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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TBPN.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 07/08/2026, and we are live from the TBPN UltraDump, the Temple of Technology, Forces Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. We used to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:That's right. It's great to be back.
Speaker 2:Yes. The invest like the best hype song really it it really has I don't know. It's just burned its way. Yeah. Puts incredible
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mental state.
Speaker 2:100%. 100%. You know who else is in a good mental state? Jeff Bezos because he's getting a markup on the 25,000,000,000 he's putting
Speaker 1:He's marking himself up.
Speaker 2:He's marking himself up.
Speaker 1:Alongside Coatue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The news is that Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. He's participating. Fund Coatue, who he has also invested in through his family office, is also participating. But there will be an opportunity for some other true outsiders to get their first slice of of blue origin.
Speaker 2:Andrew Ross Sorkin had the scoop in the New York Times today. You have to wonder if this is gossip coming out of Sun Valley. The company is raising $10,000,000,000. This is the first outside fundraise. It's hilarious to think about this twenty five year old company as being previously bootstrapped, but that's technically what it is, basically.
Speaker 2:One founder's capital just chipping away at a really hard problem for a quarter century and now we are here. Bezos has been funding this basically solo on his quest to visit the stars. He's doubling down.
Speaker 1:He can't really complain about the valuation because he's a big Yeah. Part of setting the price.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So he's doubling down. He's putting in $2,000,000,000 directly and Coatue is getting twice as much allocation, 4,000,000,000. There's another interesting Coatue tidbit I alluded to earlier from the New York Times piece.
Speaker 2:Bezos' family office is a major investor in Coatue's innovative strategies fund which is focused on emerging technology startups. So I'm not sure if the money is coming out of that fund specifically but there is a connection there. He's been building a relationship with Coatue for a long time and they are optimistic about Blue Origin's prospects. The valuation is expected to be $130,000,000,000 big for a private company. I was listening to Gavin Baker and Travis Kalanick talk about how crazy it was when Gavin was at Fidelity and he wanted to value Uber at 14,000,000,000 and everyone thought he was crazy.
Speaker 2:The valuation turned into an auction, came in at 17 and everyone was like, This is unprecedented. We've never seen a private company this big. And now $17,000,000,000 even $60,000,000,000 in the private markets looks quaint by modern standards in an era where we have several trillion dollar private companies, many up in the 100,000,000,000 plus range. It's a wild wild time.
Speaker 1:Brian wants us to warm up the Gong. We gotta warm up the For Bezos.
Speaker 2:Warm up the Gong for Bezos. Give it a couple warm up hits just to get it warm. Just to get it warm. Here we go. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Nice and warm.
Speaker 2:Yes. So the Elon bulls are saying, oh, SpaceX is underpriced now because you have to imagine I don't know if there's an exact revenue figure that's leaked for Blue Origin. But based on the size of that business, it has to be small. And so this has to be a very high multiple. But you're not really valuing this company on cash flow or even revenue.
Speaker 2:You're valuing it on the capability which is it's the second company in the world I believe to bring a rocket to orbit, land it successfully, you know, prove reusability. They got there before China, which has been trying to copy SpaceX for years. And so lots of really solid progress. Of course, there was that setback with the launch pad that exploded But they figured out a solution to that and things are chopping along just fine. The company is estimated to burn 5,000,000,000 this year.
Speaker 2:So this looks like a pretty standard twelve to eighteen month fundraise at 10,000,000,000 and has burned something like 27,000,000,000 to date, which you know, 1,000,000,000 a year on average over twenty five years, not too bad for such an ambitious project. Still a lot of money, but a big opportunity. And and you have to imagine there are a number of other comps like AST Space Mobile, as you like to call them. AST Space Mobile. Mobile.
Speaker 2:Is Mobile. AST
Speaker 1:ASTS $728,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:Billion dollar company and I don't believe that they've gotten much to orbit yet. They've done some experiments, some tests. They're still early. But it's a huge market and we've seen how
Speaker 1:fast concepts of mass to orbit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and we've seen how fast Rocket Lab and various it's a big it's a really, really big market. And so when you're going after a big opportunity and you've been working on it a long time and you got Jeff Bezos funding it, lots of reasons to be optimistic. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market?
Speaker 2:Your business on MongoDB don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Speaker 1:Another comp investors would certainly look at would be Rocket Lab sitting at just under 50,000,000,000 and there'll be multiple players in launch. Yeah. That is for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, we have some heartbreaking news, heartbreaking news. Apple has scrapped plans for a cheaper Apple Vision Pro display and is winding down work at Samsung. This is from Mac rumors. Really hits me and the other three Apple Vision Pro fans particularly hard. Brutal.
Speaker 2:I did I who who did I talk to? I talked to somebody who said that they they actually are a daily user of the Apple Vision Pro. I thought I was in the top 1%
Speaker 1:the with founder that's making Yes. That That's that
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says he watches it he watches he uses it every night or something like that. That's a lot of Apple Vision Pro use. Obviously, the the the product never really found product market fit. Although we have one in the studio, we've been having fun with it.
Speaker 2:I still think it's a it's an incredible piece of technology, but a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. The developers never showed up and it was very expensive, very heavy, very cumbersome. It requires a lot to put that thing on to watch Lawrence of Arabia. But when you do, it's worth it. It's worth it.
Speaker 2:What did I watch most recently? I watched Dunkirk in it and I watched Godfather Part two and Master and Commander. Master and Commander, that's a great movie, especially in Vision Pro. Really, you want to be in the cinematic feel. Feel like you're on a warship.
Speaker 2:So Apple has reportedly stopped development on a cheaper display for a lower cost Vision Pro. This feels like what the industry needs to move forward. The actual display was fantastic. It just needed to be cheaper and lighter so more people could get them. That at least was my thesis.
Speaker 2:But Apple disagrees with me. What do I know? So the supplier Samsung Display expected to formally end the project by September. And if you remember there were rumors of the crazy hoops that Apple had to jump through to get that incredible display because they really leapfrogged Meta who had been working with the acquisition of Oculus and they'd been improving the display fidelity. They got rid of the screen door effect.
Speaker 2:They were increasing the resolution per eye. Everything was getting better about that display but on a very linear trend. And allegedly, what Apple did was they went to Samsung and said, We know that you are working on next year's display. You're also working on displays two years out, three years out, four years out. Now what's the problem with the one that's four years out?
Speaker 2:Well, it's amazing, but it's not ready for manufacturing at scale. It's not on an automated line. It needs a lot of manual work to get it to actually produce and there's crazy low yield. So in chips, in displays, yield rules everything. If you run the machine a bunch of times you want to get 99.9% yield, 90%.
Speaker 2:In the early days when you're prototyping a new technology you might be getting just a few percent yield. And Apple said, That's fine. We'll just jack up the price and pay a ton for these cutting edge displays, jump to the front of the category with the best display technology. We'll charge a fortune for it but we'll have the best product and that will be our market entry strategy. And so I was waiting for that display technology to commoditize because it's been a few years.
Speaker 2:I thought it would just naturally get cheaper. It probably has, but it has not solved the problem of virtual reality, augmented reality. We haven't seen someone pick up
Speaker 1:Do think they're just bearish on the near term of people watching movies? Maybe. Yeah. In in in VR because I don't they're they're certainly not stopping r and d on their specs and their and their sort of everyday glasses product. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it might just be that that they studied you Maybe. Found that you're built different. Yeah. You're one of one. I I The only person on Earth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. I mean, truly like sitting down and watching a full movie is a is a rare experience today. People aren't reading, aren't watching movies, they're just scrolling and people seem to be satisfied with their phone.
Speaker 2:And also the nature of a Doom Scroll is somewhat interactive, somewhat multiplayer although obviously people see it as brain rotting and very isolating. There is a game to be played by actively scrolling which is something that doesn't require virtual reality, certainly not enhanced by virtual reality. But then also sometimes you want to read the comments. Sometimes you want to send it to a friend. Sometimes you want to fact check it and ask AI about it or spin off and do something else and go to someone's profile.
Speaker 2:So I think the number of taps and user interaction experiences in a Doom Scroll session are obviously much much higher than watching a film which you just put on and hopefully you don't pause it at all because you're engrossed the entire time from start to finish. And so if that becomes as scrolling means more and more, maybe the VR experience is less less and less relevant. So the cheaper display on the Apple Vision Pro or maybe the Apple Vision Slim or Mini or something. I don't know. They could have used a different name.
Speaker 2:Pro always left the door open to just the regular Apple Vision at a more approachable price point. But the cheaper display that they were working on would have cut the headset's pixel density roughly in half. That's not what they used to do at all. They need to keep that pixel density that's the best part of the experience. The move likely reflects Apple's broader shift towards smart glasses.
Speaker 2:Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that Apple paused work on a lighter, cheaper Vision Air, yeah, that's the term, in October 2025 to fast track its Ray Ban style glasses effort. This does not mean the Vision Pro itself has been canceled. Apple refreshed the headset in October 2025 with an M5 chip, which does very little, slightly better tracking. I think you can run some applications at slightly higher fidelity but it is by all accounts essentially an identical device. But they are long overdue for a proper refresh if they were taking this seriously and thinking about this as true growth driver.
Speaker 2:I think they have recognized that this was an experiment that needs to be put on the back burner for at least a little bit. And so this report only suggests the cheaper display project is no longer moving forward. So the Vision Pro fans have hope. It's not fully canceled. Maybe there's something else going on.
Speaker 2:Maybe there's more in the works. But anyway, it's it's interesting. I I with all the acceleration in AI, I was hoping that we would get some some, you know, advancements in this since it is an adjacent technology, but we've been few and far between on the updates. We gotta get an update from the big screen VR team because
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:They have done a great job creating high fidelity VR that's also lightweight, but it needs to be tethered to a PC. It's a little more prosumer, a little more dev kit styling.
Speaker 1:VR really attracts these, like, visionary The chats
Speaker 2:coolest guys.
Speaker 1:That are willing to go that that seem no. No. I'm actually
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You're serious.
Speaker 1:I could make that joke, but I won't. But just just people that are willing to just continually look silly for a long time to ride through the hype cycles and just like
Speaker 2:True.
Speaker 1:Keep building. I think Big Screen is an example of that. The founder that we had on that has a very cool glasses demo product, he's, I from my understanding, probably using AR and VR more than anyone else on the planet, like so committed to Yeah. Just like winning. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I really appreciate that about the category.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's see how Apple's doing on the news. Are they trading up or trading down? I pushed the button. Will it come up?
Speaker 2:We'll see. Next time. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Figma agents agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Speaker 1:Production teams
Speaker 2:We've been on
Speaker 1:swearing in
Speaker 2:a team chat. Well, here is a crazy story. I mean, it's such a minor story but it certainly grinds my gears. Think we're going to dig into it and see what you think, what I think once we dig into it. But Getty Images, we know and love them from their trove of Silicon Valley titans photographed
Speaker 1:At Sun Valley.
Speaker 2:At Sun Valley which is happening now. If you don't have a Getty Images subscription, sign up now because you're going to be first to know when the new Josh Kushner paparazzi photo drops. But Getty Images was planning to merge with Shutterstock. These are two essentially stock photo sites. In theory they should be absolutely decimated by AI image generation.
Speaker 2:Meta put out a new one, Muse Image. Nano Banana Pro has been fantastic. Images two from OpenAI has been really good. And like they're they're honestly getting to the point where a lot of the example images are just like, okay, that's just a photo. I saw Adam Messeri posted some on Instagram and I was like, is this AI or did you just take this photo?
Speaker 2:Like it's just you. And then he did a couple with filters and hair and crazy hair and those are cool and and that breeds creativity. So I think there's a lot of value in the technology. But in terms of just like I'm trying to illustrate, I'm trying to make a point visually, I need a picture of a forest. AI image generation is very, very competitive with the stock image industry and this should have this should be a business that's sort of affected like the way, you know
Speaker 1:Yeah. Imagine a lot of these businesses Cheating what I checked. Their net new revenue Yeah. Over the last couple of years is just working with labs that need
Speaker 2:Licensing. Yeah. All sorts of things. So certainly in the face of growing competition, consolidation of an industry is very normal. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:This doesn't this doesn't seem like it should raise any regulatory flags and yet it did in The United Kingdom. Getty Images has called off the Shutterstock deal after The UK created some barriers around it. So the $3,700,000,000 deal would have created a visual content company able to offer a more expansive library to users says The Wall Street Journal. So on Tuesday, Getty delivered a written notice to Shutterstock terminating their planned tie up which was first announced in January 2025 and received clearance from the Justice Department in America in April. So pretty quick turnaround in The United States.
Speaker 2:The $3,700,000,000 deal would have created a visual content company able to deliver a more expansive library to users helping meet booming demand for licensed images and videos as artificial intelligence disrupts the business of content creation. Getty stock slipped 1.7% in pre market trading. Shares of Shutterstock ticked up 1% so maybe the Shutterstock shareholders are happy about remaining an independent company. The termination came after Getty last week said that its board voted to not proceed with the deal if it meant selling Shutterstock's editorial business, a condition required by the UK Competition and Markets Authority. So the decision to by Getty to abandon its merger with Shutterstock was ultimately a commercial choice.
Speaker 2:So the chair of independent inquiry group that led the CMA's investigation of the deal. The inquiry group found that a loss of competition between the two businesses would reduce choice for UK media outlets and could lead to higher prices. And I would I would assume that this would give them some sort of pricing power in the face of, you know, essentially unlimited free editorial images in the form of AI generated images. If you want to go with the real thing, you have to pay a little bit more but that sort of offsets all the pressure of the customers that are leaving and no longer paying because they don't need to pay because they're generating them with generative AI. So this felt like a very logical story and I'm a little bit uncertain that this is a good decision for The UK to help these businesses.
Speaker 2:It feels like it's just going to wind up hurting both of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are UK media outlets not allowed to use AI content?
Speaker 2:I don't think that there's any broad rule against it. No. So they you would it would be a deliberate choice and I'm sure there's plenty I I can imagine that the Financial Times does not use AI images and that's by choice and they make that very clear and there's probably a disclosure and if they of course, they will use an AI image if they're talking about the AI image industry. But in terms of what you see on the front page of the Financial Times, it's almost always editorial images. That yeah.
Speaker 2:That image. This is from Reuters. And and that is an editorial distribution and something that is licensed. And and occasionally, they need a photo for to illustrate something and they might use AI.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I was trying to figure out why Mhmm. The the headline number here was 3,700,000,000. Yeah. Because it was based on the 01/06/2025 share prices, not today's prices, which are far far far lower.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Shutterstock is sitting at $329,000,000 market cap.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Getty is at $340,000,000 market cap. Woah. So these businesses have been really really beat up over the period since they decided, hey, we should
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tie up. Interesting. So is there is there a potential
Speaker 1:So The UK, I think regulators are actually trying to just kick these companies while they're down.
Speaker 2:Is that what's happening? Or is it a situation where Getty Oh, yeah. I mean, that that is possible. I mean, it it could just be like a just a complete mistake. I mean as you go back to Meta and you think about The UK, The US regulators blocked Meta from buying a VR fitness company that they said would create a monopoly in the VR fitness industry.
Speaker 2:And of course like the VR fitness industry like never happened. Like it's not an industry worth monopolizing. And so if you think about the business model of Quest like would it have been advantageous? Maybe. But it's worth letting Meta take a shot at that and see if having a VR fitness company in the portfolio will actually get that product to, you know, to scale.
Speaker 2:Tyler, what do have to say?
Speaker 3:Another interesting anecdote is The UK blocked Meta from buying Giphy in 2022. Yes. So to prevent a monopoly in GIFs, I presume. Yes. This could be pretty dangerous.
Speaker 2:Yes. Which is also odd. What what does Giphy power the GIFs that you see in iMessage? You know what I'm talking about? When you go to you you go to there's Genmoji, there's stickers and then there's also hashtag images.
Speaker 2:And you can find images and you can send, you know, different pictures and and GIFs. I wonder if these are from Giphy
Speaker 3:or It's powered by Bing.
Speaker 2:Powered by Bing. Okay. So there's competition in this market.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. It's
Speaker 1:says Canva doesn't label AI in their stock images. That's so annoying. So yeah. I didn't even know Canva was a player here. It would make sense
Speaker 2:to You're like you're in Canva and you want to have a picture of a forest on your greeting card and you can pick from a library. Some of them will be generated, some of them won't and they probably also have a a generative AI tool where you can generate a new image. But if you're just looking for a generic stock image that's already been described, you can probably pull from whatever library is out there. Anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Canva partners with but Getty then they're also featuring generated images.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Anyway. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 2:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. There is another interesting article in The Wall Street Journal on the cover, the front page of the main section. The what what did they what did they actually call what did they actually call the main section? There's the business and finance section. Is this just world news?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Anyway, on the cover of The Wall Street Journal, it's the world's creepiest office and people won't stay away. This is the New York complex vacated by IBM has become a magnet for urban explorers. We have a video of this place. And if you're a scrappy start up looking to expand, this might be the key to success.
