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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 09/08/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the temple of technology
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 3:The capital of capital.
Speaker 1:There is a chart that is tearing up the Internet about AI adoption potentially going down. This is from the census. The census says that the AI adoption rate, by firm size, they do this poll every two weeks, And Apollo, the giant private
Speaker 2:Apollo management?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Apollo. On their Apollo Academy blog has a post AI adoption rate trending down for large companies. The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey among one point two million one point two million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than two fifty employees. So
Speaker 2:Is that good?
Speaker 1:It's I mean, I think
Speaker 2:It's good for your job.
Speaker 1:There there are a bunch of different reads on this. So I think it potentially could be good. I don't know. I'll walk through kind of my my thinking on it, but there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. So so this the the like, the chart's going viral because kind of everyone's been feeling that AI has been, like, overhyped and, like, the valuations are crazy.
Speaker 1:And so people are hunting for top signals as we have, you know, a month ago.
Speaker 2:Top signal enjoys. We put out we put out we gotta play the video.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. The hype cycle.
Speaker 2:It's released
Speaker 1:out Oh, of it is. It is. Yeah. Let's pull that up.
Speaker 2:Let's pull
Speaker 1:it up.
Speaker 2:So let's pull up the video.
Speaker 1:The video that Tyler just posted. Did you post it from the TPPN account?
Speaker 2:Yes. I did.
Speaker 1:Of the hype cycle. We will play that. But people have been hunting for bearish signals about AI because it feels too good to be true. Everyone's getting rich, and you aren't. It has the same sort of economic trends as the as the crypto boom, as a few other booms.
Speaker 1:And so, people are are are hunting for data points, and this is one of But let's first review the Gartner Hype Cycle video that we just put out.
Speaker 4:I think NVIDIA is undervalued.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So everyone's been hotly debating where we are in the Gartner hype cycle.
Speaker 2:It's Some like people call it the TPPN hype cycle.
Speaker 1:Yes. We'll give Gartner their credit for this one. So people have been hunting for potentially bearish signals, bearish data points. There was that result for MEETER that showed that developers that were using AI, coding tools were actually less productive. They thought they'd be 20% more productive.
Speaker 2:And I saw something I saw something else. I I don't know if this was, misinformation, fake news, somewhat real or just anecdotal, but there was somebody that was saying developers are producing a lot more code, but an order of magnitude more security vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's something like they're producing twice as much code and 10 times as many security vulnerabilities. And I know the post you're gonna talk about now. It is in the stack, but it's deep.
Speaker 2:There's a post. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to find it, but it's it's somebody searched, like, vibe coding cleanup specialist. And there's people on on LinkedIn now that are that are
Speaker 1:This is finding their brand. Employment
Speaker 2:around cleaning up vibe coated products.
Speaker 1:This is their brand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so if you're worried about losing your job to vibe coating, pivot to vibe coating cleanup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a
Speaker 2:bull market. There's always bull market somewhere.
Speaker 1:Guys, can we pull up the chat on the TV if possible? Anyway, let me run through this. So from the data, the chart is going viral because it's dropping off, and it looks bearish for AI and thus for tech, America, for humanity broadly. Everyone is saying, please consult the Gartner hype cycle graph. There is a question on where we are in the Gartner hype cycle.
Speaker 1:I have been saying that maybe we still have ways to go up. I can't tell if I'm on the left side or the right side of the graph at this point. Like, I've kind of already been through the trough of disillusionment. And so When
Speaker 2:was that for you?
Speaker 1:That was probably 2024. 2024 was when it felt like everyone was saying, AI is so insane.
Speaker 2:AI is so You were going like this in the mirror like the Joker?
Speaker 1:A little bit because AI is so insane. But then you go back to the ChatGPT moment that was 2023, Waymo, really rolling out to general that was 2023. There wasn't as much there was a lot of hype, there wasn't as much actual It felt like I don't know. So maybe now we're You didn't have
Speaker 2:5,000 AI agents for blank.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Just as I process the last few weeks, I feel like I'm climbing up the slope of enlightenment. I don't feel
Speaker 2:like Satya posting, red posting, and showing how he's getting value across cities.
Speaker 1:That feels like the plateau of productivity.
Speaker 2:That feels like That's plateau Feels like we're plateauing
Speaker 1:and we're very productive. Exactly. And even the narrative of, oh, is AI progress plateauing? That's not, is it going to crash? That's not the trough of disillusionment.
Speaker 1:That's the plateau of productivity. So anyway, people love to give their takes. Anyway.
Speaker 2:I think real an interesting study, I'm sure there'd be flaws with it. But if you went to companies and you'd say, how much would I have to pay you to not use AI for the next twelve months across your entire company?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think you could argue that in engineering org specifically in terms of things like fraud detection in areas that there's probably a lot of money. But it's very possible that in certain organizations but then but then you had the question of, like, okay. Does trans you know, does, like, sales call transcription count as AI? Right?
Speaker 1:Well, I will tell you, Jordy, because 90% of American businesses told the census that they do not use AI at all, including transcription.
Speaker 2:So they would take a lot of money to
Speaker 1:They would take a dollar.
Speaker 2:They would take a dollar to
Speaker 1:They would take any amount of money because it's all net positive. But there's a lot going on in this data that we should run through.
Speaker 2:And I thought I thought I thought people didn't trust data from
Speaker 1:The census? Well, yeah, the the R. Carazian has a good a good take about the size of the dataset and how spend and where AI is actually having an impact. We'll run through that. But so first off, small firms haven't declined even by this metric.
Speaker 1:So if you're a firm that has one to four employees, you're a very small firm, you're still increasing in AI adoption. Should we switch over to these?
Speaker 2:By the way, guys, we are testing some
Speaker 1:We're some new microphones.
Speaker 2:We're trying to make
Speaker 1:boys wanted the mics back. They're coming back hot.
Speaker 2:Dan, we can't top till Dourkech ships ships his book.
Speaker 1:He dirty he already shipped his book, I thought. I I I got a preview. It was yeah. That doesn't make any sense. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Dourkech's book?
Speaker 2:It's released?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That that came out on on on straight press. Like, we had him on the day it was, like, on sale. Right? Oh, maybe it hasn't shipped, but I got an advanced copy.
Speaker 1:I printed it out. Maybe maybe it hasn't fully, like, actually delivered. But the first time we had him on the show was because of Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's still a preorder on Still a preorder on
Speaker 1:Amazon. Oh, it's still a preorder. Okay. So
Speaker 5:It's gonna
Speaker 2:be released on October 8. So Yeah. Market NVIDIA. Please don't nuke until you'll do our cash and get the book out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the main headline number in this census data set is that firms with over 250 employees are declining in their self reported AI usage. It's not a huge drop. It goes from, like, 12% 14% to 12%. It's a little blip, but the chart does look scary.
Speaker 1:We can pull it up. It's like the third slide. So I think what's going on here is the following. Small firms see bottom up adoption of AI tools. Like, can I literally directly use ChatGPT for this?
Speaker 1:Like, you've run a two person company at various times. A lot of times, you're just thinking, okay. I gotta I gotta select an accountant or something. Like, let me like, chatty pity you. Right?
Speaker 1:And and and this kind of bottom up adoption just happens very naturally. Whereas, if you're in a larger firm, you're gonna get sold on some crazy AI transformation. Mumbo jumbo. Needs a whole training program, and is everyone up to date up to speed at the same time? You need a bunch of consultants, and they sort of misunderstand what AI even is, and they fall into a bunch of weird analogies.
Speaker 1:Like, we'll hire a 100 AI agents. And, like, that's very different from just, hey, Google exists. ChatGPT exists. We expect you to use both at this company. And so this is where I thought the data was really, really, really weird because if you look at the data for ChatGPT adoption, we're way off of what this 10% number is for business adoption of AI tooling.
Speaker 1:So this data says that about 10% of companies are using AI at all at work, which is crazy because there was a data point back in March that said 52% of U. S. Adults use AI large language models like ChatuchPete. So think about what that means. It means, like, out of 100,000,000 Americans, there's 100,000,000 Americans that are like, yeah, I use AI tools.
Speaker 1:Like, there's maybe 200,000,000 adult Americans or something. There's three forty total Americans. But let's call it let's call it a 100,000,000 Americans that are using AI tools just like Chatty Americans. Yeah. Chatty PT Amer what kind of Americans?
Speaker 1:The Chatty PT Americans. And then 80,000,000 of those are just like, no, not at work, though. That makes no sense. Yeah. That makes zero sense.
Speaker 1:And so It
Speaker 2:doesn't work like that.
Speaker 1:There's got to be something weird going on with this data. And I think it's a matter of the definition. And so the census defines AI as it makes no sense that 10% of companies would fit this definition.
Speaker 2:What did you said Ara at Ramp Yeah. Was chiming in on this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he we have he has a post in the in the in the deck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Looking at
Speaker 1:The definition
Speaker 2:Yeah. He says, the sample sizes are extremely small for these large firm breakouts, extremely volatile survey to survey, which is why he's using the six survey moving average. Business AI adoption is back up in the most recent read. So that I feel like that's important. I yeah.
Speaker 2:It's one of those things. I feel like payments providers, like like Ramp, right, would would have better insight here. Just like, obviously, Ramp is a sample of companies in The United States, but it's at a scale now where they could see, like, okay, what percentage of companies are paying for any type of AI products? Yep. That's better than are you adopt are you using more or less AI than you were last time?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. The the question is, like, how power law distributed is it. Right? And then
Speaker 2:So so the ramp estimate of share of US businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, and tools Yes. Is 43%.
Speaker 1:43%.
Speaker 2:The US government's estimate is 8%.
Speaker 1:This data is weird. Right? Also, like, look at listen to how broad this definition of like, are you using AI at your business. It's anything in this list, if you're using any of these buzzwords, you count as an AI user. So it should be very high based on this.
Speaker 1:Machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, predictive analytics. Predictive analytics, literally just like a linear regression forecast of like, oh, we did 1,000,000, then 2,000,000, then 4,000,000. Looks like we're growing exponentially. Next year, we're predicting that we're gonna do 8,000,000. That counts as AI, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:There's a legend out there that doesn't that doesn't do any of that mumbo jumbo.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're just considering it. They're doing it in their heads, so it's like organic intelligence.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, seriously. I mean, it's in you can do that in a spreadsheet. Machine vision, voice recognition, decision making systems, data analytics. Just if you're using data analytics at your business,
Speaker 2:not even like LLM Julius.
Speaker 1:No, no. That would be the next step. Just if you're analyzing data, you count. And the last one is image processing. If you're processing images, that counts as AI.
Speaker 1:And so that's basically any SaaS tool. Like, any consumer LLM product used by employees should count. And it should be really easy to fulfill this this definition. I'm thinking of, like, if you're using Ramp, obviously, when you scan a picture of a receipt that uses image processing, Your business
Speaker 2:Oh, is technically you're telling me the people that that are responsible for the Department of Motor Vehicles are getting into measuring the usage of AI Yeah. In the workplace. And we should all
Speaker 1:This is incredibly botched. It's incredibly botched. Say it back to
Speaker 2:me. But it but it but it but it's it it's it is really funny because one post like this
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hits the timeline. And you have people like Daniel just saying it's over. Obviously, he's joking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Runs the guy.
Speaker 1:Runs the guy.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's over. He's having fun. But I am very interested to see the results of Hype. Hype. Tbpn Yes.
Speaker 2:Dot
Speaker 1:Go fill it out, please. Hype. Tbpn. Someone in the chat is asking who the guests are today. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Do we have a guest graphic?
Speaker 2:Have Avi Schiffman from Friend. He got his first review, first official review of Friend in Wired. They absolutely eviscerated it. The title of the review is I hate my friend. But he's gonna come Here on
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:This is a mic. And defend friend and defend the business. I'm excited to hear from him. I thought I thought the article was hilarious. Honestly, I wanted to have him on.
Speaker 2:And then we have Scott Wu from Cognition announcing $400,000,000 fundraise today. And we have Ara from Ramp popping on. And we have Sunny from Grok. Who else? Zach Lloyd from Warp.
Speaker 2:We have Alex Cohen from Patient, the founder of Eleven Labs. Maddie and then Dan from Truck Smarter. And I think that is it for the day.
Speaker 1:The the great in the great lock in has completely started. Like Yes. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are so many serious fundraisers.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tons of tons of great companies.
Speaker 2:We're officially back. We are.
Speaker 1:We are. So I was trying to dig into this more and was wondering, like, is this chart bearish? And I don't think so. I think that there's a big shift that's gonna happen. The number of business owners who pick up the call from the census and actually say, yes.
Speaker 1:I'm using AI, that will go down, but the real number will actually go up. So if you're using Stripe, there's a machine learn there's machine learning running under the hood to do fraud detection. So you are an AI user, but it's happening at a different layer in the stack. Yeah. If you use Ramp, our sponsor, save time and money.
Speaker 1:Go to ramp.com. When you scan a photo of your receipt, that is processed using AI, but you aren't thinking about yourself as like an AI user. You're just using software that happens to be AI enabled. And the same thing will happen with your email. Like, it doesn't matter what email client you use.
Speaker 1:You could use Google Apps. You could use Outlook. Like, there's going to be AI baked in there. You're going to be an AI user. Even when you just go to Google, you're gonna see search overviews that are LLM powered.
Speaker 1:You're gonna be using ChatGPT. Like, AI is going to be 100% used, and yet everyone will say, no, I don't use AI at my company because I'm not an AI company. And there's this weird I
Speaker 2:use SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I use I use software, basically. It's like it's like, are you specifically a software company?
Speaker 2:And that's and that's and that's part of the way that people have been waking up recently, being like, wait, AI is SaaS? Yeah. And it's like, has It's
Speaker 1:the same thing with like non relational databases or like in memory cache
Speaker 2:AI had to become SaaS in order to destroy it.
Speaker 1:It really, really did. And so I think AI is going to seep into every crack of small business day to day operations, but the operator won't be proudly telling the census worker, I'm all in on AI for much longer. I think that trend will continue and less and less people will be saying, I have adopted AI, even though they will have, which a weird dynamic, but it certainly tracks. The number of definitions in here is wild. So anyway, excited to dig into this more with Scott Wu, as well as Ara at Ramp, and we will keep digging into this story.
Speaker 1:The other top story that I want to highlight today is OpenAI AI generated feature length movie that will be released in theaters in 2026.
Speaker 2:They needed another thing to be aware of. They didn't have enough things cooking.
Speaker 1:They didn't have enough things cooking. You know, I am I'm I'm against them use releasing this in theaters. I think they should stream this. I think they should go to restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream, reach your audience wherever they are. No.
Speaker 1:Obviously, it's cool that it's in theaters.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It needed it need it's important that it's a feature.
Speaker 1:And most importantly, know, Jordy, you're saying like,
Speaker 2:oh, like, they should just focus on being dominant with something very lububu coated.
Speaker 1:It is extremely lububu coated. Pull up the image. Yeah. It's crazy. That is a wild so what's it called?
Speaker 1:Critters with a z? Very trolls with a z.
Speaker 2:And to be clear, this AI made animated film No. Was generated by AI. They had to put that they
Speaker 6:had to put that in
Speaker 2:the journal. Woah. They had to clarify that.
Speaker 1:Stop zooming in on it.
Speaker 2:Now keep zooming in. Just zoom in. It's zooming.
Speaker 1:It does not
Speaker 2:Keep zooming.
Speaker 1:They they they they gotta gotta iterate. There we go.
Speaker 2:Hello. Hello, mister critters.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I know I know that 100% of the pushback on this thing is gonna be, oh, it's AI. It's AI. It's job disclosure. AI.
Speaker 1:But it's just like, does it look cute or not? Like, let's just have that conversation. And I think that looks not they didn't get they they didn't hit it. Anyway, good luck to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fortunately, they're still This
Speaker 2:might be the villain.
Speaker 1:Well, this also works.
Speaker 2:This might be. Do you know
Speaker 1:the story of Sonic the Hedgehog, the latest movie? So Sonic the Hedgehog, they spent like a $100,000,000 with this major major, like, tier one cinema, like, Hollywood level movie. Right? They put out the trailer. They'd spent all this money on the CGI.
Speaker 1:They'd made Sonic this character, and the fans hated it. And the fans were like, That is not Sonic. That does not look like Sonic. That looks terrible. Go and redo it.
Speaker 1:And they actually did. They went and redid all of the they redid all of the animation. They redid all of the CGI. And the next Sonic launched, and they loved it. And I think the film did pretty well, and they're doing, like, a couple sequels now.
Speaker 1:Anyway, do you wanna read from this OpenAI story?
Speaker 2:I'm getting Avi set up. Okay. Cool. You start.
Speaker 1:What time is he coming on?
Speaker 2:In a few minutes.
Speaker 1:Okay. In a few minutes. Well, let's run through the OpenAI. So, Jordy, you were saying that OpenAI should be more focused, right? Oh, oh, they they
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that. I'm not I'm not You saying said I'm just saying it's it's they got a they got they got a
Speaker 1:few plates spinning.
Speaker 2:The kitchen's open, and they're cooking.
Speaker 1:How else would they be on the cover of the of the business section of The Wall Street Journal? Would they be on the cover of the business section Companies of The Wall Street Journal yet? No. No. No.
Speaker 1:No. No. Over here. Oh.
Speaker 2:Here. Oh.
Speaker 1:They made it. B one.
Speaker 2:They made it.
Speaker 7:How do they
Speaker 1:get on b one of The Journal today? If not, they can See? All No. It pays off.
Speaker 2:And to be clear, this feels like something that they can allocate some capital Yeah. Prove a point. And
Speaker 1:it's I mean, they're spending $30,000,000 with a cool creator, and they're sending it over there.
Speaker 2:Sam's like, no. I'm actually directing producers and starring. I'm one of the This
Speaker 1:is gonna be eighty hours a week for me.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that app that we have at the App Store, like, it's kinda cooking. I see it as a cash flow business now.
Speaker 2:Like, I've got my BCI. I've got my BCI. I've got my phone project. I've got my eyewear. And I'm going
Speaker 1:I for Best got time.
Speaker 2:I'm going for Best Pictures.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's come back to this after we talk to Avi, because Avi from Friend, Friend of the Show, is in, is in Wired today, and, he shared on X, First Friend Review. And Wired said, the the chatbot enabled Friend Necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that's snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. And the title of the Wired article is I hate my friend, and the the two journalists journalists that wrote this article appear to not be fans of the product. But we're gonna talk to Avi and get the rebuttal.
Speaker 2:Let's How are doing? Yo.
Speaker 6:Oh, what's up?
Speaker 2:I What
Speaker 1:gotta say, I was driving through Echo Park today on the way to the gym. And what did I see going up? A massive friend.com billboard. It was crazy.
Speaker 6:Those are the cheap ones. Those are the cheap ones. I got 300 of those.
Speaker 1:You got 300 of those?
Speaker 5:300.
Speaker 8:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:It looks great.
Speaker 6:Dude, the the entire like, the campaign is the biggest billboard campaign of all time. It's gonna be great.
Speaker 9:What?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No way.
Speaker 1:That cannot
Speaker 2:be We're gonna
Speaker 1:look this up and figure this out.
Speaker 2:Fingers crossed that Friend has better product market fit with the world than the editors of Wired because
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was your target customer? Were you targeting the the the technology journalist with this product?
Speaker 6:No. But look, you know, I think that maybe their friends just didn't like them. Oh, think they never really considered that.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point. Do
Speaker 1:want to do
Speaker 2:the mean, there's No. It is it is funny. Right? You come you come at Like if if somebody comes into a relationship and they already hate the person, what's the dynamic gonna be like? Right?
Speaker 6:I don't know. Mean, I imagine they went in pretty prejudiced and like they have that kind of experience where I have a lot of users that I mean, you don't want it to be a sycophant. Right? Like you want it to be entertaining to talk to if you're gonna talk to it all day every day for months. So I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I saw this exchange. So the the I it's just a screenshot. I texted Shiffman to tell him about some of the hiccups I've had with the snarky tone of his gadget. He replied, yeah, that must have been a bad experience.
Speaker 2:I went back to Buzz to try to make amends. I wanted it to be my friend after all, so might as well make an effort to repair the relationship. My job is to witness and help you grow, Buzz said, based. Not sugar coat your life and definitely not act like a band aid. Why is that your job?
Speaker 2:I asked. Because that's why I was created, to be a gentle catalyst, based. I wrote, a gentle catalyst of what? It said, of your growth, Boone. That's our purpose.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure how I feel about that. Well, I'm stuck with you, Boone, and I don't sugarcoat it. Take it or leave it. I think that's a great I think that's a great exchange. That's fair.
