Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 Thursday, 06/12/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. We're back in the Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:It's we are both deathly ill today. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's been a rough week.
Speaker 2:We're still doing the show. The show must go on. That's part of showbiz.
Speaker 1:It is. The show must always go on, and there's no greater show in the world of technology and music than the Coachella twenty twenty seven lineup featuring fast takeoff scenario, neural man neural mirage,
Speaker 2:causal loops, the alignment choir
Speaker 1:DJ Token Drift. Auto prompt. Jordy had Chad GPT generate a hypothetical Coachella poster. It
Speaker 2:was no surprise to see Gentle Singularity headlining at day Yes.
Speaker 1:Von Neumann and the Tilings, Lo Fi Oracle Synthetics. Which one did I really like?
Speaker 2:The Capybara's. Paperclipse is good.
Speaker 1:Chain of Thought Collective. Like, some of these just
Speaker 2:sound I think a lot of people were surprised to see the Gooners didn't make the list at They didn't. But maybe that's a little white pill. Yeah. Let me
Speaker 1:try and adjust this microphone.
Speaker 2:Anyways, we got a great show today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We have a stacked lineup. Can we pull up the the run of show? We're gonna have Deleon join back to back. I think he's the guest to ever go Go
Speaker 2:back to back.
Speaker 1:Back to back. He was on the show yesterday. Jordy absolutely blasted him with some confetti. And he's coming back to talk to us about the Shinke deal as well as
Speaker 2:I really didn't hold back. Going on. I really didn't hold back. Yeah. I I I tried to not shoot confetti in the face of anybody yesterday, but Deleon really, you know, got the full effect.
Speaker 2:But a lot of fun at YC Demo Day yesterday, tons of great founders, major white pill being there. Yeah, that's great. And And we have some
Speaker 1:posts reacting to YC demo day. I like that Juwan from Ramp, he's been on the show many, many times with
Speaker 2:Why did he not come
Speaker 3:on the show yet?
Speaker 1:I know we should have I saw his post after we left, but he had a really funny one. He said, you're more likely to raise a series a as a YC company than go bankrupt as a gambling addict. Let that sink in. Because there's this viral post that says, like, there's a twenty percent chance of gambling addicts going broke. And everyone was memeing it, like, a couple days ago being like, gambling addicts
Speaker 2:will take that. Yeah. Don't go gambling
Speaker 1:every day. Eighty percent chance they don't go bankrupt. It's great. But Gary Tan says forty five percent of YC companies get to series a and median ARR is $1,000,000 plus trending up. Find me another place where that is true in any set of potential investments in the world.
Speaker 1:YC does have higher valuation caps. But to me, this quality justifies it. Invest That is YC demo day. I recommend
Speaker 2:it. I love it. Astonishing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was fun. We handed out a bunch of ramp They're in hot demand. Thought We ran out. I think was little crazy with the color. Like when I think of ramp, I think of like a bright yellow, not necessarily a full neon yellow, but these hats were full neon green, like safety runner green or yellow, actually.
Speaker 1:And they're very intense, but I got a lot of text messages for people that wanted them. So we will probably be printing more of those because had lot of We handed out some of our TBPN hats, which are now
Speaker 2:printing They're here. They're finally here. Got to figure out how to distribute them. We don't want be in the apparel business.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:But we're here reluctantly. So we'll figure out how to get them out into the world.
Speaker 1:And so if you're looking for one of those ramp hats, you got to be a ramp customer for sure.
Speaker 4:So you got go
Speaker 1:to ramp.com. Time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 2:And Eric Ramp, former YC founder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So YC founder the last company. That's true. And Suhail also chimed in. He said, so many insanely great YC companies.
Speaker 1:This batch easily has many $10,000,000,000 companies. A tiny lot. 10 billion He's so aggressive.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love the AI. He's bullish.
Speaker 1:People were upset. They said mostly cursor for x. He said, nah. There was a lot of agent infrastructure stuff.
Speaker 2:There was agent for agent products.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. A lot of AI on AI stuff. But that's where the market But we're going
Speaker 2:to need agents to work on That's for people help other agents.
Speaker 1:Because that's, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I think there was like a very, very clear I mean, Gary said 90% AI. But it was even more narrow than that. It was a lot of B2B AI, a lot of narrow AI infrastructure. A lot of, how do you run an agent on the cloud?
Speaker 1:What kind of databases are you building to enable agents? All sorts of stuff like that. Some really exciting companies though, and some really great stuff. It was very fascinating comparing YC Demo Day, where I came away, like you mentioned, like incredibly optimistic about these entrepreneurs who are going and building companies, and they're clearly going to like, maybe some of them are directly competitive with each other, some of them are competitive with previous YC companies. I'm sure some will morph and pivot and change, but you just have the entrepreneurial motion, which is very exciting compared to so many other paths that people could take in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like the best time to start a company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And ultimately, it felt pretty even. There was a lot of companies that clearly, founders and teams we talked to that came in with an idea and just executed against it. But it felt like half of them too were just iterating through the batch, which is what they should be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, that's where a lot of those infrastructure plays come from is like, wanted to build an app. I needed infrastructure, so I built the infrastructure, kind of the story of Slack, you know, they were building a video game and they needed to communicate with each other, so they built an internal chat tool and they were like, let's just sell this. Yeah. And that stuff can happen all the time.
Speaker 1:It is like less visual, less exciting sometimes, but it can still create a ton of shareholder value and hopefully a $10,000,000,000 plus outcome. My interesting takeaway was that we did YC Demo Day, and then we also did the Thiel Fellowship Day a week ago or maybe two weeks ago, time flies. And the difference between YC Demo Days vibe of the companies and Thiel Fellowship companies were wildly different, like wildly different. The Thiel Fellowship companies, obviously there's a lot less, but I don't know if we talked to a single AI agent company during Thiel Fellowship Day. It was almost all like bio, regenerate organs, brain computer interfaces.
Speaker 2:It like much more of like things that you
Speaker 1:could Modify
Speaker 2:those websites. Websites, projects.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Super, super high. Fellowship. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and the and the tenor of the conversation during the Thiel fellowship during YC demo day, we were like, give us the number. What's the ARR? What are the customers? How many GitHub stars you got?
Speaker 1:And we were spraying confetti everywhere. Like, if we had done that during Teal fellowship day, think a lot of them would have been like, yeah, like we're five years out from commercialization. Yeah. It was cool.
Speaker 2:Like, we planned this a world for both of don't have revenue 2035, and then our revenue in year one will be a billion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, And so still like very, very exciting stuff on either side, but more differentiation where I think in the past, like a decade ago, it was like YC and YC clones all had kind of the same shape of companies. Now we're seeing a real bifurcation between what Thiel Fellowship means versus what YC means. And obviously, there's some companies that will do both.
Speaker 2:But I thought that was I mean, for a lot of the the founders and the teams yesterday, YC was effectively, like, do college in three months Yep. Majoring in startups Yep. Venture.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And and that's a good thing. That's a good product that enables a lot more companies to be created. Yep. And I mean, other thing school drop
Speaker 1:off that was a very interesting trend.
Speaker 2:Who was then selling soft drops out of high school and then is selling software back to his teachers. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's always just it's always just cool seeing the the like like just how how young you can be and start a company. It was funny when you asked him, okay, you asked a couple of people, like, how'd you make money in high school? And that's a hard question because, like, some entrepreneurs, they were just like, no, I was actually just heads down. Worked at school. Doing drugs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, something like that. Just doing like random stuff, mowing lawns. But they all had really good stories about like building websites and scaling things and doing all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2:That one, the one founder was like, I sold a very, basically was like, made a website for a pastor for $3. Yeah. And I was reading into that being like, you made a Squarespace site and like And
Speaker 1:you marked it like a 100%. Yeah, a thousand percent or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but still, still, it's all about the ultimate value, and a good website can easily be worth a few grand. So
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyway, there was one interesting article that came up or interesting statistic that came up a couple times. Gary Tan mentioned this, and we didn't have a time to fact check it on on air, but I wanted to get fact check it today. So this idea was surfaced that the that the so the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had a a report called the labor market report for recent college graduates. And in it, they have twenty twenty five annual outcomes by major.
Speaker 1:They have a spreadsheet there. And so the headline is that US computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. Very aggressive. And so the, like, the the narrative is obvious there. It's like AI is disrupting everything.
Speaker 1:You don't need computer science majors anymore. You just need, you know, Cursor or some AI agent product that will just go and build things for you. So we're we no longer are gonna be employing computer scientists or computer science majors. And wanted to know more about this, so I dug into it. And and and and it and there is some interesting stuff going on, but it's not exactly the narrative that I think people think it's telling.
Speaker 1:It's more of a lagging indicator. And so so the claim, like the facts are literally true. So in 2023, because this is lagging data, because you can't just like graduate and be within like one week, like do you have a job or not? Like that's not relevant. Like you might go and hang out in the summer and tour around a little bit.
Speaker 1:Like, when does unemployment really set in? Yeah. It's kind of it takes a minute. And so this data does lag. And so we're talking about 2023.
Speaker 1:But the unemployment rate for computer science majors was 6.1%, and the unemployment rate for art history, criticism, and conservation was 3%. And so, yes, it is about twice art history in the dataset. And so the same file indicates computer science ranks amongst 73 majors. Art history sits in the middle of the pack. But the New York Fed cautions that these are survey estimates drawn from one year of this survey microdata with only a few 100 art history majors graduates in the sample.
Speaker 1:So because art history is small, and they're only sampling a small section of that, the numbers are pretty are pretty small. Like, I'm pretty sure that for art history So
Speaker 2:two years earlier, CS actually had a lower rate.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so with art history, the three percent rate, they're only surveying 2,000 graduates with art history degrees. Yeah. And so you're talking about 60 job seekers. Like 60 people that are still saying, I'm looking for a job and I don't have one yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so that number, it can swing so
Speaker 2:much My immediate question was, could there be a lot of those art history degrees majors that just, that are unemployed, but aren't counting themselves as unemployed because they're not looking for a job at all? Yeah. Right? Like, don't you have to, can't you just
Speaker 1:So yes, so that's a big thing. So in in art history, a lot of art history graduates go and get other jobs or they or they don't they don't necessarily get the job of art historian out of college. And so that takes them out of the unemployment pool because they're they're they might be, you know, be in the marketing organisation or communications, they might join and do, you know, anything in a business. They might become a corporate athlete. Maybe they become a sales guy.
Speaker 1:Who knows? They're doing something. I mean, you meet these people all the time where it's like, yeah, I actually studied art history, it gives me like this really interesting background, and I have a lot to talk about. But I didn't study the thing that I'm like actively doing because, yeah, maybe there isn't like a track for sales.
Speaker 2:And ultimately, I I do think early stage engineering roles are being impacted. There's still an incredible amount of opportunity Yes. If you're savvy and high agency. These There's also a lot of you had this big tech hiring freeze in 2022 That's what's driving it. Rounds of layoffs.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then, yeah, I think a lot of companies just need fewer junior engineers. But at the same time, we look at this. We have two CS major types that work for us. And we probably wouldn't have had them a few years ago if we were doing a show like this because we were like, we're not gonna build software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now it's a lot easier to build software. Yeah. So we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, if this is real, we need to we need to look out for Tyler. So Tyler's here. He's obviously a great software engineer. Yep.
Speaker 1:But if the future is art history, maybe he needs to get up to speed in the world of art history. Let's put a background behind him Let's give him, like, a library behind him. Or or to the
Speaker 2:Museum of Modern Art.
Speaker 1:I think today the beauty of the beauty of Tyler's skill set is that he's he's incredible at at artificial intelligence and vibe coding. I think I think with enough work today, he could become an expert in art history and potentially land an art historian job, maybe even by the time the, they're keeping him live on the street.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so Maybe
Speaker 1:even maybe land a job. So, Tyler, what do you know about Tyler.
Speaker 2:So, Tyler, learn the history of art and then try to get a job in the next three hours.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:See what you can put together. Okay. You're incredibly talented. And just sort of see what's possible.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we'll check-in with Tyler throughout the show. What do you know about art history so far? What have you learned?
Speaker 5:So far, not much. I found I found a couple of good facts, though.
Speaker 1:Okay. So
Speaker 5:so, okay. Here's one.
Speaker 1:Hit me.
Speaker 5:The oldest cave paintings, you know, like in Europe, actually were not done by human beings. They were done by Neanderthals.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Interesting. That's a good Art predates humanity. Nice. Okay.
Speaker 5:I'll keep looking. Not much else.
Speaker 2:But, I mean, it's just I
Speaker 1:feel like I understand art history now. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Great stuff, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Great stuff. But yeah, so back to the stats here. 108,000 CS bachelor degrees in 2021 to 2022 versus just 2,000 art history degrees. And so it's like this 50 to one ratio.
Speaker 2:Would you have guessed there's only 2,000 art history graduates a year in The United States? Is that
Speaker 6:don't Is
Speaker 2:that possible?
Speaker 1:People. Yeah. No. No. You would think there are more, but realistically, it's like there's only a few colleges.
Speaker 1:People know that it's hard to get an art history job. And so, I mean, I remember when I got to college and I looked at like, what are the highest paying majors? Like, I should major in that. I should study the one that's valuable. I should study finance.
Speaker 2:Like, 2023, it's saying only 1,700 degrees were completed in the sector. Yeah. Art history majors get so much attention for being a thousand people a year getting the, you know, 2,000 people a year getting a in a country of hundreds of millions. Yeah. Is crazy.
Speaker 2:They get so much heat. So much shade thrown at them constantly. Yeah. And they're just like, we're just a few thousand people that like studying the history of art. Give us a break.
Speaker 2:Just give us a break. I mean, of course, there's other kind of sub degrees.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I I mean, it it it is it is odd. I I don't think I don't think the the the AI wave is really a major factor in this data. I think it's much more about interest rates and big tech companies pulling back after the after the the the minor recession correction that we had because that correction like, some of the if if you think about there's a 100,000 new CS grads, where are those folks gonna go? They're gonna go to big tech companies.
Speaker 1:If they all did hiring freezes, you're going to see unemployment rise there. Yeah. But that's not driven by artificial intelligence. That's driven by a correction in the markets that's just weaving through because it takes a year or two for these big tech companies to actually change their hiring plans and roll things out. So so anyway, it's an interesting narrative, but it's not I I don't think it's quite telling the story that we think it is.
Speaker 1:AI is part of the story, but timing is key. The spike aligns with a flood of post pandemic hiring corrections. There's no evidence yet of a persistent downward trend in CS employment. But just to be safe, Tyler is gonna become an art history expert today.
Speaker 2:Just a backup plan. Plan B.
Speaker 1:Backup plan.
Speaker 2:Plan B.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I mean, you're if you're working on an art history project, should get every art historian on Linear. That's It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products. They should be building
Speaker 2:If they're taking jobs from engineers, they they may as well start adopting the best tools that engineers and product leaders use like Linear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's the system for modern software development. Yeah. But it could in the future, in the near future, be the system for modern art history development, art history research. Could adapt.
Speaker 1:It could streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps, and more.
Speaker 2:You can can orchestrate agents on linear now.
Speaker 1:Just like deep research, but you could make it more custom. You could have, okay, with this art history project, we need to go tackle tackle all these issues one by one. Go read this book. Go to this library.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Blow off the dust off this ancient tome. Anyway.
Speaker 2:We have too much fun. It's good. Anyways, Ben was wondering if you could try your headphones again.
Speaker 1:Do I have them? Okay. I will try those. We do have some sad news. There's been a plane crash in Ahmedabad.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to pronounce that in India. Ahmedabad. But it's the fatal accident in a July. This is the new Dreamliner from Boeing. And there's 242 people.
Speaker 2:The footage of this is, I'm sure many people seen it It's very scary. Scary. Actually, I guess this
Speaker 1:is we
Speaker 2:can talk about. Sheila Monat's hometown.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You live should be tragic. But we're gonna ask Stellian about this in twenty minutes. Yep. I'm interested to get his point of view and and see if he has a read on how and and why this could have happened. But overall, yeah, devastating for I guess there was one survivor
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:On the
Speaker 2:entire plane out of hundreds of people. Mhmm. So just absolutely tragic.
Speaker 1:That is such an insane stat that just one one survived.
Speaker 2:I I I think it might be too like the plane from from the video, it looked like the plane just didn't have the thrust Yeah. To actually like, it it didn't have enough power or something. So
Speaker 1:Something very bizarre happened, but I I I I don't know. It's it it does feel like the the entire like, every time that there's a there's a there's a plane crash, like, there was that one in DC. There was that one up in Canada. Now there's this. Like, whenever there's something that that happened, people kind of retreat to, like, the base rates of the stats and say, like, yes.
Speaker 1:This is a freak accident, but it's still overall very safe to fly. But now we've had, like, three, and I feel like at a certain point, like, the stats actually do have to adjust. And so I'm I'm wondering if there's something more systemic going on, and we should be digging into this. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very rough. Anyway Really sad.
Speaker 1:We will yeah. I'm excited to talk to Dylan about it because he'll give us more context there.
Speaker 2:Back to
Speaker 1:Back to testing.
Speaker 2:Business. Yesterday, while we were at demo day, Stripe announced that they acquired Privy. Patrick Collison said in the announcement, money has to reside somewhere, and Privy holds the best the world's best programmable vaults alongside our other stablecoin work. We're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services. So we're gonna have Henry on from Privy today to talk about the business and the acquisition and what they're gonna be doing at Stripe.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Somebody called Blorkworks says, Stripe acquired Bridge, then Stripe acquired Privy, both for supposedly 10 Figs at low 8 Figs ARR. Guess who invested in both? Sequoia and Paradigm.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for them.
Speaker 2:Let's hear it let's let's give it up for some generational Alex.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They gotta they gotta pay the bills over there.
Speaker 2:Guess who invested in Stripe and have board seats? Sequoia and Matt Huang. Matt Wang. Both at Paradigm.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Masterclass. Yeah, guess Privy, the actual acquisition price, I don't believe was announced, but I think it was a great outcome And I'm very excited for the team, and Stripe is certainly cooking on all things crypto.
Speaker 1:They are. Yeah. Excited to talk to them. What else is in the news? We're still investigating what's going on with Meta and the Scale AI acquisition.
Speaker 1:Big news with that $29,000,000,000 acquisition of Scale AI by Meta, sharing Gafari
Speaker 2:Gold, 49%.
Speaker 1:It's becoming a new trend. Bill Gurley was talking about this on Patrick's Invest Like The Best podcast. He was saying that, like, there was this narrative that, oh, like, the only reason that we can't do M and A is because of Lena Khan. Well, Lena Khan's gone. What's going on?
Speaker 1:It's very odd that we talked to a few people about, like, where has the $80,000,000 acquisition gone? And that's kind of fallen by the wayside. These creative these creative deals are are certainly happening more and more. I thought this was interesting that Meta hired top Google DeepMind researcher Jack w Ray and Johan Salkirk, ML lead of popular voice assistant app Sesame. I feel like Sesame just got started.
Speaker 1:Like, that's a crazy poach so early. Right? A trade deal. Something must have happened. Who knows?
Speaker 1:But they're planning to hire up to 50 people, including a chief scientist per sources. Meta Platform says poach top engineers. And so, I mean, it's gonna be fascinating to watch Zuck build that out. There was someone else who had a great post in here saying that, like, every time you saw that one, the way it was like, every time people think Zuck has his back against the wall, he comes back. And and obviously, like, the the initial AI push was one of these or iOS was it iOS 14?
Speaker 1:The app tracking transparency thing that was supposed to, like, destroy, you know, the entire ads business because you wouldn't be able to track people on iPhones anymore. That was not a that that was something that he definitely got through. And even though Meta went down, the stock went right back up. Absolute execution. But it goes back even further.
Speaker 1:Like, the very mobile switchover for like, when mobile started getting popular, the I remember having an iPad and using a party app to interact with Facebook because they didn't have an app. They just had a website, and it wouldn't really work as well.
Speaker 2:Such a wild
Speaker 1:And then when they launched their app, they went all in on HTML five instead of native iOS, like Objective C. And so the so, like, their their their web based app was not performing like people wanted it to. And so he but but I mean, he like got through it and like obviously has become like incredibly dominant in mobile, and there truly was no there truly no one who won. Like, oh yeah, we're like the social network for mobile, and like we really like, you know, Facebook is just on desktop. Like mobile truly became like the sustaining innovation.
Speaker 1:It was not disruptive to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was interesting. Reddit went down the path of allowing parties to build mobile applications based on Reddit and then ultimately decided that they that they they needed to basically eliminate that activity, which which caused a lot of hubbub.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process in the places of continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 2:Vanta makes automating compliance and security fun. Really have Genuinely fun.
Speaker 1:We really we were talking to the Polymarket team yesterday about getting some YC markets on there. I really want the when will the YC company be added to the S and P 500? Because now they have Coinbase, Airbnb, and DoorDash.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like three out of 500. Like, they're they're going to be approaching 1% of the S and P 500 soon. Yeah. And and there's a number of candidates that could do it. I mean, Stripe, think, obviously would be a candidate.
Speaker 2:If Gary keeps doing and the broader team keep doing what they're doing, it's inevitable that, you know, they're going to get double digits.
Speaker 1:Maybe even triple digits. Maybe even all of them.
Speaker 2:It could be possible. Scenario.
Speaker 1:Let's mag 70.
Speaker 2:Was great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the number of big tech companies is growing because it used to be FANG, which was five companies, and now it's seven. Although Netflix kinda fell out of that. Maybe Netflix comes back, gets added bag eight. And then and then but Mary Meeker's trying to trim it down.
Speaker 1:She was saying magnificent six or whatever. Is she seeing six? I I forget. I mean, I guess it does kinda make sense. Like, Tesla's in a little bit of a different world.
Speaker 1:They're not, like, as much of an online, like, hyperscaler in the same sense. Like, they're
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Kind of over in the car world, but still trillion dollar company, tech company, very, very relevant. And you gotta give you gotta give him credit, Elon, for building that business. So privy to Stripe. We talked about this. It it feels like the Elon Musk, Donald Trump thing is truly winding down.
