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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 live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance. That's right. The Capital Of Capital. Today is Friday, February 28, and we gotta say happy birthday to our vice president, Ben. He's back in the studio.
Speaker 2:Ben.
Speaker 1:Ben. They tried the enemies tried to take him down.
Speaker 2:They could not. They
Speaker 1:couldn't do it. He's too powerful. But we got a great show for you today. We're covering g p t 4.5. We're gonna answer the question, what do you get when you spend 10 times as much money pre training in LLM?
Speaker 1:There's been a bunch of conversation on the timeline about this. We're gonna break it all down. Also, Skype is shutting down. I'm sure we'll have to do a, little moment of silence for that. Tell some stories about our early Skype usage days.
Speaker 1:Give you a little background on the company and how they wound up there. And then the timeline has just been in turmoil. So we're gonna be spending a ton of time on the timeline.
Speaker 2:To say the least.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's been spicy.
Speaker 2:To say the least.
Speaker 1:This, this morning, there's been drama, and there's been tons of fun posts as always. So stay tuned. We got a great show for you today. Jordy, how you feeling?
Speaker 2:I am feeling good. I'm I'm a little frustrated because Ben didn't tell us that it was his birthday about May ago. And you know how people are you know, they try to be nonchalant, you know, and they'll wait till it's Yeah. It's it's almost you know, we got an hour till it's noon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he just drops. So, yeah, it's actually my birthday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:You're so nonchalant. No. Tell me Yep. Tell he's, Ben's gonna mute me, but, no, this goes out to all the nonchalant birthday boys out there. Tell us tell us it's your birthday
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A week a month before, a week before, a day before, and the morning of.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:I wanna know so I can set up singing Telegram, Mariachis. Wow. We were at breakfast with Ben earlier today. I should have had the whole staff come out and sing him happy birthday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:would have done
Speaker 2:that. Pancakes with candles.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Pancakes with candles. But he robbed us of that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Anyway And I will never forgive you for that, Ben.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Jordy, would you like to hear a joke?
Speaker 2:I love your jokes.
Speaker 1:You love my jokes? But these are my jokes. You
Speaker 2:didn't write this joke.
Speaker 1:I didn't write this joke. This is what this is a joke written by a model that cost $5,000,000,000,000, actually.
Speaker 2:We should get into the actual cost. But, for those that are maybe listening for the first time
Speaker 1:This is my Tesla guy.
Speaker 2:This is John's eval. Yeah. You're Coogan's eval, and we should we should actually you gotta coin.
Speaker 1:Coin this.
Speaker 2:So Coogan's eval is where you take the new model, and you say, tell me a funny joke. Make sure it's actually a funny joke Yep. Like a stand up set and not just a knock knock joke or something simple. Literally, my comedians are Shane Gillis, Dave Chappelle, etcetera. And so why don't you read out the joke and,
Speaker 1:Buckle up. I mean Buckle up.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be in tears. See. We should
Speaker 1:get some tissues because you're gonna be laughing so hard. So, hey. You ever notice how technology makes us think we're way smarter than we actually are? Like, I realized this when my Wi Fi went out the other day. I immediately panicked because without Google, I'm basically just an ape holding an iPhone.
Speaker 1:Seriously, if you took me back to the middle ages and asked me how to build a simple pulley system, I'd be like, you got YouTube here.
Speaker 2:Funny. AGI achieved. AGI achieved. Hang it up. AGI achieved.
Speaker 2:Everyone's out of their job.
Speaker 1:It's incredible. Amazing. Of course, that's not the goal of these models. Their job is
Speaker 2:to work
Speaker 1:in the mines.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna
Speaker 1:you want me to
Speaker 2:keep going?
Speaker 1:To finish it. It's so bad. I I okay. So, and it's not just the Internet. Remember when we thought Alexa and Siri were gonna make our lives easier?
Speaker 1:Now it's just me arguing with a speaker about whether I said play Kanye or order Pad Thai. My credit card's maxed out, but, hey, my Spotify playlist is fire.
Speaker 2:I like how it just throws in this completely random non sequitur.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't I don't get why is it maxed out? Because he's paying for, like, AI tools.
Speaker 2:Pad Thai.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Speaking of tech, I think the weirdest part about AI isn't that it's smarter than us. It's that it's becoming more human. We're programmed we programmed AI to mimic humans, and now AI lies, makes mistakes, and blames other people. We invented digital middle management.
Speaker 1:Congratulations, humanity. We've automated incompetence. Wow. A real knee slapper. Right?
Speaker 1:Pervert I mean, I did that was that stolen from Shane Gillis or Dave Chappelle?
Speaker 2:It might have been I think what we need to do is feed your lines back into the model and ask it to judge your delivery because it really might come down to the the delivery. Right? You're setting it up you're setting it up to fail. You don't wanna believe that the model can be as funny as you are. But, anyways, we're not we're not we don't have AGI yet.
Speaker 1:We're not out of a job yet, so stay tuned. But, I mean, that realistically, that's not why like, they're not even trying to make these models that funny. It is But
Speaker 2:they should.
Speaker 1:Eval. I think it's a good eval. I think that they should be able to do that at some point. And it and and the humor eval is a way of asking, you know, the model, like, can you do something that you haven't been trained on? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the the move 37 of of writing is
Speaker 2:a joke, a novel joke in in my mind. The real benchmark is a true knee slapper.
Speaker 1:I think so. I think so. But anyway, we got a much more serious analysis from Andre Karpathy. He says GPT 4.5 and an interactive comparison. Today marks the release of GPT 4.5 by OpenAI.
Speaker 1:I've been looking forward to this for two years ever since GPT four was released because this release offers a qualitative measurement of the slope of improvement you get out of scaling pre training compute. This is something we've talked about. Yep. I'm super scale pilled. Scaling is real, but the question is, if you scale the model up 10 x, do you get a 10 x improvement?
Speaker 1:Do you get a one x, a two x improvement? I don't know if you got that. 10%? Do you get a hundred x? Like, sometimes, you know, and and he talks about the evolution here.
Speaker 1:So each point five in the version is roughly 10 x pre training compute. Now recall the GPT one barely generates coherent text. GPT two was a confused toy. GPT 2.5 was skipped straight into GPT three, which was even more interesting than GPT 3.5 crossed the threshold where it was enough to actually ship as a product and sparked OpenAI's chat GPT moment. And if you remember when GPT 3.5 was getting really good, there was this DaVinci model, this GPT 3.5002 dash DaVinci, a great name, of course.
Speaker 1:Very memorable. But that was the moment when people in the developer community were toying with it and being like, okay. This thing is actually, like, passing the Turing test. Like, it sounds like human, and it is remarkable. It's a remarkable, innovation.
Speaker 1:And so GPT four in turn also felt better, but I'll say that it definitely felt more subtle. I remember being part of a hackathon trying to find concrete prompts where GPT four outperformed 3.5. They definitely existed, but clear and but clear and concrete slam dunk examples were difficult to find. It's that everything was just a little bit better, but in a diffuse way. The word choice was a bit more creative.
Speaker 1:Understanding of nuance in the prompt was improved. Analogies made a bit more sense. The model was a little bit funnier. World knowledge and understanding was improved at the edges of rare domains. Hallucinations were a bit less frequent.
Speaker 1:The vibes were just a bit better. It felt like the water that rises all boats where everything gets slightly improved by 20%. So it is with that ex expectation that I went into testing GPT 4.5, which I had access to for a few days and which saw 10 x more pre training compute than GPT four. And I feel like once again, I'm in the same hackathon two years ago. Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome, but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to.
Speaker 1:Still, it is incredibly interesting and exciting as another qualitative measurement of a certain slope of capability that comes for free just from pre training a bigger model. Keep in mind that GPT 4.5 was only trained with pre training supervised fine tuning and RLHF, so this is not yet a reasoning model. Therefore, this model release does not push forward model capability in cases where reasoning is critical like math and code. In these cases, training with RL reinforcement learning and gaining thinking is incredibly important and works better even if it is on top of an older base model, GPT four ish capability or so. The state of the art here remains the full o one.
Speaker 1:Presumably, OpenAI will now be looking to further train with reinforcement learning on top of GPT 4.5 model to allow to think and push model capability in these domains. However, we do we we do actually expect to see an improvement in tasks that are not reasoning heavy, and I would say those tasks are more EQ as opposed to IQ. So it's more it's more just better to chat with and actually have a conversation with, related and bottlenecked by world knowledge, creativity, analogy making, general understanding, humor, etcetera. So these
Speaker 2:Definitely bottlenecked by humor.
Speaker 1:That's what I've
Speaker 2:seen.
Speaker 1:So these are the tasks that I was most interested during my vibe checks. So below, I thought it'd be fun to highlight five funny slash amusing prompts to test these capabilities and organize them into an interactive LM arena light right here on x using a combination of images and polls in a thread. Sadly, x does not allow you to include both an image and a poll in a single post, so I have to alternate posts that give the image. And then so basically, he put he left it up for eight hours. This got a million views.
Speaker 1:Lots of people voted, and he broke down the results. And interestingly, he says, okay. So I didn't super expect the results of the GPT four versus GPT four point five poll from earlier today. But GPT 4.5 outperformed GPT four on only one of the five questions. Wild.
Speaker 1:G people prefer GPT four in four out of five questions. Awkward. And it's always odd. I mean, the splits are not huge. 56% of people prefer GPT 4.5 in one question.
Speaker 1:I mean The the margins were 20%. It wasn't like it wasn't like a %. Ninety % of people thought it was one way or another. Still to Sixty, forty
Speaker 2:For every one person that prefers, you know, GPT four five in question three, two people prefer GPT four. That is pretty significant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And he says, to be honest, I found this a bit surprising as I personally found GPT 4.5 to responses to be better in all cases. But maybe I'm just a high taste tester. I think that's probably true. And so you built this, Andre, and you're like one of the greatest programmers of all time.
Speaker 1:And so you probably have
Speaker 2:high IQ High IQ.
Speaker 1:And, you know yeah. But, the thing to look for is that GPT four more often says stuff.
Speaker 2:Has a refined taste in another kind of model. So happy to hear that.
Speaker 1:The thing to look for is that GPT four more often says stuff that on the face of it looks fine and type checks as making sense. But if you really think about it longer or more care carefully, you will often more you will more often catch it saying things that are a bit of an odd thing to say or a little too formulaic, a little too basic, a little too cringey, or a little too tropey. Slightly reassuring a number of people noted similar surprise in the replies. I noticed, the few I noticed as an example. For the roast, 4.5 is punchier.
Speaker 1:For the story, 4.5 narrative jumped in, had dialogue, and hinted at a unique storyline. B was a little bit more schematic. For the poem, 4.5 is obviously way better. The rhyme scheme and meter of b are so unsophisticated. A has to be 4.5.
Speaker 1:The voters have poor taste. I like that. So, yeah. Either high taste testers are noticing the new and unique structure, but the low taste ones are overwhelming the poll. All you celebs don't Normies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You Normies, Lovies don't can't if you can't tell the honestly, if you can't tell the difference
Speaker 2:frustrating. If you
Speaker 1:can't tell the difference between 4.54, like, I don't even know if you should be allowed to Yeah. Be a member of society.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. You have to imagine, OpenAI is trying to continuously dominate the narrative. Right? It's sort of the they're sort of, ahead on revenue, but very, you know, well beyond
Speaker 1:But it's like a knockout drag out fight in
Speaker 2:terms of attention and what's what's the highest level of attention. So they had Grok last week. Yep. Wherever the was it over the it was Friday?
Speaker 1:It it started last week, but then the the app rolled out. The the voice mode rolled out. The reasoning The
Speaker 2:new cloud model. 3.7. And opening AI like, there there's some value in being the last model to drop, right, in in just terms of, you know, sucking the air out of the room.
Speaker 1:And I believe that this, that this model will be the top of the stack in benchmarks. And Right. And OpenAI has always done this cadence where they come out with the best. And then a couple months later, there's a whole flood of everyone else catching up. And all of a sudden, you're beating them by, like, a few percentage, and then OpenAI comes back and is back on top.
Speaker 1:And so if you average out, like like, OpenAI is not always on the top of the rankings on every single benchmark, but they probably have the most number of days on top because they're on top, like, you know, for about half the
Speaker 2:year. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then towards the back half of the year, everyone else is kind of chipping away at their leads in different benchmarks and stuff. But, but it's fun. So he closes out and says, so we'll wait for the larger
Speaker 2:this feeling, and that it's hard to know if it's accurate, but there's a general feeling that I have, and I'm sure others do that that that the other, foundation model companies are are launching stuff, as fast as they possibly can. Yep. And and OpenAI is maybe sort of timing things more and that who knows, you know
Speaker 1:I kinda disagree with that. I mean, I think that, I mean, the narrative is, like, Anthropic has some insane voice model that they haven't released for safety reasons. And I think if anything
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:All the grok push and stuff, that's really pushing the cadence at OpenAI. And For sure. For sure.
Speaker 2:Hey. What have you got there? Feeling the pressure. I'm just saying they seem to be they seem to be, keep you know, you can imagine if they wanted to launch GPT five Yeah. You know, could do they feel the urgent they they felt clearly an urgency to come out with four or five.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Maybe they don't and they're feeling the pressure to get five out, but there's not they're sort of, like, trying to stay just perpetually slightly ahead Yep. And, focusing on quality, whereas Grok was just we have massive amount of compute. We're just gonna brute force spend, launch as fast as possible, iterate. Grok was clearly not actually ready for production. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It didn't have the reinforcement learning that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Made it so you would just get these obscene answers that never should have been live. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It clearly was more of even it was a almost like a beta version of the product.
Speaker 2:In many ways, it was responding to stuff that was more of an alpha level product where that stuff should have been caught.
Speaker 1:It's so funny. I mean, the nonprofit board at OpenAI was upset with Sam for launching ChatGPT, the very first version.
Speaker 2:And they
Speaker 1:were like, it's moving too fast. It's too dangerous. Can you imagine the nonprofit board watching Elon lunch grok three? And they're just like, no,
Speaker 2:no reinforcement learning.
Speaker 1:No reinforcement learning. It's it's like giving you gas, like how to make a bomb. So it's generating intellectual property that's completely infringing. Like, it has sexy mode. And they're just like, what?
Speaker 1:Like, actually, like, Sam would be much better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, bring
Speaker 1:Sam back. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we should have backed Sam and and kept Elon out of
Speaker 2:the race. Our biggest nonprofit backer was the most degenerate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He that's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Safety pill Yeah. Is just accelerate accelerate accelerate
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:The entire time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, to to Elon's credit, he doesn't he he he, you know, makes the claim that that Sam is is disingenuous and and, snakey or whatever. Yeah. He's not saying that Sam is reckless.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's actually a very different critique. Yeah. And I and I think I think it's good. Like, I think that this shows that, you know, just scaling up, you know, like, there was definitely a a drumbeat from the AI doomer community that that GPT 4.5 GPT five, you scale up the pre training by, by 10 x.
