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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, 08/22/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The Turnpull Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital because the fortress of finance, the stock market is on fire. Jordy Hayes, ring that gong.
Speaker 1:Kick us off a huge gong hit for the market right now. The Nasdaq is up one point. Actually, 2%. There we go. Dow Jones is up 2%.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin's up 4%. You'll love to
Speaker 2:see Ben Carlson on X says the stock market is up on news that the Fed chair thinks the labor market is slowing down.
Speaker 1:Yes. So if you wanna save time and money, go to ramp.com. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Good
Speaker 2:for you. One single place.
Speaker 1:Yes. Very weird narrative going on. My to actually break down what's happening, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, gave a speech at a conference in Jackson Hole. And so the stock market's ripping today. The Dow's on track for its first record close this year.
Speaker 1:I would have thought that happened earlier because the Nasdaq was setting so many records, but again, it's because of all the tech the tech movement that's been really pushing the Nasdaq The Dow's been a little bit lagging, but that's expected. It's Industrials Index. But the news is not that the Fed is cutting rates. It's not that Powell said the Fed is going to cut rates. The news that's moving the market 2% today is he said that there are risks that inflation will continue rising and that the labor market will keep weakening.
Speaker 1:And if that happens, it could prompt the Fed to support economic growth by reducing rates.
Speaker 2:The narrative earlier this year was that everything computer? Yes. The narrative now, everything bullish.
Speaker 1:Everything bullish.
Speaker 2:Everything bullish. You got news? Bullish.
Speaker 1:Bullish. Yes. Yes. Everything's a bullish catalyst. Good morning, Gold Rock.
Speaker 1:Good morning, Raghav. Excellent.
Speaker 2:We will have Joe Wiesenthal joining us in about He's in Jackson Hole.
Speaker 1:Yes. Correct? So He
Speaker 2:was getting paparazzi shots I saw. Mister Jerome
Speaker 1:Oh, great. Himself. So Powell said the word inflation 55 times during his speech. And the market clearly interpreted that as a signal that the Fed is ready to cut rates if cracks begin to show in the economy. And I we talked about this earlier.
Speaker 1:Just maybe it's not this time is different. There won't be another bubble. There won't be a correction. Just, you know, no two moments in history are exactly the same. What's what's particularly unique about this particular setup is that, yes, the stock market's on fire.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of top signals all over the place. But given that interest rates are high, that gives the Fed a, you know, like a potential tool in the tool chest
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If there is a correction, if we do get over our skis on on a bubble.
Speaker 2:And this morning, the odds on poly market of a rate cut were sitting at under 80%. It popped dramatically after Yeah. Powell's comments up to a 94% chance of a Fed rate cut in 2025. Yep. This is after some of the bigger investment banks have been saying no rate cut
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Even recently.
Speaker 1:Yep. So let's talk about what was actually going on in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The the the official name of this event is Labor Markets in Transition, Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy, an economic symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And this was a barn burner. I heard from people on the ground.
Speaker 1:There were tears. There were gasps. There were people shaking, cheering, standing It was a huge moment. People get fired up when they hear about policy. Joe Weisenthal is one of them.
Speaker 1:Let me just read from some of this and just tell me if you get chills. When I appeared at this podium one year ago, the economy was at an inflection point. Our policy rate had stood at five and a quarter to five and a half percent for more than a year. That restrictive policy stance was appropriate to bring down inflation and to foster a sustainable balance between aggregate demand and supply. Mic drop.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. He went there.
Speaker 1:He went there. He went there. The labor market is a case in point. The July employment report released earlier this month showed that payroll job growth slowed to an average pace of only 35,000 per month over the past three months, down from a 168,000 per month during 2024. This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially.
Speaker 1:Get ready to rumble.
Speaker 2:Another mic drop.
Speaker 1:Yes. Another mic drop moment. I got chills. So yesterday, if you were watching closely, we had Chase Lochmiller from Crusoe on the show. He called in from a very nicely appointed log cabin.
Speaker 1:We asked him where he was. He said he was in Jackson Hole. What do you think, Jordy? Do you think he was at this event, or do you think he was just doing some extreme mountain biking on a Thursday based on how you how hard you know he works?
Speaker 2:Hard hard question. Yeah. He does. I I imagine like any everybody loves mountain biking.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Everybody would would love to spend a Thursday mountain biking. Yeah. I'm guessing given that they were announcing a major acquisition. I think it's quite possible he was there for something else.
Speaker 1:Yes. Which is interesting because Crusoe is thought of as a start up. And Jackson Hole, this particular event, is typically for central bankers from other countries, academics, economic researchers, financial industry leaders, and a few journalists. Like, it's not really like start up central. Yep.
Speaker 1:And yet, he maybe was there. We don't know.
Speaker 2:See. We'll figure
Speaker 4:it out.
Speaker 2:Billion dollar start up?
Speaker 1:Well, that's what Bloomberg reported yesterday. Crusoe's allegedly out raising at a $10,000,000,000 valuation. We will wait until they announce the round.
Speaker 2:Would never scoop.
Speaker 1:We would never preemptively ring a gong for someone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's bad luck.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it it is bad luck
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:To to
Speaker 2:Let them get it done.
Speaker 1:To hit the gong on
Speaker 2:a scoop.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. But I had two takeaways from talking to Chase yesterday. The first is that I genuinely do not understand data center technology at nearly the level I would like to. I I I know the chips are important.
Speaker 1:Chips gotta be big, fast, cheap. The energy is important. The water's important. The racks are important. I understand the memory is important.
Speaker 1:I know SK Hynix is involved in the memory. And then once you have the memory
Speaker 2:think that that it was important to have a structure
Speaker 1:Yes. But
Speaker 2:then Zuck put everything in
Speaker 1:that. Everything's changing. Everything's changing. And Dylan Patel is the only reliable guide in the space. But and I understand that, like, optimizing KV cache is important.
Speaker 1:KV cache, the key value store where, like, all everything goes in the memory, and then the model needs to access the memory. And that's what the acquisition was about. How can you access different models faster
Speaker 2:I thought it was funny that I asked I asked Joe. Yeah. So you think this has an is this at all like high frequency trading
Speaker 1:Oh, you mean Chase?
Speaker 2:Sorry. Not Jack. Joe Wiesenthal.
Speaker 1:He's coming out on the show at 12:15 by the way.
Speaker 2:Just very excited to talk to Joe Yes. In an hour.
Speaker 1:But you but you asked Chase. No.
Speaker 2:But I asked Chase, do you think this is going in the direction of
Speaker 1:Like, is there any way that running a Neo Cloud would benefit from having a CEO with some experience in high frequency trading potentially? Is there
Speaker 2:any overlap in skill sets? It's like, well, I did spend a decade in high frequency trading.
Speaker 1:Sure. You did read it.
Speaker 2:And if you think about it,
Speaker 1:It I mean sounded like he had fed you that question. It was like No.
Speaker 2:No. I totally it was actually Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. I I actually didn't know that
Speaker 2:question prepared clearly.
Speaker 1:Yes. Shallowly researched interviews. That's what you come to us for. Yes.
Speaker 2:But But you can get deeply researched interviews elsewhere.
Speaker 1:There is someone whose whole thing is deeply researched interviews and we're a big fan of his. It's Dwarkash Patel. Of course, go subscribe. Anyway, I wanna learn more about that stuff. I think it's gonna be important.
Speaker 1:And the other lens is from just more of a business context. There is a there's one
Speaker 2:It's not just important. It's it's it's the backbone of GDP growth.
Speaker 1:I think so. And I think it's it's I don't know. It's it's just people have been debating, will the AI boom accrue to the foundation model layer or the or the application layer? And in fact, there is a third layer that is very important for startups and venture capitalists to participate in, and that's the neo cloud layer, the data center build out layer, the infrastructure layer below the foundation model layer. Yep.
Speaker 1:And and so there's one lens where you could have a take that's kind of like, okay. Well, neo clouds are hypercompetitive. There's three hyperscalers. You have GCP. You have Azure.
Speaker 1:You have, you have AWS. Those Andy Jassy doesn't wanna lose. He's gonna eat you alive. He has and all three of those businesses have insane cash flow to underwrite insane CapEx. Like, how are you gonna compete?
Speaker 1:And then and then even if you can compete, is it not winner take all where maybe Crusoe runs away with it or CoreWeave runs away with it or someone else runs away with it. Like like, yes, there it like any startup category Or mom
Speaker 2:and pop data center.
Speaker 1:True. True. It could be a wild thing.
Speaker 2:Right? 15 mil.
Speaker 1:Who know? Blue Blue Al's next client could be the somebody you've never heard of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And shock the industry. But I think this is a different story because it's a very positive sum market. And, like, hyperscalers are already spending tens of billions of dollars on CapEx. The neo clouds are also valued in the tens of billions of dollars. It's a lot of money.
Speaker 1:But AI clearly and just token generation is a new technology. It seems extremely additive to productivity, entertainment, the economy broadly. Like, it's gonna take time for these things to diffuse and show up in the economic statistics. But clearly, something valuable is happening. And everyone who's interacted with an LLM, at least at some level, understands that there is some benefit.
Speaker 1:And when you multiply that out to billions of people, you create a big boom, you create a big industry. And so, just as an American, Neo Cloud's pumped me up. I'm excited. We're doing the re industrialized meme. There's a new thing to build, and we're actually building it here in America.
Speaker 2:We're we're are we the best in the world at this?
Speaker 1:Yes. We have the biggest data centers, for sure. Yeah. And we continue to. And then we have People people like to say Yes.
Speaker 2:We we don't know how to build beautiful things anymore.
Speaker 1:Go visit the Titan Cluster. Yep. Go visit Go
Speaker 2:visit Abilene.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Go visit Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:With a straight face, tell me that
Speaker 1:Tell me that that
Speaker 2:doesn't bring a tear to your eye.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, it's not just that we're building things in America. It's that we're building really big things, really ambitious things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's billion dollar projects are are happening. And they and because it's because it's complicated stuff, like the KV cache and, like, what actually makes a Neo Cloud win, what actually gets you to score higher on Dylan Patel and semi analysis ClusterMax is this odd combination of reliability, uptime, cost, all these different things that should be table stakes but aren't because we're in this new era of a different style of computing, a different a different architecture. And so the Neo Cloud market broadly is kind of at a turning point. Dylan Patel just went on the No Priors podcast with and dug into kind of this turning point. He said, of the Neo Cloud, there there's kind of four potential next paths.
Speaker 1:One, you can move up the stack. And so you have a data center. You can now offer inference APIs. So you want to not run LAMA yourself or not run DeepSeek yourself. You just want the tokens.
Speaker 1:You just want to have an API that's affordable and reliable. Together and Nebius are already playing in this market. CoreWeave is rumored to be acquiring Fireworks for this exact reason. So CoreWeave has data centers. They're gonna offer APIs.
Speaker 1:So an API as a service, not just the infrastructure as a service. Then the the second path for Neo Clouds is go massive. This is what Crusoe is doing. They're trying to build a gigawatts at gigawatt scale. No one is doing this.
Speaker 1:Yeah? And so that creates differentiation, where someone who's really focused on serving a reliable API that's, you know, easy to integrate and scalable, that they're not gonna be as focused on all the different challenges it takes to build a gigawatt scale data center. Yep. And so if you wanna Meanwhile, build
Speaker 2:you have legacy players like Oracle that are just going for that same massive scale Yep. But for a very small number of customers.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And they might not be and they might not be the obvious choice for a hyperscaler who wants to build a new so Crusoe can sit and talk to all of the different hyperscalers and say, hey, we're one of the only we're the only game in town or one of the few games in town if you wanna build a gigawatt data center. Oracle might show up, but people would be, wait, but you have OCI. You're maybe competitive with me.
Speaker 1:I don't know. So the third one is settle for commercial real estate returns. This is interesting to VCs because VCs are under underwriting at, you know, 15% IRR. These deals, they want venture scale returns out of these deals. But some of the businesses that pop up in that mom and pop data center, you're you're you're, by default, gonna get real estate level returns, which can be great if you're set up for that.
Speaker 1:But if you go into a real estate deal with Not necessarily. Limitations, you'll get burned. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and I I don't think that real estate economics are guaranteed because anybody in real estate knows that just because you have a plot of land with a building on it does not mean you're gonna generate, you know No. Returns that even beat the the, you know, T bills.
Speaker 1:No. You definitely have to, like, work work hard to actually make that
Speaker 2:One other one other
Speaker 1:The four way the fourth the fourth direction that the NeoClouds can go, and this is the one that we wouldn't recommend, it's go bankrupt. Because there's many desperate NeoCloud slash prices unsustainably to fill GPUs, but this only delays failure. So, yeah, if you're a neo cloud, we recommend not going bankrupt. Just don't do that.
Speaker 2:Don't do that. There were some news yesterday. Yeah. Meta signed a $10,000,000,000 cloud deal with Google. Yep.
Speaker 2:Reuters reported this. It's a six year deal with Meta Platforms worth more than 10,000,000,000. Yep. Under the agreement, Meta will use GCP's server, storage, networking, and other services, said the source. And this is just interesting because, like, you know, these these are the the the two gorillas of the digital advertising market.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're they're normally, like, competing for spend. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wasn't The Google Capital bloke was super bullish on Google for this happening. I think he was saying, like, well, you were studying something. I studied the Goog. I studied the Goog.
Speaker 1:I think he's a big Google bull right now.
Speaker 2:Massive. He says, I mean, Google's at all time highs.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And he's taken a little bit of a victory lap.
Speaker 1:Sundar Pachayan, an absolute role. I mean,
Speaker 2:his his entire thesis is like nothing ever
Speaker 1:Nothing ever happens?
Speaker 2:Nothing ever happens.
Speaker 1:Love that. Well, Google, if you're listening, your next livestream for Google IO, get it on Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free. Do it.
Speaker 1:Restream. Anyway, someone from the Wall Street Journal took to the pages of the mansion section to tour America's most expensive home. Inside America's most expensive home, The Wall Street Journal paid a vision a visit to the Aspen Estate of Billionaires Linda and Stuart Resnick. This is really really the the I mean, I I don't wanna say it's the current thing intact, but it's certainly like the most
Speaker 2:Top of mind.
Speaker 1:It's being hotly discussed. So it's for sale for $300,000,000. Let's hear it. That was not the sound effect I was expecting. It's 74 acres.
Speaker 1:It has a private lake, multiple houses, and a spa. I will read from this, and the team can pull up some beautiful images of this estate. It was a hot August morning when I when I visited the mansion, but in the great room
Speaker 2:Mansion doesn't feel like quite sufficient for
Speaker 1:They they need a new word. Like, we said estate. They said mansion, but I feel like giga mansion or super mansion. We have superintelligence. We have supercars.
Speaker 1:We have hypercars. Maybe we need super estates and hyper estates.
Speaker 2:Hyper estate.
Speaker 1:Hyper estate might be the move. Yeah. I think I I think we're coining this now.
Speaker 2:New coinage. New coinage just
Speaker 1:dropped. Let's hold off on our judgment till the end of this to really see if it fits the category. But I'm I'm I'm thinking I think I think that this has is a strong contender to be called a hyper estate. A vast entertaining space with 30 foot high ceilings. There were roaring blazes and the towering stone fireplaces at either end.
Speaker 1:Two fireplaces. Love that. The billionaire owners of the roughly 18,500 square foot house, Linda and Stuart Resnick, weren't in town, but Linda had carefully choreographed my visit, giving instructions as to how I should be led through the house with for the most dramatic effect. You love that. You gotta be really optimizing for the tour.
Speaker 1:If you have a hyper estate or a super estate, people are gonna QSTours?
Speaker 2:QSBS QSBS rollover in the chat shows large language Mission. Ultra compound. Ultra Brandon compound is
Speaker 1:Chateau is also good. Chateau is a good Chateau. You know do you know Linda and Stuart Resnick? I would love some I would love some background. I'm sure there's gonna be a little bit of background in here, but I bet you can go a little bit deeper.
Speaker 1:Give me some extra background there. Oh, wow. Okay. Do you wanna break it down goats. Okay.
Speaker 1:You you you do some research. I'm gonna read one more paragraph, and then I want and then I want your analysis. We crossed the great room and walked through French doors onto a heated patio overlooking the 74 acre property. From there, the epic vista of the Continental Divide stretched out in front of me. I could see the outlines of distant paragliders swooping over Aspen Mountain.
Speaker 1:An infinity pool appeared to empty into the estate's private lake where a swan where swan shaped where a swan shaped paddle boat sat by a small dock. When the Resnick saw this parcel of land in the early nineteen nineties, it felt transcendent. You were looking at God, Linda had told me by Zoom from her primary home, a lavish, beau art mansion in Beverly Hills. You thought, am I really allowed to have this? Three decades later, the Resnick's are looking to sell their Aspen home for $300,000,000, making it the priciest in the nation.
Speaker 1:It if it fetches its asking price, it would be the most expensive home ever sold in The United States known as Little Lake Lodge.
Speaker 2:So John, this is Linda and Stuart Resnick. Yes. Are looking fantastic here.
Speaker 1:They are stunning.
Speaker 2:This Serving hair.
Speaker 1:Serving Serving
Speaker 2:hair. Linda's serving
Speaker 1:hair.
Speaker 2:Yes. You don't see this cut very much No. Anymore. No. But I can see it coming back.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, this feels like it was built for, you know, the the algorithmic feed, Mhmm. It's only a matter of time until yeah. Realizes if I can get my hair
Speaker 1:This is kind of
Speaker 2:the bigger.
Speaker 1:The evolution of the Zoomer Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could wear, you know, mischief boots
Speaker 1:Yes. Rock this hair, have
Speaker 2:to look boo boo and have this hair
Speaker 1:And and then just drop somewhere. On God for real for real, of course. Known as Little Lake Lodge, the estate comes with several houses for guests and staff in addition to the main residents. The Resnick's who spend summers and holidays in Aspen declined to say how much it cost to buy the land or build the estate. Much of Little Lake Lodge's value comes from its location about a mile from Downtown Aspen, one of the country's priciest real estate markets, said listing said the listing agent.
Speaker 1:Having such a vast acreage near the center of town is unheard of, she said, calling the property a unicorn. With an estimated worth net worth of around $14,000,000,000, the Resnick's are the founders of turn to page six. The wonderful company. Turn to page six. The wonderful company.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:So if you've ever had palm
Speaker 1:Pomegranate juice.
