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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Friday, 06/20/2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra The Temple Of Technology.
Speaker 1:Many people call it the Fortress Of Finance.
Speaker 2:It's also been known as the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We have a great show for you, Jay. Folks, there's a whole bunch of news. I think we should run through it a little bit. First off, interest rates aren't going down. We need a moment of silence for interest rates.
Speaker 2:We want them to be zero, ideally negative. How low could they go? Could you have negative 200 interest rates? I think that would be the best situation possible.
Speaker 1:Negative 100% interest rates. Sean.
Speaker 2:If you deposit your money, you lose it all instantly. Negative 100% interest rate.
Speaker 1:Keep it in cash.
Speaker 2:Just invest it or lose it. Yes. You have to go long. Have to
Speaker 1:go long risk
Speaker 2:on assets. You have to be risk on or else the money just evaporates immediately.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That I guess that kind of happens if you're in an inflation environment. Anyway, the Fed's Powell maintained his caution about interest rate levels as the central bank continues to monitor the effects of Trump's tariffs on the economy, so no movement. The Fed is waiting for dust to settle on tariff turmoil, and the Bank of England is doing the same thing. It left its key interest rate unchanged, mirroring the Fed's decision a day earlier. So they're they're they're really copying off of Powell's homework looking over.
Speaker 2:Oh, he's not cutting interest rates? We won't cut interest rates either. In other news, Microsoft is planning to lay off several thousand employees in the next few weeks. This is not the same story that happened back in May. We'll dive into this a little bit later.
Speaker 2:But they're ramping up the cuts, which is, you know, obviously kicking into gear with the with the AI and efficiency push. There's a whole bunch of different narratives that we'll try and untangle. Also, Affirm is starting to sell consumer loans from their buy now pay later program to, larger investment firms like Prudential. So Prudential is buying $500,000,000 of these package loans, from Affirm. So interesting there.
Speaker 2:And then in other news, Social Security could become unable to pay full retirement and disability benefits in 2034, a year earlier than previously reported that I don't even know why that's news. It doesn't matter. AGI is coming in just a few years and none of this will matter. Also, Trump gave TikTok another ninety day reprieve. Follow us on TikTok if you're on TikTok for some reason.
Speaker 2:We are trying to grow on that platform because you gotta hedge and we gotta be everywhere.
Speaker 1:Well, we just don't think we'll be able to make a good case for taking it over
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:If we have zero presence.
Speaker 2:Exactly. We have to understand. Know thy enemy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I got some insight from our fintech correspondent, Aaron Aaron Frank, over at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He flagged that Chris Waller, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States, was on CNBC today. It was unscheduled. It's pretty uncharacteristic.
Speaker 1:But he came out and was basically signaling that they're gonna drop rates most likely in July, you know, the next cycle.
Speaker 2:And this is news from a venture capitalist that told you A venture capitalist is saying that rates are gonna drop.
Speaker 1:Yes. And we'd love to hear that.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Amazing. To hear that.
Speaker 1:Yes. But, yeah, this was apparently went out this morning. Very interesting.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Not not super traditional to break ranks
Speaker 2:like Well, the biggest news that obviously everyone is tracking is meta. We gotta cover this. You know, everyone's been focused on meta. The story, of course, is about Andrew Bosworth's $45,000,000 house. So Which Let's dig into that.
Speaker 1:Hit the mansion section of
Speaker 2:the journal this we we have a signed copy of by the way because the photographer who has shot for the mansion section was in the studio today.
Speaker 3:And we got a signature. Signature on
Speaker 2:the mansion section. We need a close-up cam. Should I put that on the printer cam?
Speaker 1:Put it on the printer cam. On the printer cam. Signed copy.
Speaker 2:Does that does that work?
Speaker 1:Priceless. There you go. Signed by Mark. And the other thing we have going on today, the sort of the elephant in the room is that Oh, we got a new intern cam going. So let's let's take it over to Tyler,
Speaker 2:how you doing over there?
Speaker 4:What's up, guys? In in the back of the Maybach. It's pretty chill back here.
Speaker 1:You got a
Speaker 3:little desk set up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Got WiFi.
Speaker 2:You're productive. The the big news that we're having him dig into is Cluly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They are okay. Something happening there But we got some flack for talking to Roy and not actually using the app. We're still above using the app, but we will let our intern use the app.
Speaker 1:It's more that we don't have time. Yes. We're too busy podcasting, but Tyler has time. Not too Many people are starting to call after his Windsurf review.
Speaker 2:People
Speaker 1:are starting to call him the MKBHD of enterprise software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People have been
Speaker 1:saying that. So, yeah. Today he's gonna be trying out Cluely. Gonna be you to see how how easily he can cheat on some hard hitting questions that we're gonna be asking him.
Speaker 2:So state of affairs, Tyler, where are we on the Cluely install so far? Have you paid for it? What's the experience been like so far?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I'm ready to go whenever. I I played around with it for maybe like two minutes just to make sure it's working.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:So I I wanna get my live reaction when we start. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, spin it up. Pay for
Speaker 2:it. Yes.
Speaker 1:Let's get on the top tier. Are there multiple And we'll check back in a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna be peppering you with questions that only Cluly could answer.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:What's the popular what's the population of Iran? Go.
Speaker 4:Go. 89,000,000.
Speaker 2:82? Wait.
Speaker 4:I don't have it running right now.
Speaker 2:You gotta have it running. You you failed. You failed your
Speaker 1:tech You failed the first test. Well, get it, get it fixed, and we'll circle back in a bit.
Speaker 2:Get it to
Speaker 1:Get it together.
Speaker 2:Guess a question, guess a number between one fifty randomly. Better than 27. Okay. So anyway, I do wanna cover the story. A $45,000,000 home that blends into the California landscape.
Speaker 2:Let's read from this. After building a modern home in San Mateo, California, April and Andrew Bosworth, Bos, made a major architectural pivot when they decided to build a gateway inspired Getaway. Getaway. Inspired by a trip through the through South America, the couple built a rustic 12,000 square foot hacienda that nestles into the landscape. The vacation home which they call Estancia Madera.
Speaker 2:Estancia Madera. That's a great name. You gotta name your house. It's like, you you know you've made it when you when
Speaker 1:you have a name, when you When you're in state as a name.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's great.
Speaker 1:It's in the Santa Lucia Preserve, a former working cattle ranch that is now a gated community between California's Carmel Valley and Carmel By The Sea. While a large portion of the 20,000 acre preserves, Rolling Meadows And Hills is a conservation area, The community also has almost 300 home sites and amenities like a golf course, clubhouse, and guest lodging.
Speaker 2:Lovely.
Speaker 1:It is where the couple got married in 2012 and purchased 65 acres the following year.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's long been a dream of ours to build on this piece of land, Boz says. But we had a lot of things to do. Our jobs, building our family, building our house in San Mateo. Yeah. So we just let it sit.
Speaker 1:But we would go down to the preserve whenever we could.
Speaker 2:That's so cool. Preserve is about a two hour drive from San Mateo where their two children go to school. It is also close to two of Meadows Meadows campuses where Boz forty three is the chief technology officer. He joined Facebook in 02/2006, two years after graduating from Harvard. Wow.
Speaker 2:He's a lifer. A badass. April was a physical therapist before the children were born. And then we're flipping over to other Meta news, and we'll go back to Meta apparently tried to buy Ilya company for $32,000,000,000. Oh, we should definitely be ringing the gong for Bos's $45,000,000 home.
Speaker 2:That makes a ton of sense. There you go. I'll do I'll do the honors.
Speaker 1:Clean hit. Clean hit. Clean hit. Anyways, as it was reported yesterday, this was sort of rolling series Yes. Of scoops.
Speaker 1:Meta tried to buy Safe Super Intelligence, Ilya's $32,000,000,000 AI startup, but ended up hiring its CEO instead. So went for an acquihire and then just basically said, we'll we'll just take DG, the CEO. Apparently, allegedly, the price that had been offered or thrown around was $32,000,000,000, which was their last valuation. Yep. Which makes sense.
Speaker 1:It's a lot. It's pricey.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean, it's it's the it's the current pref price. Right? Isn't that the current preferred price? Yep. I mean, that's the valuation of the company.
Speaker 1:And so Well, the preferred the preferred would have gotten a one x either way. Like, they would have just gotten their money back.
Speaker 2:Oh, really? Yeah. I guess you're right.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't have met even if they'd sold for $10,000,000,000. Yeah. Wouldn't it wouldn't matter. But Swicks came in here and said He's
Speaker 2:clearly texting
Speaker 1:lest I be mistaken for a hypebeast. I believe that Ilya saying no to Zuck was a mistake. Understandable given the OpenAI history but still a mistake. And he's posting a screenshot here. He probably should have said yes TBH.
Speaker 1:Why do you say that? SSI alone not a threat. Meta alone not a threat. SSI plus meta okay. We're cooking.
Speaker 1:And whoever he's texting with says both would have been my top bet immediately.
Speaker 2:If you put them together properly. They have such like a massive advantage in terms of just scale and also talent. It's like, yeah it's like the perfect blend of like what Google does well
Speaker 1:versus also what At the same time
Speaker 2:API does well.
Speaker 1:Ilya. Yeah. I don't know I don't know this exactly, but guessing he's already a bean heir. Mhmm. And at that point he I think he's always cared so much about the mission.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:The idea of SSI going to meta where they would inevitably be working on things like ads and entertainment and companionship and these things that are important.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But on a different path potentially than, you know, true super intelligence.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is like the George Hot's take about, like, imagine the future where it's not just, you know, some, you know, some regression deciding, okay, you're this age and you own this car, so we're gonna recommend this ad to you. But it's, you know, super intelligence targeting the perfect product to you constantly. It could feel a little dystopian.
Speaker 2:It can feel like it might it might drive you to just constantly be consuming endless slop all day long. It it can feel like a like a pretty dystopian outcome, but I I've always felt that that Zuck is someone who is also aware of that and fighting against that and has kids and is and and there there's a lot of things that, like, white pill me about Zuck's approach to building meta, where it seems like he doesn't wanna be the person who builds a really, like, negative service that's causing a lot of strife or problems. Like, problems will inevitably crop up when you have developed new scale. Yeah. It's it's bound to happen, but he's always actually he's not fighting to make the problems worse.
Speaker 2:He's fighting to make the to mitigate the problems. And so I don't know. There is a good ending where the AI is tracking you constantly and and trying to recommend advertising, but also trying to make your life better so you can contribute more to the economy and ultimately buy more expensive things as opposed to, you know, just like getting in a downward spiral and kind of like dropping out of society. That's that's clearly not a win for for, like, long term of the company if you are indexed on the global economy, essentially. Anyway, back to Boz and his and his beautiful house.
Speaker 2:The experience of building a modern primary house, which they finished in 2017, helped them figure out what they wanted and needed from a second residence, which they used for weekend getaways, school breaks, and holiday gatherings. First was access to nature. They used the preserved trails for hiking and horseback riding. The family spent six months of the pandemic in a smaller house in the preserve that they bought to use during their house construction. Every morning before telecommuting to work have you seen Boz's telecommuting, like, setup?
Speaker 2:He has, a recliner chair with a VR headset and an iPad. He has, like, the ultimate Oh,
Speaker 1:because working from home.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's been working from home. During the pandemic, he got really, really into it. So he had, a teleprompter with a Probably
Speaker 1:had the best set
Speaker 2:of Yeah. The best set up. Yeah. But it wasn't it wasn't just like a money is no object setup. It was like, this is what you'd expect from like the CTO of a hyperscaler.
Speaker 2:Like he's clearly like takes it seriously. And he didn't just say like, get me the most expensive thing. He clearly like put together all the best products and like designed something that was unique. So it's pretty cool. So he'd take his kids out and go exploring.
Speaker 2:Boss says, it's one of the things we love about the preserve. Your default behavior is to go outside. Beautiful. There's some great photos in here. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Other priorities were to design a house that was an architectural fit with its surroundings and to scale the house to work for large family gatherings, but also to be cozy when just April and Boz are there. That is a challenge. Right? You have you have like these massive some people wind up with like the entertaining house and then like the the house that they actually live in. Because at a certain scale, like, you see that the biggest house in LA, the one.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 1:see this?
Speaker 2:Which it had a 500 person nightclub in it. And it's like, you can't just go there and like, you can't just go to your personal nightclub and like have a few friends in there and not be like, this is weird. Yes. Right?
Speaker 1:It's tough.
Speaker 2:Or like they have a, I think it has like a, I think it's like a 100 car garage there, 50 car garage or something like you pull in
Speaker 1:What did they didn't that house ultimately end up selling for like 50%?
Speaker 2:Fashion Nova founder bought it. And yes, it it sold at a massive discount. Were trying to get half a billion dollars, which would have been a record. And I think it sold for still in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it's over a 100,000 square feet. Fantastic building.
Speaker 2:Because of pandemic pandemic related supply chain delays and labor shortages, the house took six years to build, design, and finish. The end result is a main house, which was finished in 2024 plus a pool cabana, guest cottage, and horse stables. Oh, let's play some horse noises. We love it.
Speaker 1:The horses are absolutely thrilled. The Bosworths I mean, can you imagine being the horse that gets to live and and, you know
Speaker 2:It's a dream.
Speaker 1:Experience life on this property?
Speaker 2:That sounds fantastic.
Speaker 1:Sounds incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Bosworths spent about $45,000,000 on the entire project, including the land construction, landscaping, art, and design. The design was heavily influenced by the architecture the couple saw in South America. We were traveling through Argentina and Chile and saw lots of estancias, these grand estates, which are very similar to California ranches. They're all they're sprawling in all the rooms, have access to the outdoors often on more than one side. The Bosworths hired architect Richard Beard, founder of San Francisco based Richard Beard Architects, who had designed several other homes in the area that the couple admired.
Speaker 2:They really wanna do something timeless, Beard says. The house will age well because the materials we use reflect the palette of the land itself. Even if it's
Speaker 1:new to blends in so perfectly to the Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even, even in its new state, it doesn't jump out from its surroundings in the style of both Estancia's and Estancia's and in California early Californian ranches and villas, Beard used stone, wood, and tile to harmonize with the landscape. Beard organized the house around a manicured main courtyard with smaller yards for a car park and pool pavilion. The guest rooms and kid rooms are arranged around the courtyard, so the main living area of the house, including the primary bedroom, can feel like one smaller house. There's a sequence of going from a wide open space to a more intimate one. Once the architectural drawings were underway, the couple bought brought in interior designer Jeff Jay Jeffers, good name, who worked with them on their San Mateo house.
Speaker 2:One of his first finds with the help of a rug dealer was the large late nineteenth century Orshak rug in the living room of the great room. Normally, for a room of this size, we would have a rug custom made, but I just felt like this was a different kind of house. An Estancia an Estancia would never have a new rug, Jeffers says, adding that the rug's jewel tone jewel tones over a base of golden brown sparked the project's color palette. They built the entire house's color palette around this rug. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Incredible. Just like, yeah, the rug really ties the room together. That great room, which was inspired by the gathering spaces in Estancia's and the historic lodges of the national parks, contains kitchen, living, and dining spaces with a long porch running alongside that has outdoor seating and dining areas. In 2024, at their first Thanksgiving in the house, the room easily accommodated their 20 guests. Everybody hung out in that space, April says.
Speaker 2:It was exactly as we envisioned. People were cooking, people were playing games at the dining table, and some people were just talking on the couches. The couple relied on Jeffrey's vision to create comfortable spaces. Our guidance to him was that we like to have color and interesting combinations of things. If you look at the house, yeah, it looks like I mean, that's already brand new.
Speaker 2:It looks very, like, lived in and very very approachable. It's pretty pretty amazing. Anyway, we have some massive breaking trade deal news, some personnel news. We haven't done a personnel news section in a while, but Derek Thompson is leaving the Atlantic almost after almost seventeen years and moving to Substack. Congratulations to Derek Thompson.
Speaker 2:Gotta wonder. Teaming up with with Chris Bass over at Substack.
Speaker 1:You gotta wonder. Did Substack, you know
Speaker 2:Max out contract. Could happen.
Speaker 1:Happen. In advance, something like that. Yep. You don't know. We'll see.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Well, he's starting a new business. Let's hope he's on ramp. Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Derek, you gotta do it.
Speaker 2:You're gonna be you're have a You're a businessman now.
Speaker 1:You are a business need
Speaker 2:to be on ramp, Derek. We're getting here show next week. We're gonna be pitching him ramp directly.
Speaker 1:That's right. He thinks he's coming on to talk about abundance. The frontier of science and technology. How about abundance? We're gonna bring on a ramp SDR.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe even Sam Buck himself.
Speaker 2:That'd be amazing.
Speaker 1:And we're gonna give him the full pitch
Speaker 2:Yeah. Live. How about an abundance of artificial intelligence in your CFO software suite?
Speaker 1:The CFO suite.
Speaker 2:How about an abundance of enterprise SaaS?
Speaker 1:That's right. Derek. Derek says, today, I'm leaving the Atlantic after almost seventeen years of moving my writing.
Speaker 2:What a run.
Speaker 1:He's taking I'm taking my writing to Substack. Yes. Moving my talents to South
Speaker 2:This this is LeBron level moves in the industry.
Speaker 1:He says, it would be convenient for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement to have a dramatic exit story, a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather back throw volumes across the open plan That is not the case here. I love the Atlantic and I'll remain a contributing writer here. But after almost two decades at one publication, I wanted to write for myself. The things I've published that I'm most proud of whether it was the original abundance agenda essay or my piece on workism, is that like celebrating workaholism? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Is that the trend?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think he was probably very pro work. Pro work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Merge from a very
Speaker 2:personal expression of press Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe it's like the we need a
Speaker 2:culture of work. So right here you can see he's saying like, there's no dramatic exit story. Like, I love the Atlantic. And what we're not seeing is like in the in the offices of the Atlantic, like, they're burning his jersey right now. Like, they are upset.
Speaker 2:This is this is major major news over there.
Speaker 1:This is personal. It's personal. It's personal. Personal.
Speaker 2:It goes deeper. They just pitch up.
Speaker 1:Editors are gonna take this one personal.
Speaker 2:And some and some time spent
Speaker 1:in the sea He says, I wanna know what my thinking and writing is like if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life. That's what brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. Yep. I'm excited to join their community community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember.
Speaker 1:Derek Thompson. Love it. Ben's not not, you know, but the Thompsons are really kind of dominating
Speaker 2:Yeah. The online writing.
Speaker 1:Ben Thompsons and Derek Thompsons. When's your related? Yeah. Maybe we could do a roll up of Thompsons.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You call it Thompsons Reuters.
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The newsletter will have three main pillars. Abundance, the frontier of science and technology, GLP-one's AI biotech and energy breakthroughs covered in a way that's both curious and skeptical. And three, the anti social century and the social crises of anxiety and aloneness. Yeah. And Emily Sundberg has some quick analysis here.
Speaker 1:She says, friends who don't work close remotely close to the media industry are texting me about Derek Thompson's move to Substack. Media is turning into sports and entertaining industry that revolves around exciting controversial characters in their teams and everyone has favorite players.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean Substack's out on the fundraising trail right now. This could be the this could be the thing that puts them in the centicorn category.
Speaker 1:Well, they're oh, yeah. A 100,000,000,000 you're saying?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that that would be a that would be a steal
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In my mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I would say this is the move that gets Masa on the phone. Yeah. It's gonna be a Stargate level deal.
Speaker 1:I could see it, John. Pulling I'm pulling for that. So Emily says in Feed Me this morning, the biggest news of the day in my household, Derek Thompson, who is hot off the success of his new book, Abundance, is leaving the Atlantic after sixteen years and bringing his writing to Substack. Yesterday, New York Magazine's Charlotte Klein reported on the Atlantic's hiring spree and that 300 k salaries some writers were making. A friend in one of my group chats said that that it was funny that 300 k was still considered the ceiling for writers.
Speaker 1:Just a few days ago, it was reported that Substack is churning out millionaires. You know what else is funny? Friends who don't work remotely close to the media industry are texting me about the Derek Thompson news. Media is turning into sports, which I just covered. We're all walking around with an inbox full of our favorite players.
Speaker 1:You're a media operator, you should not be taking a summer Friday today. Calling them out. You should be having an emergency meeting about talent retention when signing with Substack is always an option. One retention strategy is obviously having insurance and benefits which still beats Substack in some ways. Another is to let writers play in new formats like newsletters and videos.
Speaker 1:So, don't think this has been happening as much recently, but it was being reported in the last few years that Sub Sack would actually give writers in advance basically say like, we're gonna give you 500 k
Speaker 2:Maxed out contract.
Speaker 1:Maxed out contract. You're gonna pay that back over time as a revenue share, but it'll help you kind of like get on your feet Yep. Really get going. So exciting to follow. Should we see, does he already have paid subs up?
Speaker 1:He better. It would be it would be a a total miss.
Speaker 2:How is the brand design looking? Because I have some more recommendations for Derek. You know, if he's designing a logo for his new substack, he should be using Figma. Go to figma.com, Derek. Think bigger, build faster.
Speaker 2:Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You're gonna need a designer. You're gonna need to design some graphs, charts, all sorts of things for yourself.
Speaker 1:All sorts of things.
Speaker 2:How can you visualize abundance without an abundance of design tools at your fingertips? Get With Figma.
Speaker 1:Get into Figma, Derek. This we are calling you out. He does have a paid, plan up and running, which is smart. He's got his annual plan. He's got his super fan tier where you can just pick the number you wanna do.
Speaker 1:So if you're truly a Derek Thompson superfan, go in there. You can create a plan that's $300,000 a year.
Speaker 2:Come back and work for me.
Speaker 1:And if you're, you know, maybe like a foreign intelligence agency
Speaker 2:that wants to gain
Speaker 1:leverage over Derek, you could go there.
Speaker 2:I think that works though.
Speaker 1:Oh, you
Speaker 2:could No strings attached.
Speaker 1:No. Hi. No. Oh, Sure. No strings attached.
Speaker 1:You could sign up, create a million dollar plan. Create a million dollar plan and just say, like Just implicitly. Hey, I noticed you writing about this topic. Yeah. I I think you really got it wrong.
Speaker 2:I I think I'm considering unsubscribing. I'm considering unsubscribing. Yeah. I mean And I
Speaker 1:know you're just getting off the ground and it would be Yeah. A real shame.
Speaker 2:I mean, someone who loves technological abundance, I should sign up for that plan. And if he ever stops posting that abundance and starts going into It's like, hey hey, actually I think scarcity is
Speaker 1:churn.
Speaker 2:I think scarcity is the new thing that we should be talking about.
Speaker 1:See, I have my finger on the I
Speaker 2:will subscribe button. Great.
Speaker 1:Lots of good stuff. Anyways, moving on.
Speaker 2:Have One more ad for Derek. If you're gonna drop merch and you're gonna sell it, you're gonna need to pay sales tax. Get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Okay.
Speaker 2:We can move on from our pitching to Derek. We'll we'll have so
Speaker 1:much more. We have so much
Speaker 4:SaaS to
Speaker 1:get Derek set up with. I'm so happy that he's a businessman now.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's it's So happy. It's amazing. New clients. We need more entrepreneurship so we can sell more SaaS.
Speaker 1:It really is, you know, the legacy media dying, all their best talent becoming business people. Yes. It's so good for the the the SaaS industrial complex. It can't cannot be understated enough. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Not be overstated. Sam g says, I will I always love looking at founders crushing it to see and see if you can spot it on their resume. Edwin who bootstraps surged to 1,000,000,000 in revenue in five years looks like he can't hold the job down. And this is of course Yeah. Edwin who we covered on the show yesterday.
Speaker 1:He was at he was at Twitter for two years, Core Science at Google for one year, data science at Dropbox for a year, and then he was a research scientist at Facebook for a year, and then he of course built Surge AI, which was is or I guess was a scale AI competitor to a billion dollar revenue run rate. Fantastic. Allegedly bootstrapped. I did see some people on the timeline yesterday saying that he did have angels.
Speaker 2:But then there were some people that were saying like, well, did your safe convert? Shots fired. It's totally possible. Bill was like, yeah, you've already raised some safes, but like, you know, are you participating in the upside fully? There's always a question.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. You know, I'm sure he's they're gonna do quite well on the back of this business, especially with with more of the Foundation Labs leaning away. Potentially, we've been seeing
Speaker 1:some Yeah. Somebody was throwing out that there was like $2,000,000,000 in in demand that's now kind of up for grabs. So Handshake is going after it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Companies like Surge, I'm sure are, Labelbox. There's a bunch of them. So, Ali DeBeaux, a friend of the show says, welcome to the roaring twenties, technology brother Summer. GPU credits are countless. AI slop is skyrocketing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Aura is radiating. Your memories are in Swish albums. That's how you say it. Right?
Speaker 2:That's her that's her company.
