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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, 09/29/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the
Speaker 2:temple Of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital. The capital.
Speaker 1:A lot of people have been asking, was the TBP And Ultradome built by human beings? It just looks like something that humans don't know how to build anymore. Kind of like a
Speaker 2:boss civilization.
Speaker 1:It's possible. We haven't confirmed it. We're not commenting.
Speaker 2:It just appeared here one day. It's
Speaker 1:I'm just I'm I'm just asking questions. Just wanna dig into it a little bit further. Yep. So, you know, that's why we have free speech.
Speaker 3:A lot
Speaker 2:of people have been afraid to ask that question. Yes. And we're here saying with you, we also Yeah.
Speaker 1:We also have questions.
Speaker 2:It showed up one We went we went off the air. Yep. We showed up the next day. There was this
Speaker 1:I could
Speaker 2:dome shape, almost a monument Yeah. To entertainment and capitalism Yeah. Just appeared overnight.
Speaker 1:Where did this come from?
Speaker 2:Where did that come from?
Speaker 1:We're getting some claps from the team.
Speaker 2:Team is fired up. Best day of the week. Most underrated
Speaker 1:.thecom. True. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Most underrated day of
Speaker 2:think Monday is potentially the most underrated day of the week.
Speaker 1:It really is. You're fresh.
Speaker 2:So much excitement, optimism. You're You've never been more back than on a Monday, first day of the work.
Speaker 1:Friday is the day of being over. It is so over.
Speaker 2:It's over. And Monday, we are so back.
Speaker 1:You're so back. Yes. It's perfect. Well, continuing we're going talk about Dorakesh on Sutton, some AI stuff, some other AI stuff, the AI Meta AI app vibes. People, the reaction I think this came out on Thursday, and then the reaction happened on Friday.
Speaker 1:For the most part, we talked about it a bunch, debated it. Naval said Fired shots. Creation without a creator is meaningless. And I think it's an interesting post because I kind of disagree with this. So I think when I when I open up the Meta AI Slop app, the Vibes app, I they should have called it Slop.
Speaker 1:It would have been so funny.
Speaker 2:It would have been
Speaker 1:It would have been
Speaker 2:Or or a trough.
Speaker 1:Trough would have been good too. Just lean in all the way.
Speaker 2:Our new feed called trough
Speaker 1:in Meta AI. It's already a feed. You're feeding a view of you. But so when I open the app and I scroll it, I I don't think it's it's creator less. Like, I think that there is a creator.
Speaker 1:It's David Holes. David Holes is the one that
Speaker 2:It's created a genius a genius one creator.
Speaker 1:One creator. And I'm down to look at it for like ten, fifteen minutes. And then I'm like kind of done. I didn't feel the urge to open it up over the weekend for any other reason than research and just understanding the platform a little bit more. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wanted to know if you got past the first, like, prescripted 15 shorts or, I guess, vibes is what they're calling them. Like, would I see UGC? Would I see other stuff? Would I see people in my network? Like, would the For You algorithm have taken hold by then?
Speaker 1:I didn't notice anything like that. There were a couple accounts that were like, this person's clearly into like monsters. So they do like really big monsters. Or like this person does like POV dogs driving cars, which honestly was awesome. I think that Monkeys
Speaker 2:on jet skis, dogs driving
Speaker 1:Dogs driving cars. Although some of the renders were really rough where it was like the dog was at the wheel, but then the front of the car was behind the dog. So it like didn't get it right. But it was still fun. And it was funny.
Speaker 1:I noticed it was what the one that I enjoyed the most was one of a golden retriever like jumping and chasing the camera with this wave going over it. But what made it really special was that the song that was paired with that was Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who?
Speaker 1:Who? Who let the dogs out? And it made me realize that, like, there is a little bit of a game mechanic to the app where if you have a song that you like, you can now go and basically direct a short form music video for it. And so if there's a song that you think is fun, you can go into the Meta Vibes app and start with the song in mind instead of layering the song at the end. The default flow is image prompt, animate it, then add a song.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I think that it might be more fun to flip it around and think about this as like I'm curating a playlist almost. Music visualizer. Yeah. Music visualizer.
Speaker 2:Which went incredibly hard when I was 10 years old.
Speaker 1:Exactly. The Winamp Visualizer just put that thing on. Or iTunes had one for a while. Some of them were reactive
Speaker 4:to Yeah, the iTunes.
Speaker 1:Which was cool. That one was cool. And I think that there's something there where I thought it was mostly, I thought it was interesting that everyone is saying, like, this is a creation without a creator. This is pure AI. Even even Meta is marketing this app as there's not there's nothing human about it.
Speaker 1:It's just the AI content.
Speaker 2:Except the music.
Speaker 1:Except the music. There's no AI music. It's all iconic, licensed songs from the most recognizable musicians in the world. You can actually just go put a Taylor Swift song over something, which is crazy to think about from a music Can
Speaker 2:generate music, too?
Speaker 1:No. You can't generate music. Of course, are some songs that are AI generated that have, like, snuck into the Instagram library. They're probably on Spotify. Because you can use any song from the Instagram music library.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people will put stuff up there, and then you can pull that in. But by and large, the flow is generate a mid journey image, animate it with Black Forest so that it has a little bit of motion, and then pick a real song from the real library.
Speaker 2:Black Forest, which just announced a new fundraise.
Speaker 1:4,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:European company.
Speaker 2:There we go. Let's give it up for the German artificial intelligence industry.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up. So
Speaker 2:We got a comment in the chat. Yeah. It said, I like the table when it was messier. We did Yeah. We did go to a round table.
Speaker 2:We cleaned it up a little bit. I'm sure it'll get messier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't
Speaker 2:worry. So don't worry. We're working.
Speaker 1:The mess comes back over time. We'll
Speaker 2:we'll It's relentless. Yes. It's relentless.
Speaker 1:So yeah. I mean, I I I'm still I'm still unclear about like will this be successful. A lot of the takes on the timeline were presuming that it will have very low churn and be so good it's irresistible. Like it could just have high churn. It could just be a product that no one likes.
Speaker 1:And everyone tested it out, and they're like, yeah, Okay. I'm done with that.
Speaker 2:And Meta's no stranger to launching flops.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's happened a number of times with tried Facebook launch trivia. Yeah. They've had clones of a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Even threads arguably probably wouldn't have worked if they couldn't have just continued to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Push people to the app and grow it steadily Yeah. In the existing distribution they had.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that, you know, if I if I'm trying to get serious about a take, I would probably land on they have the flywheel down. It works because you can already share vibes to Instagram, to your story and whatnot. And I feel like there's gonna be a flow back and forth, they will get that to work, and they will actually, inject them back and forth. And even if it lands as, a tab on Instagram, like, it will be adopted.
Speaker 1:But it was just funny that everyone was like, this is there's 0% chance this doesn't work. And it's like, there there is risk to these things. Anyway, I I I thought it was interesting. It made me think like I was listening to the David Senra interview with Daniel Ackeny.
Speaker 2:I think one one interesting thing is if they had added all of the functionality and vibes, the creation tools into Instagram Yep. It would have been even more controversial.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:I think so. They would have had to deal like, this is an experiment that basically, it's a sandbox that can do anything in. Low stakes. They can get users using it. They can get some feedback, get some information, test stuff out without saying, we're launching this into Instagram which has millions of creators.
Speaker 2:Yep. They're gonna gonna feel super strongly about it. They might start saying they might start campaigning to like keep it. Let's keep AI off Instagram
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Which they don't want.
Speaker 1:This is keeping AI off Instagram.
Speaker 2:AI content will be, you know, I would Yeah. I would assume, you know, it's so long until every piece of content on Instagram has some AI element to it whether it's just editing or enhancement or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So the the other the other interesting takeaway I was talking to I was listening to David Senra interview Daniel Ek, the founder of CEO of Spotify. And I was almost thinking, like, is this more of a Spotify competitor than a than an Instagram competitor? It's so music driven.
Speaker 1:Should should Spotify have an answer to this? Should they buy something similar? Should they do a similar deal with Midjourney so that anyone who listens to a song can generate imagery and then the the the most liked imagery can become kind of that cover art and you can have like your community. You were kind of saying like that's not the way short form video works, but
Speaker 2:I think with Spotify, they also have the benefit of the best songs end up having music videos which are the artist's interpretation of a visualization of the music. Yeah. And it's gonna be
Speaker 1:Do you think that's the way it always works though? I feel like sometimes they
Speaker 2:But they also Spotify has also done something where they basically take an asset from the artist. Yep. Not a music video. Animating. Like this it's like a GIF.
Speaker 1:Loop it.
Speaker 2:Yep. Exactly. And I think that's smart. Yeah. Because I don't I don't think that people are primarily consuming music these days by, you know, setting up just I I remember being a kid and being entertained.
Speaker 2:I'm at a desktop Macintosh
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Just putting on the iTunes visualizer and just hanging out being being like, this is awesome. Yeah. But I don't I don't want I I if I'm putting on music, I'm not like, wanting to watch the music anymore as an adult. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I almost I I almost view the Vibes app right now for, like, as a music discovery tool. Go and swipe a little bit, find some interesting songs, add those to a Spotify playlist, go listen to the real song.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But the reason that that's not a hit consumer product is because people can just easily discover music in every other short form video feed. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. That's what you're saying. That's our
Speaker 2:You can talk already functions.
Speaker 1:TikTok works that
Speaker 2:way As in music discovery engine.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Well, if you wanna livestream some music, get on Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations, multistream and reach your audience wherever they are. But the big news over the weekend was Dwarkesh Patel dropped a banger of an episode with none other than Richard Sutton, the touring award winner who is essentially the Nobel Prize in artificial intelligence, and the and the author of the Bitter Lesson, the blog post that says that, again and again in artificial intelligence, there is a there's an inclination for seeking out a new algorithm, a new design, a new architecture, but in fact, progress comes from scaled compute. And so that was used to underwrite massive investments in data centers, massive CapEx. Continued investments.
Speaker 1:Continued investments. A lot of people I mean, the Andreessen Horowitz partnership been throwing around. Are better bitter lesson pilled. A lot of people are bitter lesson pilled. That's certainly been a rallying cry for the AI CapEx build out.
Speaker 1:But, mister bitter lesson now sounds exactly like Gary Marcus. According to Gary Marcus, Gary says, of course, he's been a long, long time LLM hater or LLM criticizer. He says, Astonishing. It's been a long, hard, unpleasant road, but one by one, every major figure in AI has come around to the critique that LLMs, of LLMs that I began giving here in 2019. Yan Lakoun was first.
Speaker 1:Demis Hassabis sees it. We're now two. Turing award winner Richard Sutton is now on board. And Richard Sutton says, you were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight and to make the argument well again and again for the limitations of LLMs. I salute you for this good service.
Speaker 1:And so I think that there's something interesting going on where we heard about, like, the infinity story. Right? This idea that there's a few firms that are working on AGI, superintelligence, God. And if they achieve it, it's the last innovation, the final investment. All future companies will be all future economic value will be birthed from the AI supercomputer.
Speaker 1:You can finally hang up your Patagonia vest. You'll be done. You'll retire as a capital allocator who got into the correct final deal. If you get a slice, if you're you'll be good. It was a little bit sloppy as deal logic, but it was directionally correct.
Speaker 1:Like, if you LLMs were a useful technology, there were compounding businesses to be built on top of them and investing in them even at unicorn valuations in '20 '13 pencils out pretty easily now. But many in AI didn't like Sutton's take. My interpretation of his claim is that biological systems don't learn purely through imitation whereas LLMs do. His example was like, if you think about a a bird that's learning to sing a birdsong, the the bird doesn't necessarily need to study the way that the mother bird moves the That's part it. Vocal cords.
Speaker 1:It's more just listening to the song and trying to imitate the output and then the internal Learning through own actions. Exactly. Exactly. And now It's like when I
Speaker 2:take this thing and I put it in my mouth, I get sustenance.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right? Yes. And so
Speaker 2:It's not just watching the mother bird
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Do the same thing and just realize, Hey, maybe I should do that thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of the a lot of the AI researchers are kind of like and and this is why the there was this discussion of like, we're Sutton and Dorcache like talking past each other because a lot of people in AI research tend to view the the internal structure of the neural network, the training of the weights as exactly the same process. You are just mimicking the output tokens and the internal logic, like the muscle movements that create the birdsong are learned in the same, like, random way as the actual bird does. And so there's continuing to be this debate over, like, are we on this are we on the correct path? But it kind of doesn't matter in the in the broad sense of the market because you can just put aside the super intelligence AGI question and just start underwriting the the companies as just normal businesses. Tokens clearly have value.
Speaker 1:Anyone who's used an LLM to answer a question understands this. They also have a cost. And if you balance those, you make a profit. So we're back to econ one zero one. And so in the real world, the question is like data center overbuild.
Speaker 1:The bitter lesson said just keep scaling, compute, and you will always see improved performance. At least that's how it was interpreted. But exponential cost growth for linear gains doesn't always math out. If someone says we're gonna spend 10 times as much money training this next model and it's gonna be It's 5% like, okay. Well, maybe we don't need to do that one.
Speaker 1:Like, there might be an
Speaker 2:opportunity Well, again, if you look at the leaders of various hyperscalers Yes. They are not concerned about ROI. They're concerned about winning.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And so this, like, landed on Oracle's plate. People were worrying about Oracle's 500% debt to equity ratio, which search which surfaced from this JPMorgan note. Now the interesting takeaway is like it's pretty clear the debt is on the horizon.
Speaker 1:Microsoft has a lower cost of capital than the US government right now. And so like the ability to borrow is extremely People
Speaker 2:for Assatya.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And and and people are just ready to in to buy debt in these projects. Like, that's just the thing that's gonna happen. But you can't overreact to this viral chart.
Speaker 1:There's a like, Oracle has a $100,000,000,000 in debt. It's an $800,000,000,000 company, and they produced 11,000,000,000 in cash flow last year. And so the question is more about servicing of the debt than true book equity to debt ratios. McDonald's actually has negative shareholder equity because they've been doing so many buybacks that they bought back all the equity. And so you can get really weird like divide by zero errors.
Speaker 1:I would expect that we start to see those, especially at Oracle if
Speaker 2:they Yeah. That's the thing with Oracle. You know, Allison just owns so much. You know, he's bought Yes. Basically bought back so much of the company.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And so I don't know that that chart is like the the red flag that people thought it was. Doug O'Laughlin had a good post about this. He said the chart weirdly makes no sense and doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Time for the feed to relearn buyback math impacting book value. And it is it is somewhat complicated. So maybe that's econ one zero two. But basically, it feels like as we get closer to the efficient frontier of AI CapEx, risk does increase because you have that risk of doing the $100,000,000,000 training run and only getting 5% gains. But ROIs become increasingly predictable as we move away from the Infinity narrative.
Speaker 1:And even if there is an overbuild of infrastructure, there will be immense benefits to America broadly. This is the real American dynamism story in my opinion. Multibillion dollar projects are moving through government approvals. Massive structures are being built in America again, and there's a real chance that we will see per capita energy increase.
Speaker 2:What's your read on Satya pulling back on you know, obviously, he's scaling CapEx but not being as aggressive as some of the other players. Do you think he's happy to let the industry overbuild and then come in later and say, I'll take that off you for, you know, pennies on the dollar or some some fraction of of what it actually cost to produce?
Speaker 1:I think so. I mean, that was certainly the lesson from the Or
Speaker 2:or another another way to look at it is, you know, I I control a huge amount of the demand for tokens through the Microsoft Office suite Yep. In, you know, tokens in the workplace. Yep. And I'll just come in and I'll just do deals once this infrastructure is built off my balance sheet, and I'll get benefit of it.
Speaker 1:I would love to know how Satya processed the.com boom because we always go back to that story of there was a massive overbuild of fiber. Everyone thought that the Internet was gonna be this overnight revolution. It took twenty years to really squeeze all the value out of it. Right? But Google was a massive beneficiary of the overbuild in fiber because they they were able to go snap up a bunch of cheap fiber and build a massive consumer Internet company on top of it.
Speaker 1:So I I don't know exactly what what how did how did that impact Azure? How did that impact Microsoft? Because if Azure was able to build a a very serious player in a three party oligopoly in in cloud basically between AWS, GCP, and Azure. Yeah. And so if Satya is saying, look.
Speaker 1:In the future, the there will be a consumer Internet company. That's OpenAI. We have a stake in that. And they're the new Google. And then there will be cloud providers that are token factories.
Speaker 1:And I'll need to get in that market, and I'll need to make sure that Azure is monetizing those tokens effectively. And Azure has data centers. They also lease data centers. We will adopt the same position, the same strategy. And so we will skip on the overbuild, skip on the high risk stuff, but eventually buy in at prices that make sense.
Speaker 1:Yep. You could be looking at it through a very financial lens.
Speaker 2:But Satya joined Microsoft in 1992. So he got to see the full cycle
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:In this first decade of the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he was the I I mean, he's remembered as, the architect of the cloud transition. And Balmer was the one who, like, missed mobile and missed cloud. But, you know, the company has done really well now, so maybe that was Yeah. Maybe maybe if the risk if it like, what would a worse balmer look like?
Speaker 1:Well, it could have been someone who put the business, like, out of who, like, bankrupted the company by taking too much debt and going too long into the dot com boom Yep. And getting over leveraged and really losing the
Speaker 3:company.
Speaker 2:We should read this post by Anyan I Iyer. He says Yeah. Quote, this feels like 1999 again. He goes, no, it doesn't. And I was there.
Speaker 2:I joined Cisco in January 2000 as a co op, then full time in May 2001. At the time, Cisco was the hottest infra company on the planet, riding the wave of the .com boom. But by the time I started full time, the crash had already begun a month in. My manager was laid off. The party was over.
Speaker 2:Entire industries vanished. Here's what actually happened. One, the users weren't ready. Most people were on dial up. Mobile didn't exist.
Speaker 2:E commerce logistics were immature or non existent. Everyone had ideas but the end user wasn't there. Two, capital vanished. The IPO window shut. Venture funding dried up.
Speaker 2:Startups that depended on future growth couldn't raise and died fast. Metrics were fake. Companies like Cosmo, Webvan, pets.com burned cash chasing usage that never converted.
Speaker 1:I was a Webvan user.
Speaker 2:We see some companies burning cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Got some groceries delivered.
Speaker 2:When I
Speaker 1:was 10.
Speaker 2:Back with Webvan?
Speaker 1:With Webvan.
Speaker 2:No way. No way. They so right and just
Speaker 1:There was another company called Home Grocer that was more popular in Pasadena where I grew up. And they got acquired by Webvan. And I'm pretty sure the founders of of Home Grocer probably did very well because they probably got some crazy buyout. Yeah. Hopefully, didn't take too much stock.
Speaker 2:Things like LTV, CAC wasn't common enough vernacular. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That was a new concept. We we were in What a arithmetic. Concept.
Speaker 2:Four, infra got overbuilt. Like Global Crossing and WorldCom spent billions on fiber and data centers. The demand never showed up. Cisco's customers disappeared, not because they lost, but because their customers died.
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 2:Five business models were broken. Most dot coms were never real businesses. They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch up. It didn't. Now look at today, OpenAI, Meta, Google, XAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up.
Speaker 2:Jensen put it plainly. Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt. Every forecast we've seen has been too low. We're not building for speculation. We're building for active workloads.
Speaker 2:Yep. So no, this isn't 1999. This isn't pets.com IPO ing on Vibes. We are not in a hype cycle. We are in a compute bottleneck.
Speaker 1:And this certainly I mean, feels real if you've used the apps. Like, there have been multiple times over the past few years where I've just had LLM queries fail even though I'm paying Yeah. Hundreds of dollars. And so, like, maybe the CAC to LTV math is a little bit iffy because what's the margin? Am I am I overusing it with the deepresearchrecently?.com.
Speaker 2:People are like, I just used WebVAN to deliver groceries. And it took forty eight hours. And all the food was rotten. Like, how do I short this stock?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was happening in Wall Street memos, I guess, like Mary Meeker reports, basically. But, yeah, I think this so he's quoting the Spencer Hawkins chart of the AI bubble now versus the .com bubble. And if you're apophoenix and you like a pattern, you will love this chart. I think we have to commit ourselves to revisiting this exact chart a year from now and seeing how closely does it keep tracking because it could be wildly different in either direction.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, that's Well, why don't we just make a live tracker?
Speaker 1:We should. Tyler.
Speaker 2:Tyler's not in the studio today. He had a He's traveling. Travel. But we should just make a live tracker of
Speaker 1:Yes. Of this chart and see
Speaker 2:all along.
Speaker 1:How how are we actually tracking to this, or are we are we diverging it?
Speaker 2:There was another post that was going pretty viral.
Speaker 1:Before we covered this, let me tell you about Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. What was the other post?
Speaker 2:The other post is the from Steven Fiorillo. Mhmm. He went pretty viral, 2,000,000 views yesterday. He said the AI doesn't the AI bubble doesn't exist. The bears are wrong.
Speaker 2:Time and time again, I've turned on a major financial news network, listened to a financial podcast or seen a post on X indicating that we're in an AI bubble. The rapid surge in AI related investments and some stock valuations have created a narrative that the current environment is similar to the dot com crash of the early two thousands. The main arguments I've seen are that the current euphoria outpaces real world results. Valuations are detached from fundamentals. There's a lack of ROI.
Speaker 2:Companies are hitting infrastructure and resource constraints and the escalating costs are creating unsustainable business models. The bare narrative almost always leads back to the idea that AI stocks and startups are trading at premiums that resemble past bubbles and are being driven by FOMO rather than profitability. It doesn't help that users on x are posting triple and quadruple digit gains that are often hundreds of thousands or millions in profits from their actual accounts. Some accounts on x are twisting the dagger deeper as they're posting gains from naked options or call spreads which have finance professionals screaming into thin air as some of the underlying equities are unprofitable and pre revenue businesses. Remember, there was that company, Fermi, that is gonna IPO.
Speaker 2:Yep. They It's
Speaker 3:like a
Speaker 1:peer role.
Speaker 2:Have a a lease to a piece of land in Texas. They they're planning to go out around $14,000,000,000, and they're about nine months old. So I think that it's very fair, you you know, there can be distortions, things happening in the market that don't exactly make sense
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:While simultaneously there being some businesses with strong underlying fundamentals and incredible opportunities that are trading at relatively fair multiples.