Speaker 1:They were so scale pelled that they said, when you scale up by 10 x, you're gonna get a 10 x more dangerous model.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're gonna get 10 x more risk. And that does not feel like what's going
Speaker 2:on right now
Speaker 1:at all. It feels like, yeah, these things are still, like, friendly and nice, and they make mistakes, and they're just simulating humans. And humans are default, like, kinda good, but also sometimes midwits. And sometimes they, you know, come up with good stuff. And, you know, it's all about how you implement them.
Speaker 1:And if somebody uses one of these models and creates a wrapper that does something bad, then, yeah, you're gonna get a bad outcome. But the model itself is not going to, you know, break out and have a mind of its own and destroy everything. So Andre finishes out by saying one really bad mistake that bugs me is in the GPT four point, four versus 4.5 conversation, the one generated by 4.5. Four point five asks, still buffering your responses like it's dial up Internet? This is really bad because it clearly borrows tropes from early days computing.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Anyway, let's go to some of the other takes. Michael Mignano, is is, But
Speaker 2:this comment is interesting.
Speaker 1:I think this is about it?
Speaker 2:No. The, from Maine
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Reaction there. I don't know if we have the answer, but it says, is it possible the four o update last month was already a distillation of 4.5? I think the results would be less
Speaker 1:yeah. Because maybe maybe we got some of that already baked in.
Speaker 2:That's why it's such a small, you know, difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to tell because, like, if you're just trying
Speaker 2:to say that, people right now people right now are are almost comforted in the fact that you're getting chapters of an LLM. Right? Sort of like version one, two, etcetera, and they all have different naming scenes. Yeah. But over time, you can imagine they're just perpetually updating.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But that's uncomfortable to be Yeah. You know, humans get smarter or dumber over time, right, depending on their environment and their view viewpoint of the world and knowledge and all that stuff. But it's not necessarily perpetually updating throughout even a day where you wake up and your your employee in the morning is brilliant, and then they're slightly, you know, dumber later in the day, nerfed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the the vibes around the cadence going from Chat GPT, which launched on three point five to GPT four. Everyone saw chat GPT in three point five. And we were like, we crossed the Turing test. AI is here.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be massively disruptive. Like, there's gonna be no more marketing jobs because it can just write copy. It's like there like, there's gonna be mass unemployment. Like people even even beyond, like, the doomers who are saying this is gonna kill us, a lot of people are like, this is going to fundamentally change the world very rapidly because it's happening at Internet scale. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not it's not an Adam's company. It's a bits company. And so this can be rolled out into every single company and layoffs can happen now. Right? And so people were people were worried.
Speaker 1:And then three months later, it was like, oh, we did we did we went from three to four, which feels like a 25%, thirty three % increase. It just felt like, oh, okay. If we're continuing at this pace, like, the acceleration is real. And and but then over the last two years, we've just been incrementing on fours, four four one, four five, four o And people
Speaker 2:were starting to pull that out. But, Sam, if you're out there in the markets trying to raise 40 on $3.50
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:350,000,000,000 or whatever the price is with the moss around, you want there to be this sense of, hey. The there's this sort of impending superintelligence and and, you know, every if you're needing to raise that kind of capital, you need superintelligence to perpetually be right around the corner. Even even Elon was posting, I think, earlier this week. We are on the it's the eve of superintelligence, you know, whatever. Everybody sort of,
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If if the models were to stagnate completely
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:There there would be a massive pullback in in sort of new investment. Right? Because you see the difference Yeah. Between 4 and $4.05. That's not gonna get the incremental Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of, whatever, $20,000,000,000 of investment.
Speaker 1:It's such an interesting dance because if you go too hard and you say superintelligence is right around the corner, well, then the regulator's gonna come out. People are gonna be protesting in the streets.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The doomers are gonna have a bigger argument saying, look. You can just look at what Sam is saying. He's gonna say it's the most powerful god in a box. Like, we have to control this. We have to regulate it.
Speaker 1:But if you don't say, hey. Superintelligence is coming. Yeah. Well, then we're why should we invest a trillion dollars in the CapEx? Like, we we we we in order to make these types of investments, it's gotta be the real deal.
Speaker 1:And so finding that balance is really, really tricky in my opinion.
Speaker 2:I think Satya has the right balance, which is that, AI in its current state and and for the near future is this sort of almost like a co pilot. It's a thought partner. Yeah. It's not, it it doesn't yet have, you know, total agency. Right?
Speaker 2:It's not actually replacing an employee, but it's Yep. It's being a a work sort of partner for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that still justifies a lot of CapEx, but I don't think it justifies an incremental $30,000,000,000 investment in OpenAI at the moment in time.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I think people massively underestimate how much one there is to be done.
Speaker 2:One point of view, I I forget who was talking about this, earlier this week is that there's so much value to be created and captured from the current technology set. I agree. It would take a even if we had even if all model development paused Yep. And we had a ten year shot And
Speaker 1:we just went to implement.
Speaker 2:To implement the technology, we could still there would still be numerous numerous Yep. You know?
Speaker 1:And that's what happened with the .com boom. Like, the Internet rolled out. Dial up was pretty terrible, pretty limited. But even in, like, I don't know, February, what, 02/2004, '2 thousand '5, people were starting to get high speed Internet, DSL Yeah. Cable stuff that you were where you could play video games online.
Speaker 1:You could stream videos. And then there was a question about, like, okay, well, what if your internet gets 10 times faster? Well, like, you're not gonna watch 10 movies at the same time. Like and yes, you could stream eight k video instead of ten eighty p, but most people just are fine with ten eighty p.
Speaker 2:It's still entertaining and, you you know, valuable.
Speaker 1:And so and so, like like, we accelerated the speed and can and number of connections to the Internet. And then it took us twenty years to actually reap that benefit, even though the tech kept getting better and the Internet has gotten faster. And now you can download an eight k video very quickly if you have the right line. But most people are just like, yeah, I just need, you know, a couple gig download, and I'm fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is interesting. Well, let's move on to some reactions. We got Michael Mignano. He says, technology is not a moat. Never has been.
Speaker 1:There are so many examples of incumbents copying startups technologies and leveraging their distribution to crush competition. And AI coding models are quickly making technology even less defensible with coding models like Claude, assistance like Cursor, and no code tools like Lovable and Bolt. It's becoming stupidly easy to copy existing products and apps with virtually no effort. Turns out the stuff that actually matters is what always mattered. Strong products, real network effects, ruthless distribution, and brands people actually care about.
Speaker 1:The winners will double down on those things while everyone else wonders why their perfect tech keeps getting cloned into irrelevance.
Speaker 2:So the most, most relevant, sort of point related to all of this is that, you know, we've talked about this on the show before, this idea of easy come, easy go.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so the same the same re you know, the the the the the the issue with Cursor is if you can go to a hundred million dollars building a product that that was an open, you know, sort of you open source. They it was like Versus Code. Fork. They forked it, get to a hundred million dollars in revenue. Lovable and Bolt come out.
Speaker 2:You know, Lovable goes from 0 to 17,000,000 in three months with a small team. But the same technology that enables them to do that also enables other people to come and compete away their market. Right? So Windsurf AI, which is a cursor competitor, they are have gotten to a $40,000,000 run rate in a very short amount of time. And so, historically, if you look at these businesses that have this sort of explosive growth, sometimes there's sort of specific market dynamics that allowed that to happen or allowed a specific team to do that or relationships that enabled it.
Speaker 2:But oftentimes, if a pure play software company explodes in growth Yep. And there's no network effects, which which Michael references here, or sort of, durable distribution advantage. Right? That that that that value creation can erode very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so what I think we're all interested to see how this plays out is all these companies that have this explosive revenue growth. One, it's great because when people say, oh, there's this big bubble Yeah. You can point and say, well
Speaker 1:Real value is being corrected.
Speaker 2:There's but but real customers are handing over dollars to pay for these products. And, you know, Cursor would have gone public, you know, a year ago if it was 2021. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But what what I think we're all waiting to see play out is, does this revenue, you know, ultimately get competed away by other teams that you know, there's teams that are will use Cursor to compete with Cursor. Right? Which is, you know, so we'll see. I think we're generally, you know, bullish on these companies, in the in the short Yeah. Medium term, but unclear how they sort of maintain, and and continue to create value when people just say, you know, there will be a version of Cursor that allows somebody to vibe code a free version of Cursor.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. How far like, I'm actually surprised we haven't seen somebody say, I use cursor to rebuild cursor and
Speaker 1:That would definitely go viral. We've seen some people do additional forks and and there's been some pushback.
Speaker 2:I think that was the company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the yeah. There has been pushback. My my, I wonder, are you a bull or bear on, DocuSign? DocuSign's like the quintessential you should be able to rebuild that with cursor. Right?
Speaker 1:It's just forms and filings. But
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe those ten, twenty, hundred thousand employees they have are just the best sales guys. They're embedded in every organization. They're calling you on your birthday. They're celebrating you. They're They're
Speaker 2:not like Ben. They tell you they tell you their birthday that morning. They wake up and say, hey. It's your it's your favorite sales rep.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. You clone DocuSign for, you know, $5 in cursor credits or whatever. You have Devon on the case for the weekend, and you got yourself a DocuSign clone.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest How
Speaker 1:are you distributing it? You need 10,000 sales guys.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. You know, I I just I I don't think we know. I Yeah. Want you know, the bigger threat to DocuSign is again, so Google Workspace, I think, just rolled out a a docs document signing product.
Speaker 2:We already pay for Google Workspace. It's one click away. It's not gonna be as good. But for sure, Google's, like, calendar booking link throttled the growth of of Calendly Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2:Things like that. And so I think the bigger, threat to some of these sort of commodity products. The thing is is, I mean, doc document signing has the viral sort of
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Effect where sign up and then you
Speaker 2:sign up, but that also enables to the product. Yeah. Distribution's baked in.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But, I mean, we've said this maybe five times on the show before. How has DocuSign not said, hey, our product's actually pretty simple. We should be able to maintain it with a team of a hundred engineers. We actually don't need a thousand. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's sort of give back, let's free these people to go work on other more interesting products.
Speaker 1:Set them free. Set them free. Instead of slaving away in the in the DocuSign mines.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And just let them go work on more interesting things and then, you know, give that give that cash back to shareholders who invested in new products. It it just seems like a very uninspiring Yeah. Company. But, but we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, chimed in with his take on GPT 4.5. I thought this is an interesting, data point because he's obviously using these models very deeply. He says, GPT 4.5 has been awesome to work with. Of course, they build this into Devon.
Speaker 1:You can run Devon on a number of different, LLMs. And he says, our agentic coding benchmarks, on our agentic coding benchmark, it it already shows massive improvements over o one and four o. Excited to see the model's continued trajectory on code. One interesting data point, although GPT 4.5 and Claude three point seven SONNET score similarly on our overall benchmark, we find that GPT 4.5 spikes more heavily on tasks involve involving architecture and cross system interactions, whereas Claude three point seven sonnets spikes more on raw coding and code editing. As AI takes on increasingly complex tasks, we believe that multimodal agents multimodal agents that incorporate each model's unique strengths will perform best.
Speaker 1:Just like in your brain, you have different sections of your brain to do different tasks. On a team, you have that developer who's really good at architecture, and you have that other guy who's just a beast at writing code all night long. And so,
Speaker 2:I might be off here by with Devon and Cognition's position where as the underlying models get dramatically better, their product gets, you know, better and more valuable. That's a great position to be in. Yep. Given the complexity of building out the sort of team like, product, you know, like, individual contributor as product that's integrated into a team.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Will Cognition be better positioned than a Cursor where, you know, as, how long until you can get Devon to build a version of Cursor and just say, hey, fork. Yeah. You know, we might be ten years away from that, but
Speaker 1:It's it's not a neat like I mean, the the, like, the the mental model I have for for, Cursor versus Devon is, like, completely separate things. One is like this No.
Speaker 2:Totally. I'm just saying
Speaker 1:And with Devon, I I almost see it as, like, you could see them like, like a McKinsey almost where it's like, there's a large company, and they're like, hey. We have this app, and it runs on iOS, and we need to get it to run on Android. And so you just need to take that code and transfer it, and it's just gonna be a lot of work and it's gotta be done perfectly. And so we just want you we're gonna give you $10,000,000 to do it because it would cost 50,000,000 to do it with, you know, some human outsourcing team, and and Cognition just goes and cranks and, like, gets it done. And then eventually, you're doing that all over your organization.
Speaker 1:And it's much more for, like, these these, like, corporate projects than Yeah. Like, you know,
Speaker 2:Yeah. Our backlogs, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I I I've I've seen a lot of of case studies like that, but it's very it's very different. And then also, yeah, it's it's very, it's very, like, it's a b to b product.
Speaker 1:Like, they are in open access. You can just go install it. But it is expensive and it's a very different, sales motion, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's go to, Chubby, hilarious name, with the most serious post, talking about OpenAI Mark Chen, who I actually got dinner with, a couple months ago. Great guy. Mark Chen says, we found a new paradigm through reasoning, which we're also scaling. That's right. Because GPT 4.5 was clearly proven that pre training has definitely reached a wall.
Speaker 1:GPT five must be a banger. Last chance says chubby. And, so a lot of people throwing a little bit of, a little question on, you know, hey. Everyone is going to be shifting to, oh, no.
Speaker 2:No. No. We don't we
Speaker 1:don't focus on just bigger bigger models. We we focus on reasoning, because, like, that's the next paradigm. Yeah. But I think that's fine. I don't care where you're optimizing your AI system.
Speaker 1:I don't care if it's all the gains are in pre training, all the gains are in post training, All the gains are in RLHF. When RLHF came out, people were like, oh, so, like, now, like, to scale and improve a model, you just need
Speaker 2:to have a bunch of
Speaker 1:people, like, writing answers. Like, this is an AI. And it's like, I don't care. I just want
Speaker 2:Just give me
Speaker 1:I just want good results. Good results.
Speaker 2:I just want to laugh.
Speaker 1:Make me laugh. John just
Speaker 2:wants to laugh.
Speaker 1:But also also do the research reports and make them great, you know, and and and and, you know, throw scale all of these things. And I think that there's probably going to be these cycles of memes online where people are like, oh, it it like, scale doesn't matter at all. It's all about reasoning. Oh, RLHF doesn't matter. It's all about post training
Speaker 2:or pre pre training or,
Speaker 1:you know, fine tuning or a customs Yeah. I do
Speaker 2:think it's fair for people like Chubby to feel like they have the right to try to hold, OpenAI and these other model companies who have made these sort of massive audacious claims. Yep. And they've put out a lot of communications on, on this topic to try to say, yeah, last last chance. You know, GPT five's gotta be a banger. They're basically holding it.
Speaker 2:But it's
Speaker 1:also and be like, hey. $300,000,000,000 company, last chance.
Speaker 2:Last year. It's like, no. No. I'm I'm just Who are you to decide whether or not this happens? But, yeah, there there's this balance between the the our our it's it's more so Yeah.
Speaker 2:Chubby is probably a customer of OpenAI. Yep. They're allowed to have strong opinions. Totally. And everyone's interested.
Speaker 2:Something too. Yeah. But at the same time, OpenAI, it's squarely within their right to try to massage the narrative and say, well, actually, this is the thing that's more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think both both sides have have clear
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to another hater. Do you know Gary Marcus?
Speaker 2:I do not.