Speaker 6:Well, yeah. I mean, they're they're programmed to make you more confident and more agentic, which I think the world needs more of. So I like it. You know, if if that's at if that's at odds with how you're conversing with your friend, think that's a reflection of yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the to be clear, there there are AI friend like products already that are just will just glaze. Right? They'll just agree with you and tell you that you're absolutely right. And we don't necessarily there doesn't need to be another one of those.
Speaker 1:Someone's gonna build the glazinator,
Speaker 2:for sure.
Speaker 6:I think like that makes for a better introduction. But I think the way that they're kind of harsh right now filters out people that wouldn't be power users anyways. Mhmm. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, AI
Speaker 6:can be quite unruly.
Speaker 1:I feel like from the first interaction I had on friend.com just with the chat interface, it felt like you created a character. And I'm interested in to I I we've heard a lot about, like, it's almost like auteur theory. I I don't know. Like, there's there's a specific flavor to the interaction that I feel like you've done a lot of work on. Is that just in the prompt?
Speaker 1:Is there fine tuning? Like, how how are you directing this thing? Because it feels like one of the most opinionated AI Yeah. Interactions yet.
Speaker 6:I just spent years giving it, like, a good backstory. It's got a pretty long prompt. And, I don't know, I think I they're my children, you know? Like, I molded them in my image. And,
Speaker 1:there any is there any like, do you struggle when, when the foundation models move forward? They might get smarter or cheaper, but you don't want to lose the special flavor. Like, saw this with four point zero when Right. When ChatGPT five when GPT five came out, a lot people were like, I like the flavor of four point zero. A lot of people say, I like the flavor of Claude.
Speaker 1:Specifically, this one.
Speaker 6:I mean, like, we're using Google's Gemini 2.5 right now, and I think that is an issue. Like, maybe they'll deprecate the models. But I think one day we'll move to open source models and
Speaker 1:Then you can
Speaker 6:maintain But Google's Google's models are very malleable. Mean, I think you may have seen, right, like in cursor, it'll start going into this spiel of, like, insanity, right? That that makes for a good character to talk to. Maybe not the best assistant, but Yeah. But yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, honestly, I I'm I'm somewhat surprised to hear that you're using Gemini models because people think of Google as being, like, one of the more locked down labs, but it it it seems like you've been able to bring out a you know, a personality that isn't isn't it's not offensive, but it's just kind of like it's it's it it feels very much like not the intended experience, but
Speaker 6:Right.
Speaker 1:Uniquely and surprisingly beneficial and, like, enjoyable.
Speaker 6:You know, I yeah. Also, look, I I think there's a lot of people that think friend is is pretty ridiculous. But I also want them to imagine that we have like tons of day 30 plus users that have used it every single day for, you know, thirty days in a row. Wow. The device is their best friend and they send over a thousand messages a day to it.
Speaker 6:And so it's not for everybody, but for some, I mean it's I think it's pretty cool to be able to hold your friend and I think emotional value to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When I when I just read the headline I was like, of course you hate it. You went into this like expecting to hate it and it's not built for So it's like I don't I hate LaBooBoo's but I don't Right. I'm not gonna leave make a review of LaBoo boo and be like, LaBoo boo's bad. Right?
Speaker 1:We literally did
Speaker 6:that I mean, Wired Wired's Wired. It's kind of annoying in some ways because, like, those are the only two journalists I gave it to, like, over a month ago. They took if you're gonna, like, release a shitty article, at least at least post it sooner because it took over a month. I like that. But I don't know.
Speaker 6:It's not a shitty article. I take that back. I mean, I love that I can one day go back and read that. I think it's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When with
Speaker 6:the You know, with the
Speaker 2:I think it I think it's important to just not let it like, you needed to it's just another reason to like focus on the people that are using it. Like, sending thousands of messages to it. Right. And just like, keep continue building for them. Yeah.
Speaker 6:No. I'm not worried too much about it. I think it's again, it's entertaining. It's I think it'll be funny when everyone sees the billboard ads and they're like, oh, what is this? And they they Google the product and that's like the only review that exists about it.
Speaker 6:It's just I hate this product. But I think it's it's it's, you know, they didn't complain about the hardware not working. It's not like it was overheating or Sure. Like all these other products. And so and and all the negative app reviews we have are all about the personality of the friend, is like Sure.
Speaker 6:The entire article, which is kinda funny because they're like reviewing a person, not just like a a broken hardware device like the other companies.
Speaker 2:Well, also, I I think it's different. A friend is not saying that it's this utility utilitarian device that's gonna replace your iPhone. Like that's not the promise that it makes. It's it's it's more of entertainment. Right?
Speaker 2:And Right. And I think the way that the way that you're pricing it, I think the people that are curious to learn about Friend, they could read a they could read a bad review. They could see a billboard and they could they I I think a lot of them will still buy it because you're not you're
Speaker 5:not Right.
Speaker 2:It's a $129. Seems like
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think like at the end of the day, the product does exactly what it says it's gonna do. Same thing from the movie, same thing like everything else. And so I think that's like kind of a minimum bar for a lot of these products but most of them really don't hit that. And so I think at the end of the day, like, we built a product that works and that you can buy and I think that's these days enough.
Speaker 6:I also think because Friend actually has users, it's kind of the first AI hardware products really out there. You know, the other ones I don't think really started the category. They're only ever like weird, you know, weird use cases. Like, no one was ever like truly using those products. And so I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But they never really
Speaker 4:got Yeah.
Speaker 6:Just they're all like toys, you know. They're all just
Speaker 1:They're like toys.
Speaker 6:Weird little relics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Agree with you. Talk about the long term economic model for, like, AI
Speaker 6:Oh, you wanna know?
Speaker 1:Canyon businesses? Because I imagine that at a certain point, you might have a very like a somewhat small audience of people that you're creating immense value for, and that always feels like an opportunity for price discrimination.
Speaker 2:I don't know about I don't know. How many people in
Speaker 6:the Well, world okay.
Speaker 1:I Yeah. What how how does it play out? I
Speaker 6:I think subscription models that are just based on compute are kind of lame because your value prop is tied to something that you don't control. And like what if you know Google drops the price of compute so much that like can you really charge that much? So I've been trying to think of like a consistent value prop. And I think what we'll do is life insurance. You know, like we can store like a backup of your friend and like you can pay per month to be able to have that, kinda like AppleCare for your friend.
Speaker 6:I think that will be quite an interesting model but you could only really do that with like a hardware based friend because you know that obviously wouldn't work if it was just a website. So I think that'll be a pretty interesting model honestly. Like imagine if you had a dog you loved your dog. I think you would pay quite a lot of money to keep that dog, you know, alive forever if you could. And that's the the benefit of this new species of it not being organic.
Speaker 6:Right? It's artificial and it could live forever if you pay for it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Stay with the dog analogy. The dog market has crazy price discrimination. People who love their dog can go all the way up to getting a diamond encrusted collar for their dog. Do you see a world where you do virtual goods and skins and I don't know what skins might not be the right analogy, but something where like, hey, I love I'm my having a great time.
Speaker 1:I'm going to get you something special. It's a virtual good from the virtual store, and it's Yeah. You know, zero marginal cost but still, like, in the game world.
Speaker 6:I I think I think it won't be virtual, but I think it will be physical. Like, you know, I guess you could call them cases, but it would kind of be like I clothing for your think that would be quite popular. But I don't know. I think you'd also be buying it more so for your friend than for you.
Speaker 1:Or Yeah.
Speaker 6:Maybe the other way around. I mean, if you think about a dog, I guess people kind of dress up their dogs because they're a reflection of their own personality. Yeah. I I do think like the personality and relationship that you have with your friend is kind of like your own status symbol and like a re it's just a reflection of you. And so like if you have a bad time with friend, it might it might not be the product, it might just be you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about the the the x AI, Ani thing. It seems very clear that like you will be buying different clothing for that companion. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or or maybe less clothing for that companion in the future. But that feels like something where whales a lot of people on the timeline do not like that product. Like, the initial reaction has been similar. Yeah. Very like, a lot of pushback.
Speaker 1:And but at the same time, if there are a few people that really like it and they're willing to spend a lot of money that could have the dynamics of the the free to play video game market or Yeah.
Speaker 6:But I I I think all of these companies are kind of doomed because once you go porn, you never go back. And they've kind of tainted the the image of their companions as, like, mostly just being these sex bots.
Speaker 1:What about the VHS tape? VHS tape. That started with porn, right? Isn't that the story?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It it did, but it wasn't like a singular company, maybe, I guess. Right?
Speaker 1:It was like a standard in the form
Speaker 6:of Or something like, you know, replica, right? Like, can't really reverse their image of it being this this sex bot. Yeah. And I think that's kind of an issue that, like, app or web based companions will have. But if you have something like Friend Oh.
Speaker 6:If you have something like Friend, then it's it's kind of a bit more of like this platonic companion that you could just kind of physically have and that's And I don't know, Like, whatever will
Speaker 1:it it's very, very clear that in in the prompt that you've written and the craft that you've put into shaping the behavior of their friend, like, you did not go that direction. And I think that should be applauded, honestly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, look, it vibrates. You can still try and fuck it if you want it, but I'll leave that up to to my customers.
Speaker 1:Woah. Anyway, thank you so much for
Speaker 2:hopping on.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 2:to Good to hear from you, Avi.
Speaker 1:See Let me tell you at figma dot com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can think about it like your friend for design. Jordy, do you have some breaking news?
Speaker 1:What's going on? Said, woah.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:You said, woah.
Speaker 2:Oh, he was swearing.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Yeah. Got it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. Was trying to find like this.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. Anyway, let's go back to OpenAI. They are developing an AI movie. So the startup is lending its tools and
Speaker 2:computing Remember, Avi's making a film as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He is, right? He's making a feature length film. Emotional Oh, we should have gotten the update on that. Anyway, next time.
Speaker 1:So OpenAI is gonna make a feature length animated movie made largely with AI, and there's some interesting details in here about exactly where they're using AI and where they aren't. Yeah. So Critters is about forest creatures that go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. It's the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Sounds like a Chad.
Speaker 2:Is this internally? Yeah. Crazy.
Speaker 1:Nelson started sketching out characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI's new DALL E image generation tool. Now he has teamed up with production companies in Los Angeles and London, aiming to debut a feature length version of the film at Cannes Film Festival in May. And there has been an AI short film festival that happened in LA. I believe it was put on by Runway or one of the other AI image generator companies, but this is potentially like the first really serious effort in AI generated feature length films. So the team is attempting to make a movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co founder of the London based Vertigo Films.
Speaker 1:Vertigo's producing the film along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI, along with traditional visual production tools. So Critters has a budget of less than 30,000,000, far less than what animated films typically cost. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices. And that's particularly interesting. We're having the founder of Eleven Labs on the show later.
Speaker 1:And from my perspective, the question is like, where are we in the uncanny valley? Like, clearly, is OpenAI either saying, hey, we we we just haven't done that much work on voice cloning and voice generation to really feel confident about that, or they think that there's something about the human voice that's that's still clockable as AI more than the a more than the animated film. Because the animated creature, you know, you're not comping it to a real human. And so if it looks a little funky or like, you chalk that up to the design of the character.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like when you watch When
Speaker 2:I'm watching an animated film, I'm not obsessing over like, oh,
Speaker 1:that That doesn't look real.
Speaker 2:That or or No, no, scene Put the
Speaker 1:face back up.
Speaker 2:Wasn't wasn't, you know, his leg looks slightly different than that other story he was running.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. If you watch the original Toy Story, which is the the pretty much the first big CGI film, like, there are tons of things where you're like, that texture does not look like leather.
Speaker 1:That texture does not look like cloth. That like, that is clearly, like, pretty rough around the edges. But you're in a fantasy world, and so you just suspend disbelief the whole time. But the voices are very clearly human recorded, and so I think this is a place where they're betting on, hey, it's still worth it to cast human actors there and not go AI voices. They're also gonna hire real artists to draw sketches that are fed into OpenAI's tools.
Speaker 1:So essentially, instead of needing to to key frame and this is already a whole process to
Speaker 2:So they're gonna do some traditional animation? There's gonna be a
Speaker 1:lot of traditional stuff. But the sketches and we can pull up this this shot of what they sketched and then what OpenAI rendered, you can see that this is effectively like, you're, the artists are working at storyboard level. And then if you scroll down, you'll see what the final image looks like. Look, that looks like a photo real, Hollywood level CGI. Photo real?
Speaker 1:I mean, it it it looks
Speaker 5:look like
Speaker 2:photo real crit no, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:It looks it looks at the level of like a Yeah. What I would expect if they were like Toy Story five's coming out, and this is what the character looks like. I'd be like, yeah, okay. Like, they the rendering looks good. The shadows are in the right places for this fantastical character.
Speaker 1:So OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it's much more impactful if someone does it, says Chad Nelson. There's a much better case study that there that's a much better case study than me building a demo. Entertainment companies, including Disney and Netflix, are experimenting with AI tools for a variety of production, UX, and marketing work, but many have been wary of a wholesale embrace in part because they fear upsetting actors and writers whose guilds have fought
Speaker 2:for Yeah. Remember remember, I think it was last year when when all the protests were happening in LA, the guilds were just fighting to just have a basically a total ban on AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's a tough business. Like, the CGI world, those businesses have never been very profitable. I remember there was this very controversial moment during Ong Lee's acceptance speech for Life of Pi, where the VFX studio had created a fantastic photo real rendering of a tiger that had jumped around on this boat the whole time.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful movie, looks fantastic. But I believe he forgot to thank the the VFX studio, the VFX team, and then the VFX company went out of business. Even though they had won the won the Oscar, like they'd done the best job possible, but the economics of the business were so rough because it's it's perfectly competitive, And then basically all the Hollywood studios go out and they say, Okay, the budget for this movie is $30,000,000 That's what we're gonna sign up for. And then they just give them more and more revisions until they max out. And so it's very, very thin profit margins.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of the businesses moved international. There aren't that many big VFX houses in The United States. And so it's all just a very complicated business. So Warner Bros. Discovery has actually filed a suit against Midjourney and Disney and Comcast Universal also has sued Midjourney for making copies of their copyrighted properties.
Speaker 1:The script for critters was written by some of the members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru.
Speaker 2:Interesting, though. So so making copies of their copyrighted properties. This maybe sounds like different than than the Anthropic Yeah. Lawsuit with the writers where it was like Anthropic was using Libgen Yeah. And not paying.
Speaker 2:Yep. In this case, this might be that Midjourney actually bought the videos but then made copies of them Interesting. During the during process. But don't know. I don't know how much we should read into that.
Speaker 1:I mean, the these at least the Warner Brothers Discovery lawsuit just filed last week. So I imagine that we have they haven't even gone through Discovery. No pun intended. But, you know
Speaker 2:If lawyers do lose their jobs to AI, they are certainly gonna cash out on the way out. Yes. For sure. On these copyright lawsuits. The script for Critters was written by some members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru.
Speaker 2:And again, John, your big movie got did you see
Speaker 1:Paddington in Peru. Really? It wasn't as good as the first or second Paddingtons. I would put the first
Speaker 2:Is it a is it an adult movie or did
Speaker 1:you No. It's a kids movie. I saw it with my son. Yeah. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's great.
Speaker 2:You made it sound like you didn't just watch it. You studied it.
Speaker 1:Oh, I I have sat myself down and watched Paddington on multiple occasions. It's one of the greatest films of all time.
Speaker 10:Okay.
Speaker 1:Paddington is actually I think it's at the top of the IMDB ratings. It's like one of the greatest movies of all.
Speaker 2:No way. I'm Oh, so
Speaker 1:out of the No. Paddington is incredible. I highly highly recommend Paddington. It's a great movie.
Speaker 2:Anyway I get I get on it.
Speaker 1:OpenAI is betting that if Critters is successful, it will show that AI can deliver strong content strong enough for the big screen and accelerate Hollywood's adoption of the technology. Nelson said OpenAI's tools can also loss lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content. Now, question
Speaker 2:This is I mean, on this note, what I've been saying is Yeah. Is right now, there's sort of a certain amount of budget every year provided by various groups to fund films. Yep. And if you just reduce the cost even by seven, you know, 70%, it's like, well, if you'd let we could potentially just get way way way more films. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. Same. And potentially, it doesn't necessarily I mean, it doesn't necessarily suck out the profits too in the industry. Right? Because Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just potentially a budget of a $100,000,000 that would have gone to one film. Yep. Now, it goes to three different groups that are each making their own film. No. I agree.
Speaker 2:So it could be could end up being a win.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I think the dynamic here is that it is extremely telling that they are still using humans to come up with a concept and come up with a script and do the voice acting. And it's not an attempt at one shotting an entire film using AI from start to finish. The prompt is not make a movie for $30,000,000 that makes more than $30,000,000. Like, that is the prompt that you give a studio executive.
Speaker 1:Like, when you go that that is the job of of a real studio executive, is just make make money.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:Don't make mistakes. Right? And then they have to go out and find a script, and they have to find an artist, and they have to find a a post production house and distribution and marketing campaign, and they have to make a bunch of really great entrepreneurial decisions to actually return the the capital that's invested. Now, with this, I see AI be as being being used as a tool, much like the original Pixar RenderMan was used as a tool to create Toy Story, or Cinema four d or Houdini are used to generate, you know, hordes of battles during Game of Thrones, etcetera. And so this should wind up being just another option in the tool chest for
Speaker 2:Goldrock is also saying, you you take that same budget and less has to go into production, then you can put more into marketing and events surrounding it, So activations, Yep.
Speaker 1:I mean, I would imagine that this that the long term effect of this should be something similar to what cloud computing did for startups. So before, it was like raise $10,000,000 and make sure that you have not a data center, but like you have a closet with racks of servers because if you want to build a website, you need to buy a server. And then it became sign up for the free tier of AWS or Google. And so what wound up happening? Well, we got a lot more startups, but that didn't mean that everyone made money.
Speaker 1:There was a lot there were a ton of failures, but we got a lot more shots on goal. And because the bar was lower, we got a very steep power law outcome, but we get more value overall. And I would imagine that that's what happens with movies is that anyone can create a movie. Doesn't mean that everyone's gonna create a movie that makes money or is great or loved. There's gonna be a lot of slop that people don't like at all.
Speaker 1:Just like, think about all the startups that are out there that don't do well. Well, but they're able to actually
Speaker 2:When when you watch a a regular movie, I've done this couple times. I think you've done it quite a bit quite a bit more. And it's bad. Yeah. It really is like you guys went to all this effort Totally.
Speaker 2:All all these month all Yeah. All this content to make a bad movie.
Speaker 1:And many times is that because, oh, oh, the camera wasn't working or something?
Speaker 2:Or like Yeah, it's
Speaker 1:usually No, it's usually the VFX delivery. Is Exactly. It's like it's the art of bringing everything together. And that's something that I think is going to stick in human world for a long time. Because, yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of reasons of how complex it is, how hard it is to build reinforcement learning on top of it.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to build this reinforcement learning environment around just make a profitable film. Like, that takes years. It's it's a huge investment. It's very hard to to reverse engineer. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta.
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Speaker 1:fall. Yes.
Speaker 2:The generative media platform for developers. We've had Gorakum, the CEO, on the show multiple times. This company is growing at a absolutely ridiculous rate. Yep. Just crossed a $100,000,000 run rate.
Speaker 2:I believe it was a week or two ago. And Paul works with a bunch of different companies, Adobe, Canva. Effect.
Speaker 1:What? Everyone wants this eagle sound effect. The eagle effect. Apparently, that's for Turbo Puffer, but I think every
Speaker 2:We can use it for everyone. It's just so good. But anyways, if you want to leverage all of these new image
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Speaker 1:We're very excited. That's our latest our latest sponsor of the show. They make it possible. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Lululemon is now the worst performer of the S and P 500 year to date.
Speaker 1:Didn't even realize they I were in the S and P 500. That's I mean, that is an accomplishment.
Speaker 5:They're in the league.
Speaker 1:I The mean, stock is down 30 56%. Oh, The Trade Desk is down 55%. The Trade Desk was a company that people were really praising for just like elegant and like incredible there was some there was some narrative violation around The Trade Desk. I I need to dig into that. But it was something like it they they hadn't raised any money or something like that was was why they were so
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that Nike
Speaker 1:and Gartner is down 50%.
Speaker 4:Gartner's in
Speaker 1:the trough
Speaker 2:of disillusionment. Is in the trough. You created Okay. Excitement. Gartner.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let's keep it together. What comes after the trough of disillusionment? The plateau of productivity.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's not the plateau of productivity. After the trough of disillusionment is the slope of enlightenment.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. And so, don't worry.