Speaker 2:The pomegranate juice. Fiji water.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way.
Speaker 2:Wonderful pistachios and almonds. If you've ever had a fantastic glass of Justin red wine?
Speaker 1:No way. Owns Justin? Yes.
Speaker 2:I think that's very Trader Joe's coated.
Speaker 1:Okay. Sure. Sure. I'm more familiar with the Josh because people do that Yeah. Like, we let the Josh talk.
Speaker 2:I'll take your finest bottle of Josh.
Speaker 1:Josh or Justin?
Speaker 2:But anyway, so they have a bunch of agricultural businesses and
Speaker 1:This is crazy. Stuart is 88, Linda's 82, they've been married over fifty years, and they share five children from previous relationships. So they both, I guess, were married, had kids, divorced by '32 and '38, and then boom, boom, boom, fifty year run Yeah. Building this massive compound. Little Lake Lodge is Linda's baby, a force of nature with a meticulously styled brunette Bob.
Speaker 1:The Bob got a shout out The Bob. In the journal.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Linda ran her own marketing agency before going into business with her husband. The Resnick started coming to Aspen because she developed an interest in fly fishing in the late eighties. Interesting. After a visit to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home of the actor Eric Harrison Ford and home of where chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell gives updates on inflation and interest rates. That's why you want a place in Jackson Hole, so you get easy access to Jerome.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:As we pulled up to Harrison's home, he ran out of his front door screaming like a lunatic. They are rising, she recalled in a book about Little Lake Lodge she commissioned. To her surprise, her friend Skip Brittenham quickly dropped his pants as he rushed to get ready for fishing with Ford. I thought if grown men can get so excited about fishing that they drop their drawers and stand in freezing water to cast their lines, Maybe there's something to this. I love that.
Speaker 1:The Resnick started visiting Aspen in the summer, so Linda could try fly fishing herself. They liked Aspen, which Linda described as a camp for grown up rich people. In the early nineteen nineties, they bought the land that became Little Lake Lodge to build a house on the property the Resnick's tapped architect Peter Dominic, who designs include the Grand Californian Hotel and Spa at Disneyland. That's amazing. And if you look at the pictures of this, there are some incredible touches.
Speaker 1:It has very log cabin vibes to it, and yet extremely utilitarian, and feels very a bit, like luxurious inside. For inspiration, Linda looked at books on the rustic architecture created for the National Parks Service in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties. Exterior facade would include materials indigenous to the land, Linda said, adding that she wanted the house to fade into the environment. The completed home is gray sandstone with a dark green slate roof. Blink, she said, and it disappears.
Speaker 1:Linda revealed in the building process, she said, But Stewart reveled in the building process, but Stewart didn't enjoy it. He didn't understand why the construction crew wouldn't would take off for the ski slopes on powdery snow days, for example. She eventually banned
Speaker 2:him from
Speaker 5:our understand?
Speaker 2:What? Yeah. What's there to
Speaker 1:It was like need to be grinding. They need to be locked in. They can't be
Speaker 2:skiing even
Speaker 1:though it's a no. Unacceptable. Yeah. This is why we don't we don't Well headquarter TBPN in Aspen because They all the production boys would be hitting the slopes.
Speaker 2:They have Four they're able to criticize their crew Mhmm. And the world has also criticized them.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Get into it a little bit. There's a eleven to twenty seventeen California drought, also called the great drought, Resnick's Paramount Farms Mhmm. Which is part of the wonderful company drilled 21 new wells Mhmm. In 2015. If you don't understand how
Speaker 1:I drink your milkshake.
Speaker 2:Aquifers work. Yeah. It it it historic there was a point in history where if you owned a piece of land, you could drill basically as many wells as you wanted into it and just pull out as much water.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Then people realized over time that that aquifers sort of span
Speaker 1:Share.
Speaker 2:Huge Yeah. Huge vast tracts of land. And if you're you're basically taking water from your neighbors. Right? And so Resnick who is the wealthiest farmer in The United States actually bought a majority stake in the Kern Water Bank
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which though privately owned, profits from water sales through publicly funded water transportation systems. And so they faced a ton of criticism because they produce nuts which require a mass amount of water Yeah. And export those all over the world. And many farmers historically have complained about not being able to access enough water. They also were accused at one point Gotta call Augustus.
Speaker 2:Yep. Also were a good metric. Accused at one point of using water that had been previously used for fracking. Oh, no way. So there there's a water recycling program in California that allows oil companies to sell fracking waste water
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To landowners including farmers. So
Speaker 1:Filter that.
Speaker 2:They want fracking fracking water, food products, then you got options.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they test this stuff.
Speaker 2:All of this is alleged. Alleged.
Speaker 1:The house is packed with trinkets and souvenirs from the couple's life and travels. The bathroom holds a collection of rubber duckies, a logo Linda had made for the house depicting three of the properties Ponderosa Pines is emblazoned on linens and towels. The primary suite, larger than most New York apartments, was specifically designed around mountain and lake views. It has a private office for Linda, his and hers bathrooms and closets, and an oxygen system to counteract the altitude. We talked about that in one of the first shows we did.
Speaker 1:This is very popular. If you're living at altitude, the new thing is getting oxygen pumped in to make the house internally feel like it's at sea level and so you can sleep much better. If you need to sleep better in and you're at sea level, get an Eight Sleep. Get a Pod five.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:How'd you sleep last night?
Speaker 2:Oh, let's see. I I have been consistently fluctuating in the 70 to 80 range. I got an 81 last night. I only put up six hours Not bad. Six minutes.
Speaker 1:Not bad.
Speaker 2:But I did get over ninety minutes of deep sleep.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:So jet not bad at all.
Speaker 1:That's great. Linda has thrown plenty of parties at Little Lake Lodge over the years with attendees including Diane Keaton, Barbara Streisand, and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To make hosting easier, the Resnick's have a computer program that lists their collections of linens, dishes, glassware, and silver down to the napkin. Built their own ERP. ERP.
Speaker 1:Their e their own ERP. That's insane. Amazing. You love to see it.
Speaker 2:I mean, is why You have this is why people watch this show is so they can they can learn how to better optimize their linens. Yeah. And sometimes, just need to go all the way to an ERP.
Speaker 1:Yes. If you are designing an ERP for your supermansion, get on Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build better products together. Great products together.
Speaker 1:Get started for free at figma.com. Anyway, we will close this out. She drove me around the edge of the lake in a golf cart, well goes pointed out marked trails for walks and cross country skiing. The lake is fully stocked with trout and carp, not Alex Karp, but c a r p. You will see him cross country skiing from time to time in I'm sure at
Speaker 2:some point he's accidentally cross country skied across their property Potentially. On a mission. Potentially.
Speaker 1:The Swan Boat was her idea, thinking it would be fun for the grandkids. The property contains several other houses, including a roughly 5,300 square foot home also constructed in 2014. There's also permits in place for a 19,500 square foot residence on a separate parcel that adds to the property's value because it is far larger than what can be built in Aspen today. The Resnick's are selling because they recently built a home in Santa Barbara, and maintaining three properties is just too hard.
Speaker 2:Cope. Skill issue.
Speaker 1:Skill issue.
Speaker 2:Upgrade your ERP. What are you doing?
Speaker 1:The the ERP needs to be like multi talent. You you need to move to the cloud. If that's on prem, you need to move that to the cloud.
Speaker 2:It is funny the reasons that people make up. Like, when you're selling a house, you have to make up a reason for why you're moving other than I just don't want the place anymore. Yeah. And so it's always something.
Speaker 1:Oh, we should read this post. I didn't put it in the stack, but Kanye West's former mansion has relisted amid dispute. Five months ago, things were looking up for the Malibu, California mansion abandoned by Kanye West. You know this story. Right?
Speaker 2:This is is such
Speaker 1:a crazy So Kanye West bought a so he bought a a mansion on the beach in Malibu and had someone, like, completely tear it down, and it looked like it was gonna maybe be a a renovation, but then it just turned into a disaster zone, basically. So developer Andrew Mazzella was in contract to pay $30,000,000 for the concrete structure designed by StarKitect, StarArchitect. They call them StarKitects. TaoDao Ando West. West, who now goes by Yi, had purchased the house in 2021 for about $57,300,000 and gutted it, and Mazzella planned to restore the house to its original glory.
Speaker 1:Instead, Mazzella's deal is off. Seller Bellwood Investments, which brought which bought the hulking property for 21,000,000 in 2024, is claiming Mazzella was massively underqualified and unable to get funding for the transaction. For his part, Mazzella has said a peak under the hood revealed the project would require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars more than anticipated. Not accusing them of misleading me.
Speaker 2:The idea that a, you know, a 20 ish million dollar property would go over budget by hundreds of thousands of I know exactly. Yeah. Deals extremely, like, basically exactly what you should
Speaker 1:buy pictures. Like
Speaker 2:I I honestly think that somebody would buy this in its current state. Yeah. And just like keep it like it's almost like a a monument to going insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. About to say. It's like it is and I never understood the the rationale. Was it was it feels like it
Speaker 2:feels like having this like incredibly this incredible
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, brutalist but beautiful home and then just destroying Yeah. It now feels like it's it's like buying, you know, going to Sotheby's and buying a piece of of It's like performance art.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Was it performance art or was it more just like Kanye actually wanted to renovate it and the renovation just went off the rails? Because, I mean, people tear houses down to the studs all the time, get hung up in permitting, and then they just have like a cement slab outside their house for ten months.
Speaker 2:For ten years.
Speaker 1:Speaking from experience here. Like, thank you. Like, it is hard to do renovations. In mid August, the house went back on the market for 34,900,000.0, down from 39,000,000. Designed more than a decade ago for financier Richard Sachs, the house is roughly 4,000 square feet with four bedrooms.
Speaker 1:West listed it in 2023 amid a firestorm over his anti Semitic comments and erratic behavior. Bellwood bought the property in 2024 and embarked on a roughly $8,500,000 restoration project with fractional ownership model. It raised millions of dollars from investors for the Ando project. Then in March, Bellwood signed a contract to sell to Mazzella, a commercial fisherman turned developer, who until recently was based in Montana. The Malibu project was was to be among his company's priciest residential deals to date, but closing was delayed.
Speaker 1:Mazzella couldn't secure funding. Last month, they made a revised offer of 19.5. Of course, this this is post fires. So there were a lot of fires in Malibu. There were Basically ACH was locked down.
Speaker 1:It was a bad time. And Mazella the market.
Speaker 2:Right? Had a contract to buy the home for a certain price. Yep. Decided at a at a at a later date that he wanted to pay less. Yep.
Speaker 2:And Belmont is pissed because and he has a quote here. Mazzella turned out to be nothing more than a quote unquote cowboy from from Montana who was trying to do something in Malibu. Shame on me for not doing diligence.
Speaker 1:Happens. This is fun. Shark Tank star Robert Herjavec. How do I not know how to pronounce that? I don't watch nearly enough Shark Tank.
Speaker 1:Herjavec?
Speaker 5:Herjavec.
Speaker 1:Herjavec. Yeah. Robert Herjavec is going from one super tall to another on Billionaires Row, roughly a year after Herjavec sold his apartment at 157 Am I close?
Speaker 5:Yeah. You're right.
Speaker 1:Okay. Hershovak. Hershovak, for a tidy profit, he signed a deal to buy another one about 400 feet away on the same upscale strip. Hersheypark is in contract to pay just north of $20,000,000 for a roughly 4,500 square foot four bedroom apartment at 111 West 50 Seventh Street, a new super tall condominium overlooking Central Park. The apartment has a formal entry gallery with white Macuba stone floors, a great room with 14 foot ceilings and floor to ceiling windows.
Speaker 1:For the project's developers, the price falls well below their original expectations. The apartment was once listed for as much as 28,500,000.0. It was most recently listed at 22.5. We got a very good deal. I am a shark after all.
Speaker 1:LOL. Her Hershovak wrote in an email.
Speaker 2:Oh, I thought he was saying that out loud.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:I am a shark after all.
Speaker 1:LOL. The mansion section, The Wall Street Journal emailed him, and he replied, we got a very good deal. I am a shark after all. LOL. I love that.
Speaker 1:Since starting construction in 2014, 111 West 50 Fourth Street has faced a number of challenges, including developer infighting and construction delays. This seems common in today's edition of the mansion section. That initially contributed to sluggish sales and heavy discounting at the roughly 60 unit building. Hershovak previously owned a unit at 157 completed before 11150 Seventh Street. He sold that roughly 6,200 square foot unit for $38,800,000 in 2024, just over the asking price and well above the 31,900,000.0 he paid for three years prior.
Speaker 1:The founder of the eponymous IT security firm, Hirschbeck, has appeared on Shark Tank, an investment reality show since 02/2009. He's based in Los Angeles, he said by email, but enjoys New York City and particularly likes the finishes at 111 West 50 Seventh. He loves the neighborhood, and his seven year old twins go to Central Park at least three or four times a day when the family is in town. Three or four times a day? That that's back and forth constantly.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Anyway, we are very happy to be back in NYC, he said in the email. The death of NYC is always highly exaggerated.
Speaker 2:Yes. Always.
Speaker 1:Good take. Anyway, get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Jordy, which
Speaker 2:one you got next? Dylan Field got an email Yes. This morning with the subject line, revised cost. Dylan Field for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025. So if you are if you want to be on the list for the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2025, be sure.
Speaker 1:I thought sales@tbpn.com. Right?
Speaker 2:I almost commented. I was like, whatever whatever they're whatever they're asking, we'll beat them.
Speaker 1:We'll beat them. We can beat them on price.
Speaker 2:We should actually Tyler, you should make the the most influential visionary leader to watch in 2026 with Figma Make and then
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Then make put Dylan at the top. This is just one of the benefits of being in the TPPN orbit. Yes. We'll make a list just for you. Yes.
Speaker 2:We'll put you on it. Yes. And you don't have to pay anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we we should also put out an RFP for most influential news show hosts to watch in 2026. Yeah. And see who wants to bid. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What can they bring to the table? How much does it cost? And then we can, you know, really evaluate.
Speaker 2:It really should be an auction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It should be a proper sales process. Yeah. It should be wining and dining.
Speaker 1:You should win and dine us in order to
Speaker 2:or I mean, I I really think Forbes the Forbes list. Right? There's people that wanna be on the list. Yeah. There's people that don't wanna be on the list.
Speaker 2:Yes. There's people that effectively pay to not be on the list and stay off the list. But the most pure hyper capitalist form of the Forbes list would be it's just a 100 spots get released. It's just a it's just an
Speaker 1:auction. Auction.
Speaker 2:Right? So like you can bid and people can say, do I wanna be in the top five?
Speaker 1:Yes. Do I
Speaker 2:wanna be number one? Yes. Am I cool with the top 10? Am I cool? And so it's really like proof of wealth.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Congratulations. You invented Sotheby's.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Basically.
Speaker 1:This is basically like
Speaker 2:what our We we invented Sotheby's from First Principles.
Speaker 1:We really did. This is, you know, at a certain point, the the most expensive home in America, 300,000,000, you can easily put a billion dollars of art in that home if you want to flex like that. It's certainly possible. Absolutely. But if you're running your organization on GitHub, you need to flex by getting your your team on graphite.dev.
Speaker 1:Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Big news from Trey Stevens. Yeah. This was me.
Speaker 1:Fly fisherman. We talked about fly fishing earlier. Trey says, my 12 year old son recently got into fingerboards and realized there were a bunch of improvements that he could make to boards. So he bought himself a bunch of wood, tools, sandpaper, etcetera, and made an incredible deck himself.
Speaker 2:This is so
Speaker 1:Anyone out there crafted board from him.
Speaker 2:This Were you into fingerboards?
Speaker 1:I was a little bit, but never were
Speaker 2:never really that.
Speaker 1:But you were into custom skateboards. Tell tell
Speaker 2:me that. Yeah. Well, yeah. I had a I had a my first ever company was a was a skateboard company when I was 12. I figured out that I could manufacture boards in the Midwest for like $17.50.
Speaker 2:A board? And I could Okay. And I could easily sell them for 35 to 40.
Speaker 1:Well, so you were kinda like drop shipping whereas we're looking at a real craft craftsman.
Speaker 2:I was not. It was not drop shipping.
Speaker 1:You were you were kind of reselling someone else's labor. You weren't you
Speaker 2:weren't Yeah. Okay. It wasn't hand whittled. I wasn't whittling.
Speaker 1:This was a craftsman. And how old were you at the time?
Speaker 2:I was 12. He looks You
Speaker 1:were 12?
Speaker 2:He's 12.
Speaker 1:He's 12. Okay. Well, he's still I
Speaker 2:guess 12
Speaker 1:is age.
Speaker 2:People hit their skateboard.
Speaker 1:We're looking at we're looking at a generational craftsman. But I
Speaker 2:think this is really cool. I I, you know It's incredible. There's so many Very good. There's so many good ideas that when you see them, they're just totally obvious Yeah. And beautiful custom.
Speaker 2:The, you know, the the typical fingerboards
Speaker 1:This is such a flex as a dad too. It's like nothing says my kids have not been one shot by AI slop than my kids are handcrafting. Totally. Finger boards from wood, tools, and sandpaper. Yep.
Speaker 1:So congrats.
Speaker 2:Fantastic work. News. Junior Stevens.
Speaker 1:Anyway, also fantastic work from the team over at Base Power. R for Rock has a rumor that they are raising a $500,000,000 series c at a $3,000,000,000 pre money with substantial demand up to 1,000,000,000. People wanna get in on
Speaker 2:Another billion dollars for Thrive Capital.
Speaker 1:Oh, is Thrive early?
Speaker 2:No. They were yeah. They were super early.
Speaker 1:They were super early. Well, this is fantastic. Zach Dell has been on the show and
Speaker 2:Not Zach Dell.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. What? Zach Dell is the co founder of Base Power. But we had No. Other
Speaker 2:It's Justin. We had Justin
Speaker 1:on the Yeah. We had Justin on the show, but Zach is his co founder.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We were texting with Zach, didn't but wound up going with the co founder. Anyway, just a few months after the series b. So congratulations. We will hold off on the Gong ringing until it's official. But good luck with the with the massive series c fundraise.
Speaker 1:It looks like
Speaker 2:something
Speaker 1:Brandon
Speaker 2:Brandon Brandon Gurrell in the chat says they're called Tech Decks and that is the one
Speaker 1:Tech Decks. That's right.
