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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 TBPN. Today is Monday, 06/23/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome. The temple of technology.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. And capital. The capital.
Speaker 1:Mass ive news today. Over the weekend, Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas
Speaker 2:this Was the big technology news
Speaker 1:It was the technology Of course, we will be covering what's going on in Iran. We have an exclusive interview with Shervin Peshavar, the investor and Iranian entrepreneur who came to America decades ago, has been waiting for this moment for, forty six years as he put it to us. We prerecorded an interview with him because he is in Paris. It's very late there. But it was a very fascinating interview.
Speaker 1:You'll hear that at the end of the stream. We have a great lineup. Tons of interviews going on. We're talking to the founder and CEO of Klarna. We're talking to a partner, Kosla Ventures.
Speaker 1:Tom Mueller from Impulse Space is coming on. Then we have Derek Thompson, the author of Abundance and owner of a new Substack. As well as we're doing a lightning round with a bunch of founders who have raised money recently. And then we're talking to Yaxine, the ex software engineer of X.
Speaker 2:Software engineer of X.
Speaker 1:He's an ex ex software engineer. So it'll be fun to talk to him. Anyway, we have someone who's written about the Tesla cyber cab in the robotaxi. In the back of a robotaxi, hopefully,
Speaker 2:in to the I
Speaker 1:sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey.
Speaker 2:Are sure? Here he is.
Speaker 1:How you doing? You've heard
Speaker 2:of your timing.
Speaker 3:How's it going, guys?
Speaker 2:You see
Speaker 3:the Here. Let me see. You see it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 4:Yes. There you go.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Safety rider right here as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, very nice. Okay.
Speaker 3:Got some sick sick glasses on. But, yeah, we're we're in the robotaxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from The UK.
Speaker 2:Oh, Harry. What's going on?
Speaker 3:He's a fan of the channel.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far. It really does feel like Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly. The Geofence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now, but I think they did that, with with the thought process of, hey.
Speaker 3:We wanna make sure we have a really good launch. We wanna make sure that it's going real nice and smooth. And, but so far, the rides I've taken have all been really, really good, very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the the car is unless you're familiar with the with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience.
Speaker 3:It's just there's just nobody there now. And that that's the freaky part is that
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 3:You know, for for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was gonna come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kinda like this is this is wild. This is wild. So is that better? The stock up
Speaker 2:9% today.
Speaker 1:9% today. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're welcome, everybody.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Give us your other takeaways. Well, I I I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience. What else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a preregistration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, yeah, we were invited. We're we're a part of, like, a very limited group of people that were invited. I think Tesla was just, here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that.
Speaker 3:No problem.
Speaker 2:Wow. Nice.
Speaker 3:The, yeah. It's a very small group of people. I think, a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely, over the years, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us, some early access so we can go out there, test the test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. So far, it's very, very limited Mhmm. In its use case, and I'm showing you guys here just on the road.
Speaker 3:Hopefully does it come across? Can you guys see the
Speaker 2:the road, how
Speaker 3:it's driving? Yeah. It's a very steep yeah. I think I think Tesla very specifically started this very small. But now if you go and their and their ZIP code and their phone number and email address, so they can sign up for the service.
Speaker 3:And that's probably a way for Tesla to get some, some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there. Mhmm. But so far, it's very small small geofence area, small group of people. And I think I I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt it's more than 10 right now. We're a four way stop right now, and it's navigating that no problem.
Speaker 3:But yeah. I I think I think it's very limited on purpose, but I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able experience this firsthand, it's just it feels surreal because it works. Works. It's
Speaker 2:amazing. It's Crazy.
Speaker 3:It just takes you around, and there's no one there.
Speaker 2:And you're like, that it's wild that we got full self driving cars before reliable cell coverage
Speaker 1:in major
Speaker 2:cities. Breaking up a little bit. We need
Speaker 1:to drop Mostly.
Speaker 2:Start with the top of I
Speaker 1:I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go. Yeah. I mean, what's remarkable about this is is not just that it's a self driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket, added to extra cameras, anything?
Speaker 3:Nothing. Nothing. Before. I mean, the there's different software, but, I mean, that's just a that's a software update. Right?
Speaker 3:It does there is nothing that that I can gather that says, oh, this is a a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors. This looks to me like the point you made is exactly and this is why this is such so mind blowing. Like, I just can't believe it's happening. The best selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000, potentially less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.20, and it's driving me around.
Speaker 3:The best selling car in the world. Like, that that is that's a weird thing to process
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Because it fundamentally breaks the like, what how we think about self driving transportation. Because you think about, oh, self driving, a lot of sensors, etcetera, etcetera. No. The the cost structure for this thing is the is skit the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve, that same car is going to drive itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That just breaks everything because your cost per mile plummets, the method they've taken, as far as training the the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can. And they have the cars. Right? So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:Right? And that that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible such an incredible technology, and I'm really happy they exist. But the scale piece is the challenge. Yep.
Speaker 3:And it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to to our destination, that's my Cybertruck right there just hanging out.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:You know, it's like, it's monumental. This is truly a monumental thing
Speaker 2:for them. This is like Disneyland for tech bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is amazing. Thank you very Yeah. Thank you, brother. Yeah, dude.
Speaker 3:It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like, it's it's it's it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just appending the equation around the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle.
Speaker 3:Now with self driving, they're gonna get into the the human or robot space. Yeah. This is what they do. And so I think this is just another reminder that they're they're full steam ahead, and it's it's very exciting. And I'm and it's just such an honor to be part of this this release.
Speaker 3:Truly. It's an honor.
Speaker 2:Historic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for calling in. Was great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll go back
Speaker 2:for having fun out there. Bye. Talk soon.
Speaker 3:Thank you, guys. Alright. Bye bye.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the scale of this thing. I mean, it like, Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so scale scale really matters.
Speaker 1:It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And, yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says, Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robotaxi, and you'll love to see it. A little bit of side quest going on for the last six months.
Speaker 1:You know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission.
Speaker 4:Pot of gold.