Speaker 1:Yep. I Skele had a good take on this, too. He said, I know there are some questions about this, including some smart people. But there is a word for this that describes the exact situation where NVIDIA is investing in OpenAI. OpenAI signs a compute deal with Oracle.
Speaker 1:Oracle commits to buy NVIDIA chips, and it seems very, very circular. Martin Scrella has a word for it. He calls it an economy. He says, The way you measure its success is not by the trading between partners but by nonparty demand. That demand is pretty high and growing quickly.
Speaker 1:It's I am demanding it. I'm prompting it. Everyone is prompting it. Companies are prompting it. There there is a lot of demand for tokens.
Speaker 2:So anyways, Steven continues. He says, I have a news flash for every bear. AI is not a bubble. In every market environment, there are always companies that become overly expensive with valuations that look unsustainable for no reason other than they have built a cult like following and there are more buyers than sellers. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This is not a period of extreme speculation, unlike the .com bubble where investors poured capital into any company with a .com in its name. Yep. That was a that was a big factor. The rapid growth of the Internet changed how information was disseminated and how people communicated, which led to the overvaluation of startups as venture capital flooded the market fueling unsustainable growth. The .com bubble burst because many of the companies from height of the era were nothing more than hype prioritizing user growth over sustainable business models that focused on revenue and profitability.
Speaker 2:Again, I'd push back a little bit here. There certainly has been companies that are scaling, you know, revenue really quickly Mhmm. Unprofitably, sort of betting on, you know, just capturing market share and token costs coming down. I'll I'll continue. The Fed hiked interest rates several times during 1999 and February, which caused investment capital to tighten making it harder for cash burning companies to sustain operations or rollover debt leading to bankruptcies.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And then he goes into how Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, etcetera says, these are not startups or companies tapping the debt markets to build out new business ventures with the promise of becoming profitable. These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability. Everyone has the right to their opinion. But when the CEO and board of directors are taking a blank check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Here are some statistics about Microsoft. And keep in mind that their twenty twenty five fiscal year just ended as they are not on a calendar year. So since twenty twenty two fiscal year ended over the next three years, Microsoft's long term debt has declined by 14%, while they have increased their allocation towards CapEx by a 170%. Over this period, Microsoft has increased the cash from operations it generates by 52%, $47,000,000,000, from 89,000,000,000 to a 136,000,000,000, which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards CapEx while paying down their debt obligations.
Speaker 2:Microsoft is now generating 70,000,000,000 of free cash flow while allocating 64,000,000,000 toward capex. And they did this while re repurchasing $18,000,000,000 worth of shares and paying 24,000,000,000 in dividends during the twenty twenty five fiscal year. It's a lot of money. Mic drop from Satya.
Speaker 1:I mean
Speaker 2:This is much different period than the .com era and when companies like Microsoft are leading the way, funding the data center build outs organically from their cash from operations, there's no bubble in sight. So and he does the same kind of analysis for Google and and some of the other players. So worth going and finding this. The account is at dividend streams. And anyways, worth And and the other last thing I'll say here, I was talking with a buddy who runs research for multi trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party.
Speaker 2:And he was saying, the market is, like, generally even though you see this euphoria, right, you see see retail traders, you know, posting screenshots of their Robinhood accounts, posting these insane gains. If you look at, like, cash tied up in money market funds, that sends a signal at record highs, that sends a signal that actually people are quite bearish. Right?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So it's interesting. Certainly living through history.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just wildly different than 1999. Like if you're mp3.com, which was a good idea like the idea was Spotify, right? It was a $100,000,000,000 opportunity at least. But they IPO ed with just a .com domain and a business plan.
Speaker 1:And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores that sold CDs. And they had to build databases, licensing agreements with every
Speaker 2:And they didn't have the Facebook Ads platform.
Speaker 1:They didn't have the Google Ads platform. They didn't have cloud hosting. They had to build servers and mobile apps. And where do you listen to music? In your car.
Speaker 1:Okay. How are you going to listen to mp3.com in your car? Well, normally, you'd put it in a cassette tape or a CD. Well, like, there's no integration there. Whereas today, if you come up with some app or product or B2B software, which is where a lot of the money is, you call someone up and you say, you want to switch to our product or you want to add our product on to what you're already using.
Speaker 1:And they're like, sure. Send me the link. I'll put out I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow. And it's just like everything is set up for acceleration on the actual product development, some sort of value delivered to a customer. It's just more possible now.
Speaker 1:I don't know that we're in an era of like wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like eat off of other people's plates. We see this with like like there is a bubble, but a lot of it is like the SaaS the SaaSpocalypse is legacy companies are actually selling off. And so there's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just completely new market cap that's being created out of thin air
Speaker 2:with some So disrupting ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and that disruption actually
Speaker 2:seems It was more fun for tech when when they were just as know, mp3.com was just trying to disrupt the record store. Right? It was another industry that we were disrupting. Now we're we're eating our own. Yep.
Speaker 1:Well, quickly, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Back on the bitter lesson, Nando De Fritas says, The only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations.
Speaker 1:Underpinning LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models. We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry. We're still compute hungry because there's a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute from exponential from experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation.
Speaker 1:Scaling is largely about data and evals, but the models are now trained on almost all of the web in an equally large but growing self generated synthetic dataset. Sifting through such vast quantities of data, the whole of human creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users, and with it will come billions of tasks every reasonable user need. This scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than pre LLMs.
Speaker 1:And if you think about the yeah, every time any user of the ChatGPT app, for example, fires off a query, like that's more training data, especially if you're using the reasoning models. Those rollouts will become reinforcement learning environments as well as training data. And if you're not on the enterprise plan, like, they will be training on that data. And that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better. And the gains will probably be less zero to one feeling, but there will just be continued progress.
Speaker 1:And unfortunately, at least for OpenAI, a lot of the other companies are in are in different positions, but at least for OpenAI, the monetization in front of them, whether it's from the freemium model to the ads model, agent to commerce model, like, there's a whole bunch of news today about their agent to commerce stuff. It certainly feels like it can support a lot of spend,
Speaker 2:a lot of spend. Totally. The other the other thing, you know, happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so so quickly Mhmm. That it's placing pressure on other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks. Right?
Speaker 2:Or or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong, counting, you know, one time revenue and and Oh, yeah. Bundling it into
Speaker 1:Well, ARR is yesterday's revenue times three sixty five. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or last minute's revenue times 60 times 24
Speaker 1:times three sixty five. Refreshing the Stripe dashboard and then multiply it by 60 by 24 by three sixty five. Don't do that. Stay serious. Stay compliant with Vanta.
Speaker 1:Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes manual work out of your con security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Should we pull up this Citrini video? It seems like they flew a drone around.
Speaker 2:Suttrini So it's research has been
Speaker 1:On a tear.
Speaker 2:Absolute tear. I'm gonna read I'm gonna read this. So they had a a post from 2023, which was the first phase talking about global data center hyperscaling. 05/31/2023. The first phase is centered around the development and build out of robust computational infrastructure.
Speaker 2:This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference. The enormous computing power required for AIML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors. The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand. This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking equipment, data center construction and management, and more. And again, even even even, you know, storage, right, is a is a category that was ultimately overlooked.
Speaker 1:So just reacts.
Speaker 2:And again, we we covered, I think, Western Digital at the '24. End of last year. Yep. And it is up
Speaker 1:I mean, was, like 46 more than a year to date. Is literally pulling up a Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 2:And we
Speaker 1:were And and the thesis is like, oh, like, date Story, probably gonna be important. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of data,
Speaker 6:and so they
Speaker 1:need to put that. It's like
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 1:Wild West generational trade.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Western Digital up a 146 since Yeah. Q four.
Speaker 1:But you should really read this whole article.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Star they
Speaker 1:went to Stargate and then
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they just decided, hey. Let's fly a drone over Stargate to see
Speaker 1:It's so how remarkable. The scale of this thing is insane. They they they show a ton of images of what it looked like before. Just a feel, basically. It's so crazy that that Chase, Lochmiller over Crusoe, like, really, like, clocked this as a logical place to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they go through all the different categories. Stargate power and energy, Stargate thermal, Stargate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, Stargate Civil and Structural, Stargate Fiber, and Stargate Construction Services.
Speaker 1:600 football fields filled with cables, pipes
Speaker 2:And that's the building. That's that's that's 600 football fields facility. Worth of.
Speaker 1:Buildings. Yeah. It's it's remarkable.
Speaker 2:Try and pull up this before and after. You can just see the screenshot of the land. This looks like a Google Google Earth.
Speaker 1:Each is literally a ludicrous building. There are eight under construction on a single site. This is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more: Colossus II, Meta's Louisiana Hyperion, Microsoft's Fairwater, Quantum Loophole, Nebius's New Jersey, D. C.
Speaker 1:Amazon's Pennsylvania project, Google Anthropics, Project Rainier, just to name a few. Together, the current footprint is roughly the size of Lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge. And apparently, Metis, Louisiana facility will be even bigger even bigger, which Zach shared on on threads.
Speaker 2:So there there was also some news over the weekend. Residents shut down Google data center before it can be built. So they Google mixed plans for gigantic $1,000,000,000 data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought. It's funny. Futurism is a crazy website.
Speaker 2:I'm looking at the recommended Yeah. Articles. They all seem
Speaker 1:to be fans of the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm gonna just the trending articles on future
Speaker 1:return. Returnism.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Back to the land. Trending articles right now, Bon Iver. Bon Iver. Bon Iver.
Speaker 2:Right. Right. Right. Side projects it's funny. I've seen I've seen Bonny Ver live and I still botched the pronunciation.
Speaker 2:Side projects Spotify page features an AI slop song. The second article, ChatGPT is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. Woah. The next one, Sun fires energy blast at mysterious interstellar object.
Speaker 1:They might be algo maxing.
Speaker 2:AI coding is massively overhyped, report finds. Yep. And of course, OpenAI's new data centers will draw more power than the entire Audience
Speaker 1:is captured, baby. Let's Anyway, VCs say some AI startups under pressure to show rapid ARR growth are using questionable accounting practices like counting one time deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this. Bill Gurley chimed in to say, sad to say this isn't new. But as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose.
Speaker 1:What is is Den of Thieves that that movie with Gerard Butler or something? What is Den of Thieves? Is this a book or something? I'm I'm I'm out of loop on this. But in other news, figma.com.
Speaker 1:Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. But the real news, of course, is Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out, and Claude is declaring it the coding model in the world. They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents.
Speaker 1:It's the best model at using computers, and it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math. And of course, we will be joined by none other than Mike Krueger from Anthropic in just a few minutes.
Speaker 2:But the model card is out. Remember Mike joined Figma's board
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:Part of
Speaker 2:the IPO as well. So we have Dylan overlap. Will be joining Get the whole Figma
Speaker 1:board today. Board meeting. Board meeting.
Speaker 2:Live on TV.
Speaker 1:But the model card is up, and the benchmarks look great next to GPT five, Claude Sonnet 4.5. Interesting that they didn't just go fully to Sonnet five. OpenAI is on the fifth iteration. Gemini is at 2.5. There's a little bit of, like, all of these are just gonna go the way of the so the cars are like, it's the 2025 car.
Speaker 1:It's the twenty twenty five nine eleven or the Ford Explorer. And now the phones are doing that too, like iOS 26. All the phones kind of jump forward just to say, hey, look, just keep it on the year cadence. And I wonder if the models will wind up doing that too. I wonder if people will care about the models.
Speaker 1:Certainly, people enterprises will demo these against the Pareto frontier. How much value am I actually getting out of this API relative to the cost? And they will benchmark it in their own internal uses.
Speaker 2:And of course, Satya
Speaker 1:It's good marketing.
Speaker 2:Sharing four decades in, some things never changed then and now. And it's an old ad for Microsoft Excel saying Microsoft Excel aces final exam. Throwback. Spreadsheet for Windows, trademarked, of course. Yes.
Speaker 2:And they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new Copilot in Excel
Speaker 1:agent mode. It's way better than the previous copilot in Excel.
Speaker 2:The founder of Shortcut was taken taken some shots.
Speaker 1:Oh, Shortcut's here at forty six point six.
Speaker 2:He was saying, get ready. He said something something to the effect of something to the effect of, like, get ready to dance for the next few decades or something like that. So competition heating up in the Excel agents category. Yeah. Well This post, Kathy D hit the timeline over the weekend.
Speaker 2:CTO started coding the second we got to the gate. Colin Fraser says, he went on his laptop at the airport? That is crack. Very rude quote
Speaker 1:post, but
Speaker 2:I think it's a fair post from from Kathy, but at the same time, I think if you're traveling and
Speaker 1:Yeah. You work either. Biggest flex in the world to do some work at the airport.
Speaker 2:It's been done before.
Speaker 1:It's better than watching slot videos, I suppose.
Speaker 2:That's fair.
Speaker 1:I'd rather the CTO work when possible when on the move. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite. Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our first guest of the show, Mike Krueger from Anthropic.
Speaker 1:He's in the restroom waiting room. Now he's in the TV pin Ultradome. Mike, welcome
Speaker 2:the looking sharp.
Speaker 1:You look fantastic. Thank you. Congratulations on Thank you. Everything. There's a
Speaker 2:You wore a suit. Look at that.
Speaker 1:I love the suit.
Speaker 3:Got you know, was gonna on TV pin. I had
Speaker 1:to. Thank you so
Speaker 2:sign of respect in our culture. Yes. And we appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's great to see you. Big day. Big day for you.
Speaker 3:Big day. Yeah. We're super excited. Know, and actually, was listening to you guys. I was falling asleep last night and I was like, we should have called it Sonnet five.
Speaker 3:But, you know Oh, yeah. You never know how good it's gonna be until the very end work. Really well.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I I Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now you raised the bar. You you threw that. You raised the bar even higher for five. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:You That's what happened with three and four is that we ended up with this, well, it's it's getting better, but what's four gonna be? And we're like, three seven. I'm like, we're call the next +1 3999. And we're like
Speaker 6:99999.
Speaker 1:I would love that. Yeah. Well, you know, you you can take all of our criticisms or or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here. It is very different being in the arena. I do wonder how long it'll be until the numbers just melt away.
Speaker 1:And it's just OpenAI is powered by GPT, and Anthropic is powered by Claude. And we stopped caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited about this app iPhone 17
Speaker 1:Yeah. XX. But at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an announcement, sharing new data. And it seems like that's just a way to reengage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried,
Speaker 2:maybe It's also very really satisfying to to win, you know, the place at the top of benchmark Yeah. Against people that have a higher number than you.
Speaker 1:Of course. Who everyone wants to win.
Speaker 3:I always wonder, like, and it like, when I came into this role, was like, I think, why don't companies just want us to be on, like, dash latest and just be just getting the, you know, latest and greatest? And then they're like, but the model might change, and we wanna be careful. So I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That could be a little bit easier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what are the other trade offs? Like, the the benchmarks tell one story. There's been this previous story about three point five having, this particular personality. Are there other things that, you find that customers and counterparties are are looking for, in a release like this beyond just benchmarks?
Speaker 3:One of the biggest ones is, like, how eager versus lazy the model is. Sure. You know, maybe intuitively, like, you want the model to be as eager as possible. We had this with three Sonnet 3.7 where it was great, but it was a little too eager. You'd be like, hey.
Speaker 3:Can you make this button blue? He's like, I made it blue, I also refactored your entire website. And, it was, like, too much. So we scaled it back with four, and then four was a little too lazy where people have you know, we actually have a a monitoring signal inside Anthropic where if we're finding people are saying, like, keep going. Just go.
Speaker 3:Like, guests, come on. Then it's probably being too lazy. And so we're trying to tune it for this one, which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible. So that's a big one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about on the compute infrastructure side, the actual being able to keep up with demand? Is there any messaging that you're sharing around what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability? Because it seems like there's there's so many businesses that are just like, it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. For sure. We think a lot about about capacity and and infra. And for us, it was really big to be able to deliver something that was more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost, and you can imagine that's like you know, we we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale.
Speaker 3:So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really, really big for us to be able to scale up to capacity. I think earlier this year, a lot of the conversations I've had with customers, like, how do I get more on it? Like, I'm at capacity, and we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand.
Speaker 1:Can you I I I I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to start filtering a photo, it would start uploading to the server, and then the filter would be applied on both sides. So when you hit post, it would automatically be live, and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that story?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's rough. Yeah. And we got to get a flashback. And it was 02/2009.
Speaker 3:Like, networks were really slow, so we did everything to try to make it fast. So that was one of the things we did was the second people would type messages. It would take them five minutes. And all that time, we were just doing all the processing in the background. And then that last post, you'd sync it up, and then you'd post it to the timeline.
Speaker 3:So that was a really big thing we did. We also did a lot on the timeline itself where, which photo you fetch next was a lot of optimizations that we did. It's funny. Like, now the person who initially started Claude Code, one of our products, his name is Boris, and he came from Instagram as well. And he brought some of the kind of perf ideas from Instagram, into Claude Code.
Speaker 3:And so there's some there's some lineage of of Instagram to Claude Code now.
Speaker 1:That's why I was asking about the the that story. It feels like there's we're in this wave of like consumerization just like where the user experience really matters for these models. And there's I have to imagine that there's low hanging fruit. I was joking that at a certain point, there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things because, like, how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for, like, the capital of California? And you can actually
Speaker 2:Yeah, we get
Speaker 7:get a
Speaker 3:lot of messages that just say, Hello. And then I feel like we could cache that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you cache that, and then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things. Exactly. And I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like you've reached into your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, Oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre AI era?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the biggest one so I think one thing we did well at Instagram really was just make it look good. Make your photos look good, and it's gonna be something that you're proud to share. And, you know, flashback, like, it was iPhone three GS. The camera was pretty bad.
Speaker 3:Right? So you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and shareable. So we were working on, like, you can now create, PowerPoints and Excel files within Cloud AI, and then you can edit them further if you want. And the thing I was really pushing the team on is, you know, we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours, but the thing that it produces has to be good. You don't want it to be autonomous and bad or autonomous and spot.
Speaker 3:So a lot of what we've been doing on the on the office front is, like, the anti slot. Like, make something that is actually good out of the gate. And then, of course, you're gonna polish it up and and correct it. So that's that that that, effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around. Can you give them some instructions, get it some data, and then have it produce something you're like, yeah.
Speaker 3:That was pretty good, pretty close, and I'm gonna, like, finish it up myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like that has been my biggest hot take around the Meta AI Vibes app is just that people say there's no artist, and I'm like, no, it's David Holes' vision. And that he has honed that at Midjourney. And it's his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through.
Speaker 2:And Well, and and and and downside there is that it's great if you want to consume that style Sure. Of of content. Yeah. But people like being in feeds and having randomness and new Yeah. New ideas and perspectives and aesthetics.
Speaker 2:Whereas, if you're generating UI for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view if it, like, feels like clot. Right? Mhmm. Because it's like a it's not necessarily even if if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand. Right?
Speaker 2:Sure. And so having, a distinctive style and if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop, then I think that's a good trade off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fine.
Speaker 3:I think it's a good the Figma connection is real there, too. I think if you ask Claude to make a website, most of his websites look kind of similar. But then you can incorporate your design language and your library so it actually looks you know, generically yours, at least. Like, it's something that could have been created inside your company. And, sure, it doesn't have, like, the hand of a designer on it, but at least it's not the full generic version as well.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, it's interesting watching vibes, how much of it is. It's like seventies prep school summer camp vibe and or futurism. And it's Yep. It kind of falls into one of those too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, like, found its way into some, like, local minima maxima or something. It it feels it feels, like, almost overfit in but maybe in a good way because the alternative is maybe sloppier. Who knows?
Speaker 1:More end
Speaker 3:of this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm more I'm also interested in how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a company like Anthropic. Like, going back to Instagram again, I remember hearing stories that might be true, maybe not, but about like the initial filters were hand coded, where like you were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way, and that was the expression of basically a single individual. And I'm wondering if when there's you think about the texture and the flavor of what Claude four point five is putting out, is this something that's coming from the selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline? Like, are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion, or is it an emergent property? Is it the whole team?
Speaker 1:Like, how does all this fit together to actually create something that has taste in something that's just a big, big bag of numbers? When
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training is how much individuals and their taste really matters. Like, think our particular post training team, I think, has excellent taste on the code environments and just the code production itself. One of the things that we found with Sonnet 4.5 is that if you point it at some code that previous versions had written, it'll go clean it up and be like, what is this comment here? It's totally unnecessary.
Speaker 3:They'll rip it out. And so it's, like, improved in in some taste. So there's that part. And then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the model, around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content. And there, it's actually it reminds me a lot of Instagram where we're looking at outputs and saying, alright.
Speaker 3:Can you get it to make it make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real? Can you make the docs you know, they don't need five fonts. Can we simplify that down? And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffolding where tastes can come in around how you shape the model and, again, get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good.
Speaker 2:So you think slop is a function of laziness?
Speaker 3:I think if it's the default parameters I saw a talk by Ted Chiang, who's an amazing sci fi writer, he was talking about AI and creativity. He's like, creativity is a bunch of choices, right? And if you just type to any of LLMs, like, tell me a story. It's gonna tell you a pretty similar story almost every time, and that's kind of like a nature of of the model. But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of, you know, custom things, now it starts becoming a little bit more you.
Speaker 3:And it's not a zero to one thing. Right? Like, there's some spectrum on there as well. I think to me, the the slob is the stuff that tends towards, like, the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices. And then when you tend to a bunch of choices, even if they're, like, not the best choices, at least it's got some creative spark in it.
Speaker 1:Yep. Are you thinking about imagery? I mean, you have a rich history there with Instagram. Models are becoming multimodal generally. Anthropic hasn't been chasing that really publicly, but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.5, I'm sure, and say, draw me a cat with ASCII art, and it'll do it.
Speaker 1:And there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, just write out the individual RGB, numbers, and I will encode it as a PNG or something. Like, it feels like if the text models get really good, I can just get images out of them. So how do you think that develops for Anthropic? Or where do you think you wanna bring that to bear? Is there anything that's interesting there?
Speaker 1:Do you just see it as a completely different set of a tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on?