Speaker 2:The ultimate lock in factory in sort of rural New York, I think. We'll we'll get into it. So this is in Summers, New York. I don't know exactly how far away that is from Manhattan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you were like a NeoLab and your name was like Ominous Intelligence Yeah.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:This could be a great sort of HQ, potentially, you know, your first little micro data center. Very James Bond villain sort of vibe. And yeah, it looks looks like you could make it really really homey.
Speaker 2:How far is it from Manhattan? Let's see. Okay. It is one hour. You can be in the city in an hour.
Speaker 1:That's Imagine walking these halls late at night after a long day at work. Yes. It wouldn't be it wouldn't be creepy at all.
Speaker 2:Yes. Robert Carlton was getting the mail one day in April when he saw a group of teenage boys sprinting away from nearby woods. He cut them off at the road and raised his arms. I just said, stop. It's over.
Speaker 2:The 62 year old retired engineer recalled. Soon he said three pursuing New York State police troopers emerged from the tree line and arrested seven juveniles. The criminal charge? Trespassing on the former IBM campus here. Disrespecting international business machines.
Speaker 2:Don't do it, folks. The long vacant site has become a magnet for so called urban explorers who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other unused, disused
Speaker 1:you Enough can of the graffiti. Yeah. Do you think putting I dare that.
Speaker 2:Here? We got to figure
Speaker 1:out how much How dare power they is write building all over The former of international business Exactly.
Speaker 2:What was the what was the IBM AI Watson? Watson, the machine intelligence What do mean
Speaker 1:it was?
Speaker 2:Was probably Still
Speaker 1:at the frontier.
Speaker 2:It's still at the frontier. It was super intelligent at Jeopardy. The global Urbex which is short for urban exploration phenomenon, Urbex isn't new but it's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts luring more curiosity seekers. Police in Livingston, New Jersey recently warned people to stay out of the closed Livingston mall property, Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Police issued a similar caution in April about the shuttered adventure landing amusement park going into an abandoned amusement park.
Speaker 2:That is thrill seeking at its best. We are aware of a TikTok challenge to explore the property. Who's doing these TikTok challenges? And should they should they be allowed to post those? This is this is dangerous for some people.
Speaker 2:I mean seriously, you go in there, there's lot of broken glass and and you know, who knows about the structural integrity of a building that hasn't been inhabited in years or decades. Could be very risky.
Speaker 1:Is it on the market?
Speaker 2:Well, we have some news about that. I don't know if it's actually on the market, but I imagine if you make them an offer they can't refuse, this property could be yours. So Sebastian Capital, the Manhattan company that manages the 723 acre site, that's a lot of size. Says it has beefed up security and appreciates helps police.
Speaker 1:So I'm shocked by the YouTube comments
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That are wholly coming to the defense of this building. I hate there's a class of people who see something like this and feel compelled to start breaking Why do people vandalize these kinds of places?
Speaker 2:Interesting. Can't
Speaker 5:believe these are all the top comments.
Speaker 1:I can't believe people go in there busting up the place.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. I I would have sort of expected people to be on the side of the urban explorers, on the side of the TikTok challenge challengers. Andrew Proto, a defense lawyer said a fifteen second clip isn't worth a criminal record. Don't do it. If you've already been arrested, you're not the first call we've taken this month and you won't be the last.
Speaker 2:Proto says he has represented or advised several minors arrested on the campus. The Summers town court town court clerk said some defendants received a six month adjournment in contemplation of dismissal meaning charges will be dropped and the arrest will be sealed if they avoid trouble. Some explorers who have posted about the IBM site say they follow an observe and preserve ethos and reject vandalism. They say they're driven by curiosity, the thrill of roaming forbidden spaces and a zeal to document discoveries and that they're careful and know their limits. It actually gives me hope when I hear that kids are out there getting into trouble, said Bradley Garrett, cultural photographer and author of the book, Explore Everything, Place Hacking the City about his own Urbex adventures.
Speaker 2:He sees urban exploration as a gateway drug in a good way sometimes into intellectual curiosity about history and culture. So you go, you break into this abandoned building and then next thing you know, you're an IBM consultant driving enterprise value for S and P 500 companies, traveling, businessman. Could happen. Who knows?
Speaker 1:Could happen. Raghav wants to turn it into an Amman.
Speaker 2:Amman would be good. Data center seems obvious depending on What about
Speaker 1:the first Amman with a data center? With some local AI? Both.
Speaker 2:So quickly, you asked about the price. In 2016, IBM sold the property for $31,750,000 and it's owned by a LLC that shares a 5th Avenue address with Sebastian Capital, so everyone suspects Sebastian's in on the deal. A plan to convert it to a private school foundered during COVID and Sebastian said it is Wait. Considered Floundered? Foundering is like failing, but yes.
Speaker 2:Foundered. So floundered would be another appropriate term for what happened. But it did not it was not successfully converted into a private school, obviously. But if you you want to take a wild swing, go pick it up, make Sebastian Capital an offer. Let's see.
Speaker 2:I wonder what it would trade for today. Lots of work to be done. Car and driver. Quickly. Tyler had something on the IBM complex.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So okay.
Speaker 2:You planning to go?
Speaker 3:1,100,000 square feet. Okay. Historically, you'd see like I think something like around 10 watts per square feet.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's a little bit higher tech, This is IBM Okay. Eighties. An estimate I think is reasonable is around 20 megawatts.
Speaker 2:20 megawatts. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So you're looking at a small data center.
Speaker 2:Is there any natural gas Yes. In the ground? Can we frack? Can we put solar panels on the roof? Can we build a nuclear reactor there?
Speaker 2:What are our options if we want to get this thing churning out tokens? We want to turn it into a token machine. Interesting. We should go check it out. Anyway, let's move on to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And Jordy
Speaker 1:Car and Driver says 2026 Lucid Gravity available with no interest due to no interest. What? Several months after launching the 2027 Gravity, Lucid still has plenty of 2026 models, so it's offering customers an interest free loan incentive. Okay.
Speaker 2:I wonder how long there's no interest on the loan. That seems like a good deal. The Lucid is a very well reviewed car, very luxurious interior, very polished product for some of the higher, more performance oriented trims. Incredible zero to 60 times. Incredible range.
Speaker 2:I think Larry David has one. They're well reviewed cars, but it's a electric vehicle which has high depreciation and then you're signing up to work with a company that a lot of people think might not be around forever. So what does the maintenance and repair and flow of products and new parts look like in a decade? And so that is a risk factor for a lot of people. But the Lucid Air Gravity, I think it looks sort of cool.
Speaker 2:It's sort of like a, it's a little bit like it wants to be a minivan. It's trying to do the job of a minivan but they didn't just lean into the sliding doors. At least the Model X realized that what makes the minivan great is the is the accessibility of the doors and they made them cool doors by making them gullwing or butterfly doors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The problem here is that when I looked up Lucid Gravity for sale, I'm seeing a 2026 with just 3,000 miles that's selling for a 125,000 That's a lot of money. Dollars. That's a lot of dollars. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And regard even if you're paying no interest, it's probably losing, you know, it's depreciating thousands of dollars a quarter. And so Yeah. It's still gonna be It's very rough ownership experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It will be interesting to see where they end up. I know they already have some big investors and potentially some corporate partners. It could eventually be rolled into another organization as sort of the EV strategy of a larger automotive group.
Speaker 2:Who knows? Did you want to look at end of stay? Did you see this? We got to pull up this video because we were talking about exactly this. The September Cabriolet Junior is a Porsche nine six four that has been shrunk.
Speaker 2:Actually shrunk. Exactly what you said. Look at this video. Woah. This is what this is what you asked for.
Speaker 2:Fully customizable and look at this. It looks normal size but wait until this guy gets in it. This is amazing. So it is a go kart that has the bodywork of a Porsche and so you can get one of these. They go like 60 miles an hour or something like that.
Speaker 1:They're Yes. Pretty
Speaker 2:So I think if you put a governor on this vehicle, you'd have what you want which is the vehicle for the kid that is fun engaging and highly stylized and made with precision. The group behind this is called End of Stay, s t a y has periods after it. So I imagine it's some sort of acronym. What a
Speaker 1:They while did it. Yes. They did it.
Speaker 2:They did it.
Speaker 1:I'm interested.
Speaker 2:You can see the YouTube video here, the preview of the nine six four turbo junior high performance version. It's an absolutely crazy crazy video that I got organically served to me and I was like, this is what we've been looking for for sure. This is exactly what we were talking about.
Speaker 1:I need one. I think you do.
Speaker 3:I need one.
Speaker 2:Anyway, GPT-five, GPT Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human AI interaction launched today from OpenAI rolling out to ChatGPT starting today. Taking shots at that guy on Instagram who's unsatisfied with legacy voice models. It's a lot smarter.
Speaker 1:I have a feeling he's going to find a way to keep using the old models.
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe. Or he'll just become who's the Plymouth Liberator? He's sort of the Pliney the Liberator of voice models in that I know he's taking shots and he's like very unhappy with the quality of the voice models but at the same time he does a great job of actually exposing and finding limitations not necessarily jailbreaks but he by watching those videos you can very clearly understand, okay I understand what's going on here. It's not it doesn't have tool use so it can't count, it can't set a timer, it doesn't have you know a long running context window that can stay with you for a long time so it gets it gets lost. You can't talk to each other.
Speaker 2:There's a whole bunch of different ways. And once you have all of those documented by just a he's basically like a white hat hacker. He's he's He
Speaker 3:found a bunch of benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Oh, wait. What?
Speaker 3:He found a bunch like good
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically benchmarks like if you can satisfy his his videos and run those experiments again in a satisfying way, you probably have a better product at the end of the day. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think it's I think it's cool. I'm excited.
Speaker 1:Very yeah. I'm super excited for this one. I I wonder if the yeah. The real time nature unlocks
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Like under unlocks like almost like a new kind of like pod like real time like podcast format
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Where you can just actually have a conversation about a topic. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should have it sitting right here. It has a full duplex architecture which means that it can listen and speak at the same time so it can jump in appropriately. And it
Speaker 1:can also route like certain questions to smarter models Yes. To run-in the background. You can still have a conversation.
Speaker 2:Yes. Which is great because my default flow like if I'm driving which I don't think I should be doing but I will tap the record button not the voice mode and I will dictate a really long prompt and then I will click send and then I will wait for it to cook and then I will have it read that back to me. And that's all just like a couple extra clicks, couple extra steps to get what I really want which is a conversation. I was interested about the idea of where this goes like is there is there a world where you are talking to a model and you can have sort of multiple threads of conversations going within one conversation? So you can say, hey, I need you to go and do a deep research report on IBM Watson and it goes and cooks on that and then while it's doing that, you're still talking to it and you're still having a conversation but then you also might say, well, catch me up on the latest news and it has that at the fingertips so it can talk to you about the latest news and then you can go and it can say, hey, by the way, I'm done with the report or I'm done with the code that I wrote but you're talking to me about other problems in your organization, other decisions, other research projects that you have and it's all done in one continuous conversation like me interacting with you.
Speaker 2:Like we might, you might delegate something and then continue the conversation and then move on. Oh, I got to text this person. Okay. I'll text them. They'll do that.
Speaker 2:They'll come back to me in twenty minutes with a revision to the thing that we're working on. But in the meantime, let's talk about whatever else we got going on today. So interesting to see where this goes. In other OpenAI news, GPT-5.6 Soul along with Terra and Luna will launch publicly this Thursday. Preview access is expanding globally.
Speaker 2:Lots of people are having fun with this. Some people got early access. Other people were joking about clearly not getting early access but wanting early access. But a lot of people are having fun. Tyler Cowen?
Speaker 1:What did did John Palmer say?
Speaker 2:What did he say? He's in here?
Speaker 1:No. He he had a
Speaker 2:He has one. He says, it seems I'm allowed to talk about five six now. I wasn't one of the testers but I heard it's really good. Again, I haven't used it yet but this will probably be my default model from here on when I get access. It's a good one.
Speaker 2:People are having a lot of fun. Kit Langton says, I can finally talk about GPT-5.6. I've been using it for many months if not decades and what is glaringly obvious to me now as I look back on my life is that you did not have access to it. It's very fun. People are very happy with it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. There's a there's a little bit of a fork around like when how the the vibe around 5.6 is different than Fable five. When how interactive it is versus somebody said like, Fable is like light speed across the galaxy and and Soul is like a Porsche, the nerve wringing more engaging. I don't know. It seems like we're we're entering some fragmentation in, like, the right tool for the job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ethan says, my big takeaway is that both Soul Ethan had access. So he says, both Soul and Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you're doing any work where better intelligence matter, those two models are your only choices. Dean says, I think for me, the main takeaway with Soul and Fable is that I can't remember a time when the leading models were, a, so decidedly ahead of everything else and b, so distinct from one another.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. So yeah, lot of people are talking about how they're using the models Yeah. Together.
Speaker 2:It's probably a function of just tighter tighter distillation protocols like there's less pollution. Like also like not everyone's training on the exact same data anymore because it used to just be everyone just trains on the entire web corpus and now each company has different data sets, different data brokers, different usage patterns that they can train on and then different sort of research tastes. So go give it a try
Speaker 1:I on forgot to mention this. GPT-5.6 Souls, world leading in computer use. It made me use it 100x more when we lost access to 5.6. I quickly started to go insane without it. So, yeah, people in the early access program obviously lost access for a couple weeks Sure.
Speaker 1:Due to the DC action. Yeah. But, yeah, saw some people saying like, what are some good uses for computer use? And it's like, anything on your computer. What do you
Speaker 5:use your computer for?
Speaker 1:They're not all gonna be great uses, but Yeah. I'm curious.
Speaker 2:I still think
Speaker 1:it's it's worth
Speaker 2:worth it's always worth like popularizing those like genuinely useful patterns. I mean, like deep research was that in many ways just very, like it gave you a 20 page PDF report on the topic that you were asking for and it did a lot of the work for you. And I still think the come up with a good prompt idea, find the right reason to use AI is a problem for a ton of people. There there there are there are plenty of people that adopt the latest AI tools, immediately find what the model is good at, how to use it, how to use it profitably, effectively, not waste tokens, not waste their time. But other people need ideas.
Speaker 2:They need to know that there's a new capability. You see this with the chat app. You see this with the voice mode where people are like you know, like judging a model based on hallucinations that disappeared a year ago or judging a model based on some, oh, it has a cut off window and that hasn't been a thing for a year but it still burned its burned its way into like the the memes of the online culture and thus people need to be updated on that. And so I'm I'm in favor of coming up with good computer use demos. The real one is just can it play Counter Strike effectively.
Speaker 2:That's the real computer use test. Can it rank me up to global elite? Can it down rank me so I can smurf a little bit? This is this is the future. This is what I want.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent and to deploy web app service databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. I'm extremely excited to welcome our next guest to the show. We have Vincent Weisser from Crime Intellect.
Speaker 2:He's the cofounder and CEO, and he has some amazing news for us. Tell us what happened, then we'll dig into the news, the market, the story, the company. But first, give us the news because Jordy's already warming up over here.
Speaker 6:Amazing. Yeah. So we've announced that we've raised a 130,000,000 at 1,000,000,000 with Prime Analytics Wow. To build the open superintelligence stack.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic. Congratulations. Yeah. It it
Speaker 1:What I what we were talking about before the show Yeah. Is is the the the the ratio between dollars raised to run rate.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? How much raised before this round?
Speaker 6:Just 20,000,000 total. So I think we've actually got to this run rate on like less than 20,000,000 in spend.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Which is north of a 100.
Speaker 6:Yes. That's amazing. Yeah. We we doubled it That's since we actually closed the fundraise to a 100. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So basically, yeah, on track to grow much more from here on.
Speaker 2:So reset me on the latest and greatest in the actual product offering. What customers are coming to you? Is it I have used the Frontier model to, you know, figure out that AI can in fact do some agentic workload within my organization. I want to cut cost and you're going to RL an open source model for me, fine tune it. And then am I paying you for tokens?
Speaker 2:Am I are you getting me GPUs? What is the full suite of products that you offer customers these days?
Speaker 6:Yes. So basically, it is kind of like the full stack to do training, deployment, and continue improvement of models. Think customers basically come to us for anything ranging from compute to inference to the full RL and post training stack to Mhmm. To train models. And I I would say it's like, we've had customers coming from different buckets and categories.
Speaker 6:A lot of them are, like, the AI natives who are basically starting out and and oftentimes also, like, being multi model. Right? Like, they they use, like, the frontier models. They use open models Mhmm. For different use cases.
Speaker 6:Like, good examples, like, Ram, for example, as one customer more in this, like, AI native bucket, and a lot of the big AI native startups. But then we've also increasingly been able to track a lot of the new AI labs, like a lot of the Neo labs. So a lot of those are using our full stack from, like, large scale clusters to our pre training and post training and RL stack. But then also increasingly, like, traditional enterprises and even sovereigns coming to us who want to have their own end to end stack that they can run, like, on prem. So how I see this is, to some extent, it's like, there's just increasingly, I think, like a demand for having your own, like, sovereign AI stack.