Speaker 1:Is that
Speaker 2:They're back to Golden Retriever.
Speaker 1:They're back to Golden Retriever.
Speaker 2:They're like, hey. I'm sorry. Yeah. We we went a little bit too far. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They talked privately Monday night.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, sounds like sounds like they're in a good spot. They're calling each other friends. They're back they're back to being buddies, which we'd love to see. It's possible to have a huge blow up with somebody and get back to being friends and, you know, put put things behind.
Speaker 1:You think this is actually the end or do you think this is like just a roller coaster ride that will continue forever? I think it's definitely a full employment for Teddy Schleffer at the New York Times.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a bull market for Teddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I ran into him at an event in Vegas and was asking him what he was doing. He's like, he's specifically on the on the Elon Musk beat. Like, just on Elon Musk. Like, that's, like, what he had to write about.
Speaker 1:That was, like, his not like tech, just Elon. Like, that's the whole thing. That's, like, it's the beginning. Elon deserved the
Speaker 2:full time New York Times.
Speaker 1:And he was like, yeah. Like like like, you know, like this is my Super Bowl. And he was saying, I think there's going be a blow off. And when it happens, like, I'm going to write the definitive article. And like, yeah, he's kind pulling it off.
Speaker 1:But Elon's not giving him too much to write about because he's back in the game. He's like, oh, oh, the mainstream the mainstream media is like, how do I wanna give him this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Don't wanna give him
Speaker 1:Nothing will bring
Speaker 2:Don't wanna I can't
Speaker 1:give much together than than the mainstream media taking victory laps. They're like, we couldn't possibly. Cool.
Speaker 2:Jeff Jeff Lewis has a post. Jeff's been quiet lately. Yeah. He says, steal this, everything you need to know about how we operate at Bedrock, especially when we're quiet. Mission, we don't build bedrock for consensus, we build it to hold in case of collapse.
Speaker 2:This is not a firm created to chase the next wave, it's an institution designed to hold through structural volatility and to back entrepreneurs building the systems that will define what comes next. Our capital is not reactive, slow, precise, and architected to align with those who operate on signal, not noise. We serve missions that compound meaning over time, structures that don't require explanation, and people who would rather build than perform. We're not here to participate in the field, we are here to reshape it quietly, permanently, and with those who already understand. Incredible piece of writing.
Speaker 2:I almost have chills. I think the Em dash police are gonna come
Speaker 1:Oh no. Are gonna come
Speaker 2:here. But I wanna say, Jeff, we ran into you briefly yesterday. It was good to see you. When you're ready to bring back Temp Check, when you're ready to come out of your your personal quiet period, we will be here. We will provide the infrastructure to reboot Temp Check, and we cannot wait.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Temp Check was so underrated. I love the the like, even the branding, just that, like, Miami Vice vibe to it. It was it was even, like, the pre pre Miami movement. There was still this, like, this, like, wild, like, art style that
Speaker 2:doesn't It was so unique.
Speaker 1:So It just broke it. Like, Bedrock has a norm. And, yeah, and and vibe check had a different
Speaker 2:Jeff would be, like
Speaker 1:Better temp check.
Speaker 2:At the beach in the water in Hawaii, you know, giving this sort of amazing lecture on on something. And, you know, he wouldn't even get dunked on for it because it was so authentic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you had a A lot people in
Speaker 2:the VC was was, you know, on a vacation, you know, talk you know, lecturing. They would they would be a target. But Yeah. He pulls it off.
Speaker 1:No. He pulled it off. I wanted to tell you about this this parking startup I talked to today.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So here's here's the basic thesis. There's a lot of people that park illegally in Los Angeles, you know, just temporarily in, like, red red zones. There aren't enough parking attendants to enforce all of that. So what this company does is they they send out people who are kind of dressed up in, like, you know, parking attendant style uniforms.
Speaker 1:Oh. And they go up to the people who are parked illegally and say, like, oh, like, you know, you're parked illegally. Like, I'm gonna have to write you up. And then, you know, the person, oh, no. Like, is there, you know, anything we can do?
Speaker 1:Like, well, know, we do take tap to pay, and you could just pay here. And then so then they charge the person for the parking infraction directly. And then the government makes money off of the profit that the company makes.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like that.
Speaker 1:I like that. So you're kind of acting as an individual, like an independent Kind of a party.
Speaker 2:Almost like a party DMV
Speaker 1:in some Yeah, yeah. I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC
Speaker 2:that doesn't do any legal due I thought were going to say, you know, somebody, you know, basically they see somebody parking illegally, they walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, hey, would you like me to, you know, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it. Yeah. And it'll look like, you know, you're not, you haven't left your car. I'll, you know, so if a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume this is just a guy pulled over. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, needed to write an email or something. So yeah, there's potentially a lot of opportunity there. John, I like how you're thinking. This could be the TBPN request for startups. Breaking news.
Speaker 2:Oh, breaking Let's tell and OpenAI are teaming up. Their AI powered toy
Speaker 1:Will arrive later this year.
Speaker 2:Rough for all the people that wanted to put ChatGPT in a toy. Yep. Turns out the ChatGPT in toys will be done by the company behind ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Their AI powered toy will arrive later this year just in time for Christmas. They are also incorporating OpenAI enterprise company Company wide? Company wide.
Speaker 1:Meaning like everyone at Mattel will have a
Speaker 2:Oh, thought they were incorporating a new entity. Sounded like OpenAI is incorporating Just more entity. One more This time,
Speaker 1:we have an LLC. We have an Inc. We don't have an LLP. A
Speaker 2:different thing.
Speaker 1:Don't partnership with a nonprofit. Like, you've to catch them
Speaker 2:all. So Mattel will be using OpenAI. No details on the toy yet, but if we get an AI Barbie, expect some amusing jailbreaking.
Speaker 1:I wonder how yeah. That's fascinating. I imagine that OpenAI is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now since that's been like a meme for two or three years. So it's probably pretty
Speaker 2:Yeah, so is jailbreakers. Right? Like they've tried pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken.
Speaker 1:I would say it's radically different. Like I would say like the resources that have gone into let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at OpenAI is probably like a thousand x what's happened at Apple just because of so there's so much more real world data. There's so many more real world users. There's so many more actual like, there's so many more researchers at company that are thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking. Like At OpenAI?
Speaker 1:Yeah. At OpenAI, for sure.
Speaker 2:You don't think Apple has an incentive to
Speaker 1:I know they have incentive. Jailbreak.
Speaker 2:They just
Speaker 1:dip nowhere near the scale of the actual, like, people trying to jailbreak. Like like Interesting. What what systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long? Like, for sure, ChatGPT way more
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Than than Apple services. Because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS.
Speaker 2:I just think the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product. Like, somebody will figure out how to make an OpenAI toy, like, run Grok. Right? Like, I don't think OpenAI and Mattel will be able to stop that.
Speaker 1:We do think oh, so I mean, that's a little different if you're actually doing like iOS level, like operating system level jailbreaking. I think what they're talking about here is like, you know, Barbie is gonna speak in like Barbie tone. But then you can override it by saying like, Barbie, I'm I'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice. And then it just does Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice and it's funny and viral.
Speaker 2:I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about somebody who's
Speaker 1:That's what people mean in the sense of like chat jailbreaking.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Then there is like the George Hotts like iPhone jailbreaking where you are like running your own software. And I feel like that doesn't like if I jailbreak my iPhone and I install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the iOS app store, like Apple doesn't really take fallout for that. Because it's like, I literally like, to to jailbreak the iPhone, like, George Hunt's, had to like put a soldering iron it basically. Like
Speaker 2:short sources of I remember when jailbreaking iPhones was really popular. Maybe it was when I was a kid. And you could basically get, like my friend was like, look, I have every app in the app store for free. So like apple doesn't want that.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure, sure.
Speaker 2:They're losing out on a bunch of revenue. Yeah. It's hurting developers. It's just bad for security.
Speaker 1:I imagine, I imagine what the funny things that are gonna happen is just like, can you get AI Barbie to hallucinate? Can you get AI Barbie to say something bizarre or, like, out of context? And that will be the and that will be a product of these, like, long running back and conversations with it and and some creative prompting. But at the same time, I think the OpenAI teams probably had a really, really strong go of making sure that jailbreaking is, like, basically avoided by having a bunch of, like, control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's, you know, harmful or any of the high risk real scenarios. But you'll probably still get funny things like, you know, act like Mario.
Speaker 1:And it'll be like, wait a minute. Like, that's not a
Speaker 2:I will go ahead and say that that if Mattel makes Chad GPT powered dinosaurs that, like, role play dinosaurs and can play with other toys Mhmm. I will probably buy 20 of them Yeah. To my son. So I think this is gonna be a hit.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift, go to numeralhq.com. Such a good a person, a special person in your life, get them sales tax automation software.
Speaker 2:Don't wait until the holiday Don't wait until
Speaker 1:It's flag day. Flag day's coming up. Yeah. Get your friend Yeah. Numeral HQ, sales tax on They
Speaker 2:might they're they're they probably will sell out in q four. Yeah. Gonna sell out of software.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Buy it now.
Speaker 2:Demand for numeral sales tax in q four
Speaker 1:Buy it now.
Speaker 2:Is gonna be crazy.
Speaker 1:Put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. Did you see this this clip of a friend of the show, Marc Andreessen? The thing that you want from your venture firm is power.
Speaker 1:And Brad Gerstner was quote posting it, another friend of the show, saying 100% power to help you land customers, to find and land key team, to raise from the best sources of capital, to get on podcasts and CNBC. What about TVPN? And to navigate and be heard in Washington DC. The power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job.
Speaker 2:I gotta say, a 16 z, they've got they've got the power. Yeah. They've got the power. They they single handedly, like, one point forced for my last company forced a unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great.
Speaker 2:It was great. They basically were like, yeah, you guys are using this now. And they became a customer almost immediately.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Watching this rant about the value of power, it just made me really hungry. I think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:It's like, you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry for food. So why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You need it. Yeah. You need
Speaker 1:We need to take back power hungry.
Speaker 2:What's the quote? Like when you Power's power as badly as you want to breathe. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 1:That just sounds like a Geordie quote, but I'm sure somebody said it. But, yeah, we we we we need to normalize being power hungry. It's fine. The idea Yeah. The idea
Speaker 2:of power makes When you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful.
Speaker 1:Then you'll be successful. That's great. Well, we have Dalian joining in two minutes. Let's tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 2:People wanna ask, how do you how do you on you know, how do you find and work with sponsors? How do you book an average of of six guests a day on your podcast? We do it on Adio.
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:That's how we do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:We have a absolutely we've done hundreds of guests so far this year. Takes a lot to
Speaker 1:Over 400 now.
Speaker 2:Yep. Takes a lot to
Speaker 1:I wonder what are all
Speaker 2:of that.
Speaker 1:What is our annual run rate of guests?
Speaker 2:Guest run rate. That's really the metric that
Speaker 1:It must be
Speaker 2:It's not a vanity
Speaker 1:metric. Over a thousand. Yeah. Because it's four it's four a day, and we do two fifty shows a year. Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over a thousand guests. It's great. It's just a lot of good conversations. Lot people are like, how do you do it?
Speaker 2:Is an absolute joy.
Speaker 1:There's plenty of jobs. How do we not have four conversations a day. That's Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 2:How do people say, how do you do it? I'd say, how how how do we how could we not do it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Small town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial issues. Small town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially. There's actually one company that's rolling up a lot of small town newspapers for poll for, like, political reasons.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for private equity backed.
Speaker 1:You love it. You love it. Venture backed as well. Not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, a growing problem.
Speaker 1:And so Matthew Prince says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad, not sure what to do. Find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to retire, raise the capital to buy it. That seems like the tricky part if you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out a small
Speaker 2:town newspaper. Do a mostly seller note. You know? If they're graduating college, they probably already have like $100,000 of art history major debt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, already, like just the fact that you said like raise a seller note, like that's not something that's just like in the canon. Like people have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is. People understand, like, the basics of, like, maybe a pre seed round or handshake deal. People do not like, that's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating, I think. Maybe it should And maybe maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this or or a whole bunch of different options.
Speaker 1:But, he says, run it with the community's interests at heart. You'll not get rich, but you'll do well. More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career. You'll meet the love of your life at some event you wouldn't otherwise get invited to. Have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make you, make your corner of the world meaningfully better.
Speaker 1:Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital, happy to talk. So there's the answer. If you're thinking about doing this, go in and buy in a local newspaper, call up Matthew
Speaker 2:Matthew on because he's working on some of the the micropayment infrastructure
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:That we were talking about to try to fix the business model of the Internet.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, we have Deleon Asperuhov on the show for the time in two days.
Speaker 8:There he is.
Speaker 2:I'm surprised this is working.
Speaker 1:Oh, he had to he had to go remote because he didn't wanna get blasted with the confetti cannon again.
Speaker 9:I I legitimately my heart jumped when that happened. Was like, I'm done. This is the end. This is my final moments.
Speaker 2:I would I was saying to John after, I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had like a concealed carry and you just like did a quick draw and like popped me twice, and then that was just the end. Like I'm
Speaker 9:a Florida man at heart.
Speaker 7:You know what mean?
Speaker 2:He's a
Speaker 1:Florida man.
Speaker 2:He's a Florida man.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was wild. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by yesterday. It was great. Let's run through what's going on
Speaker 2:in the By the way, nothing says SF and YC are back medallion at YC demo Huge. Huge. Really, really symbolic.
Speaker 1:You know? Yeah, definitely. I mean, they guys have doing good job.
Speaker 9:City was almost dead and AI saved it or AI plus Gary Tan,
Speaker 2:you know? I think,
Speaker 9:you know, Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to those two.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's just all it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan.
Speaker 10:It's true. It's yeah.
Speaker 9:It's just YC presidents and everybody as well.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 9:Who's Michael Seibel bringing for San Francisco?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get Michael in the in the conversation. He he can work on converting Alcatraz or something.
Speaker 5:I don't know.
Speaker 2:By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this. Apparently Google is just down. Really? GCP is down. But all of our invites are based on Google Calendar.
Speaker 2:So glad you could join. Hopefully it was cash.
Speaker 1:Are they sure we're not just under political attack? It's
Speaker 2:probably partially.
Speaker 1:They're trying to stop. Probably said, hey,
Speaker 2:we're trying to take TBPN off the air. We're trying to take Delian off the air.
Speaker 5:Let's
Speaker 9:just take down They don't want to talking about India. They're afraid.
Speaker 1:I'm afraid. Let's keep keep PG for Anyway, yeah. I mean, it's very, very sad story about the July crash. This is the Dreamliner. Right?
Speaker 1:The new or the most recent new major plane from Boeing. It's not as big as the seven forty seven, but it's super efficient. They're turning over the the fleets. It's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest. I remember the news around it launching.
Speaker 1:I don't even know if I've ever flown on one, but, it was not the it was not the seven thirty seven MAX story that people were risk, worried about. It's a completely different platform. Shouldn't have the same problems. But at the same time, there's this terrible crash. There's been a lot of crashes.
Speaker 1:Is there something bigger going on here? Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety? Anything you know about this crash? What even questions should be we'd be asking about this when something like this happens?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, to, like, set the stage, you know, I am a you know, it's a private pilot. I've gone through some level of training. Obviously, not to the level of, you know, sort of commercial pilots.
Speaker 2:Not to the level of Nathan Fielder.
Speaker 9:Not to the level of Nathan Fielder. But, like, you know, you you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots, and you see what training they go through. And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC, you know, helicopter plus plane crash, and then this, obviously, India accident obviously only just happened, Both those investigations are, you know, sort of ongoing. But I actually go back to, like, the Nathan Fielder, you know, sort of, you know, latest season where, if you look at, you know, sort of crashes including, you know, sort
Speaker 7:of these two and a
Speaker 9:bunch over the course of the last twenty, thirty years, a significant component that fed into the crashes was cock you know, sort of, was, you know, some pilot, you know, cockpit communication issues where, you know, a copilot identifies an issue, speaks up to the captain. The captain basically largely dismisses it and, you know, continues down the prior track. So there's, the DCA investigation is not yet, you know, sort of fully released, but there was early, audio that was, early user transcripts that were shown that I think it was something on the order of, like, forty five seconds before the crash. The copilot literally said, I don't think we have the plane in sight. We should basically be going down into the left because I'm not sure that we're, you know, gonna be, you know, dodging out of the, like, approach path.
Speaker 9:And the captain, it seems like, literally just completely dismissed, you know, this piece of information. And if they followed it, they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane. And so that and then if you look at, you know, sort of today's, you know, sort of India's, you know, sort of July crash, super, super early, this preliminary, etcetera, but from, you know, sort of various, you know, sort of x accounts and YouTubers that I follow, they're like, you know, sort of consensus theory right now. There's basically, like, two theories. One, you have a, like, dual engine failure right on takeoff, which is, like, a one in ten trillion outcome.
Speaker 9:The idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time. Like, even if it's, a flock of birds, it doesn't have to be a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both. But the thing that, you know, sort of quickly is, you know, lining up as, a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on takeoff. So with a plane like this, in order to have an additional lift, basically, when you're taking off, you need to have, basically, flaps down. If you basically just have the, you know, sort of flaps up and wings typical, you just aren't going to be able to you should generate enough lift.
Speaker 9:If you look at the flight profile and how it's up down and then it was fully loaded with passengers and with fuel, the flight profile basically matches that. If you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up, there are alarms. There are things that, like, are clearly alerting you that you have missed a step in a checklist, which is, like, I guarantee you whenever they pull that, you know, there's a cockpit audio. There's maybe some chances about all the alarm systems somehow either sort of failed. But, like, to me, what's very clear is, like, in the takeoff checklist, they did not put, you know, sort of flaps down, and they clearly ignored that information, you know, on the, you know, sort of takeoff.
Speaker 9:I would guarantee that there's gonna be some, you know, copilot pilot, you know, miscommunication user challenge that's gonna be a huge contributor to the crash. And so while the Nathan Fielder, like, season two was incredibly funny, some of the, like, the best TV that I've ever seen, as a pilot, I do generally think he has, like, a really strong perspective here where when you're training about how to communicate with, you know, somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is, a, like, yeah, basically, like, PowerPoint slide that says, make sure to speak up. The idea that, like, you know, just being reading the words, make sure to speak up somehow, like, trains you to actually speak up live in the moment. That'd be the idea of and I think, you know, Kugan, you and I have talked about this. Like, I could read a presentation that says, when you're on TV, don't say, you know, know, you know, which is like the verbal tick.
Speaker 9:And I could read that, and there's no fucking way that I would actually be able to do that correctly. I need to go on TVPN every two And that's the thing that practice. There's no practice. Yeah. And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's, you know, sort of season two is actually make the pilots practice.
Speaker 9:Put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes, force them to communicate to one another, and then force them to play out an alternative scenario where you actually push back against the captain and get into that in an uncomfortable place where, yes, this person's more senior. Yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that. And if you never practice that and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in The United States over the past twenty to thirty years, how is that something that the FAA is just, like, completely ignoring? And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for, like, VARTA founders fund Hill and Valley, I literally, like, think next year for Hill and Valley, I wanna put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy as one of the primary panels and be like, this is a, like, extremely important topic coming from the technology industry. Somebody needs to go influence this.
Speaker 9:So, anyways, Nathan Fielder's a fucking goat and, you know, somebody's gotta, you know, make role playing a part of pilot training.
Speaker 1:Is there is there a metaphor for the, for what happens in venture? Maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a, you know, a company that maybe doesn't have product market fit and is trading at 500X revenue? You know, maybe would keep more Roleplay. You're my roleplaying in the partner meetings.
Speaker 2:Okay. So let's just take a step back. Let's let's stop talking this specific investment. Let's just let's roleplay a scenario where a diff we're investing in a different company at 500 x, you know, ARR. And and, you know, maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the investment.
Speaker 2:Let's just play that out. Sidebar, five minutes, then we'll come back to this.
Speaker 1:You know? Do that ever happens in Silicon Valley?
Speaker 9:I mean, look. You know, when a a founder at an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and, you know, the numbers look a little too good, I don't know. I think maybe like there should be a little role playing there
Speaker 3:and somebody should speak up
Speaker 9:and say, hey, like, don't we want founders that are pretty focused on what they're doing?
Speaker 1:Or at least good at League of Legends.
Speaker 9:At least good at League of Legends. Should somebody investigate the fact that he's fucking bronze
Speaker 2:and just
Speaker 9:washed up. Like, somebody should look at that. And I think with a little bit of role playing, I could imagine scenarios like that that could train somebody. And so, unfortunately, what happens is no role playing happens, and then the primary sponsor of the deal is, you know, should shift it to somebody else and then that person's quietly exited and so
Speaker 10:our solution.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. It
Speaker 2:does happen.
Speaker 9:I'm just referencing a hypothetical by
Speaker 1:the Yeah. Hypothetical. I just hypothetical. But it speaks to the importance of training. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Training is very important. Junior people need to speak up and say their opinion.
Speaker 1:For sure. What what about the startup angle here? I there was some company that came to one of one of our off sites at FF, and it was basically like autopilot for planes. He was working with the a c one thirty, the c one thirty. And the idea was that nondeterministic probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes.
Speaker 1:And so his workaround was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations. And I was like, that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway. So this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help for, you know, mercenary or missionary reasons. Is there a world where the where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety, or is this purely in your mind, like, need just changes to training, like, laws?
Speaker 9:There definitely is. I think a lot of what, you know, sort of pilots do absolutely could be subtly automated, you know, by software over time. Mhmm. I do think it's, like, obviously, a significantly harder problem than just, like, you know, you know, chat GPT reading the Internet and then users spewing out words. Like, it's just, like, the the training data is a lot harder to acquire.
Speaker 9:The, like, outputs, obviously, like, you can't have any hallucination. And so but, like, you know, in ten, fifteen, twenty years, could this be, like, fully fully automated a 100%? Yeah. I think the challenge is much more cultural where it's just like, look. The FAA, other than, like, the DCA crash, like, they, you know, basically had a spotless, you know, track record for, like, fifteen plus years.