Speaker 1:That's her company. Know. But I I didn't wanna mispronounce it. The American dream is back. Drinking is on the decline.
Speaker 1:TBPN is the national radio.
Speaker 2:You, Ali. We appreciate the shout out. The only one that got tagged, she didn't even tag her own company. Wow.
Speaker 1:Crazy. True. We're honored. We're honored. Anna says, the most important trend of the next decade, the average 21 year old Silicon Valley founders no longer driven by greed, Allison, or idealism jobs.
Speaker 1:They're driven by fame. It is too gauche to become an influencer, so being a startup founder is the best proxy to status.
Speaker 2:Clear shots at our guest today potentially. At our
Speaker 1:guest today.
Speaker 2:Firing we announced our guest today yet? Who we're having on?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. Okay. We probably should.
Speaker 2:Should we?
Speaker 1:I I I don't know. I mean, wait a second. But but I I would say I I would say, like, this is
Speaker 2:because the breaking news printer is ready to go.
Speaker 1:It is a new era that we're in
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That young founders like Yes. Auguste Espirico can become micro celebrities
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 1:By building hard tech companies Yeah. Or any type of company, really.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it ultimately ends up being a good strategy if you wanna recruit, raise money
Speaker 5:I mean
Speaker 2:etcetera. Just being a founder was extremely low status ten years ago. It was like the classic example
Speaker 1:You were living in the tenderloin on like $200 a month. Yeah. Basically. And it was not glamorous. I
Speaker 2:I was I had negative net worth. Was $5,000 in debt living on a mattress. And but but now that's like glorified. People take pictures of the no. People take pictures of the the mattress on the floor, and they're like, I'm I'm just like Steve Jobs or whatever.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, have $5,000,000 seed funding in their bank.
Speaker 2:It's kind of stolen A little bit of stolen value, a little bit of LARP there. But but yeah, I mean, there was a bit of like an industrial complex that that created the these the new high status around the earlier stage founder. Because it used to be yes. It was high status to be like Mark Zuckerberg after the company IPO'd. But before you IPO'd, people would be asking you, like, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Like, why aren't you working at a at one of the big three consulting firms? Like, you should be at McKinsey, Bain, BCG. You should be at an investment bank. You should be in med school or law school. And now just being a founder even no matter what the stage, even if your pre product market fit, pre revenue is, like, high status.
Speaker 2:And so there are there are some folks who flock to it for those reasons, and that's probably the wrong reason. But it is odd because you can be I mean, the the unsaid part here is that she's she's alleging that Larry Ellison is driven by greed. I don't know how true that is, but it's clearly worked. Money. It's clearly worked.
Speaker 2:Like, he he's created a great company, and he's and he's been successful. And then, Jobs is driven by idealism, and it worked. And so the question is, like, can you be driven by fame, and can it work? Like Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:We're about to find out. Like, it feels
Speaker 1:like The other thing is it's not it's not found to be famous for being a loser. So if you have early fame or attention, you have to convert that into success. Otherwise, you know, you won't be taken seriously on a on a long enough time horizon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It hasn't really happened before necessarily. I mean, we've seen famous people start companies that have done quite well. We've seen people become celebrities in the process of building their companies, more or less. I mean, put like, Palmer Luckey in that category where he's he's kind of become a celebrity
Speaker 1:on the back building people in the world are technology entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:Donald Trump.
Speaker 1:Donald Trump. Yes. Social media network. Yes. Through social.
Speaker 2:Crypto entrepreneur
Speaker 1:as IPO ed his company in almost record time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then obviously, Elon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, Elon is like a legit celebrity. Yeah. He did SNL. Like, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Mean, Trump did too. So
Speaker 1:But everyone's a founder. Hailey Bieber Hailey Bieber Billion
Speaker 2:dollar Yeah.
Speaker 1:Outcome. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I mean, Anna's clearly getting at something real. Should we read the rest of this? This has become some fast this has some fascinating real world implications. The amount of young people who have now been one shotted by TikTok edits of the social network are performative how I got into y c videos are which I have made.
Speaker 2:I literally made how to get what into y c, video. I'm I'm probably responsible for a little bit of that one shotting. Are growing exponentially. Being a founder implies intelligence, status, risk taking, wealth. So naturally, the cultural shift in start up e in the start up ecosystem has moved from contrarian rule breakers and hackers to the over overachieving STEM kids for whom being a founder is simply the next box to tick.
Speaker 2:Money is not a motivator. It never was. What does it mean for VCs? They're the most memetic of the bunch. So they'll fund the founder with the most curated credentials, most hype, most viewed product launch videos.
Speaker 2:They'll confuse attention for distribution. This also explains why YC 2020 and beyond will go to zero hot take. They attract this and fund this exact type of founder. The emperor has no clothes. There will be no cultural cultural defining winners for YC to maintain their prestige into the next decade.
Speaker 2:So then when so then what happens to the builders of this decade? That's the trillion dollar question. Overly cynical perhaps, but it does reveal a risk that threatens American hegemony. Next generation founders
Speaker 1:some tinfoil hat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I idolize TikTok and YouTubers. Why would this trend reverse? Could YC be infiltrated by the CCP? It is an under it is an underrated national interest.
Speaker 2:Poison the timelines where artisan, century defining American technology companies are nurtured, reinforce the West economic dominance, and it now funds mass manufactured slop. Instead, I I I think that's a a very odd take because, like like, yes, like, they're like, like, the YC companies do seem to be a little bit more tracked now. They're a little bit more on theme with, the AI agent stuff. But you talk to the TL fellowship and it's a reflection
Speaker 1:of what the timeline is interested in.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. But what I'm saying is that, like, there are still it it's not that it's not that the the trend followers tracked kids have crowded out the risk takers. The risk takers who are there for ideological reasons or some bizarre countercultural reason, they're still starting companies. They're just doing it over here in a completely different pocket of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In a completely different they might be not on X or they might be not Well, the
Speaker 1:funny thing we didn't have any of the YC hard tech founders from this last batch on the livestream. Yeah. And it's very possible they just didn't want attention. They're just hacking away. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, I don't need media right now and that's that's perfectly okay.
Speaker 6:I don't know. Why do
Speaker 2:you have a I
Speaker 1:have the Gong because one? SoftBank's Massasan plans $1,000,000,000,000 robotics manufacturing hub in The US. I'm gonna hit the size gong if you wanna read through this.
Speaker 2:Okay. A US version of China's Shenzhen manufacturing hub. Production lines for AI powered industrial robotics. Already spoken with Trump admin officials about tax breaks for companies that are investing. Seeking partnership with TSMC, but not clear if TSMC is interested.
Speaker 2:Codenamed Project Crystal Wareham.
Speaker 3:Order inbound.
Speaker 2:Okay. Here. We should we should figure out I'm gonna I'm gonna look up, and we're gonna quiz Tyler now if he's ready. Is he good to go?
Speaker 1:He's ready. I got a thumbs up.
Speaker 2:I'm I wanna ask how much money has been invested in Shenzhen. I'm trying to talk into the mic, but not
Speaker 1:Not give it all away.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I am looking this up. Oh, no.
Speaker 2:I used o three pro, so it's gonna be twelve minutes. Damn it. Okay. New new new tab. I will have to use four o for this because I need a quick so he's investing 1,000,000,000,000, right, to compete with China's Shenzhen manufacturing hub.
Speaker 2:I wanna know how close that gets us. Wait. This is weird. I don't know. One of the 9,000,000,000, more than 25,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:This does not seem right.
Speaker 1:I have some I have some I have some various stats I think it's gonna be pretty hard to pin down the exact
Speaker 2:We request Tyler on on on this question.
Speaker 1:Tyler, over since nineteen eighties, how much foreign direct investment has there been in Shenzhen?
Speaker 7:Let me think here. I would say since nineteen eighties, over a 100,000,000,000. Estimates range from 100,000,000,000 to 150,000,000,000. And Shenzhen is a major global manufacturing and tech hub.
Speaker 2:Wow. Okay. Wow. That's so smart. It's
Speaker 1:actually I mean, kind of pulls up. Pretty pretty close. I mean, I think that the challenge is actually there's so many ways you could kind of measure this. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a table. So there's about a 100,000,000,000 of local funds. There was a state and AI robotics fund announced this year. There was a there was another semiconductor industry fund announced this year. There was up until 2014, there was 65,000,000,000 of cumulative foreign direct investment.
Speaker 1:But but who knows? And then and then run rating, I guess around 10,000,000,000. But also like does this count what Apple is doing? Right? That that that's like another form of investment.
Speaker 1:Anyways, this might be an answer that clearly, I guess, got pretty close.
Speaker 2:It was pretty good.
Speaker 1:Pretty good.
Speaker 2:That was good. I have I have a follow-up. So, you know, the iPhones made over in China often flown via 747 to America faster than shipping on a cargo ship? How many iPhones fit inside of a seven forty seven?
Speaker 7:Alright. Let me think here. I'm gonna say I would say about two to 3,000,000 in a seven forty seven. You know? So okay.
Speaker 7:So seven forty seven max payload is about a 140,000 kilograms.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:Each iPhone box is about half a kilogram.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 7:So I would say, you know, a practical range of iPhones is probably 1.5 to 2.5 per flight. But, obviously, it depends on, you know, packaging, pallets, cargo layout, you know, all that
Speaker 2:kind of stuff. That's pretty good. I mean, Chattypuji here has 9,600,000, but I think that's including, like, inch of the plane, including, like, the passenger
Speaker 1:possible that
Speaker 2:clearly I think that's more accurate. Actually. I think that might be more accurate. Is clearly Goated. Goated?
Speaker 2:It might be. Think to
Speaker 1:ask Roy, who's coming on the show later today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is I'm I'm So so press the card. The the chat GPT estimate had the usable internal volume as passenger plus cargo. And I it feels like you used just the cargo number. Is that correct?
Speaker 7:I believe. Yes. I I think so. Okay. Oh, I see Jet GPT estimate 9,600,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh, it's streaming through? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 7:So I I was using just the just the cargo,
Speaker 2:I think. This is fantastic. It actually works pretty well. Alright. I I I'm impressed so far.
Speaker 1:This is basically young young Jamie from Joe Rogan Yeah. Except you don't even have to look anything up. We just get to ask you live.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is great. Well, you know, Cluli is dealing with a lot of personal data. They're gonna need to put rigorous compliance That's right. Practices in place.
Speaker 2:They're gonna need to go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. But Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 1:We actually should put Roy in the hot seat and make sure that he is on Vanta because I would be a lot I would be able to feel a lot better
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:With, you know, knowing that that Tyler is using Van, clearly in our office. Yeah.
Speaker 2:If they
Speaker 1:were on Vanta, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll get them to switch for sure.
Speaker 1:Fully certified.
Speaker 2:What else is what else is in the timeline?
Speaker 1:I like this one. Just kind of Closing out Maasa? Closing out this Maasa story. It is funny to pull the one, you know, pull the one the one t out of the hat. Right?
Speaker 1:He
Speaker 2:The $1,000,000,000,000
Speaker 1:I don't know if he's fully, you know, I definitely don't think he's fully funded the the $500,000,000,000 project Stargate. I'm sure he's sort of making strides towards it, but it's great to see that he's this long America.
Speaker 2:It feels like he's kind of Masa is kind of the DJ Khaled of the capital markets. It's like he's he's pitching a $1,000,000,000,000 US AI hub to TSMC and Trump. And so it could just be TSMC winds up building a massive facility and the government gives some incentives for that. And, like, he's not even he's, like, investing where it makes sense off of his own balance sheet,
Speaker 1:but it's like back promoter.
Speaker 2:Kind of. But it's more like he's just he's just connecting the dots between the different pieces of the global economy. He's a power
Speaker 1:broker.
Speaker 2:He's yeah. He's he's lubricating the the capital markets. Art of the deal. Yeah. I like the name.
Speaker 2:Project
Speaker 1:Crystal If if capital formation was in the Olympics, Masa would be leading the the Japanese team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We've we've said that it's been said that the Nobel Committee should give a Nobel Prize for capital formation. And I think Masa should be a front runner.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. For sure. We have a post here from the supreme leader of Iran back in 2013.
Speaker 2:Is this real? This is a gray check mark, so it's real.
Speaker 1:Clicked through, I think.
Speaker 2:Such a wild antiquity posting style. You know, the the the hashtag. Yeah. This is vintage.
Speaker 1:Read it. He says, woman is a flower. How evil of a man to treat a flower with violence and without appreciation. Hashtag violence against women. And somebody, Ahad, quotes this and says, born to be a a lover forced to be the supreme leader.
Speaker 2:It's a wild posting style. No no spaces see posts you don't
Speaker 1:see posts like this much anymore. No. You just don't.
Speaker 2:No spaces after the periods using a hashtag, throwing in a random date. I I don't know what that date's alluding to. The September 9. Is that like right after 09:11 or something? I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's very odd. Anyway, I like this post by Ben Jarvis Green Ellis. He says, does the HDMI cord have the most dominant run of any cord ever? Hashtag witness. Hashtag witness.
Speaker 2:I don't know if power cord even counts because of its dominance, but sure it would like but it would sure like a spot on the podium.
Speaker 1:Power cord is like a
Speaker 2:commissioner for
Speaker 1:league control says type c is on a Braun esque run right now. The GOAT debate will start three to four years.
Speaker 2:That's true. But the HDMI cord has been around for like twenty years and it's just been reliable. And actually, it gets upgraded pretty regularly, but they don't need to change the actual shape of it. So you don't notice it's not not Generationally as annoying. Annoying.
Speaker 2:But it's gone from, you know, it can it can do HD, high definition video to now it can do four k, eight k. You can do power over HDMI. You can do all these different
Speaker 1:things. Big
Speaker 2:fan of HDMI CEC over here. Are you familiar with this? HDMI CEC lets you plug an HDMI cable into into a TV and then control the TV from the device that's connected over the HDMI. So you can go to the Apple TV. And when you turn on the Apple TV, the Apple TV can send a signal to the real TV
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Over HDMI CEC and say, hey. Turn on or and switch the channel. So it just makes it a lot easier to to actually, like, control the endpoint and for the communication to happen. Pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Anyway We have more breaking news. NVIDIA to drop humanoid robots that will produce NVIDIA GB 300 chips in q one of twenty twenty six. Nick says Wow. Wholly based.
Speaker 2:That is so NVIDIA
Speaker 1:Foxconn in talks to deploy humanoid robots at Houston AI server making plant.
Speaker 2:Wow. That is extremely
Speaker 1:understand this.
Speaker 2:What does
Speaker 1:that mean? I guess Fox Foxconn has been training the robots to pick and place objects and insert cables.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know if this is marketing.
Speaker 2:It feels like
Speaker 1:We've had we've we've asked a bunch of robotics experts about humanoids. Yeah. And so far, I haven't got a I I don't have the confidence that that this is actually a super great use case for them.
Speaker 2:It's the definition of like what is humanoid. Because you go to a go to like a Ford f one f f one fifty factory and they have like massive robotic arms like moving windshields around. Right? Like, it's like you could anthropomorphize that by like spray painting it pink and putting some hair on the on the hand and being like, it's a it's humanoid now. You know?
Speaker 2:But like, you could like retrofit
Speaker 1:every Just give it more bicep definition.
Speaker 2:Totally. I mean, like, Amazon has, like, tons of robots sliding around. You could put googly eyes on them and be like, they're humanoids now. And and you get maybe get, a stock bump. But, like, there's clearly things that are happening in the AI server assembly process that are using robotics, obviously, whether it's even just, like, conveyor belts or or, you know, the the the three axis pick and place, you know, pick it up, put it over here, that type of stuff.
Speaker 2:Just going to humanoids is just it's like, well, will it have five fingers, or will it have a just a grabber? Will it have legs, or will it have wheels? Like, it could just be sitting there. Because for a lot of these pick and place jobs, you can just have the the humanoid sit there with a single arm mounted to the ground because the stuff comes to it. And so then you're just kind of in a okay.
Speaker 2:We're in the arm business now. It feels it feels like it's a little bit wrapped in marketing lingo, but still cool that more companies are making humanoids because it does seem like a cool form factor that hopefully people will break through and get there. And this seems like, you know, a step in the right direction in the sense that it's a very defined task. I think when people think humanoids, they think some like, my new Turing test is is humanoid robotics will will be here and when they can put up a six minute Nurburgring time in a manual.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gated manual.
Speaker 2:In a gated manual. Because at that point, the they have to not just be a self driving car, but they have to be able to, you know, negotiate the the the wheel and the stick shift so so efficiently and so quickly that they are truly performing. Yeah. And a manual and
Speaker 1:a manual can be weirdly, like, probable probabilistic. Right? And that, like, you're, like, you know, you can move the
Speaker 2:the Synthesize a lot of data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not it's not like, you know Yeah. Perfect system. Right?
Speaker 2:It's You're not gonna you're not gonna put up a a sub seven minute Nurburgring time with the Joe Biden walk.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:You're gonna have to be moving fast. Those actuators are gonna have to be That's right. High speed. So, yeah, I I I I don't know where all this goes, but, I mean, exciting to see that they're that they're at least doing work on it because it seems like an important it's it's clearly an important path in the tech tree. We don't know how relevant it is to other to other formats, but, cool to see a lot of money pouring into the sector Yeah.
Speaker 2:From very big companies.
Speaker 1:So Foxconn will be announcing their robots in November Mhmm. And then deploying them shortly after Yeah. In our year 2026.
Speaker 2:I mean, Foxconn seems like the right builder for this. Unitree is is already like feels like it's scaling up to the point where like Unitree robots should be usable in certain locations. Like, they're not generalizable yet, but they're certainly if you train them on a specific task, they could do that task over and over and over again. The question is just like like, you know, do you need five fingers, 10 fingers, 10 toes? Is that is that really, like, the right form factor?
Speaker 2:Or or should we do be just doing things that are more specified? Because if you're if you're if if the whole point of these humanoid robots is just AI server making, just assembly, just one one spot on the manufacturing line, could probably be a much more specialized robot. Yeah. But it'll be cool to see. I'm sure we'll see a lot of viral videos about it.
Speaker 2:It'll be very cool.
Speaker 1:I invested in the company making robots for data centers.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah. And they intentionally chose not to make it humanoid form pack.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which and I think a lot of those the the reason behind, that decision would also transfer to manufacturing setting.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is like, do you need legs? If you can use wheels?
Speaker 2:Data centers have the the most perfectly polished floors with, like, no dust at all. Yeah. Like, it's it's the the perfect environment for a wheeled use case. At the same time, you probably need to have a very specific actuator for like unplugging and plugging the cable back in. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. And that's actually like it's pretty hard to reach around the back of a computer and and unplug an Ethernet cable. And obviously, the server acts are like designed to be worked on more. But still even the cabling is like very
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Detailed work. And so if that's what they're trying to do, you probably need a specific actuator for that. Yeah. Anyway.
Speaker 1:At boring biz says, today I learned that Meta's CFO and CRO share the same corporate and personal budget. It's fun. So Meta's chief financial officer Susan Lee is married to the company's chief revenue officer John Hedgerman.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's amazing. Pretty cool. Just top line and bottom line handled by the same family.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:CFO, GF, CRO, BF.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 2:Well, if he's the chief revenue officer, you gotta get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM Oh, okay. Clearing and and grows your company to the next level.
Speaker 1:Get on adio adio.com. Atti0.com. Check them out.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Arvind. He says, I find the story of AI and radiology fascinating. Of course, Hinton's prediction was wrong with a star. Jeffrey Hinton famously predicted, like, stop training radiologists. All radiologists do in his estimation was look at images of potential cancer spots, which computer vision could do better.
Speaker 2:But that didn't happen, and there's still radiologists have jobs. And so what's going on? And so Arvind says, tech advances don't automatically and straightforwardly cause job displacement. That's not the interesting part, though. Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nonetheless.
Speaker 2:The augmentation, not automation effect of AI is despite the fact that as far as I can tell, there is no identified task at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the jobs are bundles of tasks model in labor economics is incomplete. Paraphrasing something Mel Mitchell pointed out to me, if you define jobs in terms of tasks, maybe you're actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest to automate aspects of jobs, which are the boundaries between tasks. Can you break up your own job into a set of well defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I I suspect that most people will say no.
Speaker 2:But when we think about STAR other people's jobs that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances. If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place. So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation versus augmentation, and this is the star. Hinton insists that he was directionally correct, but merely wrong in terms of timing.
Speaker 2:This is a classic Mott and Bailey retreat of forecasters who get it wrong. It has the benefit of being unfalsifiable. It's always possible to claim that we simply haven't waited long enough for the claim prediction to come true. Interesting. And this is from a New York Times article.
Speaker 2:Your AI radiologist will not be with you soon. Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs, but at the Mayo Clinic, the technology has been more friend than foe. And Andre Karpathy chimes in. He says, very interesting to think about. Job equals bundle of tasks plus glue.
Speaker 2:Probably a bunch of other variables involved, e g, the number of tasks, how long each task is, e. G, meta like notion of task length roughly equals difficulty, how contextual it is, how high how high reliability it needs, whether it can be done fully digitally. Not sure what the state of the art is in trying to think this through and chart the impact of AI on labor market so far, e. G, I was curious to look for radiologists, and if I'm getting this right, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics cites 29,530 US radiologists in 2021 and then up to and let's go to Tyler. How many radiologists does the US Bureau of Labor Statistics claim there have been in 2023?
Speaker 4:Okay. Come back to me in thirty minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Be back.
Speaker 2:I think he's actually I think he's working. And so when I just when I just hit him with random questions, it's not quite
Speaker 1:He's not in the Zoom, so Cluely is not running.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Okay. He's not in the Zoom. Okay.
Speaker 8:Well,
Speaker 1:yeah. That was your first mistake, Tyler. Yeah. Always keep Cluely on.
Speaker 2:Always keep Cluely on. Does Cluely have the ability to to just prompt it directly? Or or or do you have to be on a Zoom?
Speaker 4:No. You don't have to on Zoom. You can do it on so on the website, you can just prompt it. It looks like almost just like the Chatty Bitty interface. Sure.
Speaker 4:But you can also just pull audio, like, just from in person. Like, if I was sitting across from you, it'd be fine. I'm not sure to be able to hear from in the car.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But because he doesn't have
Speaker 8:the I'll
Speaker 4:get back on the Zoom.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we'll come back to you with that.
Speaker 1:The audience will have to wait to find out how many radiologists we have
Speaker 2:Everyone's waiting with bated breath. Everyone wants to know. Well, let's tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the streamline meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
Speaker 2:If you're building Cluelly, get on Linear. Nikita Beer, building
Speaker 1:linear Customer list looks like a tier one venture firm's portfolio page. I I it. OpenAI, Cursor, Runway, Perplexity.
Speaker 2:I normally make the joke of like the next when we talk to Sam Allman, we're gonna pitch him linear but it's like, oh, too late. Boom is on there too. That's cool. I always make jokes about like using linear for other stuff and you're like, no, it's just for software. And look at boom.
Speaker 2:They're using it for everything. It's fantastic. Yeah. Anyway, let's Tyler, what
Speaker 1:are you got?
Speaker 2:Tyler, the question
Speaker 1:is Radiologist expert. We're interviewing you for a job as a data analyst, you know, covering radiology.
Speaker 2:Yes. The question is, many how many radiologists does The US Bureau Of Labor Statistics claim exist in The United States in 2023?
Speaker 7:Let me think about this.
Speaker 2:I'm noticing a towel.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna estimate maybe 31 to 34,000. At least from at least from 2023, I would say. But, yeah, that that's my best guess.
Speaker 2:It's your best guess. Thirty one thousand nine hundred and sixty. Think you got the job. Oh. I think you got the job.
Speaker 4:You might be goaded.
Speaker 2:GDC. Wait. I have another question for you. Pop quiz. Off the top of your head, what's the GDP of India?
Speaker 4:Off the top of my head, let's see. I'm gonna say 3,700,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 2:Wow. It's really it really sells it that you that you're touching your face so I can tell that your hands aren't on the keyboard.
Speaker 4:You can tell that I'm thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You're you're just thinking about it. Yeah.
Speaker 9:You gotta be
Speaker 2:a good actor. But maybe that's why Cluelly is so focused on the social media influencers because they have a little bit of acting in them. And so they're able to This is gonna be the modern tell.
Speaker 1:No, it's good. Okay. You're a great actor and Cluelly might actually
Speaker 2:Or maybe he's not using Cluelly and he just knows all this stuff off the top of his head.
Speaker 1:It's very possible. Switching gears, Nikita Beer has a post here. He says, the most important lesson I ever learned about deal making was the line Dick Costello told me, every great deal dies three deaths. Once you understand that, you will be emotionally prepared for each crisis.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 1:Nikita's done his fair share of deals.