Speaker 6:Right? It's like your own open end to end stack. But I think this is almost, like, complementing, in many cases, like, the other, like, frontier, like models and stacks.
Speaker 2:And you're using sovereign in not just the geopolitical sense, but also if you're a Fortune 500 company, you want to own your stack from start to finish potentially.
Speaker 6:Exactly. Yeah. Think that there was a lot of reasoned talk about this. Obviously, folks like Satya and Alex Carr were, like, also making making those those points and arguments over the last few weeks. And I think it's increasingly something I think where, like, a lot of, like, enterprises want to basically build this, like, compounding data mode and flywheel Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Where ultimately, I think the future that we are starting to see is a lot of these companies want to build basically self improving agents. Mhmm. And the way to do this, think, is generally you you have an RL environment for use case, you scale on it, and then you ultimately deploy that into production, and then continuously improve with the user interacting with that agent. It's almost like the the Tesla autonomy, like levels, but like for knowledge worker agents. So I think like the the ramp example I think was one that people really resonated with for basically them being able to, within a week and less than 50 k of of training spent Wow.
Speaker 6:Outcompete a frontier model Yeah. At automating spreadsheets and and finance at a fraction of the cost of of running the cheapest models. Sure. This is, like, they were able to outperform Opus at a fraction of the cost of Haiku and and, like, 30% faster, like, much more tailored to the use case. So I think in many ways, like, these, like, specialized agentic use cases are a big unlock.
Speaker 6:And I think in many ways, you still need the godlike Yeah. Big mega model to to do the orchestration or planning. But then I think oftentimes execution, I think, happens can happen with these specialized sub agents. So I think, yeah, those have been extremely, I think, like, fruitful and and and useful for a lot of the companies adopting and and training their own agents. Then I think the other big trend is just like an explosion in in your entrants that are like taking model training seriously.
Speaker 6:Obviously, hundreds of Neolabs really got stood up in the last probably twelve to twenty four months. So we started powering a lot of those, like, with our full stack, including with also large compute clusters. So, like, NVIDIA also joined us as part of the round,
Speaker 1:and Mhmm.
Speaker 6:We've been like, we've, since day one, basically operated large clusters. And and this is in in large part why we need so much money. Right? It's like to basically be standing up more and more GPUs. Like right now, we run like 15,000 GPUs and scaling to like over 30,000.
Speaker 6:Okay. And so this so this is like a lot a lot of the capital needs even.
Speaker 2:And walk me through when you're pressing the huge cluster button. Is that because there's broad demand for specific models that you need to inference at scale and so there's just a lot of inference demand? Or is it that for the level of training that you're doing, you need to be cluster scale to even kick off the training run?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So basically, it's like for for all the needs, like, from training to inference Mhmm. You you need, obviously, compute. And in a lot of ways, like our customers like are doing a lot of these like large scale training runs with us, like leveraging our post, like including our compute. Right?
Speaker 6:So it's like Yeah. Free training, fundamental and parameter models, like for what we did with RC, like q four last year. Or a really large also post training runs and RL runs. Right? So it's like increasingly basically, we abstract all of that info away.
Speaker 6:So basically, people can just like hit a button Mhmm. To do a post training run without having to like log into GPU cluster and and managing the bare metal GPUs. So we basically abstract a lot of this like GPU complexity away for but but yeah. Like for that, we're basically also ramping up our own clusters to basically just like serve hundreds and thousands of customers like in parallel on those.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what you're saying is like there might be a situation where I have a I have a 50 k budget like you gave with the ramp example. I have a 50 k budget to do some post training and I need to deploy that 50 k into like thousands of GPUs but only for a short amount of time. So the budget is actually going to be relatively small even though if I were to buy all of that it would be way more than 50, millions and millions of dollars. So you sort of absorb some of that cost, orchestrate it, abstract it away, and then you can deliver for the customer.
Speaker 2:It's just slice
Speaker 6:of Yeah. So so basically, think this is like also big unlock, like also on the inference side, right, where customers don't need to like front load hundreds of millions and CapEx or expense for large data center commitments. Yep. So we basically also increasingly solve a lot of inference. So it really is the full stack, and I think a lot of the compute like, we we have, like, quite a clear, like, visibility into the demand just because, like, people come with us with large requests or or large contracts to basically do larger training runs and deployment.
Speaker 6:So we basically just, like, need to secure the compute to, yeah, to be able to fulfill all of those. And I think, like, right now, we would probably at, like, many orders of magnitude more compute, like compute, but also revenue, if compute wouldn't be as constrained as it is right now. So it's like right now, I think, like, in the in the current environment, it's like, basically GPUs are pretty sold out Mhmm. For the next few months. And for almost, like, the rest of the year, especially if you want to, like, stand up data centers in in The US.
Speaker 6:So I think this is actually, like, think the the main bottleneck to to scale right now for anyone in AI. And this is, I think, what we've been able to really scale through extremely well because we've basically partnered with almost every data center out there since like over two years. So basically, you're able to send up like data centers in in different geographies and orchestrate them globally.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Any predictions, forecasts for American open source over the next six months?
Speaker 6:Yes. No. Really good question. I we joined also, like, NVIDIA to help them train Nematron. So they're doing the Nematron alliance and coalition.
Speaker 6:So we are one of, like, I think 10 or so partners. So it's like so like like, I can't I can't speak about some of that like all the things there, but I think like in general, both on that front and other things we're saying.
Speaker 4:We won't
Speaker 1:tell anybody. We won't tell
Speaker 2:anybody. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Anyway, anything Just between us. Between us. Just three of us.
Speaker 6:So basically, think like well, like, in some ways, leading American efforts actually are Nemotron and actually, like, Arsi with Trinity Models. Both of those we're, like, very deeply involved in. And so I think those will continue to to, like, lead, like, with, like, American open source. Like, we have, like, some of our own models cooking. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And and then, like, we help a a ton of customers over there. So I think there will actually be, like, a huge resurgence of, like, Frontier open models coming out of The US. Also, let by players like NBA itself and a of our customers and partners. So, yeah, I think, like, in in general, think the interesting geopolitical question is actually what happens with Chinese open models. Right?
Speaker 6:It's like like, obviously, we've seen news that, like, China might consider, like, export restricting them, like and and and, like, there might be policy dimensions on the on both the Chinese and The US side. Right? So it's like, think this is, I think, actually, in some ways, like, motivation to build a stack and and to also push American open source forward is to have, like, less reliance on malls that might get banned any day. Be it all more close. Right?
Speaker 6:It's like I I think this is something increasingly, like, a lot of enterprises are starting to to realize that, like, there's there's actually huge dependence, right, in the sense on like, mainly from the policy side. So this is something I think where we want to just, enable everyone to have, like, their own end to end FrontiOpenStack to be able to create their own models. And ultimately, think, like, there there will be like there there's obviously a lot of like now, like, also Neolabs, and and a lot of them are actually like thinking about things quite in a quite open way. So I think it will be surprised that this may be one of the hot takes is to see more nail labs release open models. Like, a good example that we also partnered with recently was a poolside, for example.
Speaker 6:Like, people were expecting them to be closed, but they actually opened up their models. Interesting. So I I think there will be more of those, especially given there are, like, hundreds of well funded nail labs now. Yeah. I think there will be huge resurgence just like of, like, the age of research in terms of, like, these nail labs, like, pursuing truly novel directions.
Speaker 6:Right? It's like going where, like, the big labs almost can't go necessarily, taking big, like, bold bets that also might not pay pay off all of them. Right? Or, like, if you have 100 shots on goal, like, some of them will probably pay off and result in interesting outcomes. So I think this is, like, really also, I think, what we are empowering, right, is is kind of, like, helping these new nail labs and and big AI natives and enterprises to move much faster and not have to basically all build the same stack Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Each by themselves in house. Because almost a lot of them are like tiny teams of like tens of people instead of like thousands. So we're able to like help them move much faster basically, but I'm adopting our stack.
Speaker 1:When you hear of a, you know, major American tech company, let's say, someone
Speaker 6:in
Speaker 1:the mag seven that has extra capacity, do you reach out to them? Do you get do you do you ping them? Are you at the scale yet that that a deal would be interesting to them? Or are they really searching for these, you know, $10,000,000,000 plus opportunities?
Speaker 6:For sure, like, we already are, like, sourcing, like like, pretty large clusters, so it's, sometimes, like, up to, like, five to 10,000 tributes. So it's, we we basically, like, looking at every source and pocket of supply that we can find. Like, we've literally turned every stone to find, like, the last tribute available on Earth. And, like like, we we we've been quite good at at at that. So it's like in some ways, like, I think we're like that that has been, like, one of the core tenants almost, like, since the beginning is that, like, we we really didn't want it to, like, orchestrate, like, the global compute supply efficiently.
Speaker 6:So we did a lot of, like, optimization for tolerance and this retraining even in the early days to, like, train across, like, distributed compute. So it's, like, definitely I I think to this question, it's like like, I think it's something that we're definitely, like, considering. Like, if there's any anyone with some spare jubilees here, you can always set us up.
Speaker 2:That's great. Alright. Back on on China, do you agree with my perception that if there is some sort of lockdown on Chinese open source export controls, that would not affect
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are they mad that American companies are distilling on or or post training their open source models
Speaker 2:Oh, it's by design. That was goal of the project. But I what what I'm what I'm interested about is is would they try and claw back access to Kimi or GLM, any of those models that are already been deployed? Because there's an element of like once the weights have been downloaded, it's sort of just out there. Of course, you could go and try and like sue every company, but that's very hard if you're in an American jurisdiction and you're a Chinese company.
Speaker 2:But how would you see that playing out? Would it just be going forward, no more open source and that's the CCP telling Chinese companies or some other shape of of of, like, restriction?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think it's really hard to know. I think, like, a good example was, like, in some extent, like, the most popular Chinese malls already have been closed for Gamma, which is Coin. Right? Like, in some ways, like, they've actually, like, changed their licensings Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And stopped almost closing. So I think there will be both, like, companies changing their policies. Right? But then also, I think, like, probably, like, state intervention. Right?
Speaker 6:It's like in different shapes or form.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So I think, basically, one can't rely on the steady stream of frontier open, like, releases out of China in many ways, but it's, from different perspectives. And I think similarly, a lot of other sovereigns, like, obviously, The US also doesn't want to build on on necessarily China's op mods. It's like
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I think
Speaker 6:a lot of American enterprises, obviously also like sovereign use cases, like, need American op malls, but I think similar for for other continents. Right? It's like, think there there's been a lot of work, obviously, and and we're, like, collaborating with people also across Europe, across India, across other geos. So it's like I think we'll we'll see a much more, like, multipolar, I think, open like, ecosystem of, like, open front end models. So I think that's, a healthy, like, balancing away from just relying on on Chinese.
Speaker 6:So malls, even though they've obviously, like, been a great accelerant of, like, open source progress, I think it's also unhealthy to rely just on that ecosystem. Yeah. And, yeah, like, I think we'll be like, there will be, I think, a bunch of, like, quite unpredictable changes similar to all. Like, the last few months have been quite unpredictable Mhmm. I think, to everyone involved.
Speaker 6:So I think this will continue to be the case in the sense that it will be, like, quite dicey policy, like, AI policy landscape for the next few years. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Last question. Data centers are data center construction, new data center construction, deeply unpopular in America domestically. Simultaneously, the workloads that are being done in AI data centers are basically latency is basically irrelevant. For training, certainly, for most inference tasks, if you're waiting a couple minutes for a result, an extra five hundred milliseconds to get across the world isn't going to matter. This feels like a recipe for global competition for aggressive data center expansion in a country that does see it favorably, that does see an economic boom from it or does have a lot of energy.
Speaker 2:What is the state of the non domestic, non US data center build out?
Speaker 6:Yes. So, like, we're certainly, like, building a lot of data centers and partnering with a lot of them, like, outside of The US as well. But, like, I think there's still a lot of demand, actually, for data centers in The US. Think, like, even from a data perspective Mhmm. Like, there's a lot of now, like, the financial industries and and highly regulated industries, like, also adopting, obviously, more and more agents and compute.
Speaker 6:I do think inference still matters. I like speed in a sense, like, maybe not for, like, long running agents, but, like, for a lot of use cases, people I think still really care about, like, having extremely snappy, like, responses. But I think, like, there there's definitely, I think, like, a general boom in data center build outs outside of The US as well. I think there's just, a limited set of countries who are like strong, like allies with like ample amounts of like like geopolitical stability, but then also like like energy and and and green like like green fields and and enough space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. US has unique access to natural gas Mhmm. Which is if you're trying to bring energy online super quickly, it's hard to beat.
Speaker 6:Yes. And I I think, like, we we're seeing this across Europe even where, there's specific regions, right, like, are, like, much more active in data center build outs than others. And and those are generally the ones that, like, have their own, like, money internalized on them and, like, cheap energy and and a lot of, like, also local support for it. So I think, like, in general, from what we are seeing, I think there's, like, there there is new entrance almost like to to the data center build outs, but it's like in places like Australia and New Zealand, like and and and like a small much small place, right, like, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and others, who are like having a huge amount of energy and and huge like, and and making huge bets also on data centers by a while, also being, like, allies of The US. So I think those are the countries, I think, generally, which will see the biggest boom in data centers.
Speaker 6:I think at the same time, like, I think we'll also continue to see see a boom in US data centers. But, yeah, there there's definitely it's definitely harder to get data centers in The US than outside of The US. And and so it's something where I think we'll we'll see both continuously expand. And then I think there there might also be, obviously, like, your point, like a policy, like like updating for like, what was the upcoming elections and and in midterms and things of I think, like, this this whole almost, like, populism in in The US around, like, data centers and like a lot of the the kind of, I think, public sentiment as as potentially also like sovereign influences and other things like from other nation states who who are trying to harm almost like The US data center build out. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So I think there's like a lot of things at stake for The US. Right? It's like to to not pull back on on their data center build out. But I think there will also be specific states who are like leaning in much more heavily than others. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, I I think this is already what we're seeing where like Texas. So it's like, there's specific states in The US that are just like much more well suited to really ramp up data centers from here. Mhmm. And yeah. And I think we'll we'll see them ramp up globally and and hopefully also outside of like beyond Earth.
Speaker 6:And I think Yeah. Like I think this is the only way to really probably scale.
Speaker 2:I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Incredible progress.
Speaker 1:We love seeing you and the team win. Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day. Say hello to Will for us and we'll talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Ben Thompson, the founder of Strathecory. He's been on an absolute tear during a slow news cycle.
Speaker 2:Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you?
Speaker 7:I don't know. It it and this summer is always slow. Yeah. I, you know, I take a couple days or I I slow down a little bit myself.
Speaker 2:Feel like you've done a good job of like providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted
Speaker 7:I'm to doing you a favor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You are.
Speaker 7:Is that what I'm hearing
Speaker 2:from Yeah. Yes. I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for twenty minutes and couldn't go on a tear but it's not like that was driven by like a specific, okay, there's a Wall Street Journal article where like Bloomberg has a scoop and like we need to know this. It's more just like resetting on the meta narrative. I want to talk about the meta narrative but can we start with Xbox?
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 2:I want to know first, let's go back in time a little bit and I want you to reality check me on the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox. And I think it stems with DirectX, the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards so that was a Microsoft licensed piece of property so this is why we don't have the Chrome You
Speaker 7:want to go really far back.
Speaker 2:Like like because we do we didn't get an Amazon gaming console. We didn't get a Google gaming console. Right? Right.
Speaker 7:Like why Interesting. So you we go back way back. I mean, we can go really far back.
Speaker 2:Please.
Speaker 7:I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing three d was coming along was OpenGL. And OpenGL had various pluses or minuses. It was, you know, we're way back in history. But the way this is the origin of the NVIDIA story. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Making cards to do three d graphics. You had like the Riva, the Yeah. One twenty eight, then you the TNT. Yeah. Then you had the GeForce, and like, we're talking back in the nineties when I was, you know, your guys' age or whatever it was in college.
Speaker 7:And, you know, making the first, you know, Quake comes out, like, real first three d game, you know. There's actually a really interesting Twitter back and forth with the old id people talking about Quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by watching it. Woah. But super fun super fun back But and Microsoft comes out with Direct three d as an alternative to OpenGL
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That was I think and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think it was a little easier to use, had more niceties, was more tied into the platform. But this is all sort of PC gaming. Yeah. The Xbox, the way I think about it and a lot of gamers kinda get annoyed and worried about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the game part of it. I'm more interested like the the strategy and how that fits in the overall
Speaker 1:What is your review?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can we get a GTA six review?
Speaker 7:No. Well, I feel I feel compelled. Number one, I feel Rockstar I think is charging way too little for this game. They're charging what? $80?
Speaker 7:Yes. Like, this is a game.
Speaker 2:You're gonna get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take. No.
Speaker 7:They should be charging like $200 for
Speaker 2:this donation. I know.
Speaker 7:GTA six is like the last great game.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like you think about every it was built boastably all made pre AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Like it is the pinnacle of this Yeah. Triple a craftsmanship years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears Yeah. To the extent where you have like the Twitter analyst like counting cigarette butts outside of the offices to see like how much crunch are they in right now.