Speaker 1:Pot of gold. Anyway, there's some other there's some other
Speaker 2:news Power bottom dad says time will tell but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20,000,000,000 hole and likely Uber as well. Very dramatic. I'm not I'm not I think power powder power bottom dad is a very strong poster. Yep. And, you know, the the comp competitive dynamic is really heating up.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now, it's sounds like it's 10 ish cars in a very, very small area. But but again, they they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just gonna come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes. Yep.
Speaker 2:George Hotts last week was saying that, know, Waymo has is our tele operated. He said, you know, I I haven't fact checked this. Thankfully, we're not journalists. We don't have to fact check. But he said something like 1.7 people per car Or 1.2
Speaker 5:or something.
Speaker 2:You know, sort of, you know, overseeing This is
Speaker 1:more than a taxicab. Because a taxicab
Speaker 2:only has one. Yeah. So the the real question will be what you know, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, know, how how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.
Speaker 1:I think the real question is what corporate card should you use?
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, real payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. No.
Speaker 1:It's a good point. And I don't know about Waymo and Google. I think I lean with PBD here saying that they have a lot of explaining to do, Waymo, Google, and Uber. It's hard to imagine how you can compete if your product's 10 times the price. Or if you like, the Uber has the the bull case for Uber is that they have the customers.
Speaker 1:Right? And that everyone has the Uber app installed. But if the only way to hail a cyber cab or a Tesla Robotaxi is through the Tesla app, how hard is it gonna be to get people to install that app? I think it's gonna be very easy because the brand awareness is huge. It's not like Zooks where it's some, you know, you gotta be an insider to know that they're doing tests and that the other major player in the space or whatever.
Speaker 2:The virality the virality of seeing Tesla's driving around with no
Speaker 1:driver. That guy's
Speaker 2:in the
Speaker 1:Tesla army. Like, he's doing the promotion for free and and getting a ton of
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ton of impressions. When it when it comes to Uber, you have to remember that Dara CEO was formerly the CEO of Expedia, which was a booking website. Yes. So They didn't know if Uber can figure it out, it's like, hey, we're just routing Yes.
Speaker 2:Demand and we're taking a cut Yes. But we're integrating with multiple different autonomous vehicle providers.
Speaker 1:That actually would be the bull case.
Speaker 2:Yes. But the question is, does Tesla just say
Speaker 1:Can that happen?
Speaker 2:We got this. We're not gonna give up. We're gonna let
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess I'll I'll I'll question depends on, like, the timeline. Because if the robotaxi so we don't know how much work they did. These might be somewhat teleoperated. They might have they have a safety driver literally in the car, right? Although it's interesting because the safety driver did you see the safety driver?
Speaker 1:Did they have a pedal? Because if they don't have a brake, what is the safety driver doing? Like, is the safety driver going to reach over or push a button on the screen? Kind of unclear. But the question is, if the robotaxi can't generalize to odd conditions, then you wind up in a situation where if you have the Tesla Robotaxi app and it doesn't work in the snow, or it doesn't work in the rain, or it doesn't work if you need to get to the beach, or you don't or we won't go into the mountains, Well, then all of a sudden, you actually do want something like the beauty of Expedia is that it can book me a Southwest flight to from Burbank to SFO, but then it can also book me a
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, Dubai Airlines, first first class Emirates Air all the way across the world. And so if there is a world where where I want a variety of products
Speaker 2:benefiting from variety and and not actual frequency of booking. If you're booking a Tesla Cyber Cab multiple times a week Yep. And you can save by going directly to the app Yep. You're just gonna do that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Overall, I thought that Robotaxi did incredible job under pressure. Probably, it's the first sort of live show that it's been a part of.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so the fact that it stayed composed Yep. That it didn't, you know, make any erratic Yeah. Turns or anything like that, I'm I'm pretty impressed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It it it's very exciting. But, you know, you don't always wanna be in a self driving car that costs $38,000. Sometimes you want to be a Ferrari driving Harvard Med graduate AI angel investor.
Speaker 1:We saw this photo on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:Loved this. Seems like pure bait for VC congratulating themselves for VC brags. AI Angel Harvard Medical School. Is that Aroma?
Speaker 2:I think so. Would've would've hit harder if
Speaker 1:it was an s b three, you know? Like, yeah. Okay. You're an AI angel investor, but
Speaker 2:With a with base Ferrari.
Speaker 1:Seed investor in scale. But clearly has done well and enjoys the
Speaker 2:Ben is saying it's an s f 90.
Speaker 1:That's that's not an s f 90. No way.
Speaker 2:I think it's aroma.
Speaker 1:I think it's aroma.
Speaker 2:I think you're wrong.
Speaker 6:Big debate.
Speaker 1:Let us know in the comments. And, you know you know what's missing from this picture? A luxury watch. This person's gotta get on
Speaker 4:I'm sure they
Speaker 2:have a head around. They might even have a racing machine on the wrist.
Speaker 1:They might. They might. Go to getbezel.com. Shop over 25,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Trump, this is the news of the day with the Iran crisis.
Speaker 1:Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking to everybody
Speaker 2:in the market. Everybody's saying everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous. Yeah. But it's never been tried.
Speaker 1:People always say, oh, all that matters in in oil price is supply and demand.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Well, all
Speaker 1:you gotta do is say, hey, supply. Go down. Hey. Supply
Speaker 2:go And
Speaker 1:demand go down. Yeah. And we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that. That has been
Speaker 2:tried before. It's it's worth it's worth trying something.
Speaker 1:If you do signal I mean, there there there are there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were gonna be high, and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like, that does happen every once in while. But, yeah, very, very odd to post anyway. Back on watches, the watches of espionage account says, men who guide the destinies of the world will wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razeen Cain, in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT.
Speaker 1:Well, you need a GMT because you gotta know what time it is in Iran. Start doing these This
Speaker 2:a good is a good strong.
Speaker 1:Haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the the brake cracking your knuckles. But this is this is special. It's like four points
Speaker 2:in the air.
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you gotta point to all of them.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. Interesting. Well, it's been an eventful morning. Yep.
Speaker 2:Iran attacked a US base in Qatar.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's the latest.
Speaker 2:And, people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. Mhmm. All of apparently, the missiles were taken out in the air. Yep. And this could lead to a de escalation
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And a return to a steady state of tension.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This has been my position for a long time. I'm I'm pretty anti aggression, anti war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I wanna be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves. No matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land.