Speaker 2:Yep. So I wanna get Dick on the show. It'd be great to to to hear about his whole journey. You know that you know that famous like first tweet that he posted? So he he joined Twitter and he posted you know immediately the culture was like very jokey and so he posted this joke tweet like day one as I think he was like maybe chief or he wasn't Adam Bain was the chief revenue officer.
Speaker 2:He was someone in the executive tweet. He was like day one on the job like my mission like become the CEO. He was like you know like backstab the CEO become the CEO. And he was like joking about it. And then he actually became the CEO.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. And so so it was like he was kind of like calling his shot, not really. But then he just got like put in the job. And I think he had I think he had a good run. Oh oh, just a wild story with with the arc of Twitter and Axe.
Speaker 2:Like one of the most fascinating tech companies. It's true. Every great deal dies three deaths. This is the this ties to that idea of like, you'll meet your acquirer like years before you get a deal done. You know, like you need to be ready for for the highs and lows and this is just the nature of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2:Some lessons need to be learned the hard way. I don't think that you can just read this and and internalize it. I think that, like, you have to go on the emotional roller coaster before.
Speaker 1:I think it's good for people to understand that you can be on the path to getting a deal done and there can still be major crises that happen along the way. Yeah. Whether it's a major investment, acquisition, partnership, etcetera. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I just think I just think that's like that's something like unique about entrepreneurship is this idea of like the emotional roller coaster. The high highs and the low lows. Like it's it's just it's a higher variability job than anything else. And because you just feel all those sways and all the swings of the of what's going on in the business. And there's always something that's good, there's always something that's bad, but you internalize it so much more as the founder.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, Sarah Guo, friend of the show says, the AI leapfrog effect is quietly transforming sectors historically slow to adopt technology, legal, healthcare, logistics. We've been seeing a ton of startups in those categories come through the show with often massive fundraising rounds to announce. They're not merely catching up, they're vaulting ahead.
Speaker 2:Traditionally, automation in these industries is blocked by high barriers, expensive software, difficult integrations, ambiguous ROI. The business math rarely worked. Large language models, cogeneration, MCP, and computer use agents have fundamentally shifted the economics. Suddenly, automation is affordable, fast, and obviously valuable. Examples emerging everywhere, Harvey in legal, latent health, and and open evidence in health care, Sola AI in logistics, haven't talked to them.
Speaker 2:Would be interested to get to know them. Each providing rapid tangible productivity gains. Crucially, every industry, even the slowest, is filled with motivated tech hungry end users ready to drive adoption. Founders who overlook these sectors risk missing something of the decade's best opportunities. What other areas with prior with poor priors deserve another look?
Speaker 2:Insurance, education? Oh, she's on the hunt for the next Harvey. She wants vertical SaaS. She's looking for ideas. On the hunt.
Speaker 1:She's on the hunt.
Speaker 2:Love it. I don't know. Do you have anything on the top top top of your mind?
Speaker 1:I thought Crosby, who we had on the show earlier this week, was an interesting approach. Not just creating software or a co pilot for lawyers but actually just delivering the service. So I'm excited to see more companies like that that are truly that are AI native but they're actually firms doing the work that legacy law firms used to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think there might be something like that, like, when you think about insurance and education, like those are also like massive industries. Like legal, healthcare, logistics, insurance, education. There's something interesting going on that I want to dig into deeper around these like incredibly niche industries. Talked to an investor this morning who does growth equity deals and often in some control deals as well in much smaller markets where there's there's It's easier to underwrite to a two X, but it's harder to underwrite to a 100 X.
Speaker 2:So less than like the venture moonshot category. Traditional PE. More in the traditional PE, but still with like a venture lens, and with like a tech focused lens. And so one of the examples he gave me was a company that does software for the chamber for chambers of commerce. So like, if you're if you're every city has like a chamber of And it's like, how that would appear on no market maps.
Speaker 2:Like, I've never heard I've never even considered that as a as an idea of a market. And yet, there's someone who clearly got the idea, you know, years ago, be probably from directly interfacing with the chamber of commerce. It's like the d DMV software. It's probably gonna be a business there. It's like Palantir for the DMV is probably gonna be a category.
Speaker 2:Now, is it gonna be a $100,000,000 business? No. Is it gonna be appropriate for for Sarah at conviction and and, you know, like a true venture fund? Maybe not.
Speaker 1:I know. What what are the operating annual operating budgets of every DMV in the country combined, Tyler? Totally.
Speaker 2:Do you have the answer?
Speaker 1:Have no idea. Have no idea. We'll all all all
Speaker 2:You'll do your work. Is just the battle of the LLMs right now. This is the true benchmark.
Speaker 1:This is the future. This is
Speaker 2:This is the future.
Speaker 1:What being a gold Retriever is all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just sitting around chatting with ChatGPT and Cluelly. Yeah. Let let let's find out how big of a market is DMV budgets? Wait, what was the number?
Speaker 2:How much is spent on all the DMV's in America in a year? What's the annual budget of all the DMV's in America combined? How much do they spend? Because a lot of that's probably on personnel. But maybe we can automate some of that away.
Speaker 2:That the idea?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay. So we're we're racing. Tyler, do we have a number? We're we're we're I I think you're on mute.
Speaker 1:Technical difficulties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mute button.
Speaker 1:Well, look, I'll I'll give you the California DMV is 1,500,000,000.0 a year. Yeah. You could do. DMV's. You get in there, you start Yeah.
Speaker 1:Start shaking things Take
Speaker 2:10% of that. You do that a couple more times. You get a couple $100,000,000 revenue business. Not bad. Not Anyways,
Speaker 1:Tyler, you're you're free to do some real work now. So we will come back to you Kevin Weil of OpenAI, chief products officer over there, a friend of the show says, and remember the AI model you're using today are the worst AI models you'll use for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2:In the
Speaker 1:last Andre from at Andreessen said, in the last thirty five days OpenAI Codex has merged thirty four, three hundred and forty five thousand PRs in GitHub. AI is eating software engineering. Cool to see.
Speaker 2:That's so many compared to the other coding agents. That's so so many. Wow. They really scaled that fast. I wonder what's going on there.
Speaker 2:Because GitHub Copilot is at is at 10,000 merged PRs. Codex is at 345,000 merged PRs. Cursor agents is at 1,000. Devon's at almost 20,000, and CodeGen is at 1,600. And the success rate is also the highest with OpenAI Codex.
Speaker 2:I wonder I wonder what the what the base use case for OpenAI Codecs is. I mean, I imagine that maybe the rollout was just a lot more aggressive because OpenAI for teams was already installed with a lot of a lot of workplaces.
Speaker 1:I think this probably comes down to distribution Yeah. More than even product quality.
Speaker 5:You were talking
Speaker 2:to Judge Hots and you were saying, I'm firing up seven How
Speaker 1:many of software engineers already use Chatuchupti? PT.
Speaker 2:So like, why not just fire the software
Speaker 1:and see how it works? Switch over and try it out.
Speaker 2:But man, scaling Delivering results. Crazy. I mean, good for good for Devon for, you know, being
Speaker 1:Strong second place.
Speaker 2:Strong second place there. And above GitHub Copilot which we know is is doing something like half a billion dollars in revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Not not every PR is created equally to
Speaker 2:It is interesting to understand like, yeah what is the nature of these PRs because I mean I have some like PRs on like crazy projects just because I would go around and just do like little like you know, oh tweak the documentation. Or basically like writing English but in a really powerful project. And then I'd be like a contributor. This is like a classic thing to be like to like build your software engineer resume. It's like, yeah like I'm a contributor to like Linux.
Speaker 1:Ethereum.
Speaker 2:And Ethereum or something and you went in and like fix like one test case or something like just did something very very basic. But I mean like there's gotta be some crazy stuff there. So I imagine that there's a really wide variety of those you know 34 345,000 PRs. We got to hit the gong for Kevin. Is fantastic.
Speaker 2:Hit
Speaker 1:it. I'll hit
Speaker 2:it. Yeah. You hit it. You hit it.
Speaker 1:Big. Kevin.
Speaker 2:Congratulations to the OpenAI team. Two
Speaker 1:hands that time.
Speaker 2:Maybe on Monday we can get Tyler to do a review of OpenAI Codex. That would be interesting. I wanna know how Tyler reviews that. Tyler, you got something for us. This shot's amazing.
Speaker 1:Technical difficulties. Back to the timeline. Max Meyer says, I regret to inform you that the outrageously priced Apple Studio display is the best monitor I have ever owned and it isn't close. Now I can't go back. I agree.
Speaker 2:You've used one of these? Yes. I've never used one of these.
Speaker 1:Isn't Wait. Is that is that not what we have right here?
Speaker 2:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:No. So those are wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Speaker 2:So he's this is interesting because he's using the wrong term, I think. So the Apple Studio Display, yes, that's the one we have. But it's the Apple Pro Display XDR that's the outrageously priced one. I wonder which one he's talking about. Because Apple has two.
Speaker 2:The the the studio display is like kind of expensive but it's like $1,500. The Apple
Speaker 1:Pro I mean the Pro XDR is 5 k.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the one that I think of as like extremely expensive. And and it's also weird because it's like a decade old at this point. But and they
Speaker 1:haven't It's still fantastic.
Speaker 2:Have still fantastic. Have the Pro Display XDR. Yeah. Right? It has like the the cheese grater in the back.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That and and that one's that one's known to be amazing. What's interesting is that they just haven't revised it. I I would have expected them to be like now it's eight k, now it's even better.
Speaker 2:Like they just they they just kind of nailed it out of the gate and people are still posting videos like you know five
Speaker 1:years later. A television.
Speaker 2:I know. I know. Just scale it up with the I I was I was at a soccer game yesterday and there was an ad for a high sense TV that's a 100 inches and I'm pretty sure it's like a couple grand. How much is that? Maybe we should ask Tyler but we'll see.
Speaker 1:Tyler Tyler needs to use Cluely to figure out.
Speaker 7:I'm on.
Speaker 2:I think we got a feedback loop here. Can we hear you? Much is the Hisense 100 inch TV cost? Hisense.
Speaker 7:Let me think. I'm gonna say typically, I would say around 3 to $5,000. But obviously, varies by region and model.
Speaker 2:This sounds so natural. This sounds so natural. 100 inch. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I think Apple should do it.
Speaker 1:Do it. It'd be great. Tim, do it.
Speaker 2:100 inches would be a good a good like, you know, differentiator too. Because a lot of brands that you know, they're 55, 65, 75. It's gotten all confusing. It was just like, you know, if you're going with Apple, you're getting a 100 inch TV. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, it's just amazing amazing quality.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway. Varqueshe has opposed people underrate how big a bottleneck inference compute will be especially if you have short timelines. There's currently about 10,000,000 h 100 equivalents in the world. By some estimates, human the human brain has the same flops as an h 100.
Speaker 1:So even if we could train an AGI that is as inference efficient as humans, we couldn't sustain a very large population of AIs. Not to mention that a large fraction of AI compute will continue to be used for training not inference. And while AI compute has been growing 2.25 x so far by 2028, you'd be pushed, you'd be pushed against TSMC's overall wafer production limits which grows 1.25 x according to AI 2027 compute forecast. Pretty interesting chart we have here. But, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean,
Speaker 2:my my volume rocker got screenshot of the accident, I guess. I must have been adjusting the volume. Cue the o Leonard laser eyes meme. I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:People have been debating this back and forth in our group chat about like, are we gonna be energy constrained? Are we going to be
Speaker 1:Or data centers being overbuilt.
Speaker 2:Are we gonna be GPU constrained, or are we gonna be idea constrained, as Mike put it yesterday? Yeah. And I I don't know. I
Speaker 1:I I I
Speaker 2:think back to the Ray Kurzweil timelines. Like, Ray Kurzweil has the singularity
Speaker 1:mean, it's possible to be inference compute constrained, but not and still be and still not have the ideas that get us to super intelligence or or AGI, depending on your definition.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so he said Kurzweil says AGI by 2029, that AI will reach a level of general intelligence comparable to humans by 2029, which four years from now with, like just different agents and reinforcement learning on different tasks, like that feels like we're we're kind of in the AGI era now and that 2029 feels reasonable. He says technological singularity in 02/1945, where AI surpasses human intelligence in all aspects leading to emerging of human and machine intelligence. And when you think about 02/1945, that feels like I don't know. It just feels much more reasonable, and yet it is like a crazy, crazy stat because 2045 is well within our well within our lifetimes.
Speaker 2:And so that that is the point where there will be enough h 100 equivalents in the world to be more powerful and smarter or, in theory, smarter than all of humans. So, like, the machines will outnumber the humans. And at that point, he he describes, like, it is extremely hard to predict what happens then. But I don't know. It's interesting.
Speaker 2:We'll have to dig into it. Obviously, it has, you know, immediate impacts in, you know, NVIDIA market cap, hyperscaler market cap. What's what's happening at the early stage? What's happening? Where the opportunity is in the neo clouds?
Speaker 2:All these different things. There's all these, like, micro transactions that that happen on a week to week, or month to month, or day to day basis with this backdrop of like massive change coming in maybe a few years, maybe a few decades. You skip this one post, but now, Anthropic co founder is saying, we will have superintelligence by 2028, or or I think that was like that was at least the question. And so the number keeps sliding around, and the definitions keep changing. We used to be an AGI, now we're in superintelligence world.
Speaker 2:But it it's this weird thing where like the hype is growing and changing and kind of dodging around, but also the tools are really cool and we're getting a lot of value out of them. So like you can't be entirely bearish, but there's still like a lot of a lot of weasel words being used I suppose is the term. Anyway, did you
Speaker 1:see We have a post from Justin He says we're using stock market p and l as an LLM eval now. What happens if you give each model a 100 k in a Bloomberg terminal? We're tracking the results on LMP and l, a public leader board. So this was launched yesterday. I don't think they have posted any results yet but I wanted to flag it because I'm excited to follow along.
Speaker 1:And this seems like something we would task Tyler with of saying like, make ChatGPT day trade for you. See how it does. Anand Sunwal says, he talked to a friend at KPMG. She said, they're dramatically reducing fresh grad hiring because AI does it faster, better already, gradually and then suddenly. And anyways, I thought this was an interesting anecdote and something that I'm sure will start showing up in the data.
Speaker 1:We have a post here
Speaker 2:from Do know where he got the money from? Because did he raise money for this? Because I feel like a 100 k for each model, like there's a new model every day. And so you're quick
Speaker 1:Also a 100 k feels hot.
Speaker 2:Breaking news.
Speaker 1:We got some breaking news. We got the breaking news. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Cluely.
Speaker 2:What's going
Speaker 1:This was alluded to on the timeline. There were some rumors floating around. Brian Kim has led an investment in Cluely, a series a. He says, what if breaking the rules was the unlock? We're excited to announce our investment in Cluely, an AI powered desktop assistant that delivers real time support during everyday moments, whether meetings, customer support calls, if you're live, if you're an intern live on TBPN, project brainstorming sessions or collaborative tasks.
Speaker 1:'ve almost certainly heard of Cluelly's founder Roy Lee, the mind behind viral stunts like interview coder hiring 50 interns to fuel cute Cluelly's content engine and his infamous exit from Columbia University. While Roy's bold approach may seem outwardly controversial behind the scenes, his moves are rooted in deliberate strategy and intentionality. So we will have on Brian Kim and Roy Lee later on today's show and I'm excited for them to break this down. So the rumors were true. It was pretty funny.
Speaker 1:There was an there was an account that baited Arfur Rock in the DMs to confirm it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you said he made a deal or something?
Speaker 1:Or apparently Arfur had made a deal with Roy not to leak it or something like that.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's like what Roy would want. I feel like he would love a leak. I feel like he wants like you know the virality and the attention.
Speaker 1:And he's clearly very intentional right. Yeah. It's possible he had different plans for it.
Speaker 2:I mean if they drop this insane they drop the new video? Yeah. Course. You have to imagine We'll
Speaker 1:to pull it up. We'll pull it up when he's coming on later. Raj Veer has a post. He says, Sam is right. Paying a 100,000,000 for top talent destroys your culture.
Speaker 1:It's not how you attract the best people. And he shows a picture of OpenAI unites with Johnny Ive in $6,500,000,000 deal to create AI devices. So putting Sam in the truth zone but there's, you know, narrative warfare happening right now.
Speaker 2:Right? We've talked about it before. Lots of folks on Wall Street also pulling in $100,000,000 paydays. If you are trying to set yourself up for a career in finance or high finance, get on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing Industry I should they're trusted high millions.
Speaker 2:What else is in here? Why don't we sell hurricane names? It's free money for Noah. I wanna see headlines like hurricane capital one decimates Gulf Coast. Hurricane Eric makes landfall.
Speaker 2:This is hilarious. Wow. 89,000 likes. That's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:This resonated.
Speaker 2:Obviously, it's because it's a really bad thing. You don't want your brand associated with destruction. But maybe like they could do something with like the WWE or something like, you know, hurricane like
Speaker 1:Yeah. You could see Iran sponsoring a hurricane that was causing widespread destruction in the West. Monster gin. Hurricane
Speaker 2:gravedigger is dead. But it's still bad. It's still just sad and like negative. I don't know. It's a very funny idea.
Speaker 1:Haters should sponsor hurricanes. Your enemies Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're taking on short on a big company, name a hurricane.
Speaker 1:Because that would be really if a hurricane was coming or a fire was coming towards your home and your enemy had paid to name it after themselves. Yep. That would really hurt. Yep. That would know.
Speaker 1:That would get you. Yep. You'd be got.
Speaker 2:I I say I say bail on the on the selling of hurricane names. If you wanna do out of home advertising just go to adquick.com. That's right. Out of home advertising mean easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 2:Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.
Speaker 1:Get on Adquick. Your brand will thank you.
Speaker 2:We're gonna have Wade Foster on the show soon. Matthew Prince over at Cloudflare says, I did in fact say this, quote, I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're telling me I can't stop some nerd with a c corp in Palo Alto?
Speaker 1:Shots fired.
Speaker 2:Publishers facing existential threat from AI. Yeah. He's he's duking it out. I mean, Cloudflare is the front that's the CDN for the Internet. And so, obviously, there's a lot of attacks that that happen, and they have to fight them all off.
Speaker 2:Very fun. We have some news from, HF Zero. What how would you describe h f zero? Is it incubator, accelerator, batch led startup investment vehicle?
Speaker 1:Hacker house. Hacker house. We'll let Dave. Dave is gonna pop on the show later today Great. To talk about it, but they had a new batch this week.
Speaker 1:They called it Moonshot batch. They have people doing thoughts
Speaker 2:and text. Is that like BCDI?
Speaker 1:Then a team that's three d printing drones in these tiny tiny micro factories that that is lining up a bunch of contracts. Excited to check that out. Very cool. Microsoft plans to cut thousands more employees. Companies layoffs are expected around July sales and other departments.
Speaker 1:Absolutely brutal when these things leak. I feel bad for the employees that have to, you know, spend the next couple weeks waiting around to see if they get to keep their job. But ultimately, this is the kind of thing that Microsoft does routinely. They had another layoff earlier this year and it shouldn't really be a huge surprise to everyone. This is effectively part of their corporate strategy.
Speaker 2:And so the number of cuts isn't final yet and they are planned for around the beginning of Microsoft's new fiscal year which starts in July. They said the latest round of layoffs came come on comes on top of the roughly 6,000 roles the company eliminated in May across product and software development roles around the world. Bloomberg earlier reported on the planned summer layoffs. Companies ranging from retailers to pharmaceuticals have begun drawing up plans to consolidate positions, looking to do more with leaner stabs relying on technology for additional tasks. Andy Jassy said the company planned to reduce its workforce in the coming years because of increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain roles.
Speaker 2:I mean, you have to imagine that, like, you could almost have the same narrative at Microsoft just around SaaS. Right? It's like, you know, if you have, you know, a massive organization that's just, you know, I don't know, categorizing paper receipts or something like like when software becomes more available, you can can shift those resources around. But Microsoft had about 228,000 employees at the end of its last fiscal year with roughly 45,000 of them in sales and marketing. That's a huge organization.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the with the holiday parties held at the the Rose Bowl or something, how do you even get everyone together? I don't know. How do you get off for, like, a happy hour or movie night? It's it's impossible. Microsoft eliminated 10,000 jobs in January 2023, retrenching after a pandemic driven hiring frenzy by many tech companies.
Speaker 2:The company also made cuts to its video game division last year after closing its its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We continue to focus on building high performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers. Oh, man. Layers. That's a whole thing.
Speaker 2:You know about layering? Have you heard of this? Like how many layers are you from the CEO? You try and track yourself. Like I report to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone to someone who reports to CEO.
Speaker 2:So I'm like eight layers deep. And there's whole businesses
Speaker 1:That's the number of people that you have to backstab in order to get to
Speaker 2:point where
Speaker 1:you can actually backstab the CEO and take the top spot.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, we have some breaking news. As of twenty five minutes ago, the Financial Times is reporting that Mira Marathi's Thinking Machines lab valued at 10,000,000,000 after new 2,000,000,000 fundraise. The six month old secretive AI startup in one of the largest initial funding rounds in Silicon Valley history. So I think this would been rumored for a while but it's good to see it finally closing.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Was one of the is one of the largest seed rounds in SV history. SF based Thinking Machines Lab has not declared what it is working on instead using Muradis name and reputation to attract investors said those familiar with the fundraise. So
Speaker 2:I thought you were gonna say there was like an acquisition or something. Like this is like the least dramatic breaking news I've ever heard.
Speaker 1:It's still breaking, John.
Speaker 2:It is. Breaking news is breaking news. How much did they raise?
Speaker 1:And it is funny because with the all the different billions of dollars being thrown around right now, this is You're not even You don't even get excited about a $2,000,000,000 seed round.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm gonna get excited. Get
Speaker 1:excited, John.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna get excited.
Speaker 6:I'm gonna
Speaker 1:This one is for we go. Wow. That had a good ring to
Speaker 9:it.
Speaker 2:I think it's going back there into Into Thailand's microphone maybe. Does he still have the window down? Yeah. Does. I can't see him because we're completely blocked by the gong.
Speaker 2:We're gonna have to rearrange this whole thing.
Speaker 1:And Jarese and Horowitz led the round
Speaker 2:with Oh, really?
Speaker 1:From Sarah Kuo's conviction partners. Very
Speaker 2:cool. Dylan Patel is obsessed with this company and keeps singing the praises of like who they're adding to the team.
Speaker 1:Pretty rough for machines to announce their seed round on the from Andreesen. Not even announce it, have it leak on the same day that Cluelly is raising a series a.
Speaker 2:Series a. Oh.
Speaker 1:They're really overshadowing the sort of $2,000,000,000 raise.
Speaker 2:You're joking but like, I wouldn't be surprised if Cluelly steamrolls thinking machines in the timeline today.
Speaker 1:Because of
Speaker 2:virality. We shouldn't tie Mira on today. Let's get her on
Speaker 1:Mira 36 left OpenAI in September having helped drive the creation of products such as ChatGPT, the image generator Dolly and voice mode. She had also been a senior product manager at Tesla where she worked on the Model X.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's cool. I love it.
Speaker 1:And if she had stayed at Tesla Mhmm. We might have a naturally aspirated v 12 Model X. You know, ripping around Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Speaker 2:I saw a refreshed Model S hit the timeline and it was
Speaker 1:Very moderately.
Speaker 2:More evolution than
Speaker 1:a Very moderate
Speaker 2:we didn't know what's inside. If they switched out the engine we could be we could be getting very very excited very soon.
Speaker 1:Anyway our first Thank you,
Speaker 2:by the way.
Speaker 1:Okay. We should bring Let's run it. I'll be right back.
Speaker 2:I I we got Steve Snofsky in the studio coming on to TVPN live. Let's bring him in. How you doing Steve?
Speaker 6:I am here.
Speaker 2:Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Sorry. Where did you
Speaker 6:I showed up early? I apologize.
Speaker 2:But Oh, no. I love it.
Speaker 6:I love connected to you guys before. Didn't know what your process would be.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's, it it's evolving. It's evolving. It's a it's a pirate ship over here. It is a it is a startup in every sense of the word.
Speaker 2:We we only learned later after the information was interviewing guests who had been on our show that it's common that when people go on live TV, they talk to a producer beforehand as opposed to just what we do, which is just send you a Zoom link, and you just hop right on.
Speaker 6:Like like, just so everyone is watching and listening and later is clear. Not only do you just send to Zoom, that's it.
Speaker 2:That's it. Like, there's
Speaker 6:not there's, like, nothing.
Speaker 2:Zero. Yeah. I mean, we wanna we wanna bring a little bit of the clubhouse magic, the casual, conversation nature, to the show as a feature. It might be a bug, but we are hoping that
Speaker 6:it's feature. I'm excited. I I people were asking me, what are you gonna talk about? I'm like, I I don't even know if want me to talk about it, let alone do what.