Speaker 2:I don't even think he's trading the stock. Even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA six. The love of the game. Literally, game.
Speaker 2:The the GTA six.
Speaker 7:Gamers are insane. Insane. I always tread in this water like very very carefully. But no. So I feel compelled to buy GTA
Speaker 6:six Yes.
Speaker 7:Just in honor of it existing. I like that. Even if I don't know if I'm ever gonna play it. So I'm definitely
Speaker 2:gonna do
Speaker 7:that and I'd be happy to pay yes. I have $200. Like $80 is ridiculous. They didn't charge more. Anyhow Yeah.
Speaker 1:We had one of the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like, you didn't have had ten years, you couldn't save up $80. I know. Seriously. It's like Whoever whoever you are, like like, I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear like a $100. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 7:Oh, absolutely. I want you know, they're all $20, I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than Although, unfortunately, inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable how expensive things
Speaker 1:are these It's bad.
Speaker 7:So anyhow, I got my GTA six. But we're we're back oh, so the the the console the console era. So the way I think about Xbox Yeah. Is you go back to Microsoft, and Microsoft had this whole thing. This is pre iPhone.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. Mhmm. And the idea that we're going to we already own the desk Mhmm. Via the PC.
Speaker 7:We're going to own the Pocket via the phone. Mhmm. And people always used say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They like they came out with a Windows CE in like 1999.
Speaker 7:Like, they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC. Yeah. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room?
Speaker 7:Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room and we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating a the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed. And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the Internet in their living room.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And so you're selling a multi $100 sort of console to people who want to play games, but people who don't want to play games aren't gonna randomly start buying consoles. What actually ended up taking it over was things like the Fire Stick or, you know, Apple TV beta played this. I still think it's like probably the the best solution, but it's way too expensive. Now, the Apple TV's poor price got jacked to the moon with this recent memory increase.
Speaker 7:But the Fire Stick is probably a big one. You had the Chromecast. You had Roku TV. You had, you know, these, which ended up being it's not that it's a classic Microsoft thing. They were actually right.
Speaker 7:There was this new front page to online services to be built. They just took totally the wrong approach with Xbox. And what's funny is that this approach actually became this uberos of self mutilation because the Xbox didn't succeed in achieving this because the games console is way too expensive to achieve this. But then also, they killed the Xbox where Xbox three sixty was pretty competitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it's that generation is actually the most interesting console generation. I'm happy to expound on that if you want to. But they come out after that with the Xbox One, I think. Yes. Which was super expensive because it had the Kinect built in that sort of like wave your hands around sort of thing.
Speaker 7:And it had much more like restrictive DRM things. It was gonna be more digital. It was basically that console was designed around we're gonna realize our vision and own the living room.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And gamers hated it. So they rejected it. So their vision, which they didn't achieve, also killed their console. And so and the so my I wrote over a decade ago. And the whole Xbox saga is filled with regrets, think.
Speaker 7:First and foremost, for Microsoft, but also for me. Because I, from the beginning, is like, they need to kill this program or they need to spin it out or get rid of it. Mhmm. The stated goals, which made sense from a corporate perspective Yep. Were not achieved and it is continuing to exist because it exists.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I was actually sympathetic to that. I worked at Microsoft from from 2011, 2013 when Microsoft was in the dumps And, you know, they were still had a great business, but their stock had been like $40 for like a decade. And and the one thing the employees has, like, well, at least have Xbox, all the cool kids over there. Like, it was such a important thing to corporate culture to have Xbox. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Even though this was a totally failed division in terms of achieving corporate goals and also was sort of self immolating because it was trying to achieve corporate goals that it was not going to achieve.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you think the naming scheme says about that project? I always found it very odd that they went from Xbox to Xbox three sixty. That sounds like the third. It's actually the second.
Speaker 2:Xbox one is the third but it's one. And then now they're on series x which feels like the tenth but it's the fourth and then they have a bunch of sub names. It feels like they just didn't they never leaned into just like Xbox two, Xbox three, Xbox four.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Well, you're asked I mean, maybe it shows that worked at Microsoft. You're asking the wrong guy about naming things I think. But yeah. Total mess.
Speaker 7:They called it the three sixty because it was coming out the same generation as the PlayStation three.
Speaker 2:And they wanted
Speaker 7:to jump it. Wanted to well, they wanted to be on the same level.
Speaker 6:Like, we both answered them a three and
Speaker 2:a Yeah.
Speaker 7:So what's interesting about the PlayStation three is the PlayStation three was Sony's big misstep in terms of the whole PlayStation era. What they they had this crazy processor called the Cell processor that had all these capabilities and they had up to that point, consoles were differentiated by hardware. Mhmm. And so Sony famously helped one of the reasons they beat Nintendo was they had discs, so they could have much larger, like, media and things along those lines. And whereas Nintendo was sticking with cartridges.
Speaker 7:And there was, like, other like, they were much more favorable to third party developers. Just in general, they they they had sort of taken over in PlayStation one and two. PlayStation three comes along, they produce this oh, they wanted to get Blu ray off.
Speaker 2:Blu ray.
Speaker 7:That's another example of consoles getting screwed up by trying to attempt to other corporate priorities. They it worked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Didn't they win? And and didn't Xbox go with HD DVD and they lost?
Speaker 7:They did. But at the end of the day, what happened was the PlayStation three was way too expensive. I think it ran super hot if I remember.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And all these extra capabilities were not used. Mhmm. And the reason they weren't used is that was the first HD generation. Mhmm. And you had this shift to three d games and high definition graphics.
Speaker 7:And what happened was it used to be games differentiated themselves by how well they wrote the game. Like how did it perform on your Super Nintendo, on your Nintendo. Now, we move to a world of actually all the actual game was offloaded to engines, game engines. Like, you know, it had one, unreal obviously, these were epic, got super big with the unreal engine. And so you no longer did that.
Speaker 7:What a game company did was actually design the game and then asset creation. And asset creation at HD was way more difficult, way more expensive than it was for for standard definition TVs. And so the economic imperative for developers came, we can't just be on PlayStation. We need to be on everything. And so that was the ultimate generation and almost every game was made to run everywhere.
Speaker 7:Run on PS three, run on Xbox three sixty, and run on the PC. And that was also the Xbox three sixty's best best generation. Yeah. That was the one they were most competitive on because they had all the games, because all developers were making them sort of run everywhere. Sure.
Speaker 7:They had a very simple to develop for architecture. The three sixty was very PC like, even more so than the one sort of previously. And that was their best generation. And then they come back the the next generation shoving Kinect down people's throats. We're gonna own the TV.
Speaker 7:And meanwhile, Sony learned their lesson. They're like, okay. We can't differentiate on hardware. We need to create sort of generic hardware that is easy to develop for, and the way we will differentiate is through exclusives. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:They bought a bunch of small studios, contrast like buying Activision.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should
Speaker 7:get to a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:They bought a bunch of small studios and pushed all those studios to developing killer games for the upcoming PS four. And so you got things like like the Spider Man, like Yep. That was a huge game.
Speaker 2:Naughty Dog, The Last of Us, that type of
Speaker 7:stuff. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:I mean and so the PS four was an unbelievable generation.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And in in a lot of the reasons unbelievable was because it had these exclusive games Mhmm. And they just crushed Microsoft. Because for all the cross platform games, the Call of Duty, the Madden's, things like that, those are always ran everywhere. And so what you do is you limit the economic potential of your studios because you're only building for your platform, and you make it back by all the licensing fees you get off the EAs of the world Mhmm. And the Activision's of the world because 80% of gamers are on your console, not on the other guy's console.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And so they just wiped out Microsoft in that generation, and that really just continued to the PS five. And this is where we sort of get to the the the Game Pass disaster.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yes. So yeah. I wanna yeah. Let's just jump forward to that.
Speaker 2:How is it?
Speaker 7:I didn't want to ramble too long. I was gonna give
Speaker 1:you a chance. No. We love it. We love it. I have a bunch of other questions Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not related to gaming, but I I like I I love this experience. The console history is fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really
Speaker 7:interesting how sort of because it tracks technological change to
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Such a large extent, and it totally shifted sort of strategies.
Speaker 1:So Andy, I think you can draw I think you can draw a lot of real parallels even just model releases over the last couple years how, you know,
Speaker 2:certain decisions around
Speaker 1:one model sets you back a certain numb you know, they're they're iterating a lot faster. Yeah. I'm I'm seeing parallel.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The the sort of development of the yeah. It's interesting. You can always just sort of draw draw draw lessons. So you get to Microsoft at this point again, I think I wrote at the time, oh, wait.
Speaker 7:Time to give up. Like, I wrote multiple times of the years they should give up on Xbox. And and at this point Microsoft
Speaker 2:option after they bought Activision just to make Call of Duty a console exclusive or would that have been an FTC problem? Well,
Speaker 7:we we we'll get to that because that's part of the story. Yeah. So Microsoft decides, okay, what we we're gonna actually try a new business model. It's true Xbox sort of selling a console Mhmm. Selling you know, licensing it.
Speaker 7:We kinda do that, but we're actually moving to being a services company. The stock's doing much better now. You know, like we have Azure, all the all these things. What we need to do and the way we compete with Sony is we need to have the exact opposite of the Sony strategy, and we need to lean into services, lean into subscriptions. We're gonna do Xbox Game Pass.
Speaker 7:And the idea of Xbox Game Pass is instead of buying every individual game for $60, $70, $80 gaming pricing, by the way, really has stayed suppressed probably far longer than it should have been, particularly for the AAA games, but we already got to that with Rockstar.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So they're they're they're like, you pay one price per month and you get access to all the games and Game Pass. Well, of course, no publisher wants to partake in this
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Because they make all their money upfront by selling games to their biggest fans. You you know, it's kinda like the movie model. You make a bunch of money upfront and yet looking
Speaker 1:at like at at what happened to the music industry as an example of saying like, yeah, it's cool to make your product more accessible. You get, you know, more listeners by bet.
Speaker 7:You had to make it up in volume. Right? And so this this the series s came about, there's the series x and the series s.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:The series s was a more underpowered but much cheaper model. I think it launched at $300 versus the x was I think $600 or maybe 500. And that was also a problem because you're kind of neutering the x because developers build to the lowest common denominator. That's that's sort of the highest one. So that was one problem.
Speaker 7:But the idea was we're gonna expand the market. And they have these package deals where you get an s and you get Game Pass for a year
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And it's this sort of thing. And we will make it up and the problem is no no independent developer is gonna go for that. Mhmm. So they had some of their own games, but they went out and started buying a bunch of developers. They bought Bethesda, which included, I think, it at that point, and and Zenimax.
Speaker 7:I I Yeah.
Speaker 2:They they have a bunch of like That's right. Idea library. Activision deals. Those but those developers just aren't releasing like incredible titles annually except for Activision, which does Exactly. Have the release
Speaker 7:And so the issue so the issue with buying these companies is their what you're paying for is you're paying for their existing business plus the premium. Mhmm. And their existing business was selling single copies of games Mhmm. To all platforms.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And what they were saying is we're going to basically force all these studios to take a bath, to lose a ton of money by putting all their games on Game Pass. We'll still sell on PlayStation because we have to because that's a lot of money. It'd be massively economically destructive not to. Mhmm. But what we think is gonna happen is gamers are gonna realize I could be paying $70 a pop on PlayStation
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Or I could go to Xbox and I could pay $20 a month and I can get all these games and that's it. What a better deal. And by the way, we'll get new gamers. People are gonna come in and and realize, wow. I can get all these games for $20 a month.
Speaker 7:None of that happened. All they did was cannibalize their existing business. They didn't expand the market for console gamers. All they did was have gamers who would have paid way more to play these games, pay way less to pay these games, and Microsoft ate it. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And they I think the, you know, the recent reporting was they expected to have 75,000,000 Game Pass subscribers by this year. They have, like, 30,000,000, and that number is actually decreasing. It's not going up. And so it's just been and so that that that that's sort of the context of what's happened here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Phil Spencer got retired, which if you retire at that level of a company, you're probably canned. Mhmm. Probably too late. The whole strategy of disaster. They brought in new leadership.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And now there's sort of like a reset going on. They're they're weighing off few thousand people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:They they say all games production are gonna continue, but there's a real sort of critical decision here. What do we do? Because we ended up getting stuck in the middle, like, and we're just this doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What what did you read into their approach of laying off 1,600 people now and keeping a 1,600 person rift?
Speaker 7:I mean, it's a terrible IT hub because they're like, everyone there for the rest of the year is terrible.
Speaker 1:VC would tell you to like, cut hard, cut deep.
Speaker 2:And then move forward with the team. If you're on the ship, we're going to Valhalla together or something. I
Speaker 7:do have some sympathy because the reality is I appreciated the note because they are in big trouble. And there's an there's an aspect of just stating it clearly. We're not sugarcoating it. And if they laid out how much trouble they were in and then only cut 1,600 people, then everyone kinda knows they're gonna be cutting more people. Right?
Speaker 7:So I think they're just in a bad spot. So, of course, it's not great. It's gonna destroy morale. It's gonna destroy everything for the next year because everyone's waiting to get fired. But there's a bit of they did, I think, tear the Band Aid off to the extent they could, and now there's just a now they can be very overt.
Speaker 7:They could go through and actually talk to employees about what are you working on? Why should you still be here? And the it's a reflection of the employment climate, but, like, people in general are more they're just not gonna bail. Microsoft, you know, they're gonna want to keep their job. And so they can probably, hopefully, fingers crossed, do better cuts by virtue of doing them in the open.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. But I don't know. I mean, I don't envy I don't envy Xbox's leadership at all. It's gonna be a very tough thing, but I I I can totally understand how they are where they are.
Speaker 2:Probability of a spin out.
Speaker 7:I mean, I think it I think it needs to happen. Like, I I but, you know, this is again, the regret is this was my take for years and years and years. I'm like, okay. Fine. Xbox Game Pass.
Speaker 7:That kind of seems kinda interesting. Let's go for it. It should've stuck to my guns. They're like, no. Stop.
Speaker 7:This is gonna be a disaster. I think yeah. I don't I I I don't get it. I just don't I didn't see it before. The thing that got me to say, okay.
Speaker 7:Let's give it a chance didn't work. Mhmm. I don't see it now. I mean, I think it does give me pause. They hired Matthew Ball, at Valence for Techery multiple Yeah.
Speaker 7:Times as their chief strategy officer. I have a lot of respect for, you know, his takes. So I'm curious what he's thinking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:This gets to the question before, is there a bit where they just write off these acquisitions
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And say, actually, this stuff's gonna be exclusive now. We're like Call of Duty, buy an Xbox. Wow. Like, basically giving into the FTC's worst fears, which but they those fears didn't make sense at the time in the context Yes. Because it's by writing
Speaker 1:off What's funny what's funny is that
Speaker 7:lost billions and billions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it would it would test it it would be a good pricing test for the power of a triple a game to say, okay, you can only get Call of Duty on Xbox now. And you would see like how like how many incremental Xbox sales do you get. Because that means the real value of the game is actually in the hundreds of dollars if people have Yep. And then they'll try something new.
Speaker 1:Switching gears a little bit. We keep having this experience where there's a company, you know, an AI company, let's say an application layer company that is or lab that is, you know, hot but then you don't hear very much for a few months and you write them off and then they come out and they've like added hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and are doing a crazy up round. And it's this weird thing where like even, you know, historically, you know, there's power laws everywhere. But I feel like in this moment, we're seeing more and more examples where like the tenth best company in the category is still having the financial performance that a company that would have been the leading company in their category five years ago. What do you of that?
Speaker 7:This is just a thing in tech in general that that is always sort of stuck out at me. I mean, I I think I
Speaker 1:Has it been has it been though, but like like like if you go back to like 2000 and 2015 was like the 10 best CRM company, like, actually printed No.
Speaker 7:The example I always go back to is I think it was 2014 or so when Apple bought Beats. And they bought Beats for $3,000,000,000, and everyone's going the tech press is going crazy. Everyone's writing thought pieces about it. And I'm like, you know, of course, writing about it. I'm like, $3,000,000,000, like Apple is a $500,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 7:What does $3,000,000,000 matter? And what's funny about that take is number one, it was right. Who cares about $3,000,000,000? That's in our couch cushions. Like, people were spun up about something.
Speaker 7:It didn't really matter. Number two, Apple is only a 500,000,000,000 company. Like, the the astronomical increase in valuation and numbers around this is absolutely crazy. So to your point, yeah, a 2019 CRM company, number one, they're probably wasn't a number 10 even then. But, yeah, the numbers are not even remotely tied to, like, any I just sort of let them go and be like, I write down the numbers, and they don't really mean anything to me.
Speaker 7:But it's very hard to keep track of. Like, the inflation in tech numbers specifically, you know, you think that what was I complaining about pricing before? Oh, yeah. Lemonade stands are bad. The Silicon Valley lemonade stand inflation is absolutely the worst in the world.