Speaker 1:Do whatever you can. But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Druva has breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU 57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive, AFX seven fifty seven, is difficult to produce, and we don't have many factories to do it.
Speaker 1:It's why way more robots are necessary, to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Wiesenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing the of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by we didn't actually Russian
Speaker 2:president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke.
Speaker 1:That would be bad.
Speaker 2:Which would be bad.
Speaker 1:That would be bad.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's interesting, the, Fordo nuclear facility destroyed but before July polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4,000,000 in volume. I think people are basically saying calling that it wasn't actually destroyed or at least that's what what the market is saying. So it was impacted but not destroyed even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, the the crown prince of the opposition party gave a speech in Paris earlier. We talked to Sherwin Pishvara about it earlier. You'll hear that you'll hear that interview at 02:30 today. And he launched a website to help recruit defectors.
Speaker 1:If you're designing a website, you got to get on Figma.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com. Combat Learjet says, my buddy was a b two pilot. He flew one of those extremely long missions several years ago.
Speaker 1:The mission was two pilots, thirty six point three hours of flight time, Missouri to Iraq and back to Missouri. The mission required five air refuelings, taking on over 500,000 or 500 k kilograms, maybe, 500 kilograms of gas total. These pilots are legends. Yeah. That's insane.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. Pounds. Five hundred five hundred pounds. I don't know. Anyway, what what would it be?
Speaker 1:It's the thirty six hour grind. I never wanna hear you complain about, you know, sitting at your desk for ten hours or coming on the weekend. What have I ever complained? Or some Excel, the investment specifically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I work so long. No. Thirty six hours? Get it done.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Really wild.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Jacob Hellberg was celebrating this. Very excited. He has been confirmed, by the way. And he says and he's already shifting the conversation, I think, in a good direction. He says, not a single Chinese humanoid robot should be sold on US soil.
Speaker 1:US government should preemptively ban Chinese humanoids in The US without delay, in all caps. And Jason Kalkanis says, the fact that you need to tweet this is crazy.
Speaker 2:You He realized this was posted a year ago?
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a woah. And he just reposted it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or he edited it or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he was
Speaker 1:Oh, he's way ahead of you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But now he's part of the admin. Now he can tweet it. Actually, make some of this stuff happen.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to to see him. Yeah. We talked about this. Why Yep. Why are we, you know, let's not allow what happened with DJI to happen again with a new robotic form factor.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anyway, there was some news that maybe the Johnny Ive OpenAI deal might not happen because OpenAI apparently scrubbed everything about Johnny Ive and Sam Altman off the website and YouTube. It's just completely gone. YouTube video private, blog post removed. Everything is gone.
Speaker 1:I confirmed that. You get a four zero four when you go to the original web page. Mark Gurman. So everyone thought the deal was falling apart. Maybe Johnny Ive was getting poached by Zuck over at Meta.
Speaker 1:That would be dramatic. Mark Gurman has the story. He says, the Johnny Ive and OpenAI deal is on track and has not dissolved or anything of the sort I'm told. Here's what happened. They were sued over the name IO, and there was a restraining order issued by the judge.
Speaker 1:They had to pull all materials with the name. That's interesting. Also interesting that they didn't we knew that the name of the company was IO before this acquisition. Right?
Speaker 2:No. It was Love From, and they had an internal project called IO.
Speaker 1:But that was not combined I thought that I thought that was I thought I I thought I thought that we knew that the new project was called IO, like like, six months or a year ago.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they're suing now. This happens a lot. There's there's kind of multiple sides. We'll hear both of them. Nick, who I believe is more in the Elon camp, is is saying that, you know, it's the beginning of the end for Sam Altman and Johnny Ives project.
Speaker 1:He says a federal judge has banned OpenAI to use the word IO to brand for their upcoming AI hardware device device. Little rough language there. The ruling caps a fierce trademark battle sparked by Silicon Valley startup IYO, similar but slightly different name, which spent the past six years developing its voice controlled AI wearable, the IO One. Court filings revealed an eyebrow raising series of events.
Speaker 2:So this is from IO's IO's point of point of view.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'd say from 2018 to 2024, IO publicly showcased its ear worn device investing heavily to carve out its niche between 2022 and 2025. Altman's Apollo projects and Ives Love From team participated in extensive pitch meetings, factory tours, and hands on testing of IO's product. On 03/05/2025, Altman declined investment in IO disclosing he was working on something competitive, which ended up being called IO, I dot I o Yeah. Not I y o. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Said when OpenAI revealed a 6 and a half billion dollar venture named IO in May of twenty twenty five, IO's fundraising immediately stalled as Sam Altman influenced investors to stop investing in the small start up. Obviously, these are all allegations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's interesting here is, like, Sam invested in Humane, and that project didn't really get to fruition. And so there's this question of, like like, it's possible that he was like, okay. Idea is good, but team maybe can't deliver at scale or can't deliver Yeah. As an independent venture.
Speaker 1:And so for that reason, I'm out, and that's kind of clear. You also kind of know if you're pitching an investor that's actively running a huge company that you like, you can go pitch Mark Zuckerberg to be an angel investor. But if you're pitching him, like, Instagram two point o, you kind of know Yep. Okay. I'm I'm So the
Speaker 2:the thing that's clear
Speaker 1:here Fox and the Henn House.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The thing that's clear here is that it's it's very possible that the company IYO has great grounds around the trademark. Yes. They've been operating for a while, and it is confusing. Right?
Speaker 2:Even when we're seeing
Speaker 1:it outside Yes. Also, IO, not it's not such a good name that like they have to stick with it. I would just change that name immediately.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I never never thought the name was And
Speaker 1:I would rather just have it called like the chat GPT phone or something, you know, or the or the open AI phone or something. Like, there there are other they probably couldn't get away with that because it sounds too much like iPhone. But there there are there are other brand names that they could spin off of to create a device that's the the the OpenAI device, and they don't necessarily need to use that IO keyword. And so backing off of that seems fine. There's also this trend of, like, when big dollars are changing hands, like 6,000,000,000 in this case, oftentimes, there are folks that come out and file lawsuits just because, like, there's a whole bunch of money changing hands.