Speaker 1:Gary Marcus is a fascinating figure in AI. He wrote a piece called Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall. He Yeah. He, he was at, he sold an AI company to Uber, I believe. And his whole thing is, what is it?
Speaker 1:Symbolic symbol manipulation. So he believes that, like, you cannot just throw a big pile of data at a basic algorithm, like the GPT three algorithm, and then just do predict next word, predict next word, predict next word, and then get God or get the genius human. He maintains that, like, humans represent information in their brains in different ways than that. It's not just predict the
Speaker 2:next word every two seconds. Right? And so special and unique snowflakes.
Speaker 1:He's he's somewhat right because there are clearly, like, the reasoning and and being able to search the web and use Python and all these different tools. We're building out the machine brain in multiple different sectors. But he's also been, like, massively wrong for a long time because he was saying, like, deep learning will never scale, and it's like, I'm talking to He's
Speaker 2:the Michael Burry of models.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so But
Speaker 2:you only gotta you know, if he's right right now, he's gonna
Speaker 1:be pretty vindicated. Lot of people have been like, this guy is a joke. Like, why is he be why is he testifying in front of congress? At the same time, you know, he'd I think he does have a PhD. He's like he's like a a a serious researcher.
Speaker 1:He's just taken a very contrarian stance. But so has, Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky was a linguist at MIT and and and had a lot of, Yeah. And and had a lot of a lot of theories on the way language is constructed and and saw and argued that, you could not rep like, you could not represent a human through, like, a sloppy algorithm. There needed to be some sort of more fundamental truth.
Speaker 1:And so, symbol manipulation basically says, like, you know, we need to have, you know, a concept baked into the model of, like, what a table is, how it interacts with a chair, all these different things. And so, it's been it's been controversial because there haven't been as many gains in the symbol symbol manipulation world, but Gary's been, you know, happily taking a, a victory lap, I guess, over, GPT 4.5, not just purely proving that pre training scale is all you need, but let's find out. So Chubby again says, judging by the mood, GPT 4.5 is the first big failure for OpenAI. Too expensive, too little improvement, and often inferior to GPT four o, even in comparison in creative answers in community tests like what Andrej Karpathy, posted. And it's interesting because, too expensive don't care at all.
Speaker 1:They're gonna distill this model and get it a thousand times cheaper in two seconds. Too little improvement. That is interesting. But again, you have to run the the the CapEx to profit calculation. And the GPT four training run, I think, was, like, under a hundred million dollars or something, which is still, like, a lot of money at the time, but a hundred million dollars, and they're making billions.
Speaker 1:And so you Yeah. If you train a hundred million dollar run and then You
Speaker 2:generate billions.
Speaker 1:You generate billions a year forever, potentially, if you can be sticky.
Speaker 2:Really super high margin.
Speaker 1:Not yet. But once you bake it down onto silicon or onto a chip, is it just saying?
Speaker 2:Like I'm just
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like like, the true. Like, they're not profitable right now, but, just the idea of of any of these AI companies throwing a billion at or 10,000,000,000 when you think about how much usage there's going to be Yeah. It's not as crazy as you think.
Speaker 1:And so the question
Speaker 2:is when you consider there's models that no one uses that have raised a hundred million dollars Yeah. And have spent most of it and Yeah. With nothing to show for it.
Speaker 1:And and, I mean, you you
Speaker 2:looks like they're allocating fairly efficiently.
Speaker 1:And and and you could say the same thing about, like, Amazon.com. They built out huge data centers 10 times as they they they 10 x their CapEx, like, 10 times. Right? Did did the experience of Amazon.com get that much better? No.
Speaker 1:But they printed money the whole time because they have a great product on top of it. And so, like, you don't necessarily need a 10 x improvement in the core product. If the business is working and it's generating cash, you can underwrite those CapEx expenses, all that. Yeah. And and that's what I think a lot of peep that's why a lot of people are jumping into this because Elon is saying, look, I'm gonna spend billions of dollars on GROC and XAI, but then I'm gonna vend that into Tesla.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about this, like, having a deeply integrated Grok and XAI integration in a Tesla is gonna be amazing. There's so many times when I'm when I'm driving into the office and I'm talking to Chat GPT about, hey. Here are some topics that I wanna talk about. Can you do a deep research on this one? Just using the voice mode.
Speaker 1:And if that was integrated into a Tesla, so it's basically self driving itself, and you're just having a conversation with Croc. Okay. Today, I gotta I gotta talk to Jordy about the show. I gotta pay this bill. I gotta schedule a meeting, and it's just cataloging out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Just cataloging all of this. Oh, okay. You did legs yesterday, hit chest.
Speaker 1:Here's what you
Speaker 2:should do. Rest over the in the car. I'm constantly in the car. You know, I I spend enough time on the road, you know, these days because of all the traffic that if I get in a car for ninety minutes and I'm driving, I'm gonna have 20 thoughts Yeah. That I wanna be able to execute on in that moment, but I end up having to, like, wait until I'm at a stoplight.
Speaker 2:Yep. Write it down. Yep. Keep going. And then I've built this huge backlog of tasks where if you can have this sort of omnipresent AI that that says, hey, Grock, can you, you know, call, you know, the cable company?
Speaker 2:I wanna increase my Yeah. I wanna get fiber. I have, like, you know, I wanna upgrade my plan. Exactly. It's like, that's an item you're checking off the to do list.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And I'm sure your car all your cars have some sort of voice recognition, but it's awful. Right? It's like, call John, and it's like, oh, did you want me to, you know, call you a tow truck or whatever? Like, always gets it wrong.
Speaker 1:No one ever uses it. Imagine if it's if it's, you know, truly frontier best in class. And so the question is not, does spending a billion dollars on CapEx to train a frontier model get you something that's a thousand times better than the competition. It's just, does it get you a valuable asset that then you can vend in and sell all over the place? And so can Elon sell Grok to ex premium members and make the money back there?
Speaker 1:Can he sell it into Tesla? Can he sell it into other things? Like, can he hook it up to Neuralink? Like, can he make money from the money he spent? That's that's the only thing that matters at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:It's capitalism. Right? Anyway, so, you know, people are pouring cold water
Speaker 2:on this. Tough timing too. So, yeah, they're pouring cold water on it, calling it the first big failure of OpenAI. Meanwhile, poor Sam had his first kid, like, last week. It's rough.
Speaker 2:This guy
Speaker 1:And so Gary Marcus says a big surprise only to you and the many other OpenAI fans who refused to listen to me when I patiently and endlessly explained that this would be exactly what would happen for the rest of us. This was all but inevitable. And so he's taking a victory lap. But it's but it's odd because it's like, okay. Like, go do the thing then, Gary.
Speaker 1:Like, go go do your approach. Like, do the symbolic Yeah. The symbol manipulation and Or and beat them.
Speaker 2:Podcast.
Speaker 1:He might. He might. But, yeah, I mean, it's easy to be a pessimist and say that approach isn't working. Like, the, like, like, the the starship isn't gonna work to get us to Mars. I don't care.
Speaker 1:Build something better that will get us to Mars then. If you think the slingshot we were talking to to Dalian about this. Like, if he wants to get there with the spaceplane, he'll do that.
Speaker 2:Like I don't know. I don't know. I mean, that's an obvious critique Yeah. Of Gary. But at the same time, if you are highly, researched on a specific topic, you're an expert on that topic in many ways.
Speaker 2:Yep. But Gary, you could argue he's an exited AI founder. Sure. He's been talking about this for years. Yep.
Speaker 2:He's perfectly entitled to have an opinion on the world changing technology that everybody out and and it's fine if he take I I think he can take a victory lap. Yep. We're not we're not he's not trying to say that I can do it.
Speaker 1:He Well, he has been for years. For years, he was saying Yeah. I I understand. My approach is better than deep learning.
Speaker 2:Okay. So he has That's
Speaker 1:why I Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's he hasn't been advancing the ball on his thing. It would be one thing if it was, like, they did this and then symbol manipulation in his approach outperforms and it's like, oh my god.
Speaker 1:He was right. Like, we should've we're we were going going down the wrong path. Gary was right. Instead, he's just saying, like, my their thing sucks, but my thing really sucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Which is
Speaker 1:kind of, like, my read on it. But I don't know. I mean, still, you know
Speaker 2:So he can't he can't take a he can say, hey. As an analyst to say, I'm I'm right. Maybe. Yeah. And OpenAI won't respond to this, but if they they could or would or wanted to, they would say, cool.
Speaker 2:Like, let's see your benchmarks. Exactly. Exactly. Wouldn't sounds like he wouldn't have a good answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, now he would say, I'm I'm out of the game. I'm not I'm working on policy and stuff. I'm not I'm not really building. I'm not trying to compete in that, but, it is is a little frustrating.
Speaker 1:Because, you know, like, the DeepSeq team over there, they're making they're saying, hey. We have a slightly different approach, and we're getting we're getting better performance with less investment. I mean, you know, we the the the actual investment's debatable, but there were clearly some optimizations there where they where they got close to the frontier with obviously less than what it cost to train 4.5. And so, I I I'm much more I'm much more sympathetic to, like, a deep seek stand saying, like, hey. The the best investment in, in this technology in the next wave here is on the optimization side, not on the scale side.
Speaker 1:I I I'm I'm receptive to that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you're just saying, like, this isn't working, but also, like, my thing is okay. It's like, okay.
Speaker 2:Anyway I was right, but I also fail.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on. Let's close out with another attempted humor. Dan Shipper says, GPG 4.5 is actually so effing funny. Be me. Be Dan Shipper.
Speaker 1:Wake up at 5AM, journal for forty five minutes about the dream I had last night. Dream was in second person, probably inspired by a obscure neuroscience paper I read last Tuesday. Brew coffee using beans handpicked by monks on a remote Guatemalan mountain. Sit down to write today's newsletter. Accidentally outline four new business ideas.
Speaker 1:Resist resist the temptation to launch them all by noon, meditate, feel mind literally expanding into previously undiscovered cognitive dimensions, tweet an insight from my meditation session, immediately gained 200 new subscribers, open laptop to write an article on mental models, Realize the mental the ultimate mental model was within me all along. It's only 9AM. Why aren't you laughing? I mean
Speaker 2:What's wrong? I mean Do
Speaker 1:you not understand the humor?
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:It didn't go over your head, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it flew over my head. It's
Speaker 1:Because if you're sophisticated If you don't if you can't tell the difference between five and four, you're you're not really, like, high IQ.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, Claude actually got fed this and laughed. Yeah. Like, it actually hit played a laugh track. That was its only response.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:So the models are making each other laugh. Yeah. They're not making us laugh just yet.
Speaker 1:I do think there's something cool about this. I I think he had personalization.
Speaker 2:Model is actually sophisticated enough that it knows will laugh harder if it just delivers a terror like, a terrible joke Yep. And just botches it. Yeah. And we go, Yeah. You dumb model.
Speaker 1:It it's, yeah. It's being sneaky behind the scenes, hiding its power level. Yeah. Exactly. Secretly, it could be the best.
Speaker 1:It could put every comedian out of business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's
Speaker 1:It's like playing
Speaker 2:basketball with a kid. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, no. I I I
Speaker 1:I dropped the ball. I guess you scored.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Doing. Clearly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I'm glad he thought it was funny. I, what is interesting here is that this was personalized. So he fed it in his his timeline or some more context around him.
Speaker 2:It doesn't
Speaker 1:And so it so it it clearly made jokes that were highly personalized to to him, and I think that that is cool. And I think there is something there, and we've talked about this with the Grok stuff. It creates a more unique, interaction, unique product, especially when, I think the most relevant again won't be humor. It'll be research where it will know, hey, Jordy. You're, you're an expert in angel investing and ads and entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:So I don't need to explain to you what a safe is, but you're not an expert in mining, you know, rare minerals. So I'm gonna break down. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna explain to you in granular detail.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Lithium ion, where where does that come from? And I'm gonna explain it to you like I'm five, and then I'm gonna go deeper, and I'm gonna work Yeah. With you to understand where your knowledge is and get you up to speed really quickly.
Speaker 1:I think that's gonna be amazing. Anyway, well, one of the companies that I love that's implementing AI better than anybody else is, of course, ramp Better than anyone. Ramp.com, time is money. True. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:And it is I I mean, obviously, I'm joking around, but it is true. Ramp is a perfect place to to implement AI. They, when you take a picture of the receipt, they get scanned. Of course, an LLM processes that, and it's gotten so much better. And it's the exact type of organization that you wanna be with where they're I mean, the Cognition guys work there.
Speaker 1:Like, they have they have an insane team that can go and look at whatever the frontier model is, swap it in in two seconds. They move very fast. They move very quickly. And so all the product just keeps compounding in a way that's, you know, great So you get
Speaker 2:better experience. From an from an you know, from a company that you would potentially join, there are companies out there that are just sort of boilerplate SaaS that maybe have a lot of revenue today like DocuSign. But presumably over time, will will be more like cable where some people keep paying, but, you know, they get sort of replaced. These sort of businesses that are more, you know, this is for informational purposes only, obviously, but the businesses that are more, in these sort of regulated spaces that require payment rails and banking Yep. Licenses and stuff like that are super well positioned to implement AI for customers.
Speaker 2:But Yep. You know, not not in the same way. You you can't just, you know, use curse the the version of cursor in ten years and generate ramp because banks are gonna say, I'm sorry. You know, we're not you know, we we we work with a smaller number of partners, etcetera. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I mean, it's just great. There's obviously a lot of larger companies, more established companies that, have been trying to implement AI. McKinsey's printing money.
Speaker 2:All of the all
Speaker 1:of the consultants are going around to every business. Here's how you can use AI. Ramp actually has, like, an obvious narrative here,
Speaker 2:which is,
Speaker 1:you know, receipt classification and
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 1:iterating over your financials, to get you more accurate data more quickly. Anyway, go check it out.
Speaker 2:Comments before we jump into the next section.
Speaker 1:What we got?
Speaker 2:Vishal in the chat says, guys, react to Zelensky versus Trump. I said, too political for us. Vishal looked nasty, though. And he says, makes sense, Jordy. We don't need another all in, which is a great point.
Speaker 2:We're trying to hold the line on politics. People, you know, will ask you to cover politics because, they get a lot of attention, but we are a technology and business show. Yeah. We are firmly
Speaker 1:I mean, my my answer on Zelensky versus Trump, I see Trump as, the founder of Truth Social more than
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The president. I mean, that's something he does, politics,
Speaker 2:but Yep.
Speaker 1:We're interested in him as a as a consumer model. That's right.
Speaker 2:I think they're arguing about the minds.
Speaker 1:And so once we once we hear Zelensky's business acumen, then we can comment. But in terms of the politics stuff, not really interesting to us.
Speaker 2:So And Calder says watching John get better at transitions is like watching Tiger Woods practice his swing. So Thank you. Better every day.
Speaker 1:Every day.
Speaker 2:Eventually, you won't know if it's an ad or
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all blended together.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be perfectly fine.
Speaker 1:Will have to have you on the show. And when we have you on the show, we'll have you call in not via Skype, but via Zoom or FaceTime because Skype is out of business. They're shutting it down. Breaking news here on the show.