Speaker 2:Anyways, we should we should probably get TBP and Tech Decks. We should. We should. Or we should just hire Tracy.
Speaker 7:Tech Decks are like the plastic version. Did the same thing
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 7:did? As Trace even's son.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:I like built them out of wood. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Hey. I had this Woah.
Speaker 2:Let's let's give it a let's hit the air horn because you you managed to bring a shirt to the office. I love to see it. Yeah. Wow. That's really the sign that summer's over.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Summer's over. Tyler got a shirt.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Not good. But I I had like a That's I had this whole like belt sander. I bought like a bunch of hardware. But, yeah, it was a lot of
Speaker 1:fun. Did you ever monetize?
Speaker 7:I think I sold them to some friends, but it was never a big
Speaker 1:Never a big business.
Speaker 5:Was just
Speaker 7:more for love of the craft. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Love of the craft. Love of the game.
Speaker 1:Were were you 12 as well? Is that
Speaker 7:the right Probably.
Speaker 1:I was like 13. 13. This seems to be like the the tech deck age.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I liked the idea. The same thing with with skateboarding broadly. I like the idea of being able to do like cool tricks, but like did not have the grind to actually like level up to the point where I could do a kick flip with the tech deck. It seemed like that was that was grind that I was not willing
Speaker 2:to You were reading books about data centers Probably. Semiconductors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was working in like the precursor to After Effects, Macromedia Flash and and doing like, I don't know, playing Counter Strike and modding Counter Strike. I I was I was fully online. I was going digital. Was in the metaverse
Speaker 2:for sure. Going digital.
Speaker 1:For sure. I was building building computers every once while. And and my my, like, my adolescent hustle was buying DJ equipment and reselling it on eBay. So I'd buy it in America. The American DJ equipment companies didn't have distribution internationally.
Speaker 1:And so I'd go on eBay, meet buyers internationally, and then just do all the hard work to get through the customs and shipping. Because people would like, I want that thing. I'm a DJ in Australia. I want American DJ equipment from like Denon and Morantz or or or, you know, whoever else. And and and I would do all the work
Speaker 2:crazy that you could have had a residency in Vegas now if you just had actually learned the craft of Yeah. Instead, you know, we're
Speaker 1:here at
Speaker 2:CultureDown. True. Another life.
Speaker 1:Can I give it I did at one point learn how to how to mix on vinyl? It's incredibly It's way easier now. The technology is
Speaker 6:so much easier.
Speaker 2:Learn how to not just mix, but mix on vinyl.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really hard. It it is like a true, like, scale. But then once once, like, the different tools came out, Serato and Mix Meister and Ableton.
Speaker 1:I never really got into Ableton, but I
Speaker 2:It's such an important DJ story?
Speaker 7:No. But DJ flip flops?
Speaker 5:Did you put did you ever
Speaker 7:put stuff on SoundCloud? Because I think
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Jacob Britomacci has found your SoundCloud.
Speaker 1:I I just reposted things. I never I never put
Speaker 7:Those were never your own
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. He he I think he just said that I have good taste in, like, what I had retweeted on SoundCloud or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I I've I've I'm thinking I'm gonna double down on flip flops as the nickname
Speaker 2:because No, it's just flops.
Speaker 1:Well, I like it because it's like I've a a Neo Cloud, what is Chase Lockmiller doing? He's flipping flops. Right? He buys flops for one price. He flips them for the next price.
Speaker 1:He's like a house flipper but for flops. So he's flip flops. And I think that that that that there's layers to the nickname. So I'm hoping it catches on. But if you just wanna go flops, that's fine too.
Speaker 2:I like flops.
Speaker 1:Okay. Anyway, anything else from you flops? What else is in the timeline? What's what what's burning up the timeline? What's burning up flops timeline?
Speaker 7:Alright. You'll get come back to me.
Speaker 1:Okay. We'll come back to you. We will tell you about Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert expert level insights in seconds.
Speaker 1:Ask Julius to analyze your data. Own personal data entrusted by individual at Princeton.
Speaker 2:2,000,000,000 users soon. 2,000,000,000 soon. I'm gonna call it.
Speaker 1:This is a funny post by Chrisman who's been on the show. And it's funny because it's like this it's a picture of what is it? It's a painting of Odysseus tied to the mast during the Odyssey where the sirens are calling him. And and Chrisman just says, all respect to the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it, but someone needs to tie him to the mast and stuff wax in his ears. And the original post was deleted, so I couldn't even tell who it was, but I immediately knew who he was subtweeting.
Speaker 1:But he was actually quote tweeting him, but then the post was deleted. But so the timeline continues to be somewhat just I wouldn't even call it anti Elon. I would call it like, they're just like
Speaker 2:It's like, come on.
Speaker 1:It's almost like an intervention. They're like, please, like like, you know, we're asking you nicely. Can you please like, you know, stick to the cool stuff.
Speaker 2:If a friend is making It's
Speaker 1:hyperpunk stuff.
Speaker 2:If a friend's like making a mess actively making a mistake as Yep. Strategic error Yep. And you you you're delivering it in the form of of humor. Right? You're delivering the Exactly.
Speaker 2:Advice through Doesn't always get through.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, who knows if it's good if it's good advice. It's more just like it's like a nice it's a nice ask. It's like, you know, I I wish I wish this thing was was there. Anyway, there's there's more news about Elon Musk, this time about the coordination between Meta and xAI on a bid to buy OpenAI, which was kind of rumored earlier.
Speaker 1:And people weren't sure if it was like this head fake to just, like, make the nonprofit to for profit conversion more difficult. There's clearly a crazy battle and rivalry going on between Elon, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. Sam Zuck and Elon have been at odds a long time ago because of the Twitter and threads debate and and battle there. And then they were about to do that UFC fight or the MMA fight for a while, and then that never happened. And and that was hotly debated.
Speaker 1:And then now Elon has kinda turned his sights on Sam, and maybe Zuck is a little bit more of an ally. The quote here from Nick is, OpenAI says Mr. Musk's interrogatory response is named Mr. Zuck. What?
Speaker 1:That that has to be like edited. Name name This is just Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2:And s 12388
Speaker 1:Someone six he spoke with about potential financing or investments to bid OpenAI for 97,000,000,000, which would be a 80% discount to the current valuation. Is that right? Like and this was, like, earlier this year or something. That's crazy to think about. Meta didn't join or sign the LOI, says document quests are burdensome and OpenAI should seek communication from Musk xAI first.
Speaker 1:L m a o, says Nick. And then Matthew Donaghan Ryan says, surprise, Elon Musk asked Mark Zuckerberg to join xAI's bid to acquire OpenAI. I wonder how that would have worked or
Speaker 2:even From an antitrust standpoint? Totally. It would have been pretty hard to pull off maybe if Meta was purely an investor.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Well, I mean, maybe you say, hey, but, you know, there's no monopoly in nonprofit research. I'm gonna buy a nonprofit, you know. Like, you know, hey, I'm a social network.
Speaker 1:I sell ads, Senator. I don't have any exposure to nonprofits. So Yeah. Let me pick up a little bit of the nonprofit market.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:let me let let me add that to my portfolio.
Speaker 2:Advancing I just wanna help create intelligence that benefits all of humanity. That's Yeah. That's that's all, your honor.
Speaker 1:Anyway, ChatGPT is obviously dominant and has been on a run. If you wanna get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT, you gotta go to ProFound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So this Wall Street Journal article, Elon Musk wanted Mark Zuckerberg to join OpenAI bid. Court filing says a consortium of investors led by Musk offered to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. So they were trying to buy the nonprofit in February as part of the billionaire's continuing legal battle with the company.
Speaker 1:He cofounded alongside Sam Altman, and that's the most interesting story. That's that's why you're we're getting a movie here. It's not just this, you know, this viral product that everyone's using all the time. It's the fact that In OpenAI seven different cofounders
Speaker 2:valuable
Speaker 1:started foundation model companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and OpenAI, at the at the latest tender offer is now the most if if it if it actually happens, if it is happening, it would be the most valuable privately held company surpassing SpaceX.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. Yeah. So there's probably just rivalry on market cap, but also rivalry over control of an important technology going forward. In a response included in the filing, Meta said there was no evidence representatives from the company had coordinated with Musk on the OpenAI bid. Meta and OpenAI declined to comment on the filing.
Speaker 1:Musk didn't respond. Any partnership between Musk and Zuckerberg would have marked a rare coming together of two powerful tech billionaires who have clashed publicly in the past and who are both heavily invested in the race to build the next generation of AI models.
Speaker 2:Heavily invested in building your next best friend, whether that's Ani
Speaker 4:I see.
Speaker 2:Valentine, Russian girl Yes. Stepmom. Did you know,
Speaker 1:basically, every single MagSeven CEO controls a social network? I'll run through them. Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, controls Facebook and Instagram, and I would call WhatsApp a social network as well. Sundar Pachai at Google controls YouTube. I would count that as a social network.
Speaker 2:Satya.
Speaker 1:Satya. What gonna say? LinkedIn. Yep. LinkedIn, baby.
Speaker 1:GitHub. GitHub. Yeah. Somewhat of a social network.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, for for people like
Speaker 1:Tim Cook. Tyler. Would call iMessage basically a social network. People the group chat functionality operates a lot like that.
Speaker 2:Especially when you add Genmoji in the mix.
Speaker 1:Andy Jassy at Amazon owns Twitch. Right. And I've been I've been begging for this. Andy Jassy, look at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing in terms of comps. He's going direct.
Speaker 1:He's posting on Instagram. I want you on Twitch. I want you in the chat. Chat, should we make more Trainium? Or are we getting GB two hundreds?
Speaker 1:You know, thank you for the 200. No. I can't comment on the on the next James Bond casting. Hold on. I think I'm getting swatted.
Speaker 1:That's what I hear wanna hear from Andy Jassy. Get on Twitch. I think it would be an absolutely
Speaker 2:Beat it.
Speaker 1:Banger moment on the Internet. If you just dropped a Twitch stream where he was just explaining how AWS is like, a post earnings Twitch stream from Andy Crazy. Cassy would go incredibly hard.
Speaker 2:We haven't even have we properly set up our Twitch account?
Speaker 1:Yes. We are streaming on Twitch right now. We have done not and we haven't done enough to actually grow it. And I don't know that our audience is necessarily on Twitch at all. But Twitch does have a fantastic livestream experience.
Speaker 1:And and and and people who grow audiences on Twitch are are really great. But I was talking to someone who's sort of big in the creator economy, and he was saying that it is it is impossible to cold start Twitch. You have to be big before. You have to be big on YouTube and then make a bunch of announcements. I'm on Twitch now.
Speaker 1:Drive a whole bunch of people there and be in the top rankings on day one. And then also, the default
Speaker 2:We're big over there. We have one person watching us.
Speaker 1:Let's go. I was gonna
Speaker 2:say, report show one. You are on something How you doing? Welcome to the is
Speaker 1:is Cornstalk.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:Shout out Cornstalk.
Speaker 2:Bobby Cosmic says I'm on Twitch. Let's go, Bobby.
Speaker 1:Cosmic is on Twitch.
Speaker 2:There we
Speaker 1:go. We got a little army brewing over there on Twitch. Welcome to the team.
Speaker 2:Let's chat is underrated.
Speaker 1:Twitch, Twitch chat is deeply underrated. Yeah. People wind up over there. But we're happy to restream. We're happy to be a
Speaker 2:Cornstalk, Bobby. Thank you guys for holding it down.
Speaker 1:Thank you for holding it down over there.
Speaker 2:We didn't even know we were streaming
Speaker 1:on Twitch. Safe space over there. I think we're also streaming on LinkedIn, technically. Again
Speaker 2:The LinkedIn, we gotta
Speaker 1:gotta step up.
Speaker 2:The Twitch stream is popping off now.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:I love it. You. We're the one viewer there.
Speaker 1:Thank you, guys. Wow. This is awesome. Anyway, who who else? Elon Musk.
Speaker 1:He's in the mag seven CEOs for Tesla. Tesla doesn't have a social network but he owns x. Right? And so you have six The
Speaker 2:Twitch Just the the Fidelity on this the the
Speaker 1:The video?
Speaker 2:Livestream on Twitch legitimately looks better than every other platform. Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's incredibly
Speaker 1:Andy Jassy, he's been cooking. He's the cloud cowboy. He knows his infrastructure. Maybe he's gonna pull us out.
Speaker 5:Andy Jassy, get in the Twitch channel
Speaker 1:right now. If Andy Jassy comes on the show next week, we will exclusively stream on Twitch for two minutes. I don't wanna overcommit. But we would love to have you, Andy. We're big fans.
Speaker 1:But I don't know if it's actually a good I would
Speaker 2:be honored to
Speaker 4:get the
Speaker 2:Gong for
Speaker 1:But I will do I I will commit to doing a special one time exclusive stream on Twitch if Andy Jassy comes on the show. I'll give him that. I don't know exactly what we'll what we'll wanna trade. But, anyway, my point was six out of the seven mag seven CEOs own social networks. You know who doesn't?
Speaker 1:Tyler, who doesn't own a social network? Mag seven CEO.
Speaker 7:Jensen.
Speaker 1:Jensen does not own. Jensen does not own a social network.
Speaker 2:TikTok.
Speaker 1:But imagine TikTok. That's where he's going.
Speaker 2:The juggler. Yeah. The juggler.
Speaker 1:The juggler. If he bought TikTok can continue to He can run it.
Speaker 2:Juggler.
Speaker 1:He can run it on the new cloud.
Speaker 2:He can continue to balance both US and Chinese national interests Nope. Perfectly.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine?
Speaker 2:Hopefully, he doesn't drop a ball.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, There's he doesn't zero competitive there's zero competitive antitrust problems. He could build out the infrastructure to actually run TikTok profitably. He has the chips to do all the inference, can do AI video generation.
Speaker 2:Like He can get you he's the guy to get you more addicted to TikTok. You're addicted to TikTok, you want to be putting up more hours.
Speaker 1:I don't know why this didn't come to us earlier. It seems so obvious in hindsight. He should definitely buy TikTok. But if he doesn't, let's say he let's say he wants to grow his own. I think DJX Lepton, the network, would be amazing.
Speaker 1:Just a pure social network, just for fans of semi of semiconductors
Speaker 2:I could also
Speaker 1:you see people go and talk about power. Go talk about HBM.
Speaker 2:Allison, he's gunning to be in the MAG eight.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:He's on he's The Rise is
Speaker 1:Oracle's the obvious. One
Speaker 2:And he was rumored to be one of the bidders on on TikTok acquisition.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So he knows that if he wants to be in the MAG eight
Speaker 1:That's the way to do it. Eventually. You gotta own a social network. You gotta go direct.
Speaker 7:I could also see Jensen adding in messaging to CUDA. I think that would be interesting. So between, you know, AI AI labs, maybe you send a little Bloomberg
Speaker 2:for AI researcher.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, that would be good. Yes. Right. Right.
Speaker 1:More lock in for the CUDA name.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I want it right on the bare metal. I want super low level message.
Speaker 1:Low level. Yeah. You have to write a new you have to you have to write in in CUDA to call just like send a post.
Speaker 7:Yeah, write some kernels
Speaker 1:Exactly. And Yeah, for sure. It acts as a gating. It's kind of exclusivity. Like how when Facebook launched, it was only for, oh, Harvard students.
Speaker 1:This would only be for AI researchers. And then all of a sudden, everyone's like, I got to get on DJX Lepton, the network. The DJX Lepton network. The CUDA we need a better name for the CUDA social network. Something like that.
Speaker 1:CUDA book. Maybe that. CUDA gram. Get on CUDA gram.
Speaker 2:CUDA feed.
Speaker 1:Kudafeed. Anyway, if you're building a social network, you gotta get on Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products that meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 2:If you're building digital products, I'm literally begging you to get on you're not already, I'm begging you.
Speaker 1:Begging you.
Speaker 2:Support. Do the right thing for your users. Get on linear.
Speaker 1:Cracker Barrel rebrand. Have you ever been to a Cracker Barrel?
Speaker 2:No. Never heard of
Speaker 1:it. Have you been to a Cracker Barrel, Tyler?
Speaker 7:I have not.
Speaker 1:I don't think I've ever been to a Cracker Barrel.
Speaker 2:Wait. This is crazy. I met one of the one of I think it I think it's been I I think it's still privately held. Let me check the
Speaker 1:Cracker Barrel?
Speaker 2:But I met Do
Speaker 4:they have
Speaker 7:them on the West Coast? Or is it just like a
Speaker 2:No. It's publicly traded now. But I know I
Speaker 1:know because we are all streaming on Substack. Yes. Shout out Substack. We love streaming on Substack. Go subscribe to our Substack.
Speaker 1:We are sending out the show notes every morning before the show goes live in email form.
Speaker 2:But anyways, I met I met one of the second or third generation that, like, basically, the grandson, I think Mhmm. The original owner. Mhmm. Total Chad. But, yeah, never never been to one.
Speaker 2:He told me about it, and it's I think it's a big Cracker Barrel is a pretty big deal. It never never been there. But
Speaker 1:Scott in the chat says Cracker Barrel is not all it's hyped up to be. Wow. Is Cracker Barrel cracked, or are they mid? Let's figure it out. Well, they just rebranded.
Speaker 1:Cracker Barrel
Speaker 2:for
Speaker 1:the first time in 1977. Jordy, you're a brand guy. You know design. Do Pull this picture up. What do you think?
Speaker 1:Do you think this is an improvement over their existing over their existing brand? The previous Cracker Barrel logo said old old country store had a gentleman in a chair leaned up against a literal barrel. And then they also changed their I think that the logo is somewhat of an evolution. It doesn't strike me as a revolution. I feel like the backlash to the Cracker Barrel rebrand is more about the remodel.
Speaker 1:Because if you look at the pictures of the Cracker Barrel remodel, Yimby Land says, it's one of the most upsetting things I've seen in a long time. Literally, everyone I know is in shock. Cracker Barrel has gone from very old timey chairs that you can pull out, wooden desks, lots of trinkets, and there's a there's a paddle on the wall from an oar, from a boat. It looks just like a normal store that you would walk into. It looks like a mom and pop shop, even though it's a large institution at this point.
Speaker 1:And now, it looks like it's a McDonald's. It looks like it's something that has been designed by a corporation to be copy and pasted all over America. I'm sure it's probably better for this. Bottom line.