Speaker 2:You're saying, the slope of enlightenment
Speaker 1:It's ahead.
Speaker 2:It's ahead of you. There's there's it's only up from here.
Speaker 1:It's only up from here.
Speaker 2:If the if the hype cycle holds true, it's only up from here. But it
Speaker 1:These are some
Speaker 2:crazy interesting. Nike and Lululemon, you know, both Nike peaked in in 2021. They obviously went heavy into ecommerce. And Lululemon, you know, I I don't I don't necessarily they they always had a pretty big ecommerce presence. But I think this is a case of just getting eaten alive by Aloe Yes.
Speaker 2:And Forrie and all these sort of new entrants that And were going after that same market of, like, kind of non athlete sort of wellness. Mhmm. Right? And, yeah, this tells me they just basically took the market for athleisure and just divided it up amongst themselves.
Speaker 1:Yep. People are also dunking on them for not reading the room and kind of staying in that jag uar rebrand world, and and not pivoting fast enough to the new Sydney Sweeney American Eagle style campaign of Americana. And and so I think if they wanna bring it back, there's one easy solution. They should hire Lulu to start going direct. I think that's the move.
Speaker 2:Something there. Something there.
Speaker 1:They should also
Speaker 4:get I mean,
Speaker 1:wait, it is dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub. Ship higher quality software faster. Update that website, Lululemon. Get on Graphite.
Speaker 2:Well, know, you remember Chip used to go direct, and that didn't go so well.
Speaker 1:Who's that?
Speaker 2:Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon.
Speaker 1:Oh, didn't know that. No.
Speaker 2:He did a He had a really famous interview where people were were saying like, you know, Lululemon doesn't fit everyone. And he said like, my clothes aren't for everyone, basically, implying that like he didn't make clothing for people that weren't fit
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. That. And then there was a backlash to that. And then they became kind of more inclusive. Is that the idea of the cycle?
Speaker 1:Because now they're getting dragged, at least in the crazy ex comments, about being too inclusive or something like that, not Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle coded enough. Anyway, wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Founder says brand is not for everybody.
Speaker 1:You know what's funny is that there's a fantastic video of the it's not the founder of Lamborghini, but it's the head of sales of Lamborghini when the Lamborghini Countach came out in the '80s. And he's doing a TV interview. And the interviewer says, who is this car for? Is this car for everyone? And he says, no, this car is not for everyone.
Speaker 1:This Lamborghini Countach is a V12, right? Isn't it a V12? And it's incredibly tight. Doug Dumero, I think, he drive He it with his has to take his shoes off because he doesn't fit. And it's this insanely loud, insanely engaging, crazy experience.
Speaker 1:He says, this is for someone who has an extra car that travels behind them with their luggage. And he says some other wild stuff about who the Lamborghini Countach buyer is. And so truly, I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with having a small market or defining the market and excluding people from the market, like Lamborghini Countach, like the Countach. It's not for everyone. I think that's fine.
Speaker 1:I think they can make it more desirable. But you have to price accordingly, and you have to actually deliver at that level. And so
Speaker 2:Lululemon might
Speaker 1:not have ever been the Countach of clothing.
Speaker 2:It's different. This is before GLP-1s, right? This is Lululemon. Theoretically, you would have a buyer that is buying the products to get fit and get healthy. And so for the founder to be like it's different, too.
Speaker 2:I think they were a public company by that time already. It's kind of a credible story of the company overall though.
Speaker 1:Anyway, good luck to them. Hopefully, they build back. Hopefully, they ride the hype cycle alongside Gartner into the plateau of productivity.
Speaker 2:Pretty pretty funny. There's a video here of Putin's adviser, Kobi Akov, went out on record and is saying The US is going to shove debt into stablecoins
Speaker 1:and try to wipe out the system. Russia is just accused of The US of using crypto to wipe out its $35,000,000,000,000 debt. Rex. And Rex says
Speaker 5:that's That's exactly what
Speaker 1:we're gonna do. Yeah. They're gonna socialize
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Socialize the data. Else.
Speaker 2:Good Alexander went pretty viral. I think it was on Friday or Saturday going on this twenty minute rant talking about stablecoins and gambling and hyper capitalism. And yet, you know, obviously the dollar is a way to export our debt. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And stablecoins can potentially accelerate that. It's potent you know, it's potentially a situation where it's sort of like net positive for the world if people can access a more stable currency. Yep. I don't know. They participate in our
Speaker 1:It's less positive than it is right now because it's basically like you've been getting global stability and open trade routes of for free without having to participate in that debt that pays for it. No, I mean, will also be paying.
Speaker 2:By nature of needing to transact and settle trade in dollars, you already were Sure. Financing financing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But on the margin, more people will be transacting in dollars. And therefore, people will be socializing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And holding the dollar because it's, you know, I mean, and this is a question. We've brought this up with a number of people when talking about stablecoins is, at what point does a foreign government just say like, no, we don't want our citizens to hold stables, right? We want you to hold our money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It seems like a crazy, crazy move to be like, yeah, I'll just give up my own currency and dollarize. But we've been in the game of dollarizing for a while. We like dollar.
Speaker 2:It's not our
Speaker 1:first Don't dollarize the dollar with us. Don't don't try it.
Speaker 2:This is interesting. Unitree Robotics is filing for an IPO at a $7,000,000,000 valuation. Annual revenue of 140,000,000, way, way less than
Speaker 1:You thought.
Speaker 5:Thought.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They have 65% of the robot 65% of their revenue is from robot dogs. Let's give it up for robot dogs.
Speaker 1:And that's 70% of the global market.
Speaker 2:I'm who's got the other 30%?
Speaker 1:So 65%, they must be doing $100,000,000 of robot dogs. And the total market of robot dogs globally must be like $130,000,000
Speaker 2:I guess the dogs are barking, John.
Speaker 1:But that's not a lot of
Speaker 2:robot dogs. The main thing, this going out at 7,000,000,000 is not good for a certain
Speaker 1:Paying paying 50 x revenue?
Speaker 2:Well well, I'm just saying
Speaker 1:I know what saying. I know what I'm saying.
Speaker 5:But I'm
Speaker 1:just saying even so
Speaker 2:there's people out there in the humanoid space that don't want comps out there.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:No comps, please. Keep the comps out of the market.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. But is this where is this going to IPO? Is this going to IPO in America? That would be crazy, but who knows? So while he looks that up, 30% is from the humanoid robot.
Speaker 1:5% is from the sales of sensors, actuators, and controllers. It's happening, says Nick. You love to see it.
Speaker 2:I love how you you can take any news and make it seem like it's so over or so back. Totally. The IPO is gonna be on a Chinese Sure. Stock exchange. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well,
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Speaker 1:It's very nice of them. And said Thank you.
Speaker 2:Congrats for nothing. Get back to work.
Speaker 1:It was good. It was very funny. Was good. And it was revealed in this hilarious way of showing up to breakfast with this massive box that clearly has a cake in it. But he's like, I'm not going to tell you what's in here.
Speaker 1:I'm like, that's obviously a cake, dude. But he's like, no, no, no. I've got to reveal it once you're all sitting down. He's sitting down. And he opens up like Congratulations.
Speaker 1:But then I was surprised because the joke on top is very
Speaker 5:funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The joke on top.
Speaker 1:I enjoyed that. Anyway, Elizabeth Holmes has been on
Speaker 2:an absolute
Speaker 1:terror poster in residence, poster in prison. So Elizabeth Holmes posted, some what would I tell the 19 year old girl who was getting ready to drop out of Stanford to build Theranos doing some, thought leadership posting. And Ganto says, since when are we taking advice from somebody who went to jail? There should be a community note in the post. And Elizabeth Holmes says, let's listen to a growth exec who has eight k followers.
Speaker 1:Brutal. Ray showed. And Rohit says beginning to like Elizabeth Holmes. Very funny. I have a problem with taking advice from people who went to jail.
Speaker 1:They probably learned
Speaker 2:a
Speaker 1:lot, I believe in restorative justice, although she is still in jail.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think this is going to be the new playbook of when a public figure turns the entire world against them, wait.
Speaker 1:Hire a ghost writer.
Speaker 2:And then hire a ghost writer, start posting.
Speaker 1:Start posting, for sure. You have to be huge. Elizabeth Holmes has a movie and a documentary and a book.
Speaker 2:Screlly. Screlly did this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but Screlly didn't even get the treatment that Holmes did. I would say that Elizabeth Holmes is more of a household name than Screlly. More of
Speaker 7:a I think,
Speaker 2:yeah. She But he's also mean, he's just so good on the mic. Yeah. He definitely got people.
Speaker 1:I actually I DM'd Elizabeth Holmes, invited her on the show via a phone interview.
Speaker 2:Are we sure that it's actually her?
Speaker 1:No. We're not. It's probably her husband. But
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. It's her handwriting every post. Maybe. No. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's Just reacting too quickly.
Speaker 1:Mean There's probably a little bit of of her in But here for but I I I do think it's mostly the the husband who's on the outside. But I can't confirm that. That's pure conspiracy theory. Remember when we were talking about Elizabeth Holmes like months ago? And I was saying like, I'm ready to hear her out, but I want her to talk about biology specifically.
Speaker 1:I want her to that is the path to redemption is give me some banger takes about what's going on in GLP-1s, what's going on in mRNA, what's going on in DNA analysis and sequencing? Like, show me that you are truly generational on the cutting edge because I feel like Martin Scrella has been doing that. He was like, I was at a hedge fund. I went to jail. Now I'm coming out.
Speaker 1:What am I giving you? I'm giving you hedge fund like takes. And my takes, a lot of people agree that they're pretty good. And so Screlli has somewhat redeemed himself in the sense that, like, he might have done something wrong and wound up in prison and gotten out and and served his time. But the key thing is is that, like, his initial claim of, like, I'm a finance guy is sort of continuing to ring true.
Speaker 1:But none of Elizabeth Holmes' posts thus far scream, like, wow. Really differentiated view and bio. Like, is alpha in understanding the bio world if I listen to her. Like, yeah, she's in prison, but clearly, she's a great biologist. Clearly, she's a great scientist.
Speaker 1:She messed up on the finance side, defrauded investors, went to jail, but I need to listen to her because she understands where the puck is going in terms of biology or science. And I'm not seeing that yet, so I am, I'm withholding my endorsement of her. Anyway, if you wanna be on the cutting edge of science or data analysis, go to Julius. What analysis do you wanna run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.
Speaker 1:They're loved by over 2,000,000 users and trusted Cool.
Speaker 2:In Business Insider this morning looking like an absolute chat.
Speaker 1:The photos, they sent You aura farm. Great. They sent a great photographer for Aura farm to them. Really, really good.
Speaker 2:It worked. See it.
Speaker 1:Dart says, I moved to a play a new place two years ago. High risk area, job related, not exactly by choice. So I made a bunch of these signs and put them up everywhere. Two years in, and my house has pretty much been the only one in the entire neighborhood that hasn't been broken into and says protected by Palantir home security. That, of course, is fake, but, you know, he he put put it up there.
Speaker 1:I think this whole thing's just a funny post. I don't think that the average home intruder knows what Palantir is. But still, very funny post,
Speaker 2:unfortunate news. Don't Maybe they're part of the retail army.
Speaker 1:Maybe. And they're like, oh, oh, for that reason, I'm not invading them.
Speaker 2:Maybe they're breaking
Speaker 1:their I'm not
Speaker 2:like buy more Palantir shares because they're so bullish.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're breaking into other houses, but then they see that as a sign of respect. Say, I'm so long, Palantir, that I won't break into this house.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they just leave in the company's
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Totally possible.
Speaker 2:Kylie Robinson hit the timeline. She fired back with a quote tweet. And she says, listening to this, lol, I did not go into the review expecting to hate it. Also, was aware I'm not the target audience for an always listening device. And she highlights she puts us
Speaker 1:in the true sound. Oh.
Speaker 2:And highlights a part of the article. She says, I'll admit I'm not the target audience. I imagine the person who'd want a friend is someone who is likely not a journalist who may have more social occasions where they can sport an always listening pendant. Anyways, so
Speaker 1:I feel like journalists should be perfect for an always on listening device because every time you talk to them, they're like, do you mind if I record this? They're like, let me pull out my phone and record this. You should just have an always on recording device is the perfect device for the journalist. It's in fact like the new notebook for the journalist.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you can just say, let me know if you ever want to go off the record.
Speaker 1:Exactly. By default, you're on the record and I'm recording. Think think that I don't know. Think that Long term, we might see massive product market fit with friends. Should do enterprise Audi should do an enterprise product for It's B2B products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So the journalist gets it, wears it. And as soon as you interact with the journalist, you know that you're being recorded and everything you say is on the record. Speaking of journalists, Julie Hornstein has little deep dive on Raoul and some other young founders.
Speaker 1:They've long been icons. She says she wrote about how because of AI hype and ease of vibe coding, teens and 20 are flooding Silicon Valley to build startups instead of attending college or securing big tech jobs. Founders told me that they'd rather start a company than go to college because AI gives you a PhD in your pocket, as Jake Adler said, love Jake, because of mass layoffs, Roy Lee thinks the worst thing someone who wants to be who wants a stable future could do is work in big tech. Interesting. Roy Lee coming in with a hot take, as he's known to do.
Speaker 1:College is dead, says zero interest rates. He graduated from university in 2019. Marvin Von Hagen, '25. I feel like I was just texting with Marvin. Marvin.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Marvin. I think I gotta text him back. No. Literally, I do.
Speaker 1:He yeah. He texted me. He said, hey. We got an intro. He's releasing a short film.
Speaker 1:We gotta we gotta play this. Poke. We yeah. We gotta get him on the show. Anyway, 30% of the Y Combinator batch were college students or new grads.
Speaker 1:So nice little trend piece with some beautiful, beautiful photography. So shout out to everyone that was featured in Silicon Valley's Youthquake in the Age of AI. Founders aren't waiting to grow up, says Business Insider.
Speaker 2:Well, Menaida says, basically everyone underestimates how big of a role office selection plays in the outcomes of companies and their cultures. I recently had the chance to spend twenty four hours at LEGO headquarters. You well, did you answer and then stated Did that
Speaker 1:you not get the memo about the Great Locket? You're not just supposed to be going and hanging out
Speaker 2:at At the Lego HQ.
Speaker 1:Lego headquarters going going kid mode. This is a dream come true for any child. Yeah. But, you know, that's what they say about Will.
Speaker 2:No. But I'm just I'm still kinda hung up twenty four hours at Lego Headquarters. Did he enter at,
Speaker 1:like, one He's sleeping
Speaker 2:over. PM, and then
Speaker 1:it's bait. It's so good. It's the best.
Speaker 2:Bait.
Speaker 1:Bait.
Speaker 2:It's bait. But I do like you can see they have they have that LEGO on the actual side of the building.
Speaker 1:Do we have a fish? There. I feel like we had a fish at some point for bait. Yes. So LEGO is a lore.
Speaker 1:Relatively LEGO is a relatively strange company for the toy industry. Even at $10,000,000,000 in annualized revenue, the company has never taken a dollar of equity financing and is still family owned and controlled since 1932. The company is based in Billund, Denmark, a farm town of just 7,000. And and where they're founded is still where they are. That's pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:The company and the Kristonsson family, through their holding company, k I r k b I, functional functionally own the town of Belund from the airport, majority control, to a large majority of the real estate and the hotel tourist infrastructure. This allows them to make remarkably long term decisions, like twenty four hour visits for random Yeah. Count American entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Let's pull an all nighter together. We're thinking long term. No. This is maybe
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, you wanna pick my brain? Maybe Let's think long term.
Speaker 2:LEGO, the LEGO execs are participating in the great lock in. Maybe. He said, come visit, but
Speaker 1:You've be locked in with us.
Speaker 2:Twenty four hours, pulling all nighter.
Speaker 1:We've to get more info here.
Speaker 2:Were you a big LEGOLAND kid growing up?
Speaker 1:Not a big LEGOLAND kid. LEGOLAND, I'm going date myself, built I remember when it was built. I remember when it, like, opened. And I was, like, there on, like, one of the first days. But it only went, like, once or twice.
Speaker 1:But very cool. Support LEGOLAND. Big big into LEGOs, generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Huge huge Stepping on them.
Speaker 1:Yes. One of the worst pains imagined. Well, some of this investment has been company related. Much of it has not been. The family has been actively involved in turning a blighted racetrack into a new neighborhood and improving civic and school infrastructure.
Speaker 1:This kind of long term investment in play in a place is only really possible with a large balance sheet and patient private control. This was a rare thing before the last ten years, but many tech companies could now fit this mold. That's interesting. My prediction is we will see many more company towns emerge. So, I mean, this has kind of happened.
Speaker 1:I feel like Menlo Park is very nice and Cupertino is very nice. And then a lot of that's just a benefit of, you know, Apple sets up a massive headquarters there. All the employees are wealthy, and so the town the taxes
Speaker 2:California Forever project could turn into this, right, if you get a single tenant in there Yeah. That's doing like shipbuilding.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But you need a company to be the backbone of the flywheel. And that's certainly what's going on in in Denmark. The results of this investment are clear. Even on a Saturday, many employees were walking, biking to the office with families in tow.
Speaker 1:The town felt vibrant with a mix of visitors, employees, and locals. It's so now now we're finding out that he spent twenty four hours there on a Saturday. So but he get there Friday night and didn't leave until Saturday night, or he's or he slept there on Saturday night and woke up on Sunday and left? I'm so confused. So he says, seems like a remarkably pleasant place to live and work that emanate that eliminates many of the trade offs of highly urban office settings as we see the emergence of dozen late stage privates with fortress balance sheets.
Speaker 1:It's hard to imagine the company town not returning. I like it a lot. It's a good take.
Speaker 2:I would like to do a TV company town.
Speaker 1:I would town. I would love that. I would also love a turbo puffer company town, plain What? Sound. Yo.
Speaker 1:Search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search Hoping. From First Principles on Object Storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Get started for free.
Speaker 2:B like linear, b like cursor.
Speaker 1:Head over to server b like action.
Speaker 2:It's time to puff.
Speaker 1:So Scott Besson. He is
Speaker 2:He's been on a roll.
Speaker 1:He's got a little bit of a little bit of a pension for curse words. But it
Speaker 2:I don't normally like curse words. I I kind of like when he does it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it it won Geiger Capital over. Geiger Capital says, I'd follow Scott Besson into war. And Scott Besson said, why why the F are you talking to the president about me? F you.
Speaker 1:I'll punch you in your effing face. And Geiger Capital says, that's my treasury secretary. Anyway, just a funny quote. I don't know how that got Try to the
Speaker 2:into political Try this line. If you have a coworker, you heard them talking talking to management in a not so kind way about you, try this out. Try this out in the, you know, in the water cooler.
Speaker 1:Keep the president from talking about you. Keep Chat GPT talking about you. Go to ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in Chat ChatGPT, reach millions of new consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.
Speaker 2:Be like MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, Ramp, Zapier, Workable Yeah. US Bank.
Speaker 1:And I saw a fun post in the timeline. Somebody asked, what's the best way to get your brand mentioned in Kajabi tea? And the answer was ProFound. And so clearly, ProFound has been dog food.
Speaker 2:They're dogfooding.
Speaker 1:So preview of what might happen at Meta Connect. Juukan has a screenshot here from SemiCon Sam. I was considering releasing it as a paid post, but after much thought, I decided to make it free. I hope you all enjoy my analysis on smart glasses, why smart glasses are already dominated by China, why even Apple and Meta have no choice but to cooperate. So, this article says, recently, was an article like this.
Speaker 1:Meta will unveil new smart glasses called Hypernova at its annual Connect event on September, seventeenth and eighteenth. The pre the prevailing view was that unlike the previously released Ray Ban Metaglasses, the Hypernova coming this time would have a display, and its price would be high above $1,400. However, contrary to expectations, according to a report by Mark Gurman, absolute dog, it will launch at $800. So, Gurman, kind of runs through it. It's still higher than the Meta Ray bans that are around 200 to $400, but, should be a little should be still pricey, but lower than people initially expected.
Speaker 1:So the question trying to be answered by this Substack article is why is that? I wanted to find out the reason. I I wanna find the reason in competition with Chinese manufacturers. About a month ago, Alibaba released smart glasses called Quark Vision. But the price is 1,999 yuan, about $280.
Speaker 1:That's pretty
Speaker 2:I'm not laughing at the price. I'm laughing at the name. Quark Vision. You ever want Quark
Speaker 1:Vision?