Speaker 2:On mergers and acquisitions, there's this news today about Getty Images calling off Shutterstock deal after UK regulators said that they would have to sell the editorial business for the merger to be approved. And it seemed very odd to me that a merger would be blocked by a regulator when that industry that is consolidating and is maybe becoming more monopolistic is under such insane attack from generative AI. I can't imagine a better defensive move than putting Getty Images and Shutterstock together. This
Speaker 7:happens this this is this happens every single time. Like, the the natural response to your overall category being threatened by an external force is consolidation. Like, it's the only way to defend yourself to sort of, you know, you get synergies. Like, even like, all these companies are pretty established, so it's actually fairly easy to price. You know exactly what things are.
Speaker 7:It's a much like, we if you have growing companies, you wanna merge them or acquire them. It's really unclear because how do you sort of price out the future? These companies are declining, so it's very easy. Like, you could do a discounted cash flow and understand exactly how much they're worth. It's a very straightforward negotiation.
Speaker 7:It makes total sense for them to consolidate date. But precisely because they're knowable and understandable, it's very easy for regulators to block them. And you see this happen again and again. You see, like, pushback on you saw this with TV and, like like, different networks getting together and the various pushbacks after that or in telecoms. Like, the this happens this is a natural pattern.
Speaker 7:The moment that a company, an industry wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the acts would time when action would matter Yep. Like when it when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry Yep. Regulators don't do anything. And also rightly don't do anything because you're dealing with the future and it's unknown, you don't wanna screw it up.
Speaker 7:It raises the question of what use do regulators sort of do anyway in broad broad strokes. I used to be I've sort of, you know, I think that Yeah. They probably do more harm than good as far as a lot of these sort of blocking mergers and things go. But I don't know. I'm the one that just said maybe Microsoft should take Call of Duty exclusive.
Speaker 7:So so who knows? Maybe I'll
Speaker 1:funny moment because we were looking it's a $3,700,000,000 deal. But I'm like, how is this a $3,700,000,000 deal? Both these are two 300,000,000 ish market cap companies and it was because they pry the deal was like priced back in January 2025 and so both companies had declined so much. Combined market That's under 1,000,000,000.
Speaker 5:Over the
Speaker 1:last eighteen months.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah. Deal anyway. I don't know. I mean, it
Speaker 7:could be worse. You could be Netflix and have the stock market and sort of like make a bid for Warner Brothers that the stock market hates abandon the deal, but they already decided you did the deal because you're desperate. You're anyway. So, yeah. They again, you don't even get what you bid for.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 7:Maybe that's what happened here. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Oh, well. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a have a great summer. Enjoy the break and we'll see you soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good luck with the lemonade stands. Yes. Try to try
Speaker 2:to make it You're gonna run up on a kid that has clarinet.
Speaker 7:You'll raise some money. Yeah. Clarinet and lemonade stand.
Speaker 2:Clarinet and lemonade stand. Free. Interest free. It might. Well, thank you so much and have a
Speaker 1:great see you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon,
Speaker 7:Talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Have
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Speaker 1:This reminded me there was somebody posted, like, a couple weeks ago something to the effect of, like, every day there's a new billion dollar deal in chips from some company you've never heard of. Market. I guess the trend the trend continues. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is this an overnight success? When did you start the company? How long has this been overdue?
Speaker 6:It's an
Speaker 4:overnight nine year success, you know. I've been Right. I've been building chips for thirty years, a high performance processor, and we started this company in 2017. So, no, but it's been it's been a great journey. It's just, you know, again, so noisy.
Speaker 4:There are so many companies out there doing all sorts of awesome things. But look, Inference Inference is now right in front of us. It's kind of broken everything open. It's what we do, and it's been what we've done for a long time. And so it's the new training run, and so people that are kind of been they're thinking about building just for training Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Well, now it's the time for inference, and and this is where we shine. And we shine, you know, and and and investors are putting all their money behind that. So we're excited about that.
Speaker 2:How how walk me through the the phases of I mean, you have some of the biggest companies in the world you're working with. JPMorgan Chase selected you for secure on prem AI inference. And I'm interested in the thought process that large Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 100 companies are going through right now. I imagine that there's a lot of explore frontier Very expensive. They're token maxing.
Speaker 2:Then they shift to, okay, this agented workflow is working. Let's use an open source model for it that is, you know, with either the open source frontier is caught up and can do this particular task. Maybe there's a fine tune or some RL on some private data that makes the system perform better. When is the conversation shifting to actually optimizing the inference stack, the hardware? What's the conversation like there?
Speaker 2:What are the savings Well, that people are focused
Speaker 4:I think what people are starting to realize after they started using ChatTripkey and the Frontier models is, well, there's a bunch of things they can do there and scrape, you know, who will use it and it's going to be part of their business for a long, long time. Mhmm. Right? And hyperscale is offering all sorts of different services with different GPUs and GPUs and training chips. They're offering different things.
Speaker 4:They're, again, on the cloud. What's happening now is this next phase of production is people starting to realize, okay, what happens to the stuff that I'm not comfortable releasing to these models? Like my private data, my security data, the stuff that I want your models to learn and then somehow become part of the global knowledge, right? And so what happens with that? Right?
Speaker 4:And so I don't know if I have, you know you know, my my clients' banking information, you know, my I have, you know, some some very regulated information. What do I do with that? Right? And so people start to realize, okay, there is a whole another class of workloads. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Whole another class of, you know, of of applications that you've got to go and do private. So, with someone someone like JPMorgan, fantastic, you know, I mean, they are the top of the top when it comes to enterprise and IT, right, so and and technology. Fantastic partners. They selected us as the ones that can come in and go into an environment like JPMorgan. Do full on prem secure private.
Speaker 4:They can bring their open source models. They can fine tune into it. They can deploy that privately securely and control the models and control it forever. And so so I think I think we're starting to see the landscape start to steady, right? There are some things you can use the Tropics for.
Speaker 4:There are some things that you're going to use the hyperscale clouds for. There are some things you're going to say, Hey, let me run on prem and let me control the outcome. And especially since I know I don't know how the regulatory environment is going to settle, let me just be secure for that. Let me just be safe and just run those things on my own models in my own environment with my own security around it and then be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can think, you know, pharma company being like, would love for all the other large pharma companies to share their data Yeah. With with a Frontier lab. Totally. But I'll I'll pass.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. What does what does partnership with you look like for a large organization? If I have, you know, a large IT footprint already, I probably have data centers, but they might be more CPU based workloads. Maybe I have some GPUs, but I'm not doing, you know, frontier inference. Not fully scaled up but I have some are you consulting with them at the level of like where they should be buying land for their next data center?
Speaker 2:How they set up a powered shell? Who they should partner with? Like how deep in the stack will you go with a company that you're working with?
Speaker 4:Well, look, if you look at the AI ecosystems up to date, we've been really focused on hyperscale clouds, putting out the neo clouds. The frontier models. We're really focused on building those out, you know, gigawatts here, megawatts there. I mean, just, you know, just this large scale deployment. Then what you're still thinking about is, well, how do I get as many tokens out per, you know, megawatt per kilo you know, kilowatt, megawatt, and gigawatt that I have.
Speaker 4:Right? And so that's kind of we're very focused on that. Some of it will play into that are, you know, really, really efficient models. We run the big models really fast. That's really what we're known for.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Huge models. Right? You know, the battleground for power and data center and all that is about huge models. It's not about the little models, it's about the trillion, multi trillion per annum models.
Speaker 4:That's what we focus on and we run that faster than anybody else in the world. So Mhmm. But then you flip it over to the enterprise, and for them, it's not as much about how many thousands of racks going to fit into an environment. It's about data privacy. It's about security.
Speaker 4:It's about having the capacity when I want it. It's about low latency. It's about these things that, again, you go back to traditional computing. It's what they've always wanted. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? They're always wanting low latency or high performance. All security and privacy. They've always wanted that. And so, what we can do is go on over is that because our rack our rack is a 10 kilowatt air cooled rack
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Compared to what traditional GPs are, 140 kilowatts per rack. Right? With 10 kilowatt air cooled rack producing state of the art AI.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:Now, can go into your existing data centers. Don't need to go buy new data. You already have data centers. Roll out the old gear, bring in the new gear, off the go, right? And you're running the latest and greatest models at at a great performance.
Speaker 4:That's kind of what's exciting about it. And, you know, there are first first and foremost, our customer, you know, they're buying racks and deploying them. But then broadly, they're really also a co developer, you know, when it comes to enterprise and you secure AI for enterprise, right, because they are the most knowledgeable when it comes to deploying these types of applications. They're just so smart about this stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We can partner with them and figure out how to bring the enterprise onboard, which, again, if we all think about it, there's three classes of AI clients. You've got the model makers.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? You've the clouds. People forget, enterprise is just waking up. Historically, there have been a massive amount of spend.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Mass. Right? They're just waking up. You see at Jake Morgan and some of the banks and some of the the other retailers, some to come aboard. And I think that's gonna be a part of the ecosystem.
Speaker 4:I think it's gonna be something that's gonna be around.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question for me. Jordy, you can take whatever you're after. But walk me through the pre chat GPT era for your company. I imagine that since 2022, 2023, it's been on fire, and and and demand has been through the roof.
Speaker 2:But how did the company survive from 2017 to 2022? What were you doing? Who were the customers? Did you have revenue? Like, what was was it all R and D and venture funding?
Speaker 2:Like, what was the what was the early history of the company? Because that felt that feels like a a very potentially rough period, but how did you get through that that that time?
Speaker 4:Well, look. No. I mean, I been in chip design for a long time. Well knows and always know that the long term investment. So, I mean, back in 2017, we're still trying to recognize cats and dogs on the web.
Speaker 4:Right? Exactly. Just a cat on a dog. That's what we're doing. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We're trying to figure out, you know, what what do we do with this thing? Right? And so we're building recommender models. We're also a different thing for people.
Speaker 4:But the reality is what OpenAI did, it just fleshed out all of that noise pre OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:And focused all the value around, let's start here. It doesn't mean that images aren't important. It doesn't mean voice mail. All these other things are important. But what it did is focused us as a global market to say, let's start here.
Speaker 4:Let's just start with language. And it's a very good place to start and that allowed us to actually all of us to come together and say, hardware, software, models. Everybody is focusing in on language as the use case. Now, you've got so much production traction and now you can focus on other things. We're doing great in voice.
Speaker 4:We're doing great video. These are things that are also coming, but the ability to sequence these things in production so that you can actually see value has been incredibly important.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 1:On that note, going forward, how are you thinking about reacting to customer needs? Like, this partnership with with JPM and some of your other, you know, new customers feels like reacting to this, like, real time need of, like, okay. We understand the potential. We're willing to invest a lot here, but we have certain kind of criteria around how we wanna roll these products out versus skating to where the puck is going and trying to make predictions around r and d that you do today that will pay dividends, you know, three, four, five years out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, you when your chip design, as you guys know, right, you know, takes you two years to design and you've got to go through TSMC. You've got build these wafers and you've to build the systems. Mean, there's a three or four year cycle. Right?
Speaker 4:And so, you know, always, it's a blend between engineering and fortune telling. Right? And so, you're kind of mixing those. But the reality the reality is you're always doing that, but here's the difference when it comes to enterprise. We we not only we have JP Morgan, but last month, we announced a huge partnership with Vista Equity, which has 92 portfolio companies building all these applications.
Speaker 4:What is the biggest thing that we run out with AI is we don't have offtakes. We don't have offtakes. Now, what you're seeing is the JP Morgans of the world, the Empress of the world, the Vistas of the world, all these applications all turning SaaS companies into AI first companies. Mhmm. And you're seeing the demand pull through.
Speaker 4:So what we're excited about this is not only do we have the chips, and you got connected with the data center that's there. Oh, the next thing is connected with the end user, the end off taker that applies AI into something that's useful to new businesses. So, we're super excited about the JP Morgan, business, all of these type of things. That's our that's our mentality is what are people using it for? Solve that problem.
Speaker 4:Everything underneath follows.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great. Congratulations on the massive round.
Speaker 1:Nine year overnight success.
Speaker 2:Can't wait to talk
Speaker 4:to you
Speaker 2:again soon. Have a great rest your week.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest is Alana Palmedo from Paradigm.
Speaker 8:Hey, guys. What's up?
Speaker 2:What's up? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Last guest raised 1,000,000,000. You had to one up them.
Speaker 2:You had to two up them with 1.2. Tell us about the new fund.
Speaker 8:Oh, man. Thanks for having me, guys. Really great to be here. We're super excited about it. We we raised 1,200,000,000 to go after the new opportunity set, Frontier.
Speaker 8:Thanks
Speaker 2:for warming that up for me. You're welcome. It sounds nice and warm. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:So Continue. Continue. 1,200,000,000 for investment.
Speaker 8:Alright, guys. We're we're going big. We're we're going after all frontier tech. We're really excited about it. Obviously, you guys know we got our our start in crypto back in 2018.
Speaker 8:This is our fourth fund.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Pretty pretty excited about it.
Speaker 2:But I feel like I don't know. This is being somewhat positioned as like an expansion of the vision or the thesis, but I feel like Paradigm's been investing in broader frontier themes for years now. Like can you talk about some of the history of expanding beyond crypto and the key moments in the fund's history that sort of woke you up to broadening the thesis?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, I think in 2018, crypto was the most interesting frontier to be investing into. Yeah. And like that really was the heart of how we started building the firm. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it was the thesis behind being the sort of researchers, builders first. How do you get really close to the tech to be able to understand and underwrite these things from first principles? And then I think over time, it's become pretty obvious that it's not the only frontier and really hard to ignore what's happening in AI. But actually, I would say it's more than that. It's like the world itself has started to blend together.
Speaker 8:And drawing these concrete lines is like no longer applicable. I think that like even something that called itself a crypto project years ago, today like things that are right on the periphery, tech is just all touching each other. Yeah. When you think about trying to separate it, it just doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about the early stage? There's been some chatter on the timeline about, oh, like, every VC just wants to pile more money into the biggest private companies, the trillion dollar private companies. Why would I waste money or time talking to an early stage founder? How are you thinking about opportunities at early stage, mid stage, late stage? What even is mid stage now?
Speaker 2:Is that 10 a mere $50,000,000,000 company early stage at this point? Who knows?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think well, I think stages is a hard thing to define because like what are we really talking about?
Speaker 6:Are we
Speaker 8:talking about the stage of the company? The valuation? Yeah. Like, I think it's impossible to not be backing some of the earliest founders and folks who are coming out with new great ideas. And so for us, it's like talent led I would say.
Speaker 8:Like you find great people. Oftentimes they're in their early twenties. So I don't think you can ignore the early stage, but you also can't ignore the dynamic that you're describing which is like the power law of what's happening with these larger later stage companies and how much they're able to capture in the compound rate of growth. Mhmm. So I think it's I think it's like you have to do both.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. From an actual product standpoint, are you breaking out the fund? Is there some amount, you know, segmented for the early stage, some for growth, some for incubation? How should founders be thinking about the new vehicle?
Speaker 8:It'll be truly stage agnostic. So we're going to invest in everything from super early seed stage, even pre seed in some cases, all the way into growth markets. We also, you know, are we have a core flagship fund which is an open ended vehicle and so we invest into public markets too.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. Very cool. What is the effect of this year's IPOs? What what have been the internal learnings from the the the height of the opening of the y of the IPO window? It feels like it's sort of open, but maybe not fully wide open.
Speaker 2:We've got a lot of exciting IPOs that have done well. But how is that affecting the fund and your feeling around the market right now?
Speaker 8:That's a good question. I think it's a hard thing to answer. One of the interesting dynamics happening in IPOs is like hyper liquid and some of the trading activity we've seen in advance of the IPOs. It's been pretty fun to see like the twenty four seven three sixty five markets really come alive which has been a long term thesis that the crypto markets have had. And I think Jeff Lowe at Hyperliquid has just done an incredible job pulling it off.
Speaker 8:Jeff Lowe at trade.xyz and Jeff Yeon at Hyperliquid. Yeah. And so, the Cerebras IPO, SpaceX IPO, like all of these now, like we had all of this trading activity going into those. And so, there was a lot more transparency on pricing in advance of the IPO event itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how accurate was the like on chain pricing relative to what these IPOs actually opened at? And do you feel
Speaker 8:like Mhmm. Yeah. Surprisingly like quite accurate actually.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And have you heard of any institutions like starting to, you know, bigger like firms on Wall Street that you think will, if they're planning to invest in the IPO or or trade it after it opens, actually start their activity on chain? Is that something that you see happening in the future as we get sort of more evidence that on chain trading tracks, you know, real life after these IPOs actually happen?
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, if I were them, I would be doing that. I don't know what the rules are and what the playbook is for them today, and like what the liquidity and depth of those books looks like. But I mean, I think that's the thesis for what twenty fourseven, three sixty five markets look like in the future Is you're going have a lot more institutional activity.
Speaker 8:Certainly we're seeing that in perps as a derivative product themselves. Like I think they're just a much more efficient pure play product for big hedge funds to come in. And I would even say like the same thing can be true in prediction markets. Like what we're seeing is you know some people are relating to prediction markets as an institutional product for getting exposure to things and bets that they want to place that is much more precise than we've had in the future, excuse me in the past. And so the future I think holds like still a lot of white space in terms of how these markets are going to evolve, but we continue to be really excited about it.