Speaker 2:Because I wanna see we wanna we wanna show
Speaker 1:up. This photo.
Speaker 2:Before and after.
Speaker 1:The before and after were not yeah.
Speaker 2:They tried to glow up, but they glowed down.
Speaker 1:Mark in the chat says Cracker Barrel is cracked, but this rebrand is bad. I wonder how much money they're actually saving with this type of of rebrand, or if they just genuinely think this is what will get them to the next level. This will be a growth factor for them, and they just
Speaker 2:We have a really unique approach to interior design in our restaurants. What if we made it mid and and what if we made it look like everything else? What if we made it look like some random this this to me screams like touristy Yep. Like seafood shop in a in a It's just like what
Speaker 1:is the most hyper competitive market right now in all of restaurants? It's fast casual.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:None of the fast casual restaurants are differentiating on design or layout
Speaker 2:yell, oink, oink, piggy. Come get your come get your slot bowl.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Cracker Barrel's not fast casual, though.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's know. Not. What what they did was they said, hey.
Speaker 1:There's this thing that's hypercompetitive. We're already differentiated. We could literally do nothing and win, or we could try and remodel to look like a Chipotle and a Cava and a Sweetgreen and look like a, you know, bland, modern, fast casual place. And then we will be anonymous with everyone else. And all of a sudden, we're like, you know, losing everything that makes us special.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I we'll we'll see we'll see if this turns into a boycott, if this actually hurts the the adoption. People might just be interested in Cracker Barrel. They'll just walk in anyway. They don't care.
Speaker 1:A lot of these rebrands, they get hated at the beginning and then they just become Lindy over time. I believe that happened to Pepsi. If you look at the the new Pepsi logo, maybe they had to walk that one back. But there's been a number of there's been a number of rebrands that have been really poorly received and then Well,
Speaker 2:what Cracker Barrel is doing is the same thing that the luxury houses did.
Speaker 1:Yes. If you
Speaker 2:look at if you look at all Yes. Whether it's Louis Vuitton or
Speaker 1:They all went to what? Sans serif, bold, blocky fonts?
Speaker 2:Bottega Veneta. Yes. Bottega.
Speaker 1:They really lost themselves. Their They made What's crazy is, like, I understand the first person doing that because if you're the first person to do minimalism in your category, you're gonna stand out. But when you're the seventh and and the brand designer pulls up the deck and you're like, wait, so you're gonna make us look exactly like all of our competitors? Like, why would we want that? And you say, yes, that feels crazy to me and that's what this feels like.
Speaker 1:This feels like
Speaker 2:Pull this picture up in the chat. This is the all the
Speaker 1:yeah. YSL, Balenciaga, Burberry, Berluti, and Balmain Balmain?
Speaker 2:Balmain. They'll all switch back eventually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think they'll I think they might have to, but I wouldn't
Speaker 2:It's funny that they did this right as Gen z, the new generation says, no. We want maximalist brands. Right? So
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:They'll all end up they'll all end up going back eventually.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're selling something, one of these luxury goods, you gotta get on numeral sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
Speaker 2:You already know. Sales tax AGI. There's a post here from Vittorio.
Speaker 1:There's a video.
Speaker 2:This video up. Can we pull this video up? This is one of the This hardest is one of the the hardest things to do.
Speaker 1:We we it's because it's deeper in the timeline. We gotta dig it up. I can copy it and put it down there. Copy message.
Speaker 2:I'll read the next post from Roon for now. He says, companies like Facebook record every imaginable interaction their users have with the platform. They log each of your clicks and taps. Track of how long your gaze lingered on a post. Whether you were on the same WiFi as that woman who might be your friend, which Instagram reel you watch three times.
Speaker 2:For a single user, this is quaint. But these practices are done on a planetary scale across all technology giants. They create petabytes of data per day and keep it for as long as the European regulators will let them. Then they can have machine intelligence instrument it to useful knowledge for their cybernetic control systems that build news feeds, serve ads, decide how much compute to spend on you, which SKUs should be in which warehouses right before you want them. The hive metastore bills run into the billions.
Speaker 2:Hospitals serve most of their data in telem telemetry Telemetry. Telemetry out after each case every single day. They record videos of vascular surgeries, endoscopies, discovering interesting physiologies. Sometimes they're not recorded at all and most of them, the time they delete them as soon as they're done. It's even worse for physiologic waveforms which are essentially never recorded anywhere at all.
Speaker 2:ECG, arterial Millet second scale views of patients' brains. Vascular. Parts are generated.
Speaker 1:Well, vasculatures are recorded on on YouTube. If you're like watching Sam Soulek, you'll see how vascular he is. So bodybuilding, in terms of I think bodybuilding YouTube videos sort of solves the data capture
Speaker 2:of We vasculatures. That to be the predominant training data
Speaker 1:for Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:All video models.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's good that Sam that Sam Sulik is uploading a daily video because that weights the models to be more muscular in the Like, when you just say, generate one person Please. Please, it will just pick Sam Sulik because he's overwhelming algorithm. Yep. Yes.
Speaker 2:Rune says, all of these time series of course predict people's heart stopping, brains exploding, etcetera, ahead of time. Brains exploding.
Speaker 1:What are you talking about, Rune? Brains don't explode.
Speaker 2:Surgeons teller op, teleoperate robots. None of the micro movements are recorded. Policies never learned, never correlated into which outcomes were successful or not. This would be unthinkable to most software people whose instinct is to record everything everywhere, never mind the cloud cost because we are sure that there will be some use for it later and some model to be trained later. I don't have a prescription here per se.
Speaker 2:My point is just that our civilization routinely hoards and treasures
Speaker 4:some of
Speaker 2:the silliest data in the world. I pressed like on the John Pork reel. John Pork.
Speaker 1:The load
Speaker 2:This is real. Don't I know.
Speaker 1:This is like John Pork is like one of like the brain rot terms which is like it's it's like skibbidi. It's like that era basically.
Speaker 2:And destroys much of all the most important data it generates and limits what machines can learn.
Speaker 1:Very interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, had to learn that I pressed like on the John Pork reel Yep. Before they could learn how my body will react to different medicines.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So surveillance state exists on the phone should it exist in the clinic, in the hospital. And we've talked to some people about, like, Cursor for Bio, and there's a lot of note taking that's going on. But there isn't as much just capture all the data. And that feels like, okay, have everyone in the hospital wear a, you know, glasses that are constantly recording video.
Speaker 1:So when they look at the ECG monitor, that data is just captured and it's in video. Yeah. It's hard to get at, but at least it's recorded. Every every back and forth of course, there's HIPAA compliance that needs to be really secure. But maybe there's a signal that you could pull out of all that data at some point.
Speaker 1:But people are gonna be very worried about that for good reasons. Because if you're recording all the data in a doctor's office, are you are you likely to be honest with your doctor when they ask, how many glasses of Screaming Eagle do you have a day? Yeah. You know, you need to be honest about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If
Speaker 1:you're putting back twelve twelve glasses a day, like many venture capitalists we know do.
Speaker 2:Especially in August.
Speaker 1:Especially in August. You know, the it needs to be a judgment free zone. Look, you enjoy Screaming Eagle. That's fine. But you should know the risks.
Speaker 1:And if you're if you're seeing there's a recorder going on and you and and you, you know, I I I dabble. I dabble. I have two glasses. And you're lying, you're not gonna get good good advice from your doctor.
Speaker 2:That's So
Speaker 1:there is a trade off here, but I I like Rune's point here that we probably shouldn't be throwing out data if there's some usable Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just give it to us.
Speaker 1:I can be trusted.
Speaker 2:If you got a if you got a petabyte, we got some storage here behind us. We'll Yeah. Put some racks up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the yeah. There's been companies that have like teased this. Like, the technology certainly exists. The AI pins, the wearables, the Google Glass, the Meta Ray Bans, all of these different products could find their way into, like, with a pretty simple wrapper, like a HIPAA compliant data center wrapper, could find their way into the clinic, into the hospital.
Speaker 1:Certainly hasn't happened yet. Maybe it's a maybe it's a business opportunity. We will see. Anyway, bing.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on g two. I was thinking about this.
Speaker 1:We always say it's the number one AI agent for customer service, fin dot ai. You could think about fin as a company, as an agency. No one's really used that. Everyone says they're they're building agents. No one says, we are an agency.
Speaker 1:And because that's what the you know, we are an agency. Like Come us.
Speaker 2:Hire your agents.
Speaker 1:We're yeah. Come to us. Hire agents. We we we produce agents. We're an agency.
Speaker 1:I think that's maybe the next the the next catchphrase in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2:Well, Farzad says, to me, it's become quite obvious that after Tesla builds the Roadster, they are done building cars with steering wheels and pedals. Every new platform from that point forward will be driverless. Mhmm. They will continue to tweak existing platforms model y l, super affordable three and y, cheaper Cybertruck, etcetera. But as far as new platforms go, it's pretty obvious that they're going for a brand new TAM.
Speaker 2:Car enthusiasts are not gonna be happy. You could make us happy by making a driverless car with a naturally aspirated v 12.
Speaker 1:Yes. Right? Yes. But I don't need a steering wheel. I I I would give up a steering wheel if I got if I got 12 cylinders and straight piped exhaust.
Speaker 1:Do you think they will never act he's predicting that they will never do sidewall.
Speaker 2:A humanoid in the front that would just manually shift for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just because
Speaker 2:it's entertaining to watch Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the final the final test. I he's he's basically saying that they will never the the the deeper reading here is that he thinks that they will never do a Cy Bourbon. And I think that they have to. I don't think the Is that model
Speaker 2:the YL?
Speaker 1:I don't think the YL will will satisfy someone who wants Cybertruck aesthetics, Cybertruck durability, truly, like, load the entire family and go to Tahoe. Like, the original Chevy Tahoe was designed for exactly that. Like, go into inclement weather with the whole family and the dogs and all the gear. And they have the platform. It would be crazy not to build more stuff on top of the Cybertruck platform like they did with the three and the y and the s.
Speaker 1:Right? They they they took that platform and they expanded it. Why not expand on top of the Cybertruck platform? But, yeah, maybe maybe they're just super, super pilled on on driverless and they just and they just never do it. But I would think that if you're if you're taking the family to the to the snow and you have the big family hauler, the huge, huge full size SUV, the because the Model y l, I think, is still technically a it's like a midsize SUV.
Speaker 1:Even though it's the long wheelbase version, it's not as big as the Cadillac Escalade ESV.
Speaker 2:True size, Lord.
Speaker 1:It's not 220 inches, which is the true size, It's like 200 inches, which is big. It's it's big, but it is like a mid size SUV or full size. It's not extended, like the biggest of the biggest, which I think is people what people want. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio. Customer relationship magic.
Speaker 1:Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Adio. What else we got? Angela Strange.
Speaker 2:She's got a good post here. Yeah. It's called Always Respond Quickly. Responsiveness is one of the most powerful superpowers you can have in working in life. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's because speed wins and responsiveness is the form of speed people can actually feel on the other side whether they are a customer, a founder, a boss, or a friend. For a startup, this show up as sales velocity, a buyer who emails three vendors with products that look very similar. One responds within the hour, schedules a demo that same day and is ready to help them implement that afternoon. They may not have the best product or the lowest price but they are the fastest and that usually means they win. The same principle applies to customer success.
Speaker 2:If your customer knows they can send a message and get a reply right away whether by Slack, email or phone, they will feel supported and that speed builds trust and that trust compounds over time. It's no different for investors, employees or even friends. The investors who respond quickly are the ones who get into the most competitive deals. True. The employees who respond quickly are the ones who get more responsibility, more ownership and eventually more promotions.
Speaker 2:The friend who responds quickly are the ones you turn to first when something important happens. Speed signals seriousness. It shows that you care. It creates momentum. And once people know that you are fast, they will bring you more opportunities, more trust, and more responsibility.
Speaker 2:Responsiveness, the form of speed that others directly experience often makes the biggest difference in who actually wins. Totally agree. I'm unfortunately at a point where I will either respond in one second or twenty four hours
Speaker 1:We never
Speaker 2:or even longer. Yeah. It's it's like very binary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it I the what is never said when people say, like, respond quickly to everything is like, no. It's like respond super quickly to the super important things and do not respond at all to the random spam that you're getting. Like, don't respond to the junk. And then and then there is stuff in the middle that it's like, you can get to it in a week and it's fine.
Speaker 1:And it's really just like triage appropriately. But when there's something important, do it right then. Yep. Don't don't have a don't have a single SLA for every form of communication. Like, there are people in your life who you should get back to within two seconds.
Speaker 1:There are people who, if they come to you with something, you should just pick up the phone and call them. And there are other people who can totally wait and the thing is not important and you can catch up later and discuss whatever, you know, they're trying to sell you or whatever deal you're trying to do. And and you should probably take those. And then some of them you should just, like, yeah, this is obviously slop. Like, you you sent me junk and you're going to the slop folder in my email.
Speaker 1:And you might already be there.
Speaker 2:Do you actually have a folder called slop?
Speaker 1:We do. Wow. Yes. And and if somebody gets too sloppy, they get automatically added to that.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Little tip for the people
Speaker 2:said phone addiction's so bad that watching a movie feels productive.
Speaker 1:It really does. It really does. Last Saturday, I was like God, this is important. I'm going to watch the new Superman movie. I'm going to sit down and watch this thing.
Speaker 1:Couldn't do it. This isn't enough of a productive mood. Anyway, public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And you know who else is trusted by millions?
Speaker 1:Joe Wieser Wall Street himself. Who is in The president of Wall TV and Ultradome. He's in the fortress finance, but he's also in Jackson Hole. How was it? Was it emotional?
Speaker 1:Was there a standing ovation?
Speaker 5:It's emotional. It's incredibly, incredibly exciting.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. It's a joy just to pop up the there.
Speaker 2:Amazing too, by
Speaker 1:the way.
Speaker 2:You got him. You got him. Motion. Okay.
Speaker 1:Break it down for us.
Speaker 8:What happened?
Speaker 5:You know what's really funny is, like, the people around that paparazzi shot where you see the world's major central bankers, they call it the purple. You know? Like, they joke about the, like, oh, this is where the purple arc is going to be. I you know? I don't wanna, like, feed any, like, conspiracy theories about, like, what the world's central bankers do, but I do find that to be funny that that is, like, what the people in that area refer to it as.
Speaker 5:Yeah. All that being said, you know, look, it's always sort of an extraordinary time, late August in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Like, there's arguably nowhere better to be in the world except for the fact that the Internet access out here is a little bit spotty. Other than that, it is the perfect, spot. But you get why all the central bankers come here.
Speaker 5:You get why it's so compelling. And, of course, this year, so many questions about the short term path of the economy, the long term path of the economy, and the pressure on the Federal Reserve or Central Bank independence. It's the place to be.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just glad that we got through the bear market of Monday to Monday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was rough. Talk to me about, how people read the tea leaves that is a Jerome Powell speech. I didn't have time to read the whole thing. I just kinda control f for inflation, and there were 55 mentions, which seemed high.
Speaker 1:But are people doing a deeper level of analysis here? Is there even a deeper level of analysis that you can do, or or is it always just him kind of, like, vague posting about what's going on in the economy and then people read from it what they will?
Speaker 5:So I would say that typically speaking, the control f approach is a very good approach to decoding monetary policy except for this year.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:And the reason why I would say you can't do it this year is that every five years, they'd announce the framework review, which is not really anything to do with the short term path of monetary policy. It's more like how they're thinking about meeting their goals. So this was a framework review year
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 5:Year. And so, therefore, there was just a bunch of words in there that are probably very important for, like, thinkers of long term that don't really reflect any sort of immediate thing. In terms of the immediate cycle, you know, it wasn't a particularly extreme speech, but in terms of the immediate cycle, he flagged the labor market side of the mandate as being the source of where there's more concern right now, hence, sort of keeping in play in a real way that September meeting. Hence, why the stock market got saved and everything is flying to the moon. Hence why Ethereum is up 12% today and several of, like, all of these things.
Speaker 2:Well, even even Circle Circle was up almost 10% even though their revenue is tied to the federal funds rate.
Speaker 5:You know, you joke about that, and I saw that observation, and I if you there there's one argument that's like, oh, look. Why? You know, rates are gonna be lower. Their spread is gonna be compressed. The fact that the stock is flying says to me, you know, it's still more a crypto play than it is Totally.
Speaker 5:Than it is a bank. You know? Well, it's also just a
Speaker 1:growing company and people, and there's risk with the stock. And so, you know, lower rates mean I go more risk on. Right? And it's just a trade off.
Speaker 5:But I think but I think the thing that was genuinely interesting is that, you know, we a couple in the last couple weeks, we've got some sort of we got that very anxiety inducing, producer producer price index report.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And there is this concerns like, oh, maybe, you know, the the embers of inflation are not completely stomped out. Mhmm. So even in just the last few days, there's been this, wait. Do we have to start watching a pickup in inflation again? Like, that has been the vibes from, like, other, you know, regional fed presidents and so forth.
Speaker 5:We had Jeffrey Schmidt on our podcast, the head of the Kansas City Fed. That came out yesterday. He was talking about, you know, there are scenarios in which one might be talking about higher rates rather than lower rates given where the stock market is, given where the unemployment rate is, given where inflation is, and so forth. And so the fact that, like, Powell came out and said, look. Basically, it still seems like we're in a trajectory where the cut is probably you know, that's where the risks lie, I think sort of magnified the degree to which the markets took that as.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. Give us music has been more hawkish as you
Speaker 1:as one
Speaker 5:might say.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us the update on the labor market debate and where, where that sits. So there was, like, this revision downward. It seemed really bad, but then there were Yeah. Lots of people casting questions about how real it is, what it actually means.
Speaker 1:Like, what what's the current thinking from the various camps?
Speaker 5:Sure. I think this is a great question, and, you know, there's two ways to think about those revisions. And one, I I, like, hadn't thought of originally until some conversations over the last few days Because there's one version of events where it's like, okay. This makes sense. Like, May, June, these were not great months.
Speaker 5:Like, all of our predictions about the tariffs, like, they were it turned out they were right. The economists were right. Tariffs weren't good for the economy, and the numbers vindicate that
Speaker 1:right now.
