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.
You're watching TBPN. It is Wednesday, 03/19/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance,
Speaker 2:the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks. We're talking Nvidia. GTC just happened. The GOAT, Jensen Huang, the leather jacket killer dropped a bunch of impressive news.
Speaker 1:We'll break it all down, tell you what the stock's doing. Also, Nvidia is partnering with Taco Bell. Let's go. Huge. This is a huge development.
Speaker 2:Have been begging
Speaker 1:AI powered tacos. It's coming. It's not a joke. It's a real story. Also, it's actually pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:And then we're gonna break down Intel, what's going on with their new CEO, whether or not Intel is gonna split up. This has been something Ben Thompson's been hammering for over a decade. Are they gonna finally listen to him, or is he gonna change his tune? He's, breaking it all down in a new Strathecari update that we're gonna take you through. And then we have an interesting, deep dive into a defense contractor, not a defense tech founder, but a defense contractor, made $7,000,000,000 and became one of America's biggest alleged tax cheats.
Speaker 1:Very interesting story in The Wall Street Journal. Hopefully, we'll have time to get to that. But we also have a bunch of great guests. So we're gonna talk to some folks, give you some news, give you some updates. But we gotta start with some amazing news.
Speaker 1:Folks, the astronauts are back.
Speaker 2:They're back. Super the astronauts. They're back.
Speaker 1:NASA, SpaceX, everybody working together.
Speaker 2:We don't typically hit gongs for returns from space, but
Speaker 1:We should hit one for every day that they were in space. 300 gong hits, folks. 300 gong hits. We're gonna be here all day. Was supposed to be an eight day tour.
Speaker 1:It was supposed to be an eight day tour. They were up there for three hundred days. Clark on the timeline says how it feels to return
Speaker 2:to the if you really love space though, it's kind of an amazing opportunity.
Speaker 1:I'm saying that they're pretty comfortable. I think if I get an extra two hundred ninety two days for free. Yeah. Imagine you're at the Amman, you book eight days and they're like, hey,
Speaker 2:Do they get paid overtime by the way? When they're up in space? Mean, it's kind of a twenty four seven Do they
Speaker 1:get freaking flyer miles? They can just go back forever now?
Speaker 2:It should be it should be something where every extra hour Yep. You're in space, your comp, your hourly comp sort of increases
Speaker 1:by
Speaker 2:10 True. So it just goes parabolic. Something goes bad, like you just become like a trillionaire.
Speaker 1:A trillionaire? It's great. It's like in Armageddon, that movie where they're like, okay, we're gonna have to go blow up the asteroid. Like, what do you guys want to be paid? And they're like, we don't wanna pay taxes ever again.
Speaker 1:Just these bros going up there to drive. Process. It's a great movie. And Jack has some good commentary on the timeline as well. He says, if you put, quote, pod of dolphins greets stranded astronauts on splashdown at the end of a movie like The Martian, people would scoff and call it ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And Jake in the comment says, life is sometimes more beautiful than fiction.
Speaker 1:It's it's a beautiful thing. I'm I'm just so happy they're back. You know, this turned into a little bit of like a oh, not really like a culture war story, but it was very much like, oh,
Speaker 2:like It was political.
Speaker 1:It became a little political. But I'm just so it's a it's an inspiring story, you know? Astronauts made it through. You know, SpaceX came to the rescue. NASA sorted it out.
Speaker 2:No one got It's just great. As the news, we looked a little bit silly not doing post game press conference, out there the Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you ever
Speaker 1:Tell us how it feels.
Speaker 2:You ever watched WSL, is the I don't know what it is. Yeah, not your kind of thing. But it's The women's surfing league? No, no, no, it's the world surfing.
Speaker 1:World surfing league.
Speaker 2:You they they they have a guy in the channel which is the section of the break just outside of where the waves are crashing and he's on a jet ski and he's sort of doing these sort of interviews. That's great. Next time we have splashdown, we gotta be there.
Speaker 1:Next time, Will O'Brien does a lot of work in the ocean. He says, there is something truly divine about dolphins. I believe they and whales exist in a nearly entirely different class of animals to the rest. They are hyper intelligent and frequently show incredible levels of knowingness. I it would not surprise me if they know exactly what's going on in this situation.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:Well, here's a little factoid Give
Speaker 1:it to me.
Speaker 2:You might be fascinated by. Yep. There was a NASA funded experiment in the sixties with a researcher named Margaret Lavatte Mhmm. And a dolphin named Peter Mhmm. And they did have they did have sexual encounters.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:That's great, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Thanks for bringing that to the But it was it was a part of NASA was trying to have an experiment to see if they could teach the creatures to speak English.
Speaker 1:So I I think I've actually heard that story before.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. So anyways, Donald
Speaker 1:Trump controversial. Donald Trump mentioned that that the the astronauts were indeed stranded. Deleon over almost a year ago said crazy that there are two American astronauts stranded in low Earth orbit without a clear answer on how or where they're gonna get home, and no one's talking about it. He got community noted. It was a whole backlash, like, total fight over the definition of stranded.
Speaker 1:Are they stranded? They could come back anytime, but there's problems with the with the with the one capsule, and they're just doing tests. Maybe they're just being abundance of caution. They actually could go if they needed to. Anyway, the White House has issued a a statement, and they said they rescued the stranded astronauts.
Speaker 1:They used the word stranded. And so that's probably how the history works. We'll remember it. They were stranded, but they made it back. Thanks to We are so and I'm so glad that this didn't wind up being some international fiasco.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, can you imagine I mean, was away from I was away in DC, obviously, on Monday. I slept in a hotel on Sunday. I can't imagine being away from my Eight Sleep for three hundred days. That would be excruciating.
Speaker 1:That's probably the worst part about being stranded in space if you couldn't bring an
Speaker 2:Eight Sleep. I imagine the Eight Sleep team would have tried to get Eight Sleeps up
Speaker 1:They're very good at delivering Yep.
Speaker 2:But like they did for the Doge team. Yep. But I can imagine there's just the transfer mechanism potentially the cost. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:And Eight Sleep is, you know, very inexpensive compared to sending a capsule.
Speaker 1:Sure, So
Speaker 2:the delivery costs could have been
Speaker 1:Well hopefully the team's on it. Eight sleep or nights that fuel your best days, turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. We can't recommend an eight sleep enough. Let's see how
Speaker 2:you
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:I am back.
Speaker 1:You're back?
Speaker 2:Not at my best. I got an 84 last night but I did for
Speaker 1:Oh, smoked you, 93. Let's go. Eight hours and thirty eight minutes.
Speaker 2:I got a little bit cocky about two weeks ago. Remember I was dragging you. Big deal, yeah. It's Averaging eighties. I was in the nineties.
Speaker 2:And then I let it get to my head. We're back. We're refocused. And Eight Sleep is having a President's Day sale. Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:Our code for a hundred and $50 off, our code gets you $350 off. That's a st at e p n. And let's get back to the show.
Speaker 1:Well, we have some breaking news here. X, the everything app is now worth $44,000,000,000. The valuation is a rebound for Elon Musk and its investors after the social media site was valued at less than 10,000,000,000 in September. Let's hear it for the x team, folks. This is great.
Speaker 2:And I and Brandon, Tyler Yeah. Whole crew.
Speaker 1:I gotta just hand it to them. Like, I think the x algorithm has never been in a better place.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's gone through eras. There's been the slop era. There was the maybe racist era. There's just like crazy politics all over the timeline. And I feel like it's perfectly dialed where I'm seeing entertaining stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm not missing any tech news. I'm seeing every all the high signal people, you know, the David Holes from Midjourney. He posts, like, once every few days. It's always really interesting.
Speaker 2:Did miss some news yesterday.
Speaker 1:We hit a a little bit. But like, I feel like if I'm on x, I'm seeing everything that's everything that's relevant to me and then also some fun And it's the right balance. So I I gotta just give a round of applause to the x team. They've just done fantastic job
Speaker 2:They to go to they had to go to a dark place to get to their adjusted EBITDA of 1.4 I heard that. And we're very proud of them and they're gonna be launching payments soon. If ever wanted to pay your mutuals, gonna get the chance to do that.
Speaker 3:It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:A whole lot more. We covered this sort of repricing, I think like a month ago at this point. Yeah, it
Speaker 1:was rumored and now it's confirmed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to see.
Speaker 1:But congrats to everyone at X. Fantastic work. I mean, the platforms get better. And I actually went and and did a did a little tour of the other platforms to see just like, could we even multi stream our show over on threads, Blue Sky? And the functionality just is not there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, I think Blue Sky limits videos to like three minutes long. It's like, you can't upload a three hour show if it limits three minutes. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:They trying to fry the attention
Speaker 1:of their They must be. Yeah. They could
Speaker 2:be a dark
Speaker 1:It was funny when we talked to Joe Weisenthal about that, and he was like sheepish. No. No. I actually really like x. Like, I I just post there every once in while.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, it's kinda dodgy. I was like I mean, he's playing it smart. I genuinely wasn't trying to, like, call him out on that. Like, I was like, should we be doing that? Because, like, I want as much reach as possible.
Speaker 1:Like, I see this as a business. This is about money more than anything else, as we've said multiple times. Anyway, speaking of money and guys who make a lot of it, Jensen Huang, hosted a massive conference for NVIDIA. He called it the Super Bowl of AI, which we love. We love sports analogies in tech.
Speaker 1:They announced the new Rubin AI chips and some corporate partnerships. So Jensen
Speaker 2:I love the title of this. NVIDIA CEO says AI computing needs to surge 100 fold which is like imagine, mean, it's pretty great that he can go out and say this and everybody gets gets fired up if a if a pharmaceutical CEO came out and said, you know, usage of SSRIs needs to surge a hundredfold. Everybody would get pretty angry. But we love the chips. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We love the chips.
Speaker 1:I don't even think the Celsius CEO could say that about Celsius.
Speaker 2:Usage of Celsius needs to surge a hundredfold. The GDP demands it. Mean We get 10% GDP growth. Sati called it, but he called it for the wrong reason. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's Celsius.
Speaker 1:I mean, unironically, usage of our sponsors needs to surge a hundredfold. Yeah. Like there should be hundreds of more cust
Speaker 2:hundred hundred Now this is why we we wanna see companies doing large scale M and A using watches.
Speaker 1:Yes. And
Speaker 2:go acquire, you know, 2,000,000 Daytonas.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Go, you know Daytona.
Speaker 1:Always the Daytona.
Speaker 2:It's common ground.
Speaker 1:Common ground. It's just it's just a store of value. It's the Bitcoin of the watch world, I suppose.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:The gold. Anyway, The Wall Street Journal is breaking it down here. Chief executive Jensen Huang tried to quell investor concerns about the artificial intelligence boom Tuesday at an event he dubbed the Super Bowl of AI. The world will need a hundred times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary a year ago, he said at the conference, that has grown from a sleepy chip developer gathering in Silicon Valley to a rock concert like event that filled a hockey arena. I love it.
Speaker 1:AI expansion into models that can reason and act as agents to carry out tasks for humans will require far greater computational firepower, which comes from the kind of chips that NVIDIA manufacturers. Jensen Huang said, this year, this last year, this is where almost the entire world got it wrong. NVIDIA shares have been volatile since the release of DeepSeek, but there's also been a lot of other things going on in the market since January. Obviously, tariffs and just general Trump, you know, what's going on there. There's been other competition, other other entrants, NVIDIA Intel's retooling as we'll go into, but there's a lot going on.
Speaker 1:So and then the market's just been selling off as a whole. A model so DeepSeachron released
Speaker 2:basically wants to put the word out that we're back up.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's exactly it. We're back up. A model released by a Chinese startup that said it had built sophisticated AI models that required fewer of NVIDIA's chips. That led some investors to question whether future AI systems will need fewer NVIDIA chips for training and day to day operations.
Speaker 1:Some Jevan's Paradox disrespecters right there. Yeah. Oh, bad day for those for those investors. Patrick, we'll see.
Speaker 2:Never never disrespect a paradox
Speaker 1:Never.
Speaker 2:Because it'll come back to bite you.
Speaker 1:It will. So called reasoning models spend more time thinking. There's the internal reasoning tokens, I'm sure you're familiar with, about a problem before delivering an answer. They break each prompt down into steps, a process that is best used for complex problems according to companies building those models. They might generate so much data that computing speeds will need to increase to process that data quickly for users.
Speaker 1:We've all seen this. Users won't wanna wait 10 times longer to get an answer that relies on 10 times more data. He said that deep research is kind of the canonical example. It's fine to go fire off a query and then come back ten minutes later, but it'd be better if it came back immediately. Yep.
Speaker 1:And that's what we want from NVIDIA, baby. Wong also spent time hyping up AI agents, are designed to complete complete tasks such as booking flights or making dinner reservations for humans. Agents often rely on reasoning models.
Speaker 2:It's required. This is the simple use case that we're all just begging one person to build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's like to book a flight
Speaker 2:I do think this is one of those things that it's one of those things that's so deeply obvious. But if you just built a really good version of OpenAI's operator but for booking flights and hotels, you could probably get to some ridiculous run rate. And yeah, you're going to get cloned and wrecked by FANG eventually. But you're going to have a glorious, you know, few years where you can just run Glorious
Speaker 1:secondary sales, maybe some dividends in there.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, it's gonna be a good run. Yep. The amount of computation needed is easily a hundred times more than we thought we needed this time last year. Reiterating the point, let's go.
Speaker 2:He's like analysts? I am the analyst now.
Speaker 1:Oh, our projections? We were we were off by a hundred x, actually.
Speaker 2:And it's and it's bullish.
Speaker 1:It's bullish. It's great. But this is the real story. He unveiled a new line of chips called Rubin that are expected to be available in the second half of twenty twenty six. And so NVIDIA has a chip series, but then also they they they package those chips.