Speaker 3:That's funny you say that. One of the the launch kind of, like, internal things, one of the PMs put together was a a self portrait of Cloud that it drew using cells and Excel, which is Very true. Know, was, like, pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think for us, you know, I was, like, zoom out. Like, what's the goal here? It's, like, the goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way, and we think that the sort of direct like like, I love your tech tree metaphor. Like, the direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time, act agentically, can write code, can execute code, and kind of keep track of state. And, like, almost everything that's not in that tech tree, we've not focused on.
Speaker 3:And that's, I think, been good. We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs. But it's meant that on things like image generation, that's like maybe we're really leaning on partnership or Yeah. Bringing some images in via MCP. Or to your point, maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both you know, write and run that code.
Speaker 3:The the late breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes.
Speaker 8:So Sure.
Speaker 3:Given a virtual machine, Sonnet 4.5 can take a, you know, basic image and then put in, you know, like, butterfly meme, like, is this AGI? Sure. And it's actually, like, pretty funny too. Like, another thing that I think people will see over the next couple weeks is Sunnet four zero five is, like, our funniest model, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so there
Speaker 2:is In what in what in what what what types of ways? Because there's a lot of ways to be funny and and and and to to date, I think the thing that consistently everybody has enjoyed is is like the, you know, like be me format is one format. And then but like stand up every model that I've seen has struggled.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And specifically the funny examples where people say, oh, AI generated this. It's usually like it's a top voted joke on rjokes on Reddit. And so it's kind of stealing the joke. And it doesn't really count as like a new joke, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:But anyway
Speaker 3:So we need to, like, formalize an eval for this at some point. But the thing that we do is we we bring Claude into our Slack channels, mostly in serious ways. Like, we have Claude help out with, you know, if it's a coding task or whatever. But we also have Claude in our basically, like, internal posting, you know, channel, and we'll do it for every model. And I most Anthropic employees, at least many of them, were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the, like, water cooler channel that it's, like, funny.
Speaker 3:It's, like, kinda roasting people, but not in too mean a way. Mhmm. It's, like, reacting to in jokes. It's making back references to something happening earlier. It's definitely not like, you wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways, but it definitely, like, had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to.
Speaker 2:Water cooler bench. Call it water cooler bench.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:How are you I I loved your guys' recent campaign around Claude being for you know, it's never been a a better time to have a problem. I've seen some some out of home that you guys have done around LA, which is great. As you as you kind of introduce more and more of the world to Claude, how are you thinking about kind of pouring, do you think there's ways to pour fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs? You mean, you're very qualified to to comment on some of that. So don't feel like you need to give away your roadmap.
Speaker 2:But I'm curious what's been underexplored in your mind.
Speaker 3:No, think about the things where Claude feels like it had some breakouts. And I think there's been three or four in the year and a half have been ananthropic. One was we had Golden Gate Claude where we actually put a research demo up where you could talk to Claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I still talk to people a year and a half later. I was like, that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work.
Speaker 3:And that was, like, a cool breakout moment for that. There was also, like, the the sort of point where people realized, like, Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice, and there was, like, lots of, like, college students posting the, like, you know, you know, talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had, like, a viral moment. And then who knows if this will go viral, but I'm excited to see what people build with it. We're putting something out today called Imagine with Claude, you can talk to Claude, and Claude will, like, create whole software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button. So it doesn't write sort of a back end code.
Speaker 3:It is the back end code, which sounds a little trippy. You kinda have to play with it. But people have been doing all sorts of stuff like, hey. Show me what Steve Jobs' desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launch. It's like, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, here's the finder window, and here's a, you know, dot Keynote file about his Keynote. So you click the Keynote file, and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what Keynote looks like now, and it creates that from scratch. And it's kind of this, like, glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic, and and and drawn on demand. So we'll see what people build with that, but that's another one. I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going.
Speaker 3:And it's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through to the right people who are thinking about this stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes
Speaker 1:A product like that seems within reach, magical, amazing. It also feels like if I was using generative UI, fully a fully generative app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency. We've seen this with the benchmarks. I mean, just in 2020, GPT-three on the meter length of AI task can that they can do at a 50% success rate, it was like ten seconds. And now we're blowing past an hour.
Speaker 1:I'm interested to know how you're thinking about four, five. If you think about that internally as a benchmark, it wasn't on the model card, should it be? Are you seeing promising results there? And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be? Because I was trying to think about like, yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long time, but what is a human's task length?
Speaker 1:Like, is it one hundred years? And how long does it take to get to one hundred years if we're doubling every seven months? It turns out it's like a decade. And I'm wondering how you think about, like, the the just the the length that the model can maintain consistency. Do you like that as a metric?
Speaker 1:Are we on track there? And what are the consequences of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. A big part of Cloud four point five's training was around both keeping its own memory and staying being able to work for a longer period of time and keep that consistency. I put a video up on my X, which is for every version of Cloud, we asked it to build cloud.ai. It's kind of like a flagship AI product. And, you know, one through three just can't even do anything out of the gate.
Speaker 3:Three five, like, I kinda showed something on screen, but you can't log in. Three seven, you can log in, but it doesn't work. Four, it works a little bit, but message failing yeah. Message sending fails. Four five, like, didn't just implement it.
Speaker 3:It also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its, like, prototype. So if you think about, like, that whole kind of thing, and it's a fun, like, time lapse of just even watching it do that. So I think it is really important. Even if for most tasks, you're not gonna kinda set it off on a, you know, thirty hour task like a couple of our customers did during testing, the fact that you could, I think, lets you start trusting it for longer and longer, tasks. The way I see our engineers actually use Cloud Code now is they have, like, three or four terminal windows open, and they're running Cloud Code concurrently on multiple ideas at once.
Speaker 3:And only way you can do that is if it's not gonna interrupt you ten seconds and be like, wait. What did you mean again? Or trust that you're not gonna go off the rails. So I think it's if not the, it's one of the most important kind of metrics to look at is how long is it gonna maintain coherence.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that cloud example you gave is is crazy because do you know how many man hours it actually took to build the real product? A lot. Yeah. Like, it's more than an hour.
Speaker 1:It's more than four hours. It's more than anything on this chart. If it's and and yeah. That's a very, very mind blowing concept that, like, we're still like, it's working for an hour. It's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of man hours if you were to try and create an apples to apples comparison.
Speaker 1:Very
Speaker 2:It's hair raising.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's it's exciting. It's exciting.
Speaker 3:It really is. And also, like, it hopefully makes us more flexible too, where I think there's a lot of sunk cost that happens in software. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, oh, when I rebuild it, it's so good.
Speaker 2:I mean, as we did
Speaker 3:in development industry, I'm saying, yeah, you built it. But if it's not gonna be good, just rip it up, you know, and then start over.
Speaker 1:One of the most magical experiences I had with Claude Code recently was I essentially I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications, but I do a lot of research. And so I asked Claude Code to do a deep research report. But instead of just creating a markdown file like I would get in any other deep research product, I asked it to build an HTML5 website with all of the nice features, bar charts and graphs and all that stuff. And it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this like generative UI world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering if there's a how you see that flowing into just consumer.
Speaker 1:Right now, when I think of clogged code for deep research, I think of a prosumer product. And I'm wondering if you think that there's a path, maybe it exists through mobile, maybe iframes. Like, how does this actually work its way into like my mom's life, someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is kind of giving the same sort of agentic kind of multi turn thing in Cloud but with your local mobile capabilities. And it's easily easier on Android. You can do a lot of this in iOS, but not all of it.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:And you can say things like, hey. You know, look at my calendar for tomorrow. Like, I have these three meetings. Do some local searches. Like, find out where I should have coffee.
Speaker 3:Remind me to, like, grab my coat before I leave. And by the way, like, compose a text to these three people because I need to, like, let them know about it. You'll see it work through all of it. Like, use all these local tools, do it agentically. You can't send it automatically, so you have to, like, press a button still to, like, send the message.
Speaker 3:So it's not, like, all the way, but I think that's where it's gonna start showing up in consumer applications. And I think, for better or for worse, it's going to require more partnership with the device makers because a lot of that's gated on the OS. You can do a lot more on the web. But I think that's where things are going. I think that's where it will start to feel real to people.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest lesson from Artifact? I was a huge fan of the product. And I feel like with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web, creating summaries, like, it feels like we're on the cusp of another breakout, like, product or problem solution in that space. What are what are you
Speaker 2:taking I mean, for better or worse, it feels like you could ultimately, like, Claude could one day function as our in a in in what I what I loved about Yeah. Artifact. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, yeah, we even you know, we can, like, see it already, like, search the web, do the synthesis, and then, like, create a briefing for me. I think one sort of underappreciated artifact lesson was if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to you, that's a hard sell for newcomers. Right? We had a like, our retention was actually really good if you stuck around, but it was that kind of activation that was the the trickiest.
Speaker 3:Plus, like, any shareable thing in news is really difficult. But Yeah. Think about that now with Claude, where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things. We actually can because Claude can be conversational say, I'm going to be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive. Like, is that Okay?
Speaker 3:Right? Or I'm going be on your iOS. It's gonna be way better if you connect your your maps or your calendar for this. That's, I think, where we need to go, which is don't expect people have done all the upfront work because that's gonna be too hard for most people, and then they'll churn. But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state where, you know, it's going to be actually useful to you.
Speaker 1:Everyone in teapot, on X, in tech Twitter is reacting to Dwarkesh Patel's interview with Richard Sutton. Are you bitter lessened pilled? Is the is Anthropic bitter lessened pilled? Like, how how did you and the team kind of process the debate between Dwarkash and Richard Sutton?
Speaker 3:I think we're overall super bitter lesson, Pill. I'd want an interesting example, and this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative, but I think kind of feeds into the same kind of idea. You mentioned deep research. So, you know, the our original, you know, advanced research, you know, implementation in in Cloud AI was, like, thousands of lines of code, some, like, pretty complex infrastructure. We've since, you know, reimplemented haven't launched this yet.
Speaker 3:It'll come out soon. We reimplemented on top of, basically, the Cloud Agent SDK, which we put out today too, which is basically what Cloud Code runs on too, And it was basically just a prompt and some tools and, like, none of that, like, custom scaffold and instructions and all of that. And, like, that to me speaks the same idea, which is, like, you wanna, like, let the model do as much itself as possible. Don't try to, like, overly specify all of, like, the steps and the infrastructure and all those different pieces. So that definitely shows up even in products, which is, you know, not what the bitter lesson is about, but it kind of feeds into that as well.
Speaker 3:But I think overall, like, very bitter lesson field, but also still really bullish, I think, on the possibilities of RL. And you see it in how much the models have advanced even since February.
Speaker 1:Do you think you're bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes material change in architecture or just like how AI research is done. We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer based large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and and and synthetic environments instead of synthetic data, does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas?
Speaker 3:I think so. And I think the other piece that's gonna be really interesting, one, just the scale of all of these are all runs is getting enormous. And I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting too. I don't think we're there yet too. And when we get there, we gotta do it very carefully with the right safety guardrails in place.
Speaker 3:But I think that's that'll potentially yield to some kind of divergent ideas at that point.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts on hardware? What's gonna change in hardware over the next few years? Instagram was so interesting. I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical. It was such a vertical app even though people were so used to turning their phones.
Speaker 1:And in some ways, the hardware like the medium is the message. The hardware kind of defined what you built, then eventually, we got more cameras on the phone, probably because of Instagram. And I'm wondering if you think AI will change hardware or hard or will get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places? Just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple of years?
Speaker 3:I think this is the consumer side where, like, I think the AirPod Pro is going to be like the sneaky, like, AI sort of thing that actually does the mass market, not a super controversial take. I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this? We've designed these open office plans, but I think in the future, we're gonna actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done to delegate tasks. It's really nice already. People have hooked up Cloud Code with, like, OpenWhisperer or something so they can talk to it, and it feels very natural.
Speaker 3:And and so, like, what does that do for office design? Are we all gonna be using these, like, sub vocalization things now that people are prototyping?
Speaker 1:Those are really cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But it's like, you know, like, walk through an office, bunch of people mumbling. Like, was was the vibe you'd be like there. Or or
Speaker 2:the the the dark sci fi of just as it's a it's wall to wall, the phone booths, you know, just, like, thousands of phone booths, and everybody's sitting in their phone booth.
Speaker 3:We created 1960s IBM. I feel like there's got to be something better, too. I'm also really interested in what the multiplayer like I mentioned Claude talking to us in our social channel. But there's also, what is it like to not just have an AI notetaker in these meetings, which everybody has, but an actual participant? How does it know when to chime in?
Speaker 3:And what is it listening for? Can it be like, hey, you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about? Or hey, I'm detecting a lot of disagreement here. Can we move forward? So that's gonna be an interesting it's like the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex, but it will need to show up in more and more places.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How do how do you guys think about what comes to mind around the word focus? Anthropic feels incredibly focused, and not every lab feels that way. Is that something that you guys just keep coming back to around? Or what does that mean to you?
Speaker 3:Well, for sure. I think that one of the things that we've done well is there's been that extreme focus from the research side, I think, before anything else, which is like, here's the path. We're going to build that. We're not going to have as many people, perhaps as much compute, but we're going to remain focused. But that is actually another of bridge to Instagram.
Speaker 3:We were very, very focused. I think they finally shipped the iPad app. People would always ask us, why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app? I'm like, it's focused. Like, you know, you're not gonna get a lot of new users that way, and most of the use is gonna be on on the iPhone and
Speaker 1:Web. Web took years to have a web bubble.
Speaker 3:Years. And it was like, you know, people think we were stubborn, but it was actually, you know Yeah. Every new platform you add is like another thing that you're gonna have to think about.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And, you know, yes, you can staff up for it, but it's just that that coordination cost. It's the kind of additional So we've really pushed the focus thing here as well. You know, it's like do do more with less and and do fewer things better, but I think it's really important. And it's meant that we've got more of this sort of prosumer or power user and then business lens, but I also think that's an interesting place to occupy in the market.
Speaker 1:Last question from my side. Jordy, do have another?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kind of last question. We're having Dylan on in a bit to catch up on Figma Make. And I know you joined the board prior to the IPO. What are your with Figma, the AI opportunity in current reality is very obvious.
Speaker 2:It's a place that people go to make things and build software. But what are your conversations like with, I'm assuming, other public SAS CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time trying to get your read on where software is going. Are those conversations happening? What do they look like today?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, think there's this if you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over your employee records plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs, all these pieces, I think the concern, I think, from a lot of these SaaS providers is do they become just document and data repositories. Right? And how do you, like, modify that? But then I think that there's the the sort of, like, way of making that actually interesting is, if you actually connect, an agent with another, which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it, it's really powerful.
Speaker 3:I saw this demo of Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data. And rather than just search for Salesforce data and then get results back, it had a conversation with they had two back and forth conversations where the cloud agent was like, here's the amount thinking of sending to this customer, and the Salesforce built, like, thing built on top of Salesforce was like, no, no, no. They're not gonna like it. I I looked in the, like, earlier messages, and they really hated that turn of phrase. They ping ponged back and forth with actually, like, very little human input, at the end had a message ready to send.
Speaker 3:So that's where I think you can move from worrying about, are people going to visit my website less because of agents, to more like, well, maybe not. But if you're actually building value beyond just the data store, you can still play a really key part in that exchange.
Speaker 1:It goes back to what we were talking about, about Claude being able to generate images but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas. There's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference that can, you know, just do all the math in the world and has every number, every every calculation memorized. Or you could just say, hey, here's Python. Like, just write some Python, and you you get the exact result. And so it's a beautiful synergy.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Congrats
Speaker 2:on the We're looking forward to five or 4.999.
Speaker 1:Nine nine. 4.999 would go extremely hard. I would love that.
Speaker 3:The pressure is on.
Speaker 1:4.99999. Awesome. Well, we're
Speaker 2:we're excited to to to play around with
Speaker 1:with 4
Speaker 2:five and and get into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So much for having me on. Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 2:You're the man.
Speaker 1:Let's go over to Polymarket and check-in on which company has the best AI model by the 2025. Anthropic has jumped in the rankings. This is, of course, LM Arena, which is a different benchmark, but Anthropic jumped from 1.8% to over 6%. Google is in first and continues to be. OpenAI was giving them a run for their money towards the end of of August, but Google is seems to be running away with it.
Speaker 1:People on Alamarina are really enjoying Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting how, you know, this this continues to be the probably the most popular market on AI. Yeah. And yet, all the underlying labs are focused on different things.
Speaker 1:Right? Yes.
Speaker 2:Like Yes. Anthropic is values of of different things differently than Google does.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? And and XAI, same thing. Right? Yep. So anyways
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of Chattypati, they launched a new brand campaign. Each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative, proactive users. We're showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with. Our goal is for people to look at these moments. And Emily Sundberg said, part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivens is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring Breakers worked on it.
Speaker 1:So they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting.
Speaker 2:This feels even the colors and the tones feel a lot like Anthropics' recent campaign.
Speaker 1:And it it feels solar punky. It feels a little bit like the the drone delivery company.
Speaker 2:How's this guy with his his barbell set up in this, like Well,
Speaker 1:he's doing exactly what I do. He's tracking his splits. He's tracking his lifts. He's trying to hit a one rep max. He's saying, if I use this much protein, this much protein Probably I hit in?
Speaker 1:This?
Speaker 2:Well, I guess he's
Speaker 1:He only has sixty five pounds on the bar, though. So, you know oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curls. But, you know, with the power of chat GPT, I think he's gonna be benching three plates in no time. But, yeah, very fun campaign. We're having Dylan Field join in just nine minutes.
Speaker 1:He was getting in a tussle on the timeline talking about the definitions of software engineering. Elliot, I guess at Lovable, said, we just killed software engineering, by the way.
Speaker 2:Which is like Villain says I don't know if Elliot is rage baiting. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is it is a little a little rage baity. But
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. It's like, who's that who's that post for?
Speaker 9:I don't know.
Speaker 1:In other news, Thrive has a new citation, sovereign under management. I know you were all wondering about this. Which? Which? Is from Holland.
Speaker 1:It's a nice touch. So this is private jet.
Speaker 2:This is Thrive Aviation,
Speaker 1:to be clear. Everyone everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital, of course, Josh Kushner's firm, expanding into private aviation, as he probably should. But this is a different company, I believe.
Speaker 2:But Different company. It is funny to imagine. The words big dog
Speaker 1:Big on the dog looks great.
Speaker 2:Dog with a D A W G. They park the Turbo S.
Speaker 1:You get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from, you know, Orange County to Burbank just to save a couple minutes. But if you put big dog on the engines, I think you get a free pass. I think it's the way to do it.
Speaker 2:Drive's tagline is above your standards, beyond your expectations. Much Above like your above your standards. Is that not Above your standards. We're actually above your standards,
Speaker 1:Trevor. Yes. Whatever your standards are. We we're not gonna ask you about your standards. We're just gonna tell you that this is above.
Speaker 2:We're above you. It's above your standards. We're above you.
Speaker 1:You Well, know what else is above your standards? Julius.ai. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds.
Speaker 1:No coding required. In other AI news, it's a busy day. ChatGPT is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify. We were kind of debating this, like, is the Stripe integration? We are
Speaker 2:having Jeff from Stripe on who worked on has been involved with with some of these new features. So we'll have to ask him about this. Unclear to me yet how the dynamic, obviously, shop Stripe powers Shopify. Mhmm. But how do these different partnerships work?
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:there I will be companies there will be companies that vend their essentially, product catalog into ChatGPT, maybe with like an MCP server, or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe because all of their plans, everything that they sell is sold through Stripe. And so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system and all of the features that you get with Shopify, and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SaaS companies do that. You can imagine in the future, if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory, you could buy it in ChatGPT directly with Stripe. But then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations and Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're storing that data in Shopify and doing downstream marketing on that and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear, you will benefit from the Shopify ChatGPT integration. So I don't know that they're I mean, they're clearly jumping over the precipice together.
Speaker 2:Am very when you think about using products, any any LLM Mhmm. How efficient it is to find the information that you're looking for Mhmm. And now how efficient it's gonna be to find the products that you're looking for Mhmm. There's there's plenty of categories that I'm that I don't expect to use LLMs for shopping. Like, hey, you know, like, I'm not gonna go in here and, like, look for, I don't know, some jackets.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, casual jackets. Yeah. Right? Because that that to me is, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that. But in the context of, like, purely functional goods, I'm looking to see what Amazon does in in regards to ChatGPT because think about how terrible it is to search for products on Amazon. It's rough right now. I'm I'm an Amazon respecter Yep. Andy Jassy respecter.
Speaker 2:I'm a Jeff Bezos respecter. But whenever I if I could search on ChatGPT, find me, you know, I don't know, a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than a hundred years ago. Yep. Right? I don't wanna go and buy a paper towel holder that's $4 that's a knockoff of an American And they hack
Speaker 1:the SEO, and they hack the star rating, and they hack the reviews, and they're paying for ads.
Speaker 2:And so, Chad, I've always wanted to be able to shop on Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese,
Speaker 1:And they should be able to do that. They should be able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box and letting you search in Like, natural you're already searching. Just let me query whatever I want.
Speaker 2:Also, I think the average Amazon user probably is like, just give me the paper towel holder that's $3 Yep. Direct from the factory. But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So maybe those 100 year old paper towel holder companies will say, now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe and ProFound to get mentioned in ChatGPT. Right? And then from there, assume that they are not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore because it's being teamuified. And so those brands will move over and generate customers from ChattypuT users.
Speaker 2:The question is I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, because They will. These brands
Speaker 1:Oh, certainly.
Speaker 2:In the example that Toby gives, I'm looking for a lightweight trail running shirts that's that stay cool. Can you help? Historically, if somebody's searching that and buying, historically, Google is taking Okay. Taking a cut, right, through through AdSense or if somebody's just scrolling in a brand on Instagram Yeah. And or they get an ad for
Speaker 1:I would assume that it's exactly the same as the the Facebook and Google take rate. And that you will look back on the commerce and you're like, I I pay the Google tax. I pay the Facebook tax. I pay the Chattypuji tax. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth. The alternative is no customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the and the question is, again, this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back, you know, is is what if what if the best product is not on Shopify or not not not set up in a way that you can buy it. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the hope People is that
Speaker 2:only recommending products that they have partnerships with. Sure. If so, then that sort of violates the trust that the user's been developing. So we have some stuff to figure out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hope is that there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the team that surfaces like knowledge retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information and then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of this. But Yeah. We will see.