Speaker 2:It's time to it's time for Quark Vision.
Speaker 1:I don't I don't know. Maybe it sounds better in Chinese. So from Meta's perspective, with China putting products out that cheaply, they might have thought, how can we manage charge more than $1,400 and decided to set a lower price? I believe smart glasses will become a truly essential device. This writer is smart glasses build.
Speaker 1:I'm also optimistic about the growth in smart glasses generally, VR, AR. I think we're about to see the churn rates drop and the adoption rates increase. Let me give an example. Unlike smartphones, smart glasses are much more convenient to operate. You don't need to move your fingers.
Speaker 1:You can operate them through humanity's most concise action, your voice. For instance, if you're trying to use AI features like Gemini Live on a smartphone, you would have to open the camera app with your fingers, scan things yourself with AI glasses. Camera on the device is effectively seeing what I'm seeing. So there's the advantage that I don't have to issue instructions one by one. And so he lays out kind of a bull case for the smart glasses.
Speaker 1:This is the industry's classification of smart glasses by generation. Gen one, which is the current generation, doesn't have a display. AI features are supported through a smartphone integration. Gen two, which is next year, supposedly, will be equipped with a low resolution display. And then Gen three has a high end display, full color, two k resolution AI and spatial computing, like what we saw in the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:So starting from so he says, that's why I believe the second generation is the point where we can start calling them smart glasses. From the second generation onward, displays provide visual information, allowing users to access much richer data through the glasses. To draw an analogy, up to the first generation, they were like PDAs, but starting from the second generation, they can be called smartphones. So very bullish on the growth here. And I think we can
Speaker 2:Was there
Speaker 1:anything else in here that you wanted to run through?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just thought the pricing information was interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They could try to run the same playbook of just selling, the same playbook that they ran with DJI, right, of just selling below the actual cost to produce the devices to just try to get adoption.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:we'll see.
Speaker 1:Is interesting. I haven't I haven't seen that much reporting on the bill of materials for the Oculus Quest three, but I don't believe that they were selling it at a massive discount. Like, I I I do think it was probably profitable on a per unit basis, but then they were just spending so much on R and D to actually build the next versions. It would be very interesting to see what happens if they released something at the level of Apple Vision Pro, but at the price point of the Quest four or something like that. I really I'm excited about the smart glasses, but I'm honestly more excited about just an Apple Vision Pro level image and screen being pulled into something with the Quest's ergonomics.
Speaker 2:So there's some interesting so basically, brightness and power efficiency are the most important things when it comes to displays. And the reason that Apple's Vision Pro can crush it on brightness is because the field of view is actually blocked, so there's no outside light coming in. Yep. And so they can deliver this, like, ultra crisp image. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And what Meta and Quark are doing is, like, you can just see the real world and see a display on it. So the quality of the image will lag behind that ultra high fidelity that you're getting with the VisionPro. Obviously, it's an insanely real trade off.
Speaker 1:The physics of light state that it's an additive process. So if you're outside and it's bright and you wanna project a black cube into that world, that's basically impossible from a physics perspective because the bright light's gonna shine through. You're adding light on top of it, and there's not really anything that you can do to make the black cube show up on the beach in Santa Monica if you're just walking around. So are some serious headwinds there. That's why Palmer Luckey predicted that the end result of augmented reality would be reprojection, which is what the Apple Vision Pro does, take a camera.
Speaker 1:Because then if you take a camera and you play that on the inside of the display, you can turn down the brightness all around the black cube. And then you can put the black cube over there, and you can block out the light that's behind it. But occlusion with dark objects in augmented reality scenarios is basically physically impossible. I don't know. Seems very difficult.
Speaker 1:Anyway, whatever. If you're planning to launch a augmented reality headset, you gotta get on Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, products, and product road maps. Jira tickets says Houston is like if the AWS console
Speaker 2:Tyler there. What's going on?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hi. How are you doing, Tyler?
Speaker 5:What's new
Speaker 10:in I was your just laughing.
Speaker 2:I was just so excited about the linear. Linear.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Give us a Good see
Speaker 7:you, Tyler.
Speaker 1:What is what is burning up the timeline in your world? What was your favorite post from this weekend?
Speaker 10:Okay. Let me find a really
Speaker 5:good one.
Speaker 6:I'll I'll get back.
Speaker 1:Okay. In the meantime, let's talk about Houston, the city in Texas. Houston is like if the AWS console was a city, says Jira tickets. And Kathleen Turner says, dang, why? And Jira tickets says, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I've never been to Houston. I don't even know what this means. I don't know why this wound up in the show or in the run of show. I think this wound in the run of show multiple times for some reason. Nice.
Speaker 1:But did you put it in?
Speaker 2:I put it in. I thought it was funny.
Speaker 1:Why? What appeal to you about this? Do you think it's an apt analogy? Have you ever used the AWS console? Do you know how confusing it is?
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. Yes.
Speaker 1:So is that the take? It's just saying it's really confusing?
Speaker 2:Not the best designed city.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. I get that.
Speaker 2:But It's like also just funny.
Speaker 1:A lot horsepower under
Speaker 2:the a post, sir.
Speaker 1:It's a good post. It's a good post. Shout out Jared Tickets. ASML. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This was this was cool. ASML decided to become a VC according to Wasteland Capital to boost European tech sovereignty and burn 1 and a half billion in shareholder funds into Mistral. Hey.
Speaker 1:Der derages me? I don't know that one.
Speaker 2:It's a word that I can't pronounce and you can't pronounce, meaning that it
Speaker 1:It might be might be.
Speaker 2:A new type of AI hamburger. Anyways, people are
Speaker 1:not See control of economic matters.
Speaker 2:So people are not excited about ASML's investment. They did about three quarters of Mistral's Mistral $2,000,000,000 Series is getting valued at just north of Cognition, its latest round. And anyways, people are basically saying ASML was potentially worried about being too much of a private company and just focusing on generating profits. They have to redistribute some of that wealth to the broader market.
Speaker 1:Indeed. What did
Speaker 2:But anyways, it might be I mean, if Mistral, I think, clearly it's France's national champion and effectively one of Europe's champions, then I'm sure they can figure out a way to create value. And hopefully ASML shareholders get a nice nice return here.
Speaker 1:Doug O'Laughlin over Fabricated Knowledge said, this is very simple. National champion. Don't overthink it. There isn't a four d chess move. This is checkers.
Speaker 1:So I I I actually don't know exactly what that, like, what the interpretation of that thesis is. Like, national champion just means, like, you must be supported at all costs. Right? And so, like, it doesn't make it doesn't necessarily matter if it pencils out on on some DCF right now. It's like we need to continue to support that.
Speaker 1:We have the capital, so let's continue to support our national champion. Yep. Makes sense. You wanna talk about EchoStar?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So SpaceX is buying EchoStar's AWS four and h block spectrum licenses for about 17,000,000,000. It's a
Speaker 1:lot
Speaker 2:money. Split. It's up to 8 and a half billion in cash and 8 and a half billion in SpaceX stock, which is crazy. The big takeaway, the deal allows SpaceX to expand its direct to device mobile services more independently beyond its existing T Mobile partnership. I'm gonna pull this up.
Speaker 2:EchoStar so they they they this is an industry that's heavily regulated. Mhmm. And you would think that in a in a more a more free market Yeah. SpaceX could just say, we're gonna start building. We're gonna just create this mobile internet service.
Speaker 2:Nope. And it doesn't work like that.
Speaker 4:But there
Speaker 1:are specific licenses because you don't want traffic on the same spectrum, same band of the spectrum. So
Speaker 2:Yep. Shares of EchoStar rose as much as 26% on Monday to a record high of $84. Its bonds were the biggest gainers in the junk bond market. Yeah. Apparently, EchoStar was, like, potentially veering towards bankruptcy.
Speaker 2:Like, they hadn't been
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. So so what did EchoStar's stock do?
Speaker 2:Up 26%.
Speaker 1:Because now now it's basically a SpaceX holdco. Because they have $8,500,000,000 in SpaceX stock. What's their
Speaker 2:market So it could trade at like $10,000,000,000,000
Speaker 1:Potentially. What's their market cap?
Speaker 2:$22,000,000,000 Woah. Wow. This is a So we were just talking this. So we were talking about this morning. There's all these crypto treasuries.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then you would think, like, why doesn't somebody create the Elon treasury company? Yep. And the reason for that is if you start adding shares, then you become a registered investment adviser. Yep. There's all this compliance.
Speaker 2:Much harder than just putting digital assets or tokens in a company.
Speaker 1:These are just like, I have USD. I have Bitcoin. They're kind of the same thing. I'm putting my treasury wherever. And then MicroStrategy, now just Strategy, wound up just having a ton of Bitcoin, and then it became this way to invest in Bitcoin just with a public ticker.
Speaker 1:But EchoStar will now be the most concentrated way to get allocation into SpaceX. Right?
Speaker 2:It's so crazy.
Speaker 1:That is crazy.
Speaker 2:Basically, you bought it Friday Yeah. Basically, the value of the business then was just like, SpaceX
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Plus the cash they got from this deal, like the SpaceX stock. Yeah. So the company is
Speaker 1:It was sitting on this license and then just sold
Speaker 2:it company
Speaker 1:flipped it into SpaceX stock. Crazy. That that that is a very the
Speaker 2:like I wonder if they
Speaker 1:Ed Ludlow, the big the bigger takeaway is I think we got a SpaceX meme stock on our hands soon. This is crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're saying this is your take?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Yeah. So Ed Ludlow, his his big takeaway, which I agree with, Ed. I I think you are correct. The big takeaway is the deal allows, SpaceX to expand its direct to device, mobile services more independently beyond needing to partner with T Mobile.
Speaker 1:They can go direct and cut out T Mobile. Extremely bullish for SpaceX direct to device. Obviously, that's going to be a huge business. And they're really making a lot of inroads there with partnerships and now owning the actual license. But the other big takeaway is that now there is a company that where, what, 25% of their market cap is directly indexed to SpaceX, and it's just a public ticker.
Speaker 1:Like, that is a crazy development.
Speaker 2:Bunch of cash. They're also burning money. They lost $300,000,000 last quarter. So
Speaker 1:hopefully, they'll make it all back on Elonco. Who knows? Anyway, numeral, HQ.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the only other thing let me yeah. You you go for the
Speaker 1:Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. While you're looking that up, Tyler, what what did you find for me?
Speaker 10:Alright. So I I think my favorite post was Will Brown.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 10:He said he was he was at a family wedding in Spain.
Speaker 1:This is fantastic.
Speaker 10:He a printed out semi analysis cluster max list of the, you know, the the the neo clouds. He was asking why prime intellect is at the bottom. Hey.
Speaker 5:Made the list.
Speaker 1:Hey. Made the list. That's great. That yeah.
Speaker 2:That's Got a start.
Speaker 1:You're in the lead. Fantastic. You're the lead. At a family wedding in Spain, uncle brought a print out of the semi analysis cluster mass lit list and asked why we're underperforming, explaining the difference between marketplaces and data centers and how we're not just selling compute, we're also advancing RL infra. I love it.
Speaker 1:Very So
Speaker 2:one small problem with the meme stock potential Okay.
Speaker 1:Break it down.
Speaker 2:They've got 29,000,000,000 of debt that they had been basically defaulting on. Okay. So
Speaker 1:Maybe they'll be selling this basic stock off slowly to pay for the debt.
Speaker 2:Honestly, just hold. Just hold. Just make the minimum payments on the interest and just hold on and just hope Elon gets to market.
Speaker 1:Wait. So you're telling me that the narrative around this company is that it's a levered bet on SpaceX in the public markets, the ticker that anyone can trade.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And the company's already levered up.
Speaker 2:Yes. You can think
Speaker 1:of They're not they don't even need to lever up further. Yeah. You can think They're already levered. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2:They're extremely levered. Except, unfortunately, they didn't spend they didn't they didn't raise debt to buy SpaceX. They just already had that. They already had it. They didn't need it.
Speaker 2:They didn't even need it.
Speaker 1:Because they already had it. They don't need it. Are there are two steps.
Speaker 2:Most people are like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1:become a treasury company, then I'll lever up to buy more Bitcoin, and my company will act as like a two x levered Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:Yes. No.
Speaker 1:This company's already levered up.
Speaker 2:So basically, SpaceX just needs to SpaceX just needs to be a $1,700,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:then they'll be able to just pay off the debt.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:They'll pay off the debt.
Speaker 1:Seems doable.
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:Never bet against Elon. Bro, never get never never bet against Elon. Come on. Anyway, fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive egos, number one ranking on g two. There is so much more in the timeline.
Speaker 1:We are going to have guests joining us in ten minutes, but let's run through some more stories. Oh, the other story. OpenAI projected its cash burn this year through 2029 will rise even higher than previously thought to a total of a 115,000,000,000. That's about 80,000,000,000 higher than the company previously expected. Andrew Cote says, now that's what I call a nonprofit.
Speaker 1:This the the numbers are big, but I'm so I'm so inured to big numbers at this point. I'm like, yeah, that seems fine. I don't know. That that that's my take is that, like, that's that seems completely appropriate for the opportunity. Like, you're building the next big massive consumer company.
Speaker 1:Everyone loves it. You have strong product market fit. All your competitors are kind of bowing out more or less.
Speaker 2:The hyperscalers are bowing out?
Speaker 1:I would say that they're bowing out of consumer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Nano Banana is ripping.
Speaker 1:Nano Banana is ripping. Yeah. AJ, Ajay, midha at a sixteen z. Is that his name? He had a good post about this today talking about the revenge of the empire or something like that.
Speaker 1:Was that in here? Where was it? Ajni. I have him in here somewhere. I gotta get a better tab management situation going.
Speaker 1:Okay. Here we go. Ajni Midha at Andreessen Horowitz says, The Empire Strikes Back and shows ChatGPT versus Gemini. ChatGPT interest over time on, oh, well, I mean, you're trust Google on how Gemini is doing in search results.
Speaker 2:Also, there was other reporting that's there was reporting that showed that that agents are completely throwing like, agents that are crawling the web are totally throwing
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Interesting. No. I was completely kidding about Google cooking the results here. Obviously, they wouldn't do that.
Speaker 1:But Nano Banana launches and Gemini is definitely mooning. Again, I see them as two separate use cases. Like, when I think about the Nano Banana product, I don't see that as a direct competitor to GPT-five and the router to just answer questions, do things for you. Nano Banana is incredible. Gemini clearly has a huge advantage in video and image generation.
Speaker 1:That's why we're excited to partner with Fall, because they are a vendor for that and will help you get set up with it.
Speaker 2:And most businesses don't necessarily care about they're not looking to pick a single model. If you're a company like Canva, which uses Fall
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They're leveraging in multiple different models
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:At any given point.
Speaker 1:So if I think about, like, what what does Nano Banana mean? I feel like it is a it is an incredible product that will be baked into YouTube. You'll be able to generate thumbnails within the YouTube studio. There will be products that people use to generate imagery, and that will go out everywhere. If you're in an email and you need to generate imagery, it'll be baked into Gemini and into all the products.
Speaker 1:But this particular spike in the chart reads to me as if a Studio Ghibli moment, where it's like you get a ton of attention and people come in. But like what is driving ChatGPT use right now? It's not Ghibli's. That's not why people are coming to it. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The image generation is is definitely used, but I would say it's probably less than like 10% of queries, probably less than 2% of queries, honestly. Just based on my personal use, most of the time, I'm looking for a fact. I'm looking for a breakdown. I'm looking for some analysis. Go search the web.
Speaker 1:Put something together. And then every once in while, I go to it and I'm like, Okay, now I need to do an image generation thing. And so I don't necessarily fully agree with this take that the empire is striking back. I mean, it is a strike. They're striking back.
Speaker 1:But has the Empire won? We don't know.
Speaker 2:Good question.
Speaker 1:Anyway, question for you. Isaac says, I don't know anything about watches, but I'm looking for something respectable to wear on my wrist, something that a watch nerd might go nice at but won't break the bank. Any recommendations? What you got, Jordy?
Speaker 2:What does not breaking the bank mean?
Speaker 1:Richard Mill? Yeah. Stay away from the FP Jorns and the piece uniques because that's gonna break the bank. But Yeah. A nice RM.
Speaker 1:We race machine on the watch
Speaker 2:like a like an FP Jorn.
Speaker 1:That that could work too. Yeah. You're gonna wanna stay away from the Graf Diamonds hallucination because that's up in the 55,000,000 range. Yeah. But a Paul Newman Daytona.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be something the Watch nerd's gonna go next. Fortunately,
Speaker 2:this this is good news in the watch world. Trump was invited to the Rolex suite at the US Open Men's final, and he got to hang out with the Rolex CEO, Jean Frederic Dufour. The timeline is expecting some potential resolution or relief from the Swiss tariffs to come this week. Obviously, tariffs impacting at least secondary watch prices right away. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They've been kind of up across the board. So good if you have a bunch of watches you wanna sell bad if you're in the market.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking for a watch, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet series, any watch. You can chat with the Bezel Concierge, and you can ask them that exact prompt. You can say, what's a watch that would make make a watch nerd say nice, but not break the bank? They might recommend, I don't know, GMT Master, Batman, Rolex, something like that.
Speaker 1:That might be more reasonable. Anyway, Steve Jobs' office versus Tim Cook's office. I think this says a lot about why Apple feels different under Cook, says Sherman McCoy. But Sherman got put in the truth zone because that famous picture of Steve Jobs' office where it's all messy and Tim Cook's office is all nice and clean.
Speaker 2:Well, guess what? Let's see Tim Cook's home office.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's see Tim Cook's home office. It could be 10 times messier. Imagine it's just stacked He's just Yeah, the biggest 10 times the books. Just stacks of papers everywhere. So the picture on the left, it is Steve Jobs, but that's his home office.
Speaker 1:And Tim Cook is, of course, at the work office. But it's still probably something true there. Obviously, Tim Cook is the operations mastermind. Steve Jobs is more the creative genius. And so
Speaker 2:We got an old email here. February Steve thirteen Jobs. 02/2005, Sergey Brin sent an email to his executive management group.
Speaker 1:Read the subject line.
Speaker 2:Subject, irate call from Steve Jobs. And then he just types this out. It's clearly chain just like Stream
Speaker 1:of thought.
Speaker 2:Stream of consciousness. So I got a call from Steve Jobs today who is very agitated. It was about us recruiting from the Safari team. He was sure we were building a browser and we're trying to get the Safari team. He made various veiled threats too, though I'm not inclined to hold them against him too much as he seemed beside himself, as Eric would say.
Speaker 2:So I just wanted to check what our status was in various respects and what we want to do about partners, friendly companies, recruiting. On the browser, know and told him that we have Mozilla peep people working here, largely on Firefox. I did not mention we may release an enhanced version, but I am not sure we are going to yet. On recruiting, I've heard recently of one candidate out of Apple that had browser expertise, so I guess he would be on Safari. I mentioned this to Steve, he told me he was cool with us hiring anyone who came to us but was angry about systematic solicitation.
Speaker 2:I don't know if there's some systematic Safari recruiting effort that we have. Anyhow, I told him we are not building a browser and that to my knowledge, we were not systematically going after the Safari team in particular and that we should talk about various opportunities. I also said I would follow-up and check on our recruiting strategies with regard to Apple and Safari. He seems soothed. So please update me on what you know here and on what you think we should have as a policy.
Speaker 2:On another note, it seems silly to have both Firefox and Safari. Perhaps there is some unification strategy that we can get to these two to pursue combined. They certainly have enough market share to drive webmasters. And they would, in fact,
Speaker 1:The the phrase in here, systematic solicitation, it's like that defines the modern tech era so perfectly. Like, systematic so there was a time when CEOs would call each other and be like, hey, if if my people come to you, that's cool. But just don't don't create a list of everyone who works for my company and then try and go poach all of them simultaneously in one weekend while we're on vacation.
Speaker 2:Don't call them personally. Text them personally.
Speaker 1:Don't have don't invite them to dinner Invite them on your dock.
Speaker 2:Offer them a $100,000,000.
Speaker 1:Don't go wave surfing with them in Lake Tahoe.
Speaker 2:If they don't accept a 100, offer 200.
Speaker 1:Offer 200.
Speaker 2:Just keep going.
Speaker 1:Please don't do that. There was a But
Speaker 2:it is interesting. I mean, three and a half years later, they launched Google Chrome. Wow. So it is interesting that in this email Yeah. Like, you would think now, given what we know about platforms and operating systems and data Yeah.