Speaker 5:And so that is what and then we are, like, sliding, and maybe we're at the risk of a recession and so on. So that's one way. Mhmm. The other way you could look at those exact same numbers, which I've been hearing from people, and I find this very interesting, is, like, look. Those were very uncertain months.
Speaker 5:Right? Those were crazy months. Of course, hiring was slow. But now we have a considerable considerable more tariff certainty today on August 22 than we had in May or June.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:So maybe already that was the lowest part of the year. Like, maybe we've already seen the slowest two or three months of the economy of 2025, and that already maybe we're accelerating a little bit because businesses have more uncertainty than they have this spring or early summer. And, therefore, if that's the case, then the idea that recession is the risk is not so obvious even by looking at the same data. So I think, like, you know, this is the this is the tragedy of following economics, which is you never really get an answer. You just you think you get close to something, and then there's new data.
Speaker 5:It's like, I gotta look at it. But I think it's still very unclear.
Speaker 1:Is Powell AGI pilled? Is there any element of AI? We saw Francois Chollet yesterday on the timeline saying that AI productivity is not showing up in productivity numbers. There there are, like, various takes on there's gonna be this fast takeoff, and people are gonna be out of jobs or GDP is gonna grow. But it feels like AI is just not even in the conversation when it comes to actual, like, the gravity of economic stats.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And and and you you Sorry. Contrast that to the the tech's reaction to g p d five, which was generally people were my view on it was like this is good for like models plateauing Yeah. A little bit is good if you have consumer app like OpenAI and you have Yeah. Hundreds of millions of users that rely on you every day for like a utility.
Speaker 2:Yep. Bad if you're the neck, you know, the bot, the the ten to twentieth Foundation Model Lab. Right. And so there's been bent general kind of bearishness on on the timeline around AI broadly.
Speaker 5:Well, I'll say, look. I do not know, like, what, you know, what year chairman Powell has for, like, when he sees breakout or take off. He didn't say anything about that today. But that makes sense. The theme the actual formal theme of this year's conference is, like, I forget the labor market in transition or something, and talking about these big structural questions about the future of the labor market.
Speaker 5:And AI is absolutely one of them. I don't think there is a paper being presented on AI this year, but there is a panel, I believe, happening in that room to which I'm not do do not have access. There's a little interesting thing about Jags and all, which is that a lot of media comes who actually don't really have formal access to the thing, and so we just hang out in the lobby and try to, you know, flag people down, etcetera. There is a panel, though, that I believe is talking about AI. So I do think this is it's sort of top of mind, I would say, for many of these central bankers and economists from a sort of theoretical perspective and probably less so at least at the moment from a policy perspective in terms of is any of the what we're seeing in the labor market specifically, you know, AI related at that point.
Speaker 5:But it's certainly top of mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. What we were talking to Chase Lockmiller from Crusoe yesterday. He mentioned that he was in Jackson Hole.
Speaker 1:He didn't say that why he was there, but, I'm interested in some of, like like, the various parties, what they get out of it. It seems like the central bankers from other countries need to know what Fed United States Fed policy is because that will affect their economies. It's obvious why journalists go. It's obvious why, regional federal, bank doesn't member an economist might go. But who are some of the other characters that you're seeing?
Speaker 1:And, like, what are they getting out of this particular event?
Speaker 5:So I the I'll say two things. One is that prior to the financial crisis was in 02/2008. I think you actually had more characters. I believe that you actually had, like, some of the top economists from Wall Street were formally invited to the event. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And then there was a backlash, and so I don't think they got invites after 02/2008, 02/2009. So, like, the actual it's actually narrow, but I also I sort of hinted at this at the top. I don't think I could stress enough that, like, the actual, like, late August in Wyoming, if you like fishing, like, when do what do people get out of this? I do in in no joking manner at all, does it have to do with, like, I could take a work trip to Wyoming in late August and go fishing
Speaker 2:Get out this city.
Speaker 5:In hiking. I think that's the supply line.
Speaker 1:And and This is a catalyst for more stable again. This is a catalyst for more stable global markets because if you're a power player in the financial world and you blow up the global economy, you're not gonna get invited Hole.
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 1:And so you need to bring the VIX down. You need to bring down volatility. You need to prevent the next recession. So if you're out there thinking about causing the next global recession Yeah. Don't do it.
Speaker 1:You wanna be spending
Speaker 5:yourself some Don't do it. Don't miss your
Speaker 2:Just chance don't do it.
Speaker 4:Don't do it. It's It's that that simple. Just don't
Speaker 1:do gonna get to go fly fishing. Come on. Yeah. It's that easy. It's that easy.
Speaker 1:What what else just Well, yeah, what else is on the economic calendar for the rest of the year that we should be looking forward to? When's the next Jackson Hole?
Speaker 5:Well, the next Jackson Hole is gonna be next August. You know what the funny thing is? The other regional so this is the Kansas formerly, it's the Kansas City Fed Yeah. Monetary policy symposium. Again, the other regional Fed prisons, they actually have theirs that nobody ever talks about.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:There's an Atlanta Fed one that happens in Florida. I don't think you've probably ever heard of it. Yeah. There's a Boston one. No one ever really talks about it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. There are so those happen. The big thing is gonna be the next jobs report, you know, the August jobs report or Yeah. That we get in early September and the September Fed meeting. I mean, those September is a very live meeting in terms of we genuinely don't know which way What is going to go.
Speaker 2:Is the is the how much of the August jobs report will be the result of of their approach to that report over the last year versus are we expecting changes in terms of how it's put together given the given the the Yeah. I forget the the the person who was fired Yeah. Over it. Yeah. What what's what's the story there?
Speaker 5:I mean, look. I think the widespread ex expectation is that it is way too soon to imagine that something could change with the methodology prior to certainly prior to the August report. I mean, the the the the new guy who has been nominated, EG Anthony, he hasn't been confirmed yet or anything. I think the widespread assumption and and maybe the assumption is mistaken because it's 2025, and we live in a world where a lot of assumptions are wrong. Like, the widespread assumption is that, for better or worse, whatever, like, the sort of challenges of collecting this data under the existing approach is not gonna change anytime soon.
Speaker 5:It's certainly not gonna change by the August report. Now if there's something else going on and everyone's wrong, look. I I guess that's possible, but I haven't really heard anyone think that this soon, we could have some scenario where there's uncertainty about that.
Speaker 1:We really gotta get the other feds to step up their conference game. They should be going to Aspen, Vail, Park City Yeah. Big Sky. They can just be go all around
Speaker 2:Just the Hamptons. Why not
Speaker 1:why not? Hawaii. Why You know? Really really pulling the heavy hitters. And I mean, there incentive to not blow up the economy?
Speaker 2:Is there any concern on Wall Street with how levered up all these, know, massive data center projects are? Right? We we've been joke we joked off we joked off there. It's like, this is the first time that tech is this the first time that tech is levered up to this extent? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it feels like Yep. Like, the next the next tech the next backlash against tech could very well be that Yep. Tech blows up the globe the globe. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is real. This is look. I would say three things about
Speaker 1:that. Please.
Speaker 5:One is, you know, tech got really levered up in a sort of classical debt sense in 1999 with the telecom bubble. So we do have look. And that blew up.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And it you know?
Speaker 2:But but in the more recent era, the the, you know Yeah. Mobile, etcetera.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. Yeah. The we were not as used to that. Two, just the sheer you know what?
Speaker 5:I would say there's probably more less anxiety about the sort of levering up part, like, or borrowing money to finance these data centers even though that is the case. And there's probably more anxiety about just how levered the entire economy is to the stock market itself. And the stock market is both this engine of consumer spending fueling this wealth effect, but also an engine of investment impulse. Because if you keep getting rewarded of the stock market for just, like, more AI activity, that fuels it, that fuels the sort of, like, you know, potentially snowball effect. And so I think that the anxiety is like, yeah.
Speaker 5:There is just a lot riding on the stock market. But then also setting aside the financial market, setting aside debt, setting aside stocks, there's just a lot of dollars being spent into the economy in this one area area. And when you look at other parts of the economy, it's like caring for old people caring for old people in data centers. And those three things dialysis two things. It's like 1% of the
Speaker 2:Dialysis is percent of the GDP is just dialysis.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And it's growing. Like, all these things are, like, every year, like, yeah, it's insane. And so, like, you look at, like, the most recent jobs report. The only sectors 73,000 jobs added and, like, it was, like, forty eight forty eight thousand in health and 25,000 in social services.
Speaker 5:So, basically, basically, 73,000 jobs in caring for an aging population. So it's aging population and data centers, and that sort of feels like the growth drivers of The US economy right now. And that doesn't feel insanely that doesn't feel insanely stable given how much everything else is sort of riding on the wealth effect from the
Speaker 1:stock market. Well, how how much longer are you in Jackson Hole?
Speaker 5:I go back, I go back to I go back tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Tomorrow. Okay. So twenty four hours to stabilize the global economy, talks and sends into people.
Speaker 2:Get it done.
Speaker 1:Get it done. No excuses.
Speaker 2:Get it done.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining. Get back to
Speaker 2:the store over there, Jeff.
Speaker 5:Great to see you, Austin. Take care. Thanks for
Speaker 1:having me.
Speaker 5:Have a good day. Bye.
Speaker 1:If you're looking to visit Jackson Hole, why don't you I'll be right back. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better, folks.
Speaker 1:And Tyler, flops, did you find anything on your timeline? We do have some breaking news in the chat. H e eighteen n asks, do we read live chat? Yes. Occasionally, we can see it.
Speaker 1:We do read it every once in a while. We saw some breaking news in here that Apple is planning to integrate Google's Gemini AI into Apple Intelligence. We talked about this a lot, and, you know, now there's new new article out about it. Makes a lot of sense that Tim Cook doesn't want to build out all the infrastructure to train and serve models seems like a reasonable a reasonable strategy. Do you have anything else on on Apple intelligence or Google?
Speaker 7:I mean, Gemini is
Speaker 1:a great model.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Makes
Speaker 1:sense. They're on the parade of frontier, and it's probably easier to get a deal done. And Apple's had a relationship with Google on the search side for a long time.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It feels very natural. But another post I like Yeah. Please. I I sent in the the x group.
Speaker 7:Daniel Tenerero, he has this
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:Image. The committee will continue to monitor continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. But it's like in this funny hopefully, can pull it up.
Speaker 1:Oh, you put it in the group?
Speaker 7:Yeah. On x.
Speaker 1:On x. I'm not seeing it anyway. I'm seeing something from junk bond salesman. Oh, did it just come through? No.
Speaker 1:Not seeing it. Anyway, good things come to those who wait, says Ben. The k n o b one has become shipping out of out for those who pre ordered. Thank you so much for believing in my vision for this keyboard. It's a dream come true.
Speaker 1:So Ben built a keyboard and shipped it. Very cool. You can go pick one up if you're interested. Anyway, we have our next guest. We have two folks coming into the TBP And Ultradome.
Speaker 1:We have Jeffrey Katzenberg and Kimball Musk.
Speaker 2:Welcome Together.
Speaker 1:To the show. How are you guys doing?
Speaker 2:Gentlemen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 6:Hey. Happy to be there. How are you guys? Happy Friday.
Speaker 1:Happy Friday. It's a good day in the market. We are wearing white suits to celebrate the market's, rise. It's great.
Speaker 4:Gonna We
Speaker 2:need a white we need a
Speaker 1:white hat. Wearing a white hat. Obviously, you you you know, you probably saw
Speaker 2:that this has happened. Came prepared.
Speaker 4:We have something to celebrate on our side too, so it's great.
Speaker 1:Please. Yeah. We're excited to hear about it. Kick us off. What are you what are you are you sharing?
Speaker 4:Well, Jeffrey and I have been, getting to know each other over the past couple of years, and, I've been building a company called Nova Nova Sky Stories, which builds stories in the sky using drone art. So light drones that tell eighty to ninety minute stories, like a movie or like a broadcast brought up a Broadway play. Yeah. And there's just no one better in the world that I could imagine, joining as a strategic adviser, board member, and investor to Nova Sky Stories. Help us build the next brand in family entertainment and have a lot of fun doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember Palmer Lucky was posting about the fact that there are only, like, three businesses in the entire United States that do just skywriting. Like, it's an incredibly uncompetitive space if you can figure out how to how to do something in the sky. And it's just something that no one thinks about. And yet and yet, you know, you could imagine what his point was like, what's the next version of this?
Speaker 1:And this is clearly
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like very it's techno optimist Yep. Entertainment. I remember the the couple days after the fourth this year in Malibu, we had the worst air quality. It was like India level air quality because of all
Speaker 4:the fireworks
Speaker 2:that had been going off. You walked outside, it it felt like you just looking around it looked like you were in a cloud.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I was just thinking we have drones. You can put them in swarms and you can provide this incredible entertainment. This has come up recently too. We've we've we've told a number of friends, companies that they should do drone advertising in the sky.
Speaker 1:And we don't have a vendor.
Speaker 2:And there's no does not a not a great vendor. But yeah, walk us through what these will these shows will look like in in practice, kind of what Yeah. What what the actual Experience of experience will will be like.
Speaker 6:So so before we do, I just wanna because it's kind of fun, and I know there's a chance that this will catch you off guard here.
Speaker 1:Please. Which,
Speaker 6:you know, I I have that ambition. So people and I met at Burning Man.
Speaker 1:No way. Oh,
Speaker 6:yeah. See? There you go.
Speaker 2:What time of day was it?
Speaker 1:Was it
Speaker 2:like 2AM? It was really yes. It was actually. So two years ago,
Speaker 6:Kimmel did this light show at Burning Man
Speaker 1:Oh, no.
Speaker 6:And it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. It it was art in the sky. It's not fair to, you know, sort of look at this through the lens of, you know, fireworks or promotion or marketing because this was genuinely a a a very brilliant deployment of this technology that was just at a whole another level. And so anyway, we first got to know each other just a little bit then, and then he's gone off and done this extraordinary job of very organically building out the business. You know, fundamental to it is just the state of the art technology around drones.
Speaker 6:You know, everybody now just thinks, everybody has drones and anybody can put them up in the air. Maybe, just not these drones. These are, you know, very precision built. They're they're the design of them, there's all sorts of interesting things I'm learning about them that allow them to swarm together, as you said, Jordy, you know, in a way that can create very, very, very strong imaging, and choreography and programming and the application of AI to design programming around it. And so the analogy that I've, sort of come to to feel, you know, is is is analogous for me at least is in 1990, I saw a little short film called Luxor, The Lamp.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Which if you remember was the very first piece of CG animation created by John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. And out of that came the partnership with Disney and Toy Story and Pixar and all of the amazing things. It's just transformative because it wasn't it wasn't just a tool. It actually created a new form of storytelling.
Speaker 6:And I believe that what Kimball has very successfully created already today is a platform to create something that is going to be as innovative and, I think, as impactful and important as CG animation was thirty years ago. That's how unique this is and how powerful I think it will be as a storytelling platform to create branded family entertainment in very large venues, global, all of those things, creating characters, creating original IP, and also being able to work with the greatest IP in the world to create shows around it where but anyway, that's a lot to Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I I the the thing that's so exciting to me is just like the like the the the wonder that you can inspire in a in a kid. Yeah. You know, imagine Right. They walk outside, it's it's night. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in the sky is this, you know, it could be some character from from Frozen or or something like that where there's You
Speaker 4:mean the tinkerbell just flying through the sky. Mean, other thing about the drones, they can start out the size of, two, three football fields cubed. I mean, that's literally bigger than your mind can possibly imagine. And then they can come down to the, know, the size of your hand and come land on your hand.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. That is insane. How how what like, when you think of these, sort of fleets, I don't know if that or swarms, if that's
Speaker 6:Exactly the right word.
Speaker 2:How many you know, if you guys are gonna do a show at at a something like a festival or a carnival or something like that, how many individual drones would go into something like that? Is it is it hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?
Speaker 4:It's a real physics problem. So so you the way to look at it is you're trying to evoke emotion, you're trying to make sure you connect with the audience, but you also have to match it to the venue. So if you're if you have the Rose Bowl Yeah. You can do 10,000 drones and, I mean, just completely melt people's minds in the most epic ways. And it's really fun to do that.
Speaker 4:I've done that a few times with Burning Man. We'll do that again sometime soon. But but you can also actually do it with a smaller number too. It's a you can get down to four or 500, 600 drones and still still convey the emotion and get the character across, get the connect with with with but the goal is to connect with the with the audience. The audience is is is definitely a ticketed audience.
Speaker 4:If people are paying to see a show that is eighty to ninety minutes long or maybe forty five minutes with the intermission and then another forty five minutes so that you can more like a Broadway play. It it but it's it it can be really any size, of course, and it's big. It's pretty great.
Speaker 2:I imagine.
Speaker 1:There there have to be limitations to, like, to, like, the storytelling, though. Right? Because you you have to physically move the drones from one place to another, so you can't exactly do the Kuleshov effect. You can't exactly have a cut, a hard cut. Or can you do that?
Speaker 1:How do you solve that?
Speaker 6:Actually yeah. Because there and that's what's so exciting about it, I think, and why we're gonna get some of the greatest storytellers in the world excited about creating for this new medium as opposed to sort of just retelling something else. Because you can think of this as one dimension, which is a screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And if you have a screen
Speaker 5:with
Speaker 6:10,000 pixels, right,
Speaker 1:that's a
Speaker 6:pretty high diff. Very closely
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 6:You know, choreographed together, you can and remember, these things, it's not just a light in this in it. These are sophisticated
Speaker 2:Oh, right. It's not like a single bulb. Right? Yeah. No.
Speaker 2:You can have effectively a tiny screen on each on each drone. Right?
Speaker 6:Literally. And lasers and effects and all sorts of things that they because that's what, you know, he's been investing in and building. And they, you know, that they these things are patented, and he's the only company in the world that builds them. And so this is not like taking a, you know, military drone or, you know, from, you know
Speaker 4:I mean, typically, ones that you see are these warehouse or military drones that are repurposed.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:This is a division of Intel, and we're innovating on it for ten years. First of all, safety. When you're flying 10,000 drones, I mean, something will go wrong unless you are absolutely dedicated to safety. And we're proud to say, ten years of Intel and three years with Nova, 100% safety record, very proud of that. So you have to really think about safety.