Speaker 2:Well, in other news, there's a post here from Oxon. It says, God forbid men have hobbies. Arkansas men arrested for taking turns shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after drinking.
Speaker 1:Why were they arrested? This doesn't seem illegal. This seems like top tier operator would
Speaker 2:be being dudes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give them a break.
Speaker 2:I feel like this post has gone viral
Speaker 1:Many times.
Speaker 2:Many, many, many times.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's from 2019, and then then somebody just found it and quote tweeted it, and it went viral.
Speaker 2:Week had no
Speaker 1:idea what they were 100,000 likes. Wow. Interesting. Well, gas station barbie says, feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby. Like, that's a new citizen.
Speaker 2:Social Security.
Speaker 1:And yeah, they do. They do. I guess they literally do.
Speaker 2:Add to
Speaker 1:the Yeah. It should just be a birthday card. Birthday Birthday card. Apply for. Growing Daniel says, JD Vance, I know you see my tweets.
Speaker 1:This would be a nice touch. Apparently, in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born. That's sweet. It's very sweet. Well, Eliano is describing the wide range of Palantir all understanders with with Nick Fuentes and Tim Dillon on the left, and, of course, a Palantir insider on the right, and Jim Kramer right in the middle, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Oh, fair.
Speaker 1:He he kind of he kind of it seems like he's slightly edging to the right if you look at his shoulder. His head is at like negative one, but his right
Speaker 2:shoulder We're is gonna have Jim on the show soon. We'll ask him what Palantir does.
Speaker 1:I think I think Jim has a very good thesis for Palantir, actually. I think he has a pretty strong understanding. I would put him closer to a four or a five on this. Well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen ki Kiyunkan in Japan and has been in business since July. It's still a family business for 52 generations.
Speaker 2:Let's give
Speaker 4:it up.
Speaker 1:So long. Oh. Oh. You think in decades with your business?
Speaker 2:Are you thinking generate
Speaker 1:Oh, you're going on a hundred year run? That's nice. That's quaint. What about a thirteen hundred year run? Let's step it up.
Speaker 1:Let's step up the ambition, folks.
Speaker 2:I think they should make this
Speaker 1:founder? They should make it an an Amman. Shiel says, in Japanese
Speaker 2:tradition third generation has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.
Speaker 1:Just turn it into a Motel six and bring in private equity. Lever it up. Turn it into McDonald's or
Speaker 2:a I've strip been learning about finance. I think we should play around with leverage.
Speaker 1:What is going on with that the fifty second grandson doesn't botch it? Like, that's crazy. So much tradition and reliability.
Speaker 2:I hope Dylan Field does this with Figma.
Speaker 1:Me too. That would be a fantastic
Speaker 2:We should ask him.
Speaker 1:Past you.
Speaker 2:Can you can you do
Speaker 1:Where will
Speaker 2:53 generation.
Speaker 1:Where will Figma be in the year March? That's what I wanna know, Dylan. Let's start thinking in millennia.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Shiel has some extra context here. He says, In Japanese tradition, you adopt a capable manager or have arrangement to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family. Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long. This is still common practice. Ninety eight percent of adoptions in Japan are adults.
Speaker 1:Almost all men, 20 to 30, brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son in laws to keep them in the family business.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Wow. Well Let's bring this concept into enterprise software.
Speaker 1:Dylan is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and UltraDome. His first virtual appearance, I believe, on the show. He's, of course, hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange, which is
Speaker 2:Which we
Speaker 1:quickly retired
Speaker 2:from Zoom. Quickly retired the gong.
Speaker 1:But but thank you so much for joining us, Dylan. How are you doing today?
Speaker 10:Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Great to see you. What's new in your world?
Speaker 10:Well, I've I've been deep in this weekend with Cloud Sonic 4.5, if I'm gonna be real with you Yeah. In Figma Make.
Speaker 1:That's what I want. So going
Speaker 10:still swing me in that.
Speaker 1:What well, yeah, give me your initial reactions. Like, do you care about the benchmarks model card? Are you tracking, like, the meter, like, long a task can run? Are you more like just chat with it like it's a person, have really short back and forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the of the words that are coming out? Are you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers or something like how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO?
Speaker 10:Well okay. So there's the personal side, and there's the Figma side, and there's the CEO side maybe. Sure. So I'll start with personal, which I have not gotten into yet. But I love playing with these models, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can get them into sort of weird head spaces.
Speaker 10:And that's just like a hobby of mine.
Speaker 2:What's a weird what's a weird
Speaker 1:trying to one shot them. Yeah. No.
Speaker 10:I mean, look, it doesn't have to be a one shot or single prompt. The longer you go, the more interesting it gets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You keep going. And the model's like, I'm seeing patterns.
Speaker 2:What's an example of like a you you don't have to name the model, but like what's the weirdest headspace you've got in a model? Is there just hallucinating more and more intensely type of thing?
Speaker 10:Look. I mean, models are trained on the Internet, and the Internet has some weird stuff on it. And, you know, when you find it in there, it's kind of fascinating. And I won't give examples. They're definitely not companies or model providers.
Speaker 10:What I do instead is I try to if I find a good repro case, I send it over to the models. And that way they can figure out what to do with it. Yeah. It's funny
Speaker 2:if you think the models the models trained on the internet. That means the models effectively trained on stumble upon. You know? Yeah. Like, if you like that that level of range, right, which is quite quite wide.
Speaker 10:There's a lot to the internet.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's deep. For sure. So take us to the other Let's see. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's get in at the Yeah. Not even at the Figma level.
Speaker 10:Gone there with 4.5 yet another time. But I'd say that for Figma for Figma, that is where my attention has been focused so far. And with Figma Make in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay. How do we make it so that we're able to quickly pull in Sonnet 4.5 to make and then evaluate. You know, are we ready for it?
Speaker 10:Do we have to do anything differently? Is this a good addition, a good improvement? And the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used it. It was so impressive how it made make better. Everything from planning and just thinking through and evaluating and understanding the code base that it was working on, whether it's, like, a shorter prompt or a long running session, to thinking through just sort of, like, the way it should evaluate a prompt and giving better results.
Speaker 10:And, also, you know, we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy from make output into Figma design. And we've, since launch, had a way to basically go from Figma design into make and basically copy paste in. And that way, you can bring your design into whatever you're coding and creating. And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible. And it's so just kind of, like, gives me the chills of it because we literally launched this feature where we copied from make output to Figma Design last week, not knowing when we launched it that, you know, 4.5 was coming.
Speaker 10:It would make it so much better. And here we are, and we're like, okay. Well, that's a good surprise. But I guess the general point is just it's really nice to be in a place where and I think it's an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software. As the models get better, you need to get better.
Speaker 10:So for us, we'll get the models getting better at Figma. We're like, okay. Great. Figma gets better. All of our users are going to benefit from this.
Speaker 10:And I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headspace of how to make sure that you're standing up for strategy that way.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the Figma Make user base, the community right now, there are so many different subsets of AI users. There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph. Oh, that came from four o. That came from Sonnet 3.5. And then there are people who are like, I got to try that AI thing out soon.
Speaker 1:Is the Figma make community in a place where 4.5 Sonic can just be like a strict upgrade that there's no resistance to? Or is it something where you have to think about model switching and and leaving some choice up to the user? Are there cost considerations? Like, how much work are you putting on the user or the community, and where is the right pivot point for that?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think there's to your question about sort of the diversity of use cases and personas that might be applicable here, there's so many different users on our platform and types of behavior that we see. You know, about, you know, a third of our users are designers. Two thirds are nondesigners. Design's always at the core.
Speaker 10:And I I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend, one thing I keep coming back to is, like, I think we're just entering this era of the 10x designer where the designer is gonna be able to do so much more than ever before. You know, designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX, and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack. And the designer will be in this position of leverage where they're gonna be able to do a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping lead in the charge. And I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough. Good enough is mediocre.
Speaker 10:You have to be great if you wanna make it so that you can win. And I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have, then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win. And so that's just kind of, like, how I see things going in general. And on the implementation side, I I think it's, like, not as relevant. You know, you just kinda have a variety of ways that people want to interact or different cycles of AI adoption people are at.
Speaker 10:And you need to meet them where they're at, and you need to create and provide an amazing product experience. And so it gets back to the basics there.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models? I keep coming back to the the mid journey example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like minimize loss function. It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation, no matter what your prompt is, and then you can do a lot of different things on top of it. And so it's almost this, like, collaboration between the artist David Holes and the artist who's the prompter. And I'm wondering if you think that, like how does the flavor of design that's coming out of 4.5 plus Figma make, like where does the human opinion get inserted at each level?
Speaker 1:And how does that like how much of that is actually happening? Like can you tell the difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model?
Speaker 10:I I think we're not yet at, like, a Dolly two moment for Zion or a mid journey moment for Zion. Has happened relatively the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And look at DALL E one compared to DALL E two. You know, it's it's easy to dismiss. And I think design generation will get better. At the same time, I think that the law of averages concept that you kinda mentioned is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to great. And if you're able to do that and you're able to, advance your craft, if you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are and what the engineering challenges might be, bring it all together with a great design, user experience, aesthetic. It's it's like it's not just the style. It's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out, along with brand, marketing, point of view, how is it all gonna work to work together. And if you can do that, that's, like, where I think everything unlocks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How what's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI? Because on on our side as a business that that is constantly working with creative people externally. Obviously, we have people internally. But we have like basically as much demand as ever for like talent talented creative people.
Speaker 2:Like we don't we have a ton of work that we wanna do And
Speaker 1:But we also have an unlimited demand for Figma Make and tools that help us instantiate ideas. And there's a lot of stuff where we're like
Speaker 2:Well, and
Speaker 1:it would take you to work focus on the layout or the buttons. And, like, the faster we can get that out, the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but but there's this sense of we have a insatiable demand for novel thinking Yes. And ideas and concepts. Yes. And it's it's less a it's less a
Speaker 1:I can't tell if you're saying we humanity or we TBPN because this
Speaker 2:is both, but TBPN. Yeah. And it's less of, oh, is this possible? Like Yes. Is making this animation gonna be, you know, within budget?
Speaker 2:It's more Sure. It's more like, what animation should we make?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did you make a good idea?
Speaker 2:We're willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking. Yeah. I'm curious, like, where where you see the kind of where where sentiment is that today? Because on the software development side, it seems very clear as when you can build software faster and cheaper, well, we want more engineers to build more software because the world needs a lot of software. And I think same thing for truly great, novel, creative work.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm hearing a strong advertisement on TVPN for TVPN that y'all are trying to hire. So hopefully, our viewers can apply somewhere. But the thing that I would call out is I think that we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI ton wars with design right now. Yeah.
Speaker 10:At least amongst the companies that are really getting it, the ones that have internalized the design is gonna be how you win or lose, and that's the craft, the details that matter. They are really getting aggressive, not, like, meta AI aggressive. I'm let me be clear, but very aggressive. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And it's, I think, just, again, value moving up the stack. Mhmm. And that's something that all companies will eventually figure out. I just hope that a bunch of companies don't figure out too late. But, yeah, I think Jevan's paradox as applied to talent that is adept at using models and doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created and how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people that's real.
Speaker 10:And the demand for development is certainly not, shrinking. I think that, you know, it's never been met. And at Figma, I mean, we're doing headcount planning. Like, we're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year and in big ways. And I think just generally, you know, our point of view from the start about AI at Figma is, like, how do you both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so designers can do more?
Speaker 10:And I think that's something that's a shared view. Maybe we were one of the first to articulate it, if not the first, but I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to make it so that more folks are able to be part of this life cycle, and, also, they're trying to make it so the people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before.
Speaker 1:Do you have a view on, like, the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization? Are there more design firms than ever? Are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever? Is the power law getting steeper? Or is the floor rising or both?
Speaker 1:Do you have any idea on like the shape of the design community and the shape of how designers work together or just make money independently in the age of AI?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of company side, and we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design Mhmm. And more design hiring.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:I think in that more freelancer agency segment, there's more research to do to understand is the same effect happening. But I'll maybe think back historically, you know, when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success, one of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies.
Speaker 9:And Yeah.
Speaker 10:They would quickly just start acquiring agencies of great design talent. And so that's how, like, for example, T. Hannon Lax became involved in then Facebook, then Reality Labs, and John Wax ended up leading up Reality Labs for a while. And they got someone who's legendary design talent to be able to be at the forefront of their work on Oculus for for quite some time. And I I would not be surprised if similar things started happening, but I also think that, you know, back in the early days of Figma, it was this question even of, like, how many designers are there in The United States, in the world?
Speaker 10:I mean, the beer labor statistics said that there were 250,000 designers. It's like, well, that seems wrong in 2012, but, like, how many are there actually? I don't know. Maybe it's, 500,000, not 250,000, but, like, is it, like, a venture scalable business? We don't know.
Speaker 10:And but what we noticed was that values moved the stack, and it was going to be the case that everyone's going to build up, their design team, and the design would be so important as this overall system changed. And I I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012, it has not changed. It is the same thesis we hold today. And I really believe that sort of this era of the 10x designers here, it's just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible, and it'll require more designers to step up as leaders and for them to lean into leadership roles that they may have otherwise not considered. But, you know, if they don't, then I I think it's gonna be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design, and they don't really know the guard rails or how to do it exactly.
Speaker 10:And you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts, but not many, like, railways built, tracks built for folks to go down. So that's the challenge I think that many design oriented folks will will have and the need for design leadership this time.
Speaker 2:Shopify just acquired a design studio last month, by Someone the someone in our chat mentioned this. What's your thinking around open source? You obviously have a close relationship with with Mike over at Anthropic. He's on on the board. And obviously, Claude has consistently led on on cogen.
Speaker 2:So they're a natural partner for Figma make. But is open source something you're exploring or or just given that they're not
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was a tip for a while. It was, like, commoditize your compliments. But maybe the LMs yeah. I'm I'm super interested to hear what you think.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I mean, look. There's, I think, first of all, I mean, Mike, you know, from the start of just looking at, him beyond the board, we had to make sure that, you know, it was clear. We, as Figma, have to choose whatever is best for Figma.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 10:You know, as models get better, we get better. But if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. So Yeah. On 4.5, but to the eval's easy choice. You know, roll it out to users.
Speaker 10:There's gonna be a lot of other model improvements. And, of course, open source is something we're always watching too. And so it's exciting just how much is happening right now. And I think that it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases. I'm I'm pretty psyched.
Speaker 1:What are your thoughts on hardware right now? That feels like a place where we're seeing a reemergence, a lot of hype around Meta's new devices, potentially a new design surface as people design more physical products that are maybe enabled by AI. It just feels like that could be the next thing, some sort of Cambrian explosion of hardware devices. Or maybe it's all just AirPods forever or something. Who knows?
Speaker 1:But I'd love to hear your take on like how is there demand from you for new hardware devices? Like, I the the Wacom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community, but it's a completely prosumer professional device. Just how are you thinking about hardware these days?
Speaker 10:Well, I think in the Figma context, what we think about is, okay, where are the screens that we need to serve and our users need to design for? And so that's why I was so excited to be able to check out Meta's new glasses and also the Neural Band. The band is underappreciated. So cool.
Speaker 2:People won't get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it because it's It
Speaker 1:looks just like a whoop band. Like, there's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it. And you're like, oh, can fully see what's going on. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. And but like, let's be clear. I mean, this was years in development, many years. Mean, mean, they've been at it for so long now. And I think at the first time I got the demo was almost a year and a half ago, a year and a few months ago.
Speaker 10:And I saw it again right before config, but like the sort of new improved version.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors. You know, the same thing has been true in auto. It's true, you know, in wearables in general. It's probably gonna become true in other surfaces that people will find. And I I think that whether it's AR, VR, you know, curved glass, you know, small screen sizes, large screen sizes, there's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target.
Speaker 10:And we haven't even gone into, AI and agents and what designers need to do to create context in these places too. I think in many ways, we're just in the MS DOS era of AI. We are still figuring out how to explore this amazing, latent space. You've got this LM. It's your spaceship, but you're in this, like, n dimensional space, and the best way to, like, figure out where you are, your compass is your prompt, natural language.
Speaker 10:It's like what interfaces will we built for that? How would we be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction, figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architecture just fundamentally improve? And also, you know, what protocols between the models should exist and what's the best way to create those because I think that there's a reason MCP has really caught on so fast. It's extremely valuable. And we just launched with Figma the Figma MCP for design as our mode service.
Speaker 10:Before, it was only desktop and local, and also we improved the capabilities. And then we did it for Make as well. So we wanna make sure that people know you're not trapped to Make. Figma Make, if you're on prompt to code and you're, making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're spending a lot of time on it, awesome. Like, you always had download code, But now you can just have your MCP connect to Figma Make and pull all your code in.
Speaker 1:How is MCP adoption going? It feels like there's a world where, like, I was promised, like, the AI didn't need an because it would just use the computer, right? And I imagine that there's a maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my AI just literally opens a browser, goes to figment.com, does whatever it needs to do, just like a human. And yet, MCP seems to be what you're identifying with, like, the energy around it is immense. How are people actually using it?
Speaker 1:Like, are there is there a killer app, killer feature, some story where you've been really excited about, like, the impact that it's had on an actual, like, design project or designer or firm or your company?
Speaker 10:I mean, you should definitely try it out. Like, it is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structured in Figma with Auto Layout. You've got your variables defined. And then you're able to just, you know, basically press the button. And with MCP, you pull in all that design context into your code base.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 10:And you can use inference to basically go figure out how to map it. And I'm not saying it's all one shot, but, like, with either one shot or a little bit of iterative prompting, if you have your design set up in a structured way
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 10:It it's a pretty wild experience. You know, Coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow, and, you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but Sure. How much it's affected them and how powerful it's been. And overall, yeah, people are super excited. We've been thrilled with the response.
Speaker 10:That's why we're investing so much time into it is because we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company Yeah. Is being more open making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI. Yeah. There's so much that we've done in so many places and designed as context. And that context is valuable in so many different spots.
Speaker 1:So I should think of of the MCP efforts as a almost like a business to consumer like a consumer benefit, not necessarily just something like an API that enables like better, like B2B partnerships and integrations. Is that roughly correct?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think it's, you know, I think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure. Yeah. But I think that, yes, with the right MCP services out there, the ways that they can affect, you know, all sorts of places that you consume inference, it's pretty pretty big. And I think we're just kind of at the start.
Speaker 10:So, yeah, for Figma, we're very, very excited about where we can go here. And then, yeah, I think just if you zoom out, the bigger story that is being told is, how do we go from idea to product? Mhmm. And, you know, it used to be this very linear process, but now we're no longer in that world. We're in a world where instead people try various directions, various paths, and you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas, explore them with your team, figure out that option space.
Speaker 10:We hope that it will make me a big part of it. But even if someone has a different tool that they've they're using, we also wanna make sure that they're able to bring their design context in. And with that design context, really help that other surface improve. We think that's a win win for everyone, and it's most importantly a win for the user.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools. Can you imagine if you had had Figma make? It's incredible. When you had that age, you've let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade what they're going
Speaker 1:be I mean, I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about 15 year olds sold the company for $50,000,000 or something. There's crazy stuff happening all over the place.
Speaker 3:But it's just
Speaker 2:gonna be more and more and more at the very
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 10:Last question. Bells will be wild.
Speaker 1:Last question from the chat. Do you miss the ratty? Oh, not really. No. Miss And what what is it?
Speaker 1:It's the university dining hall? Is that right?
Speaker 10:One of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Okay. I was more of a Vdub guy, but
Speaker 2:Okay. There we go.
Speaker 10:Yeah. The RADI was a great place to see people.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:And but then again, I also like I I hate standing in line. Yeah. Would time out everything so that I either arrived super early or super late. So I wasn't in the long line. But, yeah, the food, maybe not the best, but, you know, good the vibes.
Speaker 10:Right?
Speaker 2:The memories. Good
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for bringing good Yeah. Vibes to this
Speaker 2:Massive week for you guys.
Speaker 1:Massive week. We'll talk to you soon, Dylan.
Speaker 2:We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Good to see you. Quickly, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and Android Plus clusters.
Speaker 2:Core, perplexity, and many more.
Speaker 1:And we have our next guest from Stripe in the Restream waiting room. We will bring in Jeff
Speaker 2:It's time to Jeff.
Speaker 1:TVPN UltraDome. Jeff, how you doing? Woah. Woah. Okay.
Speaker 2:We're purple.
Speaker 1:I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on?
Speaker 7:We're here in New York. We're finishing up, some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Striped Tour. Amazing. But I imagine you all wanna talk about some, agentic commerce today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's looking scary. It's looking wild in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us
Speaker 2:I get excited enough about payments even without the neon lighting.
Speaker 1:Looks like everything else. Better in purple. Yeah. Alright. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Give us the the actual news item. It it seems like Sam Altman just found out about Stripe recently and decided to do some sort of deal or something. Of course, like, the companies go back a long way, and so my my my question is, like, what's new about the relationship between the two companies today?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Really exciting. So today, for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt. Mhmm. And inside of ChatTbt, you're able to discover products as lots of people are already doing, but now you can buy from businesses right in the chat.
Speaker 7:And so we partnered with OpenAI to build this, as well as a open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling agentically. So I'd love to get into all
Speaker 1:of that. Yeah. Name every product that I can buy today. I mean, give me an example because I can imagine there are products where the company wraps in a different content management system or order management system
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Physical versus there are other companies where they sell stuff, and it's really just Stripe and a website. And so that makes a ton of sense. So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So anytime you you discover a product in ChatGPT, if that seller is enabled on the agenda commerce protocol and is working with with OpenAI, you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment updates you've already saved with ChatGPT per subscription or be able to add one. And what's really interesting is, you know, one of the big unlocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to Agentic Commerce, and how do you scale accepting Agentic payments? And we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the agentic commerce protocol, which is an open standard that we co develop with OpenAI for businesses to make their checkouts agent viable, agent ready.
Speaker 7:And so as a business, you're used to first, you're selling in the mall, and then you're sold over the phone, and then you sold on the website. And now you're gonna be able to express your checkout in a way
Speaker 4:that you
Speaker 7:want for agents to be able to initiate transactions. And the second big thing is how do you actually move the money? How do you get the payment from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way, which is why we built this shared payment token API, which lets businesses on Stripe and businesses that might be using another processor be able to process agentic payments, and that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this.