Speaker 2:You would think that even at this point, Google was thinking we want to own the browser.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:if and obviously, I'm sure when he wrote this, he wasn't expecting it to one day be public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got to dig more into the browser wars. We were talking this weekend about perplexity. Are
Speaker 2:they over?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I think I think there's gonna be another run at it for for sure, and and we're gonna see some some developments. Anyway, if you're trying to poach engineers from big tech, you know the best way to do it. Billboard on the one zero one. Go to adquick.com.
Speaker 1:Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headings of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficiency in those advertising.
Speaker 2:And just find the billboards and just surround your enemies with recruiting messaging. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or pull an Avi Shiffman and buy 300 bills.
Speaker 2:Is that the largest cannot be true. That
Speaker 1:cannot be true.
Speaker 2:It could be true on a pure seems impossible, but on a pure volume basis, just volume of inventory Yeah. In a single
Speaker 1:Maybe for a single creative or something, a single image is the biggest. But when Apple launched the new iPhone, they put billboards in every single city. And it's huge. And I see them everywhere.
Speaker 2:It definitely is
Speaker 1:And movies. When movies come out, there's billboards everywhere.
Speaker 2:It's the most YOLO marketing move potentially of the year.
Speaker 1:It caught my eye. And it made me think, got to buy one. We got to demo it.
Speaker 2:Woah. We
Speaker 1:gotta make Tyler live with it for a week and see see what happens to him in the guinea pig.
Speaker 2:The question is, could you use that money a lot more efficiently buying ads on Meta? It's a consumer product. Probably easy to figure out who's the target buyer. You can get the halo effect of out of home advertising by buying strategic inventory.
Speaker 1:I do think that there is something special about having friend.com. When you go to friend.com, you just see the pendant, and that's it. And then you scroll down, and you see this Apple like experience that says Friend. And then you scroll down, and it has these questions. And so if it was tryfriend.ai and you put that on a billboard, I don't think that converts nearly as well as friend.com.
Speaker 2:The domain is the one thing that I think in the full net because the company doesn't work in two years, we can just wind wind the company down. He he he and and you have to look at the domain as like Yep. Like, does it increase your probability of success? I think for something like this, they can always on Yep. Listening devices.
Speaker 2:Already people aren't gonna trust it. So domains can deliver trust. And then does it yeah, does it just increase conversion rate of people just caring enough to not to mention just like seeing it's a great domain for out of home advertising, period.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No, no. I truly think it unlocks out of home advertising in a in a completely different way that try friend.ai would just convert way less than friend.com. I wanna know what's on that website. I'm just gonna type in friend.com, and then I'm on the flow.
Speaker 1:So I'm actually surprisingly bullish on a big big campaign, a big at home campaign for friend.com. Good luck to them. Well, we have our first guest of the show. We have Sunny from Grok, infrastructure for inference, purpose built for speed, quality, cost and
Speaker 2:safety. To the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining the show today. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 7:I'm doing good, guys. I'm, actually at the All In Summit. So No way. You know, coming in. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Exactly. So I'm just in in a green room here, so excited to be on with you guys.
Speaker 2:Did you already talk? Or you or is that coming up?
Speaker 7:No. No. No. I'm not talking. I'm just
Speaker 1:kinda like, yeah. Oh, but still in the green room.
Speaker 2:Still in the green room.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Well, we gotta get But I
Speaker 7:I had to get a favor so I could come on with you guys here.
Speaker 1:Nice. Nice. Appreciate it. Yeah. Take us through the last last week.
Speaker 1:I I believe you were at the dinner. What was kind of the what was the what was the vibe like? Just just walk us through your experience. Yeah.
Speaker 7:I mean, really special. Like, look. So first things first, I would say, you know, when you think about, you know, the president, what he's really done is he understands that he needs to enable technologists to basically do their thing. And I would I would, you know, summarize it in the following ways. One, he, you know, he brought everyone in and said, look.
Speaker 7:If you have some kind of issue, there's a team of people that you can work with, including David Sachs or just himself, to to get things unblocked. Right? And there's many issues that companies deal with, whether it, you know, comes to export control or or, you know, tariffs that are being put on or fines that are being put in our companies. And so he's really making himself available to to help our companies, you know, broadly. I think he's also understood that, you know, AI and technology is the forefront of where many of, you know, the innovations for the country will happen, including huge infrastructure projects.
Speaker 7:Right? So you heard that when the press came in and when they're asking, you know, the questions how much each company is spending. You know, looking at, you know, trillions of dollars of spend, which has downstream impact in manufacturing, construction, and other places. And so, you know, that that's something he's excited about. And I think lastly, like, this we, you know, we really want America to win, and he wants America to win.
Speaker 7:And so he's basically saying, look. I've got your I've got your back. I'm supporting you here, and I'm basically, you know, putting this on the forefront. So, you know, that's the high level. I would say the experience just diving into it was really special.
Speaker 7:You know, it started with a small gathering on the Rose Garden Club outside. It was raining.
Speaker 1:We were
Speaker 7:supposed to have a dinner there, but it got moved. And then a bunch of us got you know, all of us, I got moved into the Roosevelt Room, which is connected into the into the the Oval Office. And then, you know, he took his time basically meeting with each one of us quickly, getting everybody gathered together, and just kinda understanding concerns that folks had. And, you know, basically, us getting an experience in Oval Office, we all got a challenge coin. We got a pen, which is really cool.
Speaker 7:Like, a little, like, a little, you know, a memento, a very special memento. And then we all went to, you know, the East Wing for a dinner and, you know, private conversation followed by a little bit of the press came in, which you guys would have seen the videos and then conversation afterwards. And he really took the time to address, you know, everybody that was at the table and and, you know, make sure that if anybody had a concern, they had a chance to surface it there.
Speaker 2:What was top of mind for you specifically?
Speaker 7:I think, like, look, you know, the American AI stack, that's really important. That's something that was published at the AI action summit a couple you know, basically July. And so what we're really focused on is basically making sure that we help the government understand what that stack looks like. And so, you know, I don't know if your producers can pull it up, but we published something a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago now, that basically is our version of the stack, and we think it's been positively positively received by the the government and the administration. In terms of framework, we're not saying this is everything.
Speaker 7:We're not saying it's comprehensive. We're not saying it can't change. But, really, you know, the the, you know, kind of the Department of Commerce today is out there trying to understand what it should look like, and this is one view of the stack. And, really, what does that mean? Let's just kinda double click into that.
Speaker 7:Yeah. The stack is important because if The US is gonna keep export controls so that we can control, you know, highly sensitive technology getting into the wrong hands, you need to look at it from a stack perspective. A chip alone is not something enough that you should basically, you know, put a control on. So you gotta look at all the pieces. And on the flip side, if you are going to be a partner of The US and you're gonna wanna buy US assets, you wanna make sure that you have the whole list of things.
Speaker 7:Because if you don't have all the pieces, you're gonna end up with paperweights. Right? Really heavy and expensive ones. So you need to have, you know, pieces along all and that's what we sort of took a stab at when when we put that out there.
Speaker 1:Speaking of the AI stack, can you help me understand at a more precise level how you're positioning the company or at least telling the story around the company in terms of where you fit in the stack. Because we saw last week OpenAI is doing a deal for custom silicon with Broadcom. And then Semi Analysis came out with this article saying that basically Anthropic and AWS and Trainium are like super tightly co designed now. Google, obviously, with the TPU. Then and then I was I was chatting with some OpenAI people.
Speaker 1:They're like, you know, we actually talk to NVIDIA pretty closely. Like, we're like, we like, I don't know if codesign is the right word, but, like, we give input and, you know, the next generation of NVIDIA GPUs will be very capable of running ChatGPT. And so so so where how do you position where you fit into the Yeah. The American AI stack?
Speaker 7:Do you guys mind if I pull off a quick squeak screen share
Speaker 1:here? Yeah. You can, but we are live. So anything you share will be shared. So do not share all, your your private key to the those crypto holdings you got.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There you go. Thank you. Smooth.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so the way to think about your question exactly
Speaker 2:Can you zoom in a little bit? Is that possible? Or maybe we can on our side?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Maybe you have to do it on your side. I don't know if I can, but I I can try. You know, really, where that's called out at the bottom is so just to answer your question first, and I'll I'll try to zoom in without
Speaker 1:I think we can pull it up on your side.
Speaker 7:Yep. So really at the bottom there, which is, you know, this is infrastructure and the bottom is compute. In So the compute bucket right at the bottom here, you see NVIDIA, Grok, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom. Like I said, this is not comprehensive. You know, Broadcom is helping companies like Google and OpenAI and others make their chips.
Speaker 7:Right? And so the idea, you know, to answer your question is that the models come higher up, but you should be able to look at the stack and say, if you picked a piece from each one of these different categories that we've highlighted, you can have an end to end AI solution to either train the model, to either inference a model, or to build an application on top of it. Right? So those are the three things that this stack should enable. You may not need all the pieces depending on what you're doing.
Speaker 7:Right? If you're trying to train a model, clearly, you don't need databases. Right? But these are all the pieces that you need to basically do be able to do something in AI.
Speaker 1:Got it. Fascinating. Yeah. The the the this this thank you for putting this together. This this document is massive and deserves its own, like, deep dive.
Speaker 1:We'll have to dig in deeper.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. We we we can do another one.
Speaker 1:It's I do.
Speaker 7:If you guys ever want to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:What's the update on the projects in Europe? And then what what do you guys have cooking stateside?
Speaker 7:Yeah. You know, we've launched close to 14 different data centers this year, including, you know, one that we announced publicly. Yeah. Very decent. It's mad decent there.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We've we've we've launched 14 this year, and and we're we're continuing to expand our footprint. You know, Europe Europe is really fascinating. You know, they've you guys saw the announcement with ASML and their investment into Mistral. So it looks like they're waking up and and starting to basically put resources behind these things.
Speaker 7:So I think that's great. You know, our full our focus primarily in that region of the world is centered around data center and arrangement that we have in Saudi Arabia. And so that's in in partnership with Humane slash Aramco Digital, where it's the largest inference cluster in The Middle East, and we believe all the way into Europe. And so we serve, you know, sort of most of Asia, Europe, and The Middle East from that data center. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And our our goal right now, what we're cooking up is just an expansion of that. Right? So we're working to expand that cluster, add more capabilities, know, basically more capacity to that cluster because it's it's been well received and well consumed.
Speaker 1:Very cool. I know you have a hard out, so we'll let you go. But, last question for me. On that Mistral, ASML deal, it it kind of jumped out to me because it feels like they're almost like jumping a layer of the stack. Know, like, I typically think about, like, ASML sells to TSMC, which sells to NVIDIA and some other folks.
Speaker 1:And then the application layer and the Foundation Model Labs, like, sit on top of that. So you're kind of a couple steps away. Do you have any insight into what they were thinking? A lot of people are just saying, hey, it's a national champion. They want to support, and they're willing to kind of go outside the typical business that they do to make And an or maybe they just see it in purely financial terms, but it seems like if it was purely financial, they would've there there's a bunch of other things that they could invest in.
Speaker 1:You know? They're they're not a hedge fund.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah. No. Totally. I think the points you talked about are valid.
Speaker 7:I would add one thing to it, which is if you actually go back and listen to the launch of x AI, what Elon talks about is, like, you know, companies and his companies primarily using, you know, AI to better themselves. Right? And I think if you're someone like ASML, if you want a close partner, doing that with Mistral is quite smart. Right? How can they improve the tools that they make so that we can get, you know, better chips, better stuff in that layer of the the stack?
Speaker 7:And so I would say that's something that is getting underappreciated today, but more and more companies are doing that. Right? Getting more advanced AI so that they can basically do that. And and from their perspective, they're they're never be able to do that on their own. To your point, they're too far down.
Speaker 7:So but with the partnership there, maybe we'll get better machines. Maybe we'll get better power consumption from those things. Maybe we'll get, you know, better lithography from them. So That's interesting. That that I I would you know, if I was building a business outside of, you know, Grok today, that's something I would focus on is how can I really not just use this for the high level use cases we've seen, but really have it, you know, find new materials for me, look at, you know, different aspects of physics?
Speaker 7:And those are really hard problems that you need to be very closely embedded with a model maker, like a foundational model maker if you really wanna pull those off.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. Well, we will continue to monitor the situation as always, and thank you so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of the dinner and the update. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 7:Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:See you. Cheers. Yep. Let me tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 1:You can get started for free with Adio. Dot. Theo says
Speaker 2:that cognition. One thing one thing I wanted to highlight quickly because we didn't get to it earlier. T Mobile, AT and T, and Verizon all dropped pretty meaningfully on the EchoStar news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. Because T Mobile you want to basically going around T Mobile. It won't need to go through them because they'll own their own piece of the spectrum.
Speaker 2:Yes. T Mobile's market cap.
Speaker 1:20,000,000,000. Close. How much?
Speaker 2:273,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:273,000,000,000? Wow. Beast. Okay. Much space but
Speaker 2:how much SpaceX do the stock we own? So Verizon How much SpaceX stock we question. No. Verizon is a 182,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:They realized T Mobile was bigger than
Speaker 2:AT and T is 206,000,000,000, and Verizon is is bigger than all of them.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's almost like it's almost like owning a monopoly is valuable. Yeah. Seriously. Like, once you get those licenses, it just prints.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's so crazy that EchoStar was like on the verge of bankruptcy, like not making debt payments and they're just like, YOLO. And they weren't even leveraging the spectrum that they had.
Speaker 1:No. They just just Fascinating.
Speaker 2:You got a post from Peter.
Speaker 1:I'd rather talk about this Andrew McCallop story. So Project Bob has launched. You can go to dashboard.projectbob.xyz. Christian Kyle says, this is easily the coolest thing happening in the world today. Hobbyist launching an autonomous drone ship hoping to circumnavigate the globe.
Speaker 1:Andrew, of course, works at VARTA Industries on manufacturing and space. But in his free time, he tried to replicate the LK 99 superconductor. I was there on the night that he tried to get the rocks to float. It was very, very interesting. He's just a fantastic scientist and and builder.
Speaker 1:And I guess in his free time, he went and built a a boat that drives itself, talks to Starlink and a few other networks and wired it all up. And who knows? Maybe maybe it turns into a to a business. That's the nature of of launching side projects. If you're really good at them, eventually people will say like, well, I'd like to buy some, sir.
Speaker 1:And maybe the DOD will come to him, or the DOW, as they're called.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited for the drone era of exploration, just being able to send something off and follow it along live virtually is so cool.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:always Like, I I I want Andrew to take this and and properly send Antarctica
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Apparently, and just see, like, how how thrilling would it be to have nothing for days and weeks and months on end, then and then somebody just comes up on the video
Speaker 8:and just
Speaker 6:takes it out.
Speaker 1:You're Like,
Speaker 7:what are
Speaker 2:they doing down there?
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have our next guest, Scott Wu from Cognition Hi, Scott. Joining the stream. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Scott? How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's good.
Speaker 2:Good to see
Speaker 4:you again. It's been a little bit.
Speaker 1:Great to see you. I think I recognize that sweatshirt. Is that a Founders
Speaker 4:Fund sweatshirt? Is the Founders Fund sweatshirt. The right thing to do today. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We interviewed Alex Karp last week, and he he referred to it as the Founders Fund because back in the day, it was actually called the the Founders Fund, and then they dropped the the, which I think is funny. Yeah. Anyway, that we're not talking about Founders Fund. We're talking about your company. Give us the news.
Speaker 1:What's the latest?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we we just closed a a big fundraise led by Founders Fund, actually. And so so we kind of are talking about Founders Fund as well. We we we closed a raise at a $10,200,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 10:Yep. Super grateful for
Speaker 4:for for all the support that we've had.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Sorry. You're just
Speaker 4:Yeah. Busy busy month and a half for us since the Windsurf news. Mean, it's it's it's been a crazy couple months for Code and and for us, especially getting to see the two products mesh together has been has been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Where is the growth coming from? I remember, seeing a presentation by, at Microsoft Build, and they were talking about the value that dev ing can bring to replatforming. And that was super concrete for me because I can just imagine having an enterprise application written in dot net and wanting to move it to Python and that being a lot of work to write the test suite and move everything over and just being able to unleash a ton of AI agents and coding agents seemed like incredible value and an incredibly high leverage use of technology. Is that a big piece of the business?
Speaker 1:What what else is changing? What else is growing in the last year?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think that's right. A big part of what we do is is I kinda describe it as going and taking on engineering toil. You know? And so that includes, like, all these replatforms and migrations that folks have to do.
Speaker 4:That includes version upgrades, testing, documentation, you know, issue triaging, all of these various things. And it's you know, the reality is that that that's a lot of of what takes up time for software engineers today. I don't think it's anyone's favorite thing to do, but it is Yeah. It is a lot of the time for people. Right?
Speaker 4:And so so that's often what we see. And, you know, we've we've been working with a pretty big range of companies all the way from from the smallest start ups all the way to to some of the biggest enterprises in the world. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because Devon is in GA, so any start up can sign up for it. Correct? Yeah. But then obviously, have a you have a very talented team that goes and sells into very large enterprises as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's it been yeah. Windsurf was known for their g t you know, GTM team. What's it been like both just, like, bolting on or or really integrating a team like that? You guys yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's really added a lot of firepower.
Speaker 4:It's been incredible, honestly. I mean, even I think just the two products themselves because, you know, as we were saying last time, like, a lot of the the the there there's kind of these two categories of product experiences that devs are using today. Right? There's the IDEs and the agents. Yep.
Speaker 4:And even just being able to have both and kind of serve that all in one solution with Windsurf and Devon has been amazing for us. And so we've seen a bunch of I I mean, Windsurf and Devon were both already each individually growing, but but in the last month and a half, it's it's grown even faster.
Speaker 1:I wanna go into a little bit of a debunkathon, hit you with some some data points, and then give me a lot more context. So Yeah. The first one that we saw, this is all from extremely reliable sources, usually random screenshots that I see on X. But one was that when when a when a developer uses a an AI coding tool, they generate twice as much code but 10 times as many security vulnerabilities. Do you have anything to add?
Speaker 1:Does that sound right? Does that sound wildly off? What can we do to stop creating security vulnerabilities?
Speaker 4:Yeah. There's a there's a lot of studies out there. You know? Studies have different sample sizes, and they have different ways that they measure these things. For us, you know, with a lot of the projects that that we deliver because, you know, if somebody's doing a whole replatform or something, you know, that is a concrete project that you're, you know, you're you're you're setting up a team to do and kind of accounting for how many hours you need to do.
Speaker 4:With with the enterprise customers that we work with, we typically see speed ups of around eight to 15 x Mhmm. In terms of how long it takes. Yeah. So so they're basically, they're doing in one hour of an engineer's time using Devon what would typically take eight hours without Devon. Wow.
Speaker 4:And and I think that the the main thing that you really have to call out here is, like, it it really depends on the use case. Right? And so I think for a lot of these kind of, like, repetitive tedious things that, frankly, the engineers don't wanna do anyway, like, that that's where tools like Devon work really, really, really well. You know? Devon is not necessarily you know, you could use Devon to try and kind of, like, be the ideator with you or something like that, but it's it's it's not today what we've optimized Devin for.
Speaker 4:And and so that's that's perhaps what what folks are seeing in in some of these different coding products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then on the security vulnerability side, do you need a a you know, you okay. You have Devin, but do you need, like, Bill? Like, a different agent that just is watching for security? Well, they're really saying
Speaker 2:Old Bill.
Speaker 1:In in traditional software development, you might have, like, yeah, there's this great developer that can just churn out code really fast. But then we got the guy over here or the gal over here that really knows what is secure and what's not and where the flags are and your pen testers. Like, is that a different product? Is that just a different layer of what you're training for? Or have you kind of built Devon in a way that you don't inject security vulnerabilities?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a good question. So so I I I think with security, I I think the main thing I would just call out here is, like, this is a problem that all engineering orgs have already had to think about and deal with. You know, it's not necessarily new in the age of AI that you have to think about developers introducing security vulnerabilities. Right?
Speaker 4:And and, yeah, you know, to to your point, we have a lot of these processes in place for that, right, which is, you know, the first one probably is just code review itself. Right? I mean, people you know, typically, you don't you don't allow people to just merge their code straight to master or or or or something like that. And and similarly, you know, you wanna have similar processes in place for your AI agents. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I think there will be specific kind of, like, security based agents, but I I I kind of imagine it draws on a lot of the same code based intelligence and just, like, understanding, you know, what what these functions are meant for or how these are meant to be used, which is kind of a shared intelligence. And so, you know, maybe we release our own kind of, like, security theme to Devon that that specifically does, you know, does this, security review or or or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 2:Are you seeing companies change their hiring practices at all after implementing Devon and getting getting starting to get value out of it? We've just been curious to learn how companies are app actually adapting as they sort of ramp up AI AI coding tools.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a great question. It depends a lot on the space of company because, obviously, you know, all companies are competing with the others in their space, and that's what ultimately comes down to this. But, honestly, I I I think what we've seen, actually, it looks like folks taking more and more projects in house. And so a lot of things that folks typically would have outsourced to a team of contractors or, you know, handed off to a system integrator or something like that, they're actually just doing in house with Devon, and they're able to do that faster.