Speaker 4:And then there's a level of sophistication just gets that's where the boy the fun comes in. And, you can you can play with fire. I mean, we're actually our our drones could carry their own fireworks of all different kinds of shapes and sizes, not just like a typical firework. That is For example, you can actually have a dragon breathe fire.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's real fire. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so even just thinking about what you can do with fireworks if you have a delivery mechanism into the sky Yeah. Where, like It's pinpointing.
Speaker 1:Wow. Like, you see the fireworks go up, sometimes they have shapes. But it's still very random. It's not exactly as choreographable as you as you'd think if you had more precise control.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And we're able to get a firework to go off with a five centimeter cube in in space. This is incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Remember Where do you where do you you don't have to docs the exact location, but how do you how do you how do you properly, you know, test this product when imagine you have to go far Do you have
Speaker 4:a have a secret location in Colorado. We're based in Colorado. Yes. Deep in the Rocky Mountains and it has to be pretty darn deep in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because, some of the shows we do will be 3,000 drones and no one's allowed to see it.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 4:Because if they see it, everyone's a surprise. We really wanna wanna Well, and somebody
Speaker 2:some some hiker at some point will walk over a hillside and see that. Other drone
Speaker 1:pilot will be allowed me to fly my drone over to take some
Speaker 2:Well, yes. Somebody's gonna think it's a UFO You need counter
Speaker 1:UAS for for protecting
Speaker 2:Would you guys ever we we love advertising here. We're we're big fans of advertising. Would you ever consider partnering with with the right company? Is is that a vertical that you care about at all?
Speaker 4:Do sponsorships. We do we do sponsorships all the time. Yeah. So someone will sponsor a show. Sometimes that that that simply means, you know, it's a thank you to to them.
Speaker 4:Other times, it is, you know, the logo in the sky. It it just it just needs to match the audience, approach. But it's but it's it's we're all kind of figuring it out here. What what we're learning with advertisers, they they wanna do the right thing for the audience as well.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:They they wanna be recognized for it. They want they, you know, they wanna build their their their audience or their brand. Well, what's the right way to do this? Well, it's all kind of new. So let's sometimes we go over the top and sometimes we're doing it enough, but
Speaker 6:the thing you want to do is you want to learn from what people have done successfully in the past, but also mistakes that have been made in past. And, you know, one of the things I think we would all agree about today is, you know, I continue to love movies, love going to movies. I think it's a singularly great experience. Going to a, you know, with a couple of 100 other people and get on that roller coaster ride of a movie is very special. But honestly, sitting there for twenty five minutes of trailers and commercials before it is beyond annoying.
Speaker 6:I mean, it just
Speaker 2:Yes, incentivizes you to show up late, right? Yes.
Speaker 4:Totally right.
Speaker 6:So but let me just we should share with you a little bit, like, what's the ultimate goal here? And there's a little story that I've been retelling here the last couple of days because it does, you know, sort of give me a perspective on this, which is that I remember going to see Elton John for the first time at the Troubadour. And then I remember twenty years later going and seeing Elton John at Dodger Stadium. And today, you can see Kimball's dream at the Troubadour, and it's pretty amazing and pretty spectacular, and you can see the talent and the potential of it. And five years from now, it's not going to Dodger Stadium and, you know, during, seventh inning stretch having a drone show for 10.
Speaker 6:It's going to Dodger Stadium to see a great Nova experience there, a something with a great story to it, huge production value to it, and as Kimball said, something that has heart and emotion, something that the whole family can enjoy together. And if you think about it today, there are really two principal uses of the big stadiums around the globe, soccer stadiums, football stadiums, baseball stadiums, there's sporting events and there are concerts. And our goal, our that we look at is, is that five years from now, there's gonna be a third vertical there, and it is going to be these types of shows, that come through on a regular basis. Because once you create a show and design a show, it could be in any language, it can travel around the, you know, like a concert.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Feels like something it feels like something that's can be as immersive as the Sphere, but it doesn't cost billions of dollars to set up somewhere new. Right?
Speaker 6:You know, it's really interesting because when the camera came on here and I saw you guys dressed in white, the first thing I thought about is you must be going to see the Backstreet Boys.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Troll.
Speaker 1:Not the troll.
Speaker 2:We're always ready.
Speaker 4:We're always ready.
Speaker 6:To figure, okay. These guys are going to the sphere to see
Speaker 1:the Backstreet Boys tonight.
Speaker 6:Because you got the you got your you got the right uniform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We do. We're always ready.
Speaker 1:I saw some videos in the factory boys
Speaker 2:Are you guys what what's the well, I have a couple questions. One, how do you think about form factors in the long run? Is this something ten years from now, would I be able to hire some local company to set one of these up and for like my son's It's different.
Speaker 4:No. It's quite different. So so the the think about us, we we are already operating in 40 countries. Mhmm. We we go do events that are more right now, we're filling, you know, 3,000, 5,000 person
Speaker 2:event venues. So all tickets.
Speaker 4:And then eventually, we'll get to the Dodgers Stadium more like 50,000 people. Mhmm. But but the the the folks that will do something more for a a one off event, you know, which which will which will probably get easier over time. Right now, it's still very hard to do this. You have aviation approvals and so forth.
Speaker 4:It'll be someone else. Nova our goal is to build the next Pixar. We wanna wanna
Speaker 6:On we the other hand, Jordy, I mean, given the track that you're know, five years from now, you could hire Elton John to come play There
Speaker 4:we go. You know,
Speaker 6:maybe play a birthday party Yeah. At your house.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right now.
Speaker 6:That's what
Speaker 2:I'm saying. I just I've we have we all have mutual friends that might say it's I'm it's worth it for me to hire Novo for my kid's birthday party. I'll give you guys, you know, $5,000,000. I
Speaker 4:spoke too soon.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Because I understand everybody does privates.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everybody. Everybody. What do you guys have planned, what do you guys have planned for for Burning Man this year? I'm, I'm
Speaker 4:assuming you're both going back. I'm gonna make it out next next week. Enjoy the week. It's, my twenty seventh year. So I'm gonna go out.
Speaker 2:In a row?
Speaker 5:I work with
Speaker 4:one of the artists and love the loved the event. I did it for the art. It's just so so wonderful. Have you guys gone?
Speaker 1:I've never been.
Speaker 2:Never been. Never been.
Speaker 1:Might have to go if this is gonna be that.
Speaker 2:We could be the first guys to I mean, I I we can't be the first the first guy. Would we fit in with with white suits like this on the playa?
Speaker 1:I think they get pretty dirty.
Speaker 2:They get to figure it
Speaker 4:covered in dust, everyone is in this Well, everybody's covered in
Speaker 6:everything because you could go there dressed in this and within an hour, it will look like that because
Speaker 5:the dust just covers everything.
Speaker 2:Doing the show doing the show live from the play, I think would be deeply at odds with the ethos. But but there would certainly be some funny interviews. I'd like I'd love to interview guys at 2AM after you first met. So what are you guys gonna work on together?
Speaker 1:Have more questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's going on?
Speaker 1:So I I I'm interested in kind of like what technology the business is focused on building. Pixar obviously had to invent a lot of CGI technology, and then some of that wound up spinning out, and people made other graphics, CGI movies. Pixar created RenderMan. That became its own kind of product. I imagine that, like, the software to let an artist actually create on a fully three-dimensional canvas, but not just pixels on a screen.
Speaker 1:Actually, a a a a physical canvas of drones flying around. There are limitations. There are physical simulations that need to run. I imagine that you'll need to build a system for that. Is that internal?
Speaker 1:Are you gonna partner with someone on that? Yeah.
Speaker 4:So our vision of RenderMan is called Genesis.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:And so what what animators do, and we we we're recruiting. So shout out to all animators out there. We're recruiting the best animators in the world. We we we we know how good you are and we want you to join our team. And our version of animator is called Genesis.
Speaker 4:So what are what are animator will do is they might use some of the tools they're more familiar with like seven or four d or something to get And then they and they have and they then they upload their their ideas and animations into into Genesis, our version of RenderMan.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And it converts the whole whole piece into drone managing the physics of the drones. Yeah. And a lot of AI in this process to figure out where where do the drones go? How literally, how long do the drones get to move? Like, if you're if you're thinking about Mickey Mouse in an animation, it can move like this and it's just no problem.
Speaker 4:Oh, well, no. Hold on. Drones actually physically move. So the so the the actual animation changes from from like this, like this. It might move a little slower.
Speaker 4:And then if you do need to move it fast, it'll actually move the the the LED lights instead of the drones. And it'll actually, you know, be an illusion of the drones moving very, very fast. Yeah. But that's all part of our Genesis tool. So so that part is internal to Nova, and we continue to develop that.
Speaker 4:And we do we do have ambition for it to to make that level of a difference like Grindelman has done for for animation and and movies.
Speaker 1:That's great. On on the hardware side, what lessons are you taking from your experience with Tesla, to this business?
Speaker 4:Well, thing that I I know so much with Tesla, I do work with AI out there, but it's the it's spatial AI. Mhmm. So full self driving is not it's not LLM. It's a completely different approach to to to to learning models. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And it's actually very, very similar to to to drone to to moving drones in space, to moving them around in in the in the air. And the the lessons that I'm learning about being able to this might be a little inside baseball on AI, using the transformer technology to to do predictive video Mhmm. That you learn from Tesla. And then the the the scale of the hardware, which has gone from you need something the size of this room to something that that can, you know, be the size of an iPad to something that for when it gets to be for drones would be, you know, something that would be, you know, half the size of an iPhone. We're we're we're I'm able to watch that happen.
Speaker 4:And then, of course, once you get there, then you you you can imagine what can happen. You can even design for it, but you get the actual hardware has to get small enough. And then and once you get there, then you just start to imagine the magic that's possible.
Speaker 1:This is a question maybe for both of you, but
Speaker 4:I have with with our drones is to be able to speak to the drones Mhmm. And have the drones react to you at at a scale of 10,000 drones. That's actually possible. You just need inference engines on the drones that that are we're just not at that hardware scale yet, but we'll get there.
Speaker 1:On in terms of market structure
Speaker 2:By the way, that I that that mean, people people have been experimenting this with various models, this idea of like, you know, generative imagination. So just imagining something, talking about it, and just having the sky react would
Speaker 4:Feed to 10,000 rows and it will it will actually form in a way that responds to you. It's it's all possible without the the hardware is not solved yet, but the hardware is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Speaker 2:My worry is that you guys are gonna get get the reach the achieve this vision internally and then become so addicted to just sitting back and watching your own creation.
Speaker 1:Beauty is that you can literally touch cool. You can literally touch grass while watching one of these.
Speaker 2:You can
Speaker 6:do it outside like it's
Speaker 1:a drive in movie theater. It's fantastic. It solves a problem. You can you can you can enjoy the screen while touching grass. It's the best.
Speaker 1:On on market structure, I'm interested to know right now, it feels like the company is extremely vertically integrated. You own the drones. You develop the IP. You might work with someone, but, eventually, you're building the software. You're running the shows.
Speaker 1:You're taking in the ticket revenues. In the long term, do you see that there will be, like, an AMC or a Lowe's or a theater chain or an owner operator or a franchisee? Is there some world where your focus narrows?
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. Our focus is on on content and technology. So we wanna be the Pixar. Yep.
Speaker 4:We are very excited to work with, ticketing partners or with other you know, Dodger Stadium will have probably Ticketmaster, and that's fine.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:We work with Theater, which is a fantastic promotion partner
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Around the world. We are focused on content and technology.
Speaker 6:The venue the venues have been built.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? It's like Of course.
Speaker 6:Don't need to build you don't need to build movie theaters or own movie theaters to be in the movie business.
Speaker 4:And you're you're at the whim of whoever controls the ticketing for that venue. So you do you do have to work with whoever that is, and we're agnostic. We we there's some some ones that are better than others, but at the end of the day, we we love all of them, and we we wanna we wanna work with all
Speaker 2:of Well, you guys partner with, cruise ships? Have you thought about that potential? Are you far out at sea?
Speaker 4:We have some very, very interesting, innovations happening on the cruise ship side, but it'll be unveiled probably about a year from now.
Speaker 2:Makes sense.
Speaker 1:Anything else, Dory?
Speaker 2:No. This is super super exciting. Thank you guys for coming on and sharing.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I just wanna ask, be make sure to be careful flying these over the Amazon. There's some uncontacted drives.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I know. I know where that idea came from.
Speaker 2:Because the first thing that they see is an is Nova Sky story. I think it'd difficult to to recover. So anyways, great great chatting with you guys. Come back on anytime. So
Speaker 6:send us a selfie from the Backstreet Boys tonight. So
Speaker 2:We will. And send us a send us a selfie from the Playa.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. That's
Speaker 4:right. You bet. We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Cheers, guys. Have a good rest Have a rest
Speaker 4:Have a good of for having us, guys. Bye.
Speaker 2:That is just wild. I I honestly am so excited for those to be everywhere.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:I want Sky Stories everywhere I go.
Speaker 1:And you know what you have to settle for until Sky Story is able to run out of home advertising for you?
Speaker 2:Adquick.
Speaker 1:Adquick.com, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Actually Only Adquick combines technology So out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the We
Speaker 2:have talked
Speaker 1:to know what you're gonna say. If you actually wanna do a drone show right now
Speaker 2:Drone ads.
Speaker 1:AdQuick can help you get set up
Speaker 2:with it. Yes. So you should definitely engage with them. The sky. Somebody's gotta do it.
Speaker 1:Run some out of home ads.
Speaker 4:What
Speaker 2:Elon says, join xAI and help build a purely AI software company called MacroHard. Microsoft, MacroHard. It's a tongue in cheek name, but the project is very real. In principle, given that software companies like Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate
Speaker 1:He's them entirely with really taking shots at Microsoft lately, coming for Satya. Hopefully, this this this did not that I see get a Satya reply. But when Satya last times
Speaker 2:reply was
Speaker 1:Yeah. When Satya claps back with the corporate speak that just hits super hard. I'm so there for it. I'm cheering. It's a it's a fun little Neo and Morpheus are fighting on the timeline moment.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have our next guest, Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, of course, coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream, Jessica. How are
Speaker 2:doing? Finally.
Speaker 3:Hi. Am I talking to you now?
Speaker 2:You are live.
Speaker 1:To us now. You are live on the Internet. We are on Axe YouTube. We Twitch, we figured it out. We're on Substack.
Speaker 2:We're even on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Substack, a y c company. And Twitch.
Speaker 3:I love it. Twitch also a
Speaker 1:y c company. Hi. How are doing? Hey. We were we were at a couple overlapped at a couple dinners.
Speaker 1:Are you up in the bay right now?
Speaker 3:I am. I am at Y Combinator's office right now. Normally, live in England.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And so I'm I'm here for a couple weeks this summer. Paul and I are back.
Speaker 1:Give us the vibe check on San Francisco and YC. You've seen so many ups and downs as as trends have come and dissipated and people have talked about moving. What's your current opinion or take on just San Francisco and YC as a place to start and build a business?
Speaker 3:Well, so I come back to San Francisco sometimes just once a year, usually a couple times, two or three times, so I've only just seen little snippets of it. Mhmm. I was very depressed a few years ago. I came back, gosh, it was like three years ago when I went and I went to a bunch of like big YC startups like Reddit and Twitch and all these just to go say hi to some of the founders and to get a tour, and it was really grim in San Francisco. Like, never walked around.
Speaker 3:We were, like, in the car the whole time, and we went into these startups and no one was there. Everyone was still, you know, working remotely, and I remember leaving thinking, like, what is happening? Like, it was so weird because it was very sudden for me because I hadn't been there during the pandemic, you know? So it was all of a sudden, this snapshot was one that felt so foreign to me. And now, I feel like it is just vibrant and alive, and there's so much crazy stuff going on in the world, but in this area, the Bay Area and San Francisco, it seems so optimistic and exciting and why Combinator is just flourishing.
Speaker 3:Because I'm on the board, so we keep tabs on it that way, we don't come back all the time, but we try to come back for a dinner, a session. And now there are four sessions a year or batches. So I think we're gonna have to come back four times a year and, you know, talk at the dinners and things like that. But it's
Speaker 5:still NFL Combine of Technology. Positive.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What?
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. We try to call it the NFL Combine of Technology where, everyone who's joining the league, they're they're they're they once they leave Y Combinator demo day, they have a serious business, and they need to be evaluated by the scouts, the and the literal venture
Speaker 5:scouts capitalists.
Speaker 1:And sometimes the venture capitalists who kinda play a role of scouting the next public
Speaker 3:I'm hoping to come to I haven't been to Demo Day in a lot in a couple years. You know, years. I'm hoping to come to the next Demo Day. Not the one in September, but the one in December.
Speaker 1:You'll you'll have to come. We livestream from Demo Day now, and be prepared. We bring a lot of confetti. We bring a lot of very, air horns and gongs. And, if you're not prepared
Speaker 2:Very loud.
Speaker 1:One venture capitalist friend of ours came in, and, Jordy, like, launched a cannon of of confetti all over him, and he was very surprised. It was great. It's scary going.
Speaker 3:That's so cool. You livestream from demo day?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's it's I'm watch it. Yeah. Yeah. In England. Yeah.
Speaker 3:In September.
Speaker 2:It's the best. People have said it's the best way to experience demo day from England.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll send you the previous streams. You can watch. We we we go back to back with founders as they come off and have much more unstructured interviews. It's a complete the opposite end of the spectrum from the prepped Demo Day pitch, which has a particular veneer to it and is is meant to deliver information at a certain cadence. Our interviews are all over the place.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about what people are wearing, what they did before, what they did what they wanna do next. We do we do go into the companies, but we have a lot of fun with the founders.
Speaker 2:How do you what do you think your role is in terms of, you know, being on the board of YC, help, you know, continuing to help steward the company, but having so much space from both San Francisco and even the business. Right? I feel like when you can create that space, in this case it's a physical it can help you have a perspective Yeah. That is unique and valuable even if you're not in the office every day like someone like Gary.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of space. I I we moved to England in 2016 and it was only meant to be a year and I took a sabbatical that year from YC. Paul had already retired.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Sam was running it and it just kept going. The sabbatical was like endless, and I never went back. So I've had a lot of distance, you know, both mentally and physically, and I think it I was really tired when I left. I mean, having started Y Combinator and it was growing, and then I had kids at the same time, like, barely took any maternity leave, I was just really burnt out. And so I think I I love that I have this space because I feel like I have so much energy and love for startups, but it's not all the time.