Speaker 2:Getting more into the details, if if for an ecommerce company in particular, like, where where does where is inventory managed? Is are you guys integrating? I know Shopify had an announcement today too. Is that connected to this? Are these two totally different experiences?
Speaker 2:Like, help me understand how, like, you know, a specific company like an ecommerce brand is is gonna can get started selling in line in in these LMs?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So today's announcement for ChatGPT has Etsy live. So today, rolling out this morning, you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers directly in the chat, and Shopify is coming soon in the same in the same program. Cool. So these are the first two merchant partners, the first two ecommerce platforms that are are working with ChatGPT to be able to sell sell identically through their LM system and and their consumer base.
Speaker 7:For merchants going forward, you know, how do you, at scale, have a way to express your checkout as a merchant, as an ecommerce platform that isn't just, hey. Have the agents, like, pretend to be on my site and, click around to to to do so. How do you have a a, standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations, and that's what the AgenTek Commerce protocol is. It's a a way for any ecommerce platform, any business to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction. And we think this is a big unlock for how to scale at Gentle Commerce.
Speaker 7:The world has already had lots of product feeds. There are many at scale product feeds, but there isn't yet a way for a business to programmatically express their checkout in a way that they they can control and have it be agent initiatable.
Speaker 1:How does the standard that you built differ from MCP? Is it related? Is it compatible? Are these two separate paths in the tech tree?
Speaker 7:Yeah. We think that that that the AgenTik commerce protocol is specifically designed to help with initiating AgenTik checkouts online. And it is it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case. It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LLM first as MCP does for generic tool usage, but checkouts are complicated. They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and SKUs and inventory and payment failures and payment success.
Speaker 7:You need a dedicated specification, and that's why we're so happy to partner with ChatGPT with OpenAI to both build the standard, but also have it be the way that they're going to scale their merchants. And so you can get started at agendacommerce.dev. That URL happened to be available last week.
Speaker 2:Victory. I might
Speaker 7:have bought it. And that's and that's what we went went forward with.
Speaker 1:How did how does the Apple Tax feature in all of this? It seems like I use ChatGPT on my phone, and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital. If I say Yeah.
Speaker 2:Amazon physical goods historically have been exempt.
Speaker 1:Exempt. But if I'm buying a digital good, do you play nice with that? Like, how do you see that all playing out?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Today today's launch is is focused on on physical goods, and I think there's going to be a variety of ways that Sure. These third parties third party services are a are able to charge in in various ecosystems. But today's launch works on web, on iOS, on Android, and is rolling out to all US ChatGPT consumers this morning.
Speaker 1:Very exciting.
Speaker 2:Do you think people are are an underestimating how much of a shift this trend is gonna be? Because we were explaining before you got on earlier, if if I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want, be served a number of options, and in one click buy it, that's incredibly useful. Even I I was giving the example of even browsing Amazon and trying to just find if I'm trying to find a the example I gave is like a paper towel holder. This is personal for me because I I was I I bought a really cheap direct to factory paper, you know, direct from factory paper towel holder and I was just like, just give
Speaker 7:You know, me it's not the place to skimp.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:You use it every you use it multiple times a day. Right? But but I I've always wanted to almost a layer over Amazon to just just products that have existed or from or from brands that have existed for more than a hundred years. Right? And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of, I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old.
Speaker 2:Right? If they've been around
Speaker 7:So for it's it's like your futuristic purchase is a, I want the legacy provider. Yeah. It's a perfect combination. I think I think you're expressing what many of us are all feeling in our lives, which is the modality for discovery has completely changed. And we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent.
Speaker 7:And it's certainly having tested having worked on and tested this for the last many many months, it feels extremely natural to to purchase where where you are discovering. My garage is full of things I bought from Etsy as
Speaker 2:we as we tested over the
Speaker 7:over the last months. And this is just the beginning because with this type of foundational agent to commerce set of APIs and open standards, it's really a unlock to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale all types of new consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the beginning here, but we are, I think, unlocked, we hope, how to take these things from prototype to at scale production. And I really encourage folks who are watching today to to look on CheckGPT and try to find something fun that you've always wanted to buy that might be have been on page 10,000 of your search engine, but might be, like, right there as the LLM really can can provide you very personalized recommendations. It's it's it's just very fun to on the go Yeah.
Speaker 7:Buy and tap in this kind of way.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, thank you so much for stopping by and
Speaker 2:giving I us the have, but but probably stuff you can't even get into. But we'll have you on again soon to talk more. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon, Jeff.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, Jeff.
Speaker 7:Good to see you all.
Speaker 1:And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15.83% on the news. It's a $7,420,000,000 company. Head over to public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Not financial advice.
Speaker 1:Our next guest yeah. May maybe you wanna go long?
Speaker 2:Maybe you wanna go short. 15%.
Speaker 1:But a big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chat. GPT.
Speaker 2:Well, we have Adam Draper in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in. There we go. Woah. There he is.
Speaker 6:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. What's happening?
Speaker 1:Yo, Jordy.
Speaker 6:John. So excited to talk to you.
Speaker 2:Let's go. We're excited to have you. Give us give us the news. What's happening?
Speaker 6:Alright. Well, we raised $87,000,000. Actually, to Yeah. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Actually, what?
Speaker 6:Well, it was $87.06 $5.04 $3.02 $1 because, you know, that's how rockets go off. $8.07 $6.05 $4.03 $2.01.
Speaker 2:There we go. Boost VC. It's a rocket.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We get it we get it continue to do what we're doing. Our our investors love our returns, so we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last thirteen years, is backing great founders on the fringe.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. You were early to sci fi investing or or maybe did it before it was was was so on trend.
Speaker 6:I was early investor in Coinbase, a company called Virgin Labs that did Snapchat that became Snapchat Spectacles. I've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last fifteen years. I just flew a jetpack.
Speaker 2:No way. No way. Yes. Somebody sent me somebody sent me a video earlier. Maybe it was the same company.
Speaker 2:Were were you flying with Jackson Moses? Is that is it Gravity Industries? Is that the company?
Speaker 6:I I was fly so okay. This is the coolest thing. I, you know, I I read my first Iron Man comic when I was, like, six. Yeah. And then about a decade ago, we invested in Ironman thesis, which ended up investing in gravity.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 6:And I got to fly a jetpack two days. So
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 6:I I I I What's
Speaker 1:I heard there was some fundraising news.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's great.
Speaker 2:John's back. Hit that hit that gong. 87,000,000. There we go. Adam's the most fired up.
Speaker 2:You're the most fired up guest I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping. You're at the standing desk. I gotta tell people.
Speaker 9:Thank you guys
Speaker 6:so much for doing this. You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world.
Speaker 1:We appreciate it.
Speaker 2:We love nobody loves techno I would hate if somebody loved technology more than more than us. Maybe But you break down the jetpack. How does this it's a good example of a specific portfolio company. How does this go commercial?
Speaker 6:I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital, is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a 12 year old, and they end up coming true. And I got to do that with a jetpack. I like, I invested in, like, exactly what my childhood self would have loved to have invested in, except it was seven years ago. And then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it, anyone can do it. I was I just flew down to I got to Bakersfield, and then I got to fly a jetpack.
Speaker 6:And so I am
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. I love I love everything about jetpack. How how does Gravity specifically how are they looking to commercialize? You know, what what are the what are some of the use cases?
Speaker 2:Is it is it gonna be the kind of thing that that is more initially, you know, consumer? It's just fun to fly a jet pack, so people pay to do it.
Speaker 4:By way,
Speaker 6:one of the things I always notice when you guys doing your thing is that your cans pile up, so I wanna make sure
Speaker 1:it's, like,
Speaker 8:fit in.
Speaker 2:There we go. You got piling up. Double fisting.
Speaker 6:So we so but first off, we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great, incredible things. Gravity specifically, we saw the I saw a man fly. So he flew in my back parking lot back here in San Mateo. And when someone flies
Speaker 2:You gotta write him a check.
Speaker 1:You write a check right there.
Speaker 6:And so we wrote a check right there. Seven years later, he's built a, you know, multimillion dollar business, and it has two parts to it. There's the defense part and the media part. And also this training school so that people like I could become pilots, jetpack pilots. And basically, I highly recommend we should go do a we should go.
Speaker 1:That sounds fantastic. Always wanted
Speaker 2:to have a jetpack in the studio in the Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For really big fundraising.
Speaker 2:What's the what's the defense what's the defense use case here in in your view? Because I can imagine in in sort of more controlled environments, this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone. But at the same time, on the battlefield, I don't know, with with a lot of drones, don't know if I'd wanna strap myself in and get into get into the air just considering you might be a target. But how how do you view the defense opportunity?
Speaker 6:Turns out boarding boats, it turns out, is one of the best defense capabilities. So being able to go from one boat to another boat
Speaker 1:Wait. You see that with, like, the Navy SEALs show up in the
Speaker 2:little skiff. That was the other demo they did. Right?
Speaker 6:With Yep. That that was gravity.
Speaker 2:That's Yeah. That was insane. So gravity every time I've seen a jetpack, basically, the last seven years, it was gravity. It's been
Speaker 1:it's hilarious.
Speaker 6:And it's really an innovation in vertical takeoff and landing engines. People didn't believe. There was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground with enough fuel to live for long enough. And so this has been a huge innovation. Also, paramedic is a big deal.
Speaker 6:Like, if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within
Speaker 3:a small amount
Speaker 6:of time and get it. And then the yeah. Dude, I mean, I've I've it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew. I'm gonna be a I'm a jet pack racer, guys.
Speaker 1:Jet pack racer. I don't I don't how
Speaker 6:to say this. I don't know to say this in Italy.
Speaker 2:Just deploy deploy the fund in, like, the in queue
Speaker 6:jetpack stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, it could be bio jetpack things. It could be jetpack things. Just it needs to have jetpacks evidently.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Last question. What what's the next category that is maybe if if jet packs were underhyped seven years ago, what what what are you looking at today?
Speaker 6:These founders are coming into my office and they're saying, I'm gonna make you live fifty years longer. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to just cure all genetic disease. We're going to move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the health care and science world. So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say.
Speaker 6:And also one of the things we do as Boost VC is we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech early stage venture community. And it's coming up on Wednesday where you can see some of these bio future forward companies. Actually, a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on TPPN. Doug from Radiance. Love him.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 6:Incredible people. Gravity.
Speaker 2:There we go. I expect to see you flying around the floor Yeah. The Yeah. Of the down Okay.
Speaker 6:We'll go down together. We'll do it together.
Speaker 3:Love
Speaker 1:it. Yeah. You need to jet pack into the show. The chat is demanding it. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 2:Adam. Congrats on the new fun.
Speaker 1:See you soon. Hey. Thank Thank you. We just gotta
Speaker 6:keep tagging the founders.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Incredible. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Rest of your day. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:We, Puffin, Simon, Kerber Puffer.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow, live,
Speaker 2:ultimate TV people. Them. Can't
Speaker 1:wait. But for now, we have James Hawkins in the Restream waiting room from PostHog.
Speaker 2:PostHog. Here
Speaker 1:How he you doing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Very well. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Give the give us the fundraiser news news. Let's amp
Speaker 1:it Let's amp it up. What you got for us?
Speaker 8:Sure. Well, first of all, I am very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza.
Speaker 2:Woah. Woah. Shots fired.
Speaker 1:I I I love pineapple on pizza. That's
Speaker 2:I don't. I don't. I'm riding with James here.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, then you can hit the gong because
Speaker 2:I like this guy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's my mortal enemy. No. I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that?
Speaker 1:What timeline debating that? That that that's that's an eternal point of debate.
Speaker 8:It's fine on it. It's not a debate. It's What
Speaker 1:about hot dog? Hot is a hot dog a sandwich?
Speaker 8:Hot is no. I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1:What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it 90 degrees? Then it it looks like a sandwich.
Speaker 8:I feel like I feel like I I'm not American.
Speaker 9:I have
Speaker 8:a less strong opinion on this, I think. I think you guys are more
Speaker 1:If a dog wore pants, would it wear them with on the two back legs or across all four legs? These are
Speaker 8:You're the you're not straying from the hard questions.
Speaker 1:These are the hard questions.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna
Speaker 8:Well, you get I've one more I've got one more thing. Please. So I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised our series e.
Speaker 2:Woah. Twenty five million, 1,400,000.0 pace.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Massive. What what unlocked it? Walk through the business. What's working?
Speaker 1:The customers, the the problem set, everything.
Speaker 8:Sure. So Posthoc is a very developer focused set of analytics tools and feature flags and stuff at the moment. We try and help you understand how to build a better product basically. So we help you understand your customers in lots of different ways like errors analytics. We have 16 products.
Speaker 8:What's working well?
Speaker 2:16 products. Yeah. Should be hitting a gone about
Speaker 10:10 or 11 that
Speaker 8:are charged for and the rest in production. That's right. So yeah, we've been busy bees building stuff. What's working well, we've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after. We think there's been a big rise in product engineering.
Speaker 8:Engineers who wanna decide what to work on. And so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them. And I think we have about 240,000 customers across, like, free and paid. And so we're kinda like a heavy product led growth from engineers just installing our stuff, basically.
Speaker 1:What I some of these tools, I imagine, would be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition. What's been the secret to maintaining differentiation against the big cloud platforms?
Speaker 8:All the products in one. That's been the main thing. Going very, very wide. Mhmm. Because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you you know, there are there are feature flag products, there are experimentation products, there are analytics tools, but it's the same customer underneath all of these.
Speaker 8:And so we kind of felt it's just better. It is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that than it is to buy, like, 15 solutions, basically.
Speaker 1:That's What's kind of big take on the idea of the compound start up versus iterating and adding one product after the other? How focused do you want to be on a new product at one time? Do want to orient the entire company around the next product, or do you wanna have, you know, let's just get a bunch of things started, we'll iterate towards greatness and all of them kind of simultaneously?
Speaker 8:Much more the latter. So, we start a couple of products at a time, but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product. So back in the early days when we're smaller, we would go, hey, new shiny thing, everyone would move over.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:But then as the existing one got more and more growth Sure. We'd start we just weren't very responsive to customers and so on. It didn't feel like we're looking after people properly. So we have tiny little teams, like the average team size of post ops is probably three people on It's each just like three engineers deciding what to build. We just try and get out of the way.
Speaker 8:So we're fiercely anti bureaucracy internally. So, yeah, this this small team structure has worked great, like very flat, very wide, and a lot of autonomy for engineers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you're when you're thinking about creating a new product, what is what is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment? You know, at at what point would you would you launch something and maybe shut it down? Or or or if you're launching or by the time you're launching something, are you committed to maintaining it over the long run? I'm curious what kind of the the framework is.
Speaker 8:Sure. Yeah. We see really we start at the bottom end of the market. So the bar to us launching something's pretty low. Like, we'll start targeting two person startups kinda doing YC, for example, is kind of, start from the start is a phrase you hear a lot internally.
Speaker 8:In terms of retiring stuff, we haven't had to retire a product at this stage. We've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage, we consider it. So we're going in after a lot of the market. This is actually behavior that we're trying to change now, with AI in particular, because we're looking at figuring out how can we use, like, this sort of multidimensional data and all these different tools together, which is one of the challenges. That's partly why we did this round because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kinda go nuts trying to automate.
Speaker 8:The way I would kinda consider it is a bit like if you were trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue at, like, one data type. You'll get a rough idea, but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening. And so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors. But this is something that's new to us, and it will take a little bit of time and some confidence. So that's kind of yeah.
Speaker 8:It's probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point.
Speaker 1:Last question for me. How has AI changed the business over the last few years? There's so many different ways that you you can launch AI products, you can use AI to speed up product development. There's a million different ways. But what's been the biggest thing that's actually worked for you?
Speaker 8:It's massively sped up product development. And because of having so many products at once, it's given us a big it's just we already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available, and it's just ramped up fully. So now kind of and we even have companies quite regularly emailing us, like, smaller start ups being like, hey, would you consider buying a company? We don't know how to compete with compound approaches in our industry. Like, we've become a feature of a bigger platform, for example.
Speaker 8:And so I think we got lucky with that respect. We are targeting engineers, and their workflow is entirely changing. Mhmm. And so we're trying to move towards a world where we're generating kind of pull requests for people based on, like, our error data, their session route, like, video clips of using their products, like, their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in. So, yeah, it's a totally dramatic change for us.
Speaker 8:I think we've gone from nice air, honestly, to, like, in complete excitement
Speaker 1:going That's great.
Speaker 2:OneNote, chat absolutely loves the website. You should look at it, John. It's absolutely stunning. It's it's probably the best iteration I've seen of of take you know, building like a desktop and Yep. Making a website just like a desktop.
Speaker 2:Right? Sure. Feeling like
Speaker 1:a Oh, yeah. This is really good.
Speaker 2:Absolutely stunning. One question. Was Posthog a hot company at YC demo day? Or did it take time to to get people to kind of come around to the team and the opportunity?
Speaker 8:We actually had I think relative to our batch, we're doing quite well. There were a lot of traction, just free open source usage. We just had an open source project to start off with. But our seed round was a train wreck K. To raise.
Speaker 8:It was, like, March 2020. And so I was like, man, we got this thing done in, three days. And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this round
Speaker 1:of this.
Speaker 8:So, yeah, we made like, yeah, we made a bunch of people who put in like random five k checks and a bunch of money, which is actually one of most fun parts, if I'm honest. Yeah. So, yeah, the c round was very hard. The later rounds, it kinda got easier. Like the series a was like Google Ventures preempted, and we went with it because we there was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time.
Speaker 8:And then Sure. The later rounds all got much easier because we just had an obvious traction. We're quite an efficient business because we're inbound, and so we haven't really needed money. And that's our first rule fundraising is do not need to fundraise, but we're not against fundraising. And that served us extremely well later on.
Speaker 8:But, yeah, the start of the first round was the hardest by miles.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Such an important lesson for anyone out there. It's like it's okay if your seed round is brutal, you know, it's not necessarily can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path. It can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or or just how good the team is. So thank you for coming on and giving the update, and congrats on on on the round.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great to meet you, James.
Speaker 1:Bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for building and planning products. You heard it from him.
Speaker 1:They built a lot of products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road
Speaker 2:People forget they created modern they basically created the modern software as a service website.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true.
Speaker 2:How many how many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it, but
Speaker 1:Well, up next, have Eric, the CEO of Modal Labs. He's in the restroom coming waiting in to the TVP and Ultradome. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Eric, what's happening?
Speaker 5:Hey. How's it going? It's
Speaker 1:great to It's be great.
Speaker 2:Great to finally have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So so we build infrastructure for AI. And so, basically, if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI or sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker and things like that, it really doesn't work well for all these new AI applications, you know, whether that's, you know, generative media or, like, large language models or things like that. So we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that.
Speaker 1:Where does that sit in the stack? Like, are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at, like, these massive, massive data centers? Or or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at, like, a smaller scale? What how does the market actually bifurcate?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we focus on slightly smaller companies. Initially, we saw a lot of PMF with start ups. But in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of traction also with later stage companies, you know, public companies and enterprise companies.
Speaker 1:What's the pricing
Speaker 5:model Not for quite at something like Stargate level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. What's the pricing model for something like this?
Speaker 5:So it's all usage based, which means sort of traditional basically like a traditional cloud vendor. Like we charge per GPU hour, essentially.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure. And then do you offer like abstraction layers on top of this? Do you want to build a platform at some point? Or are you happy vending it into another cloud partner where the customer might not even be aware of you? How you sit in the market over the long term?
Speaker 2:No, we offer a very
Speaker 5:fat layer of like all these software structure that focus on engineers writing code. We consider ourselves a high platform. Right? So it's meant for engineers who who wanna write code, and, you know, they they they need a better infrastructure than maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of scaling up and down, working with GPUs, working with capacity all over the world.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And they wanna write code.
Speaker 1:What are the I mean, have you what's the biggest, like, nightmare story from misconfigured infrastructure or, like, the problem you're solving? Have you seen just, like, millions of dollars go up in smoke? Is it pretty rare? Like, what what what's the shape of failure in the AI? What what are the stakes I right
Speaker 5:don't know if I could recall anything. Okay. We're pretty good at, like, catching. I mean, in a couple of cases, customers have
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 1:mean with your software.
Speaker 2:It's more like company, you know, people coming to you
Speaker 1:Saying
Speaker 2:having had issues in the past Yeah. Figuring this stuff on their own.
Speaker 5:I I would say, like, the biggest thing right now is just, like, people wasting a lot of money on GPUs. Especially, I think, a year or two ago, like, there was this, like, kind of hyped up, like, scarcity of, like, you got to get, a thousand GPUs. Yep. So a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And now they're sitting on them, and, like, they're underutilized. Right? So they're, like, you know, what can I do with these?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is there is there value for those folks just to, like, sell it back as spot instances for someone else? Like, what what are companies actually doing when they wind up g a little bit too GPU rich?
Speaker 2:I I I know there's a
Speaker 5:couple of other companies. I think it's, like, Thrill is one of the it's not like a space where, like, super focused on. Like, we we kinda think that model is kind of broken, like, the the idea that companies go out and make big reservation. We think companies should just pay for exactly what they use. And so that's something Model does really well is we scale up and down, and you only pay for the time the GPUs are actually running.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's your view on the the GPU war? NVIDIA is obviously dominant. AMD has been in the the the year of the comeback. They're taking feedback from George Hotts.
Speaker 1:They're listening to Dylan Patel. What are, what does the race look like? There's also a lot of ASICs companies. There's Broadcoms doing stuff. What does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years?
Speaker 1:Where are you kind of, where where are you partnering up and, like, investing for the long term?
Speaker 5:So I I think in the next couple of years, it's gonna be all NVIDIA. Like, our customers only want NVIDIA. NVIDIA is, like, such a massive advantage in terms of the software ecosystem.
Speaker 2:But I I I think look a couple
Speaker 5:of years beyond that, like, that's when it starts to get more hazy. I'm personally quite bullish on TPUs, for instance, like Google's Yeah. But, of course, those AMD, like you mentioned, and other players.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are there yeah. Are are there other, like, anything that you're looking at in terms of, like, abstracting away some of CUDA's advantages? It just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding. You should be able to take, you know, some sort of model and, like, just port it, but that doesn't seem to be working.
Speaker 1:But people are certainly they have a lot of economic incentive to do that. Are you bullish on the on any of that kind of, like, breaking the CUDA lock in?