Speaker 2:We're actually breaking this news. It broke it broke earlier elsewhere, but we're breaking
Speaker 1:it down. Show. Shiel Monat says end of an era, and says exclusive. Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May. It's It's the end of an era.
Speaker 1:Skype could have been WhatsApp plus Zoom in one, but it was a terrible Balmer esque my, Balmer era Microsoft acquisition for $8,500,000,000. Let's go. Historical size.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was it was maybe terrible for Microsoft, but it was fantastic for the Skype shareholders. Yes. And so we should celebrate that.
Speaker 1:Yes. And one of, so Skype, fascinating story.
Speaker 2:That illiquid Yep. You know, they got the returns from the illiquid Skype stock
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Rolled it into other illiquid assets that have since, you know, multiplied.
Speaker 1:Hey. You're getting ahead. We we got the whole breakdown right here.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:02/2003, company founded in Estonia by the founders of Kazaa, which was which was a competitor to Napster, if you're familiar. The p two p file sharing service used to pirate music. I was using Kazaa back then. That was fun. Download some Korn tracks or Limp Bizkit's albums.
Speaker 1:It was fantastic. This is, like, the best era of the Internet. The Kazaa money meant they didn't need to waste
Speaker 2:truck in 2,003. Really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wait. What? Are you are are are are I I'm actually serious. Wait.
Speaker 1:What do you mean got run over?
Speaker 2:This is some war. I got run over by an off duty ambulance driver who was, driving a pickup truck. Is this
Speaker 1:why you can't bench three plates yet?
Speaker 2:Yes. That's exactly why. They they I was actually they I went, you know, got taken in a real ambulance to the hospital, and they said, you know, your son's fine, but he's never gonna be able to bench three plates. Oh. And that stuck with me and put a chip on my shoulder.
Speaker 1:Well, when you do it, you know, we're gonna be I'm
Speaker 2:gonna prove him wrong. I'm not gonna listen to that doctor back in 02/2003. I'm gonna, you know, do the impossible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Once you do it, we're gonna saber open a bottle of Dom Perignon and saber open a bottle of, protein shake.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Shug that.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Alright. So you didn't need to raise VCs.
Speaker 2:And three.
Speaker 1:Two thousand five, they have 54,000,000 users, 7,000,000 in revenue, and four sixty million in o five. They're printing. Just
Speaker 2:Yeah. Estonia has gotta be a great place to start in a legal peer to peer file sharing platform.
Speaker 1:Very fast Internet there. Do you know this story? So St Estonia's Eastern Block used to be part of The US Is that where
Speaker 2:a lot of the VPNs are?
Speaker 1:I don't know if there's that many, but, there are some there are some fantastic entrepreneurs there. So, they break away from Russia, and they invest very, very heavily in the Internet. They get very, very high Internet speeds. And so they have tons of kids that get online and learn all sorts of stuff. Very early in my YouTube career, I I had a research assistant who was an Estonian guy who was obsessed with Estonia and was always like, we should cover this Estonian story.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, I don't know if I should do another Estonia thing, but I like the way like, where your head's at, kid. And but I did do one on Bolt, and the founder, of that company, which is an Uber competitor. And the kid, built this business into billions and billions of dollars, kind of Uber for the rest of the world and has been fantastically successful. And, and one of his I think one of his angel investors was this guy, Yan, who was a founder of Skype, who got a bunch of money out of Skype and became a big investor. And that guy also invested in FTX very early on.
Speaker 1:He's a fascinating character. So he's been he's been all over Silicon Valley. And so, in 02/2005, they get acquired by eBay for 2,600,000,000. EBay claimed it would help buyer seller communication, but that never made sense to Shiel. And eBay wrote it down by 1,700,000,000.0 in two in 02/2007.
Speaker 1:By 02/2009, they have 400,000,000 users, a hundred million DAUs, and $700,000,000 in revenue. And so 65% of Stripe gets acquired by silver lake, a 16 CPP IB and index for 1,900,000,000.0 valuing the company at 2,750,000,000.00, a 16 wrote a 50,000,000 check, $50,000,000 check out of their $300,000,000 first fund. People thought they were crazy for investing in a late stage private equity deal.
Speaker 2:They did pretty well.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. And I remember that being on their on their, I I remember that being on their, portfolio page, and I didn't realize that they did it post acquisition, which is very, very rare for, for VC. So in 2011 Yeah. But it
Speaker 2:it's sort of some interesting lore given that they've turned into more of this sort of multistage asset manager that resembles a private equity
Speaker 1:started back in twenty two thousand nine. They've been in the game for sixteen years in these Yeah. Odd deals. So, you know, if you're out there saying, oh, they're completely pivoting their model. Maybe not.
Speaker 1:Maybe they've been maybe they've cut their teeth on
Speaker 2:in that. They didn't return the fund even though it was a good outcome, but, certainly got some of the way there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they they they invested at one point, at at 2.75, and they sold it at 8 point 5. So, three x, they probably got a hundred and 50 mil out on that $50,000,000 check. But that's a that's a $300,000,000 fund. So they returned half the fund on that deal, which is pretty good.
Speaker 1:And it was just two years. So by 2011, there are 600,000,000 users, 70,000,000 d a MAUs, 1,000,000,000 in revenue. Ballmer buys for 8.5.
Speaker 2:They probably recycled the investment and just reinvested that the three x and potentially got
Speaker 1:Exactly. Which is
Speaker 2:the So
Speaker 1:a 16 z looks really smart with early DPI. And so they're this is their first fund, and they're saying, hey. We you gave us 300. We already got a hundred and 50 back. We got a bunch of other bangers in here.
Speaker 1:Let's do the second fund, the third fund, the Yeah. Growth fund, the dynamism fund, all these different things. At Ballmer era, Microsoft innovation slowed. Skype never really made the move from desktop to mobile. Skype had poor UI, technical debt crazy.
Speaker 1:And May and never got much mobile adoption. Meanwhile, Zoom was founded in 2011, and WhatsApp took off. WhatsApp has $2,500,000,000 and is probably worth at least 10 a hundred billion. Yeah. That sounds alright.
Speaker 1:Zoom has 300,000,000, is worth 25,000,000,000. Still blows my mind that Zoom trades lower than it did pre pandemic when it had fewer users. It went from 10,000,000 to 300,000,000. Another industry only had
Speaker 2:10,000,000 users pre pandemic?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was small. But then it was but then, Google was way, way behind. And, there were a bunch of problems that actually Google internally was using Hangouts because they're like, wait. We gotta dog food our product.
Speaker 1:But once they went
Speaker 2:how bad it was. Everyone was like, this is awful. Like, it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's it's breaking all the time. We can't get 50 people in there who are crashing. So what's the choice? We either fix this problem or we go to Zoom, and there's this story about they put all their best engineers on it. Even, like, the AI guys came in for a couple days, and we're like, okay.
Speaker 1:Let's let's figure out what's going on. Let's optimize this. Let's go deep seek mode
Speaker 2:on this. And it works. Wild. I have zero you know, I have so many memories using Skype as a kid playing StarCrafts, other video games. Having Skype would be something that I would get home from school.
Speaker 2:You know, I'd finish soccer practice or something like that. I would turn it on. Yep. And it would just be on almost until basically, until
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Dinner or sometimes even later, you know, doing, you know, homework, hanging out. Yeah. This was
Speaker 1:I used a lot of these, IRC. Were you
Speaker 2:using Skype when you were,
Speaker 1:Gaming?
Speaker 2:No. In your early part of your career? Little bit. Actually, I was I was trying to make a joke about you being old. I mean, yeah.
Speaker 2:Skype was a thing. Yeah. You you would Skype
Speaker 1:with someone. Definitely in college, Skype was, like, the default. It was, like, the best video chatting platform for sure. Yeah. But the other interesting tidbit is Tony Bates
Speaker 2:like Game Boys over Skype?
Speaker 1:It was actually, Pong. That was the one. Nice. Yeah. Pong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, and and a lot of telegraphs,
Speaker 2:you know, the beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep
Speaker 1:beep beep beep. Like, that was the main thing. If you wanted
Speaker 2:to raise money get on Skype and practice your
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. I'm a beast at this Morse code.
Speaker 2:Morse
Speaker 1:code. Yeah. Morse code. And That's cool. Carrier pigeons, obviously.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. From time to time.
Speaker 1:Lot of scrolls passing around on horseback. This is kind of the vibe. Yep. Back when, you know, draft dodging, trying to not go to Vietnam. This is like my
Speaker 2:I don't know where I come at. Stuff.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Tony Bates, the CEO of Skype at the acquisition by Microsoft, was considered a rising star at Microsoft and was actually one of the top folks considered to be in the running for CEO of Microsoft, but was but left once Nadella got the gig. Anyway, fun to look down memory lane. I use Skype a lot in my life. I use Skype regularly until 2018 because it was the industry norm for one of my companies in 2018.
Speaker 1:They started, requiring Microsoft login, and they lost many of the users they had left. And he and then he did add a correction. Skype one point o did raise VC dollars. They raised 18,800,000.0 from DFJ in index Mangrove and Bessemer a year before they got acquired for 2,600,000,000.0. Mangrove was the first investor and got a hundred x on the deal in two years.
Speaker 1:And so you you had a story about, like a pen pal on Skype. What was your experience with Skype?
Speaker 2:No. I would just use it while playing StarCraft.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:And, I just remember a bunch of my friends after school Yeah. Would get on Skype Yep. Because I lived in a I I grew up, in Wine Country Yep. And, everybody was super spread out. So if you didn't your parents weren't gonna drive you around, you just kinda had to go home after school and get online.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:And so if you wanted
Speaker 2:to get
Speaker 1:a bunch of your Skype friends together out in Wine Country for a long weekend at a nice house, what what what would you do?
Speaker 2:Well, I'd go to wander.com, of course.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And you'd find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Find your
Speaker 1:happy place.
Speaker 2:We gotta know. We gotta do it together.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Thank you to Tyler for the recommendation. He said, next time you have wander
Speaker 1:at more jingles for sure.
Speaker 2:Sing it. For sure. Yeah. Flip that.
Speaker 1:Book of wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, and top tier cleaning and twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 1:It's a vacation home, but better folks. What's not to like? And we got a post from Kyle Tibbetts over at wander. He says international expansion has kicked off at wander with pins popping up on the map in new places like Quebec, Cabo, and Costa Rica. Stay tuned for more.
Speaker 1:I never leave The United States, but if you do, good luck to you. Book a wander while you're abroad.
Speaker 2:You are really America Pilled in that I'm so America Pilled. Try not to leave at all.
Speaker 1:I'm not leaving. You're gonna have to drag me out.
Speaker 2:I'm not leaving.
Speaker 1:I'm not leaving. But, fortunately, there are hundreds of wanders in The United States, and I'm gonna visit all of them. Yep. I'm gonna I'm gonna drive to all 50
Speaker 2:states. List.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna
Speaker 2:checking it twice.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go to stay in every single wander in America, and then I'm sure I'll see some videos of people in the The
Speaker 2:issue is they've said they added they added a hundred in the last month. So if you were trying to go to every wander and they keep this pace
Speaker 1:up Yeah. Three a day.
Speaker 2:Never act you have to be doing three a day. You wouldn't even Three a day. Actually get to spend the night in every single one, but you just pop in, you know, remote, unlock it, jump in. And, anyways but the pace is ridiculous. And, we got some more news.
Speaker 1:We got some more news.
Speaker 2:Some really breaking news.
Speaker 1:This shook the tech industry tech
Speaker 2:in and business
Speaker 1:This this shook the tech industry, I would say, more than any of the AI news. This was the biggest story this week, maybe this month. I think we're gonna look back on 2025 and say, this was the year of Sam Soulek getting his IFBB pro card. And so, Cody Main says, extremely niche tweet for my fellow gym bros, but Sam Soulek earning an IFBB pro card in his second ever show is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. He's 23 years old.
Speaker 1:He's got no coach. He documented every step of his journey on YouTube, and he's a certified freak. Look at that man. That is the pinnacle of excellence, and we got another post from Zach. He says, Sam Soulek.
Speaker 1:Soulek is the ultimate example of obsession. He just became an IFBB pro. He was looking absolutely diced, grainy. He was peeled. It was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Winning two he winning first two bodybuilding shows. He posted daily YouTube videos for two years documenting every single workout. He gained 4,000,000 subscribers. This is what it takes. Apply this mentality to your goals.
Speaker 1:And I really think we are the Sam Soulek of tech and business podcasting in the sense
Speaker 2:that we post
Speaker 1:every single day. And it's silly, and you can look at this and say, he's just some bodybuilders or some vlog or whatever. But there is a lesson in here about the obsession mentality and just doing things daily and improving daily over time. You see it with, why is Jake Paul big? You know, you might not like his content, but he posted it's everyday bro.
Speaker 1:He literally posted a blog every single a vlog every single day for years.
Speaker 2:Something about a coach what a coach often provides as much as advice. Advice is free on the Internet. Yep. Go get advice anywhere. It's infinitely available.
Speaker 2:A coach provides accountability. Yep. And so Sam, by just sharing every single workout, has the accountability of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Right? They're gonna say, you didn't push yourself as hard as you could there.
Speaker 2:Right? And they're gonna call them out on it, and it's and it's part of the part of the program. But, but, yeah, I think it's I think it's
Speaker 1:Beeple with his, three d renders. He posted a new three d render every single day for something like ten years.
Speaker 2:I think Joe Rogan, famous, thought leader,
Speaker 1:had a had
Speaker 2:a quote that was something to the effect of how would you live your life if you if your life was, you know, a movie. Right? And you had you knew that you had an audience. Right? You probably would wouldn't doom scroll, and you would go to bed early because, you know, you're a main character, you're a hero.
Speaker 2:Right? You'd get snug snuggle up in your eight sleep, and you'd crash. You'd get that good sleep score. Yep. But, but, yeah, there's this idea of, like, how would you work out in the gym if if you actually had an audience.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And a lot of people just go through the motions in their life. They don't take it very seriously. But take your life seriously. Sam takes his life seriously. He's 23
Speaker 1:IFBB pro.
Speaker 2:He's completely natural to Future future terminator. I
Speaker 1:Future future Terminator. I'm really pushing for that. That's our, that's our twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six goal. Please reboot Terminator. Cast Sam Soulek.
Speaker 1:The the lines will be around the block at every theater in America truly.
Speaker 2:It would be fantastic. A blockbuster.
Speaker 1:It would be an absolute blockbuster.
Speaker 2:And it's a perfect movie where you don't need it's it's about the ridiculousness of it. You don't need the best actor.
Speaker 1:No. And that's the thing. If you do the full reboot, the first Terminator, Arnold, still was working on his English and his acting, I'm pretty sure. And so he's the bad guy, and he doesn't really say that much. He's actually, like, the monster.
Speaker 1:So most of what he's doing is just marching and shooting and stuff. He's not really delivering that many lines. Then by the second one, they, like, reboot him, and he becomes the good Terminator. Yeah. Plays into all the AI stuff.
Speaker 1:I would totally watch it. The Terminator franchise, really, really cool, but it's gone downhill with all these, like, kind of shoddy spin offs, and we're in, like Yeah. Series seven. Go get, James Cameron back. Can you believe it's a James Cameron movie?