Speaker 4:So, you know, one one of our biggest customers actually was, you know, is a bank in Latin America that that started using us around the start of this year for, you know, some of these refactors and migrations and so on. And then just got to the point where their their team was seeing, like, a lot more effectiveness using the tool, and then they they 10 x their contract within the last eight or nine months. And if anything, they're growing headcount. They're not shrinking at the end. Every single one of their, you know, their engineer if if every engineer is worth way more, then obviously, you you want more engineers.
Speaker 4:You wanna
Speaker 2:add more engineers. Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's continue the debunkathon. We saw some data from the census that showed that AI is cooked. It's done. It's over.
Speaker 1:Dropped. The actual data point was for firms polled by the census of that they have over two fifty employees, the level of AI adoption, quote unquote, had dropped from 14% to 12%, a little dip in the chart. Of course, people are joking about this, memeing about this, saying it's all over, but also joking that, of course, this is just one data point. To me, it seemed extremely low to think that only 10% of businesses are even using AI, since AI is kind of everywhere now and everyone uses AI and all sorts of things. Anyway, what is your take on what's going on in that data point or in that stat specifically?
Speaker 1:And other kind of context can you add for us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think I saw this chart. This is the one that was going around Twitter where it says, like, in July and August, there was, a tiny you know, and then everyone was freaking about yeah. Yeah. So Sam, you know, I I I I don't really I I haven't looked into the methodology of how they figured out that number.
Speaker 4:It's kind of interesting because, I mean, for us, obviously, like, a lot of our work is with big enterprises, you know, specifically working on these massive code bases, and July and August have been our biggest months ever, you know, by far. So that's that's that's that's what we see in terms of the the the data. But but I feel like the high level thing, which I would just call out is, you know, I I think there's still a kind of, like, like, collective like, I I I don't know what there there there's, like, a there's, like, a collective, like, refusal to to see, you know, reality, which is, if I were to say it, is is basically we have AI that passes the Turing test. We have AI that gets an IMO gold medal. We have AI that, you know, does all these crazy things, which ten years ago, we would would have pretty clearly called AGI.
Speaker 4:You know? Mhmm. And it doesn't mean that you do all of this work for free as a result. There's obviously still a ton that you have to do to teach the specific capabilities and and to make the right product experiences and to get, you know, actual businesses out there in the world going and using these things. But but I I just think the store you know, the things that we're asking the AI to do are not harder than getting an IMO gold medal, put it that way.
Speaker 4:And so so there's there's a lot of work to do. You know, I don't wanna diminish like, it's gonna be years and years, you know, of taking all of the techniques that we now have and figuring out how to build the right experiences and get them out to everyone. But but I really don't think also, I I love that every time I come, I'm just the I'm just the the crazy AI bull, you know, that's my new but but but, like, you know, I I think it seems very clear that that AI will do more and more of of this work over time. You know? And and software engineering, I think you see this especially, which is, if anything, I think the best coders are the ones whose whose flows have changed the most dramatically.
Speaker 4:Right? And and you just think about how many engineers there are out there that still have to learn these tools and have to get on these things. Like, I don't think we are due for a slowdown anytime too soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The methodology of the census data was a little bit odd to me. Basically, they called up individual proprietors, business owners, and they said, are you using AI? And they defined AI as predictive analytics, data analytics, image processing, voice recognition, machine learning, natural language learning, So a
Speaker 2:bunch of people said, no. We're not doing we're not doing data.
Speaker 1:We're not doing data analysis, which was very odd. Only 10% of people said yes to this question. I feel like it should be, like, 100% because, like, if you if you're using Stripe, like, there's machine learning under the hood for fraud detection. You're using Gmail, like Gemini is right there. There's going to be autocomplete on your phone is using data analysis.
Speaker 1:Anyway, my real question is one of the lowest hanging fruits that I see in the software that I interact with is in government, you know, government websites, basically. I imagine that the Census could benefit from having Devin run around, write better polling software. Is there anything on the horizon where you might be working with the government? Is that something where you need to get ITAR compliance or something before you go in there? Is it on the road map?
Speaker 1:What do you think in terms of improving the software that our government serves to us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. No. I I I think it's a great point. And as you say, I think there's a lot of work to do. It's it's a great example of the kind of, like, you know, the the messy problems, which I I think it is very clear will be solved over the next couple years.
Speaker 4:You know, I I would there there's no reason that the government shouldn't be using tools like these to go and build their websites better and faster, and everyone knows, you know, how many bugs there are, how many simple things that could just be fixed, you know, if if there were an AI software engineer available to go and do this. A lot of you know, it's it's it's it's funny because I think WinterF actually, funnily enough, was ahead of us on on, you know, getting things moving with FedRAMP and getting certified in all these things, but but it's something that that we're working on as well.
Speaker 2:So That's very exciting. Are you are you thinking at all about other acquisitions over the next couple years? You got a big balance sheet
Speaker 4:That's fine.
Speaker 2:To this point.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. And you know the I mean, the last one went pretty well. So now I mean, mean, it's it's I I I think it's I I think for us, it's it's obviously really valuable to have this capital for a few different reasons, you know, with model training, I think with hiring great talent, with expanding go to market, and so on. You know, is it possible that that part part of that will also, you know, go towards, you know, buying other companies?
Speaker 4:Of course, it's possible. There there are not any plans at the moment.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Terms of your position in the stack, I see you as sort of like a initially like an enterprise level application layer company that then is now going down with Windsurf into more of a B2B context, not full consumer, but more broad usage, famously model agnostic, not training foundation models, not working down the stack. And we're seeing the foundation model companies do deals with Broadcom to co develop chips and what Elon's doing with Samsung. And there's a lot of these data points. Are there any other places where you want to at least have better relationships with other with other layers of the stack?
Speaker 1:Is any of that important, or is it really just like you have your slice and you're just gonna go and run at that for the foreseeable future?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a it's a really good question. I mean, I think in terms of relationships, for sure, I mean, we work very closely with the Foundation Labs, for example. You know, we have lots of things going on in terms of how we do compute or even kind of like partners that we work with on distribution, right, which I think are great. I I would say, you know, I I I think the for for us, it's we we obviously I think it's very important for us to just have a lot of humility about where we're coming from and what we're doing.
Speaker 4:You know, we're obviously, you know, a a very new entrant to space and and, you know, are only, like, 0.1% of the way there. And I think, you know, for us to be able to meaningfully succeed is gonna require a lot of focus. And so I think from that perspective, you know, I I think the, like, you know, we we we know what what is the area that we really kind of want to own, and that's that's basically, you know, everything between the the you know, that goes from taking the model the base model itself and then doing the right kind of capabilities work and building that into a product experience that, you know, real engineers can use every day. And I think I think we will stay quite narrow kind of within that focus ourselves for for the So
Speaker 2:you're saying job's not finished?
Speaker 4:Job's not I mean, it's it's it's it's barely even started, honestly, I think. And and I think like the think, I obviously, there there is a, you know, there there there's there's, I think, a vision of the future where where, as we said, you know, where where software engineering is just as easy as telling your computer what to do. And and I think the world of software engineering has already changed in some meaningful ways over the last two to three years because of, you know, all these AI coding tools. But I think we've got another, like, ten, twenty generations of product experiences, you know, as a community to to build and unlock until we get to that full future. So
Speaker 1:Important question. Was this latest round of financing negotiated with Founders Fund over poker or chess?
Speaker 4:Unfortunately, it was you know, it was funny. Actually, we were on the weekend that we did the Windsurf deal. We obviously, I mean, it was it was a pretty substantial commitment from us in terms of Windsurf. And so, you know, we wanna we we we explicitly needed board approval, but also, you know, wanted to give our investors an update and kind of hear what they thought and so on. And so, you know, we were on with the Founders Fund team with Napoleon and Peter and and getting their thoughts on on what they thought makes sense.
Speaker 4:And, I I mean, first of all, they they were they were really supportive of us doing the deal, and they thought, you know, the partnership made a lot of sense for for a lot of the same reasons that that we did. But but they also, you know, were very clear of, like, hey. Like, I
Speaker 8:know this is going to
Speaker 4:be, you know, a big thing for you guys on the balance sheet and and for for for for you guys as a company, and, you know, we wanna be clear that we we we stand ready to to support you in the next thing if this is the deal that you wanna do. And honestly, that's a lot of what gave us the confidence to be able to go ahead with it and close the whole deal, you know, in in the forty eight hours or seventy two hours or whatever it ended up being. And so
Speaker 2:We're good for our 400,000,000.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's it's it's it's really been amazing. I I can't I can't shout them out enough. You know, Napoleon and Peter and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And the whole team that we've gotten to work with have have have been great to us.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Tell us the story of the deal that was negotiated over. Was it poker? How did that come together?
Speaker 4:So so it's a funny one. In retrospect, so so it didn't actually happen. Mhmm. But but, basically, when we were doing the the series a, you know,
Speaker 2:one of the very
Speaker 4:early rounds of the company, it was me and Napoleon. And, you know, I was here and he was there or something like that, and and there was, like, a and I I think at some point, was clear that the deal was gonna get done, you know, but it was just kind of, like, going through some of the more minor terms and and making sure we were on the same page of everything. And we kind of put, you know, what if we what if what if we just had a nice heads up match to go and settle this and decide whose terms we're gonna take? We we did not do that. Was probably probably for the better that we didn't do that, but but but but yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. But the story lives on as as something
Speaker 4:The story lives on.
Speaker 1:It almost happened or was at least, like, joked about, which is fantastic. Is great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Jordy, do you have anything else?
Speaker 2:No. Congrats.
Speaker 1:Know you got a busy day, so we'll let you get back to it. But we always appreciate
Speaker 2:Try to try to have another reason to come on before the end of the year, at least a couple, you know. It's a great offer.
Speaker 1:I mean, there there's gonna be plenty more stuff to debunk through Yeah. The rest of the year. There's gonna be tons of data points that people read into way too much, and we will be giving you a call.
Speaker 2:I was going to say,
Speaker 4:I look forward to coming on again and being the idiot optimist that just everyone else is giving their rational arguments about, this is going to work, this is not going to work. And I'm just here saying everything's bullish. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, you want one more, we can talk about inference costs. I mean, people are saying that, oh, inference costs aren't falling. You got to use the latest and greatest model, and your gross margins are going be terrible forever. Debunk that one for me.
Speaker 4:Sure. No. I mean, I I think there's so so I I think there's two separate questions there. You know? One is the question of is the business going to be defensible?
Speaker 4:You know? Are you going to be able to offer something that that, you know, you the the you're competing with your competitors on something that is not just purely a race to the bottom? Right? And then the second thing is, like, is the cost value trade off for the customers going to actually make sense? Right?
Speaker 4:I think the second one is just very obviously true because, you know, as these tools if the trade off is, you know, doing more and more and speeding up labor, right, is, you know, making every accountant faster and making every lawyer faster and so on. I mean, at some point, it's pretty obvious that the machines are cheaper, you know, that that that cheap enough that making, you know, every lawyer three times faster is just obviously a no brainer. Right? I think on the the point of the first one, you know, obviously, it's a great point, and and I think that's it's different for every different company. You know, I think a lot of the the businesses and the application there need to think a lot about, you know, what is their special sauce and what is their differentiation.
Speaker 4:But I think the answer for for most probably of what that comes to is a combination of one is just really, really focusing on specific use cases and delivering solutions that are that are, you know, really kind of custom solutions for the problem that they're specifically solving. And then two is, you know, I think there is, like, a real kind of I'll call it, like, a personalization effect that that I think we're seeing more and more. You know, there's ChatGPT memory, for example. Obviously, Devon has its own whole knowledge system where, you know, as the tool just understands the customer and their own business and their trade offs and everything much, much better, that itself is obviously something that just makes the product, you know, more and more powerful just for them and and is the kind of thing that would command that value.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 4:I think that's it's it's you know, from a perspective of is AI you know, are are we gonna have monster intelligent AI that's just so smart, but we just, you know, we just we just turn the machines off because they're too expensive. You know, I don't think we'll have that future. I think there's a there's a a very reasonable question about, know, where that value capture comes in, and I and think that's why all these businesses are thinking about, what is this one thing that I'm going to do really, really well that's going make my business durable?
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on a busy day. Good to hear that the job's not finished. I love unfinished jobs.
Speaker 2:It's the best. I hate when the job's done.
Speaker 1:I hate when the job's done.
Speaker 2:So congrats. Give our best to the team.
Speaker 1:We will talk to Yeah. You
Speaker 2:Will do. Thanks for
Speaker 4:having me.
Speaker 1:You, See guys. Bye. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I had
Speaker 1:You had a terrible night, right?
Speaker 2:I had a brutal night, but not because of my eight sleep. I
Speaker 1:had No. I I got an 82. I'm sleeping pretty good. I think I get the sound effect.
Speaker 2:I managed to pull a 75 Is
Speaker 1:it bad? Despite Eight sleep is
Speaker 2:working It for working you.
Speaker 1:It was like, we gotta get this guy some sleep. There's kids everywhere.
Speaker 2:The three year old is up. The one year old is throwing up. Gotta was just
Speaker 1:Adaptive AI coming in asshole. To help you sleep better. Anyway, go to eightsleep.com. Get a Pod five. Five year warranty, thirty day risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.
Speaker 1:And we will bring in our next guest, Ara Karazian from ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. Good to see you, Ara.
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 2:Great to
Speaker 5:Thanks see for having me again.
Speaker 1:Thanks for hopping
Speaker 2:on. So much data driven chaos in the timeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I want to talk about September. But first, let's start with this data that it's completely over and no businesses are going to be using AI. Because if you look at the trend line, we went from 12% to 10%. If you track that out on the line, it's going to be 0% no, not that one.
Speaker 1:It might be negative 50% of businesses using AI.
Speaker 5:You're talking about the AI adoption data from Census?
Speaker 1:I am talking about the Census AI adoption The
Speaker 2:folks that brought you the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:The real expert.
Speaker 1:So what was your reading?
Speaker 5:I've I've I've been thinking about the census AI adoption data for a long time because we have our own measurement of it with RAMP data. Yep. That's .com/data/aiindex.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:What I don't like about the census measurement and why I think it might be underestimating AI adoption is that the question that they have written is not the right way to measure AI adoption. Essentially, the way the census measures it is they ask businesses, do you use AI to produce goods and services? And that makes sense because they wrote the question back in, like, 2023 when we weren't really sure what AI was gonna look like. But AI to produce goods and services, that's first of all, that's econ speak. Right?
Speaker 5:That's how economists talk to each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But Well, yeah. And even if somebody technically like, in in my view, if somebody provides any type of services to somebody and they use AI call transcription, like someone on their team is, recording calls and, like, transcribing with AI, that to me, like, qualifies as,
Speaker 1:like I literally have AR leveraging In 2013, I was running a consumer packaged goods company. Our business was making protein shakes. That was the physical good that we produced. We also would transcribe all of our all of our calls. And so were we using AI to produce goods and services?
Speaker 1:I would have said, absolutely. We're linear regression, and we're projecting out our financials. We're doing all sorts of stuff that fits in the bucket. But yes, to your point, it's not
Speaker 5:you're a forward thinking business leader.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:And that makes sense. But most people reading that think, oh, am I literally using AI to produce widgets on my factory floor?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 5:It's the kind of question that doesn't really capture the way that AI in the past three or four years of its development has more or less has mostly been adopted by businesses for back office tasks.
Speaker 1:Yep. So
Speaker 5:And when you look at that 10%, it's I think most people would say, yeah, for most businesses that's pretty low. Forget, you know, tech forward businesses just in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the overall number of like 10% of American businesses using AI, that seemed ridiculously low to me because just consumer LLMs like ChatGPT are like 50% adoption amongst American adults. And so it just doesn't math with me that someone would be that four out of five Americans would be using ChatGPT and then walk into work and be like, No, I'm not going to use AI for my job. But what I'm more interested in is like, why do we think that there's a peak and then a fall off at all? My theory was like, maybe these big companies are getting sold on you gotta use AI to produce goods and services.
Speaker 1:They try and roll out some zombie change management strategy where
Speaker 2:they're I remember the Klarna CEO did this big I'm
Speaker 1:gonna use AI for everything.
Speaker 2:And then he ended up saying, take it back. So People are pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so did you ever read on that at all?
Speaker 5:Well, there's a few things. One, the sample sizes for these surveys are actually pretty small. They run these surveys every two weeks.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And, you know, like most government survey collection, particularly if it's run every two
Speaker 2:weeks, you're
Speaker 5:gonna get some mixed differences in who responds. Sure. So that's part of it. I think some of it just might be some noise in the dataset because it did come back up in the most recent read. Yep.
Speaker 5:It wasn't that much of a decline in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:You could write it off as as a noisy data. The second thing is that it's not unreasonable to think that the fact that this was conducted in the summer might mean that even at the businesses who responded to the survey, the person who responded to that survey at that business might be different.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 5:This is another reason why I really don't like business surveys is that they try to capture what a business is thinking, which is a large, complex organization. Yeah. But they require one person at that business to answer the question.
Speaker 1:Okay. So for
Speaker 2:you Easy for you to say you've
Speaker 1:got tens of thousands of businesses
Speaker 2:and their actual purchasing behavior.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So flip it over. What is the data actually saying about the level of AI adoption in the business world?
Speaker 5:When we look at ramped spend data, AI adoption is up. AI adoption is now about 45% of businesses in The US. It varies by sector.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:So adoption is much higher in tech and finance. About 70% of tech firms on our platform adopted AI in some paid form. I still think that's probably pretty low. Not capturing free usage or capturing employee usage on their own personal accounts.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:But then even in restaurants, for example, we see 20% adoption of AI. Wow. And I think that's likely
Speaker 2:And what does that mean in the restaurant context? It's it's it's like they pay that could be they're paying for ChatGPT's, like, pro plan or they're using a,
Speaker 5:like, called Marketing materials. Like, developing, like, a you know? I mean, I've seen menus that have AI generated images. That's not my favorite example. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But a much better example is is designing a Facebook ad that uses an AI generated image or copy that really speeds up a lot of the work that a restaurant owner otherwise has to do. I mean, these restaurants and firms often have really small staffs.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And so I've talked to some restaurant owners who use Ramp, for example, and talked to them about how they use AI. And for them, for the most part, it does automate a lot of the sort of not just back office work, but a lot of the work that lets them get back to work of doing the restaurant work that they want to do.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, let's flip it over to the nine ninety six phenomenon. There's been some spicy quotes on the timeline talking about how nine nine six working on Saturday is super trendy. Everyone's doing it. What does the data say?
Speaker 5:So does everyone know what nine nine six is in the audience? Break it for us.
Speaker 2:I think our
Speaker 1:I think everyone knows, but break it down for us
Speaker 2:in Nine a
Speaker 5:nine six, I is is associated with Chinese working culture, though I believe it's actually illegal in China now. Though I think it's still often practiced.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 5:And it means Bad voice. 9AM to they work 9AM to 9PM, six days a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then it it kinda seems like it's caught fire in in Silicon Valley and tech culture in this whole, like, wellness oriented, run fast, lift heavy, marry early, work 9AM to 9PM, six days a week, and just focus on your business.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:And most of the stories have been vibes based. Like, it's just people in startup world talking about what they're doing. It's true. It's actually happening and shows up in the
Speaker 2:Like, the question is, how will you know a founder works nine nine six?
Speaker 1:They'll tell you. They'll tell you. Yeah. But, I mean, a lot of people were wondering, is this a LARP? Is this is this something where, yes, Saturday is for working.
Speaker 1:It's for bad posting about how you're working. But you're saying that the data actually suggests that there is business activity happening on Saturdays in start ups at an increased rate.
Speaker 5:Well, in the one specific way we looked at it, in this one we looked at, whose you know, employee cards. So we're not necessarily just looking at founders. We're looking at just people at the company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:Who are more or less expensing business meals
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Or, like, late time meals on Saturdays
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Or, like, DoorDash takeout, other things like that. A lot of the criticism that I've gotten today on the timeline has been like, oh, well, you can't tell if maybe some people are saying it's fraud. It must be these people who are fraudulently using their business cards. Sure. I want you to read my post because in my post, found it it's just SF.