Speaker 5:Yes. It is funny because people are like, CUDA is like a mode, like, it's Yeah. It's such an amazing but like, I don't know, like, for anyone who's like actually trying to write CUDA, it like fucking sucks. It's it's very hard to work with. So I I I don't know why it's like, it's been so hard for AMD or or for other providers to like build a better software layer, because CUDA is very hard to use.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So yeah, give it a couple of years. Like, I would hope that there's better ways to write these kernels.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I just remember the story of like Facebook was written in all PHP. They wanted to move to C plus plus They didn't want to have everyone rewrite everything. So they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP It's to hard to Hip hop. Yeah, that's it, right?
Speaker 1:And so it's like, couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different GPU, like create a new abstraction layer? I don't know how the economic incentives play out. I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It comes down Sort
Speaker 5:of what modular is trying to
Speaker 1:do Sure.
Speaker 5:In a way.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It comes down We're way below.
Speaker 5:Right? Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Yeah. I was saying it's hard to be extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that CUDA has this long term hyper durable
Speaker 1:moat. There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there, right? They both can't be true, but
Speaker 2:It's like, why can't I run a thirty hour Claude code prompt at some point or Claude code in the year 2030 and Yeah. Just like, you know
Speaker 1:Rewrite this for AMD. Don't make mistakes. And this just does.
Speaker 5:One
Speaker 1:shot. I I would I would hope that's how it plays out. But who knows? We I mean, we might be years away. I I generally like you.
Speaker 2:I've enjoyed enjoyed your takes and would love to have you back on some time when we have more time. Yeah. But congrats on on the fundraise. John, did you wanna do the honor?
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Give us the details. What what's the fundraising 87,000,000,000
Speaker 2:million dollars. 87,000,000,000 million dollars. 87,000,000. Series B.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so Lux is leading
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 5:Existing investors putting in a bunch of money to Yeah. We're super pumped.
Speaker 2:Great stuff, Eric. Thank you for joining, and have a great rest of your day. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 5:Take care.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numero HQ to get started.
Speaker 2:Well And on that note, I believe we have our first in person guest guest of the day.
Speaker 1:The day
Speaker 2:of the week. From Applovin.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show, Adam. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TVPN Ultradome. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Here we are.
Speaker 1:Great to have you. We'd love to have you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. Just kinda set the table for us.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do.
Speaker 1:That that that's a good title thumbnail for some fun day title.
Speaker 2:I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do. Right? Palance Palance
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Same thing.
Speaker 4:Same Spot. Let's break it down. So we started the company in 2012 advertising inside mobile games.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And really the goal back then hasn't changed to now. We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves, but do it on a revenue based pricing model. So that they can come in and say, look, I wanna generate a thousand dollars of revenue by day 30. Be able to get me a thousand dollars of media spend against that so I can break even, make a profit. I'll scale unlimited if I can do that.
Speaker 4:And I was I've been in ads for twenty years. I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:You
Speaker 4:don't know what works, what doesn't. You try to convince them an audience was there. It's all a bunch of make believe until you go to top of funnel revenue based pricing. And so we ended up working with a lot of game developers. These are companies all over the world, a lot of smaller indie businesses.
Speaker 4:And when you're working with a customer that where the CEO is the founder and they're on the front lines of marketing, it's a great dynamic. Because usually, they're technical. They want to actually understand the math around marketing. And so we built our business really being inside this niche, working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world. Well, business started growing a ton.
Speaker 4:We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And over the decade that we ran up up until going public, this business is super lucrative, super successful for our customers. We help these game developers really build their businesses, but no one had heard of us anywhere. Weren't Right? VC Well, not by desire. I'll say we're we're we're one of the biggest misses for Sand Hill because we we couldn't raise a million over 4 back in 02/2012.
Speaker 4:This was after we launched the product. Business was growing like a weed. We were we were doubling every single month
Speaker 2:from was the what was the pushback?
Speaker 1:Do people just think like, oh, Google will take it all?
Speaker 4:Or think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know. I I mean, I've worked on the skills over the years, but it it the pushback was Google will eliminate you. If it's not Google, Facebook will eliminate you. If it's not Facebook, here comes Amazon.
Speaker 4:So it was why is this goofy named company gonna be able to do inside Sure. Advertising?
Speaker 1:Really quickly, you said you've been selling ads for twenty years. 2005 is the start of What's the first ad you sold?
Speaker 4:We we were we were affiliate marketers Okay. In social. So a couple of us, one of
Speaker 2:And that's how that's the most hardcore marketers Oh, yeah. Started out in affiliate because it's just you you eat what you kill.
Speaker 4:If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is brutally tough. That's amazing. And and what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the the actual games that were the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zynga era post Zynga?
Speaker 4:Is the tough part. It's a lot of casual games. Yeah. Like, the the environment we have now is a billion plus daily active players Mhmm. Playing solitaires and puzzles and words
Speaker 1:Match three.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally puzzles. So if you walk down an aisle of a plane, you you'll notice like puzzles on everyone's phone. Yeah. Those are the types of people playing.
Speaker 4:It turns out it's a lot of middle aged women. It skews female. Sure. It's a really strong audience
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of people. But a lot of us don't relate to that. So you think mobile gamer, well, shooter games and, like, traditional gamer. And so that was always one of the things we had to there was a challenge in the businesses. How can that audience be good for especially as we get into ecommerce and talk about our launch Yeah.
Speaker 4:For broader brands because people
Speaker 2:They control so much purchases.
Speaker 1:I was about to say.
Speaker 4:It's all the heads of households
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:On the platform. We only have adults. We we don't work on any child apps. So you've got adults, head of household, skew female, people with money. These are people on a thousand dollar phone playing for forty five minutes a day.
Speaker 4:It's a perfect audience. People just never realized it until we became more mainstream.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about there there's this critique going around with OpenAI, doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with NVIDIA, and there's this, like, circularity to the economy. Yeah. But then, of course, there's outside demand. People want to use the products.
Speaker 1:How do you think about circularity within the mobile app ecosystem, where a lot I'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile games. And it feels like, oh, well, you know, is this just all circular? When does the actual money come in? Yeah. How how have you addressed that throughout the the the history of the company?
Speaker 1:And, like, where do we stand
Speaker 2:now?
Speaker 4:I mean, again, you got to find a purchaser at some point Yeah. In that circularity. Right? So if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported Yep. Via house of cards.
Speaker 4:But at the end of that, you you have two inside gaming, two things you're trying to do. Take a user from a game where they're playing x time per day and take them to a game that they're gonna be more engaged with and play x or point 1.5 x. You can do that. You create more ad inventory. So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply.
Speaker 4:It's not any different than social networking. You get more ads viewed, then you gotta make more use advertising. So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transactional. So you you get them going from a Solitaire to Candy Crush. They pay $2,000 a year.
Speaker 4:You've created transactional value in the middle there. There there's a lot more value than where the user started.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did the company actually scale? Like, how how, like, meat and potatoes were the first deals? And then I I imagine everything's, you know, full tech platform now. But we're we're we're the first advertisers who are onboard on the platform kind of like a handshake and a contract.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or how do you actually Yeah. Inventory? How do you sell the
Speaker 2:ticket in any video in your app
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At this moment, and we'll give you, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. How much of, like, doing things that don't scale?
Speaker 4:There was a ton of wheeling and dealing.
Speaker 1:Actually, it's
Speaker 4:cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office. Yeah. We had a gong and, like No way. There was a bunch of one of the guys who runs my business team and now runs Growth slept in the office for the first six months. So we we were affiliates.
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. Wheeler and dealers. So you'd go up to the early game developer and just give them a value prop of, you can actually buy an install. Back then, there was not even the chance of buying an install.
Speaker 4:Now I said, sell them revenue. You're talking about thirteen years ago. Being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative. And so when we went out to the market and pitched the Zyngas of the world on instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens by install Sure. That in itself was, oh, wow.
Speaker 4:That's great. And then you pair that with video. The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated. Sure. Thirty five seconds of average viewing time on our ads.
Speaker 4:Wow. You can't do anything else. So when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not distracted
Speaker 2:Not unskippable.
Speaker 4:Well, it's a mix of skippable and non skippable, but half the ads, the user actually, it's a great point, opt in to watching the ad for currency inside the game. Sure. That's up to sixty seconds of viewing time unskippable. You can't do other things. So we live in ADD rich environment.
Speaker 4:This is the most non ADD thing anywhere in the world. Yep. You've got to watch that advertisement.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fascinating. How do you think AI is going to change mobile gaming? I've seen there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this character that's I'm sure you've seen these. And then people are like, but that's not the real game.
Speaker 1:It's a pick three underneath. And then I found someone actually built the real game because game development's getting cheaper. It feels like we might be entering, like, a new there's a couple companies that have been pitching, like, vibe coding platforms for games that will, you know, like, become their own app store. It feels like we could just be entering, like, a new primordial or Cambrian explosion of gaming. How are you thinking about, like, vibe coded games or more custom software?
Speaker 1:Obviously, they'll all need ads to power this, but how are you thinking about it?
Speaker 4:I mean, short answer to for me. Right? Like like, we we create discovery. So the more content that's out there, the So if AI creates an environment where anyone can build a game and we're all creative and most people humans now today have played games at some point in their life. Everyone can write an idea down, create a game.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They're gonna need discovery on the game. They're gonna need monetization on the game. So so that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 4:More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working. So we always talk about AI as LLMs. But if you just talk about AI as modern usage in neural nets, recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today. Yeah. They power Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
Speaker 4:They power our system.
Speaker 2:This is why we always felt like, you know, Zuck, you know, spending however many hundreds of billions, like, it was it was very easy to underwrite because you could just get there's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business. Right?
Speaker 4:Totally. You get I mean, there's a simple function to all these models. It's more data, more complex model, more compute, better output. If your whole business model is built on an advertising business, that this technology continue to evolve at the pace it is is fantastic. Yep.
Speaker 1:How do how do you think about AI on the ad side? Everyone's kind of predicting I mean, there's already probably some tests out there that a lot of what Meta's doing will be just catalog, look at your inventory, and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text. How are you thinking about implementing that? Are you already running tests? How Yeah.
Speaker 1:Have the test gone?
Speaker 4:The the this is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like It's the the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog, create an optimized appearance of that catalog through the recommendation system. We already do that. Mhmm. The more complex is today, people upload a video ad into our platform, not always adapted for the platform.
Speaker 1:We're
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping. So a lot of times, they'll bring a ten second clip from Facebook uploaded to us.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, if you could
Speaker 4:have gotten forty five seconds of viewer time Oh, wait. That sucks. As a brand, that's a total miss.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They don't have the resources at every level to go, let us create a 100 ads a week for for this company now. We'll rebrand as Axon, and we can talk about that in a second. But this Axon advertising platform, they just don't have the resources to create that ad count at the scale of the time that you need into our platform. And so when you can apply LLMs to go, here's a couple cool ads out there.
Speaker 4:Let me create a 100 versions of this so we can put it into the system. That'll be a huge uplift in user response to all the brands' products that are being marketed on our platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you when you think about we're very close with the the Ridge Wallet team. And so I got to early on in the Ridge days. And I know that they an app loving customer. But early on, I would just see the effort that Connor, the CMO, it's just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make, the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day.
Speaker 2:And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, etcetera. It's it's wild. Wanted to ask how you're thinking about m and a this year, next year, in the future. You guys your market cap is has, you know, grown tremendously and you guys are now in a position where you could. There's there's a variety of different platforms out there that that have a lot of attention that are maybe under monetized or at least not monetizing as well.
Speaker 2:I'm curious if that's at all something you guys think about or the opportunity in in, you know, gaming is big enough that it makes sense
Speaker 1:specifically of, like, a Snapchat or a Pinterest or
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or I mean, TikTok was in the news last week. TikTok was guys in were you know? And and that felt like an a transaction that was more of, like, a political transaction than a purely economic deal. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I guess the broad question is, like, vertical integration. Do you want to own games at some point or or where media is developed or social media platform? Or does that just make no sense for you?
Speaker 4:Well, I mean, like, we bid on TikTok. So the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models Yeah. Than anyone else out there Yeah. Is is sound at least to us. But there's a couple things that constrain us.
Speaker 4:One, our culture is pretty unique. We've got very few people doing an exceptional amount of output. Yeah. Company is still under a thousand people. So you just don't tend to see scale like ours at that little
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 4:Headcount. The and so putting companies together into that is really tough. The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us. We're we're at a point now I mean, I put out a couple months ago that early in the year, we were $11,000,000,000 of ad spend on our platform, plus now we've grown a couple quarters, so bigger number today. We and we only work with somewhere between a 2,000 advertisers on the platform.
Speaker 4:We've been completely managed. We haven't opened up the platform. So if you think about that, when Facebook opened up Ads Manager, they had $55,000,000,000 a year revenue, and we've got more than double that today on a very large platform. We haven't even opened it up. We're gonna open up our platform, the Axon advertising platform, in two days.
Speaker 4:Wow. So once we take the advertiser account from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds, and of thousands and then subsequently millions, We think the opportunity in front of us is many quarters to possibly years. And that can It's
Speaker 2:so distracting. You know, it would have been it would have been cool to own TikTok. It's a solid asset, at least from from observing from the outside. But the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that that it, you know, you may as well just focus on what you guys already do.
Speaker 4:To totally. And with a lean team, we don't have the resources to distract ourselves. So it's it's Yep. Full speed ahead. We we wanna give our solution to all the advertisers in the world.
Speaker 4:We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming more successful. We wanna do that across the board. We've seen it in a very small pilot in ecommerce over the last year. Yep. The few 100 like Ridge Wallet and others that you you said, they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on Meta.
Speaker 4:And it's on us to execute to get this in front of all the advertisers out there. Yeah. If we can do that and become another destination like Meta where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel to bottom funnel revenue priced, All these businesses around us are gonna grow, so we don't wanna distract ourselves from that opportunity.
Speaker 2:How how are you rallying the team around q four? I'm assuming Axon is timed with the the the, you know, championship season for every, you know, retail brand. But, like, what does it look? Is it gonna be people sleeping in the office more?
Speaker 4:I I mean, there there's been a bunch of that. It's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed. Right? So opening up an ad platform at our scale is a pretty complex undertaking. You worry about, like I mean, fraud is an obvious case.
Speaker 4:Yep. You don't wanna see fraud. You don't wanna see scammy ads on your platform. That's the first thing that happens. And, like, we're probably arguably the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up self-service in any sort of form Yep.
Speaker 4:At this at this moment. And so when you've got that, you gotta do a bunch of work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human managed environment. So we've got that. You've got user experience. You need to make sure a customer can go live on their own all the way through to being able to pay you.
Speaker 4:And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right. We've been doing that for the last year. We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform. So the team is, no joke, working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple of days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can't. You don't have the luxury of of missing q four if you want to open up an ad, you know, in in in the ad business.
Speaker 5:No. No.
Speaker 1:That's the most critical time. How are you thinking about compute infrastructure? I feel like we're seeing Meta build these massive clusters, it feels like maybe that's because they're going be generating so many ads or doing so many so much gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute. They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching. Have you had to do on premise deployments, cloud stuff?
Speaker 1:Like, what how do you think about building out your infrastructure for the long term and potentially, like, very different just economic dynamic around how compute, like, falls on the income statement?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we we work with Google Cloud, so it runs through our income statement. It's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost. Yep. Because we're so lean and we because we were bootstrapped maybe going back to the beginning, we think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization as everyone's a founder.
Speaker 4:You're spending money out of your own pocket. And this holds true with compute as well. I I went into my team and said, look, we're gonna go spend $5,000,000,000, buy a bunch of compute. And in our scale, can't do a $100,000,000,000 of investment. So let's say 5,000,000,000.
Speaker 4:We we'd be wasting that money and it would make them uncomfortable. We try to constrain it to to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth. So that it becomes a cost of your future revenue growth. But what does that mean? If our engineers create a more complex model, they could consume more GPUs.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. The if we had unlimited capacity, they just deploy the model. Well, in today's world, if they see more GPU consumption they and go, holy crap, this is fantastic in result, but is it gonna consume too much GPUs? We just don't have it. They've gotta go optimize their code.
Speaker 4:And you may get like you you get it, okay, maybe we lose one point on accuracy, but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90%. So across the org, we're we're wired to think about things that way, optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible so we can have the best business so we can fund our mission long term.
Speaker 1:Makes a ton of sense. Partnering with Google makes so much sense given where they are on Nano Banana and where they are on Gemini and, like, just the cost per performance. Even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there. How How did the Google will kill you narrative? It clearly didn't happen, but walk me through the various it seems like you were getting that criticism from venture capitalists early days.
Speaker 1:How did that actually play out? Like, how do you sit together in the market of ad buying? Because you do compete, even though you work together on the cloud side. How has that relationship evolved? Like, why did the market play out the way it did?
Speaker 1:And was there anything were there any decisions where you think, like, Well, it's we made a really if key you
Speaker 2:if you talk to advertisers, let's use the Ridge guys as an example again, you want performance and you wanna constantly be experimenting and you want you don't want platform dependency. Yes. You don't want you I'd in a perfect world, you're you'd be spending like 10% of your budget here, 10% of your budget here, 10% so that one, the as prices fluctuate based because they're all markets. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:You can your business isn't, you know you know Yeah. And we saw the businesses that were, you know, in the d to c era that were dependent purely on, you know, a meta Yeah. Yeah. And and how bad things could get. Companies going bankrupt based on, you know, small changes in in price.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Anyways.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I mean, Google is a is sort of a bottom funnel channel for most dollar spent.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 4:If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, Ridge Wall Wallet appears there. Well, the consumer already knows they wanna find a wallet. So we were always gonna be additive to the Google advertising story. So they did a really good job finding us early and betting on us across multiple business slides. Cool.
Speaker 4:And it became a really, really good partnership. If you think about the business model we deploy, it's top of funnel to bottom of funnel priced on revenue. Facebook does that. And if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad, for every single product in the world where where there would be no other market. Facebook would capture all the top funnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel.
Speaker 4:Turns out not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook. So along we come with these really immersive ads, capture users' attention, and we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets. So in a way, when you do it this way, they're they're getting an arbitrage. They're getting a customer that pays them immediately. They ship the product after the fact, and they make a spread on that sale.
Speaker 4:If they can do that, there's no budgetary constraint. So we don't have a sales force at all really at the company because we're not going and asking for for budget. We're going and saying, look, if we you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite, as many wallets as you can go get in inventory. And so with that business model, we became additive to these other platforms. I think, really, that's the only way a small brand or a niche company like us was able to have the large scale success.
Speaker 1:If you're advising, I don't know, public company CEO, 100,000,000 in market cap, they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising, and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else. Like, what are the trade offs we've seen? Uber's added a bunch of ads. Netflix added ads. There's ShyGV is going to have ads soon.
Speaker 1:What are the different levers that a CEO should think about pulling? Have you done partnerships? How do you think about partnering with, like, those large scale new platforms?
Speaker 4:Yeah, we haven't yet. I think at some point in our narrative, we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out. But we we don't have excess demand with so few advertisers today. If we got 100,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out.
Speaker 9:Sure.
Speaker 4:But I think a lot of times people forget, one, the technology is really complex. You've only had in in terms of a a model like ours that's scalable, us and then obviously Meta, a very large scale that's been able to execute on this this discovery type of product price on revenue. Yeah. And so if there's only a couple of cases, it's not trivial. And people over trivialize it a lot.
Speaker 4:The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at. Otherwise, it takes a lot of work. And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places. Now, in television, you do. And that's an area that's that's been interesting to us.
Speaker 2:You know, specifically Like streaming or or
Speaker 4:Anywhere where you can see fifteen to thirty second clip. Yeah. So streaming is a great great example. Pre roll video is a good example. But a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent.
Speaker 4:So if the ad format isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for
Speaker 8:us.
Speaker 4:But it's something we can execute on over time. And I think that'll benefit the publishers because really these third party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part. And there's not another solution out there that's really that focused on them with Google maybe deprioritizing their third party ad stack for the
Speaker 1:most Yeah. What about Apple? I feel like there was a rumble years ago about, you know, a developer kit and SDK for adding ads into mobile games. And it certainly hasn't stopped your growth. So what yeah.
Speaker 1:How did that play out?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, they they have ads on search. They can monetize their own properties presumably. I would say, look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the p and l of the businesses in the market swells. So let's say Apple rolls out a great ads product, and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game.
Speaker 4:Well, you weren't gonna discover that game before. So now that developer, who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer, got a better arbitrage. Their business, their P and L grows. What happens when that happens? Well, they have more money to reinvest in us.
Speaker 4:They have more money to reinvest in Meta. And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem. If it's non performant, then the the customers are getting ripped off. Yep. And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off.
Speaker 2:I had seen a few pitches over the last couple years for businesses that were trying to effectively create app loving specifically for LLM type products. Why or why not is that an interesting opportunity? Because I would assume the app loving for LLM is app loving.
Speaker 4:You you probably never thought you'd be saying that statement. I mean, the day people started saying, I wanna be the app loving of this was when we knew we made it, I guess. Yeah. Totally. Like, LLMs, they don't have a lot of space.
Speaker 1:So, like Yeah.
Speaker 6:You don't
Speaker 4:wanna interrupt the user experience. You can't alter the output. The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one thing that was like a deep like, if somebody put in, like, a deep research query somewhere
Speaker 1:Just wait in ten minutes. Wait in twenty minutes. They're waiting. In Show me a full Accelerated. Show me commercial.
Speaker 1:You you really sit in front of everyone's bailing money. Yeah. Yeah. Failing.
Speaker 4:It's true. Yeah. That's a non view that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's totally worthless. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's gonna be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions, which Yeah. Again, for us is good.
Speaker 4:If you think about dollars spent, a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want. If they go to the LLM and they they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's gonna happen is those dollars are gonna shift around from search to these LLM outputs. And that's good because that's already bottom funnel. The user knows that they want it. And in theory, it's good because it's just gonna be cheaper to the advertiser.