Speaker 3:So it feels like this special thing, like when I do
Speaker 2:Feels like vacation. Yeah. I'm going on vacation to San Francisco.
Speaker 3:Going on vacation to the Bay Area, totally. And I've, you know, we've been having But, it's a vacation that's very strenuous because I've been having more I'm busier here than I am at home and we have meetings. I was just I just toured the OpenAI office right before I got on the show and it's it's just That's why I think I'm on such a high because it's just all so exciting. And not that it feels novel, but it just feels so different than, you know, having sheep in my yard in But in it's it's great to come back. I'll tell you that much.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On on on YC, can you help me understand the different eras of what made YC outperform other groups or investors? I've heard this someone pitched this narrative of like the original brilliant insight of YC was that a new grad who was talented could not just walk into Sandhill Road and get a meeting and raise money. And so there was this unique opportunity to take risk on younger and earlier stage founders. And then the second era, not really era, but second unseen opportunity that everyone else was missing was helping connect international founders to American capital markets and bring companies.
Speaker 1:And there's a huge amount of companies in the YC portfolio where they're they built a business somewhere else. The founders grew up there. They're connected there. But coming to YC got them accelerated in the American business context. Do those two stories resonate with you?
Speaker 1:Or those is that was that completely apocryphal storytelling? Or is there something there? How would you kind of noodle on that?
Speaker 3:Well, the first part of it, 100% is true. Was our raison d'etre. I mean, we started Y Combinator in the 2005 in Boston. So there were not many angel investors. And so if you wanted to raise money, you had to have a business plan and you had to go in and pitch VCs who of course only wanted to invest millions of dollars in you.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. There wasn't really an easier efficient way to say, hey, I really just need like $50,000 to pay the rent, quit my job, and sort of experiment with with what I'm working on. Also remember at that time, you know, sir you know, server costs were coming down. You kind of just if you wanted to do a software company, you just needed a computer. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, Paul and I thought, you know, there's we're in Boston here, MIT and Harvard. There's all these young super duper programmers, and they could easily start a startup now if they just had a little bit of money to cover their expenses, and someone gave them advice, and someone helped them with the, like, really scary business things and legal things like incorporating the company. Because Paul himself was a startup founder and he could handle, you know, the big idea of creating a web based application, but the thought of incorporating the company paralyzed him kinda thing. And so we did all that stuff and it was also a time where traditionally VCs would install like a seasoned CEO, you know, they'd get the product going and say, well, you need someone to come in and run your business, which leads me to what I wanna talk about later is founder the founder mode series that I've just launched like half an hour ago. Amazing.
Speaker 3:They bring in a seasoned CEO to run the company and we kinda thought, well, why can't the founder run the company? You know, back in 02/2005, we should just train them on the business y stuff. So that's how we started, and for many years, it was run with that in mind, you know, help the programmers our target audience was always programmers, and we just brought in people to say, here's how you run the business and get product market fit and all these different things. We had all the guest speakers that would come in. Second part of your question about the international people, I mean, we always did fund some international people.
Speaker 3:The point is, we always said in order to benefit from YC, you need to come to the Bay Area. You need to experience it. Even if you move back after the three month batch is over, you need to come here because the ecosystem here is like nowhere else in the world. Even if you lived in Chicago, we'd say, come, you have to come and be present at Y Combinator.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you ever were were did you guys ever explore or were you motivated to try to like I can't think of the the the YC of The UK. Right? Mhmm. And you guys are there.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you have reasons why that maybe doesn't exist or maybe it does exist. It just never broke out in a way. But was there always a commitment to San Francisco and not wanting to frag fragment kind of the magic of the bay after you moved there? Or was there any
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, what we always got was why Yeah. Why don't you have the YC of other cities? Especially like New York. They always thought we were gonna come to New York or or Boston.
Speaker 3:Remember when we first started, Paul and I were bi coastal, so we'd do summer sessions in Boston and Cambridge and winter sessions in Mountain View, and we did that for three years, and then when we had our first child, we had to choose, so we chose Silicon Valley, so we were always then in Mountain View. Why don't we do YC in other cities? Because we want people to come to Silicon Valley or to San Francisco, because like I just said, the ecosystem here is like no other, and you know, they can do a start up in London. There are some start ups that are doing very well in London, but I don't think we I think we need to be in Silicon we need to be in San Francisco. I keep saying Silicon Valley because I'm so old school Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I live
Speaker 2:down there.
Speaker 3:But I'm sorry. It's San Francisco now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think things have changed with the the Mountain View to San Francisco switch? I remember when I first went through YC in 2012, I was actually part of Imagine k twelve, which then kind of merged in. And I was living with another proper YC company, and we lived in Sunnyvale in a in a rundown house. It was pitched to me.
Speaker 1:The pitch was amazing. They were like, it's just like the house in the social network. It's got a pool. It's got a jacuzzi. It technically had a pool.
Speaker 1:It was filled with algae. It technically had a jacuzzi. It was full of leaves. But what this gave us was the opportunity to basically just spend all day working because there was nothing else to do. So we never were we weren't throwing pool parties.
Speaker 1:We were just grinding. And and I learned Python, and I learned c, and I taught myself a bunch of programming languages and built a bunch of products. Everything flopped. It was a disaster. Eventually, I learned to, you know, do other stuff.
Speaker 1:But, but there was something about the monastic building in, in Sunnyvale that I really enjoyed. And I'm wondering if there's some sort of, like, defenses that next generation of founders who might be in, San Francisco where they get funded with more money up front and they can afford a more distracting lifestyle. Like, is there any advice that you'd give for someone who can snap their fingers and be living in a nice apartment and have time to throw pool parties on the weekend?
Speaker 3:No one would ever take my advice. We've been telling for a few, three years, like, just stay down in Silicon Valley. Yes. It's boring, but you will get so much work done, and you'll be so focused. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think people who've gone through YC in the old days would agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But what did they do after the three months? They got funding and got an office in San Francisco and moved to
Speaker 1:San Francisco. So
Speaker 3:you can only you know, we're not gonna be able to stop people. San Francisco's so much more fun, and everyone wants to live here. And certainly, all the young people wanna live here.
Speaker 1:Literally, as soon as we raised money we actually moved to LA, but we got a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and we're throwing pool parties constantly. And it was a mess.
Speaker 3:Shouldn't be doing that. We start up.
Speaker 1:This is Soylent.
Speaker 3:I'm now confused. How many startups did you do through YC? I remember Soylent.
Speaker 1:So Soylent went through in summer twenty twelve. I was part of an Imagine k twelve team that merged in. So I became a cofounder of that c corp and added to that cap table and board, but we didn't go through YC again. Sam said, like, you could go through again, but we were like, we could just raise a seed round. So we built that business.
Speaker 1:And then I started a second YC company, Winter 'eighteen, and went through again properly. So now I'm like officially a YC founder, not this like retconned fake YC founder that got hired in and given the given the title of co founder later on. It was
Speaker 3:a very You're messy gonna have to come on the social radars then because I feel like I'm sitting here talking to you guys, but I have a lot of questions about your guys' lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Know? Yeah. It's a
Speaker 2:You're you're Well, come on.
Speaker 4:We've only
Speaker 2:done one podcast this year.
Speaker 1:Oddlines. That was it. We're We'd be happy to. Any any Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, when when you're live three hours a day, it's really, really hard. And also, we both have young kids. And so the schedule requires like turning down just a ton of events which has been frustrating. But I'm sure you're in the same boat where people invite you to stuff and you're
Speaker 3:do you used turn down everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you have to. Would you have predicted back in 2005 that being a founder would one day be high status? Something that that young people like thought would be the cool thing to do? Yep.
Speaker 2:Or was that not on your radar given At least at that time when it was hard enough to incorporate your business, much less build something successful.
Speaker 3:I think Paul might have envisioned it. I I I don't joking aside, I don't I don't think so. I mean, it was such it was such a narrow thing. Doing a startup was not the norm. Everyone either got a job in finance or went to graduate school or got like a real job.
Speaker 3:It was only sort of the weirdo, sort of people who didn't fit in, hardcore programmers that did startups. It just wasn't the normal option. And and actually and then when we came to Silicon Valley, there were more people that did it. And so there was this then all of a sudden, it didn't seem so weird. And when we first started, as you guys probably know, we only had eight startups in the batch.
Speaker 3:It was tiny. And but it grew consistently over the years. And as more startups got going, more people heard about them. And then I remember specifically, it was like when the Social Network movie came out. Don't know what year that was.
Speaker 3:Was it like 2011 or something?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Twenty ten, twenty Somebody
Speaker 2:should try to do an analysis in in on how much economic, how much EV that movie created.
Speaker 1:Probably a lot.
Speaker 2:Because it has to be in the I would've it could easily be in the
Speaker 1:hundreds Even of though it's sort of the wrong reason to do a startup, a lot of just did it anyway and built businesses. Because
Speaker 3:parents and of course, Facebook itself was made made startups more popular, and parents I mean, we used to have parents who sort of disapproved of their kids doing YC because you got into Stanford grad school. Why on earth aren't you choosing that over what's this Y Combinator? And then all of a sudden, startups became seen as like this interesting thing that people actually did. I mean, I'd like to say Y Combinator had a bit of an impact on the number of startups that got started because we hopefully made it really easy to do. So people who wouldn't have started started them did.
Speaker 3:But, yes, that movie, I do believe, had a big effect. At least it had a big bump in the YC applications.
Speaker 1:Also, just the the the press machine, some of Paul's writing around how to do PR, some of the internal resources, that also made it more acceptable. One of my cofounders dropped out of a PhD program at Caltech. Both of his parents are professors, so that was a big negotiation. But fortunately, like, TechCrunch was there and had written about us. We were profiled in The New Yorker, and the the business just felt a little bit more real.
Speaker 1:In the early days, even going through YC, you tell someone, I'm doing a startup. Hey, it's actually kind of real. Like, I'm in this YC thing. People would like, what are you talking about? Like, you are crazy.
Speaker 1:Why don't you go work at a bank or consulting firm?
Speaker 3:Yeah. People didn't get it. Yeah. And so we just happily and quietly, like, did our thing, appealed to the small group of users that loved us Yep. And just kept growing every year.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And now, like, everyone's doing it.
Speaker 1:The the the flip side of this is I'd I'd love your thoughts both as a founder and a mentor to entrepreneurs and also a parent potentially on this concept of get your bag culture or this idea that Gen Z founders are potentially optimizing for short term economic gain at a higher Do rate than previous you disagree with the premise? Do you think there's an antidote? What's your thinking
Speaker 3:about John, that what is did what kind of culture did you say? This is how out of touch I am.
Speaker 1:So so they
Speaker 2:Explain it like
Speaker 1:she was in the to it as countryside. Get your bag culture. A bag, of course, is a bag of money. And getting the bag is a liquidity event to typically reserve for IPO ing a generational company.
Speaker 2:You can say so you can compare this to, like, the the origins of YC, which is maybe more hacker culture, people that were in it to just tinker and build
Speaker 1:Build a product and satisfy the user.
Speaker 2:Experiment or maybe build something for themselves.
Speaker 1:Make something Now,
Speaker 2:there's a category of founders that I think people rightly categorize as people that are purely in it to make to Quick try money. Quick money. Money.
Speaker 3:Call them carpetbaggers.
Speaker 1:Carpetbaggers. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's that's like really old term.
Speaker 1:But It still it still uses the term bag, so I like it. Yeah. I'll use Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I think I I don't think that it's sustainable if you're after the money. You can't start a startup sort of just to make money unless you're really good. Need to have some sort of genuine interest in what you're building because they're so hard. That in order to get to that, whatever kind of liquidity event you can get, in order to get there, you have to go through so much difficulty and stress and hard times that it's I think it's hard to do. I think people have done it, but I don't think it's not as easy as it sounds to like, oh, go get that funding.
Speaker 3:I and and it's a long haul. It's like, I tell people, you gotta at least be ready to devote the next decade of your life to this. I mean, maybe you can have a liquidity event earlier than that, but I don't I don't I don't believe in that.
Speaker 2:How have you how have you thought about like sort of protecting the YC brand over the years? Because YC has this interesting challenge where
Speaker 1:Always orange, never red, never yellow.
Speaker 2:And I don't yeah. I don't mean I don't mean visual, but but in the sense of YC now accepts hundreds of founders in every year that get the opportunity to be a part of this program and the community and the institution that is YC. And that ultimately creates people that that love the brand, that promote the brand and and all these positive things and become part of this community that that is part of the value. But you also have to reject thousands and thousands of people every single year. Right?
Speaker 2:People that don't make it in. And the dynamic
Speaker 3:That's the hardest part of YC, by
Speaker 4:Yeah. The
Speaker 2:The dynamic that I've witnessed is anytime Almost every time I see somebody talking poorly about YC Mhmm. It is somebody that won't overtly say that they were rejected. But I know deep down it's like you applied a couple times and you were rejected. And this is you kind of lashing out rejecting this this institution. And it's never the founders that actually went through it.
Speaker 2:Right? I've literally never, you know a founder could go through it and say, oh my I I, you know, I went through YC but it wasn't the re and it wasn't the reason that my company worked. Maybe you could make that argument. Or I went through YC and and I didn't necessarily fully connect with my group partner but but I love the community. Right?
Speaker 2:Like there's always they always get something out of it. But it's this hard challenge of having to ultimately reject people that are part of the community and the industry that that you're in.
Speaker 3:Well, you're you're making a good point. We always want people to think good things about us and certainly if we reject you, we want you to apply again. If you're still going, it's it's not like, oh, we don't like you and we never want you to come back. Maybe we just thought your idea seemed bad and you you wind up pivoting and reapplying. I honestly think I I think we do a really good job advising everyone, even even the startups that are failing.
Speaker 3:I mean, sometimes I used to kid Paul, like, he was so devoted to the startups that even the ones that were, like, clearly failing and needed to just call it a day on their startup, he'd be like, no, we can make this work. Have you tried this? I really think our advice is exceptional and anyone who goes through the program will think even if my startup failed for whatever reason, it was still a valuable use of my time and I learned so much and I'm part of this amazing community, which just gets better and better because more people join. We can't do anything about the people who, like, say bad things. They're mostly people who have never been through the program and so, or people we've rejected.
Speaker 3:You're right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are there particular red flags that pop up for, people who see YC as a resume bullet point to add?
Speaker 3:I'm laughing because the answer is yes. A lot of people and, you know, one of the YC partners, you know, who looks at all the applications now, I don't look at the applications really anymore, but you can definitely tell people are like building their resume and just want to put it on like their LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And in fact, I think we had to like do something to prevent people from saying like like YC founder on LinkedIn. We had Yeah. Like as as in like a type of education. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 3:Like, if you're
Speaker 1:starting in the education section. It's an investor. Like, it goes it goes in the investor list of your company, which you will continue to build forever, hopefully.
Speaker 2:But I mean, that's also that's also what every brand would hope is people value Sure. Our money so much that they they they put it as part of Yeah. Their
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's an interesting trade off.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a it's a good problem to have. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have a friend who I went to high school with and, like, phenomenally tracked individual, perfect SAT scores, Ivy League education, rejected from ROIC, like, 10 times, I think literally 11 times, got in, starts a company, an AI company before the ChatGPT moment, and he's just absolutely taking off and has been doing fantastically, and then he's turned it into his whole life's work, which is fantastic.
Speaker 3:And Well, love that story. Rejected 10 times?
Speaker 1:It might have been 11 times. I I need to I'll I'll text him and confirm the exact number. But it was it was way over five, and it was this was back when YC was only doing two batches. So this was a five plus year process of facing rejection and continuing to build and getting through. And so, yeah, to the people that think that they wanna take to their non x accounts and and talk some trash, I would say just just continue to apply.
Speaker 2:The eleventh time.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then then talk some trash.
Speaker 3:Apply the eleventh time like Absolutely. Just was rejected.
Speaker 2:Well, even even I was so so my last company, I was I was rejected. No. It was even after we had raised from I was no. But I get to cover demo day now with with John and
Speaker 3:I feel guilty.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. It was for good reasons.
Speaker 2:Good for The good exact reasons that Michael laid out in the rejection were the reasons that my company my last company like, our hardest moments were all he, like, he saw it. Like, he had a crystal ball. Yep. And he saw the struggles that we were gonna run into. We eventually pivoted.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it was I appreciated the advice. Yep. And then I still feel like YC is great because you just you you not to turn this into just a Therapist. Pricing.
Speaker 2:Something. YC the whole time. But all of the the core lessons are just all available online.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? If you if you don't just read them, but you actually
Speaker 1:Apply them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But you actually apply them. I mean, the the lesson that the the lesson that I think a bunch of companies right now are gonna learn, scaling head count rapidly prior to true product market fit. Right? Here we have all these companies companies, seed series a companies. When you if if you get up to thirty, forty, 50 employees
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:With like some market pull but not true product market fit, good luck going through a real pivot like a bet the company pivot with 50 people on your team. Like it just it's so much harder than if you I think YC's standard advice is keep it like, if if you have like, you know, under seven ish people, if I can remember.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Two pizza team is can potentially pivot. Once you're at 50, it's gonna be really really hard. I don't know.
Speaker 3:And you should always stay small before so you can serve money. Because if you don't have product market fit, what if you have yeah. What if you have to pivot? You can't do it as a big organization very easily.
Speaker 1:Can can you talk a little bit more about finding product work?
Speaker 2:Other thing I will say that that from the from the 2021 era was that there was advice from investors broadly. And this is like due to just like this pressure around delivering markups. But there was this vice broadly of like, if you wanna raise money, you need to have best in class growth, which means that if you're a seed stage company, you need to go from you need to get to a million dollars of ARR. This was the '21 era of like that's what get your gets your series a done. And you need to basically do it in less than a year and like there's this extreme pressure to do that.
Speaker 2:And I think that was at odds with with YC's philosophy which was it's not about how fast you get to Like the the company that gets to a million dollars in ARR the fastest is not the one that gets to a billion the fastest. Yep. Right? And I just time and time again I When I talk to early stage founders that aren't in y c, I just say, go like read
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Read everything you possibly can that has been created from the people that are Study the blade. The blade.
Speaker 1:Sorry. That's gonna be a
Speaker 3:the blade.
Speaker 1:That's another meme. Sorry. Study Jessica's blade.
Speaker 3:I gotta get up to speed on these memes, you guys. God. Memes for old people.