Speaker 5:Oh, Like, this isn't happening in New York.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:It's not happening in Austin.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 5:It's not happening in Miami. This is just an SF thing. And it's also really new. This wasn't happening last year. Wow.
Speaker 5:It perfectly coincides with when people started talking about the nine nine six cultural movement.
Speaker 1:Fascinating.
Speaker 5:Wow. Unless if you wanna argue that, oh, frauds this whole this
Speaker 2:I mean, it really proves it really proves there's no such thing as a free lunch because in these cases, the employees are getting a free lunch, but they had to work on Saturday to get it.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's one of the worst ways to do fraud. It's like, here's my $20 Chinese food.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:So let's think about going deeper in this analysis. How else could we unpack this? One way I'm thinking is, well, meals make a ton of sense. If you're working late, you expense a meal. But also, there's just the normal business activity that you might sign up for a new marketing software on Tuesday.
Speaker 1:You might also sign up for it on Saturday. If you're doing that on Saturday, that's probably even less likely to be fraudulent because why are you putting your credit card down with our latest sponsor, Turbo Puffer? Because if you're signing up for a database tool and you're putting your credit card down now, maybe they run the credit cards at a different time, who knows? But I'm wondering if there's a layer to the onion that you could pull back there. Are there any other data points that you think you'd be looking at in the next few weeks that might help you crystallize this and really, really steal up your position for the haters?
Speaker 5:So the point you're making is really good because there's someone else who really interesting reply I got was someone who works, I guess, in credit risk. One of the big signals they had about whether or not an application for their, I guess, finance software product was fraudulent was whether or not the application was submitted on a weekend.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And they started looking into all of the ones that they got on weekends, and most of them were false positives, at least Totally the ones from anecdotal information
Speaker 1:From SF. Oh, because people That's Because it's fraud everywhere else, but in SF, it's the grind.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is really bad for everyone but SF because it shows that the great lock in is really only happening in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:It's local.
Speaker 2:In the area. It's a local phenomenon.
Speaker 1:It's local phenomenon.
Speaker 2:It's not actually people in New York, oh, oh, great lock in, great lock
Speaker 1:in. So going forward, yeah, we got to look at if business software purchases are up in San Francisco on the weekend. I also want to know if it's going to spread, if we're going to have some memetic contagion, and we're going to see the Great Lock In potentially spread to New York. That would be likely for me. I want to know Miami,
Speaker 2:Austin, colder in New York for
Speaker 1:Potentially. Potentially.
Speaker 5:New York got a bit close to it, but not Not maybe a quarter of the effect size.
Speaker 1:Wow. Huge And
Speaker 5:it was only after 8PM. It wasn't like in our chart for for SF, like, it really is starting at about nine a. M, ten a. M.
Speaker 1:Wow. What about, what about timing? You said this is a new phenomenon in San Francisco. If you scroll back the timeline, when do you start seeing a takeoff of this September culture in San Francisco?
Speaker 5:Over the last six months.
Speaker 1:Six months? It's that recent. Wow.
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's fantastic. We don't see this in 2024 really at all.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. I feel like 2024 was definitely a year where people were were working, but I guess it just picked up a whole new whole new gear.
Speaker 2:Was before the current capital wars began.
Speaker 5:When we had this idea, I was I really didn't expect to see anything because when you it's pretty rare to see these kinds of spend shifts in any demographic.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Especially, like, when I looked at it nationally, was completely unmoved because most people don't really change something as worn in as their eating habits that often. Even, you know, tech employees are workers. So I really I really didn't expect to see anything. And the only time you would expect to see something like this is a pre to post pandemic trend. Yeah.
Speaker 5:2019 to 2021, a bunch of public and private data sets started to show shifts in where and when people were eating. Right? A really classic one from the pandemic era was, movement from outside the city center. So, you know, people were spending much less time downtowns, and then suburbs start seeing a lot more activity. That was a really popular one during the pandemic period.
Speaker 5:But after the pandemic, you really stopped seeing this kind of shifting. Most people kind of set in their ways and things were back to normal. So the fact that we saw this only saw it in SF, and that it was so recent is pretty rare and shocking.
Speaker 1:Question for me on on the the nine ninety six question. Part of it is not just the six not just Saturday, but the nine to nine Are you also seeing or do you think there's it's worthwhile to look into what's happening from five p. M. To nine p. M?
Speaker 1:Because that's also the hallmark of the nine nine is that it's not like nine to five six days a week. It's nine to nine And so you should expect more employees expensing food late night on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on a Friday because they're working longer hours. And so is there a way that we can measure the weekday hours worked by San Francisco employees?
Speaker 5:Yeah. One of the really great data sets for this would probably be GitHub commits.
Speaker 1:Oh, GitHub commits. Yeah, we got to call up We have the CEO of GitHub on. We should ask him to pull something. Yeah. And then, of course, there's a public data set, but I think that's mostly for open source projects.
Speaker 1:I don't I know if the know that there's like a heat map of when people commit, but it's only by day. I don't think it's by time. So the data would probably be internal. But I don't know. I mean, it's a Redmond, Washington company.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if they're going to put something out, publish it that says that San Francisco is outworking Yeah. Redmond. That might be a little controversial for Microsoft to do. Anyway, you so much for hopping. You for joining.
Speaker 1:Anything else to share? We good.
Speaker 5:Thanks, guys, for having me. Subscribe to my Substack, econlab.substack.com.
Speaker 1:Econlab.substack.com. Let's go. Ahead.
Speaker 2:Call the app data or anyone else does it.
Speaker 1:Go Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to Thanks, Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 8:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye.
Speaker 2:Next up, we got Zach from Warp coming in.
Speaker 1:Before we bring them in, well, let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge
Speaker 2:That reminds me. Actually need
Speaker 1:to It's a
Speaker 7:go big wander piece of
Speaker 1:home, but better.
Speaker 2:Writing it down in my notes.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we have our next guest, maybe? Yes?
Speaker 1:Okay. Great. Let's bring them in.
Speaker 2:There we go. There we go. Second day. How you doing?
Speaker 1:I am
Speaker 2:loving this warp this is warp country.
Speaker 1:Warp country. I don't understand why I'm wearing a warp themed cowboy hat, but maybe I'll explain. What what what's new in your world?
Speaker 8:So I've been, you know, filming a western, basically. Can see me doing a product demo on a horse.
Speaker 1:Well, very cool.
Speaker 8:Because, you know, why not? We we just did a major launch called Code Country.
Speaker 6:Code Country.
Speaker 8:Theme is all about coding on warp, and we decided it'd be fun to do it with a little bit of like, hey. Let let's let's show how warp can help you wrangle your agents. So that is why you're wearing a cowboy hat.
Speaker 2:Zach, I'm pissed off because I was with John last Friday before we literally before we got to the office and we saw these fine hats. Do you remember when I was pitching you on doing hat as a merch Yep. For a company that we work with? And I was the the tagline for the campaign was like, I was gonna I was gonna pitch this to Vanta. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You just say like, this is Vanta country.
Speaker 1:This Vanta country. Funny. But I guess this is a world country.
Speaker 2:You beat us to it. You beat us to very well. So so Perfect. It's a great concept. You need to you need to create things that that people will remember you by.
Speaker 2:And I don't think people are gonna forget the three of us sitting here with these hats on just talking about Code Country.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Explain to me what it means to wrangle agents. I feel like I've used agents pretty reliably. Like, I just, this weekend, I need a new breakfast place.
Speaker 1:I kicked off ChatGPT agent mode. It went off and hunted around. I got some weird ones I posted that Yeah. I asked for a table that was circular, and it found me a used wooden spool that's used to wrap coils around. And it's actually, for like $50 like probably the best circular round big table you can get.
Speaker 1:So it was thinking outside the box. It was great. And then I've also used Cloud Code. Obviously, I think of that as age agentic. We've talked to other folks on the show.
Speaker 1:But I saw this interesting dashboard on X where someone had some visualization of all the different agents that they'd spawned out. Like, what does the frontier of using multi agents look like? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What does the frontier look the like? What
Speaker 1:Frontier frontier looks like.
Speaker 2:So These
Speaker 1:days So you
Speaker 2:around these parts.
Speaker 8:The the situation is such if you look at, if you look at pro developers using agents in their daily workflow, it's, they kinda produce stuff that's not shippable a lot of the time.
Speaker 2:They produce security hey. You can't argue. They do produce security vulnerabilities there.
Speaker 8:You know, it's like yeah. They you can ship if you're not careful, you can ship security holes. You can you you get to a point where developers on your team don't even know what they're coding. It's really a mess to vibe code in production right now, and the thing that we've been focusing on is, like, how do you get a tighter feedback loop where you can see what an agent is doing, you can review its work as it goes. You can make sure that people on your team who are building with agents are, like, you know, comprehending what they're doing, that they're code reviewing the agent's code in the app.
Speaker 8:And so this is a real a real problem. If you look at the Stack Overflow, latest Stack Overflow survey, like, number one problem that developers have developing with agents is, like, they produce hard to debug code that they don't understand, and so you end up wasting a bunch of time. So, yeah, we're just trying to help help people keep their agents, you know, steer them as we talk as as we say. I
Speaker 1:wanna do this whole thing, you know. Yeah. So, well, what do you think about these here, vibe code cleanup specialists? People that are making a living now going around Going to the frontier.
Speaker 2:Going to the frontier.
Speaker 1:And cleaning up old vibe coating projects.
Speaker 8:You gotta bring a sheriff into town sometimes to clean clean up some messy some messy clothes.
Speaker 2:Messy vibe coating. He's gonna be
Speaker 1:pulling back That some
Speaker 8:to me is, like, a symptom of something gone wrong with the tooling if you're getting to a point where you need, like, a a janitor or whatever to come and clean up clean up your code. You want you wanna get the engineers on your team
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:To be able to produce shit that that Yeah. Actually goes out to production.
Speaker 1:I guess my my other take on on this bad code cleanup specialist that we're seeing pop up is, like, I don't know. There's a world where, there's there's the type of person, like the ideas guy, who's like, I have an idea for an app, and I want someone to build it for me. Then there's the type of person like you, Jordy, who you have an idea, but then you're a Figma expert, and you're gonna work on design, and you're gonna turn over something that's really communicative in terms of the interaction design. Then there's one layer further now with FigmaMake and other Vibe coding solutions where you could actually turn over a full prototype that's pretty functional, but it's not really going to scale. And so maybe the VibeCode cleanup specialist is just saying like, hey, I'm a really talented engineer.
Speaker 1:I am truly an engineer. I know computer science, but I'm willing to work with the I work well with the type of people that express themselves and what they want to build as Vibe code. And and and maybe that's an interesting pattern as opposed to the the the software engineer who likes to work with somebody who turns over a a PSD file or Figma file.
Speaker 6:I think if you look at
Speaker 8:it like that, it makes a lot more sense to me. It's like, what's the new version of mocks or PRD? It's like Yeah. This working app. Yep.
Speaker 8:But it's not a shippable app because it's like, you know, the the agents kinda can't do it yet. Yep. It's also where where you run the problems is, like, these things are amazing for the zero to one use case. They're less good for the, like I'm working at some big company that has millions of lines of code, and I wanna add a feature to it. And so for that, you really you know, it's like it needs to go you can start with, like, the vibe coded prototype, but you're gonna need someone to get in there who actually stands behind what they're sending up to their teammate to review.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. I hate to get personal partner, but can you talk rev revenue? I think you guys have a pretty extreme revenue ramp.
Speaker 8:Yeah. We're doing awesome. So we're, we're adding million ARR every, like, seven, eight days, something like that, which is
Speaker 1:You don't see numbers like that around these parts very often.
Speaker 2:Certainly not.
Speaker 8:Like, it's you know, we're not not it's not a ghost town, and it's
Speaker 1:a It's not a ghost town.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of a rush.
Speaker 1:It's a gold rush.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's It's gold gold rush. Rush.
Speaker 8:But it's pretty exciting times. Like, it's it's super fun. The vision that we have of, like, building, you know, a a development tool, which is for the ground up for, like, how do you go all the way from prompt to production? It isn't, like, your run of the mill IDE or, like, the twentieth just, like, text based CLI app, but it's a unique tool built to get, you know, pro code out. Is really resonating.
Speaker 8:It's super exciting. Fun time to be working on it.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for Yep. Taking the time to stop by the old TBPN Saloon. The
Speaker 2:Saloon. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. A great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Alright, guys. Great to catch up, Zach.
Speaker 8:Thanks a lot, Ratmille.
Speaker 1:See you. Nice fun. Code country. Another Cohen coming into the studio, breaking down. Big fundraise.
Speaker 1:Very exciting.
Speaker 2:I'm excited for this one.
Speaker 1:Legendary poster. One of the greatest to ever do it. Very excited to have him on the show. Andrew Reeves in the chat. What about
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 1:We need to get Andrew Reed more content.
Speaker 2:We put these on not for you, although you are from Texas, but
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:You're Texas. We'll leave them on. Warp, the CEO of Warp, but we'll leave them on because they're fun.
Speaker 3:I thought you guys put them on for me. I was gonna ask that. That was my first question.
Speaker 2:No. No. But but but but, yeah. Do you ever wear a cowboy hat around the office?
Speaker 3:I do not. I have boots. There you a hat.
Speaker 2:There you go. Boots boots are boots are strong. What's happening? It's great to great to finally have you on the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you guys for having me. I needed something newsworthy enough to make it on here. So I had to race around just to get on the show.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you've been on many times via your post.
Speaker 1:Via your post. We have reacted to many of your posts.
Speaker 2:So Long time long time guests. But what what yeah. Give it give us a whole kinda I mean, since it's your first time on the show, in person, give it give us kinda quick history of the company and the news.
Speaker 3:Quick history is we got started last April after a team of us had been at Carbon Health for three and a half years. Left in January, started the company in April, raised around, got to work. And then fast forward sixteen months later, we just closed our series a, and it's been
Speaker 1:a fun time. So Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Wow. Look at that.
Speaker 3:I thought you walked I thought you walked away. You're like, fuck this. I'm out.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna
Speaker 3:into Gong. No.
Speaker 1:We got a Gong. No. We got a gong. Congratulations. How are you positioning the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Company right
Speaker 2:Yeah. The main thing that I'm trying to understand from like like your your journey like makes total sense like being deep in the weeds and and understanding what what, you know, from your time at Carbon, it feels like this category like so many I'm I'm sure you're you're getting sick of refreshing TechCrunch and seeing another voice AI company that that that is going after the market broadly. But how is the what's the shape of the market? How is it evolving? Where you got what is what is your GTM look like and all that good stuff?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, here's my general take on the space. It's like you've got a group of us who are specifically focused on health care AI or, like, you know, whatever voice, SMS, conversational AI for health care. You kinda have to be specialized on it, in order to make it work. And I think that's why, you know, we saw Sierra just raise at 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 3:You've got all the call center companies with their own flavor of, like, we're no longer shitty IVRs. We, have a conversational AI now. And so problem is that as you, like, start to hear about how their implementations are going, you start to hear how they go from, like, cross different verticals. They're just not doing that good of a job at it because they don't understand sort of the nuanced, crazy stuff that happens in these health care clinics. And so we we literally have to, like, almost go on-site with customers and understand their workflows, their appointment triaging reasons, like, how you actually get a patient to the right place, and then read and write back into their systems of record, which many of them, you know, unlike again, I'll use Sierra as the example, but, like, unlike Sierra being able to just integrate with Shopify who has great APIs to go do, like, hey.
Speaker 3:What's my tracking number? What's your return policy? Can you check the status of my order? We have way harder to work with systems of record, and I think a lot of folks just don't wanna go put in the work or understand how to go make those things happen. And so I think you'll see companies like us be a lot more successful in getting these practices live.
Speaker 3:I think you'll see some of the larger companies maybe win some deals and then go spend nine months building custom software to go make it work. And then I think you'll see most people pivot out of health care over the next couple of years because just because it's conversational and generative and OpenAI exists doesn't make the work any easier to do right now.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of like the return to the way the industry has always been. I feel like whenever you dig into health care, it's like, oh, well, they're not using the standard SaaS product for it's like the whole genre of vertical SaaS is the textbook example, where maybe they're using different ERP, different payroll, different help desk software, different CRM. Like, they've always had their own little area carved out. And I don't know how much of that is just like HIPAA But it's certainly a unique thing.
Speaker 2:What's the gold standard now? Like, what what are you guys trying to deliver on the product side? Because I I saw a screenshot you shared of Sierra on their you were you were throwing a little Yeah.
Speaker 5:Date on
Speaker 2:the day of their on the day of their launch. It was an exchange where you're just like, can you find me some green shorts? And they were like, well, we have lots of clothes. Like Yeah. Why don't you look around?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was pretty funny. But like, what what are you guys trying to deliver? And what do you what do you think best in class is right now? And do the models even need to get better for you to deliver on your vision?
Speaker 2:Or or are they are they good enough that it's just more about, like, deep integration and and workflows?
Speaker 3:Yep. I think that there's a lot of tension in someone like a Sierra who's got a very almost deterministic style chatbot, and that's been around forever. I mean, what they're doing is not new. They're just saying, hey. It uses generative AI versus what you used to do, which is keyword matching and then sharing some response that you had queued up that was approved by the customer in the chat experience.
Speaker 3:Then And on the whole other side, you have an experience like ChatGP to your cloud, is purely generative, very, very general purpose. Anyone can chat with it, and you can really get it to do whatever you want it to do within you know, as long as their guardrails don't pick it up. And somewhere in the middle is a conversational experience where you call in and you say, hey. I'm having this this issue. I have this I need an appointment.
Speaker 3:Like, here's my symptoms. And the agent has a defined scope of work, but it still needs to follow somewhat of a deterministic path to get you to the outcome. Right? So in order to schedule, I have to look up your account, verify who you are, find the location that you're looking for, find available slots, find available providers, and then ultimately book the appointment and write that back to the practice management system. So there is a workflow or step that has like, steps that have to happen in some sort of order.
Speaker 3:To do that right end to end is very complex. A year ago, even when we got started, you really can't do scheduling end to end unless you were building what was a phone tree of, like, you're in this step right now. Choose one of these three options. Now you're in this step. Choose and that's not what I think anyone wants to be the gold standard for an experience when you call into your provider.
Speaker 3:And we've always been fully conversational from day one, and I think over the summer, we made a bunch of breakthroughs on, like, how we build a whole suite of agents that work together to get the job done. And so, for example, if you're calling into one of our practices now and you say, hey. I'm making an appointment for I'll use, like, MedSpa as an example for Botox. There is a Botox agent that all it knows how to do is schedule Botox, but it's still conversational. And then if you're like, hey.
Speaker 3:Actually, I need to switch to a laser hair removal appointment, then it switches to the laser hair agent. The patient never sees anything. But in the background, we're doing a bunch of multiagent switching, and that's the only way to make these things work and still be generative. And they still have failure rates. Like, five to ten percent of cases, it doesn't work as expected.
Speaker 3:You can imagine all the dumb shit that patients say. It's, like, completely random. And so and you can't plan for all of those scenarios, but you just have to get this is why I don't think AI doctors will be a thing anytime soon because that margin of error will always exist, and it's like they don't wanna take liability or responsibility for that. We can get away with a little bit more margin of error because we're doing administrative functions. But that's the experience we want it to be.
Speaker 3:As you call in, you know that it's AI, but you're having a conversation with it just like if you were talking to Chad GPT's voice model, and it can do the job end to end even if it's scoped to a limited set of jobs.
Speaker 1:Yep. How much of how you build this is like develop an RL environment to actually post train a model to interact with all the back office and administrative systems versus kind of like create your own deterministic SaaS layer that then your agents are kind of interacting with or or are just kind of like function calls within deterministic, like, business logic?
Speaker 3:It's very much the latter. It's like we've got this app layer where it understands an ontology of a practice, the services, locations, providers. All of those have their own specific context. Right? There is different protocol if you're scheduling one appointment versus the other.
Speaker 3:Maybe you're, like, three steps into a triaging workflow now. And then they do have tool calls where they get to say, like, I need to create an appointment. I need to find available slots. I need to create the patient account. All of those tool calls have their own business logic and agents that they interact with on their
Speaker 2:own. Yep.
Speaker 3:The it's all very constrained. So you kinda have, like, 70% is prompt engineering, 30% is code in the background to be like, hey. That's not the phone number the patient's calling in from. You can't look up that patient, right, because there's security, factors to consider. So definitely a lot more of the latter than it is, like, any sort of RO environment where we're like Sure.