Speaker 4:So, again, if it's effectively cheaper, that wallet company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours where they're truly getting discovery from the customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds. Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the the nature of the market? Do you have a lot of data scientists? Is do you do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so engineering first, for sure. Sure. Research science runs the models. Those are those are typically, like, very intelligent math math people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Alongside. They're also engineers. Mhmm. So they can implement their own research. And then on the business team, most of the business people are math, econ.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They know how to do Python, SQL queries. Like so we're we're mostly more technical across the board. Now core advertising business, our business and engineering teams are around 300 to three fifty. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So if you just slimmed it down to what drives our the 98% of the value of the the company, it's a very, very small team. Yeah. It I always liked when I I listened to Steve Jobs talking about the original Mac team. It's a players like to work with a players, and then they they despise that, like, everything dilutes when you go to b and c's. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And we've got a really cutthroat ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong IC where you can output a ton or you're not gonna make it. And so we we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it. But the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an a player.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Makes sense. How how do you think about, you know, what what's what's your head count plan look like over the next few years? Is Yeah. Is it I mean I'm assuming you wanna multiply revenue by a lot and
Speaker 4:Without adding heads. Yeah. I mean, look look, I love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world. But, like, I I remember
Speaker 2:Good old days.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, up until a 100, I knew the story and the name and every every everyone that was at the business. And so we've surpassed that. But being run this lean allows us to maintain a really high quality. So even our go to market team on ecommerce, which every investor looks at is a huge opportunity, it's 30 people today.
Speaker 4:It's really hard to add a players if you maintain a high quality bar. And you don't need to go into the state of, look, we've just got hiring quotas. Second you do that, I think you blow up your culture in your organization. So we're slow and steady. Now the the company is built on automate first, hire second.
Speaker 4:And so LLMs let us do a ton. Most of the coding of the company is done by LLMs now. A lot of the business functions are done by LLMs. So we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly.
Speaker 1:So we should be able
Speaker 4:to do more with less. And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue without having to add heads. And then it's nice that the product's also so good, it sells itself.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for coming by the TVPN Ultra This
Speaker 2:was fun. Nobody nobody loves ads more than maybe than than us than you, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the chat says because you're a Gong respecter or Gong ally, we have to hit the Gong.
Speaker 2:For you. There There we go.
Speaker 3:Hey, Paul. Hey, thanks for coming up.
Speaker 2:We'll we'll talk about Axon later this week. Excited.
Speaker 1:And in before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. And let me also tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. We have David Senra live in the TVPN UltraDome. We have a video that we're gonna play.
Speaker 2:Go. Bring him on
Speaker 1:Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection, to the history, to the world of business and podcasting. Welcome to the show. Yeah. How's What
Speaker 2:are we you twenty four hours post launch.
Speaker 9:Are we Sir.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are we watching here? Oh, it's a drill is this?
Speaker 9:You have
Speaker 1:Explain this video. It's a text? Yes. Yes. I played it.
Speaker 9:Okay. Well, that's the video. But do you have the text that Rob put above it?
Speaker 1:What did what did he say? He said, the right way is the hard way. Jerry Seinfeld. Intro for the Yes. They bought a Rolodex.
Speaker 1:This is for your new show. Yeah. Break it down
Speaker 9:for us. So this is why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Heumann on this because I've been friends with them for, like, three years. Yeah. And I know he said, I gesticulate wildly, so don't break your your microphone. So I knew how serious they take their work.
Speaker 9:The first time I ever met Rob was in they invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio. Yeah. We talked podcasting for nine straight hours. Yeah. This is not an exaggeration.
Speaker 9:We stayed at the same restaurant. Do it for we sat there for lunch, and then we started talking podcasting. And, like, four hours later, the waitress is like, we're serving dinner now. Do wanna stay? And we're like, yes.
Speaker 9:Had lunch and dinner. So I didn't even know they were doing this. They they know that I was, like, kinda anti intro for a podcast. I just, like, wanna get right to it. Yeah.
Speaker 9:They're like, we're gonna make a bumper for you. I was like, I don't even know what a bumper is. So that's what they call this. And it's like I was like, it's gotta be short, though.
Speaker 1:Wait. That's the oh, that's that's from the video. Exactly. Intro video. Oh, it all makes sense now.
Speaker 1:Remember seeing that, and I thought, oh, it's just CGI or something.
Speaker 9:No. It's not CGI. That's the Handmade. Exactly. Handmade.
Speaker 9:They bought a drill. They bought a Rolodex. Wow. And they printed out all the a bunch of companies in the founder names
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 9:Of people I've
Speaker 1:goddamn point.
Speaker 9:So, I just love that. It's like an indication of how serious we're taking the new show.
Speaker 2:So AI.
Speaker 1:First We made
Speaker 2:it with the drill.
Speaker 9:I'm a human AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The first episode dropped Saturday, Sunday? Sunday. Sunday.
Speaker 9:They're coming out every other Sunday.
Speaker 1:Every other Sunday. How's the response been?
Speaker 9:I'm, like, wired. Couldn't sleep last night.
Speaker 1:Excited?
Speaker 2:You couldn't sleep Saturday night I saw Dave Dave. I called David Even
Speaker 1:though you haven't And
Speaker 2:we realized
Speaker 1:8sleep.com. Yes. Get a Pod five, five year warranty. I actually enjoyed your Eight Sleep ad integrated into the Daniel Akk episode. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Do want
Speaker 2:go here second? Guess I was in solidarity with you last night, David, because I put up a 55.
Speaker 9:Oh, you have See, I'm staying at a friend's house in Malibu right now, and I don't even have my Eight Sleep.
Speaker 2:Oh, you gotta you gotta correct that. Oh, wow. But, yeah, it was so funny. Yesterday, I called David. We're just catching up, and we realized we were, like, thirty seconds on the same the same road.
Speaker 9:You're, like, 500 feet from each other.
Speaker 2:So we're like, let's just pull over and and hang out. I Yes. I got to get the immediate reaction. But, no, it really is there's there's to me, one of the most satisfying things is watching ultra talented people do a new thing and and just demonstrate the the level that they're on. And you and Rob and Andrew have done that.
Speaker 1:No. I appreciate Congratulations. On the note of, like, you gotta you gotta busy people. You gotta get right into it. Talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question.
Speaker 1:I was listening to Dwarkesh over the weekend. He kicks it off with a pretty quick intro, but he does introduce the guest. My guest is Richard Sutton. He's one of
Speaker 9:He's very darkest, insanely talented.
Speaker 1:Insanely talented.
Speaker 9:Especially for a young kid. He's actually And
Speaker 1:you who else is a talented podcaster? Chris Williamson, friend
Speaker 9:of Oh, he texted me today.
Speaker 1:And Chris kicks off with no introduction.
Speaker 9:Thousand episodes.
Speaker 1:A thousand episodes?
Speaker 9:He came out
Speaker 1:today with Magic. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Incredible.
Speaker 1:What a run. But but they do introductions very differently. They do Chris kicks off with one short, punchy, like, un Google able question, basically. Like, there's no right answer to the question. He'll just say, you know, what is the value of hard work?
Speaker 1:Or what is your life's goal? And then the person just tees off, and it gets you right in the episode. Durakesh gives you a little bit more of an intro, and they go back and forth. And then he hits him with a question. How do you think about opening an episode?
Speaker 1:Do you like the way you're doing it? Do you think it'll evolve? We obviously open with one of the most over the top openings. You're watching TV, and it's like this crazy thing that just evolved. How do you think about it?
Speaker 9:All right. I think the important thing is, like, I have I'm not interviewing anybody. Yeah. And so, like, the the the tagline is, like, conversations with the greatest living founders. Sure.
Speaker 9:I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have unlimited energy to have long form deep conversations. Mhmm. You guys have been on the receiving ends of this. Like, when we have dinner, it's not like, oh, we're gonna talk for thirty minutes.
Speaker 9:No. We talked for, like, four goddamn hours. And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out, they're like, you're talking too much in the Daniel Ek episode. It's like It's like it's a conversation.
Speaker 2:I'd like Well, it's it's important to I I think that your opportunity is to not be it's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests. Yeah. That's that's not a good position to be in. Right? People watch Joe Rogan.
Speaker 2:There's a cohort of people that watch Joe Rogan just when they're just when Donald Trump's on. Yep. But but a huge amount of people are watching it because Joe Rogan, they're like, oh, who's he talking to today?
Speaker 9:Exactly. That that that's what we're doing. So, think somebody I saw they did analysis on, like, 2,000 of Joe's episodes, and he spoke, like, you know, 45 or something percent of the time. This is like the the whole genesis of this, and I think I talked about it on the Daniel Ek episode, it's because, you know, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who, again, I think is the best business interviewer Yes. In the world.
Speaker 9:Like, if I'm gonna start an interview show and compete with him, like, that's just stupid. Like, the main message of founders, the founders podcast is, like, the importance of differentiation. Yep. So, like, there's been a million let's interview, you know, business people shows. I'm not I'm gonna lose that game.
Speaker 9:I only wanna play a game that I can be the best in the world at. And so what Patrick you know, we've been really close friends. We're brothers. We talk every day. We've have a ton he's in these dinners with me.
Speaker 9:He's in these conversations, and it happens over and over again. And he's he's mentioned to me for a few years. He said it before I was on Colossus. He's just like, man, I really think have you ever thought about doing a show where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room fucking reading books and doing the crazy shit that you do? Yeah.
Speaker 9:And he's like, I've been around this. Like, no one can have these conversations. And so what really pushed me, and I said it on the Daniel episode, was me, him, and Daniel had this super intense four hour dinner. I don't meet with anybody. When I the first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to to to Austin.
Speaker 9:Five hours. We talked for five hours. You think I sat you think I sat silent? I can't sit silent for anything. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. They don't want me to sit silent. Yeah. The whole point is, like, you're, like, this weird, like, human AI with all this knowledge, and they wanna, like, prompt and, like, get me going. So we get in the car because I'm we're leaving New York and going back to Greenwich.
Speaker 9:I'm staying at Patrick's house at night. And the first thing he says to me when we get in with his driver, he's like, you have to start recording these.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:He's just like, I he goes, I've known Daniel for four years. You got more out of him in four hours than I did in four years. He goes, I talk 2% of the time. He talked 49 of the time. You talk 49% of the time.
Speaker 9:He's just like, no one can speak to the soul of the founder like you. You have to start recording these.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fascinating. There's that story about
Speaker 9:That's the whole fucking idea. There's no interview. It's just like, I'm going to talk to the greatest living founders, we're going have insane conversations that are not predictable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a there's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has, like, extremely high question to talk ratio. Like, he lets other people talk a lot. Yeah. And that was seen as, like, you know, bullish on his ability to, like, hoover up information.
Speaker 1:At the same time, in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge. Like, I noticed somebody sent me a Short that we didn't post, that someone else posted of me and Jordy talking to Marc Andreessen. And it was clear that it was like Marc had a funny take, and so that was what would get the views. And so we were there kind of as like accoutrement to the main event. And there's a like window dressing.
Speaker 1:And so there's just like there is a natural pull in the algorithm for if you're starting an interview show. I should just no, get someone really no, that's the point. But I'm saying Do
Speaker 9:you not just
Speaker 1:No, no, no. What I'm saying is that if you're just purely ViewMaxing, it's like, go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them, and say, go, and then just film. And then I have so and then say, what's next? What's on your mind? And those two things, you have to actively resist the view capture, the algorithm capture.
Speaker 1:And that's what you're doing.
Speaker 9:Before I didn't even know you know I don't view Max. Didn't legitimately before we did the giant ramp deal for Founders, right? I did not know how many people listened to Founders.
Speaker 1:You didn't like the analytics. It's great.
Speaker 9:What does that tell you? I don't give a shit. Yeah. I want the best audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the best.
Speaker 8:Not the biggest. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. The reason the ramp deal came about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Because somebody we cannot name, who, if you know if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is. Whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is. It's interesting that the probably the smartest and bet one maybe the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes, like, one knows, like, he's present isn't she visible? Literally came because he's like, I was at Michael Dell's house. He wouldn't stop talking about your podcast.
Speaker 9:He didn't know we were friends. I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show. We have to find a way to work together. That's the genesis of all of this. It wasn't how many downloads you get.
Speaker 9:It's you have the attention and the trust of the elite most elite people in the world. Look at the guest list on the new David Tenner show.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 9:It's like
Speaker 2:David Senner by David Senner.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:The I when you pull it up on Spotify in your car, it says, Daniel Egg, David Senner, David David, it's headed three times.
Speaker 2:Are you ready? Are you ready? Some somebody in the chat says, hey, David. I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday. You're quite tall and handsome.
Speaker 1:Let's hear
Speaker 2:it for you. Are you ready to be are you ready to be a household live chat?
Speaker 1:This is a live chat. You know, Joe?
Speaker 9:Okay. This happened twice. So first of I I land because I came out here just for you guys, just so you know. Amazing. Like, legitimately, I was like, I don't wanna you guys are really important to me.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I wanna, like, do this in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:We gotta talk about the how much has changed
Speaker 1:since last year.
Speaker 8:It's here.
Speaker 9:But, yeah, this had it's kind of I don't like to think about this because I walk in some I don't know which case this is. One happened at the Tesla Supercharger, and another at I walk into Sun Life and get a smoothie. And, like, I walk in, there's only three people in there, and two guys turn, and they're like, David Senra. And I'm like, what the fuck, bro? And then another guy was charging, and You
Speaker 2:used you used to only get recognized at Amman properties. Now now now it's about to be Everywhere.
Speaker 9:Oh, I have I can't tell you. Everywhere. Oh. The new show is gonna be the first one that's associated with Iman.
Speaker 1:That's very exciting.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I I shouldn't say anything yet, but like
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:We're 99% sure that this Your brand
Speaker 2:your your personal brand's already associated with Iman.
Speaker 1:How much variation do you think there'll be in episode length?
Speaker 9:A ton. A ton. Because, like, again, I'm not there's no formulaic. There's no formula here. So, like, the way I think about it is, like, Founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about.
Speaker 9:And in many cases, they're even books. Like, I think the the the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team are making are so remarkable. I didn't know who Thomas Perfetti Perfetti Yeah. Is. I read that pre the the article just came out.
Speaker 9:Do guys know about this guy? He's worth $80,000,000,000. Wow. He's 83 years old. I think he owns 80,000,000,000 this
Speaker 1:the AI will not make you rich vertical?
Speaker 9:No. No? Okay. No. This this is a guy I think he started Interactive Brokers.
Speaker 9:Oh, yeah. He's 80%
Speaker 5:of it. Okay. That's legit. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's an original size chat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's
Speaker 9:a Hungarian immigrant. But you read his profile, I'm like, I couldn't put it down. I called Patrick. It was midnight. I literally got on the phone.
Speaker 9:I was like, these things are incredible.
Speaker 10:And was
Speaker 9:like, okay. I'm so excited that I read this. Even though it's not a book, I have to make an episode. So that's the episode I'm working on right Yeah. David Senra by David Senra by David Senra.
Speaker 2:Hosted. Hosted. Yeah. Why did
Speaker 1:you pick David Senra to host the David Senra show? You have You could have taken anyone. You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in. Easy. Make it easier, yeah.
Speaker 9:The funniest response was by Christian Kiel. I think he used be at Astronis. Yeah, yeah. He's like, where'd you come up Yeah, with the
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah. That's great. Great. But with the Founders podcast, I feel like you have your thinking on episode length, how you divide up the episodes, has changed. And you have a philosophy around
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 1:And and you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser focused on Yes. What it takes to deliver a quality episode. Do you think that will happen over time?
Speaker 9:No. Because this is the thing, Okay? Mhmm. I am a control freak. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? As you both know. So, like, founders is a one person thing. Sure. Like, I to the point where I'm now hand editing the transcripts.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Everybody's, like, outsource it. This is why I
Speaker 1:wanted to
Speaker 9:play this thing because Jerry Seinfeld way, the hard way is the right way.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? It's, like, I'm complete I have complete control. It's, like, permissionless. And I feel like I'm, like, you know, creating a statue or, like, some kind of art. Sure.
Speaker 9:It's like, a very intense love affair that I have, an irrational love affair I have with that show.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:This one, I'm now I have a partner. Yeah. Like, I I didn't even mean I have an entire team now with
Speaker 1:the I have a
Speaker 9:team of founders. The what I mean is, like, there's some I don't have control over what that person's gonna say, whether they're gonna be interesting or not. And so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with, and they're we have a crazy guest list, they all came from the audience founder's audience
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Because that way, at least they have, like they know what what I'm into, who like, what I like to talk about. They're more prone to say yes for an unreleased But there's wide variance between, like, some in many in some cases, like, they're we've recorded some with incredible people, and they halfway through, I'm like, oh, they want me to do a Founders episode
Speaker 1:for you.
Speaker 9:They just want me literally, they, like, just I'll ask them a question. Like, hey, what about this? And then they'll, like, look at me and, like, want me to talk.
Speaker 1:I mean, that has to be the same case for Joe Rogan. It's like if you're getting invited to the mothership, you're like, yeah, I want to hear I want to hang out with Joe Rogan today.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, no, I I have to be what I'm learning Yeah. And, you know, this is new to me just, like, loosen up a little bit. Mhmm. Like, obviously, the quality stuff has to be good.
Speaker 9:Like, we have to edit ruthlessly. We're not gonna there's a bunch of different ideas. Most of them came from Daniel Ek that I can talk about, like, one example he gave me. And again, like, the guy is the most powerful person in podcasting. He's willing to just fucking counsel you.
Speaker 9:You should take his advice. So he's like, listen, you need to build up the original feed. Right? And then maybe a year in, whatever the time frame is, he's like, you need to have a bunch of separate feeds. So he's like, have the two hour conversation that we had.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And then edit it have another feed where you edit those conversations down to, like, thirty minutes.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 9:And then he's like, then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 fucking clips that were incredible. Just that.
Speaker 1:Isn't that something that he should be solving on the product side? Like, when I No. When I went to your show, I saw that I could do in Spotify. I could do I watched it on Spotify
Speaker 9:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Out of respect to Daniel. But I noticed that I
Speaker 2:could As switch to the artist intended.
Speaker 1:As the artist as the host and the guest intended. And I also left a comment, and I had fun in the comments section. But you could watch video, switch to audio. Yeah. But then there were also short form video clips that were all linked to the same profile.
Speaker 1:I didn't have to go find David Center Shorts.
Speaker 9:Yes.
Speaker 1:Why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their side?
Speaker 9:That's a really interesting I don't know. I'd ask them.
Speaker 2:I'll ask them.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I'm not sure. But but this was we were in Stockholm together. This he told me this in January, so a few months. Because the original idea I I I I guess I should back up too.
Speaker 9:The original idea was to launch in April. Mhmm. Because, again, like, you guys have a deep relationship with RAMP just like I do. And, you know, I had this idea. Give credit to Eric and Karim for the level of trust they put in me where I was like, I wanna do this where I have long form conversations with starting with the people that are in my audience.
Speaker 9:And, like, I think it'll be good, but, like, I think I would love if you guys would be presenting sponsor, like, done. Like, immediately. Right? And the original idea was to launch in April.
Speaker 2:April?
Speaker 9:No. This
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 9:Past April. Mhmm. But me and Daniel couldn't sync schedules, and I'm like, I'm not launching until Yeah. He's gotta be number one. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Because of
Speaker 2:The pod father.
Speaker 9:No. Yeah. It's just like the respect to have for him that like, I just knew, like, out of every I'm friends with a bunch of people I've recorded, but not to the level of, like, I've spent hours and hours talking to him. I just knew he's just so wise and he's not I just knew I could get stuff out of him that, you know, I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else. And so we recorded that, like, a few months ago, but it was, like, the beginning of summer.
Speaker 9:And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify and the head of product, they're both, like, you don't launch a show in the summer. And so that's why I got put pushed back to Interesting. September. Yeah. Because everybody's, they're just distracted.
Speaker 9:Just like you want maximum impact. Yeah. And so we we waited for a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the launch
Speaker 2:of Do videos expect to to record and scrap episodes entirely? You think that'll be frequent? Or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get
Speaker 9:The the unfair advantage we have is that, like, I do a monologue podcast and maybe better than anybody else in the world. And so, like, if they're gonna sit there and
Speaker 1:just
Speaker 9:listen to talk, I can I can go forever, like, forever?
Speaker 1:You can
Speaker 2:carry carry No.
Speaker 9:I don't think I'll scrap it. I just think you have to be again, you have to respect the the the the time of the audience. And so but this is different. So you you mentioned the founders the formula for founders. It's like, I don't like doing them longer than an hour.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So that way, you're listening on 1.5. So it's like a forty year forty year career, forty hours of reading.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 9:That you can listen to in forty five minutes.
Speaker 3:Yep. That's the
Speaker 9:value prop of founders. Yep. And that will give you a very high end audience if you just just idea after idea after idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:This other one, like, if if I can have an interesting four hour conversation, then thing can be four hours long. I don't think I can. Think I I could talk for we could talk for four hours, you should edit it down to probably, like, two.
Speaker 1:You're gonna do Gaston Glock's daughter?
Speaker 2:We should do the first Did
Speaker 1:you see her? No. She's on X. No. Yeah.
Speaker 1:She took over the company. I believe it's his daughter or maybe granddaughter. Did you listen to it every Oh, yeah. It's one of my favorite
Speaker 2:could do the three of us could do a twenty four hour podcast on
Speaker 1:Podcasting. Business podcast, for sure.
Speaker 9:We could do that. It'd be boring as hell for the audience. But you guys have invited me before. Like, do want to be here for the whole show? And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea.
Speaker 1:No. You can't.
Speaker 9:I can't livestream for three hours. Will get in trouble because
Speaker 1:I'm easy the phone. To watch. There's a woman in San Francisco charging $30,000 to name your baby. What do you think?
Speaker 2:You're using that? Were you using that?
Speaker 9:No. You shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it.
Speaker 1:Good take. See? It's easier than you think.
Speaker 9:No. But I will get in trouble. I will literally get canceled because I don't have a filter. I can't do live. Remember, I can edit the shit out
Speaker 2:of my I think the only thing you do is swear. You're very you're very Oh, you're fine. Very tame other than that. You just always divert. You're just always and you naturally divert to history and talking about it.
Speaker 9:So that's that's the key. Where it's like if you go back to differentiation. Right? This is somebody said the funniest thing where there's like a Red Bull futurist.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Okay. He's like, somebody ripped literally said, we're going to be the TPBN of Europe.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:And he quote treated them. No disrespect to them. I don't know them. Like
Speaker 1:He's been fine.