Speaker 2:We'll make y c for memes. Yes. You can come through it. We'll accept you.
Speaker 1:On on product market fit, talk about what product market fit looked like in the first batch. And now I want to apply some of those takeaways from like, we're in this weird era. There's a current discussion around AI inference reselling as a potential way to spike revenue growth that is not a true example of product market fit because you are effectively selling a dollar for 90ยข, and people will just take that all day long. And that's not actually product market fit. And I wanna know how you tussle with that and the various companies that you saw early on, like false signals for product market Well,
Speaker 3:we didn't have that much product market fit in the first batch. I think the only one was Reddit. Yeah. And even that was sort of slow going with maybe some fake accounts and But, I mean, I always think of it, and I am probably not the best person to talk, you know, deeply about product market fit, but what always sticks with me is something Paul Buchheit used to say, which is, it's better to make, like, a small group of people love you
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Than a whole bunch of people just like you. And I think if you can make that small group of people love you, you can you usually always can expand that group of just avid users. Yep. If it's if they just like you and are just coming to your site now and then or won't pay for something, those people aren't gonna stick. You can't that's not something you can build a long term business off of.
Speaker 3:And I think, you know, YC we're always just like, find people who love this product and will pay you for it. That that's the best way to determine if they love you, right? Yep. Because a lot of people will say, oh, we're starting this idea. Our friends, you know, say they'll use it.
Speaker 3:We're like, really? Are they just are they really gonna use it or are they just saying they're gonna use it because they're your friend? You know, like, they really wanna know what local events are going on in their neighborhood that night? They think they do, maybe, but they won't actually use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Talk about your new series, Founder Mode.
Speaker 3:Oh, yes. Founder Mode. Okay. So very briefly, literally just launched it like in the last hour. So Carolyn Levy, who's our legal counsel here, we're co hosts of the Social Radars, which is a podcast and we interview lots of YC founders about anything.
Speaker 3:It's very sometimes very random. Sometimes we talk about how they got started. Sometimes we talk about what's going on now. It's very unscripted and
Speaker 2:interview like a nonprofit CEO too sometimes, right?
Speaker 3:Yes. We've had Edith from Nora Health was on it.
Speaker 2:Of course. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:So the only thing is we try to do YC founders.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Although Tyler Schultz, whistleblower at Theranos was not a YC Founder, but his episode is so interesting. But anyway, so we're iterating YC Founders. So last week, Gary hosted a Y Combinator founder mode retreat Founder mode. In Sonoma Valley. And what did you just do?
Speaker 1:We have a soundboard.
Speaker 2:Founder mode.
Speaker 1:And one of the soundboard cues is founder mode in in a very serious Quake three or Doom video game voice.
Speaker 2:Sorry to interrupt.
Speaker 3:Sorry to interrupt. No. I I love that. So he had the founder mode retreat, and so Carolyn and I said, since everyone's there and we're, you know, thinking about founder mode, let's grab people and do very, like short interviews, like fifteen minutes each about what does founder mode mean to you and when have you had to do things like that because it all started a year ago when Brian Chesky gave this famous talk at our other retreat from last year and I mean, I left with my mind blown. You just sat there for an hour like with your mouth open listening to him just go on and on, and this happened and that happened, blah blah blah blah blah, talking about how he was gaslit and all this stuff, and it was fascinating, and every founder in that room was like, gosh, I sort of have been secretly worried about these same things.
Speaker 3:So Paul then wrote an essay called Founder Mode. Defined what that You defined what that me meant, but we need to collect examples. So that's what Carolyn and I are doing. You're making me laugh with that. Collecting examples.
Speaker 3:So we have like 10 different episodes coming out with a bunch of different YC founders. Yeah. Today, we launched Brian Chesky, Gary Tan, and Paul And then we'll we'll dribble them out over the next couple weeks. But it was really fun hearing these stories because there's themes that are similar, but everyone has their own different stories.
Speaker 1:Well, we like to collect KPIs around here. We have a tradition where we ask our guests to give us a number, maybe the number of years they've been in business, total amount of money they've raised, total downloads, or number of episodes that you've done for the show. Any number, and then we ring the gong for numbers. Is there anything you can share with us that can quantify your career? Anything any number that sticks out to you?
Speaker 1:Can be anything. Any number at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I'd have to say 20 because we founded Y Combinator in 02/2005. There
Speaker 2:we go. Best year yet. Best year yet.
Speaker 3:Thanks, you guys.
Speaker 1:It's not all digital soundboard. We also embrace the
Speaker 2:We're gonna we're all gonna go listen to the founder mode series. We encourage the audience too as well. And all that we ask is at some point in the future come and do the do the demo day stream with us.
Speaker 1:We would love to have you on the demo day stream live. It's a quick interview.
Speaker 3:I'm here minutes. By in December.
Speaker 1:That'd be fantastic. I'd love to talk to you more. Have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your trip to San Francisco.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Talk to soon. Bye, guys.
Speaker 1:Bye. Let me tell you about Bezel. Get bezel.com. Bezel Concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 1:And our next guest is already ready. He's in the Restream waiting room. He's coming into the TVPN UltraDome. We have Zach Bookman from OpenGov. Let's bring in Zach.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Going on?
Speaker 8:What's up, John? Hey, Jordy.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 6:I'm fantastic.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to
Speaker 5:be with you.
Speaker 2:It's Friday. We're close we're I feel Monday is right around the corner. I'm so excited.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Monday is right around the corner.
Speaker 8:Can I just get real with you guys for It's a it takes a lot of stamina to build a company and to lead and to be a CEO? And, like, what you're doing must take so much stamina too. How do you how do you It's
Speaker 2:daily marathon.
Speaker 8:It's the it's the Get real. How do you do this hours a day performing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We joke that anyone is welcome to compete with us. Just be willing to produce twenty hours a week of live content. Be willing to spend a meaningful amount of your waking life Live. Live on the internet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. On the internet.
Speaker 8:And and on diet coke which Oh, competently. Diet coke. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. We've been rotating them out a little bit but, yeah, Diet Coke's the current day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, real secret He's got the Mattaina. Andrew Huberman's Yerba Mate Mattaina.
Speaker 8:Oh, that'll jack you up.
Speaker 1:I drink two of those before the show every day. Yeah. That's And
Speaker 2:then I cruise how the drama works. Comes out.
Speaker 1:I call it podcast in a can.
Speaker 2:It's a podcast in a can.
Speaker 1:It's a podcast a
Speaker 8:So you're asleep like half the weekend.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2:That's the big issue. We're we're on like insane caffeine levels Monday through Friday and then on the weekend, our wives will be like, what's going on? Like wake up, like you're doing I
Speaker 1:finally was like the secret is stock energy drinks and then I'm I'm ripping.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. At least five hundred milligrams Father mode. Saturday and Sunday.
Speaker 8:Well, you're getting the most exciting guests too. So it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:We had some good ones.
Speaker 8:Adrenaline with no performance even Yeah. You know. Yeah. It's very really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you kick us off with an introduction on yourself? I I I'm familiar with the story of the company, but I'd love to just introduce you to the audience.
Speaker 8:Sure. I'm Zach Bookman. I'm I'm cofounder and CEO of and it's an enterprise software company called OpenGov. Yeah. It's vertical software.
Speaker 8:So we sell we sell software to modernize all of our nation's cities and counties, state agencies. Yeah. This has so I started the company with Joe Lonsdale Yep. And two amazing young Stanford engineers. 13 Can you
Speaker 2:explain, overnight success? Who's Joe Joe
Speaker 1:Who's Joe Wiesenfeld for those who know? Stop.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Joe's cofounder of okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. Good. I'm doing
Speaker 8:Cofounder of Palantir, buddy of yours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Hey. Your audience is getting so big. There's people down the valley here. Okay.
Speaker 2:So They've living under a data center.
Speaker 7:It's they know they don't know true.
Speaker 1:Thirteen years, incredible run. I I felt
Speaker 8:thirteen like year overnight success.
Speaker 1:So Of course. And I feel like this company kinda came out of nowhere. Is that was that intentional? Were you building, like, behind the scenes, is that just a function of the market?
Speaker 8:Well, a little bit of both. Yeah. Well and there's a third one, which is called the long series of painful mistakes. Yeah. We so those who don't know, we sold the company last year Yeah.
Speaker 8:For $1,800,000,000 to a very large family okay. Okay. I those stripped over there. It was it was the largest, I think, private software transaction of the year and maybe one of largest in the last few years. I just keep going.
Speaker 8:This is fun.
Speaker 1:It was great.
Speaker 2:You're on a roll. You're on a roll. This is we designed the the the soundboard for this kind of interview and you're really
Speaker 1:Hit with Hit the other. Hit them the action. Yeah. Horse noise. We we
Speaker 8:saw all these governments using, like, green screen software, you know, more than a decade ago. This is after the great recession. There were three cities that went bankrupt, 12 that were predicted to go bankrupt, and we were like, we're gonna pay taxes for the next fifty years. Where's our money gonna go? We saw the state, the state of California using an accounting system that ran on COBOL Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And they entered into a $100,000,000 agreement with Oracle and Accenture, which ballooned into a billion dollar Wow. Deal. That was seven that was seven years
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for the shareholders
Speaker 6:of Accenture.
Speaker 1:Shareholders of union. Taxpayers. I'm a California taxpayer. Just Correct. Write the check to Larry Ellison next time.
Speaker 8:And and we saw that the the city of Palo Alto was running an ERP system that was delivered on 20 disks and had green screens
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:From a German software conglomerate, SAP. Yep. And they paid $10,000,000 for it. And we were like, there's we we have to be able to do good for our communities, our country.
Speaker 1:It was
Speaker 8:super mission driven. Our mission is to power more effective and accountable government, and we thought there's pretty good business here.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And it turns out there's a your your investor audience would know there's a company called Tyler Technologies. Mhmm. Most ordinary people haven't heard of it. They do about 2,000,000,000 in revenue on software and services for state and local governments, and they are the, I think, tenth best performing stock of the last twenty years. They're on the S and P 500.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 8:They print, like, well over quarter billion dollars of cash a year, probably $3,400. And so we got out of the gate, had a little bit of hype. Yours truly made basically every entrepreneurial mistake in the book, built the wrong products in the wrong order, hired the wrong people, raised too much money, spent too much money, had to learn enterprise selling on the job. And we managed to get some outstanding star studded investors and board members. Marc Andreessen was on the board, John Chambers, obviously Lonsdale, Catherine August, who helped build First Republic, and, you know, folks like Laureen, Jobs and Scott Cook.
Speaker 8:So people were very attracted to the mission. I used to have hair down to here, so maybe, you know, there's, like, the long haired, crazy founder thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And with all these mistakes, it was hard times from, like, literally probably 2015 to 02/2019, almost not raising around. You know, uncle Joe rescued us once or twice, and, you know, Mark would joke with me. He's like, you know, and that's kinda started to work, and he'd be like, this is, like, little engine that could. And this is in you know, then it turns into, like, 2021. Zerp, every company's growing, like, 80%, and my shareholders are, like, bored.
Speaker 8:Right? They're like, we're just, a good little company. And literally right up until I could see they were a little tired. And right up until the sale, we were people thought we were worth about half of what we were worth. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So things had really started to work. Cox was diversifying their hundred twenty five year old family business. Mhmm. They do, you know, couple dozen billion in revenue, and are trying to move away from cable, automotive, and other businesses. And they said, you know, we like government software, and we built a relationship over three or four years.
Speaker 8:And and the company's actually accelerating now. So it's it's getting exciting. Incredible.
Speaker 1:What what's like what are some high level kind of, I don't know, contrarian insights or unexpected things that you could share about, like, lessons from the way the government runs? Maybe everyone thinks it's because of this, but it's actually something deeper. Just the way people understand the government, they understand it in one way. How how has your perspective changed? Because you sit in such a unique position.
Speaker 8:One obvious, almost contrarian take is folks like us in particular. We love to sit around and bash the government. Oh, yeah. And, you know, where's our money going? These idiots, the $10,000 toilet.
Speaker 8:Yep. Like, many years ago, I did this with Kalakanis, and and he went off on it. I said, look. I said, what's ironic is we are the government. Yeah.
Speaker 8:He's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, you can raise your hand and go sit on the town council.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Why don't you?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:It's a lot easier just to complain. And the reality is the people running our nation's state and local governments aren't all idiots. They're not all wasteful, fraudulent, and crooked. Many of them are accountants, lawyers, professional managers. They're actually working really hard day in and day out.
Speaker 8:They do it they could get to other jobs. Yeah. They do it because they they want a mission, and they wanna help, and they like being involved. And the the problems are very complicated, and they're regulated like heck by you and me. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Every time there's a little scandal and there's plenty of scandals in companies. We know this. But every time there's a scandal in the public sector, we put more regulations on them. So we complain about procurement, we complain about their actions, and yet we govern them. And they have to follow the rules that we set.
Speaker 8:And so what we're actually complaining about is our political culture. It's not the administrators and bureaucrats that are in our government. So that's one contrarian take. Another is few people think about how important these entities are. We always we wanna talk about federal government or international, relations or security or what have you.
Speaker 8:The reality is most of your services are done by local and state governments, literally. The roads you drive on, the water you drink, you flush the toilet, the flick the light switch on, all of this stuff is typically done by local and state governments. And we rarely think about who we're gonna call in the middle of the night if someone's breaking in. And are they well resourced? Are they well trained?
Speaker 8:Are we interacting with them? Are we governing them correctly? So I don't know if that's another contrarian take, but it's like, this is really important stuff. Super mission driven, and it's gotta be right. And they operate in glass houses, and we all get to throw stones at them all day.
Speaker 8:Could you imagine running a company if you had to, every little piece of software you wanted to buy, you needed to have it approved by your board? That's an example of a rule. We put on our local government. If it's over 25 or 50 k, make sure we get to
Speaker 1:a point.
Speaker 2:Enough to get your board to look at your board deck.
Speaker 8:The marketing reason would would laugh me out of the room if I was like, I to upgrade Salesforce and, you know, can I have 80 more k to Yeah? Give me a break. Are you the CEO or not? But we don't give those authorities
Speaker 2:to How how how have you thought about maintaining this, maintaining, you know, the culture of OpenGov, which feels like, you know, it's Silicon Valley take on on on the category. How how have you thought about maintaining and and kind of like figuring, you know, because I because I think you you went in I'm sure early days bright eyed into this business being like, we're gonna fix all this stuff. It's gonna be like, we're just gonna move fast and and make things. And then I'm sure you were kind of battle hardened by by the reality of of building and selling into these types of companies. But but now post post exit, you wanna maintain that original kind of like spirit.
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's a couple things. I mean, we started early, and there were a few important insights. One, we're apolitical. Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Our customers can can do the politics. They gotta fight in the arena. We provide technology. So we're here to support, we make them the heroes. Number two, we never play victim.
Speaker 8:It's a very hard business. It's a get rich slow scheme, as I sometimes joke. And if we can't get a sale over the line or something, you know, a wrench is thrown in, it's very easy to be like, these people are idiots. They're so dumb. They don't get how good we are.
Speaker 8:And we just cut I cut that off at the knees, like, literally in 02/2012. We don't play victim. We go back to work. We build a better product. We build a better go to market.
Speaker 8:We hold ourselves to a higher standard. We're gonna win because of the quality of our products and services and so on, and we've kind of held strong to that. The culture's getting stronger than than ever. By the way, we came back to the office, and that's hard for a lot of people. But, like, I don't know what I was thinking, staying remote, virtual, and distributed for so long, through the COVID crisis.
Speaker 2:But you recommend it you recommend it to your competitors. Right?
Speaker 8:I I I would, I'd do anything to help my competitors be fully remote virtual.
Speaker 2:Fully distributed. Fully distributed.
Speaker 8:In fact, maybe I should write a handbook on how to make the announcement at your all hands and say, move to the beach, move home with your parents, keep your salary, we support you, because we're so inclusive.
Speaker 1:This is my hot take. You gotta write a book, The The twenty Hour Workweek, and sell it to as many people as possible. Yeah. Just like
Speaker 2:twenty hours, that's How to win how to win selling into the government, the
Speaker 1:twenty hour workweek. Yeah. Just Yeah. Twenty hours.
Speaker 8:Your whole company on Slack and email. Like Exactly.
Speaker 1:You don't have
Speaker 8:to talk to people. Yep. Maybe do it from the putting green too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:So culture wise, we're very hard charging. We we call it, like, donuts and doorbusters. We'll, like we we show up with donuts, we'll kick down the door in the of the local government and sell literally door to door. So this is very high energy, high evangelism. We're literally trying to make change among these old line bureaucratic entity and drag themselves into modernity and into an AI first future.
Speaker 2:Well, I wanna talk more, but John has to get My
Speaker 1:plane's leaving in forty minutes, and I have to get to Burbank. So I I have to run. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Headed up. I'm going to
Speaker 1:San Francisco. You wanna hang out a little bit? I'll be there in a couple hours. We'll go Well,
Speaker 8:next time you come up, come by OpenGum. I'll give you a tour, we'll hang out.
Speaker 1:Sounds awesome. Come back on anytime. Yeah. This is great, man.
Speaker 2:Enjoyed this. You're our new local government correspondent correspondent and expert in
Speaker 1:the news. I'm in.
Speaker 2:We've been waiting guys.
Speaker 8:I'm sure you I'm sure you hear about, you know, all the key firms like hovering and VCs are trying to, you know, and Y Combinator trying to figure out how to
Speaker 2:kill I want I don't want anyone else bringing AI to my local government except Zachary Bookman.
Speaker 8:Very kind of you.
Speaker 2:It makes me sick to think that other people think they can compete in your category. Competition's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8:It's all good. Although, I think a lot of people are in for more pain than they might really.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Anybody's welcome to compete if they're willing to slog it out for
Speaker 1:a decade or so. Yeah. Anyway, great hanging. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 8:Great hanging, sir. See you guys.
Speaker 4:See you
Speaker 2:later. Great weekend. Thanks for joining. Bye.
Speaker 1:And that's our show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for watching.
Speaker 2:Get to the airport.
Speaker 1:Only three days till Monday.
Speaker 2:Only three days till Monday. Everybody wish Locked good luck getting to his flight. It's a good
Speaker 1:I think I'm gonna be in a white suit on the plane.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:See you later.
Speaker 2:Have a great weekend, folks. Bye. Love you. Bye.