Speaker 9:And so it's, like, really hard to justify. I mean, this is where I'd say, I think, like, of these, like, next generation, like, you know, supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle, where it's just like we're sort of stuck with this, like, you know you know, sort of tube and wing, you know, sort of plane design even though there's, like, plenty of other net new plane designs that make sense, but they're just so safe. And so then you're stuck in this, like, know, catch what you do. Like, the the analogy that I always give is, like, imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars, and you said, I'm going to give everybody this, like, two ton vehicle. They're gonna, like, move 60 miles per hour while there's, like, pedestrians close by.
Speaker 9:And by the way, we're just gonna, like, kill, like, 70,000 Americans every single year. Just every year, we're gonna fucking murder 70,000 Americans, but it offers all of us a little bit of convenience. We, like, get to places faster. Yeah. In a world with no cars, no fucking way would we ever pass that.
Speaker 2:Like, that would never happen.
Speaker 9:Right? And so there is a little bit of this, like, you know, societal moral question of, like, what is the right number of deaths in order for progress? And right now in the world of aviation, the answer is zero. Zero deaths is allowed. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is there a tinfoil hat scenario where, like, aviation's been very, very safe, and then one crash happens, like the crash, and and it and it looks just like a blip, and we return to the kind of, like, the averages. And we say, okay. Well, even including that, it's still very safe. But now there's been the clash the crash in Canada, the crash in India, crash in DC. Like, at a certain point, there's so many.
Speaker 1:Like, you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on. And and if it was this safety training thing, we we haven't been doing this type of training ever. So, like, is it possible that there's something else going on?
Speaker 9:I think when these complex systems deteriorate, like, they can deteriorate very rapidly, and it's, like, hard to totally diagnose, like, you know, an individual cause. Like, I do think that's what you're seeing of it. It's, like, Boeing culture and, like, their optimization for shareholder returns is, like, you know, sort of killing supply chain inconsistency. Mhmm. You're seeing some of the, like, you know, sort of craziness of COVID where we retired a bunch of pilots, and now we're hiring a bunch of super junior pilots.
Speaker 9:The fact that ATC is super overworked and, like, you know, they're trying to, like, still operate off of, like, nineteen seventies, even sort of software even though the world's getting, you know, some more complex and, you know, sort of higher volume and traffic. And so I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of the system. And, yeah, I do think there's a world where, like, all of a sudden, you see us return to, like, you know, nineteen nineties level plane crashes on a super regular, you know, sort of basis. And that may be the thing that finally makes it sort of be like, you know, FAA and others need to start to adopt, you know, sort of next technologies where, like, they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record.
Speaker 2:I think there's something you have to imagine this this, this idea, this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the the the crew is taking collectively, and then they're just basically running the the the thought process of planes are just so safe. I've done thousands of these. It's gonna be fine. We've you know, I've been in situations that weren't great before, and it always worked out. And then the and then they're just, like, thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that, no, you're not a statistic.
Speaker 2:You're in the cockpit. You're a
Speaker 9:person in the cockpit.
Speaker 2:Responsible for hundreds of people's lives. And
Speaker 1:I've invested at 200 x ARR and been able to SPAC before.
Speaker 2:How bad is
Speaker 1:It can get
Speaker 2:I mean, so so how bad is this for for Boeing? I mean, seven eighty seven total failure. I mean
Speaker 9:I mean, I don't think it's anywhere near, like, the seven thirty seven, you know, sort of max issues. I mean, yeah, they'll have to, like, go through an investigation. The, like, orders on this stuff are so, you know, sort of, you know, you know, you know, done so far in advance and likelihood that it, like, shifts revenue. It's like unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in, a year, actually, I don't think that'll have that much effect, especially when you just, like, look at the footage where it looks like
Speaker 7:it's Yeah. Probably error.
Speaker 1:For reference on public.com, the stock is down 5%
Speaker 2:or Wow. Something like that.
Speaker 9:Should we go on to the next topic?
Speaker 1:Yeah. TSF for Shinkai. What's going on there?
Speaker 9:Shinkai. Never thought I'd be, you know, sort of a fish investor, but I do love my fish. I've been a long time, you know, sort of lover of the Tokyo fish market Don't care eating quality fish. I never appreciated that a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market good quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch, but it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed. Traditionally, fish in, like, United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and you either, like, freeze it to death or you, like, let it flop and basically, like, you know, you know, effectively drown in air.
Speaker 9:The problem with both of those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these, like, hormones, lactic acid, etcetera, and that significantly degrades the quality of the fish. In Japan, what they do is they basically, like, stab out the brain and pull out the brain stem so the fish basically never knows that it's ever dying even though, you know, you obviously are killing it. So you have a very, basically, like, relaxed fish meat, and you bleed it out very quickly. That's a lot of what leads, like, omakase level quality. That typically is like a super manual.
Speaker 9:You need, like, an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that. Super expensive. Basically, you met this guy, save from Shinkai, you guys will be talking to that, like, one comes from, a fisherman's family, which is, like, you know, incredible, like, founder market fit. And two, basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the Japanese chefs do. But rather than, like, selling the robots, they actually just have, a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of, like, you know, high end Michelin star restaurants starting to get into, you know, sort of retail.
Speaker 9:And I think it's, like, one of these things where it's, I just love you you you rarely meet just such an example of like this is the company that this person was like born born to build. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I like yeah. Maybe stumbled into in space manufacturing when I was like in or grade, but I was not born for it. SAFE was literally like born to build this company.
Speaker 9:And I think it's, like, a perfect parallel of, like, if you look at, like, Cargill, like, a hundred years ago, they started off with, like, some simple, you know, equipment and then steadily basically grew into a massive, like, processor, distributor, a wholesaler. They're, you know, the largest, like, pig and cow, you know, sort of distributor. I think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where, like, there hasn't really been a, like, next generation tech enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry. It's super long tail. There's no, like, one agglomerate.
Speaker 9:I actually think that there's, like, initial angle into, like, high quality fish is something that, like, SAFE actually has the ambitions to go build into this, like, massive conglomerate that, yes, is serving fish, but also is the wholesaler and the distributor. And they have, like, automated fishing boats, and they have, like, you know, the, like, automatic killing and the processing and, the bleeding, all of that. Nobody's taking a look at it, basically, like, a hundred years. And I'm not too worried about like other people competing because I don't think like two Stanford grads wanna go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch of fish guts, you know, like really I've
Speaker 2:been I've I've spent time at the facility in Gundow. It smells like fish.
Speaker 1:Every day you
Speaker 9:go into work, and for eight hours, you just smell fish every day.
Speaker 1:Every day.
Speaker 9:No. You know, we just believe, you know, competition is for losers. What better way to smoke out the competition? Just be like, you have to smell fish for eight
Speaker 2:hours every Yeah.
Speaker 1:Compete It's a great market.
Speaker 2:You know, the market opportunity is is is massive, low competition. Yep. It's a great market to be in, but you gotta love the stench of fish. I felt bad last time last time I went and saw Saif and the team, he gave me some fresh fish.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And then classic LA, I had to like drive to a couple other meetings, then I realized that like, I got home like the fish had just been sitting in my hot car for like the entire day, I couldn't eat it. But I've had it, I've had it. Mean they're they're distributing to Nobu and a bunch of
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Amazing restaurants.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, I'm excited to talk to them. Thanks so much for hopping on, Deli.
Speaker 2:Deli, and they were so mad that you were back on the show. They took down AWS too.
Speaker 1:Wait. AWS is down too?
Speaker 9:Google made it US. Maybe We not
Speaker 2:be We might not even be live anymore. We're just the three of us talking. But
Speaker 1:Well, okay. We're live apparently, but we're
Speaker 2:still live.
Speaker 1:This could be Iran. It could be Russia. It could be China. It could be anybody.
Speaker 2:They don't want us to podcast.
Speaker 1:Getting in on the news. Is crazy times. Stay safe. Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco.
Speaker 4:We'll see
Speaker 1:you next time you're in LA.
Speaker 9:Talk to Bye.
Speaker 1:Next up, we're going right into Shinke. We got Saif,
Speaker 2:who I met. He's got some big news today. And Saif YC company.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:Went through YC
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Few years ago at this point.
Speaker 1:Did he raise on a SAFE?
Speaker 2:Tech company in YC.
Speaker 1:Yes. Raised He was named after the SAFE?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Good nominative determinism. Crazy. Crazy. Fantastic. What if he just only raised on SAFE?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Welcome to the stream. How are doing?
Speaker 4:Hey, gentlemen. How's it going?
Speaker 2:My man.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Going on?
Speaker 4:Good. Hanging Cool.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, Dalian already said your whole life story, everything the business does. You leak the news. Now you you leak a few of the a few
Speaker 4:bits here and there of the tech road maps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, it's so exciting to finally have you on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:I've just been, honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar
Speaker 4:and Real cheese moving silence like lasagna. That's right.
Speaker 2:There you go. But I've been able to witness your journey dating back to probably, it must be like two and a half years ago at this But watching you go from solo founder, you know, you had come out of YC working on something that was, that had, I I was immediately a believer in you and and, you know, invested, but, you know, going watching the transition from solo founder, you had absolutely, you know, not saying this in a bad way, absolutely zero hype around the business at all. You were like, I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now, the the idea sounds cool, but but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on. And now, you know, a couple years later, you're announcing the kind of round that every every every founder dreams of.
Speaker 2:So why don't you break it down? And then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. have to say, it feels like two and a half, three years ago, it was only a year and a half.
Speaker 2:Really? Wow. Wow. Wow. So Well, that's five years in in venture.
Speaker 4:So Facts. Facts. Yeah. We're really excited to announce our series a. We've raised 22,000,000 co led by Delhi and Italian Fund and Intrilago's Capital.
Speaker 4:And we are reshoring American seafood.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Here we go. Breakdown. Here we go. They they went to the wrong they went to the wrong screen.
Speaker 2:Hit it again, John, for we're having sorry to say we're having massive Sorry having massive technical difficulties today due
Speaker 1:to The Internet's under attack. AWS is huge down. But
Speaker 2:your robots are probably running, you know, locally, hopefully. But but anyways, yeah, break down kind of the the your background, history of the company, how you got to this point, and all that and all that good stuff.
Speaker 4:For sure. Well, Jordy, as you know, I like to say I come from a seafaring family. You know, I was born in in Canada, but, know, raised in The Middle East. So I was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea, had matching sailor tattoos with my granddad, all, like, kind of peripheral. No one's formally in seafood, but, like, you know, it's I have, like, very big library of just fish photos with my dad.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So it's a classic. And then, yeah, you know, I moved to The US, you know, when I was 18. And then basically, you know, a few years
Speaker 2:By yourself. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Solo. Yeah. Solo immigrant. And then, yeah, basically, has a you know, the the core of Shinke really comes from from that portion.
Speaker 4:You know, I kinda like left seafood alone for a while. And then one of my early mornings in grad school, there was an essay in the newspaper. I'm not as a vegan activist, which is kinda ironic, called if fish could scream. And it was all about how because fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals like cows and chickens and. Rolls.
Speaker 4:You know? And that kinda got me thinking. I wanted to work on some more like schizoire projects to do with that, but funnel the energy towards, you know, what we're now working on today. Right? So the essay was really talking about, you know, what Dalian said that, you know, when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish you're buying are basically brought into the deck of a boat and left to suffocate.
Speaker 4:And it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness. Right? And so in that time, they're releasing stress hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decay the meat quality in the shelf life of fish. And so, you know, I was kinda like cruising around on the Reddit Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes, and I found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now, which is basically like a Japanese analog to kosher slaughter for cows. If you're familiar, basically, like Don said, you basically spike the fish in the brain.
Speaker 4:You cut the gills, option cut the tail. The cheese are the same things. So, basically, rather than the fish flopping around, you stop the experience of stress. You remove the blood. It's the meat can last up to three times as long.
Speaker 4:It tastes mission star quality. You know, the fish that you have to if you wanna get fish like this, it's flown over from Japan. And so, yeah, we basically scale those up, you know, and our product is called Poseidon that basically produces Michelin grade station commodity costs.
Speaker 2:Incredible. Breakdown kind of the early history because I know you went through YC and this was at a time when when there there there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies. I don't think they had
Speaker 1:a request for startups for fish.
Speaker 2:Right? They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but but but you made it in. And I just remember that you had this very fast takeoff where one day it was just like you and a few YC Safe and maybe a handful of other investors. And then you really started building out the team. So maybe maybe talk about that that early day Yeah.
Speaker 2:Kind of those early days.
Speaker 4:Little little bit of corporate history. I took the company full time in, you know, early twenty twenty two. You know, we went through y c presented the summer down the day, and then, you know, from there, basically, kept our heads down. I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business, you know, built in business model and the, you know, the r and d. And I had two junior engineers with me, and we basically didn't do anything else for, like, two years.
Speaker 4:I was like, you know, I started with, like, being in the cold domain, so going from, like, the, like, Desert Dubai to the the winter domain was, like, insane insane life experience, you know, probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone seen. Yeah. And then, you know, have basically, you know, we we we had this inflection point really around the time that you and I met, you know, just, you know, a few people taking early bets on us and that kinda catalyzed, you know, hiring, you know, the core of our founding team, you know, which is like, you know, early Androle, computer vision engineers, my, you know, my cofounders of SpaceX leading the avionics team on Starship, a commercial fisherman, robotics PhDs. And, you know, a lot of that the the core DNA there is, like, reach, you know, become, you know, what we're very prideful to say is, like, you know, a top engineering culture, you know, and derivative of that now, you know, if we start to scale up the sales side, you know, a top company culture as a whole. You know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half what, like, I think would take, you know, companies years and years to do.
Speaker 4:We're already producing robots, like, as fast as, like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to. But, like, you know, we have a robot that can the payback time is in weeks. You know? It's not months. It's not like what's it
Speaker 2:like trying to recruit top talent when you have to when you have to convince them to be smell fish for twelve hours a day?
Speaker 4:You know, it's funny, you know, we had we had, you know, one of our founding engineers, Jen, you know, told me this great story once and she doesn't know about you all the time that, you know, we went to hackathon. You know, she was, like, probably, like, one the like, 20 perception engineers at Androl. It's really early on. And so, you know, she went to hackathons and Androls really early, and no one want you know, at the time, no one wanted to really spend, you know, any time really at all listening to, you know, defense hardware. And now as you guys know, it is, like, you know, the biggest thing, you know, when we talk about hardware.
Speaker 4:And, you know, so when we went to hackathon about, you know, probably a year ago now, the sentiment was really similar, you know, like, people were like, oh, fish, what? You know? Oh, meat, you know? And we we we got thrown off by, you know, intern like, freshmen and sophomores from, like, Waterloo.
Speaker 2:And it was it's mocked. It's mocked by Waterloo interns.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Literally. It's it's so it's it's funny to say because now, like, you know, we have, like, this you know, we can be, like, reselected where, like, we're now kind of the opposite scenario of, like, turning down all these top engineers really because we just, you know, we wanna keep the bar really high and, you know, our philosophy is, like, hiring smart, nice people. And it sounds really trivial, but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high. And you you generally have one or the other.
Speaker 4:You have people who are, like, really, really smart, but they know they're so smart that they're they have real and then vice versa, you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to, like, make up for
Speaker 3:the fact they're not that smart.
Speaker 4:And Golden retriever med.
Speaker 1:This sounds like Pavel's hiring hiring criteria. You have to have the dog in them, and they have to be nice with it. Facts. Facts. So smart and nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a little more suspicious.
Speaker 2:Nice with it and not be nice. Right? That's true. But it's hard. It's called having to nice.
Speaker 7:You got
Speaker 4:to have the rhythm and the tism, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw that on the top
Speaker 1:of IQ and IQ.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics. We've we've heard from a lot of folks that the supply chain's incredibly complicated. Mhmm. I mean I mean, you're not at, like, such an incredible scale that there's probably, like, geopolitical implications necessarily just yet.
Speaker 1:But what has that been like? What who are your key suppliers? Are you able to retrofit certain parts of machines? Like, how much are you building? How much are you buying?
Speaker 1:What are the key suppliers in your Yeah. In your world?
Speaker 4:So we do some very light manufacturing in the house. A lot of it is, you know, using, like, local partners, all of which, you know, and El Segundo.
Speaker 2:Oh, cool.
Speaker 4:Exactly. All put together. We do all the assembly in house. You know, in terms of, like, tariff impact and, you know, geopolitical, you know, impacts from, you know, the current administration. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Honestly, it's been fairly net helpful. The you know, yes, the price of steel and all that has just, gone up. But Yeah. You know, for us, like, the I'm not sure if you know that, you know, there's been a lot of, like, deregulation and, you know, and the tariffs around seafood. And so because of that, we're able to just, like, clean up the rest of, like, all the imported fish that are coming in from almost all countries.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now?
Speaker 4:I don't. It's, like, country by country.
Speaker 1:But I imagine it's, like over 10% everywhere.
Speaker 4:It is. I mean, it's probably around. Right? Close to 20 at this point. It's obviously varies depending on SKU and species and size.
Speaker 4:But we that amount is basically the entire margin for the import. So for them, they're just kind of like, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then there's also massive shipping costs, I'm sure. Exactly. Because it's cold chain, that's way more expensive than just like throw it on a big shipping container.
Speaker 2:Talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term. When we met, you had incredible ambitions right away. You wanted to build, you know, fleets and basically own the entire stack from, you know, catching the fish all the way through delivery to to the customer. It feels like, you know, your ambitions are still massive, but but you've really narrowed in on on focusing on some key areas. What does the business look like today?
Speaker 2:What does it look like, you know, a decade from now?
Speaker 4:Great question. I'm not gonna go into too much detail on the former just because we're kinda we're kinda seeing a little more quiet about that. But, know, we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company where we're basically, like, half halfway, like, between a robotics company and a c f u wholesaler and processor. So the model that we have is, you know, Shinke is a parent company. Basically, you know, manufacturers all these machines, you know, and for every Poseidon that we build, we give them to fishermen for free.
Speaker 4:And so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman having after starting the company. And so the way that they actually make money is actually not Forward
Speaker 2:deployed fishermen. Yeah. Forward deployed fishermen.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so the way that we make money is not actually as, like like, labor cost by the hour generally, like, it can depend. But most of the time, it's it's proportional to catch, so it's gross profit. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up, like, taking away from the skipper's hands. And so for us, you know, that's why we didn't wanna add, you know, add loads to stuff.
Speaker 4:We basically give them machines for free, and then we actually pay them a premium over the commodity, like, dot price so that they're actually incentivized fees. So no risk to them. They sit on our balance sheet. We basically own and maintain them. They just operate them.
Speaker 4:And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors.
Speaker 2:We're on this, but I wanna take a quick This is basically a machine. You put a fish in one side of it. It it it pulls the fish through it, uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Takes it out, and then it and then it moves on it. That's correct? Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We also cut the the gills as well. Wow. Yeah. Which is just crazy.
Speaker 2:And doing that on a ship that is at
Speaker 1:Moving. Moving
Speaker 2:at sea And and
Speaker 1:the fish is very It's not like there's one size of fish. This isn't assembling iPhones. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like Yeah. Can do multiple species, multiple sizes, five seconds of fish. It's it's really fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's amazing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I mean, you know, projecting, like, multiyear shelf lives on the robots that, you know, again, we can, like, pay back in twelve weeks. So pretty fun.
Speaker 1:Multiyear shelf life is also big because I imagine, like, saltwater gets in these things. There's, like, all sorts of corrosion and air, and it's just like you're in the elements. It's not some super clean room.
Speaker 4:Right. And and so that's where, you know, background on lot of our team, you know, like, when we're just working on avionics, you know, like, you know, obviously, like, space and the marine are very different, but, like, the amount of, like, detail orientation you need towards, like, protecting it for extremely harsh environments. Yeah. Like, a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into seafood.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Talk about where you guys are being distributed already, where the where the product is actually ending up. I I don't know what what logos you can share. But
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. We're you name it, we're probably there in terms of metros. So, like, New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver, you know, a lot of those places. We're basically in, like, the, like, highest and top top shelf fish for the segments.
Speaker 4:We we sell wholesale to distributors, like I mentioned, for restaurants, but we also sell directly to retailers. We have one retailer in New York that we sell to. They're the only retailer that we have. But across all the restaurants, have, like, over 40 Michelin stars. And we're probably moving about a
Speaker 2:40 Michelin stars. I'm hitting the side, Garnt. Congratulations. That's a lot
Speaker 1:of stars. Hit the star. Oh, yeah. There we go. It's the gong hear it.
Speaker 1:For Shinkei.
Speaker 4:Resinating through my bloodline.
Speaker 1:I remember that one.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 10:Thank you so much for
Speaker 1:coming on. You have anything else, Jordy? We we we do have
Speaker 2:Henry Yeah. I mean, this is awesome. Come back on regularly. Yep. Let's let's do a Taste test on the stream.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's let's do a taste test on the stream, sir. For sure.
Speaker 4:Sounds great, Jeff. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:You guys are just getting started, it's been incredible to fall. I just I love watching you win. I knew you would.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:And I can't wait for you know, it's I guess it's been a year and a half. I can't wait for the next decade. So congrats to the Congratulations.
Speaker 4:Cheers, gentlemen. Very kind.
Speaker 7:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Talk soon. Bye.
Speaker 4:Bye.
Speaker 1:Cheers. We have our next guest already in the studio. Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Let's invite Henry into the studio from Privy.
Speaker 1:We're talking about the Stripe action.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 7:I'm good.
Speaker 9:How are you?
Speaker 2:How are your inboxes doing the last twenty four hours? Lot of wealth managers. Hey, congratulations. Just blowing you up. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:We haven't talked to you in a while. I'd love to catch
Speaker 2:up. Yeah. We would have wanted to have you on yesterday. Of But we were, of for a demo day. But yeah, how are you doing?