Speaker 2:I'm sure we'll have stuff to talk about. There's so much in the news all the time. I mean, why don't we kick it off with a little bit of introduction on you and give like, brief overview of your career, then we can kind of dove dive into a bunch of different topics from that.
Speaker 6:Sure. Well, working working backwards, today, I do mostly lots of informal mentoring, coaching kind of stuff. I spend a lot of time talking to the to companies, newly forming formed ones all the way up to biggest of big, and lots about strategy and tactics and management, organization, and and rolling in technologies and all that stuff. Do a lot of writing. I I have like, my whole Microsoft history I've written, and then I do posts every few weeks on what's going on in the world.
Speaker 6:In the past, I worked at, Microsoft for a long time, started as a engineer on on programming tools.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Back in I I I think what Karpathy called, like, tools one point o. I think in that scale, it's more like point five. And then all the way through office and windows and bunch of other stuff in in the middle. I also am a board partner at a sixteen z.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 6:But you guys know for sure board partner doesn't mean much in terms of writing checks or having a decision or knowing anything that's going on. So I'm I'm learning much of what you talked about this morning the same time you are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When did you join Microsoft exactly, and how did that come together?
Speaker 6:Sure. I joined Microsoft in 1989. So for product chronology, it was, like, before like, six, eight months before Windows three point o shipped. So I was there the summer that that was being debugged, and that was sort of a big giant turning point. That came together because I was in graduate school doing databases and programming languages, which was basically what everybody in the nineteen eighties studied.
Speaker 6:And I I just wasn't gonna be a professor. That wasn't on my radar. So I literally had sent my resume on paper into the address that was on a box of Microsoft software that I'd won at a conference for a prize for my booth. And then a day later, the recruiter called me, and, like, three days later, I'm in Redmond interviewing. And then I have a job, and there you go.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 7:I have
Speaker 6:a whole story. I actually wrote the whole story out as part of my hardcore software thing.
Speaker 2:Love it. There's this narrative about the the kind of the nineties era at Microsoft that the, like, the antitrust, like like, era was so tumultuous. It was like this very painful experience for Gates, and it kind of reshaped the organization. How much do you think that that's, like, an overblown narrative or it's or maybe it's very real? And what do people maybe miss when they when they tell that story today in kind of the more compressed version?
Speaker 6:Sure. It is totally compressed. And you also have to keep in mind, it's it's like twelve years long.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:It it started in the early nineteen nineties
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:With some FTC investigations, blah blah blah. And it didn't really end until, like, 02/2007. By then, I was working on Windows. Mhmm. I was on Office, which was certainly in there, but I was also part of the very, very early set of people who were running around talking about the Internet at Microsoft.
Speaker 6:And so I was in the middle of all of it for the whole time. And I there no one is gonna ever convince me that it was as big a deal as everybody else made it to because, like, it just wasn't it's not the whole thing with litigation and regulation and the government, it's not day to day Yeah. Even if you're working in it. I mean, the government doesn't do stuff every day. The legal process doesn't change every day.
Speaker 6:So it's this massive amount of hurry up and wait. I mean, like, I'll give you like, very personally, I had to personally design the what was called the browser choice dialogue that was in Windows, which was this thing the European Union made us do. Yeah. Like, you start a new computer, you log in, and then it pops up, hey, which browser do you want? So I personally did that.
Speaker 6:But it was like over six months and it would be like, I'm working three days straight. I'm not leaving this room in our house where our apartment where I was designing it and then nothing would happen. And then
Speaker 1:Well, would go on vacation. They would go on they would go they would go on a twelve week vacation.
Speaker 2:Because you're working with
Speaker 6:they, you know, Brussels is completely European. So, like, they you'll see. It it'll happen again. Like, in fact, the Google choice just came out. The the Google decision on Android just came out yesterday.
Speaker 6:And as the summer ends, just like the Supreme Court in The US, they start pushing things out, but the difference is in Brussels, they, like, literally just, like, put chains around the door and nothing happens until September.
Speaker 1:And That's amazing.
Speaker 6:And so there's a lot of that. But I you know, there were some things about like, for example, the browser, like, ended up being completely self inflicted by Microsoft in my personal view.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:And it was just not like, it wasn't the browser choice dialogue. It was not the deals with the OEMs we had to go change. It was all our own making. More than anything, it is our our perspective was either wrong or perhaps warped by the antitrust. It made us think Windows was more important or central to every single thing we did and put us constantly trying to push it because if they're trying to push against, maybe there was something there.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But by and large, I I just I think for some people, it became a bigger deal than it was. And I think for the people covering the company I mean, if you look at books about Microsoft, most of the books about Microsoft are really about either there are, three books about the formation of the company, like, dozen books about the trial and stuff like that, and and that's about it. Yeah. And so I I and I have a whole bibliography like a 100 books you could look at. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And it's just I always it's just overdone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Zooming out a little bit in the nineties, was there anybody that that you remember being you know, having incredible incredible accuracy around predictions of how the in internet would evolve and impact various parts of the economy. Feel like what we do on the show today is try to understand the present of AI and and how it will impact various industries in the future. And there's a lot of people that have cool ideas. Some people sound like they have good ideas.
Speaker 1:Know, we have these conversations all day long and you know, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, who who do we actually kind of align with from a thinking standpoint. But I I remember earlier this week on the show we talked about how a lot of internet entrepreneurs in the late nineties and early two thousands like really predicted that the internet would allow you to run companies drastically more efficiency because it helps with distribution. So you maybe you needed less sales and marketing and all these kind of things. And then it turns out companies like still needed massive headcount to deliver products and and things like that. So I'm curious, you know, kind of focusing in on the nineties, was there anybody that you think was really getting it right in the moment around how the Internet would evolve?
Speaker 6:Well, of course, you know, obviously, company excluded. But the key thing is that I I always go back to eighties movie that you guys won't know, but there's a line in it, you know, no matter where you go, there you are. And with predictions, no matter what happens, someone always said it would. And so you have to be really careful, especially with the Internet, because all the all the things that people said in 1993 would happen, all happened. The only problem is all the words are different and the technology stack is divided up differently.
Speaker 6:So the question is like, is that prediction or not a good prediction? And so it just depends on how charitable you wanna be. There are these very famous commercials that AT and T ran. Now you have to remember, in the early nineteen nineties, AT and T had just gone through ten years earlier, a massive antitrust suit, been broken up into regional Bell operating companies. But they were, like, the biggest company you could imagine other than IBM in in The US at the time.
Speaker 6:And and they ran all these commercials about what the future was gonna look like. You know? And they were called the someday you will. And so they would be like, did you ever write a business memo while sitting on the beach? And there's like a person with this, like, 18 pound laptop and a printer next to them pounding out a memo and a cell phone the size of a shoebox.
Speaker 6:So, yeah, I now can write a business memo on the side of a beach, except I don't wanna write a memo. I'm using a cell phone that AT and T didn't really have much to do with, and I'm using not really a word processor, but I'm just talking. Yeah. So, like, yeah, you can write a memo from the beach, but it wasn't but the if you watch it, it you know, you just go crazy or could you imagine going through a toll booth and not stopping?
Speaker 2:I can,
Speaker 6:in fact. I do that twice a day. Yeah. But not at all like how they predicted in the movie. So, you know, you you have to be really careful.
Speaker 6:But then there are also some incredibly prescient, like, micro things that are just wild. Like, when this company in Seattle based, Webvan, was doing grocery delivery.
Speaker 2:I remember
Speaker 6:Webvan. Like, nobody said that was gonna work. Everybody's and, of course, it's not just grocery, but now just everything shows up four hours later.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And when they but the thing is when they said it, even the world's experts in shipping, like the founder of what was called Federal Express or FedEx at the time, impossible. Cannot do local delivery. Because, you know, their whole model was, okay. We own a fleet of jets, and we pick up your packages with trucks, drive them to the airport, and fly them all to Tennessee, and then fly them back. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So, obviously, we can't do that in four hours, but that's how we do overnight envelopes for $10. Yeah. And so but, you know, along comes Amazon and, like, a million and a half employees, and they figure the whole thing out. And so, you know, like, these you know, and there's a great a thing I always loved was this prediction that's, like, every single utility in Linux will eventually become a company. And it turned out that really ended up being true.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so the whole thing with that 1995 to February, meaning, you know, Windows '95, broad Internet for everybody even though it was dial up to the crash. The whole thing about it was all of those companies ended up being being right. It's just they were all early. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Early is mostly just wrong. Yep. It's just means the technology was wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The web the investors in web van got smoked. Totally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:yet it was the right idea that has now played out in
Speaker 2:various single category during the .com. Amazon. Like Oh, I mean b3.com, Spotify, pets.com, Chewy. Like, there is a $10,000,000,000 company in the public markets today that has a precursor. Every single one of them has a precursor in
Speaker 6:that I mean, like, that sock puppet was the symbol of fuck company fuckcompany.com.
Speaker 2:I that website. Yep.
Speaker 6:It was I mean, you you know, that was a Super Bowl TV commercial Yeah. Into pets.com, blah blah blah. And now, like, I'm I'm literally if you if I were to move camera, there's, like, nine feet of ChewyBoxes right behind me.
Speaker 2:Everyone buys pet food online now. Everyone.
Speaker 6:And so so you you I like, predictions, dime a dozen.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:But it's also and also, like, all of those companies, and I really mean this with the most feeling and sincerity, all of those companies, they they had to crawl so that everybody today or tomorrow today can walk, and then tomorrow other companies will run. And I think that there's so much of that with AI right now. A lot of what's going on, these are just the crawlers, and you have to be careful to sort of declare them winners. The platform is known, all this other stuff. I mean, I look, Karpathy's talk, unbelievable.
Speaker 6:Just amazing, amazing talk that he did at YC. And and, like, he talked about, like, it it's not the year of the agent. It's the decade of the agent. But that's not you can't build a company by claiming, hey. We're the ten year out company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you
Speaker 6:because you don't even start it thinking that. You start it thinking the revolution is happening and I'm behind already. Yeah. I mean, Marc Andreessen talks about how he moved from college to Silicon Valley in in '93, and he was worried he missed everything.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's crazy.
Speaker 6:Mean Insane. And I think that you have to have that mindset to move fast, to to do things that when the whole world is telling you it's not gonna work Yeah. Which is literally what's happening with AI right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it it feels so similar, and yet the some of the revenue ramps of these companies are just so steep that they feel much more like real they feel more real as businesses than what was going in the .com boom when there would be companies that would IPO with no revenue and just massive costs. But at the same time, if the revenue doesn't stick around, we're gonna have a lot of dead kind of corporate corpses that look a lot like .com flame outs.
Speaker 6:I don't know. Maybe another way to look at that though is remember, what's the denominator you're dealing with? Mhmm. So if you if you had an Internet company in 1996, your denominator was like, what, like a 100,000,000 computers in the world. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know, you're looking at a in an era when when 30% of The US had a home computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and so and no mobile. So you had to, like, be at home or be at work to shop.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so so a big reason that there was no revenue was, like, there were no end points.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, it's so much easier to get to 10,000,000,000 in revenue if you're OpenAI with on the back of Stripe, on the back of everyone having an iPhone, on the back of the App Store, on the back of everyone having an Internet connection, everyone having a laptop. And so the install base is just so so much bigger that you can actually build a durable business. You're still trading at a high multiple, but it seems pretty it seems pretty durable.
Speaker 6:Well, it's it it might be durable, but at the very least, the near term revenue is an entirely a product of the addressable trial market.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 6:Like, the number the whole thing with with every generation of technology is the gating factor has always been distribution.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And and so, like, when the PC was new, you know, you're talking about shipping, like, you know, a 100 pounds worth of stuff all around for $3,000.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:You know, you had to set up a store where people wore all coats and ties and it was like buying a car and all this other stuff. And, you know, to today, where like the friction to use GPT is it's like what three clicks on an iPhone Mhmm. And you're paying them $200 a month. Yeah. But I mean
Speaker 2:It's so fast.
Speaker 6:It blows my mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the It's funny because it math's out. Like like, $200 a month, $2,400 a year. Like, you're right in $3,000 PC LTV territory, immediately. But it's with three clicks instead of a visit to the store and a talk with somebody in a suit.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:That's honestly That's cost
Speaker 6:for sale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Dell's revenue ramp, if you remember. Oh, yeah. They went from five to seven to 12 to 18 to 25 and just like just absolutely Just compounding, compounding. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, the that's slower than cursor. Right? Totally. That's slower than OpenAI.
Speaker 1:But that was best in
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know what
Speaker 6:that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Almost always it's the denominator that you you can use to unconfuse things or to level set yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm I'm personally, like, very bullish on that idea of, like, the denominator being much bigger and the addressable market and that just the ability to ramp with something useful. I've been I've been talking to Jordy about this after WWC. It seemed like Apple was shifting to a more developer friendly mindset with, you know, free on device inference. They planned this for a long time, but it felt like maybe the moment is here where we'll start to see companies that are building AI apps that that have zero variable cost, only fixed cost to develop them, and then can ramp very quickly.
Speaker 2:What were your what were your WWC reactions overall? How did you process Oh. That that that event?
Speaker 6:Well, of course, you know, I I always have massive empathy for all the people that have to participate in, like, a giant developer conference because, like, nothing can be more stressful.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:I I feel cheated because they get to do it all on video and not crash in front of an audience, which turns out to be, like, quite the rite of passage. But for me, it was really three things. One of them was obviously Liquid Glass, which, know, love the shout out to Vista Arrow in there.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Take your victory lap. I love it.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Actually, super into but I I just don't I think, like, until you've literally foisted a new design on the world of existing customers, you don't get to have an opinion. Like, it it it's just like
Speaker 2:It's a good take.
Speaker 6:You know, I I it is there is literally because it is so easy to just poke holes and everything. Now Yeah. The thing is is that what Apple's doing now, they haven't quite done as much in the past, which is first, there's just way more people paying attention.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And second, like, they are releasing things that aren't nearly as baked relative to say, eight years ago or iOS seven or whatever. Because there's just you don't have that ability to do that anymore. And so but the flip side is, like, I they are gonna be so good at fixing any of the things that people got hysterical about in the first twelve hours, and you actually saw the arc go from to like Oh, totally. I see all the positives.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. People were so clearly just rooting for it to fail Totally. Immediately. And it's like, how do you have so little faith when you use an iPhone Yeah. You use a MacBook, you use Apple software all day long, every single day of the year.
Speaker 1:And you're gonna immediately call them out as idiots because like you found one example Yeah. Where The contrast contrast wasn't great.
Speaker 2:And it's also just like like, it's one thing to criticize, Apple intelligence which is a new entirely it's a new it's an entirely new discipline for Apple. Like, they they need to learn, they need to hire. There's so much more experimentation that needs to be done there. It's a challenge versus UI which is like what they have been best in class at forever and and there's no one else that's really been challenged. They've always been great at design.
Speaker 2:So I would I would It's much harder to them curious
Speaker 1:to get your thoughts on Apple's positioning in the AI talent wars. We were joking on the show yesterday that if you're a, you know, top tier one AI researcher, you can get a signing bonus that is greater than Tim Cook's annual salary total comp last year. Yeah. And Tim Cook made $74,600,000.0 I think last year as the CEO of a $3,000,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 2:And then we've been hearing about Meta. If a
Speaker 1:top a 100 AI researcher, can just go get that on day one at Meta. So, it feels like Apple is not set up to have these immense comp packages and in many ways that positions them in a way that they will potentially struggle to actually recruit, you know, top talent or or retain them in this kind of current meta?
Speaker 6:This is you can play either side of this or three sides, depending on how you wanna count. It it this it's a very, very tough time when this sort of starts to happen. I mean, we we went through this at Microsoft when with browsers, you know, and the hiring the right people who did who did languages or were interpreters or who were just known in the space or networking. And and so look. One side of it is super easy.
Speaker 6:Like, if you're the founder of a big giant company and have infinite money, you have the authority to go hire these people for whatever you personally think is the right number, and the authority to deal with the the implications of that. If you're not the founder, but you have great authority, which I think Tim does, you could do the same thing, but you do tend to start to think about the ripple effect of what you're gonna do a little bit more. You know, you think, okay. Well, now do I have to do special comp for other people? Do I have to deal with a bunch of other people who are gonna go shop themselves around?
Speaker 6:Mhmm. But one thing to keep in mind is there is also a level of adverse selection that happens at times like this. Like, the first people to leave from the outside might look like rock stars, but it might not have been working so great on the inside. Like, I saw lots of people leave Microsoft for whom on the outside was a little bit of gossip and whisper, oh, what a disaster from the inside. You're like, they were already we you know?
Speaker 6:And then also you see big losses, you know? And and this happened a great deal in the very early days of of computing with people who were doing the programming languages. That was like a huge battle, in particular between a company that's no longer around in the Bay Area called Borland International
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:And Microsoft, and we sued each other over people leaving. It was those were my competitors, and I worked on development tools. It was very, very nasty. Now, you know, that was back in the day. That was 6 figure comp, not
Speaker 1:You put them in the dirt. Put them in the dirt.
Speaker 2:It'd be so funny to play back. During the peak of the Com bubble, Microsoft was worth 620,000,000,000. Imagine the different fork in the road of history if they'd gone in to Marc Andreessen and said, we wanna we wanna pick up Netscape. We're we're bringing you in and we're making you, you know, a a $20,000,000,000 offer or something like that. Well, do you
Speaker 6:I mean, I'm not there's nothing news like, but
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Lots of those discussions all happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, again, antitrust. But they hadn't invented the 49% acquisition. This is this is revolutionary technology.
Speaker 6:This this whole thing is that this is just super interesting. I I something to add. I I know that you guys love to talk about M and A. So here's a thing to really think about with the regulators and m and a, if I could toss this in.
Speaker 2:Please. Which
Speaker 6:is you you never you can't lose sight of one particular aspect of competition in the world of regulation. Mhmm. And that's competition between regulators.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:Who's gonna outregulate who? Yeah.
Speaker 6:That so when we were being regulated, The US was clearly in charge of global regulation.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And
Speaker 6:so we sort of define the treaty terms. Like, if The US chooses to regulate, first, we're gonna have a discussion between FTC and DOJ, and then we'll decide. Mhmm. And then we'll come to you, and we'll explain to you how you will honor whatever our system arrives at.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And it turns out the Europeans really wanted, you know, like a gold medal in regulation. And so they started to to sort of assert, well, we're just gonna do more of it and
Speaker 1:If we're so good at it, we should do it more.
Speaker 6:10 x whole thing. Force your companies to follow our rules, and then they're gonna have to choose whether or not to do it different in our market or lose and lose efficiency
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Or do it the same in our market. And then the same thing is gonna start to happen much more in Asia. I mean, it happens quite a bit in China already, as Tim Cook is dealing with constantly. Mhmm. But the rest of Asia is gonna do this too.
Speaker 6:We dealt with it in Japan quite a bit. And and then, you know but the regulators are talking to each other all the time. In fact, the regulators probably talk to each other more than they talk to their victims. Sorry. Their Victims.
Speaker 6:Their constituents. And
Speaker 1:Their dance partners. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right. And so you don't lose sight. I think it's just really important to understand that because if if one of them starts to to do some like, if if if The US decides not to challenge, say, an m and a, the EU is gonna just jump on it out of, you know, competition and spite or whatever. And now, of course, you have UK and EU. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know? And and they're important markets. And so a lot of it's not it's it's almost like collusion. It's what it felt like. I'm not saying it is.
Speaker 6:It's what it felt like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Between the mass the major regulators of the world over who is gonna take charge. But that a variable in there is is the ego of the regulators. And and in Europe, they don't really have constituents. They talk all about how they're elected and appointed, and they listen. They they operate, you know, very regally.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. In The US, it's much more difficult. You see how the president can directly influence it, how they can appoint people, and and there are activists and all that. So you trust me. Like, there's so much that goes on there that is a big factor in in how things go.
Speaker 2:How how are you thinking I mean, on the the the competing regulators, it feels like the next fight should be potentially over the routing of the Siri button on the iPhone. It feels like if if consumers were able to press and hold that button and begin dictating to ChatGPT, they would be pretty happy compared to the rollout of Apple intelligence just thinking about like consumer preferences. Do you how do you think about that battle playing out? Because that's a little bit in the weeds in and from a from a consumer tech perspective. But if I'm predicting out what the next battleground will be, the invocation of the AI assistant seems top of mind.
Speaker 2:Is that the right frame? How how should we think about this playing out?
Speaker 6:I'm gonna I have to figure out how to be short and cool in this that that's a triggering topic. Here's why it's triggering.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So when we were going through our antitrust stuff on Windows
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, the original original original Windows antitrust case was about the browser. Yeah. And then it turned into the browser and instant messaging and the music player. Yeah. And the music player was about not really about playing music, but about the codex to plays play music.
Speaker 6:I mean, it's just
Speaker 2:bizarre. Really quickly, can you can you give us a little bit more backstory on, like, the actual definition of default browser? Because you could have three icons. There's some apps that will if you click a link, it'll open a default browser. But I feel like in many ways, like, the the my default browser choice doesn't even affect me that much because I'm clicking the button to open Chrome on my MacBook, and then I leave Chrome open for months at a time.
Speaker 2:And it it never even pops up. Even if I had a different even if I had Safari selected as, like, the default, I would still be in Chrome all day every day for months at a time. And so was that the nature of the default, or was it just about what was installed?
Speaker 6:Right. Right. Fantastic point. So the like, you're basically playing the role I played and arguing this whole thing is moronic.
Speaker 2:Put me in, coach.
Speaker 6:So there is no argument. You you lose the case.
Speaker 2:Yep. You
Speaker 6:deal with what it is. Okay. On on the PC originally, the default, there there were two things about it. One is you would just get, like, a mail message in whatever your mail program was Yep. And click on it, then something had to happen.
Speaker 6:Yep. And the question is, what would happen? Today, of course, you're already in your favorite mail client, which is Gmail in the browser
Speaker 2:In the browser.
Speaker 6:Which is just gonna open another tab.
Speaker 2:Yep. Exactly.
Speaker 6:Back in the day, there was this leap you had to do.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Plus, that was one thing. The other thing was it was like freaking wild wild west of hacking every place in Windows to get the other browsers to pop up.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:So the iPhone stopped all that nonsense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But the European Union just came back one day and they just decided, well, if you could do that for the browser, you should do it for everything. Everything. It shouldn't it should have like a a choose your default.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No one loves pop ups more than the Europeans. They love it. Success.
Speaker 6:They wanted like literally so so the reason that we ended up with that stupid ballot screen Yeah. Was because we agreed that you should get a choice for the browser that's pushed in your face Yep. So that we didn't have to make a choice for, like, every single file type in the operating system all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It just it's an awful, awful thing. And it turns out in the real world, where there are humans and not regulators, people just they just don't care. Now, immediately, if this were some ongoing discord, like, get a zillion Yeah. Yeah. Tech enthusiast people, I care.
Speaker 6:I wanna do this. I wanna sit this up for that. Not only that, but, like, if I'm in a tab and I open this, I want this browser and I want that. And and no humans really wanna do that. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But you can't convince the regulators that choice is bad. Mhmm. Like, you you see that's you're arguing that choice is bad. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So Windows ended up with this incredibly long list of, like, file types that you could pick and choose. Mhmm. And the iPhone sort of resisted that. And I really am I wrote a giant post about how I'm on the side of Apple on this. Because when you buy a product, you buy into the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 6:And you you you're buying the whole thing. And and the the counterargument is, yes, but that whole thing is a distribution channel. And so therefore, you can't it's like buying a highway and saying what cars can drive on it. Mhmm. But it isn't like buying a highway cause there's another highway right next to it that you can buy called Android.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so the market's already solved this problem, and what the what Europe is doing is actually reducing choice, because they're taking away the choice called really, really smart people who I pay money for that have my best interests at heart are are doing it this way. And I I actually wanna buy that. And when you're trying to do computing for 8,000,000,000 people, that's a valuable choice to have in the market. Somebody who respects privacy, somebody who's gonna protect my credit card, somebody who's gonna protect my data, and and do things that might make it more difficult for people to exploit those.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like, I I have
Speaker 1:all Yeah. The payments the payments issue in in the app store will be interesting if if apps can just everybody has their own payments and logins and all this stuff. I believe that consumers will eventually get extremely frustrated because they'll realize I have $500 of random subscriptions every month and to find and cancel all those things where Apple and the app store right now it's really You can see what am I paying for and you can you know click in Yep. You know very quickly unsubscribe from everything and that is good for the user. Potentially better than getting a small discount for circumnavigating the app store.
Speaker 6:Right. I mean, like, I'm doing the Brian Johnson Oh,
Speaker 2:no way.
Speaker 1:For Here we go.