Speaker 1:That's great. What do your internal meetings look like? Do you have like, you know, a meeting once a month where you guys pitch new frontiers that you're Mhmm. Kind of kicking around? Like, at what like, what what is what is forming a thesis look like?
Speaker 1:Is it is it all partner driven or is it more collective? You guys have kind of a general idea of a category that you're excited about and then you work together. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Well, I'd say top down like thematically we're investing into areas where that are structurally long AGI first and foremost. So, what are the things that are going have a natural tailwind to come out of that? We don't run like necessarily a top down process though down to an investment and say like let's go do a deep dive or a particular I think that oftentimes you try to gain conviction and do sprints on individual areas in the market that were maybe like there's a particular founder that we are excited about. But the process, yeah, would say it's more organic. Like each individual partner may have a different thing that they're excited about and digging in on.
Speaker 8:I do think like fundamental to our thesis is like we have to be close to the tech. And so, we ourselves have to be able to go really deep and like understand these things down to lines of code. A lot of folks on the team are computer scientists or physics
Speaker 1:down to the metal. You guys have down to metal. Yeah. Guys have a little data center in the office? Just humming away.
Speaker 4:No
Speaker 8:data center in the office. Yeah. I mean, orbital data centers, that'd be the future? I don't know. What do you guys think?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think you guys should should get some get on get on the next SpaceX rocket and run a little experiment.
Speaker 2:I think it's all just yeah. I I'm on the Elon timelines, is take whatever he says and multiply it by three, and that's probably true, which is still going to happen but just not next year.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think I think Elon will will things into existence.
Speaker 2:Yes. Agree. Enough time, he will get there. Yeah. Almost always.
Speaker 8:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:But it takes time. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to come chat with us and congratulations on the new fund.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And excited to meet all the new founders Yeah. Joining the portfolio. Great portfolio.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Great folks. I love Zip Yeah. Evan Rogers.
Speaker 8:Keller is amazing at Zip Line. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Super excited.
Speaker 2:Have a great rest of your day, and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 8:Great to
Speaker 1:have you on, Alana. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next
Speaker 1:Next up is Byron Boots.
Speaker 2:We got Boots on the ground.
Speaker 1:Boots. Let's bring
Speaker 2:in Byron Boots from Here
Speaker 1:he is.
Speaker 2:O Overland AI. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 9:Great. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's it's really exciting to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes. Great to have you.
Speaker 2:We're very excited. Can you reintroduce the product and then take us through the latest news and the contract that you just signed?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Sure. So good news is I'm working here out of our factory in Seattle. So you can actually see the product that we have. Right?
Speaker 9:So we're building autonomous ground vehicles for defense. Basically, think about that as like robots for the battlefield. Yeah. So do you guys wanna see it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Walk through it a little. Give us a tour.
Speaker 9:So so here's here's one of them. This is our our Ultra product. You can kind of see the top part of it. Yeah. It's a large off road ground vehicle.
Speaker 9:You've got sensors in the front. So there's stereo cameras and LIDAR. Mhmm. You've got these big big wheels here and and long travel suspension. Down here is a payload deck.
Speaker 9:So you can think about putting, you know, big payloads on the vehicle. Mhmm. Right in here, there's onboard power. There's compute down below the deck. Comms
Speaker 6:in
Speaker 9:the back. So that gives you just a a brief overview of one of the things that we're building. And then, you know, you asked about the contract, and we're super excited. So we're the first ground autonomy provider to get a production contract with the US military. $20,000,000 contract Thank
Speaker 2:corps. That's fantastic. That I you're thinking about it. I'm thinking that truck needs a gun. What what does the payload look like on there?
Speaker 2:It seems very modular. It seems like you can put a lot of different equipment on that. Is that something that's delegated to the marine corps? They decide they partner with other primes or or do you have like other relationships where you can bring the configuration to them?
Speaker 9:So we've put 30 payloads, 30 different payloads on these vehicles. It's designed to be modular. You can see that there's l track down here that makes it really easy to attach things.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:So this is everything from kinetic payloads like remote weapon stations, drones, e w. Sure. So it depends on what the the customer wants. We can help them integrate anything onto onto this vehicle.
Speaker 1:Dogs as a form factor. There's been a bunch of sort of Robot dogs? Robot dogs.
Speaker 2:Or actual dogs.
Speaker 1:Well, we should get into real dogs. Yeah. But there's been a bunch of videos circulating recently. There was one maybe a week ago of of a robotic dog and it seemed like they had solved, like, some of the recoil challenges. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Do you think that's a like, how are you thinking about that form factor? Obviously, you guys are you're focused on something else, but I'm sure you understand the trade offs of both. I I can imagine, like, your product is much better for high range, know, situations where you need a lot of range. But but how do you think about it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So so one of the reasons why we love this form factor is that it's first of all large enough to put a serious payload on it. It can handle one to 2,000 pounds depending on what the configuration is. It's got wheels, so, you know, it has, really good use of energy. You can you can drive it, 100 miles.
Speaker 9:So robot dogs are really cool too. So before I started Overland AI, was a professor running a lab where we worked on machine learning and robotics, and we had a bunch of robotic dogs in in the lab, and they're they're fun to work on. But I think wheeled vehicles are really the place where we can get, know, the most the
Speaker 2:most wheel is underrated and it doesn't need to be reinvented. That's what I'm crazy. Hearing.
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, so not only do you not need to reinvent a wheel, I mean, if you have squishy tires, you can do things like drive up and down stairs and do all
Speaker 2:sorts of stuff. I never thought about how simple that is. Can just drive up the stairs if your tires are big enough. How big are the tires on the
Speaker 9:That's right.
Speaker 2:On that truck?
Speaker 9:I think these are like 38 inch. So pretty big. Eights.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. I love it. What does the actual manufacturing process look like? Obviously, you're very well funded company, 100,000,000 round recently. At the same time, there's probably a lot of experimentation, a lot of putting different parts of the supply chain together, a lot of modularity.
Speaker 2:So how hand built are these? Where what does the automation story over the future look like?
Speaker 9:So the ultra vehicle like this one is actually based on a Polaris RZR chassis and and drivetrain. Okay. So we get that from Polaris and then we upgrade the suspension. You can actually see a a great view of that here.
Speaker 2:Got
Speaker 9:it. We pull out the the seats. We just add this flat payload deck. Yeah. And, you know, we do all the work to add the compute and the sensors and and wiring power, all all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9:So Yeah. We pull all that together in our factory here. We're also very field forward, so we we test these out in the fields all the time. You know, we're in the field every single day working on the, you know, the software, the autonomy. And I think one thing which is really really important about these systems is that this is a completely autonomous robotic system.
Speaker 9:Right? Like it has sensors that allow it to perceive the environment, plan through the environment, control it so that a user can just tell it where it wants it to go, what payload to execute. It's not you know, it doesn't have to be teleoperated. You know, a single user can control multiple vehicles. It's one the things which is really cool about this tech.
Speaker 2:I imagine there's like very high demand for both teleop and full autonomous mode though. Right? People want to be able to port in for a particular mission and then also be able to just try and draw waypoints on a map?
Speaker 9:So so one of the things that I think we see is when people first start to use a vehicle like this, they're like, oh, like I want to teleop it and and I'll be able to precisely control where it goes. But they quickly realize that you can actually just tell it where to go on the map, tell it you know, what orientation you want it to be in Mhmm. And it will just go there and and do it. And so, it's actually safer, more efficient, and allows you to get, like, much more force multiplication if the operator just relies on the autonomy to get it there. And so Mhmm.
Speaker 9:What we've seen is is war fighters really embracing that and starting to experiment much more with that. So we think autonomy really is the the future.
Speaker 2:Any plans to make a dual use version for Malibu? If you got a bunch of surfboards, you wanna get them down to the beach, you load them up and say, hey, I'll meet you there in five minutes.
Speaker 1:Some natural light.
Speaker 2:Some natural light.
Speaker 9:I mean, sounds it sounds awesome. We are we are actually dual use. We are using this for things like wildland firefighting and other things. So who knows? I mean, may maybe pretty soon we'll be able to to, you know, get you guys one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The day party market.
Speaker 2:The Amman taking around the the hotel property. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic news. Congratulations. And we'll talk to Incredible.
Speaker 2:You We appreciate what
Speaker 9:you so much. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:A great week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and There's password a scoop.
Speaker 2:There's a scoop on the timeline. Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool that takes on clogged code and cursor and codex potentially. It's meant to build software end to end. The tool is being internally used for now under the code name teammate. Perplexity has been sort of bouncing around from different so Steve Who here says, what happened to the Bloomberg terminal killer?
Speaker 2:They were working on that for a while. Then they launched Bloomberg Computer, which was sort of a computer use agent and saw incredible growth. Like, you saw the ARR numbers went way up. Feels like one of those examples of a company that people were sort of Yeah.
Speaker 6:Think one of the challenges
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden there's some new good news.
Speaker 1:Perplexity has a ton of revenue. Yeah. They're taking a ton of shots on goal. Yeah. Just like every other company to be clear.
Speaker 1:But I think the difference is that Perplexity doesn't have a product that's being used heavily by tech insiders.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And so people just see them as like running around with like they they it feels like they don't have something like that's a hit in enterprise that they can fall back on Yeah. While they keep taking shots at some of these Sure. Sure. Enterprise y products.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know. Yeah. It's interesting. I I deals like It's
Speaker 2:fun prints. Remember they Right. They fired up the Perplexity Investment Fund investing in other startups.
Speaker 1:I don't know what they invested in.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:know what they invested in, but But it but he has he has good access.
Speaker 2:It's possible everything in that fund is just, on fire because the market is doing so well. So many companies are getting marked up. That could be a pretty interesting portfolio to dig into at
Speaker 1:I some think that this is more this teammate makes me think that it's maybe something else, but I could see them seeing lovable's growth and having a lot of overlap And rapport. Audiences and rapport and saying like, hey, we wanna make, you know, we yeah. We wanna make it a more consumer Totally. Leaning product. I I I think it'll be hard to really get a foothold.
Speaker 2:They are more adjacent than you think. You go to Perplexity to look up some information. You get nice, you know, UI design on the responses. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They have the Joe Rogan partnership Yeah. Which seems like it's crushing.
Speaker 2:Lewis Hamilton.
Speaker 1:And they and Joe can be like, hey, Jamie, build me a build me a new CRM during the show.
Speaker 2:I don't think j Joe Rogan has any interest in the CRM. I don't think he's in the market. I think he does everything every text message and you have to be invited. So I think you know if you're gonna be on the show.
Speaker 1:Before we have our next guest
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Grok four five
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Is out. Is out. It's got some reviews, his benchmarks. Good on the benchmarks.
Speaker 2:Goes. I wonder how does Michael Truell have a SpaceX AI badge yet? Is the Cursor team involved in this heavily? Because I know they were doing some consulting work while the deal closed. Of course, the deal was announced, but they still have to go through post merger integration.
Speaker 2:I wonder how deep that team was integrated, but excited to check
Speaker 1:it out. Still gonna be running under the Cursor umbrella for a long time.
Speaker 2:Sure. I think
Speaker 1:it's much easier to sell Cursor through the enterprise
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Than And
Speaker 2:they have Composer, separate model, but
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 3:Cursor did that we've partnered with SpaceX AI to train Groc Okay. I think that there was a lot of collaboration.
Speaker 2:I really wonder if there'll be any gap in capabilities in the in the spiky intelligence sense of Groc will be good at a particular thing, writing or what something that's a little bit more ex native, Twitter native, news, social media, like that's been the advantage there potentially. And then Cursor will be more data code driven and there'll actually be sort of a bifurcation in the models or will we just see a consolidation where both models wind up offering like basically the same spiky frontier as every other model. Anyway, excited to dig into that. Always love a new model launch. But we have our next guest in the waiting room.
Speaker 2:We have Will Mayer from Coat Holdings. Welcome to the show. How are you doing well?
Speaker 3:I'm doing well. How are you guys?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you
Speaker 5:on the show.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1:What what what do
Speaker 10:we got
Speaker 1:in the background here?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that real?
Speaker 10:That is real. Yeah. That's like various artifacts from the past. So
Speaker 2:yeah. Very cool. Webby awards, I I think. The spring, isn't that a Webby award?
Speaker 10:That is a that is Webby award. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Give us a little background. Give us a little bit of the journey. Introduce yourself for those who are watching who might not be familiar with your work.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Of course. I am Will Mayer. I'm the co founder and high priest at Cold Holdings. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Background came from making skateboard films at a young age when I was like 14 for companies like Vans. Became deeply obsessed with brands and what they represented.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Moved from there into advertising, working with brands like Nike and Netflix. And then started working more and more with startups, incubating companies fell in love with cults and religions and believed that many of the best brands are some form of a religion.
Speaker 2:Remember remember early in Silicon Valley, I was working on a company and people were saying like, oh, like you don't want your product to have a cult like following. And I was looking at Cult of Mac, like the website that tracks Mac they they they refer to it as a cult. It's a great way to think about things obviously.
Speaker 1:Case against not wanting a cult?
Speaker 2:Oh, just that like, you know, cults are bad. They often lead to like terrible outcomes in the literal sense and also you probably don't want like psychos following you. You want just like normal customers in reality and that's what Apple wound up getting. They got a huge amount of just normal consumers but they do have a cult like fan base.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Needed the cult to get them through to the truly hit consumer product. Product.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I've been before the, like, nineteen seventies, the word cult was actually neutral. It just meant a new fringe group. Uh-huh. There was a period in, the sixties and seventies people referred to as the fourth great awakening.
Speaker 10:Like a huge boom in spirituality. Things like, Aum Shinrikyo, Children of God, but also brands like Blue Ribbon Sports, which became Nike or Apple Yeah. From Jobs. In that period, the word cult went from being a neutral word to a negative. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And conservatives started
Speaker 5:to use it
Speaker 10:to demarcate and delegitimize new movements. So today, sociologists mostly refer to cults as NRMs or new religious movements.
Speaker 2:Okay. Got it. Interesting. Yeah. But you're you're reclaiming and you're taking it back.
Speaker 2:Talk to us about I mean, have a couple different a couple different things going on in your world, but I'm interested particularly in in advertising video production. Like what does it look like to work with you? How long are you on a particular project? The Polymarket ad went very viral. And I'm wondering like what does that process look like from start to finish?
Speaker 10:It really depends on the type of folks we work with. With Polymarket, we've been working with them since January Mhmm. In like a bunch of different capacities. Mhmm. The team and I have been working on strategy, bunch of the brand work, and out of home stuff.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:That campaign came together in an insane timeline and was driven a lot in partnership with their internal team.
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 10:I got a call, like, three weeks before the World Cup, and if you guys know, like, people now are working on Super Bowl ads. Yep. It's like a six month process. Normally, that whole thing from, like, concept to production to post to being online and routed for TV was like three, three and a half weeks. Wow.
Speaker 10:So it was insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What how did you process all the different reactions? I I think I saw the Reuben ad like while watching UFC. I watched it too. And I was like, woah, Rick Rubin in a prediction market ad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The ad was obviously very cool. A lot of people were surprised by that. I brought it up to you. You were like, Rick Rubin came out of the rap game.
Speaker 1:Why is it surprising that he would do like a
Speaker 2:Prediction marketing on on UFC?
Speaker 1:So so yeah. I feel like it was very you have very mixed reactions to it. You know, not not on the creative. I think that was universally like creative was awesome. But how did you process people's reaction to it?
Speaker 10:I mean, I feel like a lot of the best campaigns are pretty controversial. I mean, in our time with Equinox, we, like, banned membership sales on January 1, and that became, like, the most heated moment that business has ever had, but also the most successful campaign in history for them. So I think with with someone like Rick, what was great is there's nobody that represents questions better than him for those who feel like either the creative actor
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:Anything else.
Speaker 10:So he felt like a great fit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've been feeling over you know, we're we're sort of at like peak marketing content
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And yet, like, it feels like advertising has never been in a worse place. I don't know if you feel the same way. The the the campaign with Polymarket is, like, it is a campaign. It feels like the the the craft of of advertising and that's why I think it broke through as much as like, again, the actual creative was good. Do you feel the same way?
Speaker 1:Do you have launch video fatigue? Mhmm. It used to be like, you know, maybe a company would come out with a video, but they were really just hoping for like a TechCrunch article. Now it's like, well, we're definitely doing a video and it'll look exactly the same as every other video. And then, yeah, maybe we get a TechCrunch article, but it feels like people are trying to create their own artifacts.
Speaker 10:I mean, dude, I don't want to I don't want to point it back at you, but you guys created like the OG launch video, I feel like. I remember like that was my first experience at TBPN was like you guys on a helicopter or
Speaker 6:something. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:So I I'd say
Speaker 1:No. And and we you you you'll appreciate. We had 20 other videos planned and then it it just started this sort of snowball where everyone was launching videos and we're like, this is no longer a good way to actually break through and get attention. So we just switched
Speaker 2:literally had the whole production team here like geared up for like weekly video shoots with ideas and different songs that we were gonna play out and then it just got
Speaker 1:so tired. Saturated.