Speaker 9:He's like, of course, like, Europe
Speaker 1:works two days two days a week. To their credit, they leaned into it, and they were Yeah. They leaned into it. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 9:No. But that's
Speaker 8:the point. But
Speaker 9:It's just like, god bless your soul. It's just like, then you're you wanna avoid direct comparison. Totally. And I can tell you right now, they haven't asked me for podcast advice. Yeah.
Speaker 9:But there's I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd wanna avoid direct comparison than YouTube. It's like, you're gonna lose that because everybody's gonna be like, let's compare this to TPN. What is this thing?
Speaker 4:What is this?
Speaker 2:The UltraDrum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main go to the main wide.
Speaker 1:The big wide.
Speaker 2:We're here in the Dumb.
Speaker 1:The UltraDrum.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Speaker 9:I don't know where the what camera should we looking into. There's, like, fucking 10 of them in here. It's really really
Speaker 1:because someone just copied our last set, and then we completely changed the set.
Speaker 9:You don't understand how serious these two guys take it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:It's just stupid. It is a great line in zero to one. Right? Yeah. Where Peter Thiel says, if you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You copy you don't copy the what. You copy the how. Yeah. Which drives me insane. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So my point is, like, I'm not gonna start another interview show. I'm gonna say, hey, I'm gonna have conversations and the
Speaker 2:Conversation show.
Speaker 9:But no. No. Not even that. But there's other conversation shows like Joe Rogan. What you just said, I can't help myself.
Speaker 9:Everything I hear, read, anything, it all ties back to the shit that I learned from founders. Yeah. So it's like, oh, like the first time I met Michael Dell when I flew the first time. You know, we were talking. We went through Zach Dell's Base Power.
Speaker 9:We're going over there. We're showing, like, me these date these dashboards, everything else. Within, like, the first five minutes, I'd made references to, like, Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs. So this is, like this just comes naturally. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So it's, like, the important thing about podcasting or in in I think any kind of business has to be, like, natural to you. So in our private conversations, we pull ideas from Ogivvy all the time or anybody. So, yeah, that's exactly what I wanna do. And so people are like, I liked it. Well, you should do this.
Speaker 9:I don't know what to tell you because it's like, this is just who I am. I can't I'm not acting. Like, I can only be who I am.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the thing that's so
Speaker 5:I think I think
Speaker 2:the conversations that giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or Ovitz Yeah. These people, Like, I I feel like incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and Yeah. Get get the David Center experience of like having a normal conversation, but then always you're always pulling it back and like contextualizing it with history. It's like incredibly addicting. I could just I could do, you know, go to dinner for six hours because it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:Still gonna just be wildly interesting. But now creating that product, I saw somebody somebody in the chat was looking earlier. They were looking at the first few guests and they were like, I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion. But it's actually the exact opposite of that. It's like, no.
Speaker 2:Just giving this product to something that's completely free. Anybody can just go listen to it. And you get to be get the experience of being at dinner with you and and somebody that's created a $150,000,000,000 company, a $10,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 9:So there's two things on that. So I did this, like, my very first viral episode of Founders because I don't obviously, I'm trying to go viral is when I did the I Had Dinner with Charlie Munger episode.
Speaker 1:I remember that.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And it went so viral. It put Founders to the top of the charts for all podcasts.
Speaker 1:The funniest thing about that was that didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like, he's he didn't want people to write about it and you got scoops, like, because you're you're you're basically reporting on it or
Speaker 9:so.
Speaker 1:Was like, information.
Speaker 9:Berkshire's so, again Yeah. The reason why people love Munger and people people I admire is like, they're chaotic, uncontrollable people. Yes. I am
Speaker 1:one of those people. The best.
Speaker 9:Right? So, like, Rob is not going to Rob Moore is not gonna be like, we I'm gonna try to box this guy. Yeah. There's just, like, there's just fucking no way. So Berkshire was they're they're very like, they know understand the power of story.
Speaker 9:They control everything, and Charlie was uncontrollable. And so it was not like I I they knew I was a podcaster. They knew, like, I was gonna make a podcast about it. I wasn't gonna record anything. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so Berkshire's PR was super mad because they kept not because of the episode. They actually the episode was very positive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was amazing.
Speaker 9:But what they were upset about is then you had all these journalists hitting them up. They're like, I
Speaker 2:thought What did you mean by this?
Speaker 9:I thought Charlie didn't give interviews. I'm a
Speaker 1:This one. Take.
Speaker 9:Yeah. No. So he's like, he's not I thought he he doesn't give interviews. I'm like, I'm not a journalist. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm an enthusiast. Fucking this guy's my idol. I have a bust. I have a bronze bust
Speaker 2:of Charlie I'm Munger in my not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast.
Speaker 1:But that's because that's enthusiast. That's true. That's true.
Speaker 2:I'm an
Speaker 9:enthusiast. So then I feedback. I was like, listen. If Charlie if Charlie says delete the episode, I will delete the episode.
Speaker 1:There you
Speaker 9:But some fucking lady at birthstone. No. That's not gonna happen. Like, I'm very
Speaker 2:proud of that. Have him call me. Have him call me. Here's
Speaker 9:my number. And then we found out Charlie didn't give a shit because he doesn't he didn't give
Speaker 3:a fuck.
Speaker 9:He's almost 100 years old. So to answer your question, or to to piggyback on your comment, so I was doing all these, like, I had dinner with episodes where I'd have dinner, then and I'd summarize in an episode, but you didn't hear anybody else. And so the original idea I had for David Center by David Center by
Speaker 1:hosted David
Speaker 9:Center is record there's there's Jay Z is one of the most fascinating people to
Speaker 1:me. Sure.
Speaker 9:Episode two thirty eight of Founders is his autobiography. And he doesn't ever do podcasts. And he did a podcast that was a title exclusive when he was trying to build up title. Oh. And the podcast was fascinating.
Speaker 9:It's called Rap Radar. They rented they were in a private dining room Beverly Hills. So it's the two hosts and then Jay Z
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And they just have lunch. Right? You know what? He's not, like, chewing.
Speaker 1:No. I'm
Speaker 9:I'm He's So edit that stuff Compensation. And I'm like, that's that's exactly what I want. Yeah. That's great. Because what you just said, how much would people pay Yep.
Speaker 9:To have dinner with Brad Jacobs Yeah. Or Daniel Ek or Mike Ovets? I'm going to New York again in, like, two weeks to have dinner with Ovets again. Ovets has come like a crazy friend. Like, he texts me all the time.
Speaker 9:He just booked a guest. I can't tell you who. Let me tell you the funny Ovitz experience I had this this week. He goes, hey. I just had dinner with X.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Okay? I'm not gonna I can't say who.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk's son.
Speaker 9:No. Kidding. And he goes, he's unbelievable. You should get him for the new show. And I was like, do you think you could help convince him?
Speaker 9:He goes, that's why I'm fucking texting you. Two hour no. But give him credit. He's like, what's your email? Like, the email to the person that can book this for me.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Two hours later Yeah. Date done. Like, he's a he's a shark.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 9:He's a machine. That's fantastic. He's crazy. So I do wanna say one other thing about being free. I I just retweeted my own tweet.
Speaker 1:Here we
Speaker 9:go. I think this is a
Speaker 2:pat on the back.
Speaker 9:No. Because I I think this is important, what you just said about the fact that it's, like, a miracle itself is free. And I was feeling this today because, like, the message I've been getting for the for the Daniel Rock episode Yeah. And it's like, podcasting is a miracle. You can receive a world class education on any subject you want on demand while your eyes are busy for free.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And I understand that I've been doing it for almost ten years. It's still a fucking miracle to me. I still cannot believe that I can listen to these conversations. I can it just I I I
Speaker 2:I I still I still I I still feel that podcasts were much more important to my education than my traditional education. I I thought back of of I was lucky to discover, like, Tim Ferriss when I was Yeah. 18. Right? And and No.
Speaker 2:You just being able to yeah. You just did the show with Tim. And just, like, being able to sit in on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and and how to work and how to be healthy. All these different things were were incredibly formative. And I just thought I was never Growing up, I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all.
Speaker 2:Right? I had a, you know, there's some people that are that benefited from that, and I just feel like it is the greatest public public good.
Speaker 9:You nailed it. Like, okay. If you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like, my parents didn't even fucking graduate high school. That was just never gonna be an option. I had to work full Like, maybe you get work you like, there are a small percentage of people that get world class education, they're surrounded by a crazy network.
Speaker 9:Like, think about, like, the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all, like, Jewish. These these, like, Jewish genius Harvard people. They were all at school at the same time. And then you fast forward, they've been out of school for, like, fifteen years, and they're all completely, like, absolutely dominating.
Speaker 9:Like, couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18. Yeah. Like, life changing. And there's still And you go to your you go to
Speaker 2:your friend's house for the weekend and the dad you just the conversations at the dinner table. Right? But now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone.
Speaker 9:Exactly. And so, like, I've learned more. I'm looking for this We you know, you were one of the first advertisers on Founders years ago. And I'm actually looking for this text now text that you sent me probably, like, 2,023.
Speaker 2:Oh, way back.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But you were just, like, Founders is essentially, like, the only show that I'm listening to these days.
Speaker 8:Yep.
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 9:And I want the response though because my response was kind of arrogant.
Speaker 2:Well, no. I tried to I think it was like, it should be. By by asked if you were open to being acquired, I think. And you were
Speaker 1:like Yeah.
Speaker 9:You wanted buy all oh, no. You're like, the only podcast I listen to religiously. This is hold on. This is gonna be funny. Did you think this is an act?
Speaker 9:So this is back in 03/22/2023 is when this is happening. Okay? So you text me only podcast I listen to religiously. I go, no days off. I'm coming for everyone.
Speaker 2:Fact check. True.
Speaker 1:Exact narrator, he did come for everyone.
Speaker 2:How do you explain your approach to work? Because I know you my experience, you're working around the clock. Like Yeah. You're you're you're always on, but it doesn't always look like being in front of a a, a computer editing an episode or whatever. And what have you pulled from the greats to inform your own process?
Speaker 9:So I think, man, sometimes So I just did Tim Ferriss. And sometimes, I think I said this on Tim Ferriss. Like, I say stuff, and I'm like, I should not be admitting to this. But then every time I do, people are like, man, I'm so glad you said x, or z, because, like, I feel that exact same way.
Speaker 2:What? Do you procrastinate sometimes?
Speaker 9:No. No. No. So my issue was, I think for years, episode two twenty two of Founders is Ed Thorpe. And if you look at the subtitle of that episode, it's, like, my personal blueprint.
Speaker 9:And what I thought was interesting about Ed Thorpe was, oh, this guy, like, mastered life more than almost anybody I've ever ever come across out of the 400 episodes I've done. And what I mean by that is, like, he actually was, like, balanced. Like, he, you know, he has a he lived a crazy adventurous life. He invented the system for counting cards and blackjack, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon, created the world's first quantitative hedge fund, made more money than could ever spend. He but he he, like, took care of his health.
Speaker 9:He was a good family man. And so that's what I meant. I was like, oh, he's, like, all well balanced. And I was like, this is my blueprint. And the closest thing I have to, like, a mentor, I would say, like, an explicit mentor and kinda like an older brother is Sam Hincky.
Speaker 9:And I was on the phone with him recently. I mean, recently. It was probably, like, nine months ago. Because I I kind of understood this about myself for a while, and I'm like, man, I think I'm fucking lying. Like, I think I'm lying when I say, like, that's my blueprint.
Speaker 9:Like, I don't like I don't wanna be balanced. Like, I don't like that. I like I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am like Ed Thorpe. And, you know, I think Sam's point, he's just like he's a way better person than I am. Like, legitimately better human being than I am.
Speaker 9:And his point is, like, trying to pull me back in that direction, and I just think that's, like, not gonna happen. So the answer your question is, like, if my eyes are open, then I'm thinking about work, and I'm only thinking about work. And it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession. Dude, I don't know if I'm talk about this. I literally, like this sounds so so terrible.
Speaker 9:I literally, like, had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so fucking important to me. And I knew it was I knew that yesterday was, like, a a big turning point in my life, but I woke up from a private message from Daniel. And it's like I read it and, like, immediately started fucking crying. Like Yeah. Not like sobbing, but like tears in my eyes because to have somebody that you respect so much say, you're, like, you you're I'm really proud of you.
Speaker 9:Like, what you're putting out is excellent, really great. And to have that and also love it the way I do, it's like the reason I said enter Ferrari because he said a man dominated by passion such as mine, like, can't be cut in half. His whole point was just like, he wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari. And so my work thing is just like I'm in infinitely curious. And so, like, today, you know, I worked out, and then every other thing was just reading.
Speaker 9:And, like, I'm reading two books at the same time. I'm working on Founders episodes. I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode. Like, I don't know. And then I just come over here.
Speaker 9:And like, we're friends, but this is kind of work too. And after this, like, I'm going to go back and work some more. And like, that's all I want to do.
Speaker 1:I have a follow-up question. But first, I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the I
Speaker 9:don't mind the ad. I love the ads. And I love how they're weaved in. But if I'm sitting here, it's got be a ramp ad.
Speaker 2:Run it back. Run it back.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Say both.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:These corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. My question, do you think that there is a material difference between retired and live player, active CEO, post F. Money, post economic in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out. If you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel Ek and Brad Jacobs and Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're going to interview were
Speaker 9:I'm not interviewing them.
Speaker 1:What? Yeah. Conversing. Talking to. Do you think that they would be able to tell, Okay, this person's still in the arena.
Speaker 1:This person is post economic, checked out in
Speaker 2:the bags.
Speaker 9:It's not it's not a money thing. It's not a retirement thing.
Speaker 1:What is it?
Speaker 9:It's like a personality thing. Like, wait till you see the Brad I cannot believe some of
Speaker 1:the stuff we got on
Speaker 9:film that Brad Jacobs does. There we go. Because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is. And, obviously, like, he's a public company.
Speaker 9:I don't know if he's a CEO. He's definitely chairman. But, like, a lot of these happen to be public company CEOs. So, like, I have to be you know, they have they have comms people, they have all this crazy stuff, and I'm not gonna I'm not intentionally trying to get in in trouble with anybody. You know, again, I'm an enthusiast.
Speaker 9:I'm not a journalist. I just think, hey. You're brilliant. Can I pull something out of you that other people I benefit a lot from talking to you, and so it's kinda selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you? Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversation we have any anyways?
Speaker 9:And so a person like Brad doesn't give a shit. He is 68. He's got the most energy of anybody else who's been around. He also has nothing to be insecure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies. And he's a And he
Speaker 2:wrote the book on starting billion dollar companies.
Speaker 1:And And he's wild. For, you know, like, are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in? That's not relevant.
Speaker 9:So We don't talk at all about current affairs.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Current events.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Which is which is this is why we're a beautiful yin and yang because, obviously, we're focused on what's happening the other in markets point and differentiation the news.
Speaker 1:Against a rogue. It's like, you go on rogue, it's going be like, well, let's react to the news right now. It's very different.
Speaker 9:No. And my point I'm not you know I'm not we talked about this. John was like, will you do a podcast with me? I was like, are we going do? He's like, talk tech news.
Speaker 1:I'm like,
Speaker 9:talk about tech news. No, I'm not going to talk about tech news.
Speaker 2:Would you Raghav is asking, would you interview David Senra on David Senra by David Senra, hosted by David Senra?
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 2:Would you interview yourself?
Speaker 9:Okay. So the the the Happens. Hold on. The reclusive genius that we all know and that we can't name his name Sure. Literally called me yesterday Yeah.
Speaker 9:And we had a long conversation about this. Yeah. And he had a I'm not gonna I can't say, I'll tell you guys off Yeah. Yeah. But he had a great idea.
Speaker 9:And he's like, once we we should do this for episode 100. And I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, here's another great idea. Go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Get lucky.
Speaker 2:Last question I have on my side, then we should we should grab lunch. I'm sorry. Do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting?
Speaker 1:Era? I mean,
Speaker 2:was a there was a beautiful there was there was a there was about a a a decade and a half where you could start a podcast and have a Okay.
Speaker 1:I was doing media part time. Was one of the worst of Yeah.
Speaker 9:But we had this conversation no. Had
Speaker 1:this You convinced me.
Speaker 9:I had this conversation when it came in because it was just obvious. We'll talk about this later.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Like, oh, it's the first fucking video I saw of yours.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I was like, this guy, we have to be friends.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:He's a generational talent. Like, it's just
Speaker 2:We had a we had a guy who stopped John while we were at breakfast this morning, had no idea about TBPN, but was obsessed with John's videos. And John's like, haven't published a video. I've published a video and, like, over a
Speaker 1:year. Story.
Speaker 9:Yes. I was I I wouldn't think it was that early, but I came in really years early. So, anyways, we we me and Jordy just randomly talk about this because we can't help ourselves. Yesterday, when we randomly ran into each other. This is where I, like I don't mean any disrespect to other people.
Speaker 9:So
Speaker 2:We are live.
Speaker 9:I know. I have to be very careful. So
Speaker 1:And that's a great place to end.
Speaker 9:No. No. So, okay. No disrespect there's no way this guy's watching.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:It all gets back.
Speaker 9:Okay. Okay. Right. Okay. I was induced into a state of rage.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 9:I was was at a dinner, and I was introduced to another podcaster. And they mentioned, again, they're from, like, the old school, right, when you can come in and, like, it's just different. And basically, his point was just like, yeah, there's like have to figure out, like, a new form.
Speaker 1:There were a lot of people that saw podcasting as just like a marketing side hobby.
Speaker 9:But you can't say, I need like, I need to fix my show Yeah. And I need a different like, I need, like, a new, like, take on my existing show Yeah. And also tell me that I'm gonna take three months off to do something else that's not the podcast. Yeah. And I told him, I go, you're gonna get fucked up.
Speaker 9:Like, because what's happening now This is exactly what I said, though. But this is what's happening now is people used to come in, they're like, oh, I'm just gonna like, I can do three other things. Podcasts could be your third, fourth, fifth most important thing in
Speaker 2:your life. Yeah. It's just ninety minutes once a week.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in, and the conversation we had is just like so I think of, like obviously, I approach this as if if an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a Munger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing or Edwin Land was doing what I was doing, what would they do? That's exactly how I think. And then I come into this, and I'm like, oh, and I knew you guys think like this anyways, but what I was just telling them, because I was like, where did the rest of you had, like, 15 people last time I was here. The interns went back to college.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:I'm like, no. They're gonna learn more. I go, these two
Speaker 2:Well, one of our interns didn't go back to college.
Speaker 9:But I go, this is what I said. I go, these two are gonna take this as far as it could possibly go. There's no way if you have a front row seat to that, skip a fucking year of college. They're gonna take this as far as possible. You guys are not at you're not pod you are podcasters, but you're entrepreneurs, and you just realize, like, this is the product.
Speaker 9:Look what it's got. Your fucking one year anniversary is what? Four days from now?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We need to figure out when
Speaker 1:That's a we three sixty five probably.
Speaker 9:But look at what you guys
Speaker 2:have We we didn't start 100. We didn't well, we didn't yeah. Didn't start No. Didn't doing daily.
Speaker 9:Until I I cornered you at the in Miami and started yelling Yep. Out of love.
Speaker 2:That's the real that's the real founding date.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But my point being is, like, we were just looking at episode one, right, before I came on. And look what you guys you're you're entrepreneurs. You've iterated tremendously in a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:And so, yeah, good luck competing with John and Jordy. You're not gonna do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's also I mean, the function of, you know, John spending years building up, figuring out how to create great content online, me starting my career basically selling ads on the Internet. There's a bunch of different and then
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's a would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did
Speaker 9:prior to. But then there's also something that is not copyable, which is the chemistry between you two, which is why I was so emphatic about you need to take this more seriously. Not that you weren't, but had there's just you can't buy that chemistry.
Speaker 1:What do you mean chemistry? We're mortal enemies. No. You just play chemistry with just great actors.
Speaker 2:We're here in Hollywood.
Speaker 9:There's so many times where I like
Speaker 1:I remember when I went to casting, they were like, you're going play this guy, This is
Speaker 6:a lie. Don't lie to your audience.
Speaker 2:There's so many when I'm one
Speaker 9:and the other one calls the other one. And it's just like they love each other. Like, I can't hang out with anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them. So like
Speaker 2:Nobody I just Hey. Nobody likes talking about
Speaker 1:02:25 is not going pitch itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait. We we can't
Speaker 1:Who else will I get to shoddily spot me while they're on their phone and I'm dying under the sex threat?
Speaker 6:I've I've
Speaker 1:definitely You've gotten
Speaker 2:better. I've gotten better at spotting. But but when when in the morning when we're working out, it's it's gonna be there are a couple of times John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was benching.
Speaker 9:Dude, your back what it's the the joint workouts are working. I saw the pictures of you at the beach. Your back's getting
Speaker 4:It's getting
Speaker 9:big. Way wider. My legs are working. On the juice.
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 2:No. No juice. I do. I do. But here you know the secret?
Speaker 2:I eat a ham I eat a double smash burger
Speaker 1:every morning There's at eight secrets.
Speaker 4:Ugh. Anyway. Secrets.
Speaker 2:This is a lot of fun.
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Speaker 2:I just have to say, I'm so happy for you. I'm so proud of you.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thanks, I feel lucky to have met you before you became household name. And nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive Yeah. Anything anything along those lines. Because So it's one
Speaker 9:I thank you very much. The second part, think, is really important. Just because at the end of the day, if you're insanely talented, it's like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships. Like, that is all like, outside of work, I care deeply about the friendships that I build, and, like, I don't purposely you know, I talked to Kareem about this. He's like, man, you're selling all these ads for other podcasters.
Speaker 9:You're doing all sorts of stuff. Kareem from Ramp.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:One of the maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today, technical mind working in finance today. Listen to the Daniel Epesode, and you'll see how he's similar to how Kareem's working style is very similar to Daniel's. And he's like, why don't you start, like, a, you know, business doing this? It's like, I don't I do it because I love the p I love podcasters, and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously. And it's like, I like seeing my friends win.
Speaker 1:And no side hustles.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Then that's another reason. Never side hustle. Well,
Speaker 1:let's ring it off for the first episode
Speaker 2:of The Kids. Thank you. There we go. Great hit. Thank you for tuning in, folks.
Speaker 2:We love you. Everyone. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Cheers.