Speaker 6:I'm good. You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition. Thanks.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Now, terms of the deal were undisclosed. We're not gonna talk terms. Is that correct?
Speaker 6:That is correct.
Speaker 2:But I'm still bringing But we're gonna still hit the gong for you. That's matters. That's what matters. Was definitely gong for you.
Speaker 1:But yeah. I mean, to take us through obviously, we're not gonna go through the deal, but I wanna know more about the company and the future of of of of really just like the fintech stack as we move from fiat only companies to fiat plus crypto and the interaction between these two. So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built, and then how that's gonna integrate.
Speaker 6:Yeah. For sure. So, I mean, to be very fair, and I'll I'll put the disclosure upfront, we're still in the closing period. You know, we we we put all the asterisks on the on our blog post and so on. So for the time being, we're we're still very much two separate companies.
Speaker 6:Sure. And and on that front, I I can't share all that much about, you know, any joint things, but I can tell you about what we're seeing in this space and what we think is gonna happen moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why don't you give a quick history of the company too? Because you're a couple years old, is that correct?
Speaker 6:Yeah, we started about three years ago, little over three years ago.
Speaker 2:Got it, got it. And you immediately ran into one of the most meaningful crypto winners that, you know, maybe maybe it's not as bad as as some of the earlier ones, but it felt significant at the time. So Oh, yeah. Quick history would be great, and then and then we'd kinda get into the present.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think, you know, harsh winners temper hard companies. So we we have been fighting for our lives for for for a while, which I think affects a lot of of our intensity. But the TLDR, I worked in crypto for a while. So I guess starting with me, what was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complementary rail to the web.
Speaker 6:The web is very good at fairing information across the world, but the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data without centralized intermediaries is super hard. And so that was very exciting. Flip side, all the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible, and I would not use any of them. And I think that had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto. You had academics, and you had scam artists, and those were the two things that you could do.
Speaker 6:Could do really cool research, or you could try and fleece retail very quickly. And the thought that we had with with my cofounder, Asta, is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can kind of widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto. And so we set out to build things around these sort of core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet. Historically, a wallet's a Chrome extension or, you know, a browser extension of any sort or a hardware device. You plug it in, and every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain, so affect the state of, you know, the chain as it were.
Speaker 6:So usually this is financial or this could be data related, asset related. When you wanna buy an NFT, when you wanna send money, you have to make such a transaction. Every time you wanna do that, you basically get taken out of the app. You have a pop up that's in your face, it interrupts the app flow, and it basically is akin, I think, to like filling out all your credit card details when you get to an ecommerce site before you filled in your cart, before you've decided that you even wanna engage with this. So I think our thought was, can we create a different kind of wallet that embeds directly into the product, and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft so they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in.
Speaker 6:And so, you know, that's what we do. We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems. We make it easy for any developer, any business to leverage crypto as part of their apps, and we work with everything from neo banks who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world, to payroll providers. We have a customer, Toku, for example, that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stablecoins. Let's say Privy has a Nigerian contractor.
Speaker 6:If that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USDC rather than in naira, USDC has held its value against dollar, obviously much better than NIRA over the past few years, that contractor can receive the USDC, can hold the digital dollars without having to have a US bank account just through Privy, basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email. So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send digital assets in app. And so this is, I was saying, neobanks, payment providers, all the way to trading platforms. We serve folks like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past eighteen months.
Speaker 6:They do about 10 to $15,000,000,000 a day in trading volume. Jupiter is another example, and all of these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows, but who want to give their users an ability to have very sort of low level, secure, powerful wallets that can be built into the product, and we think this is going become a much wider range of the way people build when they want to build any product that touches value on the web.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for, the average user. There's a lot of the way we seem to be in a transition period where, more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing. It doesn't feel like, oh, command line Bitcoin transactions anymore. It feels much more like the web. And so, what is the what is the funnel that the average customer goes through?
Speaker 1:When are they seeing your product, and how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, so broadly, you you can think of us as a key orchestration provider. We do key management under the hood. A lot of our work is the security of basically these rails and this key management, and then a lot of it is around latency, making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user, even though you're taking actions that require these transactions, you don't notice it. So our average signing time is, call it, somewhere between twenty and a hundred milliseconds.
Speaker 6:Because, you know, starting at $2.50, 300, you start to notice it. So that's a lot of what we focus on. Mhmm. The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers. I think our core contention is products are not one size fits all.
Speaker 6:And to that end, the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle. So, you know, you wouldn't interact with Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JPMorgan application. Likewise, the wallet that we have for Neo Bank that has face ID, so you log in, for example, with an email or a passkey
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:From their wallets created under the hood, you might not see it. Mhmm. And every time you want to send money, you might just need to face ID again to approve the transaction, is going to be different from the interaction, for example, for somebody who's doing digital asset management as part of their company, where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details. Looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto. Or, you know, last example, we serve games, and these games obviously just don't want any pop ups whatsoever.
Speaker 6:So the onboarding journey is as simple as log in with an email. You don't need to record a mnemonic. You can always export your key if you want to, so you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you. But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, they can interact with these rails just the same.
Speaker 2:Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular. It's been a wild year for the industry broadly. It's been great in a lot of ways. And some of the companies you mentioned, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, things like that, you know, got, have been around for a while. What what kind of new momentum are you seeing across, you know, privy sign ups and and potentially categories that that that maybe wouldn't have been possible a few years ago?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, you look at companies I'll I'll I'll I'll question the premise for a Just if we get a graph going of, like, you know, relative time to growth to volume, I'm pretty sure Hyperliquid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies that have gotten a trillion dollars moved in, call it, as a two year old company.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Likewise, if you look at Pump or Jupiter, other customers of ours, these are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard. Yeah. But to actually answer your question, one, obviously stablecoins, and the, I would say, broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents. It used to be, I think, like the crypto cope when AI was I mean, still is, but late twenty twenty two, crypto implodes. AI is absolutely taking off.
Speaker 6:Everybody is looking at their seat and being like, oh, man. I made some terrible choices in my
Speaker 9:life. And
Speaker 6:the cope, I think, was, well, crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise, whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data moat. And I kind of think that stablecoins changes that dynamic. For the time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents. They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries. They need to hold less fiat in various countries.
Speaker 6:So we're seeing that. We're talking to I've done this. Look and chat, GPT, one of the top 10 fintechs in the world, and we're talking to, call it, seven or eight of them at this point who are looking at things. And so it's a question of we want to offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets. We want to offer the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world, and broadly we want to expand our operations globally.
Speaker 6:So it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before. I would say that's broadly the big change over the last six months. But then, like, the other side of this is trading. You see rotations and where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest. The the thing I promise I'll shut up in a But the thing that that that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by kind of serving the two extremes of the market, we think we we build a much better product.
Speaker 6:Weird example, but we have a very powerful sort of low level policy engine. You can say, this wallet can trade up to a thousand dollars a day, but if these two people sign off on it, it can do a million dollars. These policies, we built because we had these apps that were trying to do agentic trading. They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users, they were like, oh fuck. If the LLM hallucinates, this is going
Speaker 11:to be very, very bad.
Speaker 6:We need permits on how much we let the LLM do. And now that we're working with neobanks, these neobanks are saying, we have risk policies. We have, you know, ways in which we want to approve activity. Can you give us a policy? Then so this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other, and we're kind of seeing that across the board.
Speaker 6:All of our customers are sort of pulling us upward in a way we're serving this really wide range. It actually, I think, creates a future proof product.
Speaker 2:I know the transaction is still in the process of closing, but can you talk at a high level about what drew you to wanting to work with the Stripe team?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I was in a Telegram chat yesterday, somebody said, I was just like creeping, and somebody said, there must have been that stripe charm or that Collison charm, and I think it plays, you know, this is a luck
Speaker 2:of the Irish.
Speaker 1:The luck of the Irish strikes again.
Speaker 6:We weren't intending to sell, and I think the reality, this is something an investor has said, which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time. You've literally trued through the worst environment for a startup over the past however many years. Why now? And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly, we want to accelerate that change, and we were very drawn to, I think, the care for craft and the huge lever that basically this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space. So that that was a lot of what was exciting to us is is broadly, think we share a lot of values for how to build great developer tooling, and then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way by just working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was was the really exciting part.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, congratulations. Good luck with the rest of the process. Really excited for
Speaker 2:the team, and for Stripe, and for what you guys can accomplish together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we'd to have you back when when, you know, you can talk more about the future and building. I'm I'm really excited for this. And I think it's something that everyone's thinking about. It's like, what's the future of fintech as fiat and crypto mingle more together?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It'll be fascinating
Speaker 2:to talk bullish.
Speaker 1:Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk
Speaker 4:to Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Good luck closing.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Thank you. We have our next guest in the studio already. But I want to ask you, how'd you sleep last night? I think
Speaker 2:I got you I
Speaker 1:think I got you beat. I think it's a clean sweep this week.
Speaker 4:Could you get a
Speaker 1:100? I got a 91, seven hours, thirty nine minutes, 93% consistency. 90%. Percent. This is the time we've ever Go to 8sleep.com, get a Pod five Ultra.
Speaker 2:Code TBPN.
Speaker 1:Code TBPN. Five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial,
Speaker 2:free Great to be back on the Eight Sleep Pod. It's amazing. That was my last waking thought last night.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. It's just amazing. Anyway, welcome to the stream, Chris.
Speaker 3:Hi, guys.
Speaker 1:You doing?
Speaker 2:What's going
Speaker 3:on? Not too much, obviously.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Yeah. Right. Not too too
Speaker 3:much. It's everything.
Speaker 12:Everything. Mean,
Speaker 2:I mean, times
Speaker 3:in a flat circle.
Speaker 2:Yes. I can't even I mean, it seems like since we started the stream, the whole Internet went down, so I'm just happy to be here with you.
Speaker 1:The only he's gonna be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google Doc, Google's down. You're cooked even though x is up.
Speaker 2:X is up, but you're
Speaker 1:This is the most
Speaker 2:strategy.
Speaker 1:Insane thing about you is that you can you can break through the link band somehow. It's just the ideas are so powerful. I love it.
Speaker 3:You know, nobody told
Speaker 9:me there was
Speaker 3:a link band.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Built different. Built different.
Speaker 2:Built different. Different. I had a post I had a post once that I was like, like, you know, I post links, and they still do numbers. Google.com. And it just
Speaker 1:It's blocked. John and I thought
Speaker 2:it was hilarious.
Speaker 4:Guys going go Google You got to
Speaker 2:be built different to post links.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have been built different. We've loved all the Google Docs that you've dropped. Maybe take us through the one, the end of software. What was the thesis?
Speaker 1:Then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. So admittedly, kind of an incendiary title Yeah. Especially on Twitter Yeah. To to this audience.
Speaker 3:But I the the crux of the thesis was LLMs are were and are only getting better at producing code, and generating code has largely been a translation task assigned to humans. And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard. And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language, that should just completely change the economics and the production of software. I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder have a hard having a harder time to find jobs than art majors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have our CS intern today studying art history for the
Speaker 1:next two hours to try to get this new job. He's right here.
Speaker 2:You can see.
Speaker 1:Do you have do you have a do you have a fun fact for us? I got a
Speaker 5:fun fact. Okay. So did you know that Greek statues were they were originally painted?
Speaker 1:They were originally painted.
Speaker 5:They weren't just white marble.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay.
Speaker 2:My paint Your job odds just went way up. Anyways, back to the interview with Chris. Anyway Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 1:Not at all. Yeah. But interesting fact about that, there's only 2,000 art history grads, and there's 100,000 CS grads. So there is a little bit more sensitivity. But I think even though the facts of that stat might be a little bit early to say, the trend is clear, and we all see it coming.
Speaker 1:And so we're interested in the impact of that.
Speaker 2:In some ways, it's the death of the software engineer job application. Like the job application now is like produce software.
Speaker 1:Yeah, built. Like produce
Speaker 2:a piece of software. The last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good, almost basically good enough for us to publish it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, immediately, same day.
Speaker 2:Same day. And so, like Yeah. In in at least the job application has been disrupted.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think it's this sort of inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept because it really challenges a worldview that most of our existence is constructed on top of. But I think the people who, like, rush head into it and try to understand, okay. Well, how does this change the future? What's gonna be different?
Speaker 3:You know, everybody else can be stuck clinging to the last vestiges of something that ultimately evaporates. I mean, but what's really exciting is is I mean, like, imagine a world where where steel is free. Like, what does the world look like if steel is free?
Speaker 1:Probably a lot more steel.
Speaker 3:It's like the the world looks completely different. Yeah. It looks completely different. We can build so much more incredible things. The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out, but we're no longer limited by the cost of something to produce traditionally.
Speaker 1:Be great. Talk to me about the the dynamic of as as code becomes cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate, there's there's two theories. One is, like, we are in the age of the idea guy, The the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight can instantly go instantiate it without a team of engineers. The classic example of like the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavel Osspiruchov posting about, which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset.
Speaker 1:And, yes, the software engineers, they won't be writing code anymore, but they might be the they might be the future idea guys. They might be able to think in systems and and and come up with interesting ideas. And even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves, they are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage. So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because execution is just commoditized at this point. I think, you know, if if we're if we're going back to, like, word cell and shape rotator debate, For better or for worse, I think word cells won. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bold. It's possible. Very possible.
Speaker 3:Brutal truth. Brutal truth for shape rotators, but word word cells just kinda came out on top because there's this Rosetta Stone that instantly translates words into shapes.
Speaker 10:Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The prompt can be rotate the shape. Exactly. Writing the prompt, you're good.
Speaker 3:Just put put put the fries in the bag.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, the yeah. No. The the the the the the wild, I think, moment for each of us is, like, we started going to chat GBT for tasks Yeah. And you're just, like, count the number of objects like this Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In this image, and it just writes like four minutes of
Speaker 1:it works for four minutes
Speaker 2:writing code, doing work that would take, you know, at least a few hours to do as like a as a well trained software engineer, just to do a task that that in many ways
Speaker 1:You could just look at you could just
Speaker 2:look at it and count it.
Speaker 3:But yeah. Yes. Well, so here's an interesting if if you guys wanna talk about something that Please. Is probably my next essay.
Speaker 1:Okay. There we go.
Speaker 3:T shirt. Off the press. Hot off the press. I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be, like, eroded by AI and what will never be eroded by AI. And, for example, like, we're never gonna watch robots play sports.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, that's just, like, never gonna happen. We we don't watch
Speaker 1:we don't watch robots play chess. And and robots have dominated chess, and yet chess.com has done well as a business. Magnus Carlsen has done well as an individual chess player, Hikaru.
Speaker 10:Exactly. Has a huge
Speaker 1:chess following online. You would think
Speaker 11:100%.
Speaker 1:If you just wanted to watch the best chess possible we played, you'd be watching Stockfish, and no one does.
Speaker 3:We don't. We don't. We not only that, but, like, the Olympics were so okay. So so here's the frame. When it comes to utility Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We are misanthropists. We actually kinda hate other humans. Mhmm. When you're in an Uber and they, like, start talking to you, you wish you were in a waymo. You're like, what?
Speaker 3:I don't need this. When when somebody when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I'm just I wanna buy this bottle of water. I I wanna walk away with my coffee. Why are you like, this this is like a miniature ransom.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And and you're just you're you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that you wanna do, and the human is preventing that from happening.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating there.
Speaker 11:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Right? That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually, like, very happy with humans being removed from that loop.
Speaker 3:And so as as long as the thing is utilitarian
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans, and we want them gone. Now on the other side, if if we are if we are allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another human do that thing. So think about, like, you know, fine dining.
Speaker 3:Right? Omakaze. You you go to a sushi restaurant. You need that person there that's describing cutting. You wanna see how delicate
Speaker 2:The craft is part the the craft and the and the social element to it is part of the product.
Speaker 3:Exactly. It's a story. Yeah. It's a story. You're paying for that experience.
Speaker 3:You want that human experience. You want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to. So on one hand, fine dining, you you need humans. You you you need the story. You wanna understand where it came from.
Speaker 3:Like and then on the other hand, we order food, and we tell
Speaker 1:the driver to leave it at the door so we
Speaker 3:don't have to interact with
Speaker 2:them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, like, we we we go through life with these two spheres. When we know we wanna do something and we really hate other humans, like, you know, when you call into a customer service line and somebody somebody, like, incompetent is on the other side, you just you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in in the place. And then on the other hand, you know, let's look at modern art, for example.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I think, like,
Speaker 3:the the trope in modern art is, like, it's not that hard to make. You know, where the joke is, like, my kid could do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like, your kid didn't, and also no one cares.
Speaker 3:Yep. The the thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the of the artist that went into creating that. And and
Speaker 2:The story If Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and, like, hits, you know, hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off, like that rock would would have like, you know, an immediate Mhmm. 10,000 x premium on it. Exactly. Somebody would buy it because you do Exactly.
Speaker 3:So so if if what you do Mhmm. Basically is gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. Mhmm. It's gonna go away. But if if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, it's it's moded.
Speaker 3:It's it's a huge mode. I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, would say over the last few decades, was the invention of reality television. Mhmm. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else.
Speaker 10:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:It's It's it's it's often incredible content. It is. Guilty pleasure for for many people. So On that note, I'm curious on since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug? Because they it's they're they're they're as far as I'm concerned, they've been designated a feature because it sort of went away for a little bit.
Speaker 2:Now it seems like they're back and and and stronger than ever.
Speaker 3:I think I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeiters, where it's
Speaker 11:like Interesting.
Speaker 3:This exists because there's value in the product. Replicating trying to imitate the auth this authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product. The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is. Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. That's a good framework. On this concept of the future of jobs, Sam Altman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years and showed, people what we do all day, they would say those are ridiculous fake jobs. You're that that that's not real. That's not hunting or farming.
Speaker 1:That's sitting in front of a computer just messing around, talking to people. And yet we yet yet we get a lot of value out of them. When we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm? Can we have through 30,000,000 chefs and 30,000,000 athletes and 30,000,000 reality TV stars such that people by and large have meaningful work even at some sort of scale? Or or do you think this is some there's some other way that this plays out?
Speaker 3:I think yes. Like, we will we're such a selfish race or or or species that we want to and the way the economics will work is is the jobs will basically ex job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So we have more leisure hours today than any any era ever in the history of time because we're actually the most productive. Right? Yeah. Like, if you if you if you wanna go back to, like, the stone age, there's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, like, tools get made. All of a sudden, we have free time. We didn't have free time before because every hour was meant was spent, like, surviving. What do we do with free time? We invent music.
Speaker 3:We invent bone flutes. Actually, the board games were invented concurrent with irrigation. Mhmm. So all of a sudden, you have this huge productivity boost, and then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time?
Speaker 3:Well, we we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the industrial revolution. All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other.
Speaker 2:Funny.
Speaker 3:And so we have these, like, huge boons to productivity. And then on the other side of it, we have job creation to fill that leisure expansion. So, yeah, we're we're gonna have more athletes
Speaker 4:than ever.
Speaker 1:Is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors. Like, because because I'm thinking about it like like so Ken Burns is about to drop a a new documentary about the American Revolution, and I am so excited to watch it. And I know I could go to ChatGPT and say, build me a deep research report on the American Revolution, but I wanna hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I wanna hear his voice narrated, and I wanna hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes even if they're not the best. Even if I could get even if I could get more factualness or more truth or more more detailed insights from from ChatGPT, I want the Ken Burns experience.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I don't I don't know. There's something interesting about that where, like, I mean, we you know, this is we have a friend, David Senora, who runs Founders Podcast, and the way he he he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells the stories in a way that's as compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life, and you're getting it through the experience of David. And I just don't think that's going anywhere. Yeah. Even though even though it is it is in some ways, like, the thing that could be one shot by AI with with with generative voice and and deep research products.
Speaker 1:But I think it'll be sticking around, like you like you mentioned.
Speaker 3:We're we're we're so narcissistic. Yeah. We love stories about each other. Yeah. And we love storytellers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we love telling stories. Yeah. And we hate in inauthenticity when it comes to that. I mean, like, the the ESPN eight the Ocho, like, is is is a joke, but it's like, we have more sports than ever Yeah. Because we have more leisure time than ever.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We care so much you know, I I I I I watch competitive darts. We watched competitive darts a 100 we didn't have time
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:watch it. Into bull riding recently and all the narratives there. J. B. Mani, the the greatest bull rider of all time.
Speaker 1:I know the whole history. I love it. Yeah. Getting into these obscure sports is yeah. Maybe that's the future.
Speaker 1:I just get spend all my time watching bowl riding. That's post scarcity for you.
Speaker 2:Switching gears a little bit. I mean, I I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go. But I wanted to see get your reaction to WWDC this year, Apple's news around how they're gonna be working with developers. I mean, there's there's a ton to dig in into. What what stood out to you?
Speaker 3:Sure. I know that everybody has, like, lost their mind about Liquid Glass and the new UI. I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. So there's a machine learning team inside of Apple, and they are really they're they're starting with this library called MLX, which is allows inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for for m m silicon or or Apple silicon. And what's what's really interesting about that is as a developer, right now, when you when you think about creating an application that has end user inference embedded inside of it, you also kinda have to do the mental math of how much it's gonna cost you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because it's all metered. And it's like, okay. Well, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, drop this endpoint into OpenAI or Anthropologie, whatever.
Speaker 2:Viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. And that's
Speaker 5:like, we've had
Speaker 2:a bunch of founders on the show that have accidentally done that. Yeah. You think about their early mobile days, like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now. But that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it. But that's not fun, And in the early
Speaker 1:Venture capitalists will save us in this situation. Venture capitalists, thankfully, they will come back. Thankfully, there are plenty of VCs If
Speaker 2:you have a viral load checks
Speaker 1:on a handshake.
Speaker 2:No, still,
Speaker 1:there's just so many It's real Yeah, it's a real dynamic.
Speaker 2:Part of the beauty of it being easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now we've we've been through this era of expensive inference.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yes. And so it's it's it's that point highlights the entire dynamic or, like, you know, imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by their the people who play their games. Mhmm. It would be insane.