Speaker 2:We were like, okay. Let's not do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should have we should have made 10.
Speaker 2:We should have made them one day at a time or something like that. But I don't know. What do think about like the the the the over saturation of things like how fast the Internet moves, when you want to jump on something, when you want to bring back something from the archive that hasn't been touched in years?
Speaker 10:It's tricky, man. Mean, again, like,
Speaker 1:not to throw it back to
Speaker 10:the seventies again, but the average American, I think, then saw, like, 500 ads a day, and now it's more than 5,000. And who knows what it'll be in, like, a few years from now.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 10:I we get hit up, like, every day for, like, countless launch videos. Sure. I'm not sure how long the trend's gonna last. I think just, like, it's cliche to say, but like taste and a contrarian point of view will cut through. The approach I would give to people to try is I think the poly market work resonated because we took somebody who would the whole team, like, from creatives on in internally there to the photographer Mhmm.
Speaker 10:To the talent, normally wouldn't be a part of a prediction market campaign.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:When you think of like Equinox, every photographer we ever hired for Equinox had never shot fitness before. Oh. They only shot fashion. All of our design team came from museums that we would poach. So I think like hiring people out of category Yeah.
Speaker 10:You have enough subject matter experts in the business, so bring in people who don't know the category and can bring new things to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you have a campaign that hits, where do you do you think the value is primarily coming from a great idea or the execution?
Speaker 10:I think a lot it's hard to
Speaker 1:say Equinox the the great the great idea is like, let's make it impossible to sign up for a membership on January 1. Right? Like that's the idea and that's what sticks with people. I don't even remember like a lot of the visuals, but to me that that's what made it a great campaign.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think that we spent less than 1% of what we would normally spend on a January campaign that year for what we launched, which we don't speak January. It was just black and white text, which is why you don't remember it. But, like, brand actions, I think, cut through more than anything now. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Especially with, like, I feel like AI is gonna democratize creativity and skill Yeah. To so many people. That there'll be such an abundance of beautiful visuals over the next few years that, like, the concept and what the company actually does will probably be the most important thing.
Speaker 1:Interesting. What action are you willing to take?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actions speak louder than words and maybe slop as well. How how do you how is working with Brian Johnson different?
Speaker 2:Because it feels like Polymarket, it's sort of like a standard playbook. You have a celebrity, you have a video, it's going in the World Cup. It's like it's like standard inventory. Obviously, executed very well, but with Brian Johnson, it's like this massive owned media influencer driven individual. He's huge on Twitter.
Speaker 2:It it just feels like a different company. How did you approach that? What did you wind up working with him on?
Speaker 10:It's massive. Him and Kate hit us up like probably late twenty twenty four, early twenty five because they heard we were focused on like building religions. Yeah. And the brief was basically, like, build a build a religion
Speaker 2:for That Don't makes sense.
Speaker 10:So we spent a lot of last year. We had to, like, to basically collaborate with them on what the doctrine of Don't Die became Yeah. A lot of the rituals around it. There's like a I don't know, like five core tenants of like how to build a cult brand.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And I think Brian's like done all of those completely naturally authentically on his own.
Speaker 2:Do you know
Speaker 5:Were you
Speaker 1:were you responsible for getting him on a cigarette box? You know about this?
Speaker 10:I was not responsible for that.
Speaker 2:In in France, they have pictures of I think cancer patients on the on the boxes of cigarettes and one of them looks exactly like Brian Johnson.
Speaker 1:Pull this up.
Speaker 2:It's very funny. Yeah. We can share it with you and you can see. I I'm interested to know the the the five key tenants of building a cult brand. But first, we'll show you the image of the Brian Johnson on the cigarette box.
Speaker 2:Can we zoom in there? It looks just like him to me. This one
Speaker 1:This would have been good guerrilla marketing. Yeah. You should have claimed credit.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I'm honestly surprised it's not but yeah. Respect. But
Speaker 2:well yeah. Walk us through the five tenants. How do they apply to Blueprint and beyond?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I think it it comes down to like five core things. The first being doctrine. So having like identity before features Okay. Which is like what is the sacred text that everybody abides by.
Speaker 10:Most brands have a tagline but what can actually be like truly enforced and felt by the community. Brian's done this incredibly well. Think of things like most, religions have commandments or tenets. Brands have, like, think different or Mhmm. Just do it.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. You have longer forms of doctrine, like the Technological Republic by Alex Karp Yeah. Or like Zero to One. Brian used to write under the moniker zero all the time, so he's been primed for that. The second is ritual, which like, again, Brian through the dinner series for Don't Die Dinners did such a beautiful job at.
Speaker 10:You guys have a ritual here every day, five days a week.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:But like, what are the initiations into your brand or into your community? Yeah. And it's basically forming like a ritual that becomes a habit that becomes identity over time. So like, you buy a pair of shoes, you join a run club, you are a runner. The third one is symbols and language.
Speaker 10:So, like, how can you take elements to create in groups versus out groups? What are the key features that signal people who are insiders versus outsiders to your brand? CrossFit has like it's not a workout, it's the WOD. With Equinox, we never said gyms, we would say clubs. Yeah.
Speaker 10:So elements like that are super important. The Catholic church used stained glass windows to educate an overwhelmingly illiterate population in the twelfth century to indoctrinate them into the church. Interesting. That's like another form of symbols for that. The fourth is a charismatic leader, which again, you have in Brian, you have in folks like Palmer Lucky
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Where you almost icon yourself.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So like Palmer, Goatee, Hawaiian shirts, flip flops, things like that are so incredibly important. And then the fifth one is an enemy. I think like every brand needs a nemesis. It a lot of people use, like, competitors. Apple started as IBM Yeah.
Speaker 10:With the, like, 1984 campaign. Yeah. But over time, it evolved to the concept of conformity. Because when you get bigger than your competition, that enemy loses power. But if it's like an overwhelming thought that can never truly be defeated, the enemy always keeps power.
Speaker 10:So I you were doing a
Speaker 1:brand for the dog breed golden retriever, and you needed to figure out an enemy for the golden retriever, what what would let's let's workshop
Speaker 2:The tennis ball.
Speaker 1:No. It's not the tennis ball. It's not
Speaker 2:the tennis ball.
Speaker 1:Because that's your friend. That's the thing that you wanna that's the thing that you wanna that you're desperately trying to find and get.
Speaker 2:It's hunger. I don't know. Do
Speaker 10:think? It could be hunger for for my Australian Shepherd. It's like every single loud car, so I
Speaker 5:would say like
Speaker 10:the opposite of peace. Okay. And in defining your enemy, you define yourself. Yeah. So like I'd be interested who are who's your enemy?
Speaker 10:Who's like the nemesis of TBPN right now?
Speaker 1:Oh. We've we've actually Yeah. We mapped
Speaker 2:this all out. We actually did this experience. And I mean it was geopolitical near peer rivals who you can guess. And then we had a bunch of like more satirical ones like
Speaker 1:Like our allies.
Speaker 2:People who block data centers. Centers,
Speaker 1:that whole thing. I mean, yeah. That that was that was early on. We would do things more like who were who were our allies. Like if someone would mention private equity, we would just like, you know, clap.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Because that was
Speaker 1:like no one ever is like standing
Speaker 2:Yeah. For private equity. Short sellers. We hate short sellers. That type of thing, you
Speaker 6:know. Course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The yeah. We have a sheet, the terms and memes.
Speaker 1:How do you how do you think about scaling what you're doing, you know, in a in a craft business? It's it's exceeding it's been done. Scale's been done in in in the creative field with with with agencies, but oftentimes, it's at odds with great work. But how do you think about it?
Speaker 10:I think the the point of view, the way we work is different than most agencies. Like, I I have no desire to scale the agency much larger than it is today. The way in which we work was, like, you can either grow an agency really large, try to sell for a pretty shit multiple down the road, or what we started doing, like, five years ago was incubating startups. So only a third of our clients pay us in cash, the other two thirds us in some form of equity. We helped create a credit card company that is called Built Rewards, which you might have heard of.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Sky Uncle Jane. Yeah. And I've done a bunch of stuff like that. So we're working on a ton of those with firms like Index and other venture firms.
Speaker 2:I found I found our actual Yeah. Our actual list of enemies. Did you? HVAC repairman. I don't know why they're on there.
Speaker 2:DJI drones, TikTok, Xi Jinping, under monetized podcasts, podcasts that don't have enough advertising.
Speaker 1:Which we solved.
Speaker 2:Leaf blowers.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Fantasy football. Why'd we put that on there? What's wrong with fantasy football?
Speaker 1:This is from the original printout of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The TBPN. So we we when we were doing the show early on, we would have these bits. Yeah. And if we had a good bit, we would write it down and we would have the sheet that we would update and I would just keep it here and it would just remind me of like the kind of the core tenants as we were establishing the In
Speaker 2:in in allies, we had, job creators and bubbles. Very good. Very good. Yeah. It was a lot it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good exercise for any brand. But of course, everyone should call you first because clearly much better than most people. But fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking down for us.
Speaker 2:Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Next time you're next time one of your is coming on Yeah. Flag it to us. Yeah. Be great.
Speaker 1:Excited to meet them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to Awesome. Them
Speaker 4:Sounds good.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 10:good one, guys. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. The old term sheet, the size gong timeline, some personnel news. We haven't done one of those in a while.
Speaker 2:We don't really do the trade deals. The the the trading cards really took the place of the trade deals. But speaking of advertising, I want to watch this SK Hynix advertisement that Tyler dug up. Let's play this because I want your reaction, Jordy.
Speaker 5:To This is an
Speaker 2:ad for SK Hynix? Okay.
Speaker 7:So
Speaker 2:we're also being exported
Speaker 1:exported
Speaker 2:and time went by. He's dressed up as the chip, as the HPM? He's dressed up as the memory. Can't you just be cool? How have you been doing?
Speaker 2:Why is he frozen? Some prop comedy. I like it.
Speaker 1:Wow. I don't know what that means, but I love SK Hynix.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We don't know how to make I think
Speaker 3:that ad has like 80,000,000 views.
Speaker 2:Wow. For good reason. It's a good ad. Makes me want HBM. Well, our next guest is live in the TBP at Ultradome with us.
Speaker 2:We have Tucker Brown from Compound Creative Holdings. He's the managing partner, friend of Paki McCormick. And we're very excited to have him here on the show. We're back. We're back.
Speaker 5:This is quite a set.
Speaker 2:Yes. Welcome. How was the rest of your trip to France?
Speaker 5:France was hot. Okay. It was Difficult. It was productive though. I think, you know, you guys probably saw the energy that there was Yeah.
Speaker 5:In in
Speaker 2:Were you doing deals?
Speaker 5:I was trying to
Speaker 7:do deals.
Speaker 2:Okay. But when you do the deal, are you a back of the envelope guy or a napkin math guy? Which one are you pulling out?
Speaker 5:You got to kind of combine I guess both.
Speaker 2:Oh. Both.
Speaker 6:Get Is that
Speaker 2:just because you're doing a DCS and it gets so big, you might have spread in comps on different tabs?
Speaker 5:It'd be I mean, yes, I'm sure you understand, you know, the the category that we're in. Yeah. You gotta be creative with the deals. Yeah. So Okay.
Speaker 2:So take us back.
Speaker 1:What was your first can?
Speaker 5:What was my first can?
Speaker 1:Yeah. When when did
Speaker 5:you go for the first year. Oh, I've been to film festival
Speaker 1:You waited until it was like actually gonna be productive for you.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Gonna make it worth the, you know, the money you gotta spend to get there.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah. Take us back early in your career. How'd you get here?
Speaker 5:So I've been at CAA for fifteen years. You know, the talent agency that represents biggest entertainers in the world, athletes and all that. I was at Evolution, which is our investment bank Mhmm. Working on large scale M and A, capital raising transactions across, you know, different categories. So I've been there for a long time.
Speaker 5:I like the applause on that.
Speaker 1:For capital raising? Yes. For
Speaker 5:yes. Worked with pro sports teams, worked with entertainment companies, TV, you know, TV studios
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Production companies.
Speaker 1:When does a get get tapped in for a transaction? Like So like Yeah. Like I can imagine if a if a sports team is gonna transact or or an emerging league or an athlete has a business that they wanna sell, like am I am I in the right area?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It sort of it depends, right? I mean, we're we don't work on tiny deals. Mhmm. We like to focus on larger scale transactions.
Speaker 5:So in sports, it's probably gonna be something 50,000,000 plus. Mhmm. So if you're putting a a check into a team and you got some money to spend and want to buy a piece of a sports team, we'll facilitate that transaction. Okay. We'll work on, you know, team sales too.
Speaker 5:So entire teams that trade. One of the earliest deals that we did was the sale of the Sacramento Kings Civic Runaway in 2011. How much That was traded, by way, for $500,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So How much does
Speaker 2:that organization look like a standard investment bank?
Speaker 5:A lot like an like, I mean, that's the service that we provide. I think the difference is we sit within CAA. So we have the strategic connectivity, the knowledge that might be a little different than other investment banks have.
Speaker 2:And and probably less public markets coverage? No IT capabilities.
Speaker 5:We don't do public markets.
Speaker 2:We're focused on M
Speaker 5:and A. Yeah, generally. It. Okay. So probably a little smaller.
Speaker 5:Our team's only about 20 people. Mhmm. So kind of 50 to 500,000,000 is our sweet spot. Sports is gonna be a lot larger than that. But I'd say for other, you know, deals, it's really in that kind of range.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:So, you know, I was there for a long time, and it came to, you know, how I've gotten to compound and what we just launched. Yeah. I started working around creator deals a couple of years ago. Kind of just by chance, you stumble across deals and companies that are interesting, that make sense, you want to lean in and figure something out. And that that was the case with Dude Perfect Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, a creator business that been scaling really nicely for a long time
Speaker 2:built That's on probably twenty years in the past.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Sixteen years the time.
Speaker 2:Sixteen years of the time. Yes.
Speaker 5:Wow. So they were ancient in YouTube Yeah. You know, lands.
Speaker 2:But but consistent in their performance the whole time.
Speaker 5:Like I think they were growing at a 50% CAGR
Speaker 2:for that entire And and no matter when you dip a lot of people dip in and out of Dude Perfect content. Of course, you go through some binge watching, you watch a bunch of the archive, then you come back years later and you see that, okay, everything's evolved and all the great pieces are still the same, but they've added on a bunch more capability.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And their audience, I mean, they they sort of eight to 16 year old boys, I'd say, is the core of their audience, but they also grew up with them. So these guys are they're 38 now. They have a big audience that, you know
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. Yeah.
Speaker 5:People in their thirties that grew up watching the content.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 5:I I didn't know much about it other than what I'd seen on YouTube. Yeah. They built a big live entertainment business. They go on tour. They sell at NBA, you know, size arenas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what's unique about that deal? Because they're they they have multiple revenue streams at this point. Doing advertisements, partnerships. They only have a partnership with NERF and, a bunch of other deals in the works, tours.
Speaker 2:And then they were also talking about building like a Disneyland, basically.
Speaker 5:Dude Perfect World.
Speaker 2:Yes. Dude Perfect World. Incredible.
Speaker 5:There was a big mock up of that when I first went to visit their office
Speaker 1:in Yeah.
Speaker 2:In Kansas A giant,
Speaker 5:you know, amusement park.
Speaker 2:Doing a pilgrimage. So,
Speaker 5:yeah. Listen, wanted to build, and we've heard this a lot from creators, but, you know, kind of a next generation Disney type business Yeah. For a specific audience around, you know, sports, kids, comedy, family.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Very family friendly business. And, yeah, so I I I sort of got to know the guys, saw their business, diversified across a bunch of different categories. Yeah. It wasn't just a YouTube business, it was a real media company. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So we took that market and executed a pretty large scale private equity transaction. It it wasn't easy. I was naive in the sense that I thought it would be because the financial profile was so attractive.
Speaker 2:Why was it not legible to
Speaker 5:It it just it's it's a new category, I think, generally for transacting. It's the opportunity that I see at this point in time.
Speaker 1:You don't have decades of like case studies and Harvard Business.
Speaker 5:There are no comp there isn't a single comp or press, and I looked at media company comps for it, guess. And you're dealing with talent, you're dealing with key man risk in a way that's sort of unnerving to some private equity
Speaker 1:investors. Platform risk.
Speaker 5:I mean, with them, it was a little bit less contingent on the platform itself, which was an advantage. You know, their YouTube revenue was a small percentage of the overall business at that point in time. But sure, you know, investors get spooked by algorithms, what can happen if it goes up or down or changes
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And how that impacts the business. So it took, you know, took a and by the way, you have to find the right partner too. For, you know, for Talend and for their business, they built it over 16. They owned it outright. They cared about what, you know, what the future looked like with their partners.
Speaker 5:So finding the right, not just the right deal, but the right people behind the deal to transact with, I'd say in this category, in the creator world, is more important than in others.