Speaker 1:Everyone wants it to change hands quickly. And so if you can show up and say, hey. I'm just I I I'm owed a $100,000,000. A lot of people just settle to make it go away. This happened to Palmer Luckey during the Meta acquisition or the Facebook acquisition of Oculus.
Speaker 1:There was a guy who came out and said, I invented VR. I have a patent. You have to pay me. Palmer went all the way to court, bought it, and won, but it was still it was still framed in the press for a long time as, like, Palmer Lucky stole the idea for virtual reality, which, of course, is one of those things where it's like, okay. Like, the idea of virtual reality has been around for, like, decades, if not, like, a hundred years.
Speaker 1:Yep. Palmer used he stood on the shoulders of giants, used some patents and some technology and licensed some of that stuff. And so you might have a claim. There might be some sort of settlement. There might be all sorts of different things.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, like Yeah. Like, it didn't there was no evidence that Palmer was, like, literally cheating off his homework, like, looking over there being, like, let me just take
Speaker 2:to general idea for virtual reality had been something that had been
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Written about both in venture Yeah. And in sci fi for decades.
Speaker 1:And it's the same thing here. Like like
Speaker 2:Yeah. So here's here's what
Speaker 1:I iGo device looks really cool. It's this headphone. But again, it's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what's interesting here is it's it's a potentially new type of product that could ultimately be similar to what OpenAI develops with Johnny Ive and LoveFrom. Sure. So the device IO, IYO is a product designed to be an ear worn device. The the device uses 16 beam forming microphones to create a quote unquote audio display or an immersive audio environment for both speaking and listening. The io one achieves this through the use of natural language.
Speaker 2:The user does not have to learn, know or memorize special commands, words or gestures to cause the device to do what is asked of it. Instead, all the user needs to do is speak to the device naturally as though the user were conversing with a person.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. I mean, like, this feels like souped up AirPods in some ways or completely disruptive. And it ultimately depends on the how how great the software is, how great the interaction pattern is, the branding, the design, the go to market. It's not I don't think that they own the idea of, like, put a thing near your ear and play sounds. Like, that's not the the like, if if OpenAI comes out with something that competes with this, I think we would more likely comp it to AirPods and ask, what is Apple doing to respond?
Speaker 1:How are the AirPods going to be a competitor in this category? I mean, it's the same thing with the with Meta the the Meta Quest and the Apple Vision Pro. These are somewhat similar devices, screens on your face. They have slightly different design choices, but they're both in the same category. I wouldn't I wouldn't say, oh, like, Zuck should 100% sue Apple for launching the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, that is not they don't own the idea of screen on your face. And I would say that Apple doesn't necessarily own the idea of audio in your ears, and and Johnny Ive doesn't necessarily own that idea either. So it's gonna be much more nitty gritty question.
Speaker 2:Be more quick to come to the defense of IYO if you knew they were funded by both Big Tech and Big Defense Tech. Tell me. Lockheed Martin and Alphabet are both are both in the company. They've raised over $20,000,000 in venture funding to date. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it could definitely Yeah. It could definitely be a valuable product, but I think the game will be won in the execution Totally. Of the of the software and the hardware, not strictly the idea of, like, of, like, voice first computing in your ear. That's not enough Yeah.
Speaker 1:To win. Just like Yeah.
Speaker 2:In many ways, the AirPods have already done some rudimentary
Speaker 1:version of this
Speaker 4:for
Speaker 4:a
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It'll talk
Speaker 1:to you a little bit. It's like, they're not actually
Speaker 2:Or you can call your executive assistant and say, hey, can you
Speaker 4:book this up
Speaker 1:for me?
Speaker 2:Hey, can you call this person? Hey, can you schedule this? Hey, can you book me a flight? Yes. In many ways, they're just trying to recreate a great EA.
Speaker 1:Yes. Well, whatever IAYO is building, they gotta get on Vanta. They gotta automate compliance. They got to manage risk, and they got to prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the 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:But, yeah, I mean, these lawsuits are always are always interesting. Could wind up being a big settlement. I mean, if they can even get $40,000,000 from the $6,500,000,000 in a settlement, that's a series b for them. They get to keep going, keep building. That's a that's probably a good outcome for them.
Speaker 1:Maybe they can
Speaker 8:get things changed the name
Speaker 1:is crazy.
Speaker 2:The most attention Yeah. You know, if they spin this and say, hey, the OpenAI team spent years Yep. Ordering our products Yep. Meeting Yeah. Meeting with fitting specialists, doing all this stuff.
Speaker 2:Because it's so great, maybe they'll get some
Speaker 1:more news out And you know the best thing for everyone in this scenario?
Speaker 2:What's that, John?
Speaker 1:We're gonna get some emails in discovery that are gonna go on big tech history emails, the the the x account. And you know we're gonna find some funny I'm sure we back and forth between Johnny Ive and Samoa.
Speaker 2:Speaking of speaking of of lawsuits and and emails and Discovery, Elon's lawyers are apparently claiming that he doesn't have a computer as part of the lawsuit between OpenAI
Speaker 1:Who doesn't have a computer?
Speaker 2:Elon. Elon doesn't use a computer.
Speaker 1:He doesn't even have a work computer. You posted this
Speaker 2:earlier today. Found this out because I I posted
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I posted earlier. If your CEO has a quote unquote work computer and a personal computer, it's time to start polishing your resume. And so, somebody responded to that with notes to Wait. Basically claims that
Speaker 1:How does Elon play Diablo?
Speaker 2:Well, he probably has a gaming rig.
Speaker 1:A gay oh, it's a rig. It's not a it's not a computer.
Speaker 2:No. But the the verge posted this
Speaker 1:Your honor, my client doesn't have a computer.
Speaker 2:He has a rig.
Speaker 1:He has a gaming rig.
Speaker 2:Oh, you want access to his rig? Yeah. Where he plays games on? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You want you wanna see if he's really No. They're people that
Speaker 1:would actually definitely want that for sure.
Speaker 2:The setup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I don't know. May may maybe the second greatest Diablo player of all time will will subpoena that information. Like, want actual data. How many hours did he log?
Speaker 1:I need to know the real account information.