Speaker 1:So they do chip iterations based on the different the different manufacturing technology and then they package those into the gaming versions, which are like the Yeah. The 2,080, the 3,090, the 4,090, the 5,090, and then they also do the a 100, h 100, etcetera.
Speaker 2:And just a little insight here, because we were talking about name popularity yesterday. Ruben is the 200 two thousand nine hundred and twenty fourth most popular name in The United States. I expect this to surge Totally. Today, in 2026 as Reuben rolls out. People just kind of get it in their head.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Little baby rum, Reuben into the world.
Speaker 1:Do you think Reuben sandwiches will become more popular? That's true.
Speaker 2:How can you rot? What's the Reuben sandwich trade? You gotta get on public and go It's
Speaker 1:a little bit of an Jimmy John's dominate
Speaker 2:the app
Speaker 1:store charts. That's where you go to get a Rubin. And then you get on OpenAI and you inference some reasoning models using Rubin chips.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 1:It's just Rubin all the way down.
Speaker 2:Yep. The Rubin.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. The Rubin underpins everything.
Speaker 2:The theory of
Speaker 5:of AI adoption.
Speaker 1:The AI superchip named after the astronomer who discovered dark matter, that's a cool name, is set to have more than three times the computing capabilities of the ultra chips. An ultra version of the Rubin will offer 14 times the performance of the Blackwell, he said. The Rubin will need to be a monster hit to meet sky high investor expectations for the chipmaker. Analysts expect this series of NVIDIA chips to generate nearly 40,000,000,000 in revenue in their first year of sales and more than 95,000,000,000 in their second year according to consensus estimates. NVIDIA shares were down, though, by more than 3% after the presentation concluded slightly more than the tech heavy NASDAQ Composite where there was a broad tech sell off along with declines in the S and P 500.
Speaker 1:So we are reaching bear market territory. Not sure if we're fully in it yet, but it's been a rough
Speaker 2:couple put a hundred k into Nvidia Yeah. When they went public. I'm gonna run the numbers here. You would have oh. Don't know.
Speaker 2:It just needs to
Speaker 1:be adjusted for stock split.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway You'd a of money folks.
Speaker 2:You have a lot of money but you'd also be very old and nothing is more valuable
Speaker 1:Than your youth.
Speaker 2:Than your youth.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway Than just being in the game.
Speaker 1:The company also announced partnerships with General Motors to help provide underlying technology for its autonomous driving fleet, as well as partnership with Disney, Google DeepMind called Newton that can simulate physical systems. The time has come for robots, Huang said, noting that there is growing shortage of human labor. True. This is an area where NVIDIA can build on its legacy as a gaming company, which demanded it create virtual worlds in which objects and people behaved as they would in the real world. With a slow thinking capability, NVIDIA's physical AI can help robots perceive and reason about their environment and fast
Speaker 2:Long focus is actually amazing. Oh, yeah. If you think about if most CEOs that had gone on this run would start to let it get to their head, they'd start cell phone company, you know, they'd start mobile device companies.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, sure.
Speaker 2:He'd be buying humanoid robotics companies. Yeah. He would just be doing a lot of stuff because they have such a big balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you just don't see him doing that. He's just like focused on the next chip.
Speaker 1:Hasn't gone into fabrication. It's a strong partner of TSMC, no word that he's trying to get into that market. And then also, you know, even the gaming chips, like, they never they never even did like an Alienware style, like, oh, we make a gaming computer. I think they do actually make a a computer that you can buy now that you plug into a monitor and keyboard and you can inference AI on it. But that's like a very, very small extension, very small adjacency.
Speaker 1:I was I was looking at, like, a summary of AI of NVIDIA's history, and the the the the AI summary that came up with it was like NVIDIA pivoted to AI. And it's like it's so funny because I guess they did in the sense that they were originally like, the whole story of NVIDIA is they came out of, like, scientific computing, needing to run more calculations in labs, then graphics kind of came up and people realized that you could with parallel computing, you could render individual pixels all simultaneously as opposed to a CPU. So you get this massive speed up then. And then they took off during the gaming boom. And then ultimately, the
Speaker 2:And you were a big driver of a lot of that momentum and growth
Speaker 1:because you were gaming super I've built multiple computers with many NVIDIA GPUs. They're fantastic. They're the best. But then, yeah, obviously AI came up and that was kind of, I feel like it was like ground up in the sense that like the AI researchers really said, hey, we can run our algorithms faster on NVIDIA GPUs. And then the CUDA ecosystem blossomed from there.
Speaker 1:But it doesn't feel like it was a deliberate pivot from NVIDIA, but they still were a massive beneficiary. And that's what has added, what, like $2,000,000,000,000 to their market cap in
Speaker 4:the last
Speaker 1:couple of years.
Speaker 2:Jensen is doing a lot of heavy lifting for all the robotics companies because he says, everyone pay attention. This could very well be the largest industry of all.
Speaker 1:Yep. I love
Speaker 2:it. I mean, it makes sense. If you look at the labor market, it's pretty big.
Speaker 1:This is crazy. Hotel rates in San Jose were up to $2,500 a night as the city was festooned in NVIDIA colors. Restaurants and coffee shops will earn their entire month's rent over the course of a few days. San Jose mayor Matt Mahon said in an interview, hosting the event will be a test for how the area handles the Super Bowl and the World Cup next year. So it really was the Super Bowl of AI.
Speaker 1:It's great. But you know what Jensen Huang's Achilles heel is or his Achilles wrist? Doesn't wear a watch.
Speaker 2:That is And
Speaker 1:yet his cousin Lisa Su over at AMD does.
Speaker 2:Has got some hitters. Hitters.
Speaker 1:And so Jensen, you gotta go to Bezel. You gotta get a luxury watch. Bezel has 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Go pick something up. Pick up a hitter.
Speaker 1:Make a statement. We'd love to see it.
Speaker 2:Make a statement.
Speaker 1:And you can
Speaker 2:bet that we will be doing risk It's fascinating that he's a jacket guy, but not a watch guy.
Speaker 1:Know. Usually they go hand
Speaker 2:in Sometimes one is a gateway drug.
Speaker 1:He probably has something he just hasn't really
Speaker 2:One of my favorite jacket guys is also Yeah. Just like it's, you know, two sides Yeah. Have the same coin. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, moving on to more NVIDIA news, we got tacos, folks. AI is will soon take your order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. NVIDIA is partnering with Yum Brands that owns Taco Bell, and it's an interesting story. Basically, when you go to the drive through instead of talking to a human over a very scratchy voice line where they can barely hear what you're saying, you'll just talk to an AI agent essentially.
Speaker 1:And it's kind of the most constrained conversation you can possibly have. You're just ordering from a list of, like, 20 items. So you can you can very easily use an open source technology like Whisper or any sort of, you know, speech to text to get that in there and then map that to, oh, they were saying cheeseburger. They probably meant this. They probably meant Big Mac.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can clarify that.
Speaker 2:The things here that's interesting, maybe we'll get into it in a bit, but this feels like SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This feels like enterprise SaaS. Yes. Is this potentially a marketing oriented But why is NVIDIA trying to deliver voice AI at the enterprise?
Speaker 1:So that's what's interesting is the actual IP of the SaaS lives with Yum! Brands. Okay. So So
Speaker 2:they're developing it in house?
Speaker 1:Yes. So Yum!
Speaker 2:Brands And they're buying
Speaker 1:a CTO, a chief digital officer and technology officer, Joe Park, and he said they're using NVIDIA's tools to build, but they're building it in house rather than relying on third party vendors
Speaker 2:with prepackaged apps. So what's the thing that people always steal out of cars? The catalytic converter? Sure. So the new catalytic converter is just stealing the GPUs from Taco Bell.
Speaker 2:You know, they have like on-site People just ripping them out. They're like, yeah, they got Rubens. They got Rubens of Blackwells in there. You just gotta go. It's a hundred k.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You know, quick and that and that becomes the new hot scam.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I think it'll be cloud based hopefully.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the whole thing. It's like why do they need to partner? Why do they need to actually if they're partnering with Nvidia and they're actually buying
Speaker 1:chips mean, you ever read those articles about like Chick fil A's like DevOps team? They're like one of the most like high perform Cracked. Yeah. They're cracked and they're just like really good because they have to deliver the software, like distribute it on the edge because it can't always go back to the headquarters because it needs to be like quick. You can't have delays every time you push a button.
Speaker 1:So they host it all and they deploy all this and there's all the security stuff and they're actually
Speaker 2:like really really good. Do you think Chick fil A's recruiters are just on LinkedIn reaching out to these super senior
Speaker 1:It's like Jane Street guys, and they're reaching out.
Speaker 2:The recruiter just, they don't ask, hey, would you be open to new roles? Just think, what do you think about Chick fil A? And the person comes back and they're like, I love Chick fil A bro, eat it every day.
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 1:And so he said, we wanna own the intellectual property. This is the head of Yum's Yum Yum Brands Technology division. They operate 61,000 restaurants. And Park, Joe Park says, we wanna own the intellectual property. We want to own the technology.
Speaker 1:That's a shift in our strategy as we think about AI. And they and they recently announced Byte by Yum, a proprietary platform that will house the new apps. And Park is the president of
Speaker 2:the They want that tech multiple so bad. Yeah. They're up two percent on in the in the last few days.
Speaker 1:Are they? Yeah. You're on public?
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Third party vendors, however, will have a role in certain areas, the company said. Andrew Sun, NVIDIA's director of AI business development for retail, said the partnership was unique for NVIDIA partly because Yum's advanced in house tech talent. The Yum team was primed to take advantage of NVIDIA tools and application frameworks like its Nim microservices, which is designed to aid AI development. Yum's two thousand technologists, they have 2,000 programmers and tech people, basically. Will use NVIDIA software to build apps that leverage open source models and take full advantage of the computing power of NVIDIA's GPUs.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA will also provide guidance and advice. Building in house with NVIDIA helped bring the cost down, Park said, since the AI chip giant helped Yum maximize every bit of compute on NVIDIA GPUs. I love it. As a result, the app scale better and and seamlessly fit into Yum's tech stack he added. I mean, you know, you're talking about SaaS and, the tech multiple.
Speaker 1:There isn't there is an argument where this is much more aligned economically with Yum brands because, yes, they have to fork over the money to buy NVIDIA chips, but then they kind of get the NVIDIA software probably loosely for free because I think a lot of these are like open source projects that are maintained by NVIDIA. And I I know someone who works at Disney on like the ride development. And when they build a new ride, they use the most cutting edge technology. So they go and they they they'll actually build something that looks like an NVIDIA gaming computer. And when you walk into like the Star Wars, Star Tours, like whatever's driving that simulation is the best at the time.
Speaker 1:But then once they build it, they lock it in and it stays there for like forty years. And so they're amortizing that R and D cost as well as the CapEx of whatever chips are running there over a long time. And then it's good and it's loved and people don't really expect it to change. And so for Yum! Brands, it kind of makes sense that it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're gonna figure out exactly what what hardware do we need to actually take someone's order effectively.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:What software do we need? And then, yeah, we don't really wanna pay a SaaS license forever to some company that's like shipping a of these better A
Speaker 2:lot of the SaaS companies are trying to, they would set the pricing for Yum! Brands. Cool. We have this tool, you know, there's no, you know, commit, but you've got to pay, you know, 10¢ an order and look how much money
Speaker 1:It just like scales forever.
Speaker 2:Because you don't have to use a human to take the order. Then eventually they say, well, we're doing millions of orders a day and this gets very expensive very quickly. And you're just sort of at some point replacing the cost.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. I mean, the rise of online ordering and like, I guess, digital channels is remarkable. Yum! Brands took 19% of orders through online channels, basically their app in 2019.
Speaker 1:It's up to 50% already pre AI. Just just the app being popular. A lot of people, when they show up to McDonald's, they order on the app and then they just pick it up because they're like, I'm going or it's faster than waiting in the line. And Yum Brands wants to get to a % through digital channels rather than humans, and this is kind of the last step. You already walk into some McDonald's and there's, like, kiosks where you just push.
Speaker 1:And in a lot of in a lot of airports, it's the same thing. And so consumers end up spending more when they buy via digital channels Park maintains because the restaurant can upsell, personalize, and entice eaters through notifications, and that is critical as the fast food industry faces a pullback amid inflation concerns and churning economic policy. We love everything about digital sales, Park said. The more we can create channels, whether it's voice ordering, whether it's going to be tied to our kiosks, whether it's going to be tied to AI investments to help customers go to our mobile app, I think all of these things add up to helping these in these economic environments.
Speaker 2:It is wild to think that these major food operators are trying to replace human labor at the customer interaction level and in the kitchens. Yep. And there's gonna be this sort of squeezing effect where eventually it's easy to imagine and not even too distant, in not even the too distant future that there's one employee, one human employee per location who's just walking around sort of monitoring, making sure everything's getting served properly. And then eventually it's just one human for every five locations and they just sort of drive around. And then eventually we're all paper clips.
Speaker 1:This was this was actually mapped out in this sci fi book. I think it's a book called The The Automat. I think that's what it's called. It's basically a cafeteria that you walk into. And, I mean, it's the it's the vision of what you see at like an Amazon store where there's no checkout.
Speaker 1:Basically, there's just these I think this is actually a real place in New York in like the fifties or sixties. And they put the food in these like little cubbies and then you could just say like, okay, want cheeseburger. You open it up, you take it and you pay for it. And Dave Friedberg actually started a company that was kind of in the same vein called Itza that was the same idea where you would, when you walked into the store, you didn't see any human beings. You would just see, okay, I, you know, tap some buttons or swipe my credit card or tap on the mobile app and then my order is just there.
Speaker 1:Behind the scenes, there were still people making the food but his vision at the time was to make to automate everything on the back end as well. Yeah. And so, yeah, you kind of attack it from both sides and then eventually you just get to yeah, like, you know, the truck shows up and fills up the slop of fire and the meat goes in this way and the carbs go in that way and you slop slop it all together and everyone just takes them to hose.