Speaker 1:And so you came out of that feeling like you had a greater sort of understanding of these businesses, as well as like an appreciation for their potential and their quirks, and so you decided to become the buyer. Is that the right way to think
Speaker 5:about it? Were many times during that process, and there were a couple of others I did after where I was Yeah, I just wish I was the buyer in that situation. I feel like I was doing the work to structure the deals that made sense. I understood the talent behind the deals in a way that maybe other buyers couldn't, and I came from the world of the agency at CAA where we had a whole suite of services and things we could provide for these creators in a way that, you know, a typical buyer wouldn't be able to do. So we pretty quickly started to think about what we could put together to basically be that unique buyer that we didn't see in the marketplace, or we didn't see many of, didn't see really scale, didn't see sophistication from, and started to iterate, you know, that would look like and how it would come together, and do we do it through the agency proper, do we set up something independently, which is what we did, I think it's important to be independent in the way that it's structured.
Speaker 5:And raised a good amount of money, and looking to do a lot of deals in the category and really become the the first of its kind, you know, kind of preeminent buyer in in this category. So Yeah. Yeah, excited. For
Speaker 2:creators or media businesses that wind up with the Disney style business, the flywheel of multiple properties, multiple revenue streams, do you find that those businesses are sort of organically grown by garden, like a garden, or built brick by brick? Like how often do creators have the idea Yeah. Of where they wanna go and they execute one step at a time? Because I always think of that Disney flywheel and it's a beautiful napkin sketch
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's so cool and you understand how the business works. But when he drew that, it was like two years before he died. Like, was very much a reflection on a life's work.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Listen, the best creators really are creative geniuses, but there's not always cohesion with how they think about the future and what they're doing. So oftentimes, I may see the whiteboard over there in the studio. You walk into their offices the same way I walked into Dude Perfect's office in Texas, and you see a whiteboard scattered with ideas. And it's all brilliant.
Speaker 5:It's not necessarily put together and structured in a way that provides, again, a lot of cohesion, but there's a lot of opportunity that they see. And I think first and foremost, what they've all done successfully is they focus on building a pretty rapid audience, and building engagement with that audience. And then once you have that, and you have that captive audience, it really expands and opens up the world of opportunity beyond whatever that core product or offering might be. So for them, it was trick shots on YouTube, and then, you you build an audience there, kids, family comedy, and you can extend that into live events, into products, into things they probably, you know, certainly in 2009 when they started, didn't think they'd have a line of products in Walmart Yeah. Necessarily.
Speaker 5:Right? But then you start to dream bigger once you realize that what you're doing is actually working and resonating with the audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the fund that you've built, how permanent is the capital? Are you thinking about a certain fund life cycle? Is there a world where maybe not today, but in ten years we are talking about capital markets, public markets, creators going public. There's been rumors about MrBeast, and I could see that happening, but that might be like an exception that proves the rule.
Speaker 2:But is there a world where in a decade we're looking at like, yeah, like the top 20 YouTubers and podcasts are public?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Certainly possible. I mean, it's the, you know, it's the fastest growing segment of entertainment. People want exposure to that. It's going to start with private capital.
Speaker 5:I think it will probably move into the public markets.
Speaker 4:So,
Speaker 5:yeah, I think we're moving in that direction. For us, I think permanent capital is an important part of our strategy. We don't want to be forced into an unnatural life cycle where we're forced to sell quickly. Creators don't, you know, feedback is Yeah, they're like,
Speaker 1:Hey, you're doing your life's work, but also we're going try to just change up who you're partnered with in a decade. Whereas like a CPG business or a software company, like the management team might be fully turned over over the fun lifecycle. We try to, again, in structuring this, we try
Speaker 5:to solve for what we heard was important to creators in the transactions I've been around.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And some permanence in the partnership or permanent capital is part of it. You know, letting creativity sit and remain with the creators even in a controlled transaction, there's no interference in the creativity of what they've built. That's really important, even if you're selling equity control.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah, to me, I look at it and I can see over time this just being a more and more and more important part of CIA strategy because the challenge right now is you have creators. Historically, there was maybe I don't I don't you you you you'll know much more about the history, but my feeling is that historically there was like maybe 500 stars that matter. Yeah. And then now in media, there's like 50,000 stars that matter across every single vertical.
Speaker 1:It's you you it was it was maybe easier to run a business when you had, you know, you could just focus on like a smaller number of like really really big stars who were running their own, you know, basically, they they had their own individual businesses. But when you have 50,000 creators in all these sub niches, you can't like, it seems like there's probably a limit. Like, you can't scale the CAA team 10, 20x and expect to be running the same team. Agents. Need too Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Cover it all. And so as a as a sort of new strategy saying like, hey, we're gonna try to service as much of that market as we can, but we're also gonna try to find the best talent and businesses across all these different categories and then be a long term partner to those and actually participate in their overall business.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You go deep with the ones you believe matter most and they're positioned to scale the most. Right? So we're not trying to transact with hundreds or thousands of creators. It really is to pick the businesses we believe in and categories that we think are exciting and scalable and go deep with them across the board.
Speaker 5:On the capital side of
Speaker 1:things, we're working with agents. How do you think about stages in a creator's life cycle? There's people that are gonna be incredibly talented from a just pure talent standpoint. Right? There's people out there that are not even good at making videos but have incredibly engaging content because they're so good.
Speaker 1:And then usually they graduate into having, you know, better and better teams and eventually maybe they get into products. But like, how do you look at the different stages? What's what's too early? Yeah. When are you seeing a an individual who's like showing all the potential but is too early for maybe a transaction?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We don't like to be hyper prescriptive with with how we look at it. I mean, there's certain things we do look for to assess whether it's the right stage for us to get involved. If it's an individual without a business, it's tough for us. I mean, there's a lot of work
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 5:To do probably to pull it together and make it transactable. So we look for it to be an actual business that's been built Mhmm. And scaled to some capacity. Right now
Speaker 4:Is
Speaker 1:that like multiple revenue lines not dependent entirely on platform revenue? Yeah. Like those kind
Speaker 2:of Maybe an operator
Speaker 5:or an To diversify to some extent. Maybe an operator, not essential. I mean there was no operator to do perfect when we did that deal.
Speaker 2:Wow. Wait, they do everything themselves?
Speaker 5:I mean, was I think 20 employees. The oldest outside of them was 24.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they didn't have like a business guy who would do like the Aggie business guy. Love that. That's awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a different business.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's 80 employees now. Yeah. Of course. So you look for some sense of a business, achieve diversification in some it doesn't need to be massive, but yeah, some off platform monetization is, you know, is attractive.
Speaker 5:And then, yeah, scale of revenue, profitability. We really only like businesses that are profitable and that's that's not, I don't want to say it's not hard to do, but in in this category it is. You're used to seeing margins that are not common in traditional media. Right? 50% plus margins
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 5:For a creator business is actually relatively it's relatively standard. So yeah. Look for for profitability growth and again, the categories that we think are positioned to scale Yeah. And where we can be valuable, and add additional value.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, bring When you're when
Speaker 1:you're underwriting a deal, are like, how do you think about it? Like, how do you how do you think about a business where you know there's a ceiling? Like and and I imagine there's certain situations where you're totally because, like, there's certain creators, I would say that we've always said that if you if you asked us to make content for a 100,000,000 people, we would just wouldn't enjoy doing it because we'd be covering topics that are not interesting. Right? To to us at least.
Speaker 1:Sure. And there's I think a lot of creator businesses where there's sort of like some TAM on from a from an audience standpoint in the category.
Speaker 2:You don't think we can get a 100,000,000 views on an SK Hynix
Speaker 1:I think that you can get to 40 and that's gonna be enough for it to be a home run for you and us. Like, is that a conversation that you have or is it always like Yeah. I need to see the path to superstardom and, you know, 9 figures of revenue?
Speaker 5:I think, listen, there's a difference between how we might underwrite the deal and think about where there's a ceiling and how you communicate that to a creator. If you're trying to justify, you know, value, maybe that's part of the but really they you know, the best creators won't really cap their potential. Yeah. So, you know, even if it's a $10,000,000 business today, they probably think this is a billion dollar business if we do it right. Yeah.
Speaker 5:If we sort of serve the audience in the way that we can. Yeah. And so, honestly, any of the businesses we look to transact with now probably we ourselves believe could be billion dollar plus businesses. And if we don't believe that, we're probably not betting in the right categories with the right creators. It's early to maybe make that kind of call in, you know, in this space, but to the earlier comment about public markets, you know, potential, I think we'll see many of these businesses scale to that billion plus dollar mark potentially go public.
Speaker 5:And, yeah, it's it's just there's a lot I think that's left to.
Speaker 1:Would it end up is is a more likely or or one of the more likely paths where you end up with effectively, an index of a bunch of top creators? Because to me, like Yeah. Creator business is like, I don't know that many creators even like look at the most sophisticated operations like a MrBeast. Right? You have these like 9 figure Amazon deals, you have these Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Consumer packaged goods businesses, you have, you know, royalty streams effectively. But him running him running his business being like, I gotta make sure that next quarter's good. Otherwise, we're gonna nuke. Like, that feels challenging. Whereas if you took a basket of of, you know, 200 top creators that that were were were trading, You could see that being like stable and growing, you know.
Speaker 2:You're looking for sort of like a manosphere ETF for you. So you can have exposure to world
Speaker 1:Invicular entertain in one ticker.
Speaker 5:I do listen, that's that's partially what we're trying to do. Right? I saw the difficulty from institutional capital partners to transact with single creator businesses Sure. Single assets. They're all eager to get into the category.
Speaker 5:Want money to work. They talk about it all the time. You bring them a deal that's attractive and they're like, we can't we can't do this. There's too much risk. If you bring them a basket though, right, I think it's a lot more attractive.
Speaker 2:And in some ways, dude, perfect is a little bit of a basket. There's a number of on camera talent. It's not single person, single name and same thing with Midas Touch. They have a number of products in their portfolio and number of hosts and whatnot.
Speaker 5:Yeah. The more the more layers to diversification you can achieve
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 5:The more traffic
Speaker 2:is probably easier.
Speaker 5:Right? So the business itself. Yeah. The talent maybe that's involved. Yep.
Speaker 5:And for us, the portfolio that we build. Yep.
Speaker 1:How are you how are you building out your pipeline of opportunities? Are you going I'm at you're in Cannes, you're meeting a bunch of creators, but I imagine you're like probably I'd like the beauty of creator businesses is they're out in the open. Yeah. Like an invisible creator business is not one. Whereas like some of the best deals in, you know, traditional private equity are like, you would have to like live in the town and know that this, you know, a certain business business was printing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. They're out in the open, but some of the flashiest ones don't always have the numbers you might expect that they would. Some that you don't think about as much, so a little quieter, building actually really significant businesses in a different way. So you don't always know everything even if it is quite visible. You know, I've had the benefit of living in the category for a little while, so I've seen a lot and have a good sense of what, you know, the immediate attractive targets might be.
Speaker 5:We again have the relationship with the agency at CA. We've got
Speaker 2:a Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think three zero eight creator clients. Not all of those would make sense for us, but a lot of them are growing and are looking to potentially think about capital partners, so there's a built in pipeline there. And, you know, we're open for business. I've gotten a lot of great inbound opportunities that have come our way since we announced. That's great.
Speaker 5:So, yeah, there's a lot of activity and a lot, I think, for us to do.
Speaker 1:How much time are you going to be spending in New York versus LA? LA. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I've been back and forth, over the last decade plus quite a bit. Spend the winter out here usually.
Speaker 2:Smart
Speaker 5:to do. New York's not always the the most fun. So I'm usually here about twice a month. We'll have a headquarters probably in both, you know, both locations. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then, you know, creators are kind of everywhere too. So New York and LA have been the hubs of entertainment. London a bit internationally. But we see that much more dispersed with creators that are all over the place.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How has the influencer or creator industry evolved in China? Is it similar, diff how does it how is it similar versus how does it differ from The US? Yeah. Because like they were big and early in like live shopping, for example.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, you have a sort of massive, you know, massive population. All the numbers you see with businesses over there are pretty crazy from an audience perspective. It's listen, transacting with China
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't I I can't imagine you could do deals there, but I'm saying like, is is is when you when you look at that market, is there anything that you see that allows you to feel like you're seeing into the future?
Speaker 5:It's tricky. Right? Because if you do take that as a learning and you try to apply it to a different territory, it probably won't necessarily translate in the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, live shopping has taken off in The US, but it's a lot of, like, a functionally gambling, not like buying oranges. Yeah. Oh. Like a lot of these like live shopping platforms where like people live breaking open packs of cards
Speaker 2:Yeah. Unboxings and stuff.
Speaker 1:Not like they're like shopping for apparel in the same way that in China, like a lot of these live shopping platforms, they would start with like, you could literally go and buy a new kiwis and you can see the kiwis and then you're just hitting like
Speaker 2:Apparently China doesn't have a Joe Rogan. Like they don't have a really dominant just public commentator who just gives his random opinions about everything.
Speaker 1:Well, I think somebody Joe Rogan that's commenting on that many things like
Speaker 2:It's a little risky politically, So yeah. Yeah. What about Hollywood? What's even your update on the creator economy's interaction with Hollywood post the trifecta of creator led movies? So Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Three born on YouTube crossed over. Yeah. This was predicted like a decade ago. It's finally here. Is it it feels like very high status but maybe not actually moving the needle for some businesses.
Speaker 2:Not something reliable like something low status like ads and merch which might actually drive a business forward.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Tough to yeah. Again, tough to tough to rely on that and bet on that as a business model in and of itself. Think it's a component that's pretty interesting. For creator businesses, I mean, was a big kind of narrative early on in podcast and using podcast as a cheap sort of IP development mechanism
Speaker 1:for Yeah. Long form
Speaker 5:you know, same thing with YouTube, right? A cheaper way to test and see if you've got an audience. Yeah. And then use that to sort of monetize in long form. So it's a it's a great trend.
Speaker 5:Think that we're seeing more and more of that will continue.
Speaker 2:We were talking to Alex Ramosy about this yesterday and it was interesting thinking about like he was saying that he just doesn't reach the same audience as a Ramsey. As a Dave Ramsey who who just has syndication on so many radio And if he were able to crack into that, it's not that that deal would make him that much money, that it would expose his overall portfolio, his overall business to a new tranche of clients and potential like customers but also audience members. And so there's an interesting world where you could underwrite the, you know, high risk. Maybe this person does the next obsession. Or you could say this person's on a track where they are going to crack distribution on radio or TV at some point and they're going to be on that channel and that's going to be a halo for the overall business.
Speaker 2:But obviously hard to predict.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And so that that's why it's hard to underwrite against that. Right? I mean, it's a that moonshot outcome could drive upside Yeah. But probably not gonna be a a base case underwriting situation.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:What about Substack and potential new platforms?
Speaker 5:Substack, you know, you've seen some really nice businesses built and monetized on that platform. So in the same way that YouTube can be a core that you build off of in other areas, you can take YouTube, build it into Substack. Same thing that we're seeing migration from Sub Sack into video and other, you know, other So it's one of the the kind of top platforms that we're actually looking at to evaluate if there are things for us to to invest in there, and again, migrate that audience into other mediums. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot, you know, to do in that category.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was thinking like why is there no sub stack for video? You know, like like a platform that was less algorithmic and of course the sub stack for video will almost certainly be sub stack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Probably. You just gotta get the right people on there or something. It's hard because like as soon as you make a video, you're like, well, this wants to be replicated everywhere on the internet.
Speaker 2:So let me throw it up on every channel.
Speaker 1:Timeline to first deal announcement. Any prediction?
Speaker 5:You're hold me to it? It's always hard to Are
Speaker 2:we gonna
Speaker 1:I mean, but but but we know we we have, you know, friends with funds that have a unique strategy and sometimes they don't do a deal for eighteen months after closing a fund. So, like
Speaker 5:I think we we benefit from a bit of a running start because we've been in conversation with creators. We've had this, you know, in the works for a little while.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:We have relationships that are that are warm. So, you know, we're we're looking to move fast, but also want to be thoughtful. We know those those first couple deals are going be really important for setting us up for longer term success.
Speaker 2:Love
Speaker 5:to think we get something done by the end of this calendar year. Oh, cool. These deals, at least the ones I've been around historically, they do take time. Yeah. There's a relationship element to it that involves a real time commitment.
Speaker 5:You want to make sure it's, again, obviously structured the right way.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 5:So we're ready to go. Just want to be thoughtful about making sure that we're picking the right partners and setting up the right deal for ourselves.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Let's hit the gong for the fund itself.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:No. I want Tucker to hit it. Look at this guy. He's a Gigachan. He's a Gigachan.
Speaker 1:Can have at it as hard as you want.
Speaker 2:It's warmed up.
Speaker 9:It's warmed up.
Speaker 2:Hit it. Break it. It. There we go. That's it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for coming on down. We can wrap the show there.
Speaker 1:Can't wait to do this with your first deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're excited for that. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we'll see you
Speaker 1:Boeing Flashback. Tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers. Love you.