Speaker 2:So Wired is reporting this morning Yep. That the claim appeared in a court filing related to Elon Musk's ongoing lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. He said that that lawsuit also flags that he has posted about his laptop numerous times in the last year. People are trying to put him in the truth zone.
Speaker 1:That is crazy. So he doesn't have a computer. He doesn't he doesn't have any apps installed on the computer. He doesn't have linear installed on his computer?
Speaker 2:I'm sure his team does.
Speaker 1:His team must. Because how do how would they get anything done without a purpose built tool for planning and building products? Like, they need a
Speaker 2:system for modern software How
Speaker 1:how else would they streamline the issues, projects, and product road maps?
Speaker 2:How else would they would they run such a big service with so few people on their team?
Speaker 1:It would it would make no sense.
Speaker 2:Unless everyone is just Okay. Significantly I
Speaker 1:I I think we're gonna find the computer. And when we find Elon Musk's computer, we're gonna find
Speaker 2:There's gonna be one app One there. It's linear.
Speaker 1:For
Speaker 2:sure. That's right. Linear.app. Anyway An anonymous little birdie told me that, he does have a massive a gaming PC with an ultra massive screen and indeed does not have a work computer. Pretty based.
Speaker 1:Okay. Anyway, Wealthfront is filing to go public. Very exciting. We've heard about this fintech platform before. They
Speaker 2:Seems like the window's open, John.
Speaker 1:The window is wide open if you're a series d company, series c company, series b company, maybe Cluelly gets out. Who knows? I could see Cluelly getting out Chamath. It's possible. Anything's possible when the window's open.
Speaker 1:So go for it. If you're a founder, our advice to you, just go public. Just take your company public and then go on a generational run compounding it 40% a year stock price for
Speaker 2:For decades?
Speaker 1:Yeah. A couple decades.
Speaker 2:It's all it takes.
Speaker 1:And then you'll be in the in the mag seven.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In many ways, you go public earlier, those initial
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Years can be easier because it's such a small base.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone says, like, the SEC requirements are so difficult. You could be shorts. You should be short sellers could attack you. It's like, that's just inspiration.
Speaker 2:Attack them back. Harder. With, you know, putting up incredible quarter over quarter results.
Speaker 1:Blow them out. Blow out the shorts.
Speaker 2:Speaking of the public markets, Anthony Pompliano
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Posted this morning. Today, I'm announcing a $1,000,000,000 merger to create ProCap Financial, a Bitcoin native financial services firm. The company will be a publicly traded entity on Nasdaq at the conclusion of the proposed business combination between my private company ProCap, BTC LLC, and Columbus Circle Capital Corp Corp one, a publicly traded SPAC. The ticker for the publicly traded entity right now is CCCM. And he has raised over $750,000,000.
Speaker 2:They will focus on acquiring Bitcoin for their balance sheet while also developing products and services to produce revenue and profit from Bitcoin on our balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Give it up. Some people would say that should be the first goal, but it's the
Speaker 2:third revenue and profit, everybody.
Speaker 1:We love it.
Speaker 2:Love to see it.
Speaker 1:Try to be the Warren Buffet of Bitcoin. Buy companies, invest in Bitcoin, file funnel the Bitcoin back into buying more companies, produce more Bitcoin, the flywheel continues.
Speaker 2:That's That's
Speaker 1:the goal. Well, whatever company buys, gotta put them on numeralnumeralhq.com, sales tax and autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Should we do some of the some of the downstream fallout from Cluely? I don't even know if
Speaker 2:it's fall last this post from Will Brown first. Oh, yeah. Zuck hired Alex Wang for a half to 1% equity. He's basically a founding engineer. Thought that was good.
Speaker 2:When when the when the 15,000,000,000 number was being thrown around just just a week ago Yeah. Everybody was freaking out. But it's basic it's barely a point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We I mean, we identified that. It's like
Speaker 2:Threw him a point.
Speaker 1:It's like, what would what would it take for Alex Wong to move Moneta's market cap 1%? Well, like, I don't know, a great Llama five release, that would probably do it. Right? Like, there's there's a ton of things. There's a lot of opportunity if you're just talking about that's being the stakes.
Speaker 1:It's not that he has to overnight double the company in size. He just has to he just has to, you know, implement a rational and effective AI strategy. Ben Thompson was talking about this earlier today.
Speaker 2:For a multi trillion dollar opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's so many places where AI products can have an impact. Ben Thompson was talking about this this idea that the researchers are really important, but what Zuck has been on a tear about is hiring actually great managers.
Speaker 1:When you look at Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, Alexander Wong, like, these guys are everyone the criticism, like, they're not researchers, but that's actually probably the benefit of the strategy because we are in the application war right now. We are in the implementation of these AI tools, and the capabilities of the models are clearly way, way ahead of the actual foundation models, like the actual science that's happened. I was thinking about this just like for Instagram during the Dolly moment. I was like, I wonder what would happen if you just took every single person's on Instagram, their most recent photo, and giblied it, studio giblied it, and just sent them to it. Send it to them proactively.
Speaker 1:It would cost a ton of money to do this in the inference, but you do that. You send it to everyone, and you just say like, would you like to post this? I bet you have like the biggest day on Instagram like ever. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because you're just creating all this like viral fuel for the day. Or what does it take to distill that model down, bake it into just a filter? So when you upload a photo, can just select the Studio Ghibli thing and it runs efficiently. And that's almost that's not really a research task. It's more of like product management.
Speaker 1:And I'm not even like a product manager at Instagram. Right? Good luck for product managers. But like those types of like the volition that it'll take and the will and the incentive alignment that it'll take to actually roll product like that and really push the team to be like, no. We wanna spend all this money rendering these Ghibli's because we think this is a calculated risk that will put us back in the AI image conversation.
Speaker 1:Or we want to, you know, spend all this money to distill down images, image generation, diffusion to a point where it can just be a filter button on the Instagram app. Like, those are product management. Those are cost. Like, it's almost like more of a CFO question than a research question at this point. Like, we know that the Ghibli filter is doable, and it's great.
Speaker 1:And so how do you actually get it out into the world effectively? And that's more of a manager discussion. So he's basically a founding engineer, but I think he's going into more of like a C suite role. So we'll keep tracking it. Anyway, should we keep should we keep going into the AI application layer with the rapper of all rappers, Cluely?