Speaker 3:Like like, there would be no games made.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better you know, Apple's Apple's really, in my mind, in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable on device inference, which really means free inference. Yeah. So we're so if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for for the pixels that were rendered on on end user devices, we're moving to, like, wow. Like, people can render the graphics for free on their device, and that just opens the floodgates
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:For the things that can happen. I think haters will say, well, like, you know, models are bad. You know, you know, the the the battery life is terrible. Your iPhone heats up. You know, the the models are small.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But tomorrow, two a year from now, two years from now, you know, all of a sudden, 90% of the queries that you would run through a cloud hosted model is just doable on your phone or on your laptop
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And for free. And natively, it can be offline, whatever you want, and private. And so that's a that's a such an exciting future. And from from my takeaway from WWC, that was that was the most exciting one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I feel like
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you combine that with, again, they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode, which will enable some of this activity as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, need AI, our AI Flappy Bird moment. Like Flappy Bird, I remember, was built by, like, a single developer, and it's that perfect example of, like, leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images.
Speaker 1:There was that, magic avatar app that would make you look like Superman. That kinda went viral, but, of course, it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put it on the edge. I think we will have our our our our Flappy Bird moment for LLM based interactions on the iPhone, and I I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun, and everyone will be playing with it when it happens.
Speaker 1:I I I wanna stay on the on on the topic of Apple and and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste as something that's potentially a permanent differentiator in a post AI world. There's an idea of, like, agency plus taste, being more valuable than skills. We talked to Scott Belsky about that on Tuesday. How how do you think is taste a moat?
Speaker 1:Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass, and yet when we looked at it, it looked pretty cool. I don't know.
Speaker 1:I thought it looked nice.
Speaker 3:I think taste is alive and well. Maybe I'll describe Apple if you'll if you'll permit me to to to describe another one of my frameworks
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 3:That we've developed here at Pace is is top down and bottom up companies.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So top down companies started by visionary, charismatic founders. Mhmm. Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games. And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so what what what happens is top these top down companies ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So, you know, we're we're we're all on, you know, Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods. You know, Tesla has obviously created everything from cars to Powerwalls and solar panels. SpaceX not only makes rockets, but also satellite Internet. Mhmm. Awesome.
Speaker 3:Amazing amazing constructs. And and what's interesting is the market only sees the products, and so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the company itself because these top down companies hire innovators and and build up this core core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product. Bottom up companies, conversely, are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to, pick locks, basically.
Speaker 3:And they they they, combined with perfect timing, capture lightning in a bottle. And what's what's interesting about bottom up companies is that they they only ever ship a single flagship product. This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb, most actually venture Twitter, the where where we are. And and and they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a flagship product. It's because the the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer.
Speaker 3:It's it's so so imagine like a you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person's hired as optimizer. There are no innovators. Why why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1% better? Yep.
Speaker 3:And so they're actually fundamentally in they they you can't ship a product as a bottom up company, and a lot of bottom up companies don't know that they're bottom up companies because success is a terrible teacher. A lot of bottom up companies expand through m and a because the businesses are so good. They're so good.
Speaker 9:You And then if you could buy great products,
Speaker 2:you can optimize them really well and grow them, and you look like you're I mean you look, you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make two of those flagship products.
Speaker 1:We were talking about this example with Right? With Gale AI going to Meta, it's like, yeah, 15,000,000,000 is a lot. But what if it moves the market cap 1%? Yeah. Yep.
Speaker 1:If optimizes their AI stack 1%? It's like, yeah, pay for Instagram
Speaker 3:Yep. You know, ByteDance buying Musically. Sure. These are in like, maybe some of the best investments
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Over the last couple decades, and they were M and A events.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And so if you're a bottom up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. So going back to taste, do I think taste is alive and well at Apple? Yes. Because culturally, that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. But it's not the same at every company.
Speaker 3:You know? I don't know I don't know if tastes it's famous last time. I don't know if taste exists at I don't know if true taste exists at bottom up companies.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I I wonder actually if what we what we can see from bottom up companies is just ornamental window dressing Mhmm. That we misidentify as taste. Mhmm. Because it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's hiring a good design agency at the right time, and and you're like, oh, this this company is so tasteful. But it's like, well, you had to spend $250 to to be tasteful.
Speaker 3:It's just the most legible thing. But when when actually, like, Craigslist just works great. I mean, Craigslist is a perfect example of a bottom up company. No tastes required.
Speaker 2:Interesting. I would be rattling off, like, 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework Mhmm. But I would piss off two people. So we'll let we'll let the audience imagine, for themselves. But it but it I think it's
Speaker 1:really Yeah, this was fantastic. We could go way deeper into all of these frameworks. These are great kickoff points for big discussions. I have so many more questions. So we'll to have you on back soon because this was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 4:Thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:Thanks for the time.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. And in the meantime, we will talk to you about AdQuick. Adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And our next guest is coming into the studio, Joe from Infinite Machine.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to launch our out of home campaign, John. I'm so excited. We were the we're deep in the creative process.
Speaker 1:We had to pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him in. Let's do it. We'll hear his pitch, and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised. Break it down for us.
Speaker 2:Launch day. What are
Speaker 1:you building? Launch day. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Welcome.
Speaker 1:Show us. Give us a little tour. What what are you building?
Speaker 11:Hey, guys. So you are here at our New York City facility. Fantastic. I'm calling from Infinite Machine, and we make the best non car vehicles on earth.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 11:And today, we are launching our product. It's called Alto. It is a class two ebike, but it looks nothing like an ebike. We really thawed this thing from the ground up. So it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane.
Speaker 11:It's got pedals that turn into footrests. It fits two people. It's made out of, aluminum and steel. It's beautiful. It's useful.
Speaker 11:It's high-tech. It's connect to the Internet, and we we just announced it today.
Speaker 1:The damage for one of those? How much it cost?
Speaker 11:$34.95.
Speaker 2:You're giving them away. You're giving away. Double the price.
Speaker 9:Like, them away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it it looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch.
Speaker 2:How much so so you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a license. So you basically
Speaker 1:What is
Speaker 2:the class you're riding in the class? Like, hypothetically, John and I and the team, we get fleet of these for the office, and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot. Yep. We're riding. It looks like we're on little motorcycles.
Speaker 2:Cops put the sirens on. They pull us over. We pull the pedals out, and we're good to go. We're like, look. I'm sorry, officer.
Speaker 2:It's a bicycle. Yeah. I don't know what
Speaker 1:you're talking about.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So basically, most e bikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them, but bicycles were never designed to be powered. And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for for motor power. And instead we said, okay. How can we think about this from the ground up?
Speaker 11:We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is. So if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals that are operable, meaning it has a chain. Mhmm. It goes 20 miles per hour as a class two ebike or 20 or or 25 miles per hour as a class three ebike, and it's narrower than 36 inches.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 11:That's the basic constraint. And so, you know, we took that brief, and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design.
Speaker 1:What is the barrier to going more aggressive, building it wider, taking the pedals out, making it go 40 miles an hour? Then are you regulated as a motorcycle, and I need a motorcycle license? Is that is that how it works?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So if you're considered a,
Speaker 11:an ebike, you don't need a license plate.
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 11:And therefore, it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not really regulated by the federal government. Got it. And so, yeah, like, it's just a much lower friction experience.
Speaker 11:You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements. You don't need a license plate. And so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use.
Speaker 11:You don't have to deal with complex dealers. You don't need to register the thing. And, yeah, you can get on and go, and it's and it's excessively priced.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the go to market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores, get them into traditional bike shops? I've been in some bike shops where they have ebikes as well, or is this all d to c and ecommerce?
Speaker 11:So can I show you quickly? We have a space here in New York. We're getting set up for an event. Wow. So there's a 13,000 square foot space in New York.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 11:And it's gonna be open to the public as a store. People can come in and buy vehicles. And so we are going direct to consumer to start. But Sure. Through online retail.
Speaker 1:Includes your retail.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yes. To start our own facility here in New York. Yep. We're also interested in open to selling them in channel retail.
Speaker 1:Sure. Guess it will be Best Buy, for example. Like, they would be Yeah. Lot of sense for it to be there.
Speaker 11:Exactly. Talk
Speaker 2:about talk about the broader explosion of e bikes because I feel like adults nowadays, the the number one way I feel like a boomer is when, you know, some, like, 12 year olds with e bikes are like, you know, ripping through traffics, and and it feels like every time I I drive in the city now at some point or another, and and and in some ways, like, you know, the the boomer in me is like, oh, those kids are being, you know, dangerous, and then part of me at the same time is like, it actually makes cities much smaller now, where kids can just go out and explore. I feel like, it feels like with Ulta and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the era of this sort of Mhmm. Micro mobility, right? Maybe the era was was the kind of Birds. Sharing economy, bird, Lyme model.
Speaker 2:And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome. Yeah. But the community owned approach or or this sort of sharing economy model Mhmm. Had some, like, really, you know, big big issues. And it does feel like, you know, actually having people own the end product, care for the end product, and not be just, you know, trashing devices that are part of a network?
Speaker 11:So the way we look
Speaker 9:at it is, you know, the world,
Speaker 11:as we know, is urbanizing. More and more people are living in cities. And when you live in cities, things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes, you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. And we believe that over time, more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars. They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. And our intention is to make the best of these things. Now you you're right.
Speaker 11:The gen one micro mobility companies were all sharing oriented. We think, ultimately, it's not a great business model. There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, etcetera. But, also, we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars.
Speaker 11:They love their vehicles. They have an emotional connection to them. And, ultimately, the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing, you get on it.
Speaker 11:You can go anywhere in your city in fifteen minutes. No hassle. The wind's at your back, and it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It's just night and day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about what's going on in China because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility, and BYD makes all sorts of stuff, and, they have a very different model. You know, with with so many tech companies, it's like, are you gonna wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or or Google's IO? It feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this. But what's the actual dynamic?
Speaker 1:Why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware? Like, why isn't Samsung getting in on the action? Why isn't Apple doing anything here? Can you comment on, like, the reaction to just, like, the way American companies are building technology today versus the China model?
Speaker 11:Actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So, yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multi category.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, yeah, you go
Speaker 11:to a Xiaomi, and they started making phones and laptops, and now they're making cars. Yep. When you look at The US, the model take a company like Apple. We love Apple, but they're very, very conservative. They stick to their lane, and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware.
Speaker 11:And so the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the the next great American hardware company. Mhmm. We're starting with G1 and then Alto and with vehicles at large, but we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions, and we wanna make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high-tech in new ways. And so we will be multi category at some point. I mean, we're really building the competency to build high end, moving beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer, and do it in a way where we can move really quickly.
Speaker 11:I mean, this company, I've been full time for less than a year and a half. We have raised less than $10,000,000. We've productionized two motor vehicles. So we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra lean hardware company. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:And we're gonna keep pushing, and we're gonna take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, just kinda escapes the screen. And we're gonna be all over that. We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff, and we're building the competency to make things that take advantage of it.
Speaker 2:Is there any I'm just gonna I'm just gonna speculate, but I can imagine, you guys making a horse buggy without the horse that's fully autonomous.
Speaker 1:Yes. And you just get to ride around the city,
Speaker 2:you know, windows down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You see the carriages in
Speaker 2:Yeah. In such
Speaker 1:a park.
Speaker 2:Autonomous horse carriages.
Speaker 1:That as well. For sure.
Speaker 11:Please. Or a horse or a robotic horse.
Speaker 1:Yes. I'd love that. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Henry Ford said if you ask if you ask customers what they'd want, a faster horse. I want a faster horse. I'd love a faster horse.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're already self driving. Bought a horse. They come out of the box
Speaker 4:self driving.
Speaker 1:Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there. Exactly. Well, are has has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now? Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain?
Speaker 1:Some companies have been fine on the battery side. The more defense application companies like Skydio run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like? I know that everyone's focused on reindustrialization in America, but it's a long journey.
Speaker 11:Things have stabilized on the tariff front. Mhmm. You know, it's not great. Mhmm. The world economy is highly entwined.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles, is highly connected connected to China and beyond. And so we are all you know, we are fully supportive of industrializing America. We wanna be on the cutting edge of that. We support your smart policy to do that, both, you know, carrot and stick.
Speaker 11:So tariffs are stick. You know, there's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only seen the seen the stick. So short story is, you know, it's stabilized, but, honestly, I think we should be playing offense as America, and we're not yet.
Speaker 11:We're we're we're using kind of protectionist measures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about making these, vehicles safer using technology. I I I remember, like, the hoverboard was a beneficiary of of, you know, better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it, very, very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in, like, 2014 and then kinda disappeared. But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company twenty, thirty years ago?
Speaker 1:What what what what technology trends are you benefiting from?
Speaker 11:You know, on the safety front, these are lower speed vehicles. So you're not moving at, you know, highway speeds. And so the name of the game is awareness. Mhmm. People not just for the rider, but also for people around you.
Speaker 11:So that's emitting a sound that's being highly visible, and that is alerting the rider when there are issues, and we do that stuff. You know, I think over time, we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do, alerting and also to take over the vehicle when when that presents itself. But to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding ebikes right now. If we can make them 10%, 15% safer, that's a big win, and that's where we're starting.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about getting them in let's getting Ulta in the hands of us.
Speaker 1:I wanna I'm gonna sign I'm
Speaker 2:gonna I'm gonna we're gonna configure
Speaker 1:One for the after show.
Speaker 2:One for each person on the team. Then We're
Speaker 1:gonna be bombing around.
Speaker 2:And then we're just gonna be emailing you every day. Hey. Hey. What what's what's the wait time? What's the wait time?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We're do We are offering what we call internally the Burning Man shipping option, which is straight from the factory in August before Burning Man. If you opt for non Burning Man shipping, that costs $4,500. But if you opt for non Burning Man shipping, that will arrive in late September, early October.
Speaker 9:Okay.
Speaker 11:So, you know, they're shipping quickly. We are about to start mass production, and maybe for you guys, we'll expedite a few.
Speaker 2:That'd be amazing. No. I mean, I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man. As you can imagine, you know, if you can get a density of these on the Playa, the number of Instagram stories, posts, etcetera, it's going to be absolutely wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, what about storage? Like, what are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment, or or do most buildings these days have, like, in like, safe places to store ebikes or parking garages for these things?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You park the vehicle outside. It's fully weatherproof.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:It has an onboard security system. It's virtually impossible to steal hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge. You can take the battery out of the seat. It weighs 20 pounds.
Speaker 1:Sense.
Speaker 11:It's a hot swappable battery. Take it up to your apartment, and then we have a dock that you drop it in, and the dock plugs into a normal one ten volt outlet. So Interesting. Super simple.
Speaker 1:You charge it overnight and then just take it out with
Speaker 11:you every morning. Six hours to charge. We also have a supercharger.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 11:It takes three hours Yeah. For a couple $100 and yeah.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Anything else? Please make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump. I just think it would be fun.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask,
Speaker 2:when can we get these That's thing I
Speaker 1:strategy here. I want to see the big jump, monster truck rally. Let's push these to the limits, really show people
Speaker 2:what the future I think we should get one and put the full TBPN racing livery on it.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:All of the ramp on there.
Speaker 1:I agree. All the different partners. Are we doing like Pikes Peak? Or are we doing like Half Pipe? Like, what's going to go most viral here?
Speaker 2:All of it. All of it.
Speaker 1:All of it. Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm super I'm super this is one of the, I love businesses and products where you take something that seems like, you know, seems like it's competitive, and then you spend a 100 times, you know, you'd be a 100 times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and you create an entirely new
Speaker 1:Also, shipping before Christmas, I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree. It's rare We're getting big Christmas tree. It's rare and rare these days because everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs, and all of this is digital now. So it's very hard to find something to give to someone.
Speaker 1:Although this is obviously like a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing. We've been recommending that people give each other, you know, sales tax software or potentially corporate cards, but I think I think this is gonna be added to our Christmas list this year.
Speaker 11:I think this is a little bit more fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And people
Speaker 11:can place if they want if if folks wanna make sure they get one for the holiday season, they could put a deposit down now. It's a $100.
Speaker 9:Oh, cool.
Speaker 11:And it's fully refundable.
Speaker 1:So Okay.
Speaker 11:Well Save your configuration.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah. We'd love to give it a try. We'll talk you soon.
Speaker 2:Very excited for you guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cheers. Bye. Awesome. If you're operating a wander, you got to get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around That would be fantastic.
Speaker 4:Crazy collab.
Speaker 1:Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, Ojai, any any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling. And if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your Your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:Wander allows you to go golden retriever mode because you just don't have to think about anything.
Speaker 4:You'll just be
Speaker 1:chasing the ball. Beach. Well, we have Zach again from Plaid. time on the show. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:Great to see you. It's always a pleasure. I'm I'm always blown away when you join because it's always so much fun talking to you. So thanks so much for joining.
Speaker 2:Great to have you.
Speaker 1:What's what's the latest in your world?
Speaker 7:Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm I'm I'm honored to be here, and, it's always fun. It's so much fun. Latest in our world is, we did PlaidFX today. Okay.
Speaker 7:This is our our annual conference where we announced a bunch of the stuff that we were working on for the past year. It's been, super fun. The biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this, amazing cutting edge, anti fraud product. Looks at all the data across all the all all all of the usage and the data flowing through the Plaid network and builds a really great antifraud tool. How But, yeah, that's the that's the headline of the day.
Speaker 1:How how one shot able is fraud these days? Can you just pipe a ton of customer data into, like, a single context window and just ask? And can the prompt just be like, is this fraud now? Or or is it is it still, like, leveraging all the traditional fraud tools?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, the the the hard hard part is twofold. Okay. is, you have to put all of your historical data in it to say, hey. Is this pattern anomalous?
Speaker 7:Is something weird Yep. Going on on here? So the question is, like, can you can you get all of your data into that? And in Plaid's case, can you take all the data that we see across all of the fintech apps and all the users Mhmm. And then say, hey.
Speaker 7:What are the patterns that are occurring consistently? So for example, you know, if you sign up for for Coinbase today, that might be a totally normal sign up. You sign up for LendingClub today and you just signed up for six other lending products today, then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out. Mhmm. And so, can you can you can you get all this data all in one place?
Speaker 7:That's that's that's problem number one. The problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it because fraud changes every day. Some of that is algorithmic. So are the algorithms, like, chasing the fraudsters in the way that they need to? Some of that is manual.
Speaker 7:So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say, hey, I heard from you I I I've seen this thing going on, or I heard from some other some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring. Can you search for it and tell me, is is that actually occurring to me? And then can I build
Speaker 1:some rules to to protect against it?
Speaker 7:So it is a constantly evolving game.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how important is this problem? I feel like every American should just default assume that their information is, like, floating around the Internet available to the highest bidder. And so, like, in in some ways, like, the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity. Is that is that reality?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That is the reality. Financial fraud is going up around twenty five percent a year right now. Some of that is or actually a lot of that is AI driven. So, you know, people using AI tools to send text messages, to convince people to do certain things. I think, yep, one answer is absolutely tools, and we're trying to build the best in class tools and give it to all the fintech companies.
Speaker 7:In fact, we've been we'll go well beyond fintech with these The other is just education, like explaining to consumers how it works. So, you know, my my my parents and I yeah. We have a a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other other end of the line if we're sending money or frankly doing anything that requires authentication. Those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day to day processes are always helpful, but it's a combination of tools and processes and and and so
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense. Can you talk to us about impossible travel problems? I found out about this yesterday where where someone's logging in from Singapore three hours after they were in San Francisco, and they couldn't possibly be there. Is that something that that that you're already built a tool around?
Speaker 1:Is that is that kind of Yeah. Like table stakes? Or or or are there are there, like, evolutions there? Yeah. So, I mean, a a lot of the the the way
Speaker 7:that the the AntiFire product works, it's called Protect. It's got a bunch of these different analysis analyses that we do. So there's there's, I think, just under 20 different analyses that are running now, and we're adding more every Mhmm. One of them is location tracking. So we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app, and then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user account in a different place, alright.
Speaker 7:Great. Well, that's that's actually, you know, it's an impossible travel question. And so that will immediately generate a flag. There's a bunch of these other things. Like, we look at stuff like how long is this bank account existed.
Speaker 7:Turns out a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud, and an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud. We do stuff same thing for the phone number. How long is this phone number existed? And there's a there's a zillion of these analyses that then run into a bunch of statistical work that we do on top of it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But, you know, every time you look at a fraudster or or or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect. Mhmm. So you can look back and say, oh, Obviously, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California two hours later. That's impossible. But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, like, you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist?
Speaker 7:And that's that's that's the complexity that we focus on.
Speaker 1:So so I imagine at one point, this was, like, very heuristic driven, very, like, a multivariable regression almost just saying Yeah. Like, here are the different fraud factors. Let's add up, like, a risk score. Have these products moved to a transformer architecture? Are we using LLMs in them?
Speaker 1:Are we using modern AI tools? Or or or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the the the existing the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years. Like, I don't know how relevant the new models are. People are kind of, like, throwing transformers and diffusion at everything right now, and I don't know if that's appropriate here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, the answer
Speaker 7:is yes to all the above. Mhmm. It is not heavily transformer driven yet in terms of fighting fraud, though increasingly, it is becoming that way.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:We definitely use LLMs for a bunch of things like auto building tools, like Sure. Doing some of the data cleansing, so on and so on the back. Mhmm. But yeah. Fraud is a fascinating industry because if you talk to any company, their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform.
Speaker 7:Right? They want the fraud to be more expensive for a fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else. Sure. And so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing.
Speaker 7:They want, like, the the the new type of fraud solution. But then eventually, everything that's new becomes table stakes for everyone because, you know, you you kinda have to have it. Yeah. And so, yeah, you know, we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture, but it's still early days
Speaker 2:Yeah. To me use
Speaker 7:platforms to actually solve.
Speaker 2:To me, this product feels like something that's just possible with, like, massive scale. Like, you probably wanted to build something like this, like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, but but couldn't just because you didn't have, like, the the sort of broad exposure to all these different touch points. Is that right?