Speaker 2:Cows walking in cows walking in one side.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:Humans coming in to just grab the food on the other. They don't even see each other.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Of
Speaker 1:Bull market and
Speaker 2:beef Speaking of cows on the 101 right now, there's a billboard that says by PETA, right around all the people whose homes burned down that says meat brought the heat and basically blaming all the fires on all the fires on just humans loving a steak here or there. But anyways, we don't talk about Politics. Animal rights on the show. This is a business show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, if you are encouraged by that news or maybe discouraged by that news, why don't you go over to public.com and, you know, place your bet on Nvidia. Are they going up? Are they going down? We can't tell you, but you can figure it out for yourself.
Speaker 1:And remember, you can do a lot more than just bet on Nvidia with the most extreme high leverage puts and calls you can possibly imagine. You can also do multi asset encouraging. Industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. So go over to public.com and sign up and start investing.
Speaker 1:Anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It would be awesome if somebody did a take private of PETA and then you could sort of trade against, it's almost like a prediction market on
Speaker 1:You keep saying take private, but you mean take Take for public.
Speaker 2:Profit. Take for profit.
Speaker 1:You mean take for profit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take for profit.
Speaker 1:I mean, we've said this. They already where all the most delicious endangered species live. And so they could easily start selling those rights to hunters and poachers like overnight. They could be printing printing money. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, I mean, it's a it's just a fantastic economic opportunity.
Speaker 2:That's such an insane. We've we've spent decades developing a map of like where
Speaker 1:Where the all the all the most exotic animals are in Exotic animals the world. And now it's time to capitalize. Capture all the value. Trade at a thousand x multiple and just go to the moon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they could apply the same framework they do for what are the hunting licensee, like the, you've got to get like a tag or whatever. So they could, they could, you know, do some proper demand planning around those ecosystems and make sure that there's real longevity in those markets.
Speaker 1:For sure, for sure. Well, got got a guest joining in three minutes. So we're gonna set this up with some timeline posts that we saw. You know, we never talk about politics on the show, but, the JFK files broke, and there's a tech angle. So we wanted to talk about that.
Speaker 1:So, Brett Favre, I don't think that's the that's must be somebody impersonating the famous quarterback. Maybe it's the actual quarterback. I don't I don't actually know. But
Speaker 2:I doubt.
Speaker 1:Brett says, I don't have enough life to go through 70,000 JFK files. Anyone know what really happened? So I I reading from this, I don't actually know
Speaker 2:This is the real Brett Favre.
Speaker 1:It is the real Brett
Speaker 2:Favre.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's the
Speaker 2:He says he's in his bio, he says
Speaker 1:It's the it's the
Speaker 2:famous one time pigskin thrower There
Speaker 6:you go.
Speaker 2:Cost film.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, Brett Favre, you know, Trump released the JFK files. There's 70,000 documents out there relating to the JFK assassination, JFK's, presidency, and, s w y x, I believe that's Swix, host of a great podcast on AI, says, all you chat with PDFMFs, you have been preparing your entire life for this. Don't miss your shot. And George Savolka, a friend of the show who's coming on in a few minutes, says, we've processed all 80 plus k all 80 k pages of the JFK files with AI.
Speaker 1:What questions do you wanna ask? Well, we're gonna ask him a bunch of questions in just a few minutes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's almost like the time the JFK file release with generative AI Yes. So that the gen AI companies could get a layup Yep. Demonstrate the power of the technology for
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think Biden said that. He was just like, you know, I would have released them, but LLM technology just wasn't there. The context windows just weren't big enough. Was waiting to be able to do proper rag on these.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Devin AI tweeted, prime Will DePew would have embedded the entire j k JFK files and shipped a rag enabled chat app by now. And I was just like, what is this post? Because I think this is, like, from the official corporation. Like this is from cognition. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's a very funny post. They're posters. And it's like, it's so insider.
Speaker 2:Wait, speaking of Will, he's coming on the show.
Speaker 1:He's coming on the show next week.
Speaker 2:This next post, I was lying I I was laughing at this earlier. He says 10 things I learned in YC winter twenty twenty five. One, never let no one know how much dough you hold. Two, never let them know your next move. Three, never trust nobody.
Speaker 2:Four, never get high on your own supply. Five, never sell, no crack where you rest at. Six, that credit, debt it. Seven, keep your family and business completely separated. Money and blood don't mix like
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Alright. Eight, never keep no weight on you. Nine, if you ain't getting bagged, stay the f from police. 10, if you ain't got the clientele, say heck no.
Speaker 1:It really hits when you censor it like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's fantastic, Jordan. You're doing
Speaker 1:a great job.
Speaker 2:We need a we need a like a Beep. Beeper button. So whenever there's a swear word, we just hit that Yep. Instead of saying the word.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah Great post.
Speaker 1:Long long history of of rap lyrics in in in venture. And I think we have George joining the show right now. George, how you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm good. Good. Is that a is that a white claw or a Celsius on your desk?
Speaker 1:This is a Celsius.
Speaker 3:Oh, very good.
Speaker 1:Very Fantastic.
Speaker 3:P g 13. I love it. Are you
Speaker 1:are are are you a white claw in middle of the day guy?
Speaker 3:No, I'm just a third cup of coffee guy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. That's where I'm at.
Speaker 1:Where do
Speaker 2:you max out? Where do you hit your sort of zone of genius with caffeine? Is it in the three hundred milligram range, higher, lower? You
Speaker 3:know, think the the unfortunate thing with caffeine is I'm I'm probably like half a cup of coffee and then it's just less productive. I I think I think I think it actually just distracts you slightly. You need to be like
Speaker 2:So you gotta go so you go for three because Microdosing. You're just so good at what you do that you gotta make it a little bit harder to have fun.
Speaker 3:Is that is that it? It's it's when when you're when you're jet lagged or delayed, you just then you then you've got a kind of discount or or you need to rely on Lucy or or or, you know, all all the different John Kugen things.
Speaker 2:But Fantastic. Today, we're
Speaker 3:on three cups of coffee.
Speaker 1:Okay. Oh, you're on three cups of coffee. Is that because you're diving into the JFK files? Can you break us down? What have you found so far?
Speaker 1:Take us through the story.
Speaker 3:That is that is actually why I I'm on three cups of cups of coffee. I was I was up late responding to to different, you know, conspirators on the Internet. But, yeah, last night, as as many folks know, there was a dump of 80,000 formerly unreleased pages with no redactions to the JFK files or the Trump presidency. And, obviously, no one has time to read through 80 k pages of, like, scribbles and scratch and and and a bunch of of scanned documents from the seventies. And we uploaded them to our system that usually looks at virtual data rooms in a bunch of of of financial and legal documents and instead just toss them all in there and, like, instantaneously had access to an AI that could look over them.
Speaker 3:A lot of interesting things that that came up, some of which I can talk about on this on this podcast or or or, I guess, live live live show, and some of which I'm I'm I'm probably less keen on. Sure. There's definitely, like, a variety of different mentions of multiple shooters. There were a few different mentions that people thought were of UFOs, but in reality, it was OCR getting stuff wrong, so there's nothing too interesting on on UFOs. But then there's also and I'm trying to pull back into some of the old questions that I was being asked.
Speaker 3:A variety of different mentions of folks like, I believe, Jay Garrett Underhill. He was, interestingly enough, you know, someone that a lot of conspiracy theorists believe was assassinated by the CIA for going and claiming that it was a CIA inside job. The a very interesting piece of the entire, you know, dump is that you might fit like, if you were to guess who are the most mentioned people, you know, you might met you might guess that it's, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald and and JFK and a variety of other people. But it goes, like, in in if you extract all the entities from every document, JFK is first, John Kennedy is second, so, you know, just double mentions of JFK. Then central intelligence is the third most mentioned, you know, entity in the documents.
Speaker 3:Then Fidel Castro. So so there's there's there's I believe if you actually pull up 18 documents that are thoroughly about Fidel Castro. Right. And then the fourth entity is FBI director and FBI agency. So as you kind of go down the list, you can actually see, like, lots of mentions of Cuba, lots of mentions of the CIA and the FBI, but but not as much on the on the the other standard people that, you know, folks would usually go and look into.
Speaker 3:A lot of documents also mentioned Martin Luther King Junior.
Speaker 2:You think of of your guys' tech and and more broadly, some of these models can help us just get a better understanding of history. Right? For every big story like, you know, the JFK assassination, there's just like this incredible amount of evidence, some of which is real, some of which is not. They're all from different sources and it's almost if you have one human that sort of dedicates their life to the topic, they can sort of figure out the truth behind it. Is it possible that that this is obviously not what, you know, what what heavy you guys are working on, right?
Speaker 2:You're sort of focused on the enterprise. But do you see a world where we just get a better understanding of these sort of major historical events by kind of hacker historians leveraging, you know, what you guys are doing here with with the chat, with the JFK files product?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I think that ultimately, a lot of history is subjective, and the history books are written in a way that, like, presents always one side of the story. And as you see a shift away from what I would call, like, synthesis, right, like history books towards people using first party knowledge and then orchestrating effectively an AI over whatever they'd like or whatever question they'd like, you'll actually start to see people change. In the way that they work, in the way that they understand history, the way they understand historical events change. And just like social media allows you to basically validate your own beliefs, I actually think AI can be used as a tool to present, like, any side of an argument, whether good or bad.
Speaker 3:And that just means that there's less maybe social control that traditional media news outlets and publishers or books would have over, like, the cultural zeitgeist and and how people refer to historical events.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's I mean, now that people are so aware of documents will be embedded in LLM systems and this is how these large troves are processed, there's some sort of metagaming going on where, you know, if I wanted to implicate you in the JFK files, I could have released 80,000 files from JFK and then added another 200,000 files just about George. And all of a sudden, it's gonna look people are gonna say, oh, well, why is George mentioned so much? And, you know, they don't really realize that these are completely unrelated. But by by contextualize contextualizing them as, like, one block, all of a sudden, I'm kind of, like, data poisoning it. Is that do you think that's gonna happen in the future?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so interestingly, if you look at if you look at things like rag models, so traditional, like, retrieval augmented generation, and you ask questions like, who are the people mentioned, you can data poison it. Mhmm. One of the things that you're seeing with a lot of deep research products like Hebia, and so this is just like a differentiator between Hebia and Try GPT Enterprise or between Hebia and and even, like, the Perplexity Spaces product is that instead of, like, going and pinging a search engine, Hebia goes in, reads every single file, and tells you whether or not they're related or not. So it's not search engine.
Speaker 3:It's more infinite effective context window. So the AI can process a lot more information. And and using that, it's it's better about, you know, having slightly less bias or, like, having the data skewed in, like, a a in in a way that, you know, a a search engine might.
Speaker 1:Speaking of context windows, I know that there's been, like, a little bit of an arms race. Google, I think, has, like, the biggest one at, like, a million tokens. Are you is that an important lever to pull when you're building your product and your system? Like, is that a important optimization vector, or is it just let's find the smartest model or the cheapest model or maybe cost doesn't even matter because of your clients? What are you optimizing for?
Speaker 3:Ultimately, we're trying to build the product that an AGI with infinite resources and infinite intelligence would use.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We're not trying to build the AGI or the model or, like, the the longer context window. We're trying to build an agent orchestration platform where you wouldn't judge, you know, a a artificial superintelligence by its ability to use an abacus or to, like, to do computations in its own context window. You would judge it by its ability to use a tool like Excel Mhmm. To do structured data processing. Similarly, we think that, like, the best way to do unstructured data processing won't even even be in a larger effective context whenever one model, but rather ways for it to orchestrate sub models to do computation on every file.
Speaker 3:And so if you look at what's going on with the JFK files, you're actually having one god model orchestrate a bunch of other smaller models and read with full attention over every document, but not, you know, you you don't have to jam that all into one infinitely long context window. It's an infinite effective context window.
Speaker 1:Was there any, like, preprocessing that you had to do with the files? Because I imagine a lot of these are, like, screenshots or, like, photos of, like, pretty messy scans of documents. Like, it's not exactly like a JSON file.
Speaker 3:A ton of of different processing. One of the the worst parts of, like, running an AI company, like, processing old documents, is that the documents, like, aren't are messy. And, like, ideally, you'd want, like, a multimodal model that could process pictures of every document and do that. But if
Speaker 1:I set up for
Speaker 3:that expensive, even slower, there's you know, it's there there's a context window issue there. Yep. So what we do is we we have probably the highest throughput indexing and, like, a highest accurate accuracy indexing engine that will actually use multimodal models for really hard documents, sometimes use, like, standard OCR Mhmm. Do, like, table and layout detection, and all this other stuff to feed it into something that LMs can, like, process in an easy way.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about the history of the company? Because you started, like, before the AI boom. And I remember you describing the company early on, and I was like, oh, that sounds kinda cool. And then, like, I saw you again, like, a couple years later. I was like, oh, this guy's working on, like, the hottest thing in the world.
Speaker 1:So how did you like, what's the prehistory of the company?
Speaker 3:Prehistory is I think I I made an early bet on large language models, and it and it paid off. I was in a PhD at Stanford
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And I was working on, honestly, just studying meta learning because I thought it would be a really important piece of technology. And as kind of, like, summer of twenty twenty unfolded, OpenAI destroyed all of our research. They released a paper on GPT three, which was, hey. Large language models are meta learners. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it took, like, the academic world that was trying to build Asia and were like, okay. You're never gonna do It's gonna happen in a closed source way, and and OpenAI will probably be the people that that invented it. And so I think being close to that shift and being close to the realization that this technology was gonna be important early on was like, okay. I should probably leave my PhD, and this will be the most important product and technology that I can build. And then spent the next two years, like, in the desert searching for customers that would pay for anything.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Building the best possible enterprise product that I thought future agents that I thought future people working alongside LLMs would want. And that just set us up to strike in a really fast, big, and market grabbing way when the iron was hot. I think How Yeah. Oh, please. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You're you're focused on the enterprise, I'm I'm just interested to get your opinion here because we've we've talked about it yesterday with Scott from Cognition. Do you feel like we're close to have you have you seen any teams get that you're excited about around like building a truly great consumer AI agent? We've sort of been promised for a long time this like workflow of like, hey, we're gonna book a flight. It'll book your hotel. It'll do this.