Speaker 2:The final rapper. The final boss of rappers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should we should get Tyler's take on this because the the question that I think people are digging into is that, clearly, it's like, the easy the easy take was like, oh, it's this is like Theranos. And it's like, I don't think it's like Theranos at all. Like, the product works. Like, you you tried it, and you would agree that it is a real product.
Speaker 5:Yes. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 5:It's it does what it advertises.
Speaker 1:It does what it advertises. Now there are some questions about, like, the actual long term value there, or I I think the risk, the the the the the bear case for Clueling
Speaker 2:is The real the the risk is that the risk is that the opportunity does not align with the the the marketing strategy. Yes. So, like, the opportunity for helping students with their homework and the sort of like traditional nature of cheating
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Aligns with the marketing strategy. I think they can dominate there. Yep. The enterprise opportunity of let me intake all the information from every call that you have internally, every sales call that you have, every,
Speaker 1:you know That's a very competitive space.
Speaker 2:That's a very competitive space that the labs will probably wanna own because it's very valuable data. Yep. Right? You can imagine OpenAI having a desktop application that's permanently running in desktop.
Speaker 1:They already do. They already have a yeah. But they haven't
Speaker 2:they haven't adopted that the same degree.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, the the the risk is, like, is, the pattern really works and people are like, this is what we want, we always want the screen capture and constant responses from LLMs. Like, if it's a really big opportunity, you're gonna face competition from the really big labs. Yeah. If it's a smaller opportunity, it's hard to kind of scale up. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of And the
Speaker 2:more the the other pushback was high level, you know, why are we funding these types of businesses that are loud and and not, you know, truly sort of bending the world in any type of positive direction. And it has the the cheating angle, which some people I think that was very intentional.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think was The
Speaker 2:pushback I would have there is like, it seems like it seems like there is enough venture capital right now. Mhmm. Like, if you have a great idea in hard tech, defense tech, manufacturing, etcetera. Yeah. You will be funded.
Speaker 2:Yep. And it's, you know, it's it's not like some great, you know, manufacturing American dynamism business is not getting Yep. $15,000,000 this week because Cluelly got 15 last week.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so it's not zero sum. Yeah. We had some good reactions. Kevin, aka Plant Daddy
Speaker 1:Plant Daddy.
Speaker 2:Was quoting segment from our interview and said, Roy was basically saying like there's not enough viral content, which is actually an interesting take, his take at a high level is like if you make something like great, novel, engaging, it just will naturally go viral because there's actually a a scarcity of Mhmm. Of like viral content. I think it's an interesting I think it's an interesting point and I think that he's probably right to some degree. Kevin fired back at a high level and said, this is not correct. While it is true that when oh, and sorry.
Speaker 2:The last thing Mhmm. Roy was basically saying that consumption has just shifted so dramatically to TikTok, which is a new form factor, and so that's changed the dynamics. Kevin is an active creator, I believe, on YouTube, and I'm sure he's everywhere. So he was just firing back. He says, this is not correct.
Speaker 2:While it is true that when TikTok blew up in 2020, there was a brief moment where there wasn't enough short form content to satisfy consumption. That lasted twelve to eighteen months. I remember it well because I was one of the first gardening accounts on TikTok in 2019. It was free back then, literally any video popped off. Then millions of new creators came onto the scene coupled with 10x reduced friction in creating content due to TikTok's native editor filter and CapCut, you saw an explosion of short form videos.
Speaker 2:So both the number of creators and number of videos dramatically increased. Consumption just increased even more because the videos were all five to fifteen seconds long. So one scrolling session equals a 100 videos instead of 50 to 70% of one YouTube video. It's not true that the next six to twelve month, anything that you post has a potential to go viral will go viral. That's only true when there's a paradigm shift and all platforms have to catch up.
Speaker 2:The phase where IG meta released reels and YouTube released shorts to catch up to TikTok was truly a free attention grab era and thousands of creators made a fat bag during that era. From 2020 to 2022, I grew Epic Gardening from 300,000 to something like 8,000,000 across all platforms be it was that free. That time isn't today though. He says, I think what you're seeing right now with Cluely is someone applying a mister b style hyper scale influencer content model into something that VCs will salivate over b to c AI. Whether anything comes of it is another story, but it is somewhat comical to see the tech VC space go crazy for the viral attention grabbing when the type of attention they're grabbing as well as the scale of it is dwarfed by almost any top 1% creator of which there are thousands of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Christian Kyle was pointing out that clearly is getting millions of views on x, but only a few thousand views on YouTube. And so it's very, very platform specific. And and yeah. But it's it it he Roy is really fantastic at applying that the the viral playbook that works for x on x.
Speaker 1:And it's been it's been very successful. I think they're successful on other platforms too. But it is interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting. Slow Ventures Yeah. Created a fund. Megan Lightcap over there runs We've had her on the show, I believe.
Speaker 1:Right? Don't say much. Don't know
Speaker 2:have Megan on, but we should. Basically saying, hey, there's all these creators that are getting a massive amount of attention. They Yeah. They if they have capital, they can monetize it. So some people are paying attention to this.
Speaker 1:It's still like, I've been surprised by how much the cheating buzzword has been really controversial. It seemed very clear to me that that was deliberately edgy and just kind of an edgelord statement, and that it was pretty clear that the tool was very much just like embracing the new norm of copilots happening everywhere, and that cheating was deliberately used as a as a word to kind of spark controversy. But it but it it really is it really is acting as baggage on Roy. And so Sarah Guo, over conviction, said, we should celebrate hacking, not cheating. Cheating quietly pockets extra monopoly money, insider trading, plagiarism, inflated metrics.
Speaker 1:Happening hap hacking openly flips the game board, exposing rigged rules and inventing a better game for everyone. Wikipedia replaced Britannica. Airbnb monetized spare rooms. Linux openly challenged Windows. Both break the rules, but hacking doesn't compromise integrity.
Speaker 1:It reveals the old game wasn't worth playing. Yeah. It's interesting because, like, he could have totally reframed the Cluelly launches as hack everything, hack dating, hack your your, you know, your online interviews or whatever.
