind of like, I think the right framework to approach life with, right? A golden retriever is not, you know, rabid, foaming at the mouth Mhmm. You know, being, you know, a poor sport.
Speaker 1:They're just, you know, joyful, you know Yeah. Chasing that that tennis ball. And so I hope everybody brings that energy to the rest of their work week.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. Go have a golden retriever weekend, everyone. This has been a fantastic show. Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna miss We'll see you on Monday. We'll miss your We have a a whole bunch more guests. We're doing a bunch more of these special days, and we'll have a whole bunch more ads for you. Of course, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, please, and stay tuned for the next one. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Cheers.