Speaker 2:And we just haven't, there's no dominant product that's doing that today. I'm curious just to get your opinion there. Do you feel like we're close to that super, super magic moment other than the sort of chat GBT sort of conversational chat search experience.
Speaker 1:Talk more about, like, super intelligence timelines than they do about just like AI booking me a flight. Yeah. I wanna know I wanna know your flight booking agent timeline.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what I wanna know.
Speaker 3:It's definitely more near term than Okay.
Speaker 1:A superologist. Than paperclip it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Paperclips are are your airplanes. I would say useful agents in consumer almost assuredly will be solved by the big mobile providers. And so it's almost like the worst space for a start up to work in.
Speaker 3:Honestly, there's a million start ups now building b two b AI, like, trying to compete with us and a bunch of our other competitors are trying to build it's like, it's already too late. Like, if the whole world's trying to do it, like, you're already way too late. Like, that you have to you have to start way before everyone's trying to build it. But I I think it will be done by OpenAI this year or sometime in the next year. I don't think it's gonna be a start up that doesn't.
Speaker 3:And I think it's just not because it requires partnerships. It requires, like Yeah. Honestly, API handshakes between agents, and and and APIs of external providers like Delta and United. And and I think that'll be that'll be a problem that requires a large language model scale company or or training scale company to
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that's a good point. We have the anti bot industrial complex that's just, like, preventing bots everywhere. And so if you're trying to build a consumer AI agent that's just a a rebranded bot, it's very hard to do unless you're OpenAI and you can go to DoorDash and say, look, like, let's do this deal. Our users want this.
Speaker 2:We're gonna be able to drive, you know, a very meaningful amount of traffic.
Speaker 1:Well, can you give us an update on kind of where the company is, where people can find you, and just kind of wrap it
Speaker 2:up because we've gotta move on to the next guy.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. The company is Hebia AI. You could just search Hebia on Google and then click on one of our paid ads to drive up our our customer acquisition cost.
Speaker 2:And it's hebia.com now, I noticed. You got the.com.
Speaker 3:We we got the we
Speaker 2:so there was someone squatting on that for, like, you know, the longest period
Speaker 3:of time. I was like, they they know exactly who I am. They're just gonna charge me
Speaker 2:a crazy amount
Speaker 3:of money for it. But, yeah, you can find us on on Hebia AI or Hebia.com, and I'm George Sevilleka on Twitter at g svulka. And we should be releasing as as the Trump administration releases more files, a variety of other interesting, like, AI deep dives. So That's amazing. Give follow and big fan of this of this show.
Speaker 3:Thanks for
Speaker 1:asking for Thanks
Speaker 2:for calling in. Yeah. It's fan fantastic way to just demonstrate the power of the product, and and thank you for your public service. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Guys. Talk soon. Bye.
Speaker 2:Citizen techno journalist.
Speaker 1:Citizen techno journalist. My two favorite wild card JFK conspiracies, the driver was responsible. People think that there's this conspiracy theory.
Speaker 2:You wanna grab the hat, John?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The hat. So people think that the driver was responsible because there was like an there's a burst of acceleration right at the wrong time and it shows that like maybe he was in on it like slowing the car down to make the shot easier. And then the really crazy conspiracy, it was a suicide by JFK.
Speaker 1:He wanted to like send a message to someone and so he was like, I'm
Speaker 6:gonna die from this. He got
Speaker 2:his Strange is right. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1:people used But there's an unlimited amount of conspiracies
Speaker 2:The crazy thing is is I do believe there was there was truly many many documentaries released all at the same time. Yeah. And it was just intentional. Like, I'm sure the truth was always in there somewhere.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to Topher from Albedo. Welcome to the stream. Wow. That is a great background.
Speaker 2:The command center.
Speaker 1:The command center.
Speaker 5:In the command center.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Fantastic. Young company that incorporated in 2020. Right? And first satellites in orbit already.
Speaker 1:And breaking news, you gotta update your Wikipedia page because on Albedo Space, it says the company plans to launch its first satellite in 2025. That's old
Speaker 2:news. Old news.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, someone updates that. We need to figure out the Wikipedia thing. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We started, late twenty twenty in Y Combinator winner '21 batch. Fantastic. We got our start.
Speaker 1:Wow. Hard tech in in YC. Another narrative violation. But but break it down for me. Like, what does the satellite actually do?
Speaker 1:And, like, where is the path I see on the wiki again? Plan to have a fleet of 24 spacecraft. Is that accurate? Are you thinking bigger? And what happens when this constellation goes up?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so, basically, what we do or or we we build satellites that fly super low in this new orbit called Belio, very low Earth orbit. And so this first one, they're pretty big. They're, like, walk in freezer size. We just launched this first one on Friday as the cake top run transporter 13.
Speaker 5:So, like, the big satellite up top got dropped off in Leo. There's epic drop off video of us getting, like, dropped off right over the Nile. So that was super cool. But the the kind of novelty that we're bringing is is building these satellites to operate in this very low orbit for an extended period of time. And so then we can capture imagery or other things at a resolution that today you can only get from planes or drones on the commercial side or from the national systems on the government side.
Speaker 5:And so it kind of is a breakthrough in terms of the data quality at low cost that we can capture from this new orbit where there's a lot of drag and and different things that have prevented people from building satellites that could that fly this low before. But that's that's what this first satellite will do, and and we'll get down there in in about two months from LEO to VLEO.
Speaker 2:So Talk about just from when you started the company, had been plenty of high profile space oriented companies, but it feels like I just can imagine there was way less just excitement and interest even then when you were starting the company. How how have kind of conversations even on the capital side shifted since then? Because I'm sure your inbox these days is is full of inbound, but maybe it wasn't always the case.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Definitely, there's a lot more interest these days in in from the cap you know, capital allocation community on the national security technology side. And for us so the where we got the idea was actually in in president Trump's first administration. He tweeted this, classified satellite image. Basically, declassified it as the president.
Speaker 5:People saw it. Were like, well, this looks like 10 centimeters per pixel, which is about the size of a coaster that you put your drink on. Must be from a billion dollar reconnaissance satellite. Would be amazing to have commercially because it could replace planes and drones for all these industrial applications that go through the pains of flying those platforms today, but it would cost a billion dollars even from LEO because you need a huge telescope. And so that's what initially drove the idea for very low earth orbit.
Speaker 5:At that time, there was still say investors were still bullish on earth observation as a whole today. That is not generally the case. It's been a tough market in terms of the capital that has gone in compared to what's come out. For us, tapping into that commercial aircraft and drone market, which is just super fragmented and the value prop is pretty obvious, if you can match that resolution from space, you have global coverage. It's on demand.
Speaker 5:You image spots much more frequently, and it's much cheaper. And so the resolution is key there. And then to to to the question on the national security side, there's this big shift right now to proliferated architectures because of counter space threats from our adversaries that make our big bespoke satellites very vulnerable. And so what has historically prevented that in a lot of ways is the capability trade off, where if you proliferate and build way more satellites than a few big bespoke ones, maybe the capability isn't as good. In our case, Beelio really unlocks these two things that have previously been mutually exclusive, which is that exquisite capability but at low cost.
Speaker 5:So now you can spend that, you know, cost savings on proliferation, which is much more resilient, creates much more coverage. And so, yeah, it's definitely a good time to be to be launching this first satellite, be first Sevelia with with the tailwinds underway on the national security side.
Speaker 2:Speaking of national security, when you see, espionage and enterprise SaaS, does that keep you up at night? Your guys are obviously in much more sort of critical industry in many ways. SaaS is important, but also having sort of global visibility.
Speaker 1:Neck and neck, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Neck and neck. But but, yeah, you know, do you think that, you know, how seriously do you guys have to take security given that you're processing all this very sensitive data?
Speaker 5:Definitely seriously. And we we not only from, like, a the data perspective, but a lot of our technology is ITAR controlled. And so that drives certain security levels. We have a, what they call, a tier three license, from the remote sensing regulatory body. That means that we have additional kind of cybersecurity requirements.
Speaker 5:And so that has driven us to, yeah, think think about the cybersecurity and and those sorts of things, early on because we had to. But, yeah, I mean, given given what we're doing and the, you know, the more exposure we have now than we did years ago, it's definitely, yeah.
Speaker 1:You talk a little bit about the pros and cons of VLEO? I mean, I'm sure that you get, you know, higher resolution with smaller telescope. I remember early on someone was telling me that, you know, oh, imagine the Hubble telescope, you know, just turn it around and point it at Earth, and that's probably what the spy satellites look like. And, there's probably some benefits there, but then you're also fighting gravity. So do you have, like, crazy booster capability?
Speaker 1:Is that what you're optimizing for? Like, just pros and cons of VLEO.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the we would say, actually, the hardest part for our architecture in VLEO is, like, the kind of robotics precision pointing control system technology that we need to build because the satellite's moving so fast, and we have this big telescope in a tiny angle. And so being able to collect a bunch of different areas, make those images not blurry, that is where, really, the hardest part is for any big space based telescope, but especially in BLEO. But then there also is a lot of atmosphere there as well. So we have a a bunch of propulsion on board.
Speaker 5:Being heavy and having a slick area is pretty helpful for that. And so, like, if you put I think historically, a lot of people have looked at VLEO with CubeSats, and those just don't last, like, very long there because you can imagine, like, a bowling ball versus a feather ripping through the atmosphere. And so we we pack a ton of mass in these pretty big satellites with solar rays covering everything because we keep them body mounted opposed to deploying out, like, traditional satellites, which which which hurt some of the power. But then there's a bunch of, like, atomic oxygen stuff there too, and there's special coatings and things that we do for that and and to protect the optics and the and the solar array. So there's a bunch there's kinda, like, a bunch of different categories.
Speaker 5:The most obvious one is drag that, for us, our average mission life will be about five years per satellite. It's actually very dependent on the eleven year solar cycle. And the good thing about the drag, though, is it's a safe place to be. So, like, from a space safety perspective, there's concerns in LEO. If satellites break, they're in orbit for, you know, fifty, a hundred years.
Speaker 5:But in in V LEO, it's like a matter of weeks or days. And so it's, not you know, it's a sustainable place
Speaker 2:to be. Has running this company made you wanna travel more or less? I could imagine you just get an image of somewhere sometimes and you're like, there. I feel
Speaker 1:like I'm in The Maldives. Know what it looks like. A bunch of water.
Speaker 2:But I could also see it. You just see this place and you're like, wow, this looks fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's no one else around. I gotta go get this barren island I found.
Speaker 2:Not that you have time travel, but, you know, someday maybe.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I have definitely gotten better at at my geography skills, running this company for four years. But, I mean, we we will start getting our first pictures in a couple months when we get to Vilia. So that's really when we'll have, you know Come on.
Speaker 5:Been there, done that in terms of all the spots that
Speaker 2:we image and and maybe drive a
Speaker 1:lot less. How do you think about the the the market size and the trade off between commercial and government contracts? I don't know how much you can talk about the government size, but but there's, like, famous examples of, you know, satellite imagery being used to see how many cars are in the Walmart parking lot and some hedge funds saying, oh, well, Walmart's gonna miss on earnings because they didn't have enough cars in the parking lot buying stuff, and it's a proxy metric. Obviously, hedge funds have a lot of cash. They can pay for a lot of data.
Speaker 1:It's maybe less cool than, hey. We're helping keep America safe. But, obviously, it's a real market. Like, you're running a business. You gotta sell to whoever you can.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about it in the early stage for customers?
Speaker 5:So with this first satellite, we'll operate solo for the first two years, then we'll start deploying more in 2027.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And we have, pre and we have this reserve program because there's a finite amount of imagery capacity that we have. And we've signed 22 customers on that, and the the by far majority are commercial. Sure. And it's a breadth of different industries. Like, we have mining, power lines, agriculture, mapping, natural gas pipelines, like a lot of these different kind of industrial use cases.
Speaker 5:And so we we see a huge opportunity there, not because there's any precedent for it because, like, kinda like I was saying, the the earth observation market has not done as well as it as it was hoped. But from that aircraft and drone perspective and those proof points of those those contracts, we have kind of strategically tried to cover a lot of those different applications so that for the first two years, we can demonstrate the value across those. And we've we've, like, completely sold out of our capacity over over The United States as as as well as a few other regions. Our allies as well are very interested in this level of exquisite data, and so that will be a big customer base for us. And then from the kinda split with the national security side, we have this, you know, not only this this Clarity satellite that we have, but we've built the bus that we call Precision in house for the VLEO environment, and it can host these very large payloads.
Speaker 5:And so from a platform perspective and these kind of proliferated but exquisite mission sets, that's where some of the the opportunity with the US government will be along with delivering data from our satellites. But we also, you know, see the need for these dedicated platforms and what VLEO can bring to the table, not only for just pictures, but a lot of other things.
Speaker 2:Do you think the dynamics of space have made you and the team better operators? There's so much around, you know, just sort of these long term planning horizons. Like startups traditionally are like, we're just trying to do this as fast We're gonna ship, we're gonna iterate, but like that Okay. Doesn't you can't it doesn't you the the you gotta move fast, but then the you can't just you don't wanna be breaking things. It's expensive to get stuff up, and then it sets you back years, and that can be that can kill the company.
Speaker 2:Right? So Alright. Has that you know, how how has that impacted how you, you know, build?