Speaker 2:And it probably would have Where the other position is like
Speaker 1:much less viral, but much less controversial. Yeah. But it's
Speaker 2:The other thing is like give yourself superpowers in any of these domains. Totally. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the copilot thing is like the friendliest framing of all of this. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like Yeah. It's just
Speaker 1:like something to help you out.
Speaker 2:Auto complete saying auto complete for everything is not nearly as viral.
Speaker 1:And many people have said that over the last year.
Speaker 2:And I think that's what Roy is battling with is he, I think generally has good intentions, right? He has his own intentions around. He clearly is excited about being famous. Yeah. In many ways, he already is a niche tech celebrity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Over a 100 k followers.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, he does want the respect of insiders.
Speaker 1:I think
Speaker 2:you can tell that from from some of his comments over the weekend and and replies. So, anyways, he's young. He's gonna figure it out.
Speaker 1:Well, if he's gonna try and sell this into enterprise at some point, he's gotta get an Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Yeah. I know. Continue the conversation saying, one thing Cluely got really right is hiring only marketing people who have already built large followings on their own.
Speaker 1:Any marketing person that isn't bringing you an audience is just being subsidized by yours. I thought this was a good take. I I don't know how it it it's tricky because many people who have built large followings have their own businesses, but Roy's clearly created some sort of, like, great relationship with them such that they can come in and earn a paycheck and at some point get paid very highly. Kind of unclear how much is cash and stock, but it's enough to get people to step back from TikTok account that's 100,000 followers or something like that. But that type of person understands the algorithm and actually can do marketing more effectively.
Speaker 1:And so I think there is an interesting lesson there in that the new marketing like, we transitioned from from resumes to GitHub profiles for hiring programmers. We've seen this with folks that the interns we focused that that we've hired where someone will come in and say, I built this this weekend. Here's an example of what I can build, or here's an example of something I built in the past, an open source project. And the equivalent in the marketing world now is building some sort of following and actually understanding content creation at some level. And so it's, yeah, it's very bullish.
Speaker 1:Maybe maybe marketing departments should be doing more proactive outreach to folks that are building large followings but not quite monetizing them just yet and saying, hey. You clearly understand Instagram, TikTok, whatever you're doing, you should come inside the organization and work here in our marketing team, which I think can make sense. Dylan Field had some alternative framing of the Cluely story. He said, Cluely isn't just good marketing. Roy hacked the algo feed with an antifragile memetic virus.
Speaker 1:And the more energy you throw at it, the stronger it gets. Well, here we are throwing more energy at the memetic virus, baby. That's what it's all about. We can move on from Clueline a little bit. Teddy Blank says, royally disturbs people because by any measure, he should be a successful crypto slash forex influencer, core sales hustler.
Speaker 1:But instead, he chose b two b SaaS, and it feels unnatural. Funny that he's saying b two b SaaS because the previous the previous post by Plant Daddy said b two c SaaS. And so Roy even knows.
Speaker 2:They're doing They're doing both,
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah. They'll sell to willing buyers at market prices. Also interesting in the open source world, Ian has the story. While clearly spent that $15,000,000 on marketing videos, this random guy on Reddit built an open source, the exact same project.
Speaker 1:Always interesting to see when these open source projects break through because I remember there was a competitor to Devon, OpenDevon, that was open sourced, and everyone was like, Devon's cooked. But we saw the the data, and it seems like Devon's producing tons and tons of GitHub pull requests and has a very different go to market motion. And that for a lot of enterprises that are doing replatforming of their dot net application to Python, they might not wanna use an open source product. They might wanna have a team there that's actively improving the project on a daily basis. And so the open source did not kill Devon in that case.
Speaker 1:In fact, their more significant competition comes from OpenAI Yeah. And another large enterprise scaled, you know, dollars 100,000,000,000 company, not just some random developer. On the flip side, we saw DeepSeek and Manus come out with open source projects. Manus? But but not quite these, like, you know, I just open sourced it and made it free.
Speaker 1:Like, DeepSeek and Manus, nobody would call those, like, true side projects. So it's unclear how much this will affect. At the same time, if you are hesitant about sending screen recordings to Clueli, maybe open source is the one that you actually wanna run. You wanna run this locally because of a privacy issue. But it will be interesting to see whether or not this is a factor in Cluely's rollout.
Speaker 1:Yep. I would be surprised if this is if this is something that makes a difference to them. I would imagine it's much more about
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're clearly marketing to people that don't know how to run
Speaker 1:Totally. Software. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The thing that was interesting, Gary Tan shared, are people building brands ahead of the tech just to try to hold space right at the moment that the just right models hit? Somebody named Ethan Ding was highlighting that, he was comparing Cluely and Icon, both of which have been very controversial. Ethan said, I'm surprised no one's connected Roy Lee's playbook to the icon ad maker playbook a couple months back. Have an unusable product. Dominate mindshare for potential buyers.
Speaker 2:Buy time for the AI to catch up to bail you out. I don't I don't, you know, Roy Lee's product is not unusable. We used it on the show Friday. Yep. It worked for the use case that that they advertised the most.
Speaker 2:Yep. They clearly are dominating mindshare. The the question is, will AI catching up actually actually enable them to win in the enterprise or these categories. The issue is that the two categories that Cluely is going after being effectively like b to c, so like Yep. Students, and b to b enterprise Yep.
Speaker 2:Are two categories that ChatGPT is already dominant in. Yep. And so the the the question again is is, are they gonna be able to win head to head, with OpenAI even if OpenAI doesn't have as many viral, TikToks being produced in house. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. He calls out the risk of churn here. I think that's very real. I think the bigger question is, Cluli and very much is wrapper, but at the same time, it's not trying to compete on the foundation model level. And so if the models get better, Cluly should get better.
Speaker 1:And so you are you are very much riding the rocket or riding the the wave of technological improvement, which seems like a good strategy. I guess it just keeps coming down to the question of if this is truly the UI paradigm that people want to interact with ChatGPT through, you would expect the ChatGPT app to launch this. But, you know, who knows? Maybe it gets popular, and maybe there's other pockets of of opportunity that come through. And and there's a bunch of
Speaker 2:In other news Yeah. Mark Gurman was reporting over the weekend. He said Apple will need to leave its m and a comfort zone to succeed in AI. Basically, calling out that Apple has held various early conversations with different companies like Perplexity and Thinking Machines around potential acquisition. People were pressing him saying, why Perplexity?