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Get Sam Soulek, get James Cameron, get it in the same room, and make a great Terminator reboot, I would absolutely watch that.
Speaker 2:Crazy to think that if, James Cameron didn't didn't survive his reading and driving era, remember? He was driving trucks while reading. Very, very, sketchy, but, we would never have Terminator, and we would never maybe have Titanic, Avatar. We'd never have Sam Solic, cast as Terminator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, if you're thinking about going for your IFBB pro card, you know that sleep is the number one way to increase your testosterone naturally. And, yeah, maybe you're competing in the naturals. And if you want to get great sleep, we recommend getting an eight sleep.
Speaker 2:I would I would love if someone in our community, actually went to be to be a bodybuilder. We would put the full force of the brotherhood Exactly. Behind them.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, we'd even pay off judges and
Speaker 1:stuff like that. Whatever
Speaker 2:it took.
Speaker 1:And so Eight Sleep, of course, it's nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn and check it out.
Speaker 2:What's your sleep score? Oh, I don't know. It might
Speaker 1:have been a rough night.
Speaker 2:I actually had a rough
Speaker 1:night too.
Speaker 2:Eight sleep. The app My rough night is your best.
Speaker 1:You got me beat a couple days. Oh, what what what you got? I got a 91.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You beat me.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's go.
Speaker 2:I got an 86.
Speaker 1:Okay. I got 6045.
Speaker 2:I just put didn't put the time into it.
Speaker 1:Quality wasn't great. Routine wasn't quite on point, but we're getting better.
Speaker 2:I had to pick someone up early this morning, earlier than usual. It's a journey. Talking about soon.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to some launches.
Speaker 2:By the way, we gotta mention it. We have a link in the in the YouTube.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And we have a code. Yeah. TB just the code is TBPN or 8sleep.com/tbpn. Get a few hundred dollars off your Eight Sleep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go. Go. Go. Enter the the challenge and try to, you know, beat us on our sleep scores.
Speaker 1:Yep. Fantastic. Well, let's go to some launches. We got Splash Robotics coming out of y Combinator. They are building unmanned patrol boats to defend our nation's critical infrastructure and secure our borders.
Speaker 1:They're able to autonomously detect and intercept threats faster than any human operator. I love stuff like this. You know, all the memes are like, I guess we're doing boats now. I guess we're doing military technology. And and I saw someone reacting to us, like, did the DOD just take over y c or something?
Speaker 1:But this is the perfect hack project for a YC team to go build. I I'm I'm so I'm so happy with these
Speaker 2:two projects. Is this this is a Serana competitor?
Speaker 1:Probably at some scale, but, you know, with these YC companies, like, who knows? Like, they're so early that they could wind up finding some little niche here and there. Yeah. It's very unclear that it's like, yeah. This is a real shot across the bow to the billion dollar company that is, like, working with the DOD.
Speaker 1:This could be something that goes into, coast guard or or or responds to an entirely different program area. It could wind up being something that's more commercial focused. It could be something that gets acquihired or merged into another company. It's just a bunch of people building some cool stuff, and so I'm I'm I'm here for it.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite YouTube channels is this guy, H. I. Sutton. He's a defense analyst. You know this guy?
Speaker 2:No. No. Don't. It's he just talks about naval warfare, and he makes these, like, one shot monologue videos about Oh, this is great. Interesting tech.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So he'll basically start the video and be like, yeah. I didn't really people have said, oh, get a better microphone, get a camera, all this stuff. Not doing it. Just making this video, and Fantastic. These videos are super engaging.
Speaker 2:Great. He just nerds out about you can go, watch this video. Essential Guide to 2024 Naval Warfare in the Black Sea. Mhmm. And so it'll talk about There you go.
Speaker 2:This guy. And it'll talk about all the ways that they're using, you know, autonomous, technologies. And so Splash Robotics, I wouldn't be surprised if they're using his videos to inform their product development.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Because they talk about how, they'll they'll actually take jet skis and turn them into sort of these, remote controlled bombs and, you know, eventually would potentially be autonomous. So Cool. Cool to nerd out on.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, congrats to the team. Let us know how it goes. Let's move on to Brendan Uribe, the, former cofounder of Oculus VR with Palmer Luckey. He has a new company called Sesame.
Speaker 1:He says, we're exploring a future where the computer isn't just a tool, it's a partner with a truly natural voice and personality. No big claims, just early work we're excited to share. And a bunch of people were, shouting this out. Toby Lutke, the founder and CEO of Shopify, said, man, Sesame's voice model is absolutely insane. You have got to try this demo and post the link.
Speaker 1:Still puts up one k likes. Let's see it. Built different. We'll love to see someone include a link
Speaker 2:to still do numbers. I love it. Try to play it? I don't know for
Speaker 1:The Coonsh also says, this is the most her moment I've felt in the last few years. It's truly uncanny. Recommend trying this now. But in the comments, Gaurav Vohar Vohra says, what am I missing? This felt trash.
Speaker 1:And Nikunj just says, what? Like, so little bit of different, of of different experiences. You just gotta go try it for yourself. I don't think we're gonna pull it up, but, it seems like a cool, cool chat focused, voice focused AI tool. So, excited for for them to launch that.
Speaker 1:And we recommend that you go make your own decision about whether or not you like it or not. But speaking of AI, we got a post from Kushi. She says, where is Cursor for Figma?
Speaker 2:And you
Speaker 1:got an answer?
Speaker 2:Is Cursor for Figma.
Speaker 1:That's true.
Speaker 2:You've been talking with the team over there.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They got some big, big plans in the works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's really shocking that a founder mode CEO who's a Thiel Fellow and has been in the game
Speaker 2:Who just got a billion dollar breakup fee.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Billion dollar breakup fee and has been studying this stuff for
Speaker 2:decades. Non dilutive financing.
Speaker 1:He's actually heard of AI. You know? And he's been on the same timeline that we've been on. And so he is well aware of it and building plenty of, tools to make Figma, easier to use and and more, diffuse both on the, prompt to design side and then also deployment into actual app. Obviously, you can imagine where Figma goes on either side of the design program.
Speaker 1:They built
Speaker 2:this great I think Figma.
Speaker 1:They built this great core design tool that's very, very rich, very deep. It makes a ton of sense that they would extend in both directions.
Speaker 2:I think Figma should ultimately do this sort of quarterly release model. I think they have more to release than someone like a Flexport. Right? They're they need to be dominating sort of
Speaker 1:And it's highly visual.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's highly visual. Very cool. Having them switch and and really start to, push you know, having Dylan push the team to say, we are going to be shipping, you know, these sort of, incredible advancements in the product every single quarter, would be cool to see.
Speaker 1:I I was thinking about this, like, have you ever seen those, like, pictures where people use MS Paint and then they paint, like, the Mona Lisa? It's, like, the most incredible thing or they do art in Microsoft Excel. Yeah. I really wanna see an account pop up that's like Figma abuse basically where someone builds, like, the Sistine Chapel in Figma, and it's like pis pixel perfect. And it's
Speaker 2:just But, like, with the individual pixels.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So just having someone there obsessively abuse Figma to do something that it can do, but it was certainly
Speaker 2:got designed to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that is highly viral potential, and I think
Speaker 2:it would be great marketing. Age of AI generated images Yeah. I want the art artisan designer to be making a an image pixel by pixel. I wanna
Speaker 1:see the time lapse with
Speaker 2:the face cam. Hand colored, hand painted. Exactly. Go and do it. We'll cover it here live.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, let's move on to Weber who says, introducing flora, your intelligent canvas. Every creative AI tool thoughtfully connected. We've built flora, flora fauna AI side by side with creative professionals from art students to designers at top agencies like Pentagram to give them speed control and collaboration in one seamless system. This feels like Figma adjacent potentially.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Yeah. We built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations designed by creatives with pace.
Speaker 2:Feels more oriented around generating, things like copy and images Sure. Versus design, but I'm sure they're thinking about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like less prosumer, less professional, and maybe more like, what's that what what was that other, design tool?
Speaker 2:Visual electric?
Speaker 1:No. The one that's, the Australian girl runs. Do you know who I'm talking about?
Speaker 2:How do we not?
Speaker 1:How am I blanking on this? It's worth, like, billions. Right?
Speaker 2:I You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:Right? Can Canva. Canva. Canva.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say if you search design tool, it will be the Yeah.
Speaker 1:But Canva was always, like, a little bit more consumer, like, make a meme, make a postcard, make an invite, and then it's gone kind of upmarket. Figma has been more of, like, what the best designers in the world use, and now they're going a little bit more downmarket to something where an individual, programmer could use it. And this feels a little bit more like pop in, make something, and they're starting with, you know, something that's a little bit more organic UGC driven than, hey. We're plugging this right into enterprises on day one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They've said they've built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations. These workflows could save weeks of iteration to get access. Repost the first post above in comment flora. That's hilarious. Wow.
Speaker 1:Little little algorithm hacking on your on your launch video. 1,000 reposts and 3,000 likes, half a million views. Very smart.
Speaker 2:See that as very smart. See that on when people release podcasts on Instagram now, they'll say, comment for the link. You know? Yeah. And I'll DM you the link.
Speaker 2:Right? And it's sort of a way to just hack the algorithm to think that there's a ton of interest in in a in a post. But, clearly, there was a bunch of real interest here, and, go watch the demo. It's very cool how they, you know, link these models together. And this feels something, you know, closer to, Cognition or Devon for me, and that as if they can own the workflow as the underlying models, you know, get better and they're connecting them in different ways to generate, you know, final outputs, they'll they'll be well positioned and their product will improve as the underlying models get better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Well, it's cool to see people exploring new tools and, yeah. Love to play with that and see if we can generate some content for the show with it or something. Let's play around with it. Well, anyway, let's move on to the timeline, which has been in turmoil.
Speaker 2:Vishal in the chat just asked for this, so his timing was perfect.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Packy McCormick says, Anduril versus Jason Calacanis, who you got? And a lot of people are sounding off in the comments.
Speaker 2:Reggie in the comments.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Drones strike his a s s.
Speaker 1:Now we're talking. Well, I've got the popcorn. And so this all started with, there's been news in the just in the world that, like, there might be some Epstein files coming out, some Epstein leaks or something. Palmer posts a picture of the black book, with Jason Calacanis' phone numbers listed there. I guess this is a Rolodex from, the dis the the late mister Epstein.
Speaker 1:And, but this is actually old news. This Yeah. The the the This is not the years ago.
Speaker 2:This is not to be confused with the client list.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. And and Jason It doesn't,
Speaker 2:you know, it doesn't necessarily make, certainly doesn't make Jason look good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But there are lots of people in the in in the black book because they met him for any sort of reason. In
Speaker 2:this case, they had at least four of his phone numbers. So it sounds like
Speaker 1:It looks like 3 or 3. 3 and an address. Right? I think. But yeah.
Speaker 1:Got it. Got it. So, obviously, they met and, and Matt Grimm, quote tweets Palmer and says, this is the face you make when your weekend just got a little bit more complicated. We see you, Jason. So the Andrew guys are really coming for JCal.
Speaker 1:And Jason responded. He says, and now Matt Grim, Palmer Lucky's partner is using a Photoshop photo of me being twice as fat as I ever was and trying to slander me by insinuating I was involved with Epstein. Matt knows full well that I wasn't, that I've said I wasn't, and that there is no news here. Like, thousands of
Speaker 2:issue here just just double clicking on the Photoshop thing is how do we know this is photoshopped? It doesn't even if you're gonna go to the lengths of photoshopping a picture, you would you would maybe take it a bit further, I would say, because he looks yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:Like those Jody Vance ones where he's,
Speaker 2:like, full
Speaker 1:red. Like, the GigaChad one. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe Take it
Speaker 2:a little bit further. This is just very believable. The other thing is, you know, Jason has been vocal about being on Ozempic and these things, and he he used to have an some some extra weight on him. So the issue with Jason is he does tend to, say things that aren't true Yep. From time to time.
Speaker 2:And so, I do believe there's some factually correct things in here, related to this not being the client list
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Things like that. But at
Speaker 1:the same time of others, I mean,
Speaker 2:that's I kinda think it might be real quick.
Speaker 1:See.
Speaker 2:I think it might be real quick. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Ted in the nineteen nineties, I am in his black book, which has been out for over a decade. That's true and has hundreds of other Ted tech finance New Yorkers in it.
Speaker 1:What is Ted?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so it is a real picture. So if you if you're the guys in the chat, Rory, Haskell, and Brian Yeah. Save, Matt, actually has a screenshot of the source. He pulled it first.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. That is a real photo.
Speaker 2:Jason. I mean Cut.
Speaker 1:We we respect we respect someone who's, looking great now. Yeah. He's looking younger than ever. He's getting dice. He's on Ozempic, and I see an IFBB pro card potentially in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know? This one is not looking great, but he's looking better now. Keep going. Apologize to Palmer.
Speaker 1:Jason. Clean up the relationship, and then hit the gym. Go and
Speaker 2:send select mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Go subscribe to Sam select. The information is all there. Arnold classic.
Speaker 2:He he basically open sourced
Speaker 1:I'm not asking to go open. Have been Classically.
Speaker 2:Been, people have been investing in creators. I'd like to see Jason Calacanis' launch. Yeah. Invest in, you know, give you know, invest in Sam Soulek. I would kill to be in that round.
Speaker 1:I would I would actually, that's a great deal. We should try
Speaker 2:to put
Speaker 1:that for that.
Speaker 2:You should try to put that together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should.
Speaker 2:John would would kill somebody to get allocation.
Speaker 1:Oh, man. I think he's gonna be extremely successful. I am super bullish on Sam Soulek. And so yeah. Little bit of little bit of spicy timeline today.
Speaker 1:You know, we love the Anduril folks. We love J. Cal. There is one problem that we need to address, which is the fact that, Jason Calacanis still does not run ads on the all in podcast. And that,
Speaker 2:I think, is a real problem. With the the all in turmoil now, you have to imagine he he's seeing a window to potentially get some ads on there. Right? People Yeah. Saks is out of the picture.
Speaker 1:Do you think Epstein is the reason why he doesn't run ads? Do you think that's what Epstein told him?
Speaker 2:Like Say, hey. My final wish to you
Speaker 1:Don't run ads.
Speaker 2:I know we weren't that close. I know you never came to the island. Yeah. But just please, whatever you do
Speaker 1:Don't run ads.
Speaker 2:Run ads. And Jason maybe just wants to respect it seems like they were maybe they certainly
Speaker 1:were friendly.
Speaker 2:They certainly were friendly. We don't know if they were friends. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They were definitely acquaintances.
Speaker 1:I I I think I think J. Cal has the chance to turn it all around, apologize to Palmer, clean up the relationship, and then run some ads for Anduril.
Speaker 2:It really is a stain on,
Speaker 1:chief,
Speaker 2:Jason and that. It's rough.
Speaker 1:And and we know that Palmer does have the ability to turn the other cheek. You know, he was going after Zuck and Meta and Facebook for a long time, and they cleaned that up. They cleaned up that relationship. Something happened. Things changed, and they clearly, you know, had a conversation.
Speaker 1:Palmer went and looked at the Orion headset, said, hey. This is great. You know?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so I would I would love to see that turn around because I hate when, the big dogs in tech are fighting. I don't like it.