Speaker 5:Have absolutely, like, learned a ton, as a first time founder in the last four years, and it's been an amazing journey. We, I I think the main way we've approached that is just by hiring more experienced engineers than the average startup would. And so that people know, you know, even whether they come from a new space or kind of a a tech, world or, like, a OG aerospace prime world, they know exactly what needs to be done from day one. And so we've been able to move a lot faster via that while still with this level of you know, these aren't CubeSats. These are, like, very complex space robots, basically, with precision optics and crazy control systems.
Speaker 5:And so we don't have the thousand satellite production line where we're, like, doing the on orbit testing constantly, but we've spent more time testing on the ground and just kind of understanding, you know, the trade space from an architecture perspective. And I think that's helped us move faster even though it is a complex capability and especially the learnings we'll take from this first one. And, I mean, that we the commissioning that we're doing right now, we're, like, I think, like, two weeks ahead of our internal schedule. Because you wouldn't expect to put up a space robot, and it just, like it's not buggy and stuff. You have to fix stuff.
Speaker 5:And we've been our engineers in in here on the first day were like, is this actually the real data, is this simulated data? It's just kind of working. And I think a lot of that is just smart design, like, really good planning, and that's all kind of a result of the engineering team and the bias towards, you know, the the seasoned experienced folks on that side.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Answer.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll let you get out of here soon. Last question. How was DC?
Speaker 5:DC was great. Yeah. I heard you were out there as well. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very briefly.
Speaker 5:The the the podcast. It's very important work. Yeah. It was great. We did, manifest demo day, which is awesome.
Speaker 5:It was, this event to kind of present to different military and intelligence potential customers and users. And it was we had the big mock up on stage of the satellite so you could see it to scale. We had just done a pass That's awesome. Where we had sent some dark dark pixels through the payload sensor. And, yeah, yeah, it was it was a great turnout.
Speaker 5:All the all the demos were honestly awesome. Like, the the the guys that put on the event that everybody brought out, it was it was pretty incredible to see all the tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mike's a killer. He's a awesome event. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot.
Speaker 5:Thanks, Scott.
Speaker 1:Gonna be back
Speaker 2:here Cheers.
Speaker 1:I wanna see some of those photos.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where where are you sending it first? Amman. Right? You send us to the Amman and you Yeah. And you zoom in so closely that you can read the capital allocators pitch deck that they have at the pool next to them and you can see what they're investing can talk about
Speaker 2:that good fundraising strategy. Right?
Speaker 1:Leave your deck on Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. Just get a mole at every Amman. Yes. And have them print out the deck. The janitor.
Speaker 2:The janitor and have just leave them around the property.
Speaker 1:Take them.
Speaker 2:Leave by the hot tub, leave them by the pool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whoever your head of spying is, just Yeah. Embed them at the Amman as a janitor.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Let them let them kind
Speaker 2:of It's a ten year game. Let them become the manager at Amman Giri. Yes. And then, you know, and This is the way. And just sort of let let them become so embedded in the property Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and get the guests really trust them Yeah. And say, hey, are you leading any series a's?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What's going on?
Speaker 2:You're doing any term sheets this week?
Speaker 1:Boom. Boom.
Speaker 2:All it takes is one trade to make back
Speaker 1:Big bags. All those stuff
Speaker 2:old bags of cash.
Speaker 1:It's great. It is a very, very cool company. He was he was kind of alluding
Speaker 2:to Planet Labs. We got Lee Jacobs and Cyan. Let's go.
Speaker 4:Hey. Welcome, Chris. What's up?
Speaker 1:Nice chain.
Speaker 2:What's up? Congratulations, guys.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Already putting those LP dollars to work with some nice jewelry.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. This oh, this little thing?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:No. That was that was fun one.
Speaker 1:That was a fun one.
Speaker 4:Around here at at Long Journey. So, yeah, sometimes I put this on.
Speaker 1:You know? Fantastic. Can you give us the overview? Where'd Long Journey start? How'd you get here?
Speaker 1:What are you announcing today?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Long Journey started in 2020 when Cyan and I, you know, we've been really good friends from our days at AngelList.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And she had decided that, you know, she wanted to go back into her roots at early stage.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And we decided to start a fun together. And that was in 2020, and that was, like, May ago.
Speaker 7:So Yeah. I basically asked him to meet me at a coffee shop, and I said, what do you think about me joining you? And we team up together, and he said, I've been manifesting this basically. Like, yes. And that was it.
Speaker 7:Like, we there was no further discussion related. So that was it.
Speaker 4:Totally. I kinda knew I kinda knew it was gonna happen. We had just had this really powerful, you know, way of working together. And when she said, let's work together, was like, yeah. I've been waiting for you to ask for that.
Speaker 4:Let's do it. That was about five years ago. And today, we announced our newest fund, which is a hundred and 80 1 point 1 8. As many eighteens as we could fit in with 18 on the on the end of it. There's always
Speaker 2:there's always a few more, at least in crypto. You know? You could Yeah.
Speaker 4:Totally. Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 1:The numerology is big in tech these days. Everyone loves numerology.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:But I prefer I prefer a more creative one than just the $4.20 69. The $4.20 69 is a little played out at this point. I like
Speaker 3:that you're yeah. The numbers are going,
Speaker 4:you know, high is a it means life. And, you know, you've probably heard or
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Or miss for something. You're given 18 or 36, which is, like, life, and we really think of it as, our role is to is really respectful of the dollars we've gotten from our LPs, but also to give the gifts to entrepreneurs so they can give more and more gifts. And, ultimately, we're we're we're pro life. I mean, that's not exactly what I mean to say, but it's like, we love life here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 4:You know, long journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk is this sorry. I didn't if I didn't catch it. Is this fund three? Fund four?
Speaker 4:The third institutional fund, but it's technically the the Fourth. Fourth fund. I tried to it's it's confusing for a reason, you you know, just to throw people off.
Speaker 2:Keep them on their toes. Certainty. Keep on their toes. Has the strategy changed at any point? You know, obviously, we have a very close relationship with with Justin Mares.
Speaker 2:We've joked about this on the on the show. He's an adventure partner at Long Journey for those that don't know and I always joke about it. Anytime I see an exciting company, Justin Mares is always like, yeah, I got in at a two and a half cap. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, so I mean, like, you guys have been very intentional around valuation.
Speaker 2:You actually have extremely, I feel like risk on approach where, know, some of the, some of the, not to say it's not calculated, but you know, you're willing to give a hundred thousand dollars at some point to somebody who just literally just has, like, a crazy idea. How you know, talk about kind of your strategy. Has it evolved, or has it just been coming back, you know, always back to kind of early stage roots? Let me
Speaker 7:start with our thesis, which is chase the magically weird. And when we went and looked back at all of our companies that that had the highest returns, they had one thing in common, which was that nobody believed in them at the time. And so Justin, you know, is remarkable at finding people and companies at their inception point where sometimes, like, he like, he created inflection grants, for example, and he's always doing interesting things on the edge, like Yeah. Doing things in Edge City.
Speaker 4:When when he started Ketlin Fire in 02/2015, he was like, yeah. I he was like, there's this thing called bone broth. And I was like, what's bone broth? He was like, yeah. You take these bones.
Speaker 4:You, like, squeeze them. You put them in a box, and you can sell them for $8 at Whole Foods. And I was like, okay. Tell me more. That was pretty absurd.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Now, as you know, it's it's a thing.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Bone broth is everywhere and everything, and everybody talks about it. So Yep. What we like to do is invest in things before it becomes a buzzword and it becomes consensus. And so when everybody is chasing, for example, the application layer of AI right now, we're thinking about what is next.
Speaker 7:And so we're already planning ahead for the future that it comes after what everyone's investing in right now. And we've done that consistently, and I think that's where all of the alpha is. And, you know, it it really works for us, and it's where we like to play.
Speaker 2:So it's do you think it's getting harder? You know, people have talked recently about how the the, you know, the YC batches, everything feels very on trend. Right? You've got defense tech space, AI agent infrastructure. It feels like, you know, fifteen years ago, there were still secrets, right?
Speaker 2:Whereas now information gets out super quickly. Now the benefit if you're an investor is like if you're ahead on a trend, you can invest in something and then two months later it's getting a four x, you know, markup and you look really good. But do you find that, you know you know, do you see that the Internet is is making it even harder to stay ahead of and find what's weird, or is it just about, you know, sort of thinking differently? And
Speaker 7:No. I think that so I always think that I I love Y Combinator, so I don't ever wanna say anything negative about them. But, you know, I think that they serve a great purpose when you go I've I've found a couple of companies in my career at Y Combinator. But you Block
Speaker 4:Security was
Speaker 7:Block Security, for example. You're basically searching for a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And and you're also you know, you're dealing with some pretty stiff competition. When you go in that room, it's like the who's who of venture capital and angel investing. And so, you know, I don't really wanna play in that arena. You know, I want to dream about the future and figure out what's coming so that when that entrepreneur starts to go out and pitch people initially, a lot of people will be like, well, that doesn't fit into our thesis. You know, investing in nanotechnology right now.
Speaker 7:Right. You know? Like, no one's thinking about nanotech, but maybe nanotech is one of the next things. And so that's where we wanna actually figure out, you know, where are we gonna be in six to eight years? And that's we wanna get ahead of it and do the picks and shovels of whatever that is.
Speaker 7:So we did that with Crusoe. We did that with Together dot ai. We're doing it with, we have a stealth company that's, you know, in the chip space. And so we're doing things that will power AI, but staying away from kind of the this Cambrian explosion of people investing in things at high valuations because we're not gonna get a price advantage if we enter now. We should have seen it in advance.
Speaker 7:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Syan, can you tell me about the diamond age?
Speaker 7:Oh my gosh. Yes. It's my favorite book. It's by Neal Stephenson. And I remember the first time I read this book, if you if you pick it up and you try to read it, the very first ten pages or so, there's this character that's so annoying that I couldn't get past the first ten pages.
Speaker 7:And then my husband was like, hey. He dies. And I'm like, when? It was like, by, like, page 11, if you can
Speaker 2:just get him through if you can
Speaker 7:get through this I think his name's Bud. Yeah. He's a horrible character with, like, a skull gun attached to his head.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:But once you get past that, you know, Neal Stephenson, one of the reasons why he's one of my favorite authors is he's a historian, first and foremost. And so he predicts the future by going deep into the past and understanding historically what the trends have been, and you can determine how the future will play out based off of that. And so one of the things that he predicted among many things, like in Snow Crash, the book that he wrote, he predicted meta. He predict predicted, VR. He predict second life, and, there was a company called their.com and virtual reality, period.
Speaker 7:And then in the diamond age, he predicts an AI future where there's a little girl who gets a book, and it's indistinguishable from an iPad. And this book basically teaches her to adulthood. And so you can imagine a future where, you know, scarcity we live in a world of abundance. So the other thing in in in Diamond Age is everything is manufactured and three d printed and on a on a on a level where everything is perfect. So if everything's perfect, the thing that becomes valuable is human innovation and human thought and human artistry.
Speaker 7:So while everybody's worrying about how we're gonna mass produce art and music will be you know, and and code and all these things are gonna be created by AI, the artisan is always going to be able to create that desk that you're at. You know? A piece of art, a piece of music that's original from the human mind is always gonna stand out as being different. And so I think that human innovation and and human ingenuity and things made with human hands are just gonna become incredibly valuable. So I based a lot of my investment decisions over the past, I don't know, probably over ten years based off of Neil Stevenson's work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And and so I'm just a I'm a huge fan of his, and I'm gonna be on a panel with him coming up.
Speaker 3:I'm all
Speaker 7:excited about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You I mean, you think about Palmer with Oculus VR coming from Snow Crash. Delian's favorite book for a long time was Seven Eves, another Neal Stephenson book. Can you tell me about the actual diamond market?
Speaker 1:I believe you invested in a company that Yeah. Makes diamonds.
Speaker 7:They call diamond.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting to go from sci fi to actual investing thesis.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I invested in Diamond Foundry early, and the thesis behind that was, when everybody thought that they were just gonna make fancy diamonds that we wear for wedding rings
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I thought, what is the secret here? The secret is that we're actually gonna need compute, and diamond wafers are going to be a thing. And, also, industrial diamonds, which are actually the more expensive diamonds, and they're not pretty. We're gonna need that for cutting, for manufacturing, and for, you know, all sorts of applications. Saw blades are made out of diamonds.
Speaker 7:And I went around to other investors, and I told them about this future. Going back to magically weird, they're like, you're crazy. Like, this is just gonna end up being a three carat diamond, and this market is they kept comparing it to De Beers and, know, comparing it to, you know, the the diamond market. And I said, no. That's not you're not seeing the bigger picture here.
Speaker 7:And that was in completely informed by the diamond age because in order to have this, you know, post scarcity future of abundance, diamonds were a critical part of that. And I don't know if you remember in the book, but there are things that are made of diamonds in there. You know, there are buildings made of diamonds. They're just like all of the technology was enabled because of that unlock, that we needed this this material that was virtually indestructible.
Speaker 2:How how important do you feel science fiction is to the future? Right? It seems like and and is there more that the technology industry should be doing to invest in you know, we have we've we've had people like Jason Carmen on the show who make documentaries about tech today. He wants to eventually make sci fi, but do we need to be funding a lot more science fiction media? Is that one of the ways Are
Speaker 1:we running out of sci fi? It feels like we've invented most of the things that, you know, I grew up with except for, you know, flying cars, but there's already flying car startups. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So my biggest gripe with Hollywood and with media in general is it's cheaper to create a dystopia than a utopia. So when we move into AI generation, we'll be able to create utopias cheaply, and that actually will allow us to tell stories about a scientific future, that actually is possible where, you know, before, in order to render all those things and to get things that didn't exist was incredibly expensive. So the filmmaker just went to the dystopia. It's much easier to create a wasteland to create, like, robots destroyed everything than to create robots made the future better for us.