Speaker 7:I mean, this was the pitch that I was giving for Plaid in, like, 2014. Mhmm. Basically, my pitch was that when we get big enough, we're gonna have a lot of data, and we're gonna build these analytics that financial services doesn't have because, you know, no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it. It took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff. And then we acquired Cognito, an ID verification company in 2022, which is a big catalyst.
Speaker 7:Mean, in part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, look. Come use our data, put it together with your data, and then think of all the amazing anti fraud tools you can build. So, I mean, this stuff always happens slower than you want it to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there.
Speaker 1:How much of this, like like, fraud right now, financial fraud, is kind of acting as, like, a tax on fintech companies? And should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools to go after the fraudsters, like, at the source and just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud?
Speaker 2:Well, I think one of the big the big challenges is in in crypto, a lot of fraudulent activity is happening, and and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China. If you just go to if you go to some if you go to the Chinese government and you say, like, we know exactly who's doing this, they don't they're not gonna act on it. So, like Yeah. It's
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, the the answer is yes yes to all the above. Like, the government should be more active in this. Again, much of the as as you said, much of the fraud doesn't stem from people that are inside The US, so it's not the US government doing it. I'm sure you guys have been following or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Horrible name for a type of fraud.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like, they have these these these humans in fraud rings in, like, Malaysia and Malaysia.
Speaker 1:Ships with people. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Exactly. And, like, they're they're often government sponsored or at least government, like, affiliated in some way. Like, there's there's there's knowledge in the government that that that happened. And so, I mean, you know, and if that is happening, great.
Speaker 7:Yes. We could we could give better data to the Malaysian government, but also you gotta build the tools.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What about I I don't know how how much you can comment on this, but, you know, there's been a lot of discussion recently and and frustration and at least after the the Coinbase, you know, user data issues around like KYC's, KYC laws and and effectively the government requiring people to retain all this data. Do you think that there would ever be any movement in DC around really updating these laws to protect to help protect user data? Or is it just one of those things that that we have to to live with?
Speaker 7:I mean, you you would think they should. I mean, realistically, yeah, the the the concept that if if if you're a bank and I sign up for your bank, you have to collect all of my most sensitive data, and then you have to store it forever in your database. Mhmm. On a scale of forever in, you know, many, many databases, you have to assume that those databases will be hacked. Thus, you have to assume that on the scale of forever, your data is all gonna be public.
Speaker 7:And so it doesn't make sense that that that you would retain it. You should in theory collect it, verify it, and, like, get, say, a token that it exists, like, get some assurance that exists and then delete it. It seems like I I I would hope that the regulation change. I think it's it's it's, you know, regulations move as fast as regulations move, And so I'm not sure that it's gonna be imminent in that sense. But on the flip side, like, the industry is solving it.
Speaker 7:The industry is building tools that are better and better. I mean, relying on a static Social Security number, sure, yeah, we'll do it. That's fine if if if we have to for regulatory reasons. But the reality is if if if social security number entry is your only fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, like, you're you're in a bad place as it is. Yeah.
Speaker 7:That makes sense. The industry will solve it, basically. Can
Speaker 2:you talk? This got kind of lost among other massive news cycles, but there were some updates to Dodd Frank one zero three three that a few weeks ago. You guys talking offline were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers. Kind of, can you give us kind of an overview of what happened? I know, I think when we were in DC, you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think this is a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should. So in the Dodd Frank law, the the the they wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data, and they can assign it access to to parties such as Plaid to act on their behalf. And then there was never any rule written on that. It was it was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB.
Speaker 7:No rule written for a long time. Under Trump administration, Kathy Kraninger, the head of the CFPB at the time, started writing the rule for this. It then can can continued into the Rocha Chopra era of CFPB under Biden. The rule that emerged from that was a very far reaching, huge overstep of a rule. In the Trump administration, now there's a push to either pare back or get rid of the rule.
Speaker 7:What actually happened is the day that the rule was published by Rohit Chopra, a group of the banks sued, you know, that same day. Mean, they they had the lawsuit pre prepared beforehand and this was clicks of that.
Speaker 11:Send.
Speaker 7:And so that that kind of is ongoing. The wrinkle that's come up recently is that the currency of PB has basically said something effective. Yes. We agree with the banks, and we should get rid of the rule, but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulatory things that were set up and could actually put at risk some of the the ways that open banking works in The United States today. Meaning, it could it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem.
Speaker 7:They could try to turn off data in certain areas. They should try to limit data in certain areas. They could more more likely what's gonna happen is they're gonna try to limit certain industries. So if you remember, you know, a couple years ago, there was this big debanking thing that went on On top of where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah.
Speaker 7:This would give them the ability to turn off crypto. This would give them the ability to turn off, you know, gaming or things like that, or basically any any industry that they might feel is competitive with them. And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group. It would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this. And so we think that, you know, we don't mind getting rid of the rule.
Speaker 7:We just don't wanna foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products that they interact with.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Did you have a reaction to the Circle IPO? I'd I'd you know, obviously, it performed very well, but and and stablecoins have been in the news, but I'm I'm interested to hear kind of, like, what the next most exciting, instantiations of that technology might be. I was talking to a payroll company CEO, and, he was kind of mentioning that, yes, it's lower fees and faster. But interestingly, stablecoins might allow them to kind of recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way that I wasn't expecting. So, like, the the the the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to kind of custody their own treasuries essentially through stablecoins.
Speaker 1:What have you been seeing in the stablecoin world broadly? What are the interesting knock on effects? How much excitement is there among stablecoins from your partners?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, there there there's a ton. Yeah. There's a lot of amazing companies. I think you talked to pretty
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you already talked to them? Are you going
Speaker 2:for Yeah. Yeah. Just an hour ago. Just earlier.
Speaker 7:Great. Yeah. I mean, huge shout outs to them. Like, amazing to see what they built and Yeah. It's very excited for the ecosystem.
Speaker 7:I think, you know, from our perspective, what's happening in stablecoins right now is not what will happen. So what's happening right now, a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge. A lot of people are using it for cross border payouts or or or money transfers that otherwise would just be friction full. And then, you know, a lot of people are using it just as a as a form of the savings account that has higher yield. And while those are all big TAMs, it's not that that interesting relative to the rest of what what what could go on in financial services.
Speaker 7:I think increasingly, we're gonna see more and more consumers having the ability to move money easily between, say, a bank account and a crypto wallet holding something in USDC or or or another another stable coin. And, yeah, you're right. There there are big opportunities for people to hold elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest off of it. Increasingly, think that that that float, which was historically held onto by the platforms, may well get shared more and more with with the underlying companies. So payroll companies, if the float was all held at the bank, now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float.
Speaker 7:So that's a huge new revenue stream for them. While interest rates are what they are, I will say. So that'll create increasing volatility in their in their revenue streams because if interest rates go down, then obviously the float goes down. So I do think that that's that's that's a a big potential thing that a lot of a lot of companies might want to. Also, offering more tender types allows a lot of the large platform to keep dollars on their platform more.
Speaker 7:So you see some of their big payments processors. Their goal, obviously, is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of that float and offering more tender types, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in in in in crypto, you could hold it in a stable coin. That keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives them both more leverage
Speaker 1:and and and more revenue in the long term.
Speaker 2:That's very cool. What are you guys doing on the MCP side? I I know you you had some announcements recently there.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So that's that's another big part of the announcements today. I mean, the short answer is, like, MCP is making it easier for developers to build. I think the concept of a REST API was new when we started Plug because everything was on Stope. Now the concept of, you know, writing to a raw API without using cursor or windsurf or something like that is increasingly becoming rare and will become rare over time.
Speaker 7:And so really, for us, it's just staying on the cutting edge, building tools that help developers build faster on cloud, and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage, their their interactions with our system, so on and so So it's fun. It's really fun.
Speaker 4:It's awesome. Do you have
Speaker 2:any type of broad thesis around how agent I think there's a lot of narrative around, Okay, agents will just default use crypto assets or anything around that. There's
Speaker 1:sort of an It's PV2. It's coming.
Speaker 2:Yeah, anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative, I you know, wanna kind of push deeper. I'm I'm curious if you have strong opinions.
Speaker 1:I do not think
Speaker 7:they will default these crypto assets. I think crypto assets might be easier at but, look, the the bank account is already effectively a digital product. Mhmm. Whereas now with the digital product did not start that way certainly. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Cards, probably are not yet fully digital Mhmm. But are moving that direction. Like, still you have to know a 16 digit card number to actually like authenticate a card. Mhmm. Whereas bank accounts have a lot already set up.
Speaker 7:And then it it it could have the the next phase of that is obviously crypto. Because crypto starts being digital made up, and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things. My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to to to these to to to to LMs and and to agents. But it's gonna take a little while for the industry to evolve. But fast forward two, three years, and it'll be all the same.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 2:No. This is great.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic news. Congrats.
Speaker 7:It was awesome.
Speaker 2:I'm curious. Did did Chesky tell you to to move to this kind of release cycle, or or have you been doing it for a while? It's sort of the Chesky it's the Chesky method. The Chesky method of No.
Speaker 7:Been doing it for a little while, but, man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it. And all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 7:Yeah. We were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from from from from from listening to their playbook.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the the the jobs approach, you know, walks so the Chesky method could run. Yeah. Awesome. Well,
Speaker 1:I'm I'm
Speaker 2:excited to read through the the other announcements later and come back on anytime.
Speaker 1:It's great to hear. Awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel.
Speaker 1:Go to get bezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I love that.
Speaker 2:Think that that YC There was one YC to ELC that had the Oh, they were hitters. And the and the Texas Timex.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The day date was day date. And JLC reversal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, when we called the founders on it, they were like, Oh,
Speaker 1:I don't want to be embarrassed.
Speaker 2:It's not super YC coded to have a, to have a hitter on the wrist, but
Speaker 1:nothing embarrassed. K throw a 100 K and do a attack, you know,
Speaker 2:no, that's the clue method. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:The clue method. No. Build a generational company and then, buy a nice piece on bezel for your, for your father. Father's day is coming up. Head over to Bezels.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get your dad a watch. Create. Let's check-in with our intern Tyler who's pivoting from computer science to art history. What do you got for us, Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 5:Good. Yeah. So earlier, I I was thinking, like, I think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So I took two different tests. Okay. The one was the it was an AP art history practice exam. Okay. So, you know, it's like for high schoolers.
Speaker 5:Yep. Average high schoolers, like pretty dumb.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:I thought I'd do pretty well. I got 12 out of 29, so that's 41%. So
Speaker 2:Failing. Failing.
Speaker 5:Know, some some place to go there. And then I also took, like, you know, maybe that exam was just, weirdly, you know, it's, like, very specific knowledge or something. I took another exam. This was the Britannica art history quiz. On that one, I got 24 out of 60.
Speaker 5:So that's 40%. So, you know But but have a lot
Speaker 1:of room for
Speaker 2:Well, there's there's about an hour left in the show. So so
Speaker 1:Were you using cursor for art history to to to answer those questions? Or were you Yeah.
Speaker 5:I was not, but that was earlier in the show. I have been studying. Okay. So I think I'm gonna take it, you know, twenty minutes before the show ends. Okay.
Speaker 5:We'll see how I do then.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:But I was also kind of just looking, you know, at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:So it, like, if you kind of want to stay in the art world, that's basically you work in a museum or you work in kind of art dealership gallery. Yeah. Yeah. looked at kind of becoming like an a museum curator. Okay.
Speaker 5:For that, it's you basically need a PhD.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 5:was looking at art dealership. Okay. And obviously, like, for that, you kind of need some some funding to start with. So I took producer Ben's ramp card.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Okay. Laid down some art pieces. They're gonna come in next couple weeks.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:There
Speaker 5:you So, yeah, I'm I'm already starting this career. I I'm feeling pretty good about myself.
Speaker 2:So you flip the you flip those pieces, bake it all back, pay off the ramp card, reward business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we will be checking in with his IRR, seeing if he can beat the average venture Yeah. Yeah. Just beat the market. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's that easy.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Great work, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Making lots of lots of promising promising progress. That's very good. Anthropic cofounder Ben Ma Ben Mann says that we'll know AI is transformative when it passes the economic Turing test.
Speaker 1:This is something I was talking about earlier. Give an AI agent a job for a month. Let the hiring manager choose human or machine when they pick the machine. More often than not, we've crossed the threshold. We've been talking about the economic touring test for a while.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow. Maybe it needs its own coinage. Maybe we need to dig into Anthropic more deeply. But we have the perfect guest for that. We have Sharon from Bloomberg joining us right now.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing?
Speaker 13:Good. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for being here. I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear writing fantastic pieces. Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about. What did you learn from the the piece that you wrote about Anthropic and Dario? We haven't had a chance to have him on the show.
Speaker 1:We talked to Sholto. They have an interesting culture, interesting history. Can you give us your kind of 50,000 foot foot view on the company, what they stand for today, and maybe how that's changed?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is, facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of, ideological ethos, which is around building AI safely as an and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were. Yeah. And then also to deliver on the business value. Right?
Speaker 13:So I was kind of, I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been, with Dario at the helm. Even though he has this very deep research science background, he's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly Mhmm. Double, and now there's other reporting about tripling revenue. So, you know, that's sort of where they're at. But as you get more money, as you get more you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, you know, how does does that translate into pressure to move really fast Yeah.
Speaker 13:At the same time that you're trying to be responsible?
Speaker 1:Did you get a sense that they have a they have a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships? Because they've they've done a deal with Amazon, I believe. They were just mentioned that WWDC is plugging into Xcode. It feels like they're trying to maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider. They seem to be doing very well in in coding and with, on the enterprise side.
Speaker 1:How much of that is deliberate or just, like, it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was?
Speaker 13:I mean, so in my reporting, like, it was very deliberate, their strategy, to, of all, not lock in with any one hyperscaler. Right? So they have both Google and Amazon as partners on the That kind of hedging, I think, was very calculated. And also, they you know, Dario, in my interviews, he's been pretty dismissive on reporting about Stargate Mhmm. You know, saying it's not clear exactly what it is.
Speaker 13:And I I I think his stance is that sort of you can you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it. At least that's what he sort of said publicly to me. Right? But but as as you said, like, I think the pressure's on, right, for them to to deliver and show that they can. He invented scaling laws, but can you actually build up the compute and pay for it to do that?
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety? I was very I I never really got caught up in the paper clipping and the AI doom narrative, but after seeing, deep sea That's what every that's
Speaker 2:what every human says right before they
Speaker 1:get their paper back gone. But but but after seeing DeepSeek drop in the anthropic paper about Manchurian candidates or what was it? Secret hidden agents? I forget the term that they use, but Sleep agents. The sleeper agents embedding something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain web page.
Speaker 1:It it discovers that, hey, I'm not just running, you know, in some random solo dev's cursor instance. I'm actually inside the NSA. I should go around and do something else. And and that really flipped a bit in my mind to say, okay. Safety research is actually maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable because people will want to do safety evaluations on the models that they use.
Speaker 1:How has the safety rhetoric evolved at, at Anthropic over the last couple of years in your in your in your reporting?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So I think, you know, AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of, hypothetical thought experiments like the paper clip experiment for a very long time, like predating even Dario Emaday's, right, entry onto the scene. However, I think in Anthropic, what I've seen evolve is they're starting to to outline and trying they're trying to be as concrete as possible to explain, like, what the risks are, what the different levels of risks are. They made a whole, responsible scaling, kind of document framework to say, okay. It's it's kind of modeled after how biological labs are that are very high risk and how, okay, if what you're working on is this level of biological risk, then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety.
Speaker 13:So that's how they viewed it in Anthropic. And so, you know, when I was reporting this out, they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to be able to handle. Mhmm. And then they did extra tests, they're like, okay, no, but we're all right for this release, but we better get up to par
Speaker 2:than What time period was that? Was that like an hour or like ten days or a month?
Speaker 13:So, you know, Dario told me they basically had to delay, not this release, but the the last big one Mhmm. By something like nearly a week. Mhmm. Because at the sort of in the final days leading up to the release, their safety team, you know, one of the red teaming, group came to them and were like, listen. Like, we this model actually may be more capable than we thought.
Speaker 13:Right? So I do think that's that's a challenge. Right? It's taking these really hypothetical seemingly kind of sci fi scenarios and translating it to, like, well, when is that actually gonna happen at our lab? And what do you have to do to protect yourself?
Speaker 13:And it's both physical security, like making sure no one can break into your lab or something like that. But it's also, you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from saying I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about was the biological one, right? And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned that could someone use this to come up with a novel bioweapon?
Speaker 2:Sure. An interesting dynamic with safety teams where if you're sitting there with a team of, let's call it, 20 something people, and you're costing the company tens of million you know, I don't know
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:$10,000,000 a year, it's not a you're not going to feel that like, your job's that safe if you're never sounding the alarm. Sure. There's kind of an incentive to be like, oh, this feels a little dangerous. Dollars every year. Let's look into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, if you I
Speaker 1:mean, there's also just so many other dynamics at play. And I think people always dig into this like, are models too powerful? That's a great marketing line. Oh, it's too good. Like, you know, you could never give it to the the wild.
Speaker 1:It's too powerful. And then there's also it's also maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a have a productive launch. You need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh, yeah. It's a safety issue.
Speaker 1:So there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused. I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like, you know, we we noticed this with, with with the Llama four launch. They haven't been able to release Behemoth yet, and they had some some issues with, benchmarking. But notably, they didn't say it was a safety issue. And that would have almost been an easy out, and it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago.
Speaker 1:But the the the community, the developer community just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore. I don't know if you had any reactions to the to the long term.
Speaker 13:I I have you know, in my own interviews with Dario, I've asked him about this, and, you know, he has been upfront. Like, I we we report on, you know, there were delays to, just this latest big release. Right? The the latest sonnets. They're kind
Speaker 1:of Yeah.
Speaker 13:Or sorry. Is it Opus? Whatever the biggest one is. I'm forgetting all the specific names right now. And, you know, we we have reported on on these delays.
Speaker 13:We were we wrote, you know, a big article about how scaling laws, at least with the pretraining side of these models, were starting to slow down. And, you know, Anthropic, in my in my reporting with Dario, he was pretty upfront that, like, that wasn't a safety, like, you know, that big delay was not that big model being, later than some of their early projections, that's because they were facing kind of the same technological problems that I think many labs are facing. Right? And ultimately, they did release it. So but I think people, you know, they're they're it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation when they say something slowed down.
Speaker 13:I think I saw no evidence for that in this specific case.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Let's talk about the most recent deal.
Speaker 1:Meta acquiring Scale AI, 49% of the company is changing hands, I believe, at around 14 or $15,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Spiritually, the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Yes, But technically. Has been your reaction, and what have you learned from reporting on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you just covered that they have a new CEO, so so break
Speaker 13:it up. Reported that, yeah, per, you know, per our sources that they have picked the new CEO to be Jason Droege, former VP. He's currently, you know, at scale being promoted, and and he was formerly an Uber VP and formerly also a partner in VC at Benchmark. So but, you know, that's just that's just the latest. Right?
Speaker 13:We we kind of we have really been breaking the news on this front. We had a scoop this Saturday night, that we were the ones to report that these, talks were happening for Meta to make this multibillion investment in scale. I think it really caught, you know, a lot of people by surprise in the industry. This is a huge investment planned, on Meta's front, right, probably their biggest ever
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 13:In a company. And I think it's, you know, I think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full on founder mode and try to catch up on AI. And this last Llama four release was, you know, widely considered a disappointment. And so how do you how do you change course?
Speaker 2:Bring in
Speaker 13:some fresh blood. Right. Investment and this super intelligence lab. And he's recruiting engineers. We've reported on that.
Speaker 13:They're making crazy high offers, right?
Speaker 5:Yes. And
Speaker 13:they will open Zuck will open the checkbook for the top talent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I the interesting thing
Speaker 2:that stood out about some of you know, people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, oh, you could make
Speaker 1:ten Nine figures was the number.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nine figures. But you have to look you're trying to recruit somebody that joined OpenAI two, three years ago, they're probably run rating at $10,000,000 a year already on fully loaded comp basis. So I think it makes sense. What have you learned about the future of the scale business? Is Jason going to be pounding the pavement, trying to get more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of scale competitors right now that are saying, hey, we're going to take a lot of
Speaker 2:deals They're foaming at the mouth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're going to use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, do you wanna do business with a company that's owned by Facebook or Meta?
Speaker 13:Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's really unclear what's gonna happen with the future of scales business. You know, obviously, the Meta investment, you know, that's expected. You could see partnerships happening there on that front.
Speaker 13:But what will happen with the other customers, I think we don't know. Mhmm. And and what will happen with, yeah, other competitors in this space? Could they start to, right, gain ground as scale deepens the ties with Meta? We'll see.
Speaker 13:I think what we do know you know, we we have reported that Alex Wang plans to to join Meta. Mhmm. I think for Meta, he is seen as someone who is just sort of reinvigorating, right, their AI team in this renewed AI effort. He's a big name. He's incredibly savvy, you know, very well connected and built a real business with scale.
Speaker 13:So, you know, I think that's where we're at. We're in the middle of, you know, of the deal. We're waiting, you know, to see the all the official details sort of as this plays out.
Speaker 1:Earlier this week, Bill Gurley was talking about the M and A markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening. Tech was laying the blame at the foot of Lina Khan for a long time. Lina Khan's obviously out. Why do you think the big tech companies are still using that She's
Speaker 2:still posting, though. She's still she's still reposting stuff about being anti monopolistic.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:So she's around.
Speaker 1:Is this more just like this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle generally, even without even in a different administration? So it should be continually used?
Speaker 2:Don't think this is an asset that Meta would want to own, just generally,
Speaker 1:right?
Speaker 2:You wouldn't want to fully own
Speaker 1:It is a different business, Because
Speaker 2:you're dealing with tens of thousands of offshore contractors, Is that something that Meta wants to
Speaker 1:make some Don't they already do that with those Sure.