Speaker 6:And you know, like, I've got all the bands, all the rings Yeah. And yet they all get access to my Apple health data. And that's freaking me out.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:Because, like, they can just read it's it's sort of like what happens with all the social apps that get your contacts.
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Like, all they get, they get your contacts, and then they just have them, and there's no taking them back. Mhmm. You know, so you sort of have to run your life if you care about that with, like, the secret contact list that doesn't integrate with anything, and and I hate that you have to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and so I I think that that we're we're and so here's the funny part about about, like, this defaults and and the Siri button and all that is that, yeah, of course, want choice and I wanna have the hardware button. First, I don't want the hardware button, but that's a different problem. And but the the thing is is that that the the European Union is is at the one hand, they're gonna push for choice choice and openness, but they're also the freaking GDPR data protection pop up people.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 6:So they you can't reconcile and the security people.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So if you ever read if you read the digital markets act, which is the big one that's that making the stores require all that, it's got all the stuff that just waves their hands at it literally says, and, of course, security should not be compromised. Excuse me. What does that really mean? Security can't be compromised. Like, that's kind of a big deal.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so that's the loophole through the whole thing that's like, well, that means you you really have to approve the third party stores and you have to do this stuff, but that's not what they wanted you to do. And and so they've set themselves up because they've just regulated at opposite ends of the spectrum, openness of and choice and security privacy. Like, it's unreconcilable, and which is literally iOS, Android. Like, you pick.
Speaker 2:Can you tell me the story of the iPhone launch and how you processed that at the time?
Speaker 6:Oh, sure. So I was there and and I'd flown back from from
Speaker 1:Like, in the room?
Speaker 6:I think. And I I left, and so a bunch of things. Like, first, you know, you remember he did the whole thing where he just railed on on Windows smartphones at the time
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know, where he does the market share based on each OEM. And and I was using I was actually using a Trio at the time
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 6:Which was the Palm device. I I wouldn't use the our phones. But I was locked into Trio because and I had been a BlackBerry person because Outlook tested BlackBerrys very early like, before they were released. I was completely one of these CrackBerry people. I actually read the entire DOJ finding on a Blackberry flying on a plane because the pager signal travels through the clouds
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 6:And you could actually download it, like, two k at a time. I my view of it was a lot of the simplicity was gonna be difficult. I actually was I loved that they didn't support Flash and that if and that a year later, they were like, yeah, and we're not doing Flash ever. So no way. Because I I thought Flash was a virus.
Speaker 6:And and I but I I I definitely was on the touch skeptical side.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 6:you know, I was online in June to pick my, know, four gigabyte black one up at the AT and T store in Seattle, waited on the giant line, got yelled at, traitor, all that stuff.
Speaker 2:You know? You
Speaker 6:know? And you I used it in ten minutes in. I was like, woah. And it didn't have push. It didn't have copy and paste.
Speaker 6:I knew all the you know, the touch keyboard was brilliant, but not quite. And, of course, having been on on the office team when the when word autocorrect was invented, I was I was like, wow. I know how this is gonna go. Like, every error is gonna be like a meme Yeah. And the whole, you know, the whole deal.
Speaker 6:But and it was obvious obvious that there was gonna be an apps there was a way to do apps. It was the app store a year later
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That really changed things for me personally. Because it was the there were stores. PalmPilot had a store. There was a website called Handango. When but you needed, like, a rocket science degree a serial cable and all the stuff to get apps onto these phones, and their phone their app store was unbelievable from the technology, from the APIs, and the ability to write them, and the go to market.
Speaker 6:You know, people mock and rail on 30%. Freaking brilliant. Because the amount of money it took to get an app recognized in the marketplace was way more than 30%. So I I I was like over the top like this is gonna screw us up big time by by o eight. It's a great story.
Speaker 1:Wow. Great lore. You're a big tech defender so are we. Yes. Well, big tech gets a lot of hate but you
Speaker 2:know. I mean, there's so much to talk about. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. This is
Speaker 6:a really great Thank you, guys. I love what you guys are doing. So really thankful to have a chance to chat with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Come on again soon. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'd love to.
Speaker 6:Thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Great. Awesome. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest
Speaker 3:of your day.
Speaker 2:Bye. Really quickly, let's tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source any watch
Speaker 3:from ordering order.
Speaker 2:Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com. And Quaid had a Bloomberg hit.
Speaker 1:Quaid was on Bloomberg TV this morning talking about the watch market.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I love it.
Speaker 1:Alternate these are alternative assets.
Speaker 2:Yeah. These are great. Next up, we have Anupam from Roblox in the studio. I've been fascinated by this company for years. It's a company that I don't have a ton of experience with personally, but it's obviously a behemoth with a generational founder at the helm.
Speaker 2:Very interested to get to know you. How are you doing today?
Speaker 9:Very good. How are you? Happy Friday.
Speaker 2:Happy Friday.
Speaker 1:Sad Friday for us. We love what we do, and so the weekend is just a tough time where we're we're not on air.
Speaker 2:We're just counting hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's great to be
Speaker 2:here. Yeah. Would you mind, kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and what you do for the company and how you wound up there?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So first introduction about myself. I have done a couple of big data startups
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Before. So I have been a founder, and I've been involved in at least at least scaling a couple of companies. And then I was retired for a year, and Roblox came along. It was such a fascinating business. It was such a fascinating technology stack that it came in, and now my responsibilities are AI, used to be called machine learning at that time, and infrastructure.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. So that's that's generally my remit in the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take me on a little tour of how artificial intelligence is being used right now. We're we're hearing stories of just accelerating software development, new products being unlocked, new actual features. How would you characterize the various ways AI is transforming the company right now?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So sort of three arcs. The first one is it's been around for a long while for companies like ours. So our homepage for many, many years has been generated by machine learning. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:What you all call recommendations, whether you like them or not is different.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 9:Sure. The recommendations are machine learning generated.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:So if I watch a TBPN YouTube podcast, maybe I'll get I'll get other TBPN
Speaker 2:podcasts. Right? Collaborative filtering, recommendation algorithms, going back to, like, you know, Amazon, you might also enjoy classic machine learning.
Speaker 9:Right? Yeah. And so classic machine learning would be everything that we do, what we've done for many, many years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:In that area, people are starting to think about using large models in production
Speaker 10:Interesting.
Speaker 9:Which is very difficult because it's super expensive
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:To invoke a large model, and you wouldn't like your YouTube homepage or Roblox homepage or Netflix homepage, Amazon homepage. Any of these home pages loading slowly would be really, really tough. So the entire industry is trying to figure out how to get these large models working in in traditional machine learning.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Then very unique to us is the amount of AI we use in safety.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So everything that you type in the chat That is the goes through a filter.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:Right? And that we we we develop technology with machine learning, but now we are developing technology with AI, which means we are deploying a very large model, which has a huge memory of your chats.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:So that we can detect bad behavior.
Speaker 2:That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. That's huge. Talk to me about really quickly, we'll we'll we'll continue on the I I think there's probably a third option. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just inferencing these large models at cost, is open source important? Are you looking forward to, like, getting some of these LLMs that are good enough or at the frontier, like, onto ASICs just dropping the cost? We see these we see these news news items every week. Oh, this cost is 80% cheaper. This is 90% cheaper, but it still feels like it's probably expensive.
Speaker 2:Have you just been bearing the cost and you're waiting for it to come down further? Or have you developed tricks to actually reduce the cost to something that looks more like a traditional, you know, database query cost, which is basically negligible?
Speaker 9:So the so the latter. Very, very good question, by the way. This is this is something that is top of mind for us. Because if you're going to, you know, invoke that model 250,000 times a second Yeah. If every one of them was 10¢, you would be in trouble.
Speaker 9:You wouldn't have a business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? So then what what we focus on is creating smaller models from large model. So we still start with the large model, but we then create smaller and smaller models through distilling and quantization. Both of these techniques are well understood.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we talked to a company that's doing this for other companies coming up with it's just a profanity filtering LLM. And it's and it's trained on a consumer graphics card and it's so small.
Speaker 2:It's really baked down and and this makes a ton of sense for a large enterprise that has a very high performance computing needs at scale.
Speaker 1:Talk about the how you see the potential of AI at the game experience level for players. How much time you guys are thinking about that? I can imagine, you know, players leveraging it to create worlds, characters, storylines, narratives.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All that kind of thing.
Speaker 9:So you take me up for the third point, which I which I which I was going to, which is, you know, generative AI. Classic generative AI is text, image, video, and kind of stops after that. So we decided around one and a half years ago to pick up from that. So we don't try to create our own large model which is the the train on text. We've created our own large model for three d generation.
Speaker 9:So today, if you want to build a video game or if you want to build a game, you are going to open some software. You're going to blend all the all the stuff together. You might have to, you know, work with your artist for many, many hours. But imagine if you could just type a prompt, a stylized Japanese village pagoda, and you want to make it gothic for whatever reason. We have a large model right now, open sourced.
Speaker 9:People can go to Hugging Face and and and use it and and build an entire scene using three d generation model. Well All of it is possible because, obviously, all the advances that have happened in AI.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah. I I imagine the traditional workflow is like Cinema four d or Blender or Unreal Engine, and then you're, you know, bringing that in to do the shading, and all of that stuff is, like, super teed up for for image generation. Makes sense. I'm also interested in in in when do you think we will see the advancing the advancements in AI play into actual NPC creation.
Speaker 2:So I I designed a game in Roblox, and I want to, instantiate a character, a boss, and I'm don't just wanna give them a star algorithm to or or, oh, yes. The boss, like, you know, attacks three times with the sword and then casts the fireball. And it's the same you know, when you play those games and it's just like, this doesn't this feels too algorithmic. Like, I understand the algorithm that's running there. It's clearly, you know, deterministic code that I'm interacting with, and it feels like, oh, it's a bullet it's a bullet sponge boss.
Speaker 2:Instead of like, oh, wow. Like, it feels like I'm playing against a human. They're being creative. Maybe they're not maybe they're not just impossible to defeat because they're superhuman AI, but they're just creative in a way that the default AI algorithms are have been in the past, whether you're fighting, like, you know, a boss in Doom or something. Is there any are there any resources that you're going to provide to the community on that front?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. So that that's something that we debated a lot. One is that we, as a platform, become very opinionated about what an NPC is.
Speaker 2:And Yep.
Speaker 9:You know, this is how they go blocks NPC's, but that's not our philosophy as a company. Mhmm. As a company, we are a platform that deploys a series of APIs, and then we just wait for people to come up with things like grow a garden or dress to impress.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 9:Trust me. You know? I don't know about y'all, but I couldn't have thought about dress to impress. It is such a simple game, and it appeals to such a very human thing. You dress to impress.
Speaker 9:Right? And so
Speaker 1:I mean, we we do. We play our own version of that here on the show,
Speaker 2:as we can see.
Speaker 6:Tailored suits.
Speaker 9:All of us are. You know? Even my teenager who wears a torn shirt is actually trying to convey something. Right? Going back to your NPC question, we release large models as a service.
Speaker 9:So we don't want our creators to worry about what you all asked. Right? The the cost of inference, which model should I use, all of those details, we take over as an infrastructure team. So infrastructure is invisible to them. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And now many creators are using that to give their players capabilities to build their own NPCs.
Speaker 2:So it's
Speaker 9:it's two layered now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Rather than
Speaker 9:us building the NPCs, like, you can, you know, like that old thing. You can do it, and you can do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can you can you give an update on the scale of Roblox? I think there's been headline, you know, every everybody I think should know by now that that that it is a massively scaled platform. But even just insights into average user minutes on the platform scale, how many you know, what percentage, you know, I imagine it's double digit percentage of American children play
Speaker 2:Yeah. Roblox. You give us some ground on the scale right now?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I'll give you the scale, the latest scale, which was I can't believe it's Friday, so it was just five days ago. 25,000,000 concurrent people players showed up.
Speaker 2:25,000,000 people. At the same time. At the
Speaker 1:exact same time.
Speaker 2:That is so much. It's like, it's more than the Super Bowl. Right? It's like significantly I think it's significantly more than the Super Bowl. Like, it's like
Speaker 9:The Super Bowl every day. Significantly more than the population of certain nations that I shall not name.
Speaker 1:Not quite not quite the Super Bowl, it's a 127,000,000.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Well, you're getting there.
Speaker 1:But concurrent is specific.
Speaker 9:Yeah. But concurrent is essentially on a random time. But then our founder Dave always reminds us that, yes, today, of course, there's a lot of news around these all time highs. But for the last sixteen years, every other weekend, we've hit a new high hit a new high. It just happens to be that this weekend, we just hit a Guinness book to, you know, the world record of a single game having 16,000,000 people playing simultaneously.
Speaker 9:Yeah. That's never happened before. I didn't know that. I'm an infrastructure person. So we've been working on this for a while now.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Last December, we thought we saw one of the biggest tries with this to impress, and then we saw fish, then we saw dead reels. So it's every two or three weeks, we see a massive, massive high.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tell me the story of Grow A Garden specifically. Did this come out of nowhere? Does do these things surprise you at this point? Or are you able to predict and track these things?
Speaker 1:Yeah. How early can you tell if a game if a new game is is actually a hit? Is there initial data that you can see from the first 10,000 players or anything like that says, you know, this thing's gonna go into the millions?
Speaker 2:The third the third Google result for Grow A Garden by the way is a Reddit post on r/roblox from a month ago. Why is Grow A Garden so popular? So even even the Reddit community can't figure it out. But what do you know about it?
Speaker 9:Yeah. Yeah. So so I'll take you back a little bit. You know, two or three years ago, we used to do annual planning. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Which tries to answer your question, which is, can I predict how how many players will be playing? How much at what time? And then we realized it's it's sort of as an as an engineer, it's a little bit of a fool's errand because you're almost capping the popularity of your platform by saying I'm going to predict some 10% growth, 20% growth. So what we do is we do long range planning, but we also do short range planning, which means as you as you talked about, if if I see 10,000 people really engaging with it, the recommendation in order to fix it up and start that's giving it more traffic.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:K? In the meanwhile, we are tracking that the game the game is going up. But on the capacity side, we don't try to predict exactly how much a game is going to be popular because we're a platform with literally millions of experiences. So we wouldn't have been able to tell you that Grow A Garden is going to be at this. But we could have told you that as a platform, we continue to grow at a very high rate.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So we plan for the platform, and then if one of the games becomes popular, it's okay. Every four weeks, we have had a new popular game. So so we just we just track the total growth. We don't try to be good enough to track each each game.
Speaker 1:Yep. Do you is do you find it I I can imagine if you're SRE, you want to go. This is like the the the NBA of site, you know, reliability engineers
Speaker 2:I would
Speaker 1:be there's almost there's few there's few places where you can get this this amount of pressure, this scale, this much unpredictability.
Speaker 2:Who's who's LeBron James of of site reliability engineering? We wanna ring the gulf for that. You should give them a shout out. They'll immediately get poached.
Speaker 9:So here's the here's the interesting thing. Thank you for bringing that up. Very few people would would would bring up the the science reliability
Speaker 2:The heroes.
Speaker 9:The heroes of
Speaker 5:the universe.
Speaker 2:Unsung heroes. The unsung heroes of the Internet. Well, we would be nothing without them.
Speaker 9:Keep the Internet running. Yeah. 100% agree. But here's what we we have done culturally. Number one, every executive is on an on call rotation with this artist.
Speaker 9:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Let's see. That's a crazy cultural move. I love it.
Speaker 9:I'm on call, I think, from today's 6PM or something. Wow. And I report to the CEO and the SVP of engineer. So, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:For some of my industry friends, it's just odd. I thought you kind of work up towards not being on call, but
Speaker 2:Friday night.
Speaker 9:Institute of liability culture Yeah. The way institute of liability culture is everybody takes some on call. We are not always on call, but we always take a rotation. So that's number one. The other is our SI team is really a software mindset.
Speaker 9:So so every Tuesday, they run this thing called Taco Tuesdays. Now you would think that they're eating tacos. Right? But what they're really doing is testing the actual capacity. Every Tuesday, they try to bring Roblox down by taking capacity from a particular service.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 9:K?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that is Just nibbles nibbling a little bit of a little bit of the server. Yeah. A little bit of the taco.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Just testing. You take the voting you you take the discovery service and you starve it of capacity as if we have too many players. But we are all in the office, so we can watch it. Right?
Speaker 9:The other one that they do is is chaos testing. We have a very unique name, but our comms team doesn't like to talk about that name.
Speaker 2:So I'll
Speaker 9:not say the name on this on this call. But but let's say there's Roblox and there's Godzilla, and if Godzilla was in our data centers. So I'm still not naming the service. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 9:So it creates so much chaos in our system, including, like, unplugging servers. Yeah. Now most people don't know this about Roblox. We have 24 data centers globally.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 9:We look like gaming company from the outside, but really to your point about being the Super Bowl of site reliability. Yes. I agree. Because we also have servers to rack and stack. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:So we do these things and this chaos testing throughout the week trying to keep bringing down Mhmm. Roblox as if we want to see what happens, and that's why we get ready for big Saturdays.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. Do you have anything else Saturdays. I wanna let you get back to
Speaker 1:is a super every Saturday is super bowl on Roblox.
Speaker 2:But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. You said
Speaker 9:it. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Was great. Thanks for joining.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll talk to you How'd you sleep last night? Did you put up good numbers?
Speaker 1:See how we do. Gonna I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie to you, John. I got a little bit cocky about a month ago.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:you just earlier this week.
Speaker 1:Fallen fallen off. I got a seventy five.
Speaker 2:What do
Speaker 1:you put up seven hours for me.
Speaker 2:Ninety six. Let's hear it for me. I want a soundboard. Play the Ashton Hall. Yes.
Speaker 2:Ninety six. Take that.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go home this weekend reset and get back Yeah. Because you're putting me putting me to shame.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm I'm I'm beating you up out here. Anyway, let let let let let's run through some news before our next guest gets here in twelve minutes. And also go over to 8sleep.com. Get a pod five.
Speaker 2:They have a five year warranty, a thirty night risk free trial, and free returns free shipping. The US prepares action targeting allies' chip plants in China. This is from the Wall Street Journal. The move isn't meant to escalate trade tensions. White House officials say it sounds like the the number one thing you would do if you were trying to escalate trade tensions.
Speaker 2:But, let's see. Beautiful image of TSMC here. Can you see this, Jordy?
Speaker 1:This factory looks
Speaker 2:This looks amazing. I don't know if this is a factory. It might just be like the headquarters. Wow. What an amazing building this like
Speaker 1:They basically spherical building. They were like, make us a Pinterest board of the most sci fi building of
Speaker 2:the future, and then let's just build that. This is giving Apple a run for its money with the donut. This is really, really cool. I have never shipped picture before. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Canon. The capital Canon. Now, you you see why Masa saw this. It was like $1,000,000,000,000 to TSMC. Let's get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's get it going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, it's interesting. Right? Jensen, earlier this year Yeah. After all of the trade war stuff, started setting up new facilities for NVIDIA, I believe in in Shanghai.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm sure he's sitting there, needs a heater after seeing this headline.
Speaker 2:Going back and forth. A US official wants to revoke waivers that allow global chipmakers to access American technology in China. People familiar with the matter said, this has been something that people have been talking about with the CHIPS Act for a long time. Just the idea that, yes, ASML makes lithography machines that are used by TSMC. ASML is not is a European company, not an American company, but they use a lot of American intellectual property.
Speaker 2:And so the the American government feels that they have the ability to restrict trade of those lithography machines, which is obviously a key point of leverage in the AI race. Yep. Now, there's differing opinions as to how real the AI race is or or how seriously it should be taken. There's folks who are saying,
Speaker 1:not a I think the debate is is is it a war?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Is it is it a dunk contest? Who knows? Dunk.
Speaker 2:You know, DeepSeek shows up, windmill, oh, reasoning model for free. Breaks the backboard. You'll love to see it. The move could strain relations with South Korea and Taiwan whose companies would be most affected by the change. The revocation could disrupt the global industry as companies deal with trade war issues such as China's limit on rare earth magnets.
Speaker 2:And so, you know, you you hit them, they're gonna hit back at some point. So, currently, South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix, very important company that makes memory, and as well as TSMC, enjoy blanket waivers that allow them to ship American chipmaking equipment to their factories in China without applying for separate for a separate license each time. So your TSMC or your SK Hynix, you wanna do packaging in China because that's where the industrial hub is. That's where the Special Economic Zone is. You gotta ship in a whole bunch of different equipment.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's just, you know, that CNC machine or something or whatever from America. Yeah. Well, that's gonna throw off everything you're doing if you have to go to America and ask for permission every single time. So Jeffrey Kessler, the head of the commerce department in charge of export controls, told three top companies this week that he wanted to cancel those waivers according to people familiar with the matters. They said Kessler described the action as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on critical US technology going to China.
Speaker 2:If carried out, the move could be both disruptive diplomatically and economically. Earlier this month, The US and China agreed to a fragile trade truce in London. The d part of the deal involved each country agreeing to hold off from introducing new export controls and other measures designed to hurt the other. And so there's it feels like we're we're leaning more here. Trade war more than trade race or AI race.
Speaker 2:But we will see. This action isn't a new trade escalation, but we would be designed to make the licensing system chip equipment similar to what China has in place for rare earth materials. The White House official said The US and China continue to make progress on completing the agreement they reached in London and negotiating on trade. Chipmakers will still be able to operate in China. The new enforcement mechanisms on chip mirror chips mirror licensing requirements that apply to other semiconductor companies that export to China and ensure The United States has an equal and reciprocal process.
Speaker 2:And so that's the story from the journal. This is a fun story. We're getting AI pancakes. Applebee's and IHOP plan to introduce artificial intelligence
Speaker 1:in People have been begging for this.
Speaker 2:Yes. People have been begging for this. It's a very funny story.
Speaker 1:But this company The silence from Applebee's on on the AI war has been deafening.
Speaker 2:Yes. So this is all about Dine, a company called Dine Brands. And I saw this and I thought it was interesting because AI pancakes is funny. But this is a $450,000,000 company or $425,000,000 company. They're public on the New York Stock Exchange, Dine Brands Global.
Speaker 2:They're partnering with the they're the parent company of the two chains. They aim to streamline operations and encourage repeat diners. And guess where they're headquartered? Pasadena, California. Wow.
Speaker 2:We gotta get the CEO in the studio. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:Let's do
Speaker 2:it. The company behind Applebee's and IHOP plans to use artificial intelligence in its restaurants and behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers. Dine Brands is adding AI infused tech support for all of its franchisees.
Speaker 1:They're trading at about point five x revenue. And so if you slap some AI in there, they could trade at 300 times revenue.
Speaker 2:Make it happen. I'm I'm excited I don't care
Speaker 1:that they're a restaurant.
Speaker 2:I'm rooting for them.
Speaker 1:Business.
Speaker 2:It's passing a homegrown company. Let's go. So Dine Brands adding AI infused tech support for all its franchises as well as an AI powered personalization engine that helps restaurants offer customized deals to diners. So this is this is more just like retention and, typical marketing stuff. But, I mean, you could imagine that a lot of these AI tools will would as silly as it sounds, it would benefit a restaurant chain because there's a lot of logistics and operations and marketing that needs to be done, and why not have AI play a role in that?
Speaker 2:The question is always, like, where does it sit? Is should this be a SaaS product that you're buying from a start up that's leveraging AI? Should you go should your current marketing partner offer this as just an add on or improvement to what they're already doing? Should this even just be your your marketing team now has the ChatGPT license? It sounds like they're going a little bit deeper, though.
Speaker 2:So the the Pasadena, California based company, let's hear from Pasadena, which also owns Fuzzy's Taco shop and and has over 3,500 restaurants across its brand, is taking a practical approach to AI by focusing on areas that can drive sales. The chief information officer, Justin Skelton, is commenting to the journal in this. Streamlining tech support for Dine Brands' more than 300 franchisees is important because issues like a broken printer take valuable time away from actually managing restaurants. So it's not for the customers, it's for the franchisees. They call in.
Speaker 2:This is the this is the classic question of like, why at McDonald's? Why is the McFlurry machine always broken? Well, now, if you're a franchisee owner and you have something that's similar to a to a McFlurry machine, a printer, receipt printer, or
Speaker 1:POS system. As these chains roll out AI Yep. Across different customer touch points and in the back office, can imagine that that waiters, like like world class waiters Totally. Will actually end up being like even more of a luxury Yeah. And people actually seeking them out.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. It is a truly great waiter and service team at a restaurant can massively elevate the experience, right? It's like, it's and and so I think this is one of those things. AI will take some jobs the restaurant industry
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But also elevate roles, you know, like like, you know, sitting down at your favorite restaurant
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Seeing a waiter that you see once or, you know, twice, three, four times a month. Right?
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 1:having that experience, that relationship.