Speaker 7:And so I do think here's what's really interesting. I gave a talk recently, and I asked everybody in the audience, who here has red diamond age? Only one person, and he was 20 years old, raised his hand. That is alarming to me that people are not reading more science fiction and not writing more science fiction and not thinking about the future and what it can become. You know, I'm really excited about shows and books like free body problem because we do need to start thinking about we did send signals into space.
Speaker 7:They will be received at some point, and there will be aliens coming if they exist. And so, like, these are things that are existential threats, not only, well, to all of humanity that will bind us together where we actually start caring about things as humans rather than nation states and things like that is when Earth is going to encounter an outside force is gonna be one of the most unifying forces for our entire planet. And so I think we do need to think about that. It is a future that could happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The utopia It's
Speaker 7:disturbing to me that more people don't read in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're not helping there.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to We're reading posts.
Speaker 2:We're reading a hundred posts a day to people. No. I think that the utopia versus dystopia thing is super important. You know, we see this on social media. If you post everything's bad, you'll get a hundred thousand likes.
Speaker 2:But if you go, you know, no one's ever had more access to food, education, health care, all this stuff. It's like, you you know, nobody
Speaker 1:Nobody wants to see that. Want conflict. Yeah. Need Dystopia means conflict. It's antagonist.
Speaker 7:About it. We don't talk about the 99% of everything that's going right. We fixate on the 1% that's going wrong. Yep. And it becomes this narrative that the world is going to to can I curse?
Speaker 7:The world is going to shit. And and and, basically, unfortunately, young people, when you ask them if the world is a better or worse place, they think it's a worse place
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Because they're on TikTok, because they're on social media, because they're being fed a feed of nonstop violence and death and Tesla cars blowing up. And and so your view of the world is dark and gloomy when it's actually you know, people are living longer, people are more prosperous. You know, there's so many things going on that's just so great for humanity, but we don't celebrate those things. And so I'm really hoping that part of the the next four years of you know, when you see people working on deep tech and there's this new sort of reinvigoration of technology where people are excited about the future that they start actually highlighting and talking more about the things that are going right than the things that are going wrong.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Sort of a one last sort of random question. I'm curious to get hear how you guys think about this. We seem to be entering a period of sort of renewed nationalism globally, like Europe's waking up, you know, America's, you know, fighting trade wars with our closest allies. This comes at a time where, you know, Lee, I think we met for the first time at this sort of pop up city, right?
Speaker 2:There's sort of these renewed experiments around cities, nation states, network states, you know, do you foresee a future where people are traveling way more and we're all investing globally, or are we going through an era where, you know, do you do you do you imagine that most of this fund, as an example, will be deployed here in The US, or are you guys thinking you know, how are you thinking about international?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Let's say I answer the the broader frame. I think from our perspective, we're really open minded. You know, if you're really gonna do invest in the magically weird and do things that, you know, the absurd before it becomes consensus, you have to stay open minded. So we've done things all over the world in Europe and in Brazil and and and stuff like that.
Speaker 4:But in general, we've always been really excited about what happens in America. And I think if I had to guess, most of the dollars will be deployed that way. But I, yeah, these little mini cities, it's such an interesting future to imagine. I do think that there will be we're on the recombination phase and, like, the Havoc actually, the first name of the fund that I started was Havoc VC. Nafal wanted me to keep it that way, but, you know, maybe one day we'll get back to long journey.
Speaker 4:We'll rebrand in in a few years, and you guys will get the exclusive on back to Havoc. Fantastic. Yeah. But That's what like. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Havoc.vc was my URL. I do think that the three combination creates opportunities for new ways of living in new cities and edge city, the stuff that, you know, Janine and team there are working on is really powerful where we met Jordy. I don't know what you think about this or something.
Speaker 7:Countries have the culture that we have in America where it's okay to fail. Like, when when I speak broad you know, I go abroad and I speak in France or Italy or wherever. I have entrepreneurs who come up to me afterwards, and they say, you know, I don't live in a culture where failure is an option.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And so I think that's one thing that makes us special. We also have laws that are pretty well established around businesses, like, that we we understand how the framework works. Whereas if you invest abroad, you have to understand the legal framework of that country, which can be problematic sometimes. And then I think going back to the diamond age, the diamond age does cover network states, and it does cover, some really interesting, very futuristic concepts there. There's this group of people that they call the neo Victorians, and, they basically have everything that's made by hand, but they're the most technologically advanced and the most wealthy group of people.
Speaker 7:And they basically band together on a set set of values. And so it's possible that we'll start seeing that going forward, and we might see investable opportunities in in those. But it's still very frontier, and it's still very on the edge, that sort of thinking. But in general, I think probably a majority of our investing is just gonna stay in The United States.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Love it. Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on the new fund. We gotta bring the size gong
Speaker 2:for you. There we go. Thank you for bringing the chain on as well. It's a big fund. It's great to talk to you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:You so much for having us.
Speaker 1:And we'll talk to soon.
Speaker 2:See you guys. Good luck out there. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 4:See you later.
Speaker 2:Very cool. It's hard to do hard to do four funds in basic Well, didn't
Speaker 1:call it fund four because in Chinese, the number four is for death. So that's probably what from the numerology perspective, that's probably why they
Speaker 2:skipped Go
Speaker 1:straight into fund eight coming up quickly. That's
Speaker 2:got Preston Holland.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:There he
Speaker 6:up, brothers? What's up, brothers? If there is if there's anything that we should talk about in the, temple of technology, it is private jets. I think that this is Yeah. Probably one of the more fitting, segments.
Speaker 2:No, we've been waiting for this. You're our private aviation correspondent. You got some professional studio lighting setup. You're looking great. Should we kick it
Speaker 1:off with G650ER versus BBJ? Like a lot of our listeners are trying to decide between those two. Where where like, what considerations would you make if you're trying to make a big purchase?
Speaker 6:If you're going BBJ or $6.50 ER, personally, I'm going $6.50 ER for the sole reason that the market is far more liquid. BBJs tend to sit on the market. I think the absorption rate is something like four hundred and fifty days on market is the average because you have to think, you have Grant Cardone and Saudi Princes. Those are your two buyers of your jet. And if they don't like it, then you're just gonna be stuck with it.
Speaker 6:Whereas with the $6.50 ER, you know, let's say, Ramp might do another up round. I don't know. Maybe there's a buyer there. I don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 2:Eric's too Eric's way too modest.
Speaker 1:He's way too modest. Way
Speaker 6:too modest.
Speaker 1:Alright. But, yeah, I I I take your point. I take your point.
Speaker 2:But, hey, Evan Evan Spiegel. He's also a buyer.
Speaker 1:He's got a BBJ. Yeah. He's a good guy. He has his own own hangar there too.
Speaker 2:The snap hangar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When we discussed this, our argument was that, BBJ, little bit less flexible on where you can take it. Sure. It makes sense if you're a politician, you're landing at major regional airports, major international airports for big campaign stops. But if you're more of a CEO doing the off sites, doing the ski trips, you want something that can land at a smaller airport.
Speaker 1:You think it's a reasonable way to think about
Speaker 6:it? I think that I think that it's almost like you've been reading my newsletter, because I make that exact argument because BDJs are very cool, but now you're limited to really long runways. And so who you know, the whole point of private jets is that you get to access the over 5,000 runways that exist in The United States, which is a fun fact. There's more airports than Chipotle's in The United States.
Speaker 5:No way.
Speaker 6:So, like, just to to put it into perspective of, like, how many airports there are.
Speaker 2:Wow. And we gotta triple it. And then we gotta triple it again. We need an airport in every suburb of I mean, that's
Speaker 1:the answer to the flying car. Just have Yeah. Just have airports everywhere. I can fly. Oh, I'm going 10 miles past town.
Speaker 1:Have a Six fifty ER.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We've had a popular flying car manufacturer called Gulfstream for very Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:No. I I always say my line is you can you can sleep in a jet, you can't fly a house. So if you're making if you're making Making that kind a, you know Yeah. If you're making that, if you're coming up, oh, should I buy my first house? Should I should I get a private jet?
Speaker 2:What, you know, the answer's obvious. Answer's obvious.
Speaker 6:Well, you you guys talk a lot about stock tips. I mean, where better to get good stock tips than the FBO? I mean, it is prime listening for stock Exactly.
Speaker 2:That's right. Talk about I'd love to get a high level market update on just private aviation broadly. We're at this interesting time. You know, are we in a correction? Are we in a recession?
Speaker 2:Is the economy crashing? My sense is that the the whales that sort of move the private aviation market are insulated to some degree from fluctuations in the market, but what's happening in your neck of the woods?
Speaker 6:So private jet flyers tend to fly above small market corrections. Right? So you you you go you look back to 02/2008 now. There's a lot of of carnage there and and and a lot of you know, you've got bad practices, obviously, in real estate. You had a lot of bad practices in private jets too.
Speaker 6:And so people were buying positions and flipping them and just a lot of a lot of nonsense shenanigans that happened. What we're experiencing right now is is, not that. The the market has got really hot during COVID. You saw, if you look at, like, valuation softwares in private aviation, and they do exist, you see this kind of depreciation curve, and there's a pop right at the end of twenty twenty, tended to peak right fall fall of '20 '20 '2, which is when all the other, you know, sort of assets. So, but but really peaked in that.
Speaker 6:We've been coming down off that high. We're not I wouldn't say that we're back to normal quite yet. So, like, if you look at the trajectory we should have been on in 2019 barring the pandemic because you gotta remember, you know, if if if you remember way back then, which felt like thirty years ago, but, during the pandemic, so many people that probably could have flown private but didn't now said, oh, well, I still wanna be able to travel, so I'm gonna go ahead and fly private. You see, you saw Wheels Up. You saw Vista.
Speaker 6:You saw all of these companies just kinda go bananas in growth because so many new entrants were into the market. Well, that since eased off as, you know, interest rates have gone up and kinda the economy's cooled off a little bit and you you know, kind of the the fringe, private flyers. I an interesting quote that I heard, in kind of a a a happy hour setting from an aviation executive was there's a lot of wheels up King Air flyers going back to comfort plus. They're not even the first class flyers. They're more of the comfort plus flyers.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, we kinda had this this market correction, but, this year, there's there's some tailwinds for 2024, some optimism. Twenty twenty three in kind of the transaction space was relatively slow. You typically see a bump in the fourth quarter, and we did again last year, but not quite as as sharp as we had kind of in previous years and what everybody's expecting. A lot of people anticipating bonus depreciation. And for those that are not obsessed with buying assets and depreciating them, it means that you can take a % of the cost in the first year to reduce your tax basis.
Speaker 6:So what it ends up doing kind of when you do do the math, is a bit it's about 20% of your purchase price that you get in tax savings in that first year. So if you finance the aircraft, you know, now you basically are just paying monthly for access to the airplane, and are able to carry it, you know, over over the life of of the drone the aircraft. Charter market slowed down a fair amount last year. It's recovered okay in the first quarter this year, not, you know, not to the to the levels that it was in '22 and '23. But it's, it's definitely better sorry.
Speaker 6:Twenty one and '22, it's better than it was in 2023. But there's been this and this is a macro shift into kind of fractional, the net jets and flex jets of the world. Even from owning aircraft or chartering, there's been a lot of growth in kind of that segment. So it's a little bit about what we're seeing. Bonus appreciation, whenever it does get passed, is definitely gonna be a stimulant to transacting of airplanes.
Speaker 2:When it when is the when when will that be decided? Is it is it known? And and what's your is there a prediction market set up for this yet? Are you are you going
Speaker 6:That's a good question. I I would I would love to see if Polymarket's got a, got a % bonus depreciation set up, like, when it actually happens. So Trump addressed it in the State of the Union speech. He he said a % costing. That's kind of code word for a % bonus depreciation as the rest of us know it.
Speaker 6:It it was it was almost through Congress last year.
Speaker 1:I love that he's addressing the private jet market in the State of the Union. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's great. Well, the private jet market got it well, it's it's a beautiful funny that you mentioned that. It's a beautiful contrast from, the last budgetary proposal, which specifically called out private jets something like 12 times specifically in, like, a two page document, basically saying we're gonna cut all of the private jet loopholes for, you know, corporate executives, yada yada yada. Obviously, Trump is, he likes private aviation. I mean, there's there's no there there is no hiding it that Trump appreciates a good private jet.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so, so yeah. So so kind of the sentiment is a little bit more positive. A % budget appreciation actually almost made it all the way through congress last year, but the Republican, the Republican Senate did not wanna give the Biden administration a win before the election, and so it it died. But it was it was there. I mean, we were we were on the, you know, two yard line.
Speaker 6:So I think I I I don't I don't know exactly when kind of what I'm hearing from some of my clients is they're anticipating, you know, one of those any day now type things, from what they're hearing in Washington. So I I think it's any day now.
Speaker 1:What about Starlink? How has adoption been of Starlink on private jets? It means it seems like it'd be a no brainer, but are there barriers to actually retrofitting planes? And are there certain planes that are easier to retrofit? Is it expensive?
Speaker 1:I imagine that it's got to be the number one request for a lot of people.
Speaker 6:It it definitely is. Starlink is gobbling up market share, but as a percentage of the overall fleet installation base, it's still pretty small. I don't know exactly off the top of my head what the what kind of the percentage penetration is. Mhmm. But it's growing faster than any of the other providers.
Speaker 6:Right? So there's there's transitions. You have connectivity in in private jets has been undergone a little bit of a transition from surface to air. So think cell phone tower to private jet
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:To satellite from above low Earth orbit. And so there's been the legacy ground to ground to air systems are kind of phasing out. You've got the ATG 4,000, for instance, which is a very technical, older Wi Fi system. Now they have the selection between, do I go to the l five Wi Fi, or do I switch over to Starlink? And when you talk about you know, it's it's anywhere from a hundred and 50 to $350,000 to install the equipment.
Speaker 6:And then, last time that I looked, I think the unlimited Wi Fi package is, $10 a month, for unlimited Starlink. That's why. It's funny. They the way they measure that is by speed. How fast are you going is how they determine how they're gonna charge you.