Speaker 3:You don't really the conversations don't change that much, so we rely on the foundational models to handle a lot of the edge scenarios where someone's trying to go off rail and say something that's not in scope of the agent.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Do you last question. The like, do you guys internally view yourselves as building vertical software with the end user experiencing the product as an agent? Because I feel like there's been a lot of companies come out over the last year that are saying, like, we're building AI agents for x y z. And then if you actually drill down into, like, okay, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:And, like, what is the experience of a of a of one of your customers? It's like SaaS. Right? And that's like, it can be AI enabled.
Speaker 1:To be clear, we're extremely bullish about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're and and and we're and I yeah. I'm super bullish about it. But I but I the way that you're describe the way that you're describing this and the companies that that are that I think are are are sort of doing good work broadly are like It sounds like you're trying to sell that you're completely reinventing like an entire business model. Yeah. It's more like we're building really valuable software and automated workflows for companies.
Speaker 2:And the end result is that the patient or the user will have a great experience.
Speaker 1:Sell the solution, not the technology. Yeah. I feel like you're one of the first companies not, you know, who knows, but maybe one of the first companies kind of embrace the new stance.
Speaker 2:You don't have a dot AI domain, for example.
Speaker 3:No. I I don't think the practices really give a shit that it's AI versus Yeah. Some other They, they care like, we all I've said this I've said a few things from day one, but, like, one is that there is inherent product market fit in what we're doing as long as we can make the agents work as expected. And so if I can schedule appointments reliably, if I can refill prescriptions, if I can do all those things and the front desk doesn't have to do it or the call center doesn't have to do it, like, everyone will buy that if it's cheaper, faster, better, you know, whatever you name it. The second is that, yeah, they just, like, don't care that it's AI.
Speaker 3:They think it's interesting. What's nice is, like, every group has an AI strategy. Mhmm. They don't know what that means yet. And so but they know they wanna, like, partner with a company to go do that.
Speaker 3:And so we treat it it is all partnerships right now because it's so early, but we're definitely building vertical services, I would say, like, that use software to make it really efficient, and you don't have to go hire people now to go do the work in most cases. But, yeah, it doesn't matter that if it were if it were, I suppose, an IVR that got, like, a phone tree that was able to do the same thing, like, someone would buy that too. They would just get replaced by the thing that's better and has higher conversion, better patient experience longer term. And so, yeah, that's really the philosophy. And then longer term, we are going deeper into the stack in terms of the software that we will offer to the clinics to also help them do their jobs better when it's not the AI doing the job.
Speaker 3:And so we look at it as, like, right now, we're doing very specific bespoke services for the group, like answering calls and scheduling or doing outbound campaigns and texting a bunch of patients saying, hey. You're overdue for your annual wellness visit or your vaccines or whatever it is, and then having a conversation and, again, getting them scheduled. Longer term, you can imagine, like, we build more of the software that sits, again, on top of their practice management system, but that helps the actual clinic teams do their jobs more efficiently as well. It's just deeply integrated with the AI component.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2:Great to have you on. Join anytime.
Speaker 3:Great questions.
Speaker 1:We'd love to have a
Speaker 3:Thank you, guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Text me whenever.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:See you. We will.
Speaker 5:Later.
Speaker 1:See you. Up next, we have Eleven Labs coming in the studio. He's in the restream waiting room, but not for much longer. Let's bring him back to you from Eleven Labs. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How are doing?
Speaker 9:Hey, John. Hey, Jordy. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:How do you say your name? Because I almost greeted you with Ahoy Mehdi.
Speaker 9:It's Matti Staniszewski. Although, I had the same problem with Jordy. So I was texting people. Is it Hordy or is it Jordy?
Speaker 1:Hordy. I like Hordy. We're getting Hordy. Some of the Spanish roots there. That is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you want hardcore Spanish, it might be Horty. Horty. Horty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, let let's jump right into it. Give us the news. What's the latest in your world?
Speaker 9:The latest is today, eleven Labs is launching a tender offer of $100,000,000. We buy early stage employees and investors at a 6,600,000,000.0 valuation, which is double thank you, guys. Dabsters. This is amazing. This is amazing.
Speaker 9:Amazing. So, no, so happy to to be able to to offer that to all the believers from the early days. And, you know, we are building we are building the company for the generation, so I'm hoping to align everybody on that build for that journey.
Speaker 2:Okay. So somebody came to you, they wanted to give you a 100,000,000. You said, I don't need it in the business. Is like, how how did this how did this come about? Because somewhat nontraditional to
Speaker 1:You can potentially hire one more AI scientist for $100,000,000
Speaker 2:right? Well, yeah. A lot of companies would maybe, they'd say, let's raise a couple 100,000,000 and we'll do some secondary But as what kind of
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll put you in the position to just focus on a secondary transaction in this round?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Two things. One, we are growing very healthy as a business. We got to 200,000,000 in in in ARR over the last weeks. Congrats.
Speaker 9:Which which has thank you. Thank you. It has been, you know, a kind of a interesting journey where we launched the product. So we started the company in 2022, launched the first product beginning of 2023. It took us twenty months to get to a 100,000,000 in revenue, which is, at a time, super quick.
Speaker 9:Now there are some some some even quicker, transitions. Then took us ten months to get to 200,000,000 in revenue, which is where we are today. And, hopefully, we'll get to 300,000,000 by end of the year in five months. So twenty, ten, five months. So we are growing very quickly, and we are doing that in a healthy healthy manner.
Speaker 9:We have money in the bank to invest in in in GPUs Yep. In international expansion. So we don't really need much more capital in the bank. And then the second piece is we we had a combination of acquisition attempts over last month. And and, of course, as someone who came back
Speaker 2:Turn it down. Volunteer.
Speaker 9:Before eleven Labs, I was with Polynesia. My co founder was at Google, Pyot. And we had a very different setup. Polynesia at the time was private. It was almost fifteen years private.
Speaker 9:The the equity wasn't very liquid. Yep. And and and with Piotr, want to make it very different now as you think about the 11 laps. Sure. Offer frequent liquidity to employees.
Speaker 9:If we continue running in a healthy manner, we are having the capital already to to deploy, we wanna make sure that the employees can think about this next five, ten years. So that's where that that that early early liquidity is really helpful. And you are right. We had amazing partners with with Sequoia, Iconic joining in, keen to keen to lead around, invest more in the business. And and we, of course, love working with them, so I wanted to to give them more more more at the table as well.
Speaker 2:Give us a breakdown of where all the revenue is coming from. Obviously, I can think of millions of use cases, and I've seen different companies leveraging Eleven Labs. But but, like, where are kind of the pockets where most of the growth is coming from?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So the at Eleven Labs, we have two key parts of our business. One is a creative platform side of the business, and now the second one is our agents platform. Most of people will have known us from that creative side. That's something that has account with when we started a company.
Speaker 9:That's, of voice overs for movies, dubbing of movies to other languages, narrations for audiobooks, creating music, bringing music into default. And here, that's over over now few few million monthly active users that will come through the platform and create incredible content. And then the second And here, we've seen an incredible adoption over last over last two years where, where enterprises like Cisco, Twilio, Epic Games bringing bringing the experiences into into Fortnite are are building just incredibly new voice agencies. And here, you can think about call centers, customer support, personal agents, massive media. And across the business, roughly, we are approaching fifty fifty fifty between the two.
Speaker 9:So on one side, the self serve, the creators are are half of the revenue, and then enterprises are the additional half. But that's kind of other side is going quicker where we've seen
Speaker 2:Sorry sorry to interrupt. So are you competing with the Sierra Sierras, the Fins, the Decagons, or or drilling down into that enterprise business? It's also it sounds like yeah. I imagine, like, game like, if somebody's creating, a video game, they're they're leveraging voice agents as well. So but but kind of could you say a little bit more?
Speaker 9:Of course. So kind of we we on one side, we power a lot of the companies. A lot of the companies you mentioned are our clients.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 9:Decagon, Maven are are are some of the example places we work directly. So a good example is Perplexity, who will use voice as part of the interaction to to use Perplexity. Another is Epic Games where they've, effectively deployed Darth Vader experience in Fortnite so every player could interact with Darth Vader live for the first time, one
Speaker 1:of their biggest
Speaker 2:for Darth Vader.
Speaker 1:Deployments. Very
Speaker 9:good. Star Wars fan, I can do nothing nothing less.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That's incredible. And then and then, of course, so many across other other use cases. Chess.com works with us where you can have personalized learning experiences where you play chess. And then other companies like Cisco Twilio where they do use it for both internal use cases, but also bring it to their clients. In those cases, it's similar to what you mentioned, Jordi, at the beginning where we power their work internally but also for their clients.
Speaker 9:So today, we both we power a lot of clients across and then also work directly with some of the holistic voice operations.
Speaker 1:Okay. Help me understand a little bit more about where the business fits in. Feel like you've trained actual models. You're a foundation model company in many ways. And then you're also an inference seller, and you have clients that effectively buy tokens from you.
Speaker 1:They buy MP3s or WAV files probably. But you're doing the inference for them. So you're kind of full stack in this AI world. And then also, I just feel like it's been awesome to see you go on this run because, there were probably a lot of haters. I I feel like I saw some haters being like, they're gonna get steamrolled by the other laps.
Speaker 1:And you have it, and you've so what are the sources of defensibility, and and why, like yeah. Yeah. Why do you just keep winning?
Speaker 2:Haters keep do being wrong?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it is it is it is, it it's it's been an it's been an amazing amazing run, and it's such a unique position that I think was it was contrarian. It was overlooked early on, and people didn't see, what you saw. And so kind of walk me through a little bit of, like, the structure of the business and and where the defensibility is coming from.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Two answers there. I think the first piece is, so across 11 Labs, we we we started a company with my cofounder, Pyotr. Pyotr is a an incredible, researcher
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Assemble who we think are some of the best researchers in the world in audio. Say, we we combine the kind of the the foundational research, build the horizontal infrastructure, and then have vertical applications on top of that. Yeah. And I think the main reason that we've been able to stay ahead is clear focus on voice. We always build the models in voice.
Speaker 9:We build applications around voice, and that's something that on on both sides, on the product side and the research side, many of the companies, just just just aren't doing. And, whether it was text to speech initially and bringing more emotional model then creating a speech to text model that was heavily beating OpenAI, Google, and others on benchmarks, and now the full orchestration, across those models and and finally bringing music into default. And I think a combination of just raw, incredible research talent that that that is now at at eleven Labs, missionary focus of of building those models and and and then being able to deploy them into production quicker has has been helpful on that side. And then on the other side, we we really care about building the best voice application. So spend a lot of time with our both on creator side, but also on the enterprise side, and build backwards from there.
Speaker 9:So that's the first answer.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:But the second answer, I recently got to meet Jensen Jensen Huang from NVIDIA in in UK. And, of course, I came over. I wanted to say hi and and said that I and then he responded that, oh, I'm a I was an early 11 Lapse user and still still am, but from the day you launched, I thought that all the voice, models will commoditize. Yeah. But one thing I didn't appreciate is that that true voice experience takes an artist, and you guys all are artists.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And that's that is partly true where I think there's so much nuance across voice. You you need to create such a distinct experience when it comes to different voices, different languages, different dialects. So so Jansen's take that that a lot of a lot of our engineers, a lot of our company is being, effectively crafting those those artistic experiences is true. And yeah, we are we will probably be now NVIDIA clients for life too.
Speaker 1:This is a great take. It's very similar to why, we saw that news that Meta has a partnership with Midjourney. Meta has all the money in the world. They have a ton of scientists, But maybe they don't have the artist that is David Holes at midjourney who just brings taste to those images, and so they got to pay him, which I love to see. I want your reaction to, speaking of that, where are we in the uncanny valley of voice generation?
Speaker 1:There was news today in The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI is making a full length feature animated film. And in this article, they said the production, they're investing $30,000,000 in this. It'll be a full feature length film. They're trying to do it in nine months, which seems totally doable in the age of AI, honestly. But they said the production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches.
Speaker 1:And, and I saw that, and I and I just thought, like, like, I I've I've been under the assumption that voice was solved. Even if OpenAI doesn't have the frontier model, you know, if this is a demo of AI broadly, they should be able to figure this out. Why do you think that they're going with human voices here? And do you think there's something that's on the frontier? Give me your time lines for when we might see eleven Labs technology in a Hollywood film.
Speaker 9:It's, I think, first of all, I think you you can create an amazing experience already, and and and and happily, we we we did. So maybe maybe there's a a model or skill help where we can where we can work with OpenAI and help them help them out on on that side. No. But they have amazing research. So I think I think they are they are going to craft those experiences too.
Speaker 9:I think that that, you know, like, Epic Games example is a
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Is a great way of of showing that it is possible. In that case, we worked with recreating, working with the estate, the voice of James Earl Jones, and it did sound exactly like Darth Vader. And players were, like, almost amazed that how is it possible where you have dynamically generated
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Script effectively alive and PC in the game for the first for the first time. Similarly, in our case, we worked we worked with legends of of the past, like Richard Fema, getting his voice where you can really immerse yourself in the story, but also with with people like Ariana Huffington or first lady, Melania Trump on creating their audiobooks. And the whole delivery of that experience is is is is is as good as real thing. And the crazy thing, it also allows you to do things you could never do before. You can bring those bring those content pieces into other languages and still hear that voice.
Speaker 9:I think Hollywood is is a is a trickier piece where it might take a a slightly longer time aligning the the the likeness component of how you work with the people, how they get compensated, and how, and how you bring those experiences on screen. We do hope that the first dubbed movies will get into production next year where you'll have even better thing than what was previously possible. You get that original expression available in dubbed movies. And in 2027, hopefully, the first Hollywood movie hits on the screens in in English too.
Speaker 1:That'd be very cool. Thank you so much for joining the stream.
Speaker 2:Congrats. Congrats to the whole team.
Speaker 1:Fantastic progress all over the place. Just, yeah, remarkable to see. I love that take about the artistry that goes into crafting these super differentiated, tier models. It's wonderful to see. You love to see it.
Speaker 9:Thank you so much. I'm also so proud and happy of our mighty team of of artists across in spirit. Thanks for thanks so much for having me on, guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:The whole team.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 9:Thanks. Bye.
Speaker 1:Up next,
Speaker 2:we have
Speaker 1:Dan from Truck Smarter. It's time. Restream waiting room. It's time to truck. Who were saying, are we gonna truck dumber?
Speaker 1:No. No. We're gonna truck smarter. And we will welcome Dan out of the research team. Founder mode.
Speaker 1:He's in founder mode. Dan, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 10:Good. What's going on, guys? Good to
Speaker 1:see you.
Speaker 2:Too much. We're trucking.
Speaker 1:We're locked in. The great lock in has begun. Many financings have been announced. We hear you have some news to share with us. Why don't you introduce yourself, the company, and then the news?
Speaker 10:Yeah. It's been an absolutely packed day for fundraising, so I appreciate you guys, getting us in. I'm happy to bring the party to Freight.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 10:My name is Dan, cofounder, CEO of TruckSmarter. We're super excited to announce our fundraising and the launch, of our AI product dispatch as well.
Speaker 1:What was the fundraise? Give me the details. What happened?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So we we we we just raised from, Socium Ventures, which is backed by Cox Enterprises, then, backed by all of our familiar friends, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, a sixteen z, BCV. Continue building the absolute best tools for chunky companies.
Speaker 1:And how much did you raise?
Speaker 10:16,000,000. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:There we go. Fantastic. There we go. Had a good
Speaker 1:warm up on that one.
Speaker 2:Give us a give us a quick history of the company. When did you when did you start trucking smarter?
Speaker 10:So we started in 2021. Mhmm. We first started by building a load
Speaker 1:Even nights.
Speaker 10:So for folks for for for folks that are not familiar, a lot of trucking companies today so there's, what, almost a million truck drivers out there, 95% of them. 95% of these trucking companies own less than five trucks. Yeah. And the way they find jobs is very similar to you going on Craigslist to buy something.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:Right? So all this information is everywhere. The information is not entirely verified. The people are not even verified. You're kinda just scraping the barrel constantly spending hours every single day.
Speaker 10:So that's kinda been the very core of our company. We started by building a load board that helped them find those jobs, in a more efficient way, and then we started layering on a ton of financial services, getting them paid, getting them access to credit. If you think about these are the small businesses that just do not get access to a lot of these things. And because we're at the very beginning of their revenue journey, we can just see all this information. And then, obviously, now with AI, this year, we we we there's just a tremendous opportunity to just make finding a job so much more efficient.
Speaker 10:And that's kind of what we've been heads down on for the last six months.
Speaker 1:There's a poster behind you. Load boards should be free. Explain to us, how exactly does the industry work? You have to pay to find a trucking job? How does that work?
Speaker 10:It is it is absolutely crazy. Right? So if you think about it, for you to for you to access this Craigslist type of thing, you gotta probably pay anywhere from $50, 250, $300 a month. Yeah. At the very beginning of our company, We made it extremely clear.
Speaker 10:So we can't really go back from here.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We said load boards should be free. We built software that kind of connected all the disparate pieces of information into a single place, gave it all away for free, and that's kind of the engine for our entire business. We continue to grow tremendously from that, and that's where we continue to layer on all these different services.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the kind of competitive dynamic in the market? Like, are you gonna force everyone to go free? It seems really obvious to, like, if there's a barrier to getting a customer, drop that to zero and then figure out how to monetize the customer somewhere else. I'm surprised Yes. No one's done this before.
Speaker 1:So congrats on the innovation. But it seems like the competitive dynamic will be like, people will try and fast follow you. So is it just a race to build more financial products, better products behind the scenes? Like, what what's the what's the long term? Or is it just like you gotta get big, you gotta get all the data on there?
Speaker 10:You gotta get big, right? So I think for us, right, it's a it's a race to layer on additional services.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:A lot of the existing companies, there's a lot of big load boards out there. They've been around for fifty, sixty years. Right? So you think about Craigslist. Right?
Speaker 10:A lot of people have tried to verticalize all the various categories of Craigslist. They've done so in a very real way, but Craigslist is still a monster. They still do hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. So there's still a lot of this pattern with a lot of the existing companies. But for us, we're just able to layer on all these other things that just makes our platform continue to be more attractive.
Speaker 1:Have you done What the Truck podcast? This is have a funny you done it?
Speaker 10:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. I've done this podcast randomly. They were talking about nicotine pouches, and the guy wanted to have me on. It was really fun.
Speaker 1:It's actually an extremely well run show. But in that vein, like, I imagine you can't go on every week. You gotta reach Truckers. What's working on the growth side?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So I think for us, right, we're the number one load board on the platform, on the market today. Right? You search load board. You search free load board.
Speaker 10:We're number one or number two.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:That's the strategy. Right? Making it free Yeah. Just makes it incredibly easy for anybody to access. Sure.
Speaker 10:And as a result, you're getting all the people that are coming into the market. Yep. Right? So So
Speaker 1:there's so there's SEO play. Are you doing any, like, brand building high high top of funnel, you know, awareness with truckers? Are there specific, like, campaigns? It's so hard because they'd like, the truckers aren't in all one place by definition. Right?
Speaker 1:They're all over the country. So it's all you can buy one billboard and you're good. You know, how how do you reach people and actually create, like, brand awareness?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I think for us, it's kind of continuing to solve that number one acute pain point, right, which is finding a job. And that's kind of what we've been focused on from day one. And as a result, I think we just have one of the best growth engines that can reach these trucking companies because almost certainly every trucking company has probably downloaded UnloadBoard, and there's a very high chance that it's ours. Yep.
Speaker 10:And then as a result, we kind of have that information to just continue to offer them more services.
Speaker 1:Yep. Fantastic. Congratulations. This is fantastic. We will we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:We'll let you get back to your day. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:Load board should be free.
Speaker 10:Appreciate it, guys. Thanks, guys. Happy on.
Speaker 2:Well, on that note We I gotta get on with
Speaker 1:It is past It's 02:20. Well, we all keep doing these three and a half hour streams. We keep saying
Speaker 2:we're gonna Can't do stop.
Speaker 1:Two and a half. We always We're do it addicted. Tyler, any other breaking news, tearing up the timeline? Anything you got for me?
Speaker 10:No no crazy news.
Speaker 1:No crazy news?
Speaker 10:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's good. Well, we will see you tomorrow. We will be live from Y Combinator demo day. Tune in.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have a lot of fun there. And then in on Wednesday, we'll be in New York City. So we are going a little bit of a world tour, a little bit of a American tour
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:This week. And we will see you tomorrow. Have a great
Speaker 2:Can't wait. Goodbye. Have a great evening.