Speaker 2:Hate to see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I hate to see it.
Speaker 2:See
Speaker 1:it. I just want one one solidified
Speaker 2:Podcasters technology. Podcasters and Industry. Podcasters and founders should never fight.
Speaker 1:Never. Never. Anyway, well, if you love Jason Calacanis, don't work at Anduril, I guess. Devin Luton says crazy Anduril campaign.
Speaker 2:An amazing extension. I wanna see an ad quick billboard Yeah. That says, if you love Jason Calacanis, you'll hate working
Speaker 1:at Anduril. Yeah. If you're listening to This Week in Startups, probably don't work at Anduril because, yeah, you'll be, it'll be rough for you. But they have a crazy Anduril campaign here at Boston South Station. They put up a bunch of different posters.
Speaker 1:They're literally obsessed with America, don't work at Anduril. They have the graffiti, some great design going on, and, people are loving the advertisements. And if you're looking to do some out of home, we recommend adquick.com, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 2:An AdQuik blindly we can say.
Speaker 1:AdQuik. Only AdQuik combines technology.
Speaker 2:AdQuik enables you to launch hyper targeted out of home campaigns.
Speaker 1:We are we're still working on all
Speaker 2:of that.
Speaker 1:But it combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Go to adquick.com to check it out.
Speaker 2:You work with a bunch of fantastic companies too. If you work with AdQuick, you're working with Shopify, Carvana, DoorDash, Poshmark Wow. ButcherBox, Ramp, Wall Street Journal, Warby Parker, Discount Tire. Cool. The H and R Block, Lyft, Instacart That's a lot
Speaker 1:of Compass.
Speaker 2:Compass, Basecamp, Equinox, Pluto TV, DuckDuckGo, Nike, NFL, Amazon, Drizly, GoPuff. They got all the big dogs up there. Go be a big dog. Run some out of home ads with AdQuik.
Speaker 1:And you can follow Chris on x. He said, hey, Elon Musk. Look at this. And it's a post from, someone flagging the fact that Google is buying Apple search ads on the grok term is just too beautiful a circle of life for me. Google is buying Apple search ads on the grok term.
Speaker 2:Hey. You wanted this extremely politically incorrect, LLM? How about the most
Speaker 1:The most politically correct?
Speaker 2:Politically correct one.
Speaker 1:Do you want the opposite? Yeah. And so yeah. I didn't actually know.
Speaker 2:I don't know how I didn't know Google had a Gemini app.
Speaker 1:We talked about this. They spun it out because it was so hard to find because I was complaining. They listened to me. I was complaining about how I paid all this money, and I couldn't get to Gemini. Although I'm sure when I download the app, who knows what model I'll be on, and the model probably won't even tell me what model I'm on and what the context window will be, but that's not how people use these things.
Speaker 1:And so they say, unlock the power of Google AI on your phone. You search for Grok, you get Google Gemini. Don't make the mistake. You know, be sharp. Don't get fooled.
Speaker 1:If you're looking for grok sexy mode, you're not gonna find it in Google Gemini. Let's go to, Brent Liang, who we've done some work with. We love this guy. He says, the lean startup thinking has bit has probably done more harm than good. Lots of low conviction three month pivots and folding based on an abysmally small sample size.
Speaker 1:Encourages being neurotic and constantly skeptical. Almost the opposite of being an entrepreneur. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I mean, the thing that yeah. I think the lean like, the the whole thing the the best thing you can do if you're early in your startup journey is just read all the books. Read zero to one. Read The Lean Startup.
Speaker 1:Founders Podcast.
Speaker 2:Founders podcast. I think founders podcast is advice or or wisdom that's more timeless, right, where Dave the center is not saying you need to fully follow the McDonald's founder and just do what they said. He's just saying this is his approach to work. Yep. Learn from it.
Speaker 2:Take it. Apply it. I read the lean startup back in the day. I think it's, it's this fine line between sometimes if you're willing to just persevere and look stupid and and be okay with the fact that you don't have traction and just keep pushing forward trying to get it. Sometimes you get paid off, you know, you get paid for it.
Speaker 2:Yep. If you look at, you know, crypto founders, the the ones that have been successful have not followed this approach for the most part. They've sort of just said, you know, they stayed stayed lean, but more so they're willing to look stupid for two years so that when the market rips, you know, they look like a genius. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:And so it's definitely, this is a vintage post. I think we're now seeing if you're going and building in hard tech, for example, you can't afford to follow purely the lean startup approach.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's it's it's a model that I think works really well for PMF or DICE style products where it just says Yep. You know, intense focus, stay really lean, you know. But, but, yeah, it's not gonna work if you're trying to build androil. Right? You need to have this sort of bold, ambitious plan and be very patient and execute it over many, many years and, you know, realize that, you know, you could do years of work before being paid for it, and and that's part of the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think this is the lean startup thinking has kind of mutated a little bit. Like, the original idea of the lean startup was just that in the .com era, in order to build a website, you had to raise $10,000,000 and build a data center. Like, I I remember as a kid, like, my dad worked at a You
Speaker 2:hand built some of those data
Speaker 1:centers. I literally did. I would rack servers as, like, a summer job. And Yes. And and this was just for, like, a company with a website.
Speaker 2:You gotta when when when we're, you know, 60 and and some and on posters in the comments, you know, you check
Speaker 1:that chirping
Speaker 2:at you. You say
Speaker 1:I was servers myself.
Speaker 2:I was racking servers when I was You're
Speaker 1:doing diapers. Yeah. Yeah. But it's true. Like like, the default the default path to building even just a website, like, we want to build a car a car auction website or we want to build any startup.
Speaker 1:It was raised $10,000,000 because you are going to need to buy servers, hire a lot of different people because there are not these abstraction layers of AWS. There's no cursor. There's not even Python. Like Yeah. The code needs to be written in Java or c plus plus.
Speaker 1:Well, what happens when you write in Java and
Speaker 2:c plus plus? You need five times
Speaker 1:as many people because everything takes longer to write. And so, so the lean startup was just getting the word out that it is possible to now build a company Yep. In a lower cost, lower CapEx intensive way, and that was true.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He basically just coined what was happening Exactly. In some circles and said, you know, this is a way, but it's founder mode, right, where founder mode didn't have a name.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And then but people kind of were aware that certain companies just operated, you know, and CEOs just operated differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and so pea he people were he was just saying, like, hey. We don't need these $10,000,000 seed rounds to build websites anymore. Yep. You can build on top of these services and stay lean.
Speaker 1:And then once you find traction, talk to your customers, get out of the building. These were all these ideas of, like, don't go and waste all this money and and do a $10,000,000 experiment, do a $1,000,000 experiment. But I agree with Brent that pivoting every three months, folding based on an abysmally low sample size, that is wrong. You should Yeah. You should make sure that you really tested things, actually understand the product.
Speaker 1:And ideally, you have a ton of conviction about the the direction that the company is going before you even start. So you're like Yeah. Yeah. The first three months have been rough, but I still know that there's an insight here. I still know that there's some fundamental value of what I'm creating.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to Rohit. He says, excellent portrait of Tyler Cowen in The Economist. Lots of known beats, but this is the most underrated part. And so The Economist did a whole profile on Tyler Cowen. I highly recommend you go check it out, but I love this quote.
Speaker 1:He says, cut Cowen's life Cowen's emotional life remains a mystery. He told me he did not experience regret. I don't know what the function of it is, he said. Is it to signal thoughtfulness, to stop you making further mistakes? It's like revenge.
Speaker 1:I don't understand it. Cowan also said he doesn't understand envy or anger. He didn't know what, he didn't know what he should be envious of. He didn't get lonely by himself or in company. He actually said, why bother?
Speaker 1:When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He'd never been clinically depressed, depressed for a month, for a week, an afternoon. I looked up from my notebook, an an enormous smile. One I had not seen before spread across the whole of Cowan's face. Like, for a whole afternoon, he asked, hugely grinning.
Speaker 1:Just mogged.
Speaker 2:So on the on the topic of our our earlier subject, g p t four five, Tyler Cowan was quoted today saying, I'm more positive on four four five than almost anyone else I have read. I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only. As we know from Khan's third critique, that is about the hardest achievement possible. Yeah. And so somebody did the be me prompt.
Speaker 2:So be me, Tyler Cowen. Yeah. Wake up at 05:23AM precisely. Eat exactly seven blueberries, three Brazil nuts, and a quarter cup of Icelandic skier sky sky.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Productivity.JPEG. Write two blog posts, one on obscure Romanian cinema, the other on the economics of parking meters. Check email reply exclusively in lowercase. Very interesting. Thanks for this.
Speaker 2:And perhaps send. A 10 breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials, discuss Singaporean food stalls instead of geopolitics.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Lunchtime arrives. Ask waiter, what is your least popular dish? Waiter visibly confused.
Speaker 1:What's your least popular
Speaker 2:dish? Recommend some fermented herring special. Wonderful. I'll have that extra spicy. Genuinely enjoy Extra spicy.
Speaker 2:Genuinely enjoy it. Back to office, podcast guest waiting. It's a chess grand master who's also an amateur botanist and former DJ.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:So I actually think this is, like, pretty That's pretty good.
Speaker 1:And and and that's just, like, so many different threads pulling all together. Yeah. Like, there must be a lot of different data in the training model if you're pulling all that together because some of that stuff, you really have to, you know, follow all of his blog posts, all of his tweets, all of his podcast transcripts to understand that or talk to him in person to really get that flavor. So yeah. Good job.
Speaker 1:Maybe potentially underrated. Maybe the early haters are wrong. We'll see. We'll see as it rolls out. Either way, it's just nice to have a more aesthetic model.
Speaker 1:I think that's good. Even if it's not there's actually maybe even a better outcome. If it's just a nicer, friendlier, more more aesthetic experience, it doesn't necessarily need to be
Speaker 2:hundred guys that queue solve that. What car carpathy was kind of alluding to just said differently, which was if you're a high taste tester, you're gonna notice the difference here. If you're a low b, you know, word cell, you're, you know, you're gonna maybe miss.
Speaker 1:I need to we we need to try the be me prompt. And it's may maybe that should be the new prompt. See how it does.
Speaker 2:Golden retriever. Start day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jordy hayes dot com.
Speaker 2:The house. Bark a little bit.
Speaker 1:Turbos.png.
Speaker 2:Put on sunglasses indoors.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, we got a post from Catherine Boyle. JD Vance is going
Speaker 2:to be headlining the American dynamism summit next month. This is Coachella for get for tech bros that like guns.
Speaker 1:Yes. And Coachella for tech bros that don't like guns have Gavin Gavin Newsom and doctor Chelsea Clinton at the upfront summit. And so this is the opposite of the all in summit, says Chris Frolic.
Speaker 2:And so Chelsea Clinton has a venture fund? She's at Dora Venture Fund?
Speaker 1:What? I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:How are we not we we've we've said before we would never raise a round?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Also, when did she get her doctorate? I I That
Speaker 2:just Dora Ventures. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Anyways, yeah. Upfront Summit happened this week. It was very popular. I think Delian stopped by. Some other people texted me that they were in town.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So she has a values conscious venture capital firm investing in health and learning. Maybe she's backing. The PMF or Die founders.
Speaker 1:That'd be great.
Speaker 2:They also don't wanna raise, but Yeah. You know, venture's about value add more than capital. I bet you'd doctor
Speaker 1:What what what were the values that she cares about?
Speaker 2:Health and learning?
Speaker 1:Oh, she should back Sam Soulek. He's all about health.
Speaker 2:That's so true. That's so true.
Speaker 1:He's the pinnacle of health. Look at the picture.
Speaker 2:Trump tried to get Sam Soulek, but he just was busy.
Speaker 1:They got Chamillionaire a long time ago. Did you know that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've had a they've had a star.
Speaker 1:Like a
Speaker 2:as a venture to partner.
Speaker 1:It was very fun. I think Andreessen had Nas and then upfront had Chameleonaire. And so you'd hop on a call, and Chameleonaire would just be hanging out with you talking on talking sass.
Speaker 2:Talking sass.
Speaker 1:Great. Anyway, speaking of the PMF or die, guys, let's go to Blake. He says, standards I have for new employee slash partners work twelve plus hours a day, make massive sacrifices, desire to pay their dues, won't break under pressure. These are 100% within, one's control.
Speaker 2:So the the the key here Yep. Is it's perfectly fine for a leader to say this Yep. If they live all those things. Yep. Blake is you can go on PMF or die.xyz, which is not our website and see exactly how much he's working Yep.
Speaker 2:Tracked, every single second of the day. He's making massive sacrifices. He's not leaving the cage Yep. For ninety, you know, potentially ninety days
Speaker 1:He's paying his dues.
Speaker 2:Potentially ever. And he
Speaker 1:hasn't broken under pressure.
Speaker 2:He hasn't broken under
Speaker 1:pressure. Twelve days then.
Speaker 2:I mean, there was a lot
Speaker 1:of pressure happened.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of pressure week one. The thing the thing we didn't fully calculate with the cage is that there would be hundreds of people basically, you know, demanding that, demanding attention in the chat. So we'll get to talk about that. We're actually gonna be doing a press conference on the PMF for Dives stream, at 1PM, Pacific, in just thirty minutes. So what
Speaker 1:And we gotta we we we gotta check on him because if PMF for die.xyz shows Blake in the seat for eleven hours fifty nine minutes, it's not gonna look good for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's gotta he's gotta
Speaker 1:be down he's got work cell number gotta be operating at full capacity.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Elon Musk. He's quote tweeting someone who is doing another AI game dev, demo. He says, wow. This is cool. Danny says, I believe that Grok can be a serious tool to build quality games.
Speaker 1:I've been pushing the limits of Grok three by having it code this retro doom inspired gothic shooter from scratch. It's been less than twenty four hours to of work, and I think I got it to a pretty good place. And the demo's pretty cool. But, yeah. There's another post in here that I wanted to highlight that was that that that was fun about how if you wanna go viral, the best way is to code, a game right now and and screen share the the video.
Speaker 2:Let me see if I can find that one. You're self building the game.
Speaker 1:You build the game And
Speaker 2:then play it.
Speaker 1:And then you
Speaker 2:Build it. Play it. Build it. Play it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Christophe says, if you wanna go viral right now, start making a video game with cursor and post the progress. I'm sick of seeing it, but that's what gets the impressions right now. And so, yeah, maybe we should build a t t VPN game. Go viral.
Speaker 1:Hey. We built this in 10 slots.
Speaker 2:Need a bait. We need to be focused one post a day from each of us baiting an Elon repost. That's good. Wow. Elon is awesome, and Grok is so awesome.
Speaker 2:I love Grok. I I stopped using all I stopped using chat, DVD, and everything else, and I just use Grok. Yeah. It is the best.
Speaker 1:Yes. Repost. I also Your phone just your phone. I also crushed your phone.
Speaker 2:Just starts melting.
Speaker 1:I crushed my nine eleven into a into a ball of metal,
Speaker 2:and I bought a cyber truck. The the metal sidings on my cyber truck
Speaker 1:with it. With crushed nine eleven. Melted down nine eleven is the side side plating for sure.