Speaker 6:Wow. So if you go under 300 miles an hour, it's like 200 a month. And if you go over that, it's like 10,000 a month. So it's pretty significantly different.
Speaker 2:You ever heard this line before? What's the difference between private aviation and crack cocaine?
Speaker 6:I have.
Speaker 2:You can quit crack cocaine. I have a more I'd love to get your take. VistaJet announced a $600,000,000 investment. I believe it was yesterday. I think that's when we first chatted about having you come on.
Speaker 2:What you know, historically private aviation, you see a lot of tech guys look at the market and say, I'm gonna I need to dominate this.
Speaker 3:I love this.
Speaker 2:I need to I need to get a piece of it. You know, we we've seen sort of a lot of Silicon Valley attempts at cracking the private aviation code that just haven't worked for one reason or another. Some of these companies like even over the last few years, I feel like they spacked and then like really struggled. Right? Talk about the the Vista fundraise, and then maybe I'd love to kind of hear you expand around.
Speaker 2:Is this should Venture just stay far away and just let private equity play their game, or are there venture opportunities in the category?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So VistaJet just announced a $600,000,000 fundraise, which interesting enough, it that's actually down off of the the original leak, came in the fall where it's gonna be around a billion dollars. And then come February, it was gonna be 800,000,000, and then they settled it at $600,000,000. So, not pub it's not public information of what it raised at. Vista is actually based in Malta, so they're not even a they're not a US entity.
Speaker 6:And so there's a lot different reporting rules and and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Well, we're
Speaker 6:not gonna hit
Speaker 2:the size gong because they didn't they didn't hit their target.
Speaker 1:That's right. Maybe a little one.
Speaker 2:Little golf clap.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Little little pencil on the gong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But they
Speaker 6:it really, the the main reason is when you think about software and and you think about financing growth of something that has really low fixed costs and low cost of goods sold, you can really gas it with a bunch of capital, and and it's gonna just grow really quickly because your cost of goods sold don't scale proportionately with that revenue growth. That's the whole beautiful point of venture, right, is that you can if I've got a a pile full of money today, I can throw gas in the fire, and it's gonna grow exponentially. Well, private aviation is just really expensive. And so Vista, the reason that they raised this mostly is for kind of a deleveraging activity. They they had levered up a lot of their assets.
Speaker 6:They do have a really young fleet, which is part of the the appeal for Vista. So if you guys remember back to, Taylor Swift flying back for the Super Bowl, if you followed that saga, she flew on VistaJet, because it's they're they're young they're young airplanes. They're really good at international operations. So if you're going to Asia a lot or you're going to Europe a lot from The United States, this is a really good option for you, because not every charter operator is great at that type of international operation. And so they had levered up all of their planes, and then they went on a buying spree.
Speaker 6:And they bought Exojet. They bought Talend Air. They bought I mean, like, literally went on a private equity style roll up of a bunch of different providers in this space because, you know, having the thought that, you know, if you get to a certain scale, then, you know, you all of a sudden unlock a lot of opportunity. Well, if you think of traditional EBITDA, right, if you remember what the d stands for, depreciation, if you hold the assets, like, that's an that's a real cost. That's not just a financial add back cost.
Speaker 6:And so kind of restructuring some of the debt on their fleet and freeing up free cash flow in order to be able to continue to to service their members. And so, you know, they're they're they're not publicly traded. They kind of flirted with an IPO a couple of times now. But, frankly, the companies in private aviation that have gone public have, you know, tended to struggle because retail investors and institutional investors do not understand this space because they don't understand the cost of the fuel fluctuation costs and the engine maintenance costs and, oh, guess what? All of our pilot salaries just doubled because the airlines doubled, so now we have to follow suit.
Speaker 6:And so reporting quarter to quarter is really challenging in this business because it's really hard to take a step back in a public market and kinda see the bigger picture. And so that's kind of why these companies Well,
Speaker 3:it's part of it look
Speaker 2:It's part of it too that some guys and girls out there love private aviation so much that they'll own an asset almost as a trophy asset. They just don't really care how much money it makes. They just wanna say that they're in the game. Is that part of it? And then if you're trying to compete on really putting up earnings, you're like, well, this guy doesn't care if he makes like as long as he's breaking even, he's happy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we're trying to run a business here. That that kind of introduces a a pretty poor competitive, dynamic.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, there's no industry that is sexier. I mean, let's be honest. Right? Like, to say that you own a portion of a private jet company is something to talk about it.
Speaker 6:You know, the cocktail factor, which is, like, a real thing when you're raising money. Right? Hey. Check out my b to b SaaS, my b to b HR SaaS that I own. Like, one's gonna be like, oh, wow.
Speaker 6:Tell me more.
Speaker 1:Not after Monday.
Speaker 2:But it'd
Speaker 6:be like, what's your spying operation?
Speaker 2:Okay. Got I got What spies are you doing? I got a question for you. Has there been any corp Corporate espionage? Corporate espionage meets private aviation, Somebody bugging their competitors, Gulfstream, get picking up those private conversations.
Speaker 2:Have we seen that before in the past?
Speaker 6:Oh, not none that I'm aware of, but that sounds that sounds juicy. Sure.
Speaker 5:You might be giving some
Speaker 6:some bad actors some ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. We know we know you got some stories. But I I do have a a question on on kind of like the future of the industry. Obviously, huge cost associated with with private aviation is just the the pilot, two pilots, etcetera.
Speaker 2:There's companies like, what's the one that does automation for the military? Flight automation?
Speaker 1:Oh, flight automation? I don't know. Palantir?
Speaker 2:Shield. Shield. Don't they do that?
Speaker 1:Oh, Shield. I mean, they make drones,
Speaker 2:but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Are are are there exciting companies working on autonomous flying?
Speaker 2:I know a lot of the underlying manufacturers have really good autopilot, but how close are we to sort of more integrated systems that are, you know, communicating with air traffic control and actually just
Speaker 1:sort landing self driving or like self driving cars for the Sky company, but they were working on the c one thirty Yeah. And then the a c one thirty, more like troop transport than Yeah. Private aviation. But there's a bunch of interesting laws he was talking about where you can't have a nondeterministic system in the loop. There like like, you can have deterministic software for, like, cruise control, but you can't have an AI generated nondeterministic system actually choosing to step on the gas or the brakes.
Speaker 1:And so his solution was he puts an iPad here that tells the the human what to do, and then there's a human in the loop at every step. But I'd be interested to just hear about, like, what's the state of self driving technology in planes?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So there's there's a big regulatory issue. The FAA is historically, well, it's the government. So, like, first of all, like, let's set the benchmark of speed and and innovation at that. And then, you know, the FAA is somewhere below whatever that benchmark is, which is by is by design.
Speaker 6:I mean, look. Nobody wants to feel unsafe when they get on a commercial airliner or even when they're getting onto a private jet. Like, regulate regulatory capture in this situation to a certain extent is good. The problem is is when you start to disrupt and interrupt some of that regulatory framework, you have to create an entirely new basis for how you think about some of these technologies. So couple of interesting companies that are that are doing this.
Speaker 6:And and and and your point to the end of loop, that's totally right. And and I I frankly, there's there's a a long slew of of, basically the whole framework for the regulation is built around the pilot. And so you had now have to create a a scenario basically, create an entire new regulation for automated flight. Yeah. One interesting household name brand company that's doing really cool stuff in kind of the safety world is Garmin.
Speaker 6:So, like, they don't just make watches. They also make, avionics and aircraft. And so, they came out with a feature, I don't know, couple of years ago called Autoland, and it's specifically designed for kind of the owner flown pilot. You can get it in King Airs and Vision Jets and TBMs. I think Epic's about to come out with it, where essentially there's a button, and I call it the oh shit button.
Speaker 6:And if something happens, you push the oh shit button, and the screens go white, and it says, okay. You know, we're in emergency scenario. It communicates with the tower. It finds your nearest airport. It puts your gear down.
Speaker 6:It lines you up on the approach and literally lands you on the runway without a pilot intervention. Now it's designed for it's literally designed for emergency situations. It's not for, you know, every day.
Speaker 2:But for laser pilots or a crew had a couple extra drinks and, you know, don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that.
Speaker 1:Also, on private jets. They mix, but not in the cockpit.
Speaker 2:Usually, John gets angry if anybody mentions Garmin, but it's in regard to Garmin sport watches.
Speaker 1:No. Yes. Yes. We're responsible at Dazzle.
Speaker 2:We're we're supportive of their aviation products.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:Yeah. The, well, the the dueling apps on their, sport watches is just UX just anyway, so so that's an interesting company.
Speaker 1:It's cool.
Speaker 6:There's a company called Skyrise. You guys may have heard of them. They've done a couple of raises. I got to fly their simulator, over the summer, and it's so it's a helicopter simulator, and essentially, what it is is a fly by wire system, fully reimagined avionics. And what it does is now there's still a human in the loop, and you're still flying it.
Speaker 6:But what it does is it sets up, like, an envelope that you can't go beyond and basically create, an unrecoverable situation. So Wow. Helicopters have a lot of different, variables when you're talking about tilt and lift and all that kind of stuff. This basically makes sure that you as the pilot cannot exceed those barriers and put yourself into a unsafe situation. That's really cool because, you know, everybody loves to talk about flying cars, and there's been a lot of carnage in the flying car space recently.
Speaker 6:I mean, it seems like almost every week somebody can't raise an another fund. There's a lot of movement actually going to Dubai now, in that sector. So so the sovereign wealth funds are starting to pick up the slack where USVCs have gotten a little tired with projections. Mean, 2025 is supposed to be our year of flying cars. And I don't know if you see any outside, but I I know that I personally don't.
Speaker 2:But we got slop on the timeline. Yep. So there's that. Last last question I'm gonna leave you with, Preston. If you were flying, you don't do this very often, but let's say hypothetically, you're flying in a commercial aircraft.
Speaker 2:The pilot had an issue. Would you be able to land a Boeing seven zero seven fairly easily? You confident in that? I think everybody every guy
Speaker 1:Every guy is
Speaker 2:pretty confident, but where's your confidence level at 10?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I'm I'm about halfway through my private pilot, so I'm gonna go with better than probably 80% of the guys on board, 90% of the guys. I mean Okay.
Speaker 2:So you're the guy you're the guy
Speaker 1:you're guy we're putting in the cockpit.
Speaker 6:I I, at the very least, know what to say to the air traffic controller, and I know that I know the buttons that we need to push to alert everybody that like, hey, by the way, like
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 6:Heads up. Coming in hot.
Speaker 1:Coming in hot. Well, thank you for coming in hot. This was a fantastic conversation. We appreciate you stopping
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Our private jet Consultant. Yeah. Well We'll have to do the next version of this. On a private plane.
Speaker 2:Thank you, by the way. The other you were helping us look at a at a at a flight recently. We didn't have an appointment But hey, if you're looking to fly private, go go talk to Preston. He will walk you through the process and get you some great prices. So thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:Look forward to the next conversation.
Speaker 1:Thanks a lot.
Speaker 6:Thanks, guys. This was fun. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. If you were on a private plane, you get off and you need to find a place to crash, a place to sleep, a nice little vacation home to rent, where what would you do?
Speaker 2:I would use the driveway of a wander as a private airstrip, and I would just land at the closest one. Perfect. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Go to wander.com and use code TBPN. And, also, they're giving away a wander. So sign up and you could win.
Speaker 2:Not the whole house, but a free trip. A free trip. Wander.com/tbpn. Check it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's do some timeline. Get out of here. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Let's do it. I'm I'm excited for some timeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Me too. I've been itching for it. It's not a real show unless you get some posts in. I like this one from ATF Recovery Diver took the GF to the Hell Yeah Museum.
Speaker 1:And it's just it's just it's just suits of armor and and like like crazy tapestries. And, and I love it. I love it. It's fantastic. And another thing that should be in the Hell Yeah Museum is the Pebble.
Speaker 1:Pebble is back. Back in 2012, Pebble was my on ramp to wearable technology, says Michael Fisher. And over the next four years, it evolved into a proper smartwatch platform that never lost its distinctive personality until Fitbit bought it. Now it is back with an open sourced OS and new hardware. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Do you remember the story of Pebble at all?
Speaker 2:Wait. It's called Repebble?
Speaker 1:Repebble because they're they're repurposing it. I guess they couldn't get the full .com. But, this has been talked about for a long time. It was a YC company. Eric Mikofsky became a YC partner after Pebble.
Speaker 1:Fascinating company. One of the few consumer hardware ecommerce companies, so was a bit of a mentor to me back in 2012. Talked to them a bunch. Crazy business because it's it was a very popular Christmas gift as all consumer electronics are. And so they had to do this crazy demand planning and forecasting where if they didn't lock in the design by by July or August, then get them all made and and know their marketing plans to ship to the Best Buys by by October to get them on shelves by November, to get them under Christmas trees by December.
Speaker 1:Like, they would just miss their entire plan for the year because, I don't know, sixty, seventy, 80 percent of the revenue would come in that q four window. And so very difficult business, but they definitely basically invented the smartwatch, became very popular, and then Apple came out with the Apple Watch and absolutely decimated them. But I don't think you should be afraid of I
Speaker 2:mean, I love this.
Speaker 1:You now because as we've covered on the show before, isn't innovating anymore.
Speaker 2:That is right. But
Speaker 1:who knows?
Speaker 2:I'm on the site. It says for those unfamiliar with Pebble, it is an e paper smartwatch with simple functionality Yeah. Long battery life and fun quirky design. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:It's a week long battery life.
Speaker 2:It sounds like the founders just self funded everything to date to just get this back into business. Yeah. And I love that. He says, I have personally funded development for these new watches. I just really want them myself.