Speaker 2:So The ihop and past the zoo on Sunday mornings. Yeah. It's just You and dad, sharp elbows. I've been there with my son
Speaker 1:once and was fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's all the dads taking the kids out, letting mom sleep in on the weekend. That's the meme. And it's just like line out the door. I I had no idea it would be so popular.
Speaker 2:It is extremely popular. So they're building tools on top of Amazon, which has, the Q generative AI assistant. It allows the company's field technology services staff to query its knowledge base for tech help using plain English. So, you know, chatbot, but but trained on specific questions that the restaurateurs or the franchisees have to answer. And then they're also rolling out a personalization engine.
Speaker 2:Pretty fun that they got a nice Wall Street Journal write up about this. Other tech initiatives Dine Brands Dine Brands is testing include AI powered cameras that can detect when a table needs to be cleared. So you will not need to wait for your waiter to come around. They'll have a dashboard. See, hey.
Speaker 2:That you clean up on Aisle 6. As well as an AI app for restaurant managers that helps them oversee the day to day operations like staffing, kind of just better time keeping, better management, better just tooling for these companies. Very interesting. With these updates, Dine Brands joins McDonald's and Yum Brands Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which are similarly tapping AI in their restaurants and behind the scenes. One promise of AI is that it can make fast food and casual dining restaurants more automated, lessening the need for human labor and speeding up the work of existing staff.
Speaker 2:The ability to offset labor costs, whether by reducing or more accurately forecasting it, is a major cost savings for restaurants. Unclear what that would mean for a price war if both companies implement AI, they're both able to reduce labor costs. Would they both just drop prices, or would they actually both reap higher margins? I actually don't know
Speaker 1:how Or just spend more money on marketing.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. May maybe we just see more McDonald's ads in the Super Bowl. And I have ads in the Super Bowl, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Anyway, AI is moving quickly, I believe it's going to be embedded in everything we do, says Skelton. Fantastic. We just least give him
Speaker 1:a one x revenue multiple. Yeah. I've seen enough.
Speaker 2:Pump it up.
Speaker 1:I've seen enough. Pump it up. Have our next guest in the studio. Great. Let's bring
Speaker 2:quickly. Let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find
Speaker 1:your happy place. Find your happy place. Seriously, it's summer. Got
Speaker 2:wander.com.
Speaker 1:Now is the time. If you've been waiting around, get on there.
Speaker 2:They got inspiring views. They got hotel grade amenities. They got dreamy beds. They got top tier cleaning. They got twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 2:It's a vacation home, but better, folks. There's also the TikTok ban, which has been delayed for the third time. The president gave the Chinese controlled video app another reprieve from a twenty twenty four law requiring its sale or closure. Another ninety days. Just ninety days.
Speaker 2:Trump is kind of the king of these, like, you know, stalling it out. This has been like his
Speaker 1:Leverage.
Speaker 2:He's known for, like, moving extremely quickly and just being like, all of a sudden everything has a massive tariff and then also like really dragging his feet on things.
Speaker 1:Art of the deal.
Speaker 2:Art of the deal. I'm banning TikTok. Art of the deal. I'm delaying the ban. Art of
Speaker 1:the I'm banning TikTok. 40 chess.
Speaker 2:40 chess. He issued another ninety day reprieve. White White House spokeswoman said the administration will work over the next three months to close a deal ensuring American user data on TikTok is safe and secure. Prior supreme court ruling upheld the law, citing national security concerns regarding TikTok's data collection in foreign ties. What's interesting about this is that the the narrative of, like, of, like, why is Trump soft on TikTok during the election cycle was completely different reasons.
Speaker 2:It was like, there was there was someone who had Susquehanna what's his name? Jeff Jeff Haas or something? I forget. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this investor at Susquehanna had a huge position in ByteDance, which owns TikTok. And so a TikTok ban might, like, personally impact him to the tune of, like, $5,000,000,000 or something. So so, obviously, it was worth it to him to invest, like, hundreds of millions in lobbying to prevent that from happening. So there was kind of this narrative emerging that like, Jeff Yas was was like the driving force economically in America.
Speaker 2:Just a natural incentive, not like a CCP agent. Just like just like he has a financial incentive to to not let his asset get burned by by a ban.
Speaker 1:And and the investors in DJI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There are few.
Speaker 1:American venture investors.
Speaker 2:American venture investors in in DJI who would similarly be against a ban. Right? Just if you were just tracing, like, basic economic logic. Now there was also the narrative that Trump wanted to, keep TikTok alive because it was very good for his campaign because there were a lot of viral TikToks promoting Trump.
Speaker 1:But Or or just very bad for the campaign because how many young people would
Speaker 2:be like banned my favorite app. Exactly. They took my TikTok. I'm voting against this guy.
Speaker 1:My precious.
Speaker 2:All of those I'd all of those reasons are out the door because he's elected. So I don't I still don't understand the logic here, and I hope that something gets done here. Anyway, we'll we will continue to track the story at the end of this ninety days. Start the start your engine. Start putting a ninety day hold on the calendar.
Speaker 2:We'll be checking in, and, obviously, check Polymarket to see the updates
Speaker 1:on Yeah. Right now, TikTok sale announced in 2025 is sitting at a 28% on Polymarket.
Speaker 2:By the end of the year?
Speaker 1:By the end of the year.
Speaker 10:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels correctly priced at the moment, but who knows?
Speaker 2:Well, we have Miles from Dash Fuel in the studio. Welcome to the show, Miles. Good to meet
Speaker 1:you. Welcome. How are you doing? Good. How are you?
Speaker 2:Good. Would you mind kicking us off on, with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company? And then, obviously, I have a bunch of questions to ask downstream of that, related to the current, kinda global situation.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Happy to. So I'm the CEO of Dash Fuel. We are a vertical SaaS company focused on downstream oil and gas logistics.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 11:So that is you know, you have Exxon and the big producers producing fuel, but how do you get that fuel to gas stations, airports, marinas for actually the consumption of that fuel? And our customers are focused on that.
Speaker 2:So are your customers, like, I I like, you know, the the 76 or, like, the Chevron station, the gas station? Some of our
Speaker 11:customers are. Okay. You know the big hazmat trucks you see driving down, the cylindrical trucks?
Speaker 8:Yep. Those are our key customers.
Speaker 2:Okay. And that might be a different company that is contracted by SeventySix. Hey. I need gas. Deliver it for me, but then I might go to a different competitor if I'm if you're out of gas today, and I need to read
Speaker 6:it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay. And, yeah, fascinating industry. How did you get how did you discover this opportunity? I feel like this is something that most people don't necessarily interface with on a daily basis.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So I actually got recruited by a venture studio called Fractal. So they incubate vertical SaaS problems.
Speaker 11:And this is one of the ones they were incubating. And it's a huge market, lots of legacy players, old technology, and just an interesting space. Like, it's dynamic. It's complex. It's 20 fourseven.
Speaker 11:It's a critical part of how kind of The US keeps running. And so I I kinda jumped at it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what is the key unlock in actually building a vertical SaaS product? Is it just like having an a mobile app or getting from paper to spreadsheets to a database table and some visualization? Or is it handling payment processing more efficiently? Like, where are you actually plugging in and creating value for these companies?
Speaker 11:I think honestly, all of those. So key things that we look at are moving off paper. So that's a big one.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 11:Duplicate data entry. So logistics or spreadsheets into the accounting system is a big one. And then the third big one is just driving increases in profit margins. So fuel is a very complex dynamic optimization problem. So you might, for a single load, have 400 different sourcing options from all of the terminals around, and it's dynamically priced.
Speaker 11:And so how do you figure out what is my optimal sourcing for those? And so we're gonna try and drive those margins higher. And so those are kind of, I'd say,
Speaker 8:the three key pieces for us.
Speaker 2:So what are your customers seeing? We're seeing news that oil prices are starting to gyrate on the basis of the conflict in The Middle East. What are you hearing from your customers and folks in the industry?
Speaker 11:Yeah. So I think we're definitely seeing that. So Thursday night into Friday morning from last week, the typical price volatility in our space is roughly $03 to $04 overnight. And we saw price jumps from 15 to 20¢. So you're talking, you know, five to 10 x greater volatility.
Speaker 11:So that's definitely playing out, and that obviously cascades through, ultimately if prices stay high to gas stations and the end retail customer. Although we haven't seen much of a jump there. It's very competitive, and so prices are still only slightly higher, I would say. The big thing I think people are watching for is does this conflict extend into the straightforward moves where you would have
Speaker 2:who likes higher prices? Who likes lower prices? Obviously, the American consumer
Speaker 1:government loves high gas prices.
Speaker 2:Deals like that. But I've also heard that, that gas station owners actually like higher gas prices because they slap a margin on top of the of the oil price. And so, when when prices are high, they might be making more money. But at the same time, if consumers are pulling back from high prices, they may not go into the store and buy, you know, a a case of beer and some snacks.
Speaker 11:I I think it's admits more of the Goldilocks. The happy middle is kind of where people like to be with a little bit of volatility so that you can take advantage of price swings. But Interesting. Ultimately, as you're saying, too high prices, no one's gonna be driving. No one's going in to buy snacks for gas stations.
Speaker 11:So no one wants really high prices. And really low prices, you start to have producers cut back because no one wants to sell at the $30 or $40 a barrel volume. And so really that happy medium is where people like to have it sit. You've got enough supply and demand matching. And so I'd say that's kind of the sweet spot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How closely do you track these markets? Can you tell me the story of that time that like oil was negative ly priced or something
Speaker 1:like that? Tango or whatever?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. What what what happens there? Can you break
Speaker 6:that down?
Speaker 11:I honestly, I don't remember. It was like a very temporary thing but Yeah. I do remember. So I was actually this that was before I started this. I was at Bridgewater.
Speaker 11:And I remember the markets were going crazy and we're, you know, I was in trading at the time and so people were scrambling to figure out how do you deal with this temporary dislocation where as you're saying prices were literally negative. People trying to roll contracts and it was mostly just chaos.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It seemed like something where, like, you could make money, but there was always a risk that you would have to receive the oil. Then they'd be like, okay. Like, you're getting a thousand barrels of oil delivered. Do you have a warehouse for that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Good luck finding a tank on shortlist.
Speaker 2:Or like a 100,000 if you went in with size. Right. Yeah. So what else are people tracking in the news if you're trying to understand where oil markets go? Obviously, that's sort of Hermu's story is important.
Speaker 2:But is there is there a narrative around, oh, we have a strategic reserve that we might unlock. There's other sources that might come online. How do these things work out? I feel like there's always this this back and forth between the various major players, kind of jostling to keep the price at a reasonable place for everyone.
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And I think the other thing is with producers, obviously, the higher the price, the more they want to they're incentivized to kind of export a drill or what have you. So they're also definitely keeping an eye on that. I think from The US perspective, there's no real super fast supply unlocks is the problem, right?
Speaker 11:Because to spin up a new well or something, you're going to take six months or so. And so people are keeping a close eye. They're probably starting to get ready for that, but they wanna see how this plays out. Like, if this conflict mostly goes away in the next couple of weeks, then, you know, it's gonna be much ado about nothing really. If this extends or again if more drastic action's taken that's where you know we could see something different change.
Speaker 11:And so I think it's mostly in a wait and see now from the people that I've talked to. And again I'm more in the downstream space but from their perspective on the upstream, it it's mostly a waiting game right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How what pieces of the entire oil supply chain are still on paper the most? Can you actually walk me through I'd love I'd love just, like, oil one zero one.
Speaker 3:Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know it's it's not dinosaur bones, but it's something close to that. It's in the ground. It gets dug up, and then it it goes on a journey. Walk me through that whole journey and kind of, like, what the different players are.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. So you're like you're saying, you're you're extracting that raw crude out. Yeah. And then that is again, your ExxonMobil's org, you know, you have smaller players in the Permian Basin or things like that.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. That that is gonna go into refineries, and those refineries are processing the raw crude into its various components. So that's not only just like gas and diesel, but that could be, you know, end up in plastic and other things like that. So you're separating out the pieces. From there, it's either, you know, via pipeline or via barge moved around and, again, talking US specifically Mhmm.
Speaker 11:To there's about 1,200 terminals around The US.
Speaker 9:Oh, wow.
Speaker 11:That's then sitting in those terminals until a wholesaler or a carrier comes and picks a few a load of fuel up and then goes and delivers it ultimately to, again, gas stations, airports, homes for home eating, whatever you have. And there's a lot of paper. Right? So so in a single load for one of those deliveries from the terminal to an end store, you might end up with, you know, a bill of lading, a delivery ticket. Maybe you've got two bills of lading.
Speaker 11:You end up with a supplier invoice a day later, maybe a freight invoice. You could have four or five different pieces of paper. They're all coming in differently. A couple of them are gonna be pictures from a driver's phone that are emailed in. So you can imagine it's a little bit hard to process all of that, keep track of everything.
Speaker 1:How does the overall industry and various players in gas process what will be maybe not ever a a total phase out of of gas cars, but you know, what what is, you know, California had like a this ban in place for banning the sale of new gas cars past 02/1935. Sounds like there
Speaker 2:was From my cold dead hands.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I mean, there was a massive amount of pushback from from the president as well as congress. So I don't think that necessarily is happening as of now. But is there does does the industry try to, isn't going away, has a bunch of different uses.
Speaker 1:Gas isn't going away. Again, has a bunch of different uses just other than just getting a car from point
Speaker 2:a to Just look at the Nurburgring times. It's obvious.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course. I'm curious, like, if there's any sort of like high level discussion around, know, because many of these companies have been in business for so long, you know, you've been in business for a hundred years, you should be thinking about the next hundred years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, That's reasonable.
Speaker 11:Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Sorry, sorry, I accidentally tossed the iPad off.
Speaker 2:No, no, it's appropriate. The idea of not having a naturally aspirated V12 at my disposal is boo worthy.
Speaker 1:Boo worthy.
Speaker 2:But break down the evolution of the industry.
Speaker 11:Yeah. So I think you have at the upstream space, have them exploring alternative energy a little bit. Right? So you had BP was exploring carbon neutral fuels and a lot of these things, they've been exploring them. And I think you've talked to people you know, like Valor Atomics who are exploring that as well.
Speaker 11:And so I think there's definitely interest there. And so that's one piece. There's also another piece which is like on the kind of gas station side, you have these EV chargers, which in some ways are helpful because it takes ten or fifteen minutes. Someone's more likely to go into the gas station and the vast majority of gas station revenue is actually from inside the store. It's not the gas.
Speaker 11:That's breakeven if they're lucky type thing. And so you have some of that as well. And then, honestly, you look at the projections out to 2050 from from the US government, you don't see that much of a decline because just as as people are wealthier, they wanna travel more. They wanna own a car. And so so it's all honestly more of an unlock than anything else.
Speaker 11:And so as long as The US keeps growing, I expect to see demand to keep growing. You know, you have a little bit of a slump, but in the order of one to 2% as opposed to this giant, you know, cliff that you're gonna fall off of anytime soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being our gasoline correspondent.
Speaker 2:Yes. Our oil and gas consultant.
Speaker 1:Straight from the oil fields of America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Can we call you a rough neck? Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Show me
Speaker 1:our hands. Vertical sass rough neck.
Speaker 2:Vertical sass rough neck in in the trenches. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk
Speaker 1:to Thanks for joining, Miles.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Up next, we have Alex from Meridian coming into the studio.
Speaker 1:Former size lord.
Speaker 2:Former size lord. Break it down.
Speaker 1:I think he was in PE, Toma Bravo, maybe BlackRock. I met him before a couple years ago when he was just getting the company off the ground. Let's see him in Welcome
Speaker 2:to the studio, Alex. How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Hey, guys. Doing well. How are you?
Speaker 1:Doing well. What's going on?
Speaker 5:Not much. It's been a big week for me. We we're launching our seed round publicly. I had a baby two days ago, my first.
Speaker 1:No way. Size gong for that. Two. Two. We need two.
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. How how much did the baby weigh?
Speaker 5:The baby was seven pounds and it was a seven
Speaker 1:million Seven pounds and a $7,000,000 seat round number is
Speaker 2:the Amazing. That's great news. Congratulations.
Speaker 5:I saw a tweet the other day. It was like the new fundraise announcement stack, and it was like, you know, TechCrunch is out. Yeah. You guys are in. Think what it was The New York Times.
Speaker 5:Right? You would say marriages, deaths, births.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 3:Yes. Deputy Well
Speaker 2:Oh, we're they are new to the new
Speaker 1:thing is baby baby
Speaker 2:announcements. Baby drops. We we definitely have to do that. We need a different Baby drops. Different prop for that.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations. Congratulations. It must be a absolute blur of a week, but it's great to have you here. Are you are you are you calling in from Miami? Where are you based these days?
Speaker 5:I'm in Miami. Yeah. I'm in Cool. Today. Company's based between New York and Miami.
Speaker 5:We have sales and customer support in New York. I'm down here in Miami today. I'm wearing shorts because, you know, I'm here supporting my wife as well.
Speaker 2:Why'd you put her
Speaker 5:on a blazer?
Speaker 1:But There we go.
Speaker 5:I'm not gonna stand up.
Speaker 2:But any any anyway, break down the make you on the pitch of the company. How are you
Speaker 1:pitching the title? And quick and quick backstory too. Oh, yeah. People need that. Context and go into the
Speaker 5:for sure. So I spent about ten years in private equity. Was at big firms like CBC, Blackstone, and
Speaker 2:you. Thank you. Thank you. You doesn't give me credit.
Speaker 5:Thank you. And I would say one of the common themes of that career was just wrestling with terrible software pretty much across the stack. It was like software that was built in the nineties had kinda been pushed into the cloud and Mhmm. Was really never kinda modernized. And I think a lot of that was because private equity as an industry was kind of an SMB for software companies.
Speaker 5:It was like five or six guys in a room. It was like Henry Kravis and George Roberts, you know, Sizelords doing a couple of deals, and the economics were great. So you never had to make it more efficient. You never had to figure out how to use software. And there was this promise of the private equity CRM that was basically it's got all the context of who you're meeting with Mhmm.
Speaker 5:The deals that are crossing your desk, all these pitch decks, all this information, but none of it was being harvested into an intelligence layer. And so firms would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Salesforce, and then they'd use it like an Excel spreadsheet. Like, who's working on what deal? We gotta tick through them. And, you know, that was about it.
Speaker 5:There was no, like, insight that was coming out of it. And so what we do at Meridian is we combine the concept of CRM with a massive third party company dataset and an AI agent called Scout that essentially is the power user of the CRM and the dataset. And so what Scout does is it goes out, scours all of the information on private companies that's out there, and there's really never been more of that, and really helps you focus your mandate on the ones that you are actually gonna invest in and then pulls in all that context that's in your inbox, that's on your calendar, that's in your investment committee memos, and helps you focus on the 10 companies in your space in that kind of specific thesis you have that you need to get in front of, helps you set up those meetings, and helps you kinda get in front of them faster ahead of your competitors.
Speaker 1:Talk about the structure of the market. Is this the kind of business that you basically need to get every customer, right, or at least all the the the truly big logos in order to build, you know, a $9.09 figure revenue business? What what does that look like?
Speaker 5:Totally. You know, when I first started the company, people said, you know, obvious idea. Right? People want a better CRM than private equity, but small market. Like, how big can it get?
Speaker 5:Mhmm. And I think what we've discovered is actually just how deep the market is. There are so many private equity firms. They've never you know, it's a really fast growing industry, but it's also a broadening industry. Right?
Speaker 5:There's there's private credit that's just going through explosive gross
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:It's huge. Hedge funds that are doing private deals now and kinda combining private and public. There are family offices. There are this whole universe of sovereign funds, LPs. And so we've been lucky to kind of sell to each of those constituents.
Speaker 2:And and, I mean, do solo operators or, like, scout funds, like the the HBS grad who's gonna go out and buy a window washing business? That fit your Literally,
Speaker 5:I mean we literally have hundreds of HVAC roll ups on our website.
Speaker 2:We're
Speaker 5:suddenly seeing this trend.
Speaker 1:HVAC roll
Speaker 9:Very quickly.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. How how does value accrual work in the industry? I imagine that the data brokers and the data providers want their pound of flesh than the private equity firms. Not notorious for being loose with the pocketbooks. Not exactly, you know, they're like, they're they're they're going to try and extract as much value as possible.
Speaker 2:So you're kind of sitting in between those two. How do you not get squeezed? And what's the fair take rate between these three kind of parties in this in this deal?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's a great question. You know, when when I started the company, I kinda had this thesis that we were gonna have to charge a huge amount for all of this live data on companies. But what's happened with AI is that actually that data is so commoditized now. Like, you used to pay $7,000 a seat for a PitchBook license.
Speaker 5:And what PitchBook would do is basically structure all this publicly available data around, you know, who invested in which company, how many employees do they have, and put it in a database for you. Can get all of that information with good prompting now. And so we actually have our own proprietary dataset. We use AI to kind of scour all of that stuff. We feed it directly into the platform.
Speaker 5:And so what used to happen was associates would just, you know, copy and paste information from PitchBook, throw it into Salesforce, and, you know, it was just this kind of dumb database that you had to manually update. Now we're able to just package all of that into the software. And so we do work with a few of the data providers. SourceScrub is one of them because they do have amazing proprietary data. But for the most part, these databases are, in my opinion, gonna become incredibly commoditized over
Speaker 2:time. What is what is LinkedIn's role in the industry right now? I feel like LinkedIn has an incredible amount of data. I've seen growth equity investors look at headcount growth as a, hey. Maybe I should give them
Speaker 9:a call.
Speaker 1:I know venture investors
Speaker 2:that They do that too.
Speaker 1:Track this, and they know a company's cooked long before the headlines start coming out.
Speaker 2:The time when you see, oh, there's two competitors, and one's growing headcount, and the other one's not. Yeah, they both raised at 5,000,000,000 a couple years ago, but one's actually compounding. I mean, not that head crown growth is really like, it's kind of a vanity metric. It could be a bad signal, but it's usually
Speaker 1:How many people doing truly poorly don't tend to
Speaker 2:10 x head count in a couple of years. Yeah. So but but I've always been interested in LinkedIn. Back in the day, you used to have an API. Used to be able to scrape it very liberally.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's way more locked down. Is this like, just walk me through, like, even trying to get access. Is it is it available? Is it pricey? What is the dynamic with LinkedIn?
Speaker 5:Yeah. LinkedIn data is is is a great data source. Headcount data is probably one of our most requested kind of numbers that we we throw in every company profile. Another one is Glassdoor reviews. People wanna know, you know, is this a good place to work?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Are the account executives hitting quota? If they're not, you know, that's a bad sign. Yeah. LinkedIn, you know, they continue to try to lock the data down Yeah.
Speaker 5:So that these web scrapers can't hit it. But we do actually work with a couple of really good LinkedIn scrapers. That's, you know, one of our data sources that we buy it from. They're just, you know, trying to be one step ahead of of the LinkedIn algorithm.
Speaker 2:I would do not expecting that answer.
Speaker 5:Totally. I mean, they try to paywall as much as they can. Yeah. Yeah. But there are always ways around it.
Speaker 5:And frankly, I'm surprised that LinkedIn hasn't just API ed that data and started to sell it because it really is an incredible database that you can start using.
Speaker 2:I guess they're just not GI pilled because, like, they they they will let you pay for a human seat and look at everything. But if you wanna automate it, they're they're they're not as friendly.
Speaker 5:A 100%. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Jordy, any other questions?
Speaker 1:I'm curious if you have any insight. We have a friend of the show that was posting this morning. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was gonna ask this. This is good.
Speaker 1:I'll pull up the post. You probably have crossed paths with him at some point. This is carried no interest. He's anon. He says, uh-oh, it is happening about two weeks ago.
Speaker 1:I started getting five plus emails a week saying the same thing. The VCs are ready to start selling the insane glut that is the twenty twenty one to 2022 vintage might start moving soon. VC's DME. I have dry powder, and he says a screenshot. Are you guys still buying software companies?
Speaker 1:I have a well respected VC firm that is finally wanting to part with a bunch of their good, not great assets or portfolio companies. Are are you seeing this?
Speaker 2:About this for a long time, but there's always a question of, like, when will this actually happen?
Speaker 1:And I'm sure I'm sure back in your day, you you bought I I imagine you you acquired venture backed companies that were good, but didn't quite, you know, weren't necessarily gonna go public or anything along those lines.
Speaker 5:Totally. I mean, I think the 2021 vintage is is challenged for sure. And I think we're seeing a lot of, you know, private equity firms just they're gonna have to hold those deals for a long time. They're marking them at one x because they have that luxury. But to really grow into value, it could be many years.
Speaker 5:And I think that's So even on
Speaker 1:so that's on the but but the but what I was calling out is venture funds are sitting there with a bunch of software businesses that they wanna sell to PE. So the challenged, you know, vintage Inventure is trying to sell to, you know, effectively a 2025 or 2024 vintage on the private equity side.