Speaker 2:They've had issues sure. But they've also had issues
Speaker 1:with it, right? It's liability. Anyway, sorry.
Speaker 13:So of course, know, Linacan is known to be aggressive on going after you know, monopolistic behavior and especially in the tech market, doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not gonna scrutinize these kinds of deals. Right? I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals. I think, you know, companies never wanna raise too many eyebrows with regulators. And even if people are from different political parties, we have seen Republican controlled FTC sometimes, you know, I mean, that is part of their job, right, is to review these sorts of large transactions.
Speaker 13:So that may be why, you know, we're seeing we're continuing to still see, you know, companies not want to go too far on that front.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Can we move over to Microsoft? It feels like Satya Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space, and, now the game is about holding on to it. It seems like they might be back to training their own language models at the same time at the last Microsoft build keynote.
Speaker 1:He was distinctly highlighting how model agnostic Azure was and how they would be happy to route you to any OpenAI model, any DeepSeek model, any LAMA model. They they they wanna be Switzerland, but at the same time, they wanna have a horse in the race. So what what's the latest thinking around Microsoft?
Speaker 13:I mean, I report on Microsoft more in the context of OpenAI. So I'm not the Microsoft expert. I will say that, yeah, obviously, we've seen we've seen more tension around the Microsoft OpenAI relationship lately and what that means. I think OpenAI is also diversifying. Right?
Speaker 13:They're working with other hyperscalers now for Stargate. They have Oracle on board. They have SoftBank financing. So this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, and I think that goes both ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is the dynamic right now in the reporter talent space? It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire net new information and actually get scoops is is higher than ever. What is the dynamic right now? We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and and layoffs at different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing.
Speaker 13:I mean, I think that the value of reporting, like a real original reporting and going Yeah, original reporting. Scoops, getting people to share with you information that isn't public, that takes a lot of human skill that, at least in my job, I, you know, I don't think that's replaceable by AI for now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That that that that's what I was getting at. I do think at some point, maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to, you know, 200 employees Got me share. At at, you know, a single given time.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, that that that tracks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I in in terms of the Stargate project, were you able to go visit as part of the reporting? Can you give us kind of the lay of the land on on on what who who the who the major players are and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the in the progress in Abilene, has been?
Speaker 13:Yeah. For sure. Well, shout out to my colleague Brody Ford. I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after. Nice.
Speaker 13:He actually went out to Abilene for me because I was I was unavailable the one day that we could go or whatever. And it's astounding. I mean, I saw the pictures. I got the live feed. It is expansive.
Speaker 13:Like, I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures, video, or go there. Mhmm. And, you know, I think that, there was a lot of like, there was sort of a lot of people doubting if Stargate was even real. I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project, like, you know, where the other sites will be. They've said they plan 10 more, at least in The US.
Speaker 13:We don't know exactly, like, how the financing will work. Mhmm. Stargate, we talked to Massasan for this, who's obviously you know, SoftBank's leading the financing. They said, that's project by project. We'll go step by step.
Speaker 13:But I think what we learn can learn from Abilene is, like, at least that site, that Abilene site is very real. Like, it is happening. There it is being built out. We've seen the pace of it. So, you know, that could end up being kind of a template or a test case, right, for how much Stargate can execute in the future on all of its promises.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:No. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Get Reach out when you got your next scoop. Yeah. We'd love
Speaker 1:to have you on the same day to
Speaker 2:talk about some more context. This is great.
Speaker 13:Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your positions. We have Cameron from nominal coming on the show next. Oh, he's already in the studio. There we go.
Speaker 1:Jordy, I'll you take the intro. Gotta run. I'll be right back.
Speaker 2:Let's do it. Welcome in. There he is. What's going on? Cameron, welcome to the show.
Speaker 10:Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see
Speaker 1:you guys.
Speaker 2:You've, you've been busy since the last time. I don't I don't actually know when that was. Maybe it feels like maybe a month or or two ago, but time flies.
Speaker 10:Think it was, yeah, I think it was about a month ago. And the fun the fun fact with that is, that was, like, right in the middle of a the ten day, you know, series b, fundraise sprint. So I absolute chaos. Absolute chaos. And, you know, people appreciate this.
Speaker 10:Connor Connor Love from Lightspeed Ventures posted or, you know, tweeted earlier today, but I was actually taking that, that prior TBPN call from the Lightspeed office here, like, in between.
Speaker 2:No way. So he was able to see, all right, how does Cam handle himself in a TV like setting, not that we're
Speaker 7:TV like.
Speaker 10:Exactly. It was a good tactic. He was like, hey, do you want to be honest and just take it from our office? And then, you know, so.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Breakdown breakdown the new round, kinda how it came together, who are the different players, all that good stuff.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Absolutely. So I'm really excited. Yeah. We're announcing a $75,000,000 series b.
Speaker 10:That is there we go.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 10:Led by led by Sequoia, and particularly Alfred Lin, is gonna be joining joining Nommo's board. And then as we mentioned, there's an additional investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, combination of Guru, Jahal there, and Connor Love, which we're really excited about. And then existing investment from, from our investors at General Catalyst, Lux, and Founders Fund.
Speaker 2:So it's Basically, you're collecting you're collecting them all at this point.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Gotta I don't know how much
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Talk talk about business progress since since the last call. I'm sure things are moving really quickly.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Things are moving really quickly. I mean, we, you know, we're we're raising this capital, to accelerate just to go faster. You know, really three big things we're gonna do with this. The is kinda continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises.
Speaker 10:We're very proud to say, you know, many of the, you know, the startups and scale ups building in this new hardware wave are are nominal customers, and that is gonna keep growing. But, you know, recently, we've been taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies, you know, defense primes, and the traction has been really, really positive. We're also expanding internationally. So we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe, and we're gonna keep keep doing that. The big thing is product development.
Speaker 10:And so we, you know, we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's gonna require multiple products. We've started, our original thrust is around testing, but we're having customers pull us in listing linking testing to more quality acceptance testing, production, manufacturing. And then later in the life cycle saying, hey. I use nominal to build all of the software, you know, build all the rules and logic that governs how my my system works under test, and I actually just wanna, you know, version control that, organize it, and I wanna deploy that on my asset when it's in the field and more of a a monitoring sort of fleet monitoring, fleet maintenance use case. So we're building products, and we're gonna be expanding.
Speaker 10:So that's that's the where the funding is going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How big is the market for this, or how how should I think about the market? Is this is this something where there's a lot of incumbents that that you can kind of go after and and pull away from you?
Speaker 4:Or Eat alive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Eat alive. We won't we won't
Speaker 7:Eat alive. Words.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Or or are we are we kind of like like, disaggregating test functions across all the companies and and and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's really, you know, the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give, like, a quick, you know, update, a kind of the status quo world. And so I think we see, pretty much everywhere we go that testing is too slow. And, really, you have, scenario a where people are using 1990 software. It's pre cloud.
Speaker 10:So it's it is like especially in the aerospace and and more industrial world, software that was built before the the notion of, like, centralizing data even existed. It's, it's crazy, and, and it's people are really frustrated with it. So those are you think of things like, you know, Siemens or or Emerson or National Instruments, which I had to kinda mention last time. So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend. Like, people people spend a ton of money there.
Speaker 10:Those are billion dollar businesses that that we are excited to be be disrupting. And I think the area is where people are taking new software and new data technologies that are not designed for hardware, at all in the least and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this, like, tool chain, for testing. And Nominal is just a better way. And so that's sort of, you know, showing showing these organizations what the future can look like, and delivering that value, and and and they're willing to pay for it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What what kind of metrics do you track outside of core kind of business metrics are you thinking about? Like like trying to figure out, like, the if you're increasing the the development timelines Yeah. For your customers in some ways, like, you can allow people to just iterate test faster Yeah. You can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses.
Speaker 2:Like, how how much how much do you try to track that kind of thing? I know a lot of it is probably hard to to fully capture.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I'd say I'd say I had a a phone conversation with with Brian Shempf, CEO of Andrew Hall, where, you know, he sort of was saying emphatically, like, the one of the metrics he looks at, like, the single most important thing is, like, how fast are my, you know, individual programs testing? Like, it is such a direct correlation to just, like, the success of that product, and that is what we see, like, you know, everywhere. So at the high level, like, the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput. You know, being able to to to have, you know, cases where at our customers', you know, test campaigns that were supposed to take nine months taking six point five months.
Speaker 10:Right? That's that's something we deliver to a customer. And when that's on a $200,000,000 program where their end customer is the DOD, like, that's massive. Right? You know, it's funny for a product like Nominals.
Speaker 10:We actually you know, we obviously track user engagement in time and app and all these sort of functions, but that's, honestly, like, not the best correlation. We we sort of say, it's really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in
Speaker 7:the app. And our a
Speaker 10:lot of our north stars actually, like, I kinda want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly. And then if they move on, you know, that's that's actually fine because they're that value that is compounding.
Speaker 2:Are you guys gonna actually set up an international presence at all? You said you have a bunch of international customers. Are we gonna see a nominal office in The UK? Australia.
Speaker 1:Gotta go to Australia. It's a quick flight.
Speaker 10:You're naming you're naming some good places. I'll say I am I'm doing sort of Nominal's big, you know, international business trip, actually, over the next two weeks. So gonna be going to the Paris Air Show Let's go to
Speaker 2:business. I love international business.
Speaker 1:I love international businessman on the show. Yeah. It's an honor. It's an honor. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Gonna be going to the, yeah, the Paris Air Show and then and then, you know, stopping in in The UK as you you kinda mentioned. Yeah. We're, I mean, we're really excited, and I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening, like, a, you know, physical office there, but I think it's absolutely, you know, in in nominal's future, and we're excited for that. You mentioned Australia, general office world.
Speaker 10:Like, we're we're really supportive of that, and and they they want and need all the same things that our US based customers do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I noticed you you offer the service on on premise still. Obviously, a lot of companies are moving on cloud. Yeah. How important can you give me some dynamics around, like, hyperscaler adoption within these in within within these industries, like AWS, GovCloud, ITAR compliance?
Speaker 1:Like, I know Palantir got some super high ITAR clearance. There's obviously different tiers to this stuff. Yeah. Or is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's a really good, it's a good question. I you know, from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as sort of flexible and as versatile as we can. So we we don't, really pick any one, you know, provider. I'd say from our product perspective, we have two products in the market right now.
Speaker 10:The Nominal core product is where we started, which is cloud based. The whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry, sensor data logs, test and and, you know, data in one central place, run analytics, and and automate. Very quickly, we we launched our product, which is Nominal Connect, which is actually a desktop application, which sounds crazy to say and and, you know, in in Twin Japan. But we're we're meeting our our customers and meeting the market where it is. It's run on, it's built in Rust.
Speaker 10:It's run on a game engine. Right? So it's not your your your normal. And so it you know, super deterministic workflows, sub ten millisecond latency What data
Speaker 1:engine are you using?
Speaker 10:It's unreal. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Unreal. No way. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 7:That's really cool.
Speaker 10:So it's really cool. So being able to to have you know, where whereas it used to be, you know, maybe a a a National Instruments, you know, desktop app with, like, a a little widget, and you you can kind of envision the thing from 1990. Yeah. You know, we have this insane super fast rendering three d visualization of our customers' robotic systems or drones, right, like, with telemetry coming in. And the power is that can run completely air gapped.
Speaker 10:Right? If you're in Mojave or you're downrange, like, doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop. And then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the the kind of nominal mothership. All that data is sort of merged and deduplicated, and it's super powerful for for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened.
Speaker 1:Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of, like, industrial use case? I know that, like, isn't Unreal Engine free unless you're generating, like, a million dollars in revenue? Like, how do you pay, Tim Sweeney?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, you know, it's a good it's a good question. I I I'll I'll I won't
Speaker 1:I won't
Speaker 10:discuss it.
Speaker 1:You can answer it at a high level. I am sure
Speaker 8:you can Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Details. No. I mean, it's like we we're really excited about I we're really excited about the technology and kind of where it can scale. I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, the market is speaking. I looked it up. The company that owns National Instruments is actually down Oh, awesome a few percentage points over the last six months Wow.
Speaker 1:Most likely in reaction to
Speaker 10:I'm sure it's
Speaker 7:Yeah. Extremely correlated.
Speaker 2:They're just already pricing it in.
Speaker 1:Of course. Of course. Yeah. Well, thank you so much
Speaker 2:for hopping on.
Speaker 1:Super Super congratulations. Do we hit the gong properly?
Speaker 2:Let's hit the gong. Alfred Lin on the board. That doesn't happen every
Speaker 4:Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Big gong.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super excited. Come back on anytime, Cameron. Awesome.
Speaker 10:We'll talk to guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:We'll see you. Our next guest is Anil from Meter hopping on in five minutes. We'll go through some time
Speaker 2:By way, Cameron's Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane. Product and growth at Anderil, Advisor to applied intuition.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go.
Speaker 2:Head of defense at Sail Drone. Oh my. Investor operator at Lux Capital. Woah. Then now started nominal.
Speaker 2:So it's almost like he was built for this.
Speaker 1:Whirlwind tour. I mean, there's other news. It's not really tech related, but it's related to our friends in the Wall Street and finance community. The race for democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up. Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on polymarket.
Speaker 1:Zoran Mamdani is, absolutely spiking. He's at 42% versus Cuomo's 56% right now. Signal has a breakdown. He says, this is a textbook example of narrative discipline. Whether or not you agree with Zoron's platform, the coherence is surgical.
Speaker 1:Every message hits the same emotional register. Every post or speech is a variation of the same core cord, anti machine, people morally upright. His surge is pure memetic lift. It's pure belief, and belief spreads fast.
Speaker 2:This is the guy that just says freeze the rent.
Speaker 1:That's his platform. Every time he posts And posts his
Speaker 2:new bit, his new bit is eliminating police presence in areas that have high crime.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. And so a lot of accelerationists are getting excited about this. A lot of people that are anti New Yorker are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York. But he is gaining ground, and he might be the next mayor.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, don't you think the rent the rent should just be free?
Speaker 2:No. He's You're not going far enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Housing should be free. Capital
Speaker 2:is big.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Capital is big. Also, new all time high for Oracle. Let's hear it for Oracle. Wow.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Ellison is cooking.
Speaker 1:We love it. Congratulations to Larry Ellison.
Speaker 2:Larry's listening to this. Sure he TVPN.
Speaker 1:It's it's it's just fantastic news. Oracle's deeply underrated. It's a fantastic company. Been in founder mode for decades and continues to be on an absolute They
Speaker 2:basically own Abilene.
Speaker 1:They do. They do. And they're getting yeah. The Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure. So we have our next guest coming in the run.
Speaker 1:In the TBP and UltraGun. Welcome to the studio.
Speaker 2:How are doing? What's going on?
Speaker 1:I love the background. Very cool. You doing? Hardware.
Speaker 2:It's our hardware business. Hardware business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Break it down. What's what what's behind you?
Speaker 1:What do you do?
Speaker 12:Yeah. We are a networking company.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And our hardware behind us is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the Internet.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Incredible. Breakdown the news today. Yes. And, John, get the call.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. I'll get it ready. What happened? What happened?
Speaker 9:What happened?
Speaker 12:We we we raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff.
Speaker 1:And how much did you raise? We raised about 170,000,000.
Speaker 2:There we go. Hit it, John.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Best part of the day. Congratulations. Thank you, guys. Talk about give give some backstory on on the history of the company, kind of the different stages, what it took to get here.
Speaker 8:Sure. So so we
Speaker 12:got started actually quite a few years ago, and what's interesting is networking is one of the largest parts of technology, but almost no new companies get started networking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:You know? Networking supports multiple $100,000,000,000 market cap businesses, but almost all of them got billed through acquisition. Nobody sat down and said, hey. We'll build the entire stack together, cohesive operating systems, hardware, APIs, firmware. So so we got started a few years ago, building out the entire stack.
Speaker 12:The COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it. But the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers and just, like, scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration. But then in the day, I think, you know, nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, you know, something like 15% of the Internet or something like Terrible.
Speaker 2:What's going on? What what what we we've been live the entire time, the issues have been happening. Can you give it can you give us a quick update on on what you think is happening there?
Speaker 1:The the production team is stressed
Speaker 2:right now. They're sweating right now.
Speaker 12:They're sweating. Because you guys are up, there are rumors that you guys took down the Internet. Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Exactly. Well, I I think the really interesting part about networking is most of the issues actually happen because of, like, configuration errors. And today, that's one of the causes for it, because it's, you know, disparate hardware systems, software systems that don't really work together, and they're made by many different vendors, etcetera. Today, it was one of the reasons for not the entire reason, but one of the reasons for was, like, network configuration errors.
Speaker 2:Wild. You guys have a a it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already. Is that close to true? Are you working towards it? What what's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base?
Speaker 2:Because that's
Speaker 1:Is the job finished, or is the job not finished?
Speaker 2:Or is it just getting started?
Speaker 1:Just getting started.
Speaker 12:Are you quoting Kobe, John? I'm saying the job's not finished. Yeah. Yeah. So so our customer base, I think, is, like, quite interesting.
Speaker 12:We we do have a lot of tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers, but probably our most interesting ones are, like, the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, folks that go build, like, ISPs and data centers and, life sciences labs. All of them sort of need connectivity and Internet and networking to do whatever they're doing. And, you know, probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how things get built and all the interesting work they're doing from, you know, battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to once one of us buy something online, how quickly does it get there? Because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated, and then they need networking. So our customer base definitely is we have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy too.
Speaker 1:Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation. Like, what's most important? What's been most accelerator for you? Yeah. And and kind of, break those down in terms of priorities and and where you're investing and what you're most excited about?
Speaker 12:So I actually think, those things are all interconnected because it's what incentives are what drive everything. Mhmm. So if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for x dollars
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And then sell it to you for x plus whatever margin they're trying to hit. And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money, either by charging customers way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all. We just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very new. I know rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like, that's sort of kind of given in how we buy things. Yeah. But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was barely new, and we we were the people to sort of do it.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest. Mhmm. Because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10¢ out of a component
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:We tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use, how are they laid out, how is it built, what are we optimizing for. Hey. Something costs another $10. Let's go do it. But what's the end customer thing like?
Speaker 12:And then the better hardware that you have, you're unable to go build better software, and this loop sort of hits. And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we actually deploy it and maintain it ourselves too. We're fully vertically integrated.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:I I know I know a lot of the tech companies don't wanna touch the real world things, but, you know, the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing, we go do not just the pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly, if you will, of actually going and deploying all of it. And we do this all without any capital cost to customers and only marginal cost on operating expenditure compared to how
Speaker 2:we operate. About that. Talk about why a CFO would wanna have Yeah. OpEx versus cap, you know, CapEx in this type of scenario, and is that kind of a driver around decision making?
Speaker 1:It it is, but it depends on the business. Right?
Speaker 12:So if you have businesses that are PE owned, for example, you actually want it to be CapEx. And so our our contracts can hit the books as a lease, so it doesn't hit their operating margins. They get an EBITDA boost. That happens too. But, ultimately, what customers actually care about is, do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment that buy it, it's a depreciating asset?
Speaker 12:Mhmm. Then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it, and then every four or five years, I have to go buy new hardware because some new technology comes out, etcetera. Or if this hardware goes bad, I have to go replace it myself. That's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely, which is instead of having to go spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to kind of fix all this stuff, we take all that on and sort of take on all the risk instead of the customers, then that contract can be actuated as OpEx or CapEx depending on what their business needs.
Speaker 2:Talk about meters business. You're doing a lot of things. You're doing hardware, software. You have, I'm assuming, a network of, you know, team all over the country that are, you know, helping with installs. Talk about kind of the efficiency of the business, and and I'm assuming, you know, this new $170,000,000 round is is, you know, a a testament to the to the strength of the core business.
Speaker 12:Yeah. It's a really interesting core business. Right? Because you're right. We get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one you're seeing behind us, and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere.
Speaker 12:And we're not just in United States. We're we're in Canada. We're in Europe, everywhere in the world, hopefully, by next year. And the operational parts of it are super challenging. If you can imagine data center in the middle of nowhere or manufacturing facility, there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there.
Speaker 12:You have to go kinda sort of fix that, and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in this new entire rack. So what what's sort of important for us is, you know, it's like a a duck swimming in a lake. The customer doesn't see all the kicking that happens underneath to kind of deliver this to them. Yeah. And our work is always tying these things in together.
Speaker 12:Why are we building the hardware? How is the software getting built? How are we deploying it and maintaining it? And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loop back to how we build better hardware, what choices are we making. You know, just this morning, a bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports where it should go so it's easy for install, and and that loop is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure even though after computing and CPUs and Intel, networking is the oldest and largest, part of all of technology.
Speaker 1:So you you I mean, you you you you design, develop, manufacture, make this networking equipment. You're deploying it as a lease, on a more rental basis. Does that create a CapEx problem for you? Like, how are you thinking about your the way your balance sheet is growing and developing? Is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building?
Speaker 12:Yeah. This is a really interesting question. So if you looked at historically how networking hardware got built Mhmm. Somebody built it for, let's say, $500 Mhmm. In BOM cost.
Speaker 12:But by the time it ends up in a customer's hands, it's like $5,000. So networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margin. So you should start there Okay. At any time. what we also try to do is a lot of our customers, because we're dealing with physical spaces, whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers anywhere, the build out times are predictable.
Speaker 12:Right? Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live or a manufacturing facility goes live or a school goes live. So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that. Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going. We do have issues on, like, trying to figure out exact timing there.
Speaker 12:We're not always perfect, but we can do that. So to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use a debt a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate partners. A big focus of what we also do is not only do we directly sell to customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include meter in as a default. And that's actually where the main meter comes from. If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power meters, water meters.
Speaker 12:This should be more like a utility. Why is it that we're all struggling to kinda wrangle it, to get it into working in any type of space? So for us, the depth and where that plays in is a little bit on hardware, but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world and the pace of which we can do, expecting a customer and some sort of discounted cash flow expectation of December from now.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about, the, the the kind of, like, wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment. Sounds like, you know, apartment building makes sense. Scale up, start up office makes sense. It's probably overkill for the home office. You might just wanna get a an Amazon Aero, mesh networking system.