Speaker 1:All the whole the whole team, as soon as I mean, they had like a very tough funding environment with the Apple competition. They kind of framed it as like a David and Goliath story, but it didn't really break through. Apple was just delivering at such a higher level on the actual functionality and features and just styling and distribution and all the different things, integration, that they eventually had to sell the business. But immediately, everyone on that team, even kind of just some of the random executives were like,
Speaker 6:we gotta buy it back.
Speaker 1:We gotta do it. We go, I I love this company. I love that They
Speaker 2:haven't slapped an an LLM in this thing yet. There's no mention of of Yep. AI. It's a hardware device Yep. In 2025 without
Speaker 1:still think the kids watch is the opportunity there. There's there there are some some some brands that have done
Speaker 2:They already have children's They're popular. Daytona, children's, Nautilus.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess we should have a children's smartwatch Yeah. As well.
Speaker 1:For sure. Well, when they get Pebble off the ground, they need to advertise it. I think they should put up a billboard. I think they should go to adquick.com because adquick.com makes out of home advertising easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway Boom. Moving back to the Wiz acquisition, which we covered yesterday, amend and pretend, is breaking down who made money. Wizzbacker Sequoia Capital is posed to deliver a return of about 25 times its invested capital from the cybersecurity start ups pending sale to Google. The multiple on invested capital, MOIC, is roughly 10% stake in Wizz.
Speaker 1:Alphabet agreed to buy for 32,000,000,000 in cash. So Sequoias is about to reap 3,000,000,000 from the sale. And amended retention says
Speaker 2:Is this a Sean Maguire?
Speaker 1:We'll have to ask him.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's possible. He he would he definitely has worked with the team. Mean
Speaker 1:Yeah. He posted about it.
Speaker 2:His his haters are are in are in disbelief
Speaker 1:right now. And and so Amanda pretends says, it's good to see Sequoia and Green Oaks finally get a win on the board. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You don't
Speaker 2:see that often. I'm kidding. Average week for them.
Speaker 1:Yep. You know?
Speaker 2:Average week, size long. It is funny when when you are a really scaled allocator. Yep. If a big exit is happening and you're a multi stage fund and you're not in it, it's like, what were you doing the last five years? Had how many, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Sometimes they just intentionally are passing. Other times they don't necessarily have an opportunity to get in, but.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move over to online dating. Eric Zhang at x AI says he just deleted Hinge. I will not go on another date until we achieve AGI. The only late night grind in my foreseeable future will be of the professional variety.
Speaker 2:There we go. Instant banger.
Speaker 1:You love these posts from the
Speaker 2:Huge Alpha just going to x or x AI and just getting into the banger vortex that is the team. Know?
Speaker 1:It's so crazy.
Speaker 2:You've seen, you know, blowing you up Yep. Helping you hit some big numbers.
Speaker 1:It is it is like a remarkable shift from the pre and post Elon owning Twitter. Because before Elon owned Twitter, I never saw a single SpaceX person on the timeline or a Tesla person on the timeline, and I really don't see them that often now. So SpaceX and Tesla clearly have a culture of, like, hey. Don't post. But x AI and and X, like, the the everything app, their employees clearly like to get wild on the timeline, which we love to see.
Speaker 2:Got it. You got it.
Speaker 1:Mene Marzakis says, if you leave before 6PM, be honest with yourself. It's a half day.
Speaker 2:Love this. Yeah. Mene is a good friend. Okay. And he's on the founding team at another very close friend.
Speaker 2:And yeah, they're absolute grinders. And they're actually I meant to put this in, but they they're a company called Anon. They're working on a b to b agent product and they're hiring for a bunch of roles. So go check it out.
Speaker 1:Shout out to them.
Speaker 2:Absolute dogs.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Luke Metro. He's reposting a video of a Xiaomi EV factory. Someone sharing that the S U 7 ultra parks itself while he heads to a meeting.
Speaker 2:Ben, do we have a video?
Speaker 1:Luke Metro says in ten years, Americans traveling abroad are going to look at Xiaomi cars like Boris Yeltsin looked at American grocery stores.
Speaker 2:Hey, guys. If we don't just for the record, if we don't have video tomorrow, wanna see some angry DMs to Ben. He just said tomorrow. So anyways, I'll explain the video. So this is a complete and utter knock off of the Taycan.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:It does look pretty cool. Yep. They made some upgrades. They added a wing.
Speaker 1:Does it depreciate the do they have the same depreciation?
Speaker 2:I'm sure even faster.
Speaker 1:Even faster.
Speaker 2:But apparently, this is, like, one of the top selling cars
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In in I mean, China gets crazy with these cars.
Speaker 1:They have one that floats. You can literally drive it through a lake, it won't sink. That's amazing. They have another one that comes with a karaoke machine inside of it. They have they have ones with, like, the LED bar on the back so you can send a message to the person that's tailgating you.
Speaker 1:They're having lots of fun. But, yes, we we wanna we wanna stay competitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's it's pretty funny. Dominant is He just sort of drives up, gets out of his car, it parks itself. It's pretty cool demo
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At the very least. But if
Speaker 1:you're running a car company and you wanna compete with Xiaomi, you gotta get your finances in order, folks. Time is money. You gotta save both. Head over to ramp.com. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:Go to ramp.com. Anyway Ramp. Ramp.
Speaker 1:We got a post from Tyler. It says pump Pamplona has the running of the bulls. California needs the running of the bears.
Speaker 2:This is a great pick too if you can scroll down. He's fresh out of a run.
Speaker 1:I love how he yeah. He's really he's really out there doing doing things.
Speaker 2:You can just run from bulls.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder how much more dangerous it would be to run with bears. Do you think that's significant? Bulls are dangerous. Bears are very dangerous.
Speaker 1:Is it comparable?
Speaker 2:I've seen you would never have seen this. Okay. Because you don't follow mankind's greatest athletic pursuit, MMA. Okay. But the Russians, there's a bunch of videos that come out of Russia with with these wrestlers growing up that actually wrestle with bears.
Speaker 1:Yeah. MMA, is it muscle man assault or something? What was the sample?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Something like that. That you can wrestle with bears.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I we we briefly looked into getting one just I think the future of the Boy Scouts is just
Speaker 1:Domesticating bears.
Speaker 2:Our young American boys learning to wrestle with bears. Yep. And learning the dance between sort of mankind and nature.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:We got a post from Signal. He says, every post you write should be instantly shareable to a group chat. You need to give people at least one of the these three reasons and I'll take action immediately. Deflects an opinion they couldn't articulate or hadn't considered until now to post a thought they're too afraid to say outright, to signal their own wit or intellect to everyone else by sharing something extremely relevant, funny or profound. The best posts do all three at once and we call this a signal, a signal post.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Named after a great signal signal.
Speaker 1:And I'd say if you're in signals group chat, know, hats off to you. You're some of the most brilliant folks. We really, you know, salute to you and hopefully this post finds its way into your group chat.
Speaker 2:Alright. There we go. We got another your way into a group chat. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, somebody else was posting about that how, like yeah. It was Nikita. Nikita was saying, like, you need to you need to, like, be really nice to designers because it'll do numbers and they'll share it in their Slacks and everyone will look at it if you're nice to their designs. Yeah. And so that's another way to get into the group chat
Speaker 5:and be
Speaker 1:shareable instantly. Nate Cooper.
Speaker 2:We got a Nate Cooper post. I thought this was a good reminder. Don't build to an exit. Don't build to a sale. Build a great business.
Speaker 2:I think every entrepreneur, you know, if you grow up reading TechCrunch, you have the sense that companies just start, they have a good idea and then they get bought for a billion dollars. And those exits can happen randomly and by chance and you can get lucky. But the really big exits like Wizz, it's like, you know, phenomenal outcome in a very short period of time. But they were adding like 200,000,000 ARR a Right? It's like they didn't need to sell.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they could have just kept growing the business. They had a lot of optionality. They could have gone, you know, public. They could have, you know, gone.
Speaker 2:There's there's a bunch of, you know, potential buyers at a at a range of prices and having that optionality because they were just building a good business. It's the best thing to do. You just make better decisions when you're not desperate. You don't need the sale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just focus. Need an
Speaker 2:individual customer, etcetera. Totally.
Speaker 1:Should we go to Sean Frank, breaking down influencer marketing? He's That's right. CEO of Ridge Wallet, one of the best wallets in the world. I carry one.
Speaker 2:He's actually the top wallet salesman in the world, I would argue. I bet they sell more wallets He is. Than
Speaker 1:And I think of the Ridge Wallet as a status symbol. It lets everyone know when you pull out a Ridge Wallet, you take performance marketing seriously.
Speaker 2:That's right. They
Speaker 1:are a they are a fantastic performance marketing organization and everyone will know. You you you get it. You get it. So he says, I've spent $10,010,000,000 on influencer marketing. $10,000,000.
Speaker 2:Would think he would spend way more than that.
Speaker 1:Should know. Well, he spends a lot on Facebook.
Speaker 2:No. I know. But I I feel like I personally You
Speaker 1:gotta get those numbers up, Sean. Come on.
Speaker 2:No. He spent way more than that.
Speaker 1:He's just he's just picked a
Speaker 2:nice round He's being humble. 10,000,000 in one influencer marketing is the closest thing to be able to pay for word-of-mouth marketing. Yep. You can't turn a switch to scale word-of-mouth, but influencers have direct relationships with fans. They talk to and with their audience.
Speaker 2:YouTubers in particular are getting a % attention share. It's the closest to word-of-mouth marketing you can pay for. The time impression quality of these ads are high. Facebook ads are a swipe and gone. A YouTube creator ad can be two minutes.
Speaker 2:There are five big ad units you should buy in feed, social posts, story posts, in content ad reads on YouTube podcast ads, in content rights. It goes down. Above ad units, let's talk program strategies, gifting, free product with guaranteed posts, affiliate, pay for content, flat fee posting, CPM based deals. So he goes into a bunch of details here, the important thing is I own a company that does YouTube advertising for brands you can go use brandonnative.com. So thank you, thank you for the plug.
Speaker 2:Branded Native actually got started via Ridge. Yeah. You know, basically running their in house YouTube marketing strategy. It turns out a bunch of brands need it. Yep.
Speaker 2:It's now run by the great Maria Taverni. You can just email, DM me, I'll connect you to her. She's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Run some ads folks.
Speaker 2:And run some ads. We love ads. I love ads of all types. Yeah. We got another post from Near.
Speaker 2:Yep. I'd like to publicly state I don't buy the whole there will be a ton of new jobs thing for normal people. There will be many new jobs but not for normal people. So lesson, be abnormal. Yes.
Speaker 2:Be goaded.
Speaker 1:Yeah, skill issue. Find some weird hobby or something or some weird segment of the market.
Speaker 2:George was Talking about leveraging LLMs to understand history. That's basically what he's doing in this one edge case as a marketing strategy. But you could imagine somebody who just nerds out using LLMs to better understand history. And that's probably a, you know, a $5,000,000 a year business if you just get the content right and and really
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like you you don't wanna be in a in a massive hoard of undifferentiated labor because that will be the first target for an AI company. Because they'll say, oh, well, there's 10,000,000 people doing the exact same job. It's very automatable versus
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. There's a one of one person. What's the economic value of creating an a an AI system that can replace that one person? Probably not that much.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:You won't be replaced.
Speaker 2:We got a fundraise from my friends over at Crossman. They're excited to announce a $23,600,000 fundraise led by Rivet Capital. Also a friend over there, Zach Rosen, who's a man. We saw him at demo day briefly, to bring every business and AI agent on chain. Just as every business moved online, every business will move on chain.
Speaker 2:And with the rise of AI agents, there will soon be billions of new economic actors using stablecoins to transact in the real economy. Crossman's all in one platform makes building on chain easy with low code APIs for wallets, stablecoins, on ramps, tokenization, and credentials. Crossman has a really cool story. In this sort of NFT boom, they built a way to like basically buy NFTs with a credit card. Yep.
Speaker 2:So they just like rocketed. Yep. Their growth was insane. And they have just kept this tremendous pace up, expanded the product to do a bunch of other things. This was an example.
Speaker 2:So Crossman was a customer of Party Round and they were raising, I believe, on like an uncapped note because they were just growing so quickly. There was like some small discount. Sure. I was like, wait like whatever. I'll wait for the next round.
Speaker 2:And then the next round came like a week later. So I just ended up paying. I'm like, ended up at a got got in and very excited about what they're doing.
Speaker 1:So Well, I think we should close out with the David Senra post here. He's quoting Tom Osman who says, heard a great line the other day on Founders Podcast Shout out, Tom. Like, when you find an edge, shut up about it. Feel like this is more important ever than now. Yes.
Speaker 1:Secrets are important. And David Senra says, I had dinner with one of the wealthiest people on the planet. His family has commissioned two biographies of prominent family members. I asked him for copies so I could make an so I could make episodes about them. He said, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:I have no interest in educating my competitors.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Built different. I love it.
Speaker 2:Skill issue though. We tell the world pretty much everything. Yep. We told them our secret plan Yes. Which is to be the news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Be the news you want to see
Speaker 1:the
Speaker 2:Be
Speaker 1:the most profitable podcast in the world.
Speaker 2:This is a fun show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:great. Good I have liked to do another four hours
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of timeline.
Speaker 1:But we have more stories for tomorrow. We can go through Intel and maybe that the the $15,000,000,000 defense contractor. So stay tuned for tomorrow. Maybe we'll get through that. I still wanna go through humanoid robotics supply chain stuff.
Speaker 1:There are so many deep dives to do and not enough time, folks. But we have Delian coming on tomorrow, our space correspondent, Delta v with Delian, where as as we're calling the segment, we have a bunch more people scheduled. So stay tuned. Stay locked in, folks, and have a great day.
Speaker 2:We should see if Delian should could bring a dolphin Oh. To this to the to his appearance
Speaker 3:That'd great.
Speaker 2:Since they love space clearly and celebrate it. They they celebrate it. Thank you for tuning in, folks.
Speaker 1:We will
Speaker 2:see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Great day. Bye.