Speaker 5:Totally. No. And I think that's gonna happen more and more. The IPO window's closed. Private equity is sitting on a lot of dry powder.
Speaker 5:They gotta buy stuff. And I think those VC funds are gonna see, you know, definitely value impairment. Right? Private equity are not paying the type of, let's say, ARR multiples that they probably invested in. But Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's a lot of great IP that's out there. I think for the right private equity firm to come in, buy the IP, probably roll together a few of these things, I think it's actually gonna be a great strategy. And I'm I I definitely see private equity firms getting more creative with how they wanna work with some of these early, but, you know, really highly valued companies that got over their skis.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on on the new baby and the seed round. Is Great news. Big week for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congrats.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Come back on again soon.
Speaker 3:We'll talk soon. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 2:Up next, we're covering our breaking news with Andreessen Horowitz. They
Speaker 1:said they wouldn't do this deal, but they did. They said it was impossible.
Speaker 2:The chattering the chattering masses said it wouldn't it wouldn't get done, but it did. And we have Who do we
Speaker 1:have in here first? I
Speaker 2:think Brian. Apparently, Brian and Roy are both in the waiting room. I don't know if we wanna let them in at the same time. Have them go back to back. What are you thinking, Jordy?
Speaker 1:I think we start with Brian Okay. Give the level deal. The anatomy of the deal, and then we bring in Roy.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And we just go crazy. Brian, welcome to the studio. How are doing? Good to meet you.
Speaker 4:Good to meet you. Great to be here.
Speaker 8:Thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy.
Speaker 1:Your notifications must be crazy right now. Clearly, you guys decided, hey, Friday. Let's let's throw it out.
Speaker 2:Take away the time.
Speaker 8:That's right.
Speaker 1:Nobody's crazy to launch.
Speaker 8:Everyone's going to going and going on a weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's no other Andreessen deals that are really taking up mindshare right now. This is the one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You guys you
Speaker 2:the the
Speaker 1:the thinking machines was leaking to the
Speaker 5:to the Steve Rolled the
Speaker 2:$2,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:And, of course, Cluelly is
Speaker 2:gonna suck all the attention out of the room. For sure. This is the hot one.
Speaker 1:Anyways, we got we got your we got your launch post here that we read There we go. Briefly earlier on the show. But why don't you break down, background on you, and then let's break down the deal
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Why you invested. And then and then, of course, we're gonna have Roy on in in just ten minutes.
Speaker 8:Fantastic. Background on me, been at a 16 for four or five years. Mhmm. Look at a lot of AI applications. You've met a bunch of my colleagues here and have them on already.
Speaker 8:Invest in 11 labs, function health of the world, and prior to this, was a was a snap, as a early employee and, was a CFO. So
Speaker 1:been in LA? Yep.
Speaker 2:Are you
Speaker 8:in LA now? Five years. No. I'm in New York right now, but my heart is in LA.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. We gotta get you back. LA's LA's coming up.
Speaker 8:It was too too nice to live. You know? Alright. So deal, rationale, anatomy of deal or as you said.
Speaker 2:The anatomy breaks down.
Speaker 8:Like, really, really breaks down to a couple things, but really three points. One is, you know, distribution. It's really, really hard to get distribution these days. And to get it repeatedly Mhmm. Is a little bit of a dark art.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And so I think Roy had that in in abundance. So one, got the distribution. We invest for strengths of strengths, as you know, not lack of weakness. Yep. And so that's really exciting for us.
Speaker 8:Mhmm. Second, I love the product. You know, I grew up on Dragon Ball Z. Yeah. And I always wanted the one of those scouters that tells you how strong is Jordy, how strong is John, like Sure.
Speaker 8:If the thing goes up. Right? And that's essentially what it is on your web browser. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 8:Talking to people, you just do a quick command enter, and it just gives you all the things you need to know while reading it and looking into your eyes. Mhmm. I think that's special. I think that sort of is right for a lot of the use cases, whether it's consumer or enterprise. So I love the product.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So that's that's one thing I'll call I'll call out today. We've had our intern over on the intern cam testing testing the product all day long, and I've been impressed. Yeah. I've been impressed.
Speaker 1:He's there. Tyler,
Speaker 8:give a There we go.
Speaker 2:How how are you liking it so far?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's been really good. I mean, it it's very fast. The answers are really good. I I think it's, a great product.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's amazing. Out of stock, what would you rate it?
Speaker 8:Why are why did you put it in a put it in in
Speaker 4:a car? Nine.
Speaker 2:It's our version of kind of, like, the the the office in a box. What do they call us?
Speaker 9:That is
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot a lot of people have, like, these toll booth or,
Speaker 2:like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Know, phone booth style. I
Speaker 2:think the world
Speaker 1:that can only afford to
Speaker 2:live in the pod. And our version of a pod is a Maybach.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's very perfectly it's perfectly soundproof. So when we don't wanna hear him
Speaker 2:He just rolls up the window.
Speaker 1:He just he just rolls
Speaker 2:up But he's got a a in there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's got a
Speaker 2:comfortable setup.
Speaker 1:Phenomenal. Phenomenal. Massage chairs.
Speaker 8:Good good ergonomics.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. You. You, Tyler. Fit.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. So so that was 10.
Speaker 1:That's right. So we've we've Roy on the show a couple times. We've covered some of the various stunts, and we got some pushback one of the times we had him on because we hadn't used the product. It. And somebody was calling us out.
Speaker 1:Yep. And now, as a company, we're paid subscribers of Cluely. We're customers. Throw out You can throw the TBPN logo on the site. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've been I've been impressed. Like, we we were kind of firing back questions Yep. Using it more in that interview functionality and and the answers were very good guesstimates of of, you know, if somebody that had generalized knowledge on a topic being able to answer quickly. And he actually looked
Speaker 2:better question on it answer it answered the seven forty seven question better than my ChatGPT four o direct answer question.
Speaker 1:Clearly mogged. Clearly mogged. Yep. O three.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Whatever whatever the fine whatever I was in o three.
Speaker 3:Clearly mogged o three.
Speaker 2:Love that.
Speaker 6:But it
Speaker 2:did well.
Speaker 8:I guess the last point I'll just add on, mate, is it's, you know, it's a, you know, revenue conversion. Mhmm. A lot of people thinks, oh, is it just hype and what's happening? Is it all distribution, all the stunts? The truth is that he he is actually converting that to revenue, right, whether it's consumer or enterprise.
Speaker 8:So that to me is sort of the, I guess, the seriousness that underlies the crazy stunts that people see outside. And that combination works for me. I'm excited for it. And, you know, let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Let's go back to the first one. Roy's clearly great at distribution, breaking through, getting attention. It feels like earned media does have a cap versus paid media or brand marketing or some of the other flywheels of, you know, referral programs or or or, you know, some viral mechanics
Speaker 1:It doesn't have a cap, John. He's gonna be in front of congress, you know, using Clue Lee and some spectacles
Speaker 6:Well, that's
Speaker 2:a good
Speaker 1:question. Cheating cheating when he's dragged in front of congress, you know, for antitrust.
Speaker 2:Do you think it has a cap or or or and and because you could one one scenario is is this is his this is not this is not his is not his permanent go to market motion. It's it's merely the beachhead. It's it's the way to break through, get attention, hire the first 50 interns, but the next thousand interns will come through recruiters and kind of standard practice, and he'll be on a more traditional podcast circuit when he has news, but we won't be hearing from him every single day. The other is that maybe we're in a new era and he actually can and the company can go viral every single day. And you're seeing kind of the the MrBeast playbook in reverse instead of MrBeast going viral every day and then launching a snack brand, the other way around.
Speaker 2:So he's builds a company and then becomes famous on the back of that company. Which one of those feels right to you?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think maybe I'll just comment. One, MrBeast follows Roy. So that that's
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 8:Fun fun fun fact one.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 8:Fun fact two, I think from a media and audience perspective, John and Jordy, I think I think of it as, like, a bunch of oceans. There's no one ocean. There is Indian, Pacific, Atlantic,
Speaker 2:and Yeah.
Speaker 8:That's Twitter, you know, Facebook properties, as well as, like, you know, more organic. And all of these pools of water are very, very deep. Yeah. And in terms of general population, who I lovingly call our, you know, consumers, I still think it's so early. The only consumer AI product people are using are really chatty PT.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And for them to actually learn about products like this and use it, I think the the the sort of ocean's way deeper than we imagine, and we're just scratching the surface today.
Speaker 1:Talk about calculated risk.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:There this feels, you know, this is a calculated bet. You guys invested 15,000,000 in the company. He's clearly talented on the product side, clearly talented on the attention side. You know, he's charismatic, he's fun to talk to, he's well spoken, all these things. So there's a lot of reasons to love it.
Speaker 1:And then the the pushback and and other other VCs that maybe didn't do the deal would say, Roy's like a wild wild card. Like, do you do you think that more investors need to be comfortable with, like, a very potential real risk and and and maybe the average VC has just gotten a little soft?
Speaker 8:Good things. I think look. Like, if you think of the history of large general population products, you see a lot of them actually being pretty risky early on. Hot or not for Facebook.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:Where does Snap begin? What was, you know, Reddit initially? And sort of think of thinking about that, I think there is a beginning of a lot of the consumer products and products that are used by many people have a funny beginning sometimes. And I think so one, calculate a risk site. We're comfortable with that.
Speaker 8:And I think second thing is when I you know, I have a saying where momentum is a moat today in this sort of era of AI applications. And when I say momentum is a moat, I don't mean just distribution. I also mean product iteration.
Speaker 10:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And so the calculated risk here is that Roy can convert this awareness into people clamoring to work at the company that are highly high and exceptional great great people to build products, and then use that to continue to iterate on innovation on the product format that is already amazing. So that's sort of the bet, if you will. And when those two come together, I think we'll be surprised.
Speaker 2:How do you think about restrictions or dynamics from the major, like, big tech companies? Because, yeah, you mentioned that, you know, there's a consumer angle here. Yeah. But when I see the product, I see it as a desktop app, and many consumer interactions happen on the phone. And so, you know, Roy was fantastic at creating a viral moment around the idea of, like, using Cluely on a first date.
Speaker 2:And yet, you're not gonna have a first date over a Zoom meeting on your MacBook Pro.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe you're always planning another pandemic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. May maybe. But but but but people do talk to each other on the phone and on FaceTime, but it's much harder to plug in and do screen recording and do Yeah. Picture in picture and all of that. So it feels like there needs to be some sort of transition point if you're going to go broader to killer use cases for consumer.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, you're gonna bump up against a ton of pushback from the platforms who just say, we don't wanna give you access to that API. We don't want you to screen record for for for privacy reasons, good or bad.
Speaker 8:So I don't disagree. We are techno optimists, and I would believe that there will be another innovation that actually allows the likes of Cluely to live and be omnipresent in everyday interaction. Yeah. That said, you know, AI is like a digital god we created, and we trapped it behind a little chat box.
Speaker 9:Yep.
Speaker 8:So it is natural to me that it should live on a thing that you actually work and interact with the most, and we're starting with computers today because that's where the power is. Like, that's actually the digital god is not godly enough on the little little, you know, little devices today. So we put it in a little larger box. Yep. And the little boxes will get better, and we're excited for that future.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I'm excited for you guys. Congratulations on the deal, and we gotta get Roy in here. We should pull up Awesome. Pull up the launch video as well.
Speaker 1:But thank you for joining.
Speaker 8:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Ryan, thank you for being bold Yeah. And making real bad.
Speaker 2:Probably had to fight it out with the American dynamism team because as we know, they're working on hardware. They're working on reindustrialization. They're doing everything over there. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Bye. Next up, have Roy from Cluelly, the man himself. Third time in the studio, third time on TBPM.
Speaker 1:Get the
Speaker 2:to the stream.
Speaker 1:That hammer ready.
Speaker 2:Ready. Let's bring him in. Let's hope he's ready. Roy, give us the news. Give us the headline number.
Speaker 2:How are you doing? How much did you raise?
Speaker 10:15,000,000 fucking dollars.
Speaker 1:Clean hit. Clean hit.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Thank you. Why'd you raise money? I thought you're printing so much money you didn't need to raise ever. What happened?
Speaker 10:We're printing money, but we need more money.
Speaker 2:We're trying
Speaker 10:to every single day, we're looking for things to spend money on.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Uses of the funds. What are you gonna spend on first?
Speaker 1:14,000,000 for brain computer interface development.
Speaker 6:Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 10:We we have whatever you thought the viral content, you thought this was cool, bro. We're doing 10 x this.
Speaker 2:Okay. More videographers, more more
Speaker 10:actors, editors, more engineers, more everything, please.
Speaker 1:Mas. Mas.
Speaker 2:Yes. Let's go. Yeah. What's the morning routine like now over at
Speaker 10:Cleaning Everybody wakes up and we swipe on Hinge for thirty minutes. It's mandatory. Everyone swipes on TikTok and Instagram for an hour just to make sure the viral senses are refreshed.
Speaker 2:Okay. We
Speaker 10:we we all do cold plunges, and we're we're we're we're ready to hit the day with with caffeine.
Speaker 1:If you if you cold plunge, though, does it negate, like, the the brain rot? Like, do you get to or is it is that intentional of, like, relogging, like, know, bringing
Speaker 10:in We we we we scroll to keep our viral sense up, but after that, it's it's time to get to work. We're a serious company. You know? We're not just we're not just trolling over here.
Speaker 2:Okay. That's good to hear. Talk to me about the Hinge use case. I wanna hear, Kalu's desktop app. You're not in the App Store.
Speaker 2:If I'm if someone's using Hinge on their phone, how are they gonna take advantage of Cluely now or in the future?
Speaker 10:I mean, every single time you screenshot something and ask ChatGPT anything, I mean, like, this this entire use case, like, it is ridiculous that I have to do this. Like, AI can already take the context of your screen and audio and and and and and give you information out of it. Why can chatchbt.com not use this? Why is the main AI use case not already aware of what's going on on your screen? We think this is crazy.
Speaker 2:Yes. But it's but it is locked down for privacy reasons on the iPhone. So the question is, like, what user interface innovation are you gonna bring to bear on the phone so that you can actually unlock the vast majority of cons consumers who are realistically not using the most popular consumer apps on their desktop?
Speaker 10:I would I would push back on whether we even have to enter the phone at all. Really, the technology is growing so fast. We might just be able to skip phone entirely. We might be able to skip classes entirely. And I like like, whatever it is, I think this technology is growing super fast.
Speaker 10:Like like, think I think phone like, in five years, I would question whether phone is the dominant consumer use case.
Speaker 2:Okay. I I I I get that you're BCI pilled. It still feels a few years out. The Meta Ray Bans feel very much here today. Have you looked into those APIs?
Speaker 2:How developer friendly is the Meta Ray Ban ecosystem versus the iOS ecosystem versus the MacBook Pro ecosystem, which seems to be where you're flourishing right now. I feel like you're gonna have a really hard time on iOS, no matter how cracked your engineers are. Apple is just gonna say The risk.
Speaker 1:I think I think Roy,
Speaker 2:if anybody could risk Tim Cook. Tim Cook, I I I won't I won't put it past you, but it feels like the Meta Ray Ban ecosystem might be a little bit more open. What are what's your read on the Meta Ray Ban or the Meta Glasses rollout? They just had an announcement this today.
Speaker 10:My read is that there is way more money in in all in desktop assistant than people actually think. There's maybe two, three competitors in this maybe maybe two, three competitors who are actually trying to take a meaningful stab at desktop assistant, and there's way more money and way more value in this than people think. Still gonna be using computers in a few years. Maybe we'll be using something else, but, like like, enterprise bro, these sales Oracle, Adobe, these guys move slow as fuck, bro. Like, they will be
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 10:Yes. Still, bro. Like, they are moving slow. We're gonna have computers, unlock a bunch of enterprise value for the next few years, and we'll be here to capture all of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I mean, I I I get that the it I mean, it feels like this is going towards enterprise note taking, enterprise assistant, and and and would have a very positive yes. You use the cheat on your technical interview as like a viral hook, but, you know, we're we're having our intern demo clearly today. And you could see that if we're on a call, just having answers be pulled up ambiently is valuable. There's obviously a bunch of, you know, bots that plug in and listen and record your emails, but being more proactive seems like a step forward.
Speaker 2:It begs the question, why are you in the consumer group in Andreessen? But I guess that there still is a consumer angle long term. But how are you seeing Cluelie users adopt the product? It feels like the logical case is at work on the desktop.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Well, of I mean, the question is how are Cluelie users using the product?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:Most people it it is most helpful in a meeting. Right now, there's no product on the tool that gives you live assistance during a meeting. Yes. That's where all the prosumer and enterprise values most prosumer and enterprise value is being derived. Yes.
Speaker 10:Other than that, we have a gigantic consumer, the most viral use case ever of literally cheating, bro. Like like like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Answers your questions.
Speaker 10:And, like, what even when you're doing homework, I mean, like, just immediate, bro. Like, you do all your homework instantly, when you're doing quizzes, assignments, when you're watching lectures, bro. Immediate, bro. It's immediate help.
Speaker 1:Immediate. On-site. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gotta give a shout out to the whole team. We we we were reviewing clearly throughout the show today. We're pretty impressed with with the product. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people that are yapping on the timeline haven't tried it yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We would never.
Speaker 1:And I think anytime going forward somebody leaves a negative comment just say, hey, totally understand how you might think that. Why don't you just use the product for five ten hours and then come back and let me know if you feel the same way.
Speaker 2:I think that's the right
Speaker 1:Get a user out of it. Talk about the process for for the round. You you did you you raised the seed round not very long ago. I'm you know, did this come inbound?
Speaker 10:I will say right now to all the VCs watching, if you ever are trying to get in a round, you get me an email thread and you say, hey. Let me loop in my assistant, and we'll schedule a call in two weeks. You are not getting allocation, and I wake up every single one of my friends to make sure you don't get allocation. Bro, these rounds move so fucking quick. You don't have too much.
Speaker 10:Your whole job is to find the alpha and invest quick and early. Why are you looping an assistant in two weeks? My partners, Brian and Eric, they came with stakes and Coke Zeroes to the house.
Speaker 1:Stakes and Coke
Speaker 10:Zeroes. These guys. This is how investors need to be. Your job is to find the fucking alpha, bro. Why are you looping in an assistant?
Speaker 10:There was a there was a preempt and I think all rounds, you need to preempt.
Speaker 1:Like, Fuck. Come on, bro.
Speaker 2:Preempted founders.
Speaker 1:If you're not getting preempted, just shut your company down. Even if you're running out of money, if you're not getting preempted, just shut the company down.
Speaker 2:Shut the company down. That's great.
Speaker 10:These are going so quick. Companies grow
Speaker 1:so good.
Speaker 10:All VCs don't have two weeks to loop in your assistant.
Speaker 2:Okay. What is your underlying motivation for building this company?
Speaker 10:I want to be conqueror of the fucking universe. It is so obvious that AI is going to massively expand what is capable. And I think, like, in even in five, ten years, bro, if we keep growing at this rate, like, we'll be on the next ship to Mars. We'll all be living at 400 years old, and I'll be jacked till I die. And in that universe, bro, like, these companies will converge into super companies.
Speaker 10:And these super companies is gonna be me versus Elon versus Sam competing to be guardian of the fucking galaxy, bro. And it's I'm I'm gonna be on top.
Speaker 2:Okay. Sounds like you're power hungry. There's been a criticism
Speaker 1:Which can be a strength.
Speaker 2:A strength. The there's clearly a subtweet about you going around on X arguing that you are driven by fame, not greed or idealism. Is that true? To what degree are you motivated by fame specifically?
Speaker 10:The only two things I I really care about in my life are working on is working on something that I find interesting and getting the work seen by people.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 10:Of Elon Musk. These are my inspirations. Like, these people are known by every living conscious human being in the world. Man, this guy founded Apple. This guy did Tesla.
Speaker 10:Like, it's it's the coolest shit ever. Four thousand years ago, bro, you wanted to hunt big fucking woolly mammoths
Speaker 6:and bring it back to tribe.
Speaker 10:There's no more woolly mammoths. There's only startups.
Speaker 2:Okay. So
Speaker 1:So you're not beating the allegation.
Speaker 2:Wait. Wait. But but but the more precisely, if if the best path for Cluly forward is your interns getting up getting tons of social media views, you step out of the limelight because you're managing the company. People know Cluelly, but they don't know Roy Lee. Is that still a win for you?
Speaker 10:Of course. At one point, the company becomes undistinguishable from the founder. Yes. It happened with every single big company, and it's what it's what what will happen with Cluelly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just it's just a unique situation because we we know of Palmer Lucky because of Oculus, the product, and many people know of Cluely because of you and the and the viral stunts that you've pulled. And so you're kind of inverting it. And the and the question that the the haters are asking of you is that, is this is the long term goal to build a great product or to build the brand of Roy Lee?
Speaker 10:Bro, it is to change the world in a meaningful way, and you don't change the world by going viral a million times. You change the world by genuinely building a world changing product. Technology changes the world. I will I will build great technology and every person in the world will watch me do it.
Speaker 1:Okay. Amazing. How how big are you going on the content side? Do you wanna get a single video with a 100,000,000 views? Are you are you going that big?
Speaker 1:Is that is that kind of the wrong framework to think about it? But but I but I imagine you're gonna have more, you know, budget than ever and and, you know, it's now to get a million views on x on a video. Is is a 100,000,000 views on YouTube the next, you know, challenge?
Speaker 10:I will tell you right now, and this might be the the most logical thing I I say on here. But the biggest societal shift in maybe human history happened about five years ago when TikTok surpassed YouTube in terms of, like, virality and usage. All of a sudden, the number of content creators stayed the same, and the relative number of content being created stayed the same, whereas the quantity of content being consumed about 100 x. As a result, there is this gigantic gap where there is not enough viral content for people to consume, which is why you see the same subway surfers overlaid on a Reddit store. You see that a 100 times because there's literally not enough good content out there.
Speaker 10:For the next maybe six months to a year, anything you post that has the potential to go viral will go viral, which is why you see our marketing team is all influencers with viral sense. Yep. We know. We independently all have 20 ideas a day that we know will go viral. And this extrapolated out over a year will literally generate a billion views a month.
Speaker 10:And if you're someone who thinks a billion views a month is not gonna convert to to some money, like, bro, you're retarded. You're gonna go
Speaker 6:back to school, bro.
Speaker 2:A billion views a month, is that is that like, will you run into a cap? Is there a set market size that you will saturate, and then we'll be seeing Super Bowl ads?
Speaker 10:I have no idea, but I'll tell you right now. Like like, Super Bowl ads, it's it's it's all old. Like, this is the old meta. The new meta is in content, is in short form, and nobody seems to have captured the the gigantic delta in generating more viral content.
Speaker 1:I still think it'd be funny if you forced a 127,000,000 people, the number of people that watch the Super Bowl to just watch a video of you saying, hello. I'm Roy Lee. I encourage you to go to cluelly.com and sign up for Cluelly today. So don't count it out. But anything else you wanna share while you're here?
Speaker 1:I know it's a big day for you. The timeline's blown up. You you not very many people have the stones to to launch a series a on a Friday, a summer Friday.
Speaker 2:To go head to head against Mira too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you pulled it off.
Speaker 10:Again, I think people worry too much about the little things. In reality, if you post something that deserves to go viral, you will 100% go viral, and this will only be true for maybe the next few years. Maybe. And I encourage more people to post. Most businesses will die, not because the product sucks, but because you can't get enough eyeballs.
Speaker 10:And I think we if we win, if and when we win, we will show to the world that there needs to be a fundamental difference in how companies are built. You start with distribution and eyeballs because right now, that is where the gigantic delta is.
Speaker 2:And if you
Speaker 10:can't have then
Speaker 2:Stick with us. Stick with us for a minute. I wanna play your, fundraising video live on the stream. Then if we have any questions from that, I wanna ask you.
Speaker 10:Please. Please.
Speaker 2:So let's play Pull it up. Video. Mister Lee, Columbia University has found you guilty of academic integrity violations. Do you have anything to say? Color grade.
Speaker 3:More of the
Speaker 7:color grade.
Speaker 10:I've already apologized to school, but to be honest, in two years, nobody's gonna think this is cheating.
Speaker 1:Yo. The increase in wire just hit. You think it'll last us through the summer?
Speaker 7:Oh my god.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Chloe.
Speaker 2:Great video. Banger. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Banger.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna hit the gun
Speaker 1:again. Very well done.
Speaker 2:Very well done. And beautiful beautifully shot. Like, the lighting. I mean, your cinematography, yeah.
Speaker 6:I will
Speaker 1:shut it to you.
Speaker 2:Very, very good. Very, very good. Nailed it. Anything else for Roy?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's it for now.
Speaker 10:In house studio.
Speaker 2:It's crazy that you can shoot that in house. That that that really is, remarkable. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:We are excited to follow the journey.