Speaker 2:Actually should do one of those. We we it would be worthwhile doing a, you know, telling Jason Calacanis, huge Tesla guy, to, say, hey. We're gonna drive a a vintage, Ferrari. You drive a Cybertruck and do one of those, you know, pulling battles and just let the Cybertruck win. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 2:Posted from our account. Yeah. So we get the Get the repost. Yeah. So we
Speaker 1:get the ratings.
Speaker 2:We get the ratings.
Speaker 1:You get the ratings as Jake Alex would say.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it is cool. I I love that people are building cool games with with, cursor, with grok, with all these different tools. Very, very fun. And and we love to see people be able to instantiate, like, silly ideas like PMF or Die or PMF or Die.x y z in a very quick fashion, which is only possible with the AI era. And so, yeah, if you have some funny idea, something on your bucket list, go build it, post it.
Speaker 1:You might get quote tweeted by Elon Musk and get 3,000,000 views on your on your app, drive a bunch of followers, and then start a podcast. Who knows? Anyway, let's move on to Lewis Hamilton.
Speaker 2:I wanna I wanna read this because this is, this sounds like something that Senro would say. Yep. And it it is clearly an
Speaker 1:I think he might be quoting
Speaker 2:Yeah. David Senro. Potentially quoting this, you know, a lot of the best, athletes, you know, actors, etcetera, have just been ripping Senra. Senra quotes. But, clearly inspired by by Timmy or potentially happening at the same time, Lewis Hamilton, now over at Ferrari says, don't ever compare me to anybody else.
Speaker 2:I'm the first and only black driver, and that's that's ever been in the sport. I'm built different. I've been through a lot. I've had my own journey. You can't compare me to another 40 year old pastor present formula one driver in history because they are nothing like me.
Speaker 2:I'm hungry, driven, don't have a wife and kids. I'm focused on one thing, and that's winning. That's my number one priority. I love how locked in he is. There's this quote.
Speaker 2:I think it's, it's Alonzo Yeah. Where he's driving.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he makes this, like, very, very, like, sketchy pass.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he goes after their their interviewing, he goes, he's got a wife and kids at home. I knew he would break. And it's, like, the craziest thing because you can tell Yeah. He's you know, they're both gunning for the corner. Yep.
Speaker 2:He's like, yeah. This guy's I don't wanna die. Racing again. He's like, I don't wanna die. Wow.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 2:And so when you're racing, it's it's, you know, the the yeah. I I don't know what the actual I'm sure that base jumping is more dangerous than Yeah. You know, f one, but f one's one of the most dangerous, you know, high level professional sports.
Speaker 1:Thankfully getting a lot less dangerous thanks to the halo and some of those And
Speaker 2:a %. I I drive a lot slower than I did pre kids. You know? I I used to go up in the canyons and have a rip. I do that much less frequently now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense. Anyway, let's move on to Sam Lesson. Sam says, Elon's, what did you get done this week at at AI scale is in fact the AI future. AI isn't going to be your professional assistant.
Speaker 1:It's going to be your professional manager getting spicy. A lot of people probably won't like this one. Over and over, I
Speaker 2:see Sam doesn't get enough credit for being up there in the rage bait hall of fame with with people like Sweaty Stardust.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, he's up there. Sam is more sophisticated Yep. You know, in his approach.
Speaker 1:Higher brow.
Speaker 2:He's not saying, you know, I want my employees to work hard. He's saying you're gonna be managed by an AI. And I think this is a cool take. You know, we've talked before. You can imagine a world where a an individual who's never managed another person before is managing, you know, Devin and other agents to run their business.
Speaker 2:But this is sort of, flipping that on its head.
Speaker 1:So it says over and over, I see people pushing these rosy ideas that AI is going to be your assistant. Fine. Yes. You will get some cute AI that schedules for you in some form and sends sweet nothings in the morning about your day. It will prepare little reports for you that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but that won't be the real leveraged impact.
Speaker 1:The real leveraged impact is that AI is gonna be your manager. You are the order taker for it, not the other way around. Elon has got this right. The real value of asking formally what have you done this week and knowing who is pulling weight, culling those who don't, and optimizing pushing those who are slash can. You couldn't do it effectively before AI at scale, but now you can.
Speaker 1:It might be nicely disguised as a coach. Cute. Hey. To be more productive, to do x y z, or it looks like you could focus on x versus y if you wanna get that promotion. But what it will really be doing is snitching for your boss, your boss's boss, and ultimately, the dreaded shareholder.
Speaker 1:Why? Well, that is where the productivity is gonna come from. AI will clear the path for basic easy tasks to make sure your time is leveraged fully and will make it easy for managers to deal with all the complexity, cut to the chase of where and how value comes from, and who is driving it. More transparency is generally good, but people who think this is some rosy machine works for man, nah. It's the other way around.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Especially interesting in light of that, controversial AI, sweatshop company from YC this week. Yeah. That that it's like the what did you get? I I no one really pieced it together, but that company could have just been called what did you get done this week AI?
Speaker 2:No. It's more of, like, what did you get done in the last hour? What did you get done in the last ten minutes? And then comparing that over time
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Previously. And and knowledge workers have this thing where they they sort of get assigned a project or they have a general area of responsibility Yeah. And then they just sort of have to there's actually really delayed feedback. Everybody that's managed a team before, if you started a company, you hire somebody, you sort of break down what they need to get done. You check-in with them a week later, and sometimes you're you're you're saying, wow.
Speaker 2:This is amazing, incredible progress. You're crushing it. Yep. Sometimes you're sitting there and being like, well, what did you do the last two days? Yep.
Speaker 2:You're coming to me now confused. I wish you asked me, you know,
Speaker 1:two days ago. Yep.
Speaker 2:And even worse is, like, if if something slips for a couple weeks and it's like, oh, it didn't even get started Yep. And AI can sort of potentially be omnipresent and sort of be in real time guiding people towards, you know, the right outcomes. Yep. So I still think there's, like, a manager sitting above the AI coach manager
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That is sort of setting, you know, the goals, but maybe over time, you know, that that fades and it's just we're all just working for the
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:Hardworking paperclips.
Speaker 1:The shareholders at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to roll off Botet over at Sequoia.
Speaker 2:Just on you know, to kind of extrapolate there, you can imagine a world where, shareholders in a public company say, we're actually collectively, you know, as shareholders, are gonna vote to high you know, basically hire this AI consulting team that's gonna micromanage the management. It's it doesn't seem unreasonable that that that could happen, and potentially allows shareholders to exert, you know, more more day to day control over, the management at a company.
Speaker 1:Could be a lot of pushback. We'll see. Yeah. I wonder what will happen with that post, if it will break containment and get some pushback. But for now, I think it's a it's a reasonable take.
Speaker 1:Who knows? We'll see. Let's go to roll off over at Sequoia. He says, we remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of the capital yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time.
Speaker 1:It's only been three years. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Who is he subtweeting? Yeah. Crazy. I mean, I'm sure he's just seeing number of rounds happening across his portfolio and saying, wait. This person's doing, you know, a $20,000,000 investment, and they only have $50,000,000 under management, how does that work?
Speaker 2:And it's, oh, it's a it's a manager who's, but, yeah, again, there there's a bunch of really, you know, good players out there that use SPVs or great, you know, tool for investors. And oftentimes, they provide access to, great companies, but certainly there are many examples where, you know, SPVs typically get sort of if you're a founder putting together around, you're you're prioritizing people that have the capital ready to wire. Right? Or that's one capital call away Yep. To wire.
Speaker 2:SPVs are oftentimes a not a last resort, but, you know, you're maybe you make room for somebody to do an SPV because they're saying, oh, I'm gonna bring in this celebrity and this, you know, person and whatever. But, again, I think, you know, I don't think he's subtweeting figure, but figure right now, one of the risk of the rounds they're putting together is he's basically marketing in my view, he's almost marketing to retail investors because if he needs to raise $2,000,000,000 at a $40,000,000,000 valuation, the people that will do those rounds are tourist chumps who, think they're getting in on the next Tesla. Yep. But are ultimately that when that company has been, you know, certainly a firm like Sequoia or Founders Fund is not doing figure Yep. At almost twice the price of Anduril.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. And so there's clearly, like, a spectrum of, kind of credibility in rounds, not just what, you know, are you doing in SPV or going with a traditional VC firm. But even within the VC world, there are some funds that have very high GP commits where the partner who's doing the deal has a very material portion of their wealth in that fund. And so they are like, they've basically solved the principal agent problem
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:By putting their tying their net worth to that firm. And, and so, yeah, you might raise a $10,000,000 series a and $2,000,000 of that might come from the partners or the GP or more in some cases. And so, if it's a professional investor who's highly aligned, that can usually be the best possible signal or the best possible, outcome. But There's a good There's a good comment. When we're talking about here
Speaker 2:from, Harry. He says, this is generally true, responding to Roloff. This is generally true, like, 99% of the time, but when you stumble on a diamond in the rough dot dot dot, I'm still chasing the high for my second ever angel investment into an SPV with no institutional lead run by Naval into the Notion seed round in 2016. So he you know, I'm sure that was somewhere around 20 post and, is now sitting at north of 10,000,000,000 and did did pretty well.
Speaker 1:And I wonder if that SPV was the was the lead check or not. Because it's very different if it's like, oh, there was a Well,
Speaker 2:it said it had no institutional lead.
Speaker 1:Oh, good.
Speaker 2:It basically
Speaker 1:yeah. Oh, yeah. Very institutional lead.
Speaker 2:Was the biggest in his, investor group was the biggest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Naval's, like, pretty good as
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As PB runner. Anyway, let's move on. What comes after smartphones? AI glasses you actually wanna talk to says, Anjani Midha. We at Andreessen Horowitz are excited to invest in Sesame's mission to bring the computer to life.
Speaker 2:Okay. This is a reference back to tech demo earlier in the show where, you know, somebody was saying that this is the most her like moment that they've experienced. Other people were pushing back on it, but, I just like the domain, sesame.com.
Speaker 1:It's nice.
Speaker 2:That's a good one. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. It feels very, you know, it's very memorable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then it still ties to, like, this idea of, like, open sesame. You're talking to a genie in a lamp. You have three wishes. Like, there's, like, some fun lore there, but it's still a word you can spell.
Speaker 1:You can get the .com. It's
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so this is a company that's competing directly with meta ray bands Yeah. Which is gonna be tough because ASAP Rocky, famed rapper I didn't know that. Style god Yeah. Is working with Ray Ban.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so I saw Reggie was posting that Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure
Speaker 2:ASAP Rocky will then be working on the meta ray bands. Yep. And you'll see And
Speaker 1:they have a crazy partnership with Luxottica for to bring in house all the ray band stuff. And Yeah. And then, obviously, they're they're rolling out Llama and all these different tools. And, that that was one of the more, attractive features of the Meta Ray Bans when I experienced them was taking the dog for a walk and being able to just say, hey. Hey, Meta.
Speaker 1:What's you know, like, how old is this tree or something or whatever. It was like it it was it was cool to be able to ask, you know, history questions. You're listening to a podcast, and then you can just say, hey, Meta. Like, tell me more about this, and it becomes more of a conversation. Anyway, let's move on to Bridget Harris over at Founders Fund.
Speaker 1:She says demand for yield will send the stable so stablecoin supply way, way higher. Fintechs are realizing stablecoins are the best way to deliver yield to customers, and it'll become status quo the same way cash back did. Once customers adjust to getting yield on everything, it's hard to go back. Latin America is the first mover here, but popular US based fintech platforms are also starting to offer yield, which consumers are increasingly recognizing as the new normal. Right now, Coinbase automatically offers 4.1% API on any USDC held on their platform.
Speaker 1:And there's a bunch of other companies that are getting into the game, into the stablecoin game. Robinhood's mentioned, and they're pushing, yeah, different API first for subscribers. APY for subscribers. And so, moving people into stablecoins.
Speaker 2:Crazy that Balaji was formative and actually just making this category, and now the market cap is the stablecoin market cap is how many
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, yeah. Twenty one Co was was was his company. He wanted to create a computer that could mine Bitcoin and also, do do a bunch of other stuff with stable coins and and micro payments using crypto. And now, the technology is finally approaching reality.
Speaker 1:The micropayments haven't really rolled
Speaker 2:out yet. But painful that one of the areas of crypto that has the strongest product market fit, you couldn't really invest in the tokens themselves. Yeah. Is one one
Speaker 1:Well, Tether, if
Speaker 2:you got
Speaker 1:into that deal, they're making a ton of money. They're printing money because they take a slice of the APY on top of it, the yield. But, I mean, it also has to work better in a high rate environment. Right? Because Yeah.
Speaker 1:How can you get high yield on USDC in a zero interest rate environment? It's gotta be really
Speaker 2:hard for me. CX. Question try to make a 10 x in a day Question. And, you might lose it all.
Speaker 1:Well, we got some personnel news. Joe Gebbia, the founder of ope of, Airbnb, is moving on to Doge. He says he's excited to share. I'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into the government. My first project at Doge is improving the slow and paper based retirement process.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Like, that is a job that no one in his position would ever want Has ever done. Has ever done.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna go be a a product manager for the government.
Speaker 1:It's insane. That Beautiful. Pull. I love it. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you for your service. Like, I 100% want a smoother, and less paper based retirement process. This is fantastic. Since leaving his operating role at Airbnb in 2022, he's been looking for the next design, challenge in the digital realm.
Speaker 1:And he can think of a few more important, he and he says, I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government. If anyone else in good standing wants to help design beautiful user friendly digital products, reach out. And so he's going over to the office of personnel management, trying to, smooth things over with good design. And that makes a ton of sense. I love it.
Speaker 2:So cool to see.
Speaker 1:And you've seen just, like, the flaws with, like, the the Medicare website took took all this time. And, like, whenever you interact with any government website, you're just like, this feels 20 years old. Like, what's going on here? And so just having someone in there who can, you know, staff a team of designers, turn things around quickly, actually implement changes.
Speaker 2:Most people haven't, you know, built a company like like Airbnb, you know, and they go they go into the the OPM Yeah. Business, other people's money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:Joe said, okay. I'm gonna go into the office I'm gonna go into the OPM, you know, sector and the office of personnel management
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, you know, make our country a better place to be.
Speaker 1:And it I mean, it is crazy. Like like, you think about his experience at Airbnb. He wasn't just the cofounder who was there for a couple years. He was there all the way to 2022. So historic run, fifteen, fourteen years, something like that.
Speaker 1:And then also, Airbnb operated at a scale that is actually somewhat relevant to the government. You know, it's like millions and millions of people. They're dealing with payments. They're dealing with, not maybe not Social Security numbers, but certainly, like, ID and and, and, KYC stuff. And so Yep.
Speaker 1:They've done a lot of different, tools here. So, great post. Congratulations to you, Joe, and good luck on your mission to improve, the retirement workflow. Incredible.
Speaker 2:Before we jump into the next post, we got a, request from Brandon Jacoby. He's we're gonna pull up a video right now that
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Zach just posted on his Instagram, but he's pulling it up.
Speaker 1:Do we need do we need He
Speaker 2:doesn't have audio. I don't think we need, I don't think we need audio.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Wow.
Speaker 2:So Zuck posted this on his Instagram.