Speaker 1:At the same time, you know, even look at Google's campus, it's, it's it's absolutely massive. Are you going one direction or the other? Are you maxed out, or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take, how you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a a a client like Meta's Silicon Valley campus, which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures, you know, in America. Is this something where you can just kind of copy paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together, or will there be new, technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale?
Speaker 12:I think the answer is both. Mhmm. But we are already doing customers of that scale and more. For example, Bridgewater, who's the largest entrant in the world, runs on meter Wow. As an example.
Speaker 12:But I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements Mhmm. To hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and Mhmm. Sort of implement. But I I think overall, what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking, if you will, because it has to go work with the rest of the world. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Generally, when you look at enterprise companies, they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing or what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer. For us, any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the Internet. So they don't get to do their own protocols, their own things. So largely, there are things on the margin, but largely, whether you're a Google or a Meta or a Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do, all of them use the same Internet,
Speaker 3:if you will.
Speaker 12:Yeah. And this is also the same in, like, data centers too. Mhmm. What you would find in majority of non GPU data centers is not that different what you would find in a large campus because it all has to flow together. The packets must flow end to end.
Speaker 1:Wait. What's the difference between non GPU data centers and GPU data centers in this context?
Speaker 12:So so, yeah, in GPU stuff, there's actually a lot that happens between two GPUs and between custom GPUs.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 12:That's a different type of networking.
Speaker 7:There's lot
Speaker 12:of work that's happening. Obviously, NVIDIA with their Mellanox acquisition four, five years ago, and what's happening now with ultra Ethernet. But just everything else is actually relatively same.
Speaker 1:What was the what was the keyword you just said? Ultra inter Ultra Ethernet?
Speaker 12:Ultra Ethernet is a new thing that's happening. Is this like
Speaker 1:I I remember cat five, cat six. I've heard about cat seven. Is this like cat eight? What are we talking here?
Speaker 12:This is like a whole different ballgame. So if you if you look at, you know, the joke in the networking world is, you know, Ethernet is dead. Long live Ethernet. Mhmm. You know, every sort of fifteen,
Speaker 1:twenty years, Ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. But, you know, somebody comes up with innovations on how it can scale up on speed, on throughput, on bandwidth, on security. Mhmm. So ultra Ethernet is this new version that's coming out for, you know, next phase of all the data center build out that's happening. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Because, know, roughly, The US has more data centers than the rest of the world combined.
Speaker 1:Wow. Roughly. Let's go here for America. That's some white pill right there. Everyone says we're falling behind, but not today.
Speaker 12:But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that, and The US is trying to Yeah. Never. So
Speaker 2:there's a lot Don't even try.
Speaker 1:Don't even try. We're undefeated. We got user meter. We're using We're meter in national strategy, so it's kind of nuanced. We're pro, but also it's high as long as we're benefiting.
Speaker 12:Anyway Yeah. There's a lot that goes into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I we we've experienced it here.
Speaker 1:There's, like, new generations of just streaming cameras that do power and video over Ethernet. And and you and, you know, we're thinking about kind of the v two of the studio, and there's a ton of insane things that you can do do over Ethernet. It's no longer just the LAN cable. And so Yeah. It must be fun to be at the heart of that.
Speaker 1:Jordy, any more questions, or should we let them get back to building?
Speaker 2:On the the funding milestone. And
Speaker 1:Yeah. Check-in next time.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to soon. Anytime.
Speaker 3:Thank you, both. See you soon. Bye. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime
Speaker 2:It is an absolute
Speaker 1:banger day.
Speaker 2:Lots
Speaker 1:of fun risks.
Speaker 2:I no. But I'm I was just gonna say it's actually insane we've been able to keep the show up with every the
Speaker 1:entire It is crazy. We we we got lucky today. Did do have we ever has the stream ever actually gone fully down? We had Zoom go down one day, and we were kind of kind of kind of wrecked by that. Well, let's bring in our next guest.
Speaker 2:Ian in the chat says Mixpanel, Shopify, and GCP are still down for him, all the services that he's in.
Speaker 1:Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry. Just send us your mailing address. We will print the show onto Vinyl, and we'll send you a record of the show so you can listen to it. You got a big fidelity
Speaker 2:same day shipping.
Speaker 1:Exactly. So
Speaker 2:that you can get the show almost live Yeah. Yeah. Know, a couple hours.
Speaker 1:Couple hours later. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right
Speaker 1:on. Yeah. Yeah. We'll also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while too. Anyway, our next guest is here.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream. How are doing, Trish?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 8:Corey, Dawn. Good to see
Speaker 7:you guys.
Speaker 8:Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Big day. Big day. Announced a series a, a website, and you took down the whole Internet.
Speaker 2:You took down the whole Took down.
Speaker 8:I can't confirm or deny it was part of the launch strategy, but good timing. Give
Speaker 1:us the stats. How much you raised?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Raised $20,000,000.
Speaker 2:20,000,000 Congratulations. Who'd you raise it from?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Sound led the round participation.
Speaker 2:Hit it again for sound. Hit it again. Congratulations. Amazing. Sorry.
Speaker 2:Continue. We got a little excited. Good Gong.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Participation from Buckley, Naval, Laraj, Brudowski.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 8:Founder of Dropbox, Arvan from Perplexity, bunch of other awesome angels. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Very cool. Break down the pitch. Like like, how how are you positioning the company right now? Because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff.
Speaker 2:Because they pivoted from pizza to something new.
Speaker 1:So I'm excited hear that. Company. There there was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand. They that didn't go so well. So, obviously, a huge white space
Speaker 2:Well, they just did pizza for a day. They sold out. Yeah. They moved on to
Speaker 1:the mixing. So are you building now?
Speaker 2:On on the platform.
Speaker 1:Guess, how are positioning it?
Speaker 8:For sure. So I think for us, always the mission of anti metal has been how do we simplify infrastructure. But current moment, what's really different is, you know, software engineering, the bottleneck used to always be programming. Like Mhmm. If you could build a software, you could ship it, you could distribute to everyone, suddenly your product is live.
Speaker 8:Now you have all this AI assisted stuff, like really awesome products like, you know, Cursor, Lovable Vault, v zero. And increasingly, like, the latter half of that equation, which is deploying that code, maintaining it, making sure it scales, like, going from one user to 1,000,000 is increasingly the bottleneck on, like, how companies, you know, are actually gonna grow and sustain. Like, you know, the short of it is, like, writing code is no longer the hard part. Right? It's all these operations and and maintenance.
Speaker 8:And so what we're really indexing on is building this product that helps you better manage, you know, and automate infrastructure. So a lot of that is you know, the nuance of infrastructure versus code is a lot of it is knowledge that is baked into, you know, people's heads. Like, you have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works. That's your go to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up something. But that's not super sustainable.
Speaker 8:Right? And this, like, notion that comprehension could just scale linearly as you hire more hire more people isn't super tenable anymore. We're, like, emitting a bunch of data. All that data is super fragmented. Everyone's super specialized.
Speaker 8:And so for us, what we're trying to do is, you know, start going into companies, plugging into their entire infrastructure area, whether it's, like, source code, their cloud, their ticketing system, whatever it might be, really understand why things are failing and basically pull in data and give them these golden pathways as to what's going on, why is it happening, what prescriptive action should I take that is gonna help me fix this, and along the way, sort of learning what are the ingrained practices of your organization. That part is super important in the sense that we don't wanna build, like, an opinionated platform that says, like, this is good or this is bad. Right? That's pretty subjective to each company. So it's a little more about learning.
Speaker 8:Okay. Given this tenant, what's gonna be good for them? How do they prefer to operate? You know? What's gonna make their systems perform the best?
Speaker 2:Makes a ton of sense. How much how much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus, like, it it feels like the the nature of software development is changing so quickly. But if you can kind of focus in on on what will always be true and and, you know, many people would say that's human nature, you can create something, like, durable and valuable out of that.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think a big thing for us is, you know, some companies try to position this like, hey. We're a full time employee, and we're gonna, like, automate this function away for you. I think for us, it's a little more of how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system, encode it into a system such that it's reusable. Like, the dream for us as companies go from asking this question of, like, yo.
Speaker 8:Can we keep this running to what what can we build next? And really taking away this time for maintenance, that a lot of people are spending their time on. So, you know, I think human nature, like, inevitably, all infra problems are kind of human problems. Like, you know, someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on. And in that sense, you know, working with our users to understand, like, what's their preferred behavior?
Speaker 8:Why do they want their stack set up this way? Why have they chosen the tools they did? And not trying to, like, force an opinion down their throat.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Can you talk to us about some of the newest problems that companies are facing with LLM inference costs, just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and and just taking advantage of all the tools. We saw Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool. Are you hearing from customers like, right now, we're in this era where every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X. And so unless you're under a rock, like, it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing, not leave a bunch of money on the table.
Speaker 1:But are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the kinda AI age generally?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I think the one is, like, what you struck on the head, which is all of this AI stuff is super nascent. That means there's not a ton of, like, super robust tooling out there, how to monitor, evaluate these things. You know, people are building their own frameworks on the fly. I think, like, most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf.
Speaker 8:They're building it in house. Right? Interesting. So there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things. The other thing is, you know, models are another potentially single point of failure.
Speaker 8:Like, if cloud goes down, like, what happens to your product? Are you ready to do a model routing? Are you gonna do something else? But I think, like, you know, putting them into, like, a broader system perspective, they're not, like, new problems in the sense of these are things systems engineers or, you know, data architects have had to think about for a long time. But, obviously, more and more companies are doing these things, and they're really complex systems.
Speaker 8:I I think the part of that is actually just, like, you know, we don't index on this super highly, but something we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software, like, highly verticalized niche to their internals. Like, you know, why go put something on a retool dashboard when I can, like, build it and bolt and probably get a more nuanced tailored experience? So I think that coupling of like, hey. We're working on a pretty nascent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at the same time combined with we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this, like, really chaotic environment where people are, you know, stuck in the trenches of, like, debugging things, figuring out how do we scale them, paying down tech debt, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is, like, really underrated right now?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Honestly, OCI. I think Oracle Cloud, they're never part of the conversation. I think all these other clouds have really great offerings, really good services. I think the thing about Oracle is, you know, they don't sell a bunch of services on top.
Speaker 8:They have a really good foundation. Like, these guys have been in the computing business for quite a while. I don't think it's the sexiest option out there, but, like, from a price perspective, security perspective, I think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's gonna look like over the next couple of years. But, yeah, I think underrated.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. The, stock hit the all time high today. Yeah. Let's hear it for Larry.
Speaker 2:For all time highs. And Larry. Generational run. Fantastic. What's your guys I'm just curious since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this.
Speaker 2:What what's your what's your personal, you know, cogen stack right now? What are what are you and the team loving?
Speaker 8:Stack. Right now, we have cursor for the entire team. Mhmm. Some people prefer Cloud Code. Depends, you know, different strokes for different folks.
Speaker 8:But yeah. I mean, like, people are using ChatGPT, Cloud, Cursor. Cursor is probably by and far the biggest one. We're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like Cloud Code, but I think the median for us is people are loving Cursor. That's probably been the best coding experience.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Makes a ton of sense. What about just go to market, top of funnel? Like, you're it's an interesting super interesting company because you've been able to go massively viral with what is an enterprise software company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Punching. It would be different if you were selling an energy drink. I would kind of expect a stunt and, oh, yeah, everyone's talking about it. But you've been able to break through in a really interesting way in in in the x community, in the venture capital community. What are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side?
Speaker 1:What viral loops are you taking advantage of? Flywheels, just break down the marketing side.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, like, you know, growth is a big part of our DNA, I think, largely from, you know, my cofounder, Matt. Obviously, I, like, have decent growth and marketing. You know, for us, a lot of it, at least in the early stage right now, is you wanna grab people's attention, obviously, attention economy. I think the the really nice thing for us is this is a problem.
Speaker 8:Like, every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree. Even people on the operational side when they're, like, running a business, they're like, holy crap. Like, we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck, like, fixing the service or paying down tech debt instead of launching the new thing. But, yeah, I mean, we're doing all sorts of things. I think, candidly, you're gonna see a bunch of it over the coming months.
Speaker 8:We're gonna have a, you know, a bigger splash later this year, but, yeah, more to come.
Speaker 2:Can't
Speaker 1:wait. Well, you'll have to hop back on when that bigger splash happens.
Speaker 10:Yeah. A 100%.
Speaker 1:Great talking to you. Well, congratulations
Speaker 2:on the round. Great to get the full update. Yeah. I think we're both on the on the cap
Speaker 1:table. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 2:Love it. Awesome, dude.
Speaker 8:Thanks, guys. Take care. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. Let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger. Build faster.
Speaker 1:Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for
Speaker 2:free ihaveachallenge.com. For the audience. Your your personal website is probably bad. Go on Figma. Make a new one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:And just ship a website. Yeah. Do it in in, like, five minutes. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Speaking of design, SIGNAL's been on an absolute tear breaking down all of the WWDC updates. He says two quick up up observation observations after using iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for a few days. IOS 26 feels great. The system is fluid. Buttons are larger.
Speaker 1:Everything responds with intention. It's super enjoyable and fresh. IPadOS 26 is a breakthrough. Productivity finally feels native. File handling, window management, multitasking are intuitive and fast, the most fluid and powerful computing experience on the planet for most tasks.
Speaker 1:He says he does everything except code on an iPad. And so I've I've every time there's a new update, I'm always like, oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad.
Speaker 2:Maybe I should I'm
Speaker 1:tempted. This might be the one that does it for me. It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad Pro because it's over four hundred days since they launched last one, so they'll probably refresh it at the next iPhone event. But I'm I'm I'm definitely thinking about getting it on here. Think it could work really well for running the show too.
Speaker 2:Got a couple iPads around the house Yeah. To just kind
Speaker 1:of Collect dust.
Speaker 2:Collect a lot of dust, but maybe I'll upgrade
Speaker 1:and Maybe you can get back in. I think you gotta commit to that being Tyler,
Speaker 2:how is your your iOS iOS 26
Speaker 1:experience so far? Have you run into any more problems?
Speaker 5:It's pretty good so far. I mean, it's still, you know, my phone is, like, six years old, so it's a little bit slow. Okay. But overall, it's been totally fine. I like it a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's good.
Speaker 2:Vegas six six year old iPhone.
Speaker 1:I was asking him I was I was asking him, like, show me, and he starts swiping through his apps. And one and on one screen, he just has, like, 25 copies of what app was that?
Speaker 5:Chick fil A.
Speaker 1:Chick fil A. He he somehow got the Chick fil A with the one app. You're only supposed to be able to install the app once. Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed.
Speaker 2:You got to have 26.
Speaker 1:It was the funniest thing.
Speaker 2:If you're serious about Chick fil A
Speaker 12:Chick fil
Speaker 2:A should have at least
Speaker 1:26 Just in case 24 of them break, I guess, give us the update on the art history project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet? By the way, my wife texted me and said that it's extremely embarrassing that we didn't know that Greek statues were painted because apparently that's common knowledge. But also she has a Common she has
Speaker 2:an art history. Yeah. Oh, Okay. The art history major.
Speaker 1:It's basically
Speaker 2:Common knowledge if you're if you're if you're a renowned expert.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Anyway, give us the latest art history fact. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so I took another quiz or another assessment. This time, I got 50%.
Speaker 1:Oh, very
Speaker 5:good. That's about 10% in only, I think, like an hour and a half.
Speaker 1:Compound that. You'll be a help.
Speaker 5:I mean, 50% more than
Speaker 2:50% Honestly, give yourself some credit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 25% improvement.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, if I get 10% every hour and a half, that's math checks out, extrapolate a bit. I think it's like seven and a half hours, I should be at 100%.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So I should have everything done. You could be at 200%.
Speaker 1:200%, 300%. You could be the world expert. Did you learn anything else interesting about art history? Do you have any more facts to share with us? Are you tapped
Speaker 5:I've been reading a lot about this guy, Giorgio Vasari.
Speaker 1:Okay. So he's kind of
Speaker 5:he's century. He's kind of a polymath, author, historian
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Painter, sculptor. He's kind of like the the Plutarch of
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Of art. Right? So Plutarch writes noble lives of or parallel lives of noble Greeks and Romans.
Speaker 1:Right? And
Speaker 5:then Vasari kind of writes the same thing for kind of Renaissance art. But kind of this controversial guy, he he writes about, you know, he he he looks at art from the perspective of the artist, which is, you know, controversial in the sense that, like, later on this guy, Winkleman, I think, he criticizes Vasari. He says, no, you should separate the art from the artist. You should look at art kind of in and of itself by itself. But yeah, a lot
Speaker 1:That's where it came from. I've heard the term separate
Speaker 2:the art from Chris from Chase would just say, absolutely not. We're not going to separate it.
Speaker 1:No. We're going to look
Speaker 2:at it.
Speaker 1:The artist is
Speaker 2:what never is If we were to issue you a termination letter today, would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art? I actually In your job prospects, I mean?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So so so I I also looked at those other stats about just general employment.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And, you
Speaker 5:know, so I'm actually a physics major. I'm not CS.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:And physics is actually the most unemployed. So so they're at physics majors are at, I think, 7.8%. CS was at
Speaker 1:six point one Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:So I think I probably would go into art history. I mean, I haven't got much else. So amazing.
Speaker 2:Is exciting Underrated. Underrated.
Speaker 1:Think he's discovered some massive alpha.
Speaker 2:It wouldn't really take that much to double the number of art history majors.
Speaker 1:There's only 2,000 of them, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Something like that? Yeah. Well, 2,001 now.
Speaker 2:2,001. 02/2001. Amazing. Let's rip through some timeline. Great work, Tyler.
Speaker 1:Yep. We have some news. Congratulations to Crusoe. Chase Lockmiller been on the show. They are partnering with Brookfield on a $750,000,000 debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future.
Speaker 1:Do we have to ring the gun?
Speaker 2:Think Hit it. Hit it, John. Hit it. That's
Speaker 1:a lot of that's a lot of pesos. That's a lot of pennies. Congratulations to the whole team over there. Fantastic. We love big data centers.
Speaker 1:We love scaling laws, putting big training runs on the data center. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:We got another post from Zai Z. What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism? I got to say, it came to me immediately. I guess it's here as a comment, too. But I was going to say, it's a boy, Chad.
Speaker 2:Chad. It's just so obvious. Chad, I think, is going to come back in a big way. I think it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur. But now it's just massive alpha there.
Speaker 2:It can kind of be an inside joke
Speaker 1:for you
Speaker 2:and the other dads. Twenty years from now, your son, little baby Chad turns into a man. Oh, oh, he's his Chad. Huge surprise.
Speaker 1:I was thinking how Ive was in the news because he went to OpenAI. But he's technically Sir Johnny Ive because he's been knighted He's
Speaker 2:been knighted.
Speaker 1:By the by the the British royalty. Right? And I was thinking we need an American version of Sir, of knighting. And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really, really impactful, the ones who have driven, you know, massive capital investment like Chad Beyers, they should be knighted in an American way, and they should earn the title giga. And so and so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap him on both shoulders and knight him Giga Chad Byers.
Speaker 2:Giga Chad Byers.
Speaker 8:I think
Speaker 1:I I I think that would really, really it would be the American version of the knighting.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:And it's based purely on how much capital formation?
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's no other criteria.
Speaker 2:That's that's
Speaker 1:really That's way it needs
Speaker 2:to go. I mean
Speaker 1:So step one, name your son Chad. Two, get him into capital allocation on the private side ideally, but public markets will work too. You're still eligible.
Speaker 2:There's some more good comments in here. Grit Capital says
Speaker 1:King?
Speaker 2:King or Don.
Speaker 1:Donald. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Don. Don. Donald. I never Yeah. Thought about it.
Speaker 1:The Don. Yeah. That's where Don comes from. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think so. In other news, Anand Sanwal says, my and only angel investment went to zero today. Well
Speaker 1:Founder of mistake.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Should have made 50. I'm sure one of them would have worked out. Made it all back in one trade.
Speaker 1:Fascinating because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all the data and stuff. But he knew his life's work was to build that company, and that's what he focused on. He only invested in one company. Fascinating. He's very,
Speaker 2:very Hard dealership guy responds, congrats.
Speaker 1:Very funny. Anyway, yeah, yeah. Mean
Speaker 2:He said he learned I don't really enjoy And
Speaker 1:if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to be good at it. So stay out of the game. Paula says Diet Cokes are fridge cigarettes.
Speaker 2:So true.
Speaker 1:So true. Just drink them all day long.
Speaker 2:All right, this is a good place to end. I like how Zac has been back against the wall like 37 times since 02/2007, and every time resoundingly wins. But each time again, has a crisis. People are like, oh, man, Zuck is cooked.
Speaker 1:Yep. So true. Built different. Do not count
Speaker 2:him The
Speaker 1:AI talent crisis is merely a bump in the road for old Zuck. He's cooking.
Speaker 2:We've all been there. We've all, you know
Speaker 1:We've all been trying to a
Speaker 2:personal behemoth, you know. Yes.
Speaker 1:All have something we need to wrangle and get out. A power Whether it's a four hour stream or a 2,000,000,000,000 parameter model, You know, you've to get it out.
Speaker 2:Well, this was a great show. I got to give it up to the Production team. Our incredible production team.
Speaker 1:Keeping us online while everything goes down across the We've
Speaker 2:everything there is to know about art.
Speaker 1:We're experts too. He's an expert. Yeah. Now we've got to worry about poaching. Because I imagine a lot of the galleries are going to be watching this and they're going be, oh, New York history maybe just We
Speaker 5:got a picture.
Speaker 2:Understands physics, live streaming, and knows everything there is to know about history of art.
Speaker 1:The history of art. Anyway, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts
Speaker 2:and We will
Speaker 1:see you we will see
Speaker 2:you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Have a great day.
Speaker 2:Have a great afternoon.