Speaker 10:We just got $15,000,000.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Tell us about the fundraising leak. Well, what's your deal with r for rock? Were you able to how much do have to pay him to shut up?
Speaker 10:Man, I I was I was begging him. You guys have no way. For the last few I've been begging this man. Please do not leak.
Speaker 2:Why? Why? I feel like I feel like it already leaked separately and, like, having I feel like you would be leaning into a leak. I was expecting, like, a collab almost.
Speaker 10:I think what whatever leak there could possibly be, I have very strong faith in my ability to make my announcement go more viral.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 10:This video will go more viral than any leak would have even if I try.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. You actually don't wanna take the gas out of the out of the tank.
Speaker 2:I love it. Thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic, good luck.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to you and the team. Excited to watch you guys cook this summer. Yeah. And hopefully, the 15 makes it, you know, back, you know, August. Just remember, August, it's gonna be hard to get the autoresponders will be on.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be hard to be know, get those twenty four hour meetings. Yeah. And so just make sure you got the runway to September.
Speaker 2:And and this might come as a shock. Again. IPO underwriters do not preempt. So at some point, you will have to stop with the preempt everything mantra.
Speaker 1:I don't know. There's some SPAC sponsors out there
Speaker 2:that Who knows? Maybe, yeah, maybe you'll get preempt
Speaker 1:in the fall. You know? I wouldn't be I wouldn't be surprised. So
Speaker 2:You're you're saying it as a joke. I I feel like it might be in the cards. We're we're we're gonna be tracking it. Thank you so much for stopping
Speaker 1:Great chatting with you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you later.
Speaker 1:Talk
Speaker 2:soon. Bye. Wow. What a sensational run for Roy Lee. I'm I'm I'm very excited for him.
Speaker 1:Just getting started too.
Speaker 2:And I won't I won't dox any any particular names, but Roy Lee is the most controversial guest within my family group chat. Very very divisive. Part of my family absolutely loves him and is like he is a national treasure and another member of my family is like I cannot stand this guy. Which is why. Good The
Speaker 1:internet loves people that are you know, divisive. But
Speaker 2:I did I did I I feel like this was like a more serious interview and I feel like we broke through a little bit more and and obviously, like, there is the idea of Roy Lee, the character who is who can play a character that can go viral and there is the Roy Lee who is, like, the entrepreneur, the man. And we got a little bit through. And, you know, I'm fine with either showing up. I'm I'm I'm actually fine to do an interview with the character and have fun on the stream. I'm also interested to talk to him, you know, as just a person who's building a company.
Speaker 2:And I think we got a little bit of both. Still, you know, lots of uncertainty. It's an early stage company, but I'm I'm rooting for him. Hopefully, he built something great. And it seems like the product has been pretty good so far.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, we have Dave from h f zero in the studio. There he is. Welcome to stream, What's going on? How are we doing?
Speaker 2:How are doing? We're doing great. It's been a banger day. Lots of news.
Speaker 1:Dude, tough to follow-up Roy Lee. The guy has a lot of energy. So we gotta we gotta we gotta bring it
Speaker 8:Give us some numbers.
Speaker 2:Give us how many companies were in the last batch?
Speaker 3:We do 10 companies every single time. There
Speaker 1:go. There we go. Hello. Give us give us the audience some quick background on you and HF Zero and then let's dive into the batch and talk about some of the companies.
Speaker 3:Sweet. So I'll give a little backstory. Is cool if I give, a two minute backstory?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Perfect.
Speaker 2:We'd love that. So
Speaker 3:a little backstory of myself, started largest hackathon in the world, like, ten plus years ago. It's called m hacks at the University of Michigan.
Speaker 6:Oh,
Speaker 3:yeah. Dropped out of Michigan and just traveled to different universities helping spread hackathons. Then I I had my heart broken. I quit everything when I lived in monasteries for a year and a half. And HF Zero is essentially a monastery meets a hackathon.
Speaker 3:And so I started investing about six years ago now. This is before HF Zero. My third investment was a startup called Ramp
Speaker 6:that actually No.
Speaker 2:What? Pretty cool.
Speaker 1:You should've just you should've just called it quip. Many people would've said, nope. That's it. I've I've done it. I've it.
Speaker 1:But you kept going. Kept going.
Speaker 2:Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Depends on why you do it. And so our normal investing was going really well. But then we started thinking, like, what is the product that these top technical founders actually want even more than cash? Everyone's trying to invest money in them, but what is the product that they actually want? And that's how we came up with HF Zero.
Speaker 3:It's essentially a monastery meets a hackathon. It's a ten week monastic retreat where you let go of everything in your life and drop it in the zone of your life and build. And a lot of repeat founders joining our program. It's the most selective startup residency in the world. And actually, the backstory is interesting.
Speaker 3:So the first batch was in New York and it kicked off 02/15/2020. Wasn't a great timing to have in person people in the same house. Yeah. And so two weeks in, had to shut down that, like, zeroth batch. But I heard the day that I shut it down, I heard that Taiwan didn't have COVID.
Speaker 3:So I flew to Taiwan that night Woah. In the hopes of keeping this dream alive. I spent six months learning Mandarin, building political relationships, convinced them to give me visas. Then I flew everyone to Taiwan, and we
Speaker 2:were in
Speaker 3:the first full h f zero batch in Taiwan in the middle of COVID. It was the only country in the world that didn't have COVID. And that batch worked. Then my cofounder at the time, Lucy Lucy Kuo, who started Scale, she was in Miami and she was like, yo, Dave, Miami has like a 100 investors for every technical founder. You know all the technical founders.
Speaker 3:We bring them here. They're gonna have a great time, fundraising and and everything. So we started Miami Hack Week, then we ran two batches in Miami, they went amazing. She was totally spot on. Then I decided to go all in on HF Zero, and we were thinking really deeply about where we wanted to do it.
Speaker 3:San Francisco was dead at the time, but we came and visited and it seemed like it was just having the sparks of life coming back. And so we were between New York and and San Francisco to base it. We decided to take our early bet in this latest wave on on San Francisco in a big part due to, like, Gary Tan and the the work that he did, like, kind of getting the city shifted back in the in the right direction. And we've been holding on for dear life since then. We we started this hackathon in San Francisco called AI Hack Week, which happened to be the week after ChatGPT came out.
Speaker 1:Good timing. You had some bad timing the first time around. Good timing that time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 3:Good timing in Taiwan. Good timing in Miami. Good timing in San Francisco. And and then the program's just been taking off. Since we moved to San Francisco, we've had about 35,000 teams start the application to HF Zero.
Speaker 3:We still only back 10 teams at a time. It's been 10 teams from the first batch. Wow. It's still 10 teams at a time today. I I love what we get to do.
Speaker 3:We pour our heart and souls into it. And when you work with 10 teams, you actually deeply get to know, each and every one of the teams. So so we we love what we get to do over here. But so
Speaker 1:many batches a year? Is it is it
Speaker 3:Three batches a year.
Speaker 1:Three.
Speaker 2:Great. Interesting. Yeah. I I think you know my buddy Evan Steitz Clayton from, Teespring. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I hung out with him very, very early, and he was, like, a couple years ahead of me in, like, the venture world and gave me a bunch of amazing advice that was very, very helpful. But the last time I ran into him was he was at YC demo day, alumni demo day, and he was writing a poem about every company that went on stage. And I was just like I think he was like maybe thinking about investing in them, but I was just like, that's a very different way to process and internalize. And I mean, even in the age of AI, it's like the one thing that like the LLMs probably couldn't do a good job at. But but but great guy.
Speaker 2:I mean, have you read the poem? That's rough.
Speaker 1:Jokes are rough. Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:all it's all rough.
Speaker 3:I think were epic back then. That was how I would view the the demo days. I would just read his poem
Speaker 2:and see Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He'd post them all. Was great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but I wanna hear the story of, like tell me the story about one particular company that particularly surprised you or did something unique throughout a particular batch and really take me on the the the story of, like, what can happen? What does great look like in the context of this ten week sprint?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the company that comes to mind right away is OpenRouter. So a lot of the folks listening probably use OpenRouter. It's the top router when you wanna switch between models. So Gemini 2.5 Flash came out, and it was, like, incredible and way cheaper.
Speaker 3:And then you're if you're on OpenRouter, you click one button and you switch everything over.
Speaker 9:Yeah.
Speaker 3:OpenAI to Gemini or from Gemini to Anthropic. Yep. And if you actually go, you can go to openrouter.ai/rankings, and they have, like, essentially a definitive usage rankings for all the LLMs. But to your question, when Alex was in HF Zero, this was, like, fall twenty twenty three. And back then, there were only a few models.
Speaker 3:And so he took this really contrarian bet at the time that actually there would end up being a long tail of models that people would use when at the time everyone thought it was gonna be, like, one model to rule them all. And and so at that time, there there were very few models and this bet wasn't even true. And actually in the middle of the batch, he almost gave up on that thesis. He was like, man, maybe I'm I'm wrong on this. But but in the context of h f zero being with 10 other teams who were, like, on the ground who were pushing these models to their limits, he ended up, like, having the right surroundings, the right community and stuff where he actually, like, stuck with this kind of crazy thesis at the time.
Speaker 3:And now if you go to their website opener, like, they're doing, like, trillions of tokens a week. So that one's
Speaker 2:It's a great one. We're actually having on the show soon, so I'm I'm really excited to meet him. I've never met him, but, he seems like an amazing thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So Alex was the founder of OpenSea before he started OpenRouter.
Speaker 2:So That's where I know his name. He was in my YC batch. Yeah. Amazing. I didn't realize that he yes.
Speaker 2:Second time founder. That's such a unique thing. And you wouldn't a lot of people don't think that, like, second time founders or someone as successful as him would go through any sort of program. Usually, it's just like straight to series d. You know?
Speaker 1:There's so many stories. You did you did CrossMint super early too. Right? I remember Dave called me and he's like, you gotta talk to this company. They're insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They were raising on an cap note at the time and I was like
Speaker 3:The whole round uncapped after h m c.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You you you did you did this uncapped round with you know, with a discount of course. And I was like, I couldn't get on board with the uncapped note personally. And I ended up having to invest like three weeks later Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like at the at like whatever the series a price and and you're totally right on that one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I wanna talk about, those repeat founders. This is something that, kinda shocked me. So I I went through YC in 2012 and then or, like, my my my first company went through YC in in, summer twenty twelve. Then when went back through in summer in winter sixteen.
Speaker 2:And I was like, I'm still like a founder. I'm still like a startup guy. But we'd scaled the first company to 50 people. And I was very much in manager mode. Like, I had like gray hairs on staff and like managers.
Speaker 2:And and even though we had enough money to hire hire people, there was this big mental shift. I remember Dalton Caldwell from Y Combinator kind of telling me like, hey, you gotta go back into individual contributor mode. You gotta Even though you can afford you're connected enough Absolutely. You gotta do it yourself. And and through that, it was a wildly different experience and it was really good.
Speaker 2:Talk to me about some of the shifts that you see in these second time founders going back in to these like, you know, dedicated environments where you're maybe not hiring and scaling and raising bunch of money even if you can.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So about 70% of the founders we back are repeat founders and usually our kind of bar for actually considering them repeat founders is their last company did at least 10 mil annualized. Yeah. And in fact, in dispatch, you know, the 10 teams, five of the founders either built a billion dollar company before this or their previous company was doing a 100 mil plus.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's very different
Speaker 3:than most. The the challenge is of repeat founders actually pretty unique to being a repeat founders. It's like by virtue of their success, their last company, they had gone into they were managing, you know, hundreds, maybe even like a thousand people.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:But what that wasn't the recipe that made their first company successful in the beginning. They know that. And by virtue of their success, they're usually angel investing.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:They're advising startups. Everyone wants them to speak at their conference.
Speaker 2:They might have families.
Speaker 3:All sorts of things. Yeah. Percent of the teams we back, someone has a kid.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah. Very different from
Speaker 3:Exactly
Speaker 2:right. The RTC
Speaker 1:stuff. That's hard mode.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so and so the the challenges they have are different. And so actually our our, like, residency that we offer is, like, very different. It's not an accelerator. It's not incubator.
Speaker 3:It's a residency.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They actually, like, leave their normal life for these ten weeks, and we subtract everything from their life. So our whole thesis is while everyone's focused on value add, we focus on this thesis of recursive subtraction that actually our mantra at h f zero is the most insidious distraction isn't networking or conferences or this or that. No. It's the second most important thing in your business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so founders are so often so good at doing the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth most important thing in their business. But the first the the most important thing in the business is usually a blind spot.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:It's usually something that that all that you only see when you force yourself to stop doing everything else, and then you're, like, you're on that second most important thing. That's very important. And you ask yourself that question. Is this the most important thing in my business right now? And and it comes up for you and you just can feel it's it's not, but you don't necessarily have clarity yet Yeah.
Speaker 3:On what the and then and then you realize, oh, man. I've actually been afraid of this thing because if I if I go here, I might find out that the whole business doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So so that's why it's usually there's some fear that is holding. And so by doing this recursive subtraction, startups just end up, like, zooming forward. Because in the beginning of a startup, like, early stage, you essentially have two things. You have, like, your rate of realizations, and a lot of this comes by, like, talking to your customers, and then you have a grind. And the residency format allows you to increase your rate of realizations and then grind like you've never grinded in in your life before.
Speaker 3:It's, like, it's, like, pretty insane. So that's why, like, in our last batch, forty percent of the teams broke three mil ARR by demo day. So, like, results we're seeing, like, even if you're Sequoia, shouldn't be able to pick this well. And I think it'd be hubris for us to like, we're getting amazing founders, but I think it'd be hubris for us to think it's just that we're we're picking this well. Part of it is the selection bias.
Speaker 3:Like Mhmm. The set of founders who are repeat founders who are willing to leave their nice apartment, most of have made money on their last startup. Yeah. Who wanna leave their nice apartment and move into the residency for ten weeks, they're serious.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They wanna birth their life's work. But the other part of it is that the residency works. This format of company building, I think a lot of companies, like, kind of did it in an emergent way, like Apple in a garage. Facebook had the house in Palo Alto. Even Dev and Cognition had the house in Atherton.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So a lot of companies kind of do these residencies without fully realizing it. We've figured out a way to do this to, like, a whole other level, and it works like every single time. We're just getting like the the results don't even make
Speaker 1:sense. Can I can imagine a conversation, you know, with with a CEO in in one of the batches and and they're saying like, oh, I'm worried about this, you know, or like this thing's working, this thing's working, this thing's working, etcetera? And you're like, but what are you afraid of? Yeah. And they're like, oh, I'm not really afraid of anything.
Speaker 1:You're like, no, what are you afraid of? And then they're like, oh, I'm afraid of this thing. And then you're just, you know, you're you're effectively the the sensei.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we can't
Speaker 3:You can't really directly just ask it like that. You actually have to like stop doing a bunch of the other things that are important but aren't the most important thing. And it's only when you actually subtract over and over and over again do you actually have the space to even realize that you might be afraid of something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally. We keep coming back to this this, like, x thread about the motivations of the modern Silicon Valley founder by Anna. I wanna get your reaction to this. She identifies trend.
Speaker 2:She says, look, there's a cultural shift in the startup ecosystem that has moved from contrarian rule breakers and hackers to the overachieving STEM kids for whom being a founder is simply the next box to tick. And it seems like you have carved out an an area or like a weird I don't even know what like, yeah. Like, just you you you still have to be taking a risk to do what you're proposing. And I'm wondering if you can comment on that trend as like
Speaker 1:It's like sacrifice.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Like like like, there are ways to do founder that are high status now.
Speaker 1:And low sacrifice.
Speaker 2:And low sacrifice. Talk to me about the status symbol that being a founder is and how you think about that within the context of your program.
Speaker 3:So one of my core values is substance over hype. And so actually, like, at HF Zero, we actually kept the lowest profile possible for the first couple years of the program. Because in my mind, I'm like, there's nothing to talk about here until, you know, we have our first unicorn or, you know, first company goes public or whatever. Like, I already know a ton of engineers and everything. I wanna just build the best product in the world for founders.
Speaker 3:There's no one else building this product for repeat founders. And so that's what I'm constantly focused on. That said, Jordan, our creative director, who I think y'all chatted to, and then my cofounder Emily did convince me. They're like, hey, Dave. There's, like, nothing online about HF Zero.
Speaker 3:It's, like, two years in. They're like, we we should do we should do at least something so that when people who don't know you already look it up, they know it's, like, actually a real thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so they fought me on this for, like, six months. And then finally, was like, okay. Well, if you get the New York Times, we can do it. But I was joking. I didn't think that actually and then next thing you know, had a New York Times writer, like, living with
Speaker 2:us for
Speaker 3:a week. And she happened to have been, like, a Google engineer before she was a New York Times writer. And then she loved it so much that she started coding again.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. So that was sweet. And so just
Speaker 1:just journalists.
Speaker 3:Repeat founders who join our program and really the founders that we filter for, they are here to birth their life's work. Like, these folks aren't founders because it's any, like, any sort of status thing. They're founders because, like, whatever, like, they grew up, whatever, like, childhood, like, shit they they they can't not be founders. They can't not build things. So that's, like, when you're at HFZ, you're surrounded by a bunch of people who, like, it doesn't matter how high status, low they they just, like, can't stop themselves Mhmm.
Speaker 3:From building. And, yeah, that's that's the really cool thing. And it's, you know, it's only 10 teams and just you're surrounded by other folks who are, like, this kind of I'm gonna say addicted. Like, it's a sacrifice thing. It's, like, a very painful thing starting a company.
Speaker 3:And they've done it like most 70% of founders in fact have done it before. They've been through that pain, and then for some reason, they're, like, sick enough to, like, do it again. Yeah. And yeah. And and I and I respect the hell to them.
Speaker 3:And then and then, you know, seeing seeing I I watched, like, a little clip of of Roy's thing earlier. And there's a big part of him that's, you know, excited about the fame and the attention and all this stuff. But another thing he mentioned was around, like, the the BCI stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? We had a startup in our batch. We just had our demo day this week called Conduit that literally as they just they had a a huge breakthrough in, like, neuro neuroscience research where they have the first helmet that can actually, like, read your thoughts before you type them. And it doesn't work every time. But when it does, it's,
Speaker 2:like,
Speaker 3:fucking nuts. And a week ago, this didn't work. And then now we're right on the verge of, like, literally as a coder, like, you being able to wear a headband that actually even because think, you have the thought of what you wanna build, then you're bringing it into English language, then you're bringing it to code, there's just, like, loss every step of that way. But if you actually could just see the the the image, the the concept, the thing they're thinking in their head, like, prompt like, you know, vibe coding's cool, but, like, thought
Speaker 2:to Thought.
Speaker 3:Thought to
Speaker 2:Curse, accept all. Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:Like Build me a build me a $100,000,000 revenue business.
Speaker 2:Don't mistakes. But, I mean, the BCI stuff is super real. Like, Nudge, there's so many companies working on this stuff now. And I saw one company that was doing, like, they they would read your brain while you're sleeping and then use generative AI to generate videos about what you dreamt about. Like, that even if it's like wildly off and abstract, it's still just like a cool thing to have on your nightstand.
Speaker 2:And so it does seem like we're about to see a Cambrian explosion in this industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanted I wanted to have you review the companies, but we should just have
Speaker 9:Yeah. We should have
Speaker 2:a bunch of them on. I mean, we're having Alex on soon. Yeah. Please send us all all the companies. We wanna talk to them.
Speaker 2:This is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Thank you so much for joining, Dave, and and congratulations on all the progress. It's an awesome story.
Speaker 3:One one one last note that's pretty So from our last batch, average valuation post demo days 50,300,000.0.
Speaker 10:Anyways, I thought y'all.
Speaker 1:Your your your everyone is like, oh it'd be great if there was like some type of
Speaker 2:But it's only 16 x revenue.
Speaker 1:Residency with with reasonable valuations.
Speaker 2:No, their revenue it's very reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. It's less than a 20 x revenue multiple which isn't that crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? They have real traction.
Speaker 3:If you'll meet any founders on TVPN who wanna make twelve months of progress in twelve weeks, send them our way. Much
Speaker 2:love y'all. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great talking Cheers.
Speaker 2:Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 2:Anything else you wanna cover?
Speaker 1:Somebody from from your I don't know if you wanna I don't know why
Speaker 2:you wanna talk to family No no no no no but this is what I was telling you about. Like Roy Lee is the most controversial person in my family right now. Half of my family loves him.
Speaker 1:But is this your grandma saying he's No. No. Someone else.
Speaker 2:But yeah. Is the intern Cam still active? I wanna go to Tyler for one last pop quiz. Oh, is he on? Okay.
Speaker 2:I wanna
Speaker 4:ask Yeah. Hey, Eric.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's the capital of Michigan?
Speaker 7:The capital of Michigan.
Speaker 2:Didn't you go to school there?
Speaker 4:I think it's Lansing.
Speaker 2:I think you're maybe leaning on clearly too much at this point.
Speaker 1:Don't know if you're cheating using your brain or I can't really assess the product.
Speaker 2:What's your name?
Speaker 4:My name. Let me think here. It's like the that paper that just came out. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you think that based on your use of Pluto, do think it'll make you smarter, or do you think you'll take your foot off the gas? I mean, I was thinking
Speaker 4:Let me think about that, actually. I I think probably the latter, honestly. I mean, it's just like I just don't need to think. I don't need to store any knowledge in my brain now. So maybe it frees me up to do more, you know, reasoning tasks.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:But even then, you know, once they get o three in here, it's really like everything's covered.
Speaker 2:No reasoning. Did did you get a feeling for what model was under the hood?
Speaker 4:I don't know. I think I could probably check but I'm not sure right now.
Speaker 2:It's so weird interacting with somebody using Cluely. Like every answer is like, and then you don't know if they're reading Cluely or not.
Speaker 1:Or just actually thinking. Well anyways people should go try the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know. Your own decision.
Speaker 1:I really think that anytime Roy gets a negative comment. Yeah. Please just you know use the product for five five plus hours and then you can have an opinion.
Speaker 2:The message to Andreessen no crying in the casino. Because you know Roy Lee, there's probably a viral video of him going to the casino soon.
Speaker 1:Pretty soon.
Speaker 2:You know that's gonna make a lot of people angry and
Speaker 1:so Chamath is talking about spacking again. Yeah. I think Cluey's a good target I bet.
Speaker 2:It's not the craziest target out there.
Speaker 1:Not the craziest, know, Chamossa and MrBeast, Holdco.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of revenue there, it's growing, you know. The market needs a pure play AI.
Speaker 1:I love viral. A pure Roy play.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no pure play.
Speaker 1:Well, we have some more breaking news. Apparently Break it down. Apple held internal internal talks about buying perplexity. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned that.
Speaker 1:But clearly, everybody's talking about buying perplexity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be an interesting way to just beef up Apple Intelligence and and Siri very, very quickly. You know, the the Perplexity team's clearly built a great product. The the the question has always just been like, it's hard to unsee people from ChatGPT and Google.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to break through. What's interesting is, like, comparing it to the Roy Lee story, which is like, I feel like Perplexity has gone viral many, many times. And if you look at the the even just like the ex presence of the of the CEO, Arvind, are let let me look up how many Arvind Arvind at Perplexity. He has 271,000 followers. Roy Lee is just over 100,000.
Speaker 2:So similar kind of broken through serious, you know, on the podcast circuit. Very, you know, respected founder, raised money, a lot of attention on the company. But it's always difficult to actually get people to switch their daily driver from Google search to Perplexity in mass. Yeah. But if you can team up with a company like Apple, that would solve that distribution problem.
Speaker 2:And so there probably is a case to underwrite the deal at some sort of I imagine the number was big if they were talking. I don't imagine it was some, you know, oh, we'll take you out for small. A fraction of the preferred. No. It was probably a real deal if they were talking about it.
Speaker 2:And so but it but but but the question is like, could it make iPhone users happier? Could it make the next version of the iPhone even more even more addictive and higher retention and and get people to upgrade to the Pro phone with a faster chip that's gonna have faster local perplexity and faster interactions over Apple intelligence with Siri. I mean, Siri was an acquisition after all. They didn't pay very much for it, but it was. And so the idea that Apple never acquires things is not really true in the AI space.
Speaker 2:So I don't know. I'm I'm rooting for them either way. I'd love to see. I'd love as a consumer, I'm rooting for Apple. I would love a better search experience on Apple natively.
Speaker 2:And I feel like getting a a major player in in AI in the company would be the perfect thing right now. So I hope it happens. But good luck to everyone on both sides of the negotiation.
Speaker 1:Well, it is the weekend.
Speaker 2:Have a great weekend, folks. Leave us five
Speaker 1:stars for
Speaker 2:Apple and Spotify. And thanks for tuning in. Will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Talk to then.