Speaker 1:Oh my god. This is incredible. People who call the top on Zuck Okay.
Speaker 2:But Wow. But I the live reaction, I have no idea. This is for I don't think Zuck can move like this. Is he AI? I think he's flexing a new
Speaker 1:I don't think so. I think he did it. I think it's real. Look at, yeah, look at the jump. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's accurate. The fingers count up. Everything looks good. They're having a blast. He's singing.
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 2:Where is
Speaker 1:this? He's doubling down.
Speaker 2:Wife's birthday
Speaker 1:or something? Something like that. Wow. What an amazing, amazing post. I love
Speaker 2:it. I'm
Speaker 1:You know you you know, in China, that would get you in prison. Did you see,
Speaker 2:do
Speaker 1:you that would be a
Speaker 2:short term for sure. Says your wife only turns 40 once.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Wait. What did what song is
Speaker 1:he singing? This is incredible.
Speaker 2:Here. I'm gonna pull up the audio real quick.
Speaker 1:I love it. React. It's so good. Yeah. Jack Ma did something similar.
Speaker 2:Okay. So he's lip syncing. Okay. That's great. Still.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Jack Ma did the rock star thing on stage and shortly after kinda disappeared. Literally. Because it was like people were like, okay. He's becoming like a god.
Speaker 1:Like, people are like
Speaker 2:worshiping him. Credit to Zach. He'd practice that to a degree that he
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He looked
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like a real saint.
Speaker 1:Blend of robot and bro. Clearly I mean tested it.
Speaker 2:Totally moggled. Totally mogging all the people that said, oh, they were trying to do a poly market on if he was gonna get divorced this year. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I remember. Fake news on
Speaker 2:that. Back.
Speaker 1:And yeah. I mean, I think
Speaker 2:gamblers are in shambles.
Speaker 1:I think he did the right thing. You know, there's a lot of questions about, like, oh, should he back off the bro stuff? No. Double down. Go crazier.
Speaker 1:Keep it going.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is sophisticated and wholesome stuff. It is. You're very wholesome. Fortieth. You're gonna put on this incredible show.
Speaker 2:She's gonna remember that forever.
Speaker 1:Yep. The the PR team behind this must be paid so well. It's like this clearly came
Speaker 2:Let him cook.
Speaker 1:Let him cook.
Speaker 2:The blue sequence here.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's great. That's fun. Anyway, let's move on to some, reports from Altimeter, from Sheel Monat. Incredible early vintages from Altimeter VC funds.
Speaker 1:Wonder how much of total returns are from Snowflake. They led the series c at $260,000,000 post in 2015. That stake was worth 4,400,000,000.0 at the IPO. Let's do a little size gong for Altima. Boom.
Speaker 1:Thank you. BC is a power law game, and they crushed it on snow. Wild that Brad started with just $3,000,000 in 02/2008. Really? That's insane.
Speaker 1:Ran it up. 61% net IRR, $6,500,000,000 realized on 2,800,000,000.0 in committed capital. They got a bunch of funds here. They're a lot of rippers, and, it's great stuff.
Speaker 2:Brad is just such a cool guy too. I ran into him at my local coffee shop. He spends
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:He's a surfer, so he he spends, some time in Malibu. Yeah. And, you know, walked up to him, said, hi. We're in a handful of companies in the same companies, but, just such a such a cool down to earth dude who has a has been on a an absolute tear. He had a rough go with the hedge fund Sure.
Speaker 2:In 2022, I think it was.
Speaker 1:When the market sold off, like, 50%. Yeah. And I think it was long, like, that people were, like, SaaS
Speaker 2:long Nvidia. Is over. Yeah. But, that's the
Speaker 1:good news. Interest rates went up. And, obviously, if you're highly into tech, you're gonna get burned.
Speaker 2:And I feel and I feel like Back in the game. As, as journalists, like, newcomer Yeah. Started leaking Yeah. Performance, this is a great time if you're an investor to leak your screenshots. Oh, look at this.
Speaker 2:Like, this is a leak job.
Speaker 1:Actually go.
Speaker 2:Oh, please don't share this. Please don't share that I have 61% net IRR Yeah. Off billions of dollars. You know? I would hate for that to get to get loose.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to, Nick who post a screenshot of Jeff Bezos liking his post. You know, you gotta you gotta do some engagement bait for the billionaires that are hanging out on x all day. Nick apparently posted news. Amazon just dropped their first quantum computing chip code named Ocelot. We are so back.
Speaker 1:That could have been me posting that. But, you know, Nick got to it first. He got the Bezos like. And And I wanted to break this down a little bit. It's in the journal today.
Speaker 1:Amazon unveils its first quantum computing chip. We heard this from Google a couple, months ago. Google in December said it developed a new chip called Willow. And that really at that moment, the people that were watching quantum computing closely were like, okay. This is a breakthrough where we're now starting to accelerate the development here.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, earlier this week, we covered, Satya Nadella on Dwarkesh Patel announcing the Majorana chip. And they claimed a quantum computing breakthrough by creating a new state of matter. Now Amazon's in the game. Their cloud computing business on Thursday unveiled its first ever quantum computing chip, which claims marks which it claims marks an important step in the development of useful, reliable quantum computers. That's what we want, folks.
Speaker 1:The chip dubbed Ocelot can lower the costs of reducing quantum computing errors by up to 90%, Amazon said. And there's and the race is on. Everyone wants to build a practical quantum computer. The Amazon Ocelot chip is a prototype, not a full blown quantum system, said Oscar Painter, head of quantum hardware for AWS.
Speaker 2:To be honest, John, I'm a little bit frustrated. We were prepping our quantum chip
Speaker 1:launch. We got kinda edged out by this.
Speaker 2:Satya goes onto our cache.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, even, even Google's working on one. They've got Willow. They're teasing that. We kind of got beat to the punch, but I wanna let people know we are still in the game. Yep.
Speaker 2:Ben has been working on it while we record. He's been working on Quantum Chip. And this is a transfer. Actually had his wisdom teeth removed. He actually
Speaker 1:He was grinding on
Speaker 2:He was actually grinding
Speaker 1:lab. Grinding. Reducing quantum noise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Creating new
Speaker 1:state of the matter. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And this is gonna change podcasting.
Speaker 1:You I mean, you start compressing our audio feed with a quantum computer, it's gonna be super high fidelity. The Yeah. The best takes possible. Anyway, let's move on. Mike Taylor says, I may have underestimated the power of my product appearing in in an every post.
Speaker 1:RIP my calendar. A 30 onboarding calls booked in twenty four hours. Little fifteen minute slots. The guy is slammed. His product's ripping, and congratulations to him.
Speaker 1:Have you ever had a calendar booked like this on a single day?
Speaker 2:I have. For party number? I remember having this exact calendar set up. The My son was, born on a Saturday, and my calendar looked like this on Monday. It was kinda brutal.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't recommend that, but I'm sure Sam, Sam Allmans looked like that this week too. So Yeah. Sometimes you just gotta do it. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:You You gotta you gotta be in a certain frame of mind to really deliver and bring the same pitch, you know, 50 times back to back to back to back to back back back back. Fifteen minutes segments. But you probably get really good at your pitch
Speaker 2:if
Speaker 1:you do that. And you get the reps in, you learn what works, what resonates, what doesn't, how
Speaker 2:to talk, how to let them talk. I've done this, you know, not not in a, you know, sort of micromanaging way, but portfolio companies where they'd say, like, oh, like, we're not creating sales momentum. It's like, cool. Screen share your calendar. I'm like, you're talking with you're talking with, like, two customers a day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You should be talking to You're
Speaker 2:never gonna you're never gonna actually be a top decile company from a growth standpoint Yep. Unless you have some crazy product led, growth motion, unless you have this extreme volume because it really is just, you know, should should be obvious, but it's just a numbers game. If if he has a 10% hit rate, but he's doing 20 calls a day, great. Adding he's gonna be getting, you know, significant amount of traction from
Speaker 1:this. Six minutes left. We're going through some quick bangers. I will read them. You give me your take.
Speaker 1:Let's start with Morgan Barrett. Big night for hard tech in California and America at Velarv Atomics. So proud of Isaiah Taylor. They had a big announcement last night. Looked like something out of a sci fi movie.
Speaker 1:What was your take, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Anyways, this was absolutely wild. Yeah. I didn't know what to think. We we we got invited, but,
Speaker 1:couldn't make it.
Speaker 2:Couldn't make it. It it's it's seriously would be easier for us to get to Austin than that side of town right now. Yep. But, what a show. An absolute showman.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I
Speaker 1:was pissed because I feel like he really upstaged us on the production value. Like, we're the ones that bring in the Hollywood Designers and create elaborate sets, and his set was way above
Speaker 2:what we did. Say, oh, you guys have such a nice set. Yep. And, But not anymore.
Speaker 1:They're saying
Speaker 2:He's making us look
Speaker 1:atomics is the one that looks cool. So Yeah. Anyway, congrats to the team over there. Let's move on to, Lotan Banger from Rob David. He says, high yield Harry.
Speaker 1:Citi, when it comes to accidentally sending people money and It's just
Speaker 2:It's so funny.
Speaker 1:A dunk, and there's a dunk reel. And, I don't know if you read this story. It's in the journal today. Citigroup almost made a $81,000,000,000,000 mistake. They accidentally moved to transfer 81,000,000,000,000 to a customer.
Speaker 1:Yes. Trillion. A bank employee mistakenly entered this absurdly high figure last year while trying to manually input a transfer to a client's escrow account. Despite the fact
Speaker 2:have 81,000,000,000,000? That seems a little bit
Speaker 1:Well, the annual GDP of The United States is around 25,000,000,000,000. So no, Jordy. I don't think so. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I'm just, like, yep. What what is, like, just to put this in perspective Yep. That they they I'm assuming they have, what?
Speaker 1:They have billions, I'm sure, but not trillions.
Speaker 2:Hundreds of billions?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. And so there's a couple different examples of, the fat finger transfer could happen, is a lesson
Speaker 2:of technical difficulties. Would that go through? Would it appear on the customer's screen? Oh, you now have
Speaker 1:I have seen that happen. I've had friends who have said, like, oh, some bank error happened. And for a moment, I had, you know, a couple billion dollars in my account because they messed it up, and then they reversed it, of course.
Speaker 2:So it's all fake?
Speaker 1:Yeah. All the money's fake.
Speaker 2:All the money's fake.
Speaker 1:The money's in the computer. I talked to a hedge fund guy who actually said, like, there's money in the real world, and there's money in the computer. He's like, and the computer money, like, that's the stuff that goes up and down or something like that. It was a really funny thing. Anyway, if you're trying to make $81,000,000,000,000, you gotta start a hedge fund.
Speaker 1:You gotta go on public.cominvesting for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And they're not gonna send 81,000,000,000,000 to anyone accidentally. They run a tight ship over there. Let's go to Nico over at default.
Speaker 1:They announced a $4,000,000 new funding round from ABC. We covered it here on the show. And they did this launch, which I know you'll have something to say about. They sent out 100 branded champagne bottles in custom pelican cases. And Tom Osmond says, solid sponsor for TBPN TBH.
Speaker 1:What'd you think?
Speaker 2:On a long enough
Speaker 1:We love champagne.
Speaker 2:On a long enough time horizon, we will work with every champagne company.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You know, as long as it's truly champagne Yep. From the Champagne region of France.
Speaker 1:But this was a story I actually heard this from Sam Blonde. He was at
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did they did this?
Speaker 1:He's at Zenefits and then, Brax, I think. Yeah. And he said that one of the things that worked really well was sending people champagne. As he was in sales.
Speaker 2:Because you're not giving them a beverage. You're giving them a moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Moment that they can take home, and then they open it with their
Speaker 2:wife, and they think about
Speaker 1:it, and they're having fun.
Speaker 2:Or their team.
Speaker 1:Or their team. There's a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:We never we always offer champagne to Ben.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Anyway, we covered this earlier on the show, and Mike Maples responded. We talked about his amazing BMW z eight.
Speaker 1:He says, TBPNers, glad you like the z eight. I actually fell in love with it when BMW showed the z o, the z o seven concept back in the late nineties. At the time, I lived in Austin, and the local dealer wouldn't even take my deposit because they were sold out instantly. So I called around and found a dealership in Shreveport, Louisiana willing to let me buy their allocation in 02/2001. I've had it ever since, and it's probably the one car I'd never sell.
Speaker 1:Cheers. We gotta have him on the show. We gotta ask him what other cars he owns. What else what what cars would he sell?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know? But, fantastic car, and thanks for replying, Mike. We'd love to have you on the show. We can chat about cars. I've never driven the z eight, but I've heard really good things about it.
Speaker 1:Everyone talks. True classic. Yeah. So thanks for engaging, Mike. We'd love to have you chat about cars.
Speaker 1:You're welcome to come in and call in anytime. Let's go to Riva. She says, looking to hire a chief of staff.
Speaker 2:By the way, we have basically a minute till we're starting to Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, we got some promoted posts. We got we got Reva. She's hiring a chief of staff, trying the usual agencies, recruiters, but struggling to find someone vibey. So if you're looking for a chief of staff, go work for Reva. Who else we got?
Speaker 1:We got some merch.
Speaker 2:Let's save some of these for Monday.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. We'll save some.
Speaker 2:John's got an incredible podcasters high right now. I I
Speaker 1:I don't wanna stop. I wanna stop. Well, we got we got one more.
Speaker 2:I can't look at it.
Speaker 1:We got one more. We gotta do.
Speaker 2:Is an addict.
Speaker 1:We we we we gotta do this. So it was Steve Jobs' birthday on Monday, and Bezel replied to us and said, he's a minimalist watch king. And in here, he's, he's wearing a beautiful Seiko. And I love that Bezel we text them all the time. Can you clock this watch?
Speaker 1:And that's why we wanted to run an ad for bezel today. Go to
Speaker 2:best I know Brandon Jacoby is listening right now, and I think he's one of the biggest Steve Jobs Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fans that I know. Blazers.
Speaker 2:Brandon, I expect you to be in a Steve Jobs Seiko on bezel. Send us send us a screenshot, and we'll feature it on the show. Fantastic. But,
Speaker 1:go to bezel. Shop over twenty two five 22,500 luxury watches. They're fully authenticated in house by Bezos team of experts.
Speaker 2:That's a great place to end the show. Actually, the the real place to end the show, is, Sarah was was watching from home, and she commented in the chat and said, you have twelve years because she's 28 right now. So she was referencing
Speaker 1:Oh, to learn. Sucks. Yeah. Sucks. To learn the song.
Speaker 2:Anyways, great great day of timeline today. Fantastic. It's fun to rip through timeline.
Speaker 1:It's a fun show.
Speaker 2:We're trying to do more timeline. We we're we're there's a lot of news to cover, but we're trying to do yeah. We're we wanna make sure the pod is snackable, so thank you for tuning in with us on a Friday. We are gonna jump over, to the PMF or diastream and grill Patty and Blake on What
Speaker 1:did they get done?
Speaker 2:What they got done this week. They've certainly been busy, and, we are excited to, grill them. So anyways, have a great weekend, brothers. We will see you on Monday.
Speaker 1:See you on Monday. Thanks for thanks for watching.