Speaker 2:Mark responded, which looks like it's an output from ChatGPT. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's not. It's not.
Speaker 2:From PC. He already wrote this. It's got so many em dashes. Look how many em dashes it has though, John.
Speaker 1:Wait. No. No. I think I actually maybe this is from I don't know. I'm confused.
Speaker 1:I can't tell anymore. Yeah. This might be from ChatGPT. I thought this
Speaker 2:is from So he says a proven consumer ready product. It fills a clear need, a decently sized team, and a reasonable valuation at around 14,000,000,000 perplexity wouldn't break the bank. Yeah. The timing too is interesting. Apple's long running search deal with Google is under threat from a US antitrust suit.
Speaker 2:This iPhone maker has to prepare for a post Google search world Mhmm. And acquiring Perplexity would allow it to finally launch its own Apple branded search engine.
Speaker 1:My question about Perplexity going to Apple is what is Perplexity building on top of that wouldn't be an issue in an Apple acquisition? Because I don't think that they trained a foundation model themselves, and I don't think they necessarily wrote a massive web scraper. So I feel like they might be sitting on top of a few APIs that might be renegotiated if all of a sudden Apple's the buyer on the other side. So Google Search or Bing I think Bing also had for a long time an API where you could search the web using Bing and resell that as a product. But if Apple's the buyer, it's gonna be a different conversation with Microsoft.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:So So they use a number of different they have their sonar family of models. Those are Perplexity's in house models.
Speaker 1:Probably find out
Speaker 2:R one seventeen seventy six, which was a deep seek. Then they have a bunch of different third party models that they use OpenAI, Anthropic, So they're they're they're routing to a bunch of different, but they say the default model is optimized for speed and web browsing delivering fast relevant answers. Yeah. Complexity has been solid. I I I I use it once a day.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I
Speaker 1:Oh, you do?
Speaker 2:I I I at least once a day. I don't think I don't know if I'd use it if I wasn't running the show, but I get value from it day to day.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I'm not sure if it'll happen. I mean, it certainly makes sense. I posted over the over the weekend that Siri was an acquisition. And so even though Apple has this culture of let's never let's never acquire anything or let's never let's build everything in house.
Speaker 1:Everything needs the Apple polish. They do have a lineage of acquisition, although Siri was a much smaller acquisition, much earlier
Speaker 2:200,000,000.
Speaker 5:Stage.
Speaker 1:200,000,000. And and I think Siri had been around for, like, a couple years. Kinda similar. And if you think about what a I mean, it's
Speaker 2:With inflation. 100 times 200,000,000 in 2010.
Speaker 1:It's a 100 times as expensive. It is it is a big big deal but still it's, you know, it could it could happen.
Speaker 2:Well, in more important news, the All In podcast. All In podcast released their new tequila brand over this weekend in LA. There was quite a lot of pushback but I thought the bottle was quite unique. Yep. And I would be down to
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:a stack of
Speaker 1:choker chips. Would able to sample it as well. Also, people were saying, oh, this is so out of character. But Elon Musk has Tesla tequila, and Donald Trump has Trump tequila apparently. And so liquor brands.
Speaker 1:I guess Trump has a liquor brand. And so this is this is a proven proven strategy. Anyway, we have our first guest of the show, our second guest technically since we already have that call in, the CEO of Klarna. Welcome to the stream. How are you?
Speaker 2:What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me. I was just realized the light in here is very, very odd, but I hope this is fun.
Speaker 1:I think you look great.
Speaker 2:You're good. You're good.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. I imagine you had to stay up late for this, so we always appreciate it when someone can do that. Would you mind getting
Speaker 2:Last man in the office, it looks like. Leading by example.
Speaker 1:Exactly. This is what your team said.
Speaker 4:Some more people here than me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, no, your team said this about you. They said that you're you're you're obsessed with artificial intelligence right now, obsessed with digging in the weeds, tinkering with stuff. Probably goes back to the the early history of the company. Maybe that'd a good place to start.
Speaker 1:How did you actually like, what was the inciting element or the inciting incident that led you to start the company?
Speaker 4:Wow. Well, so as you may know, I've been at this for longer than many others. So I'm at the twentieth year of this venture.
Speaker 2:An overnight success. Overnight success.
Speaker 1:Love overnight success. It's been easy. But
Speaker 4:I was 23 back then, so I'm not that old yet.
Speaker 1:23.
Speaker 5:But Did you ever
Speaker 4:have a real job? What?
Speaker 1:Did you ever have a real job, or did you go straight into entrepreneurship?
Speaker 4:I had many jobs. I had many jobs. I, you know, I started working when I was a 15 year old at Burger King Nice. Flipping burgers. That's great.
Speaker 5:Were you
Speaker 2:any good?
Speaker 4:Ever since
Speaker 2:Were you any were you any good?
Speaker 4:Flipping burgers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think it was like we actually had a competition for, like, making whoppers really fast No way. With quality. Quality. Okay. I think it I I think I scored pretty well.
Speaker 2:Good. Awesome. Good.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, walk
Speaker 2:me through So
Speaker 1:15, you're flipping burgers. 23, you're starting a massive tech company that will go on a twenty year run. What happened in between?
Speaker 4:Very shortly well, first, look, you know, for whatever reason, I always dreamt to be an entrepreneur, kind of odd thing to do as a kid. My my father really wanted me to be a doctor, but I was inspired by rich Richard Branson and Ingmar Camper, the founder of IKEA and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I went to business school. Bad idea. I should have to code the first thing I did, but that was a bad idea. But, anyways and then, you know, after a few years of just, like, testing a lot of different jobs, I ended up, by a very odd story, going around the world without flying, coming back too late to continue my university studies, and as a consequence, ending up as a sales guy at a factoring firm that was doing, like, account receivables. Last thing
Speaker 2:in the world
Speaker 4:I ever thought I would work with. Yeah. And at that point of time, realized there was a lot of these very small newcomer ecommerce companies that were selling stuff online, and they needed a better payment solution because their customers didn't trust them. They didn't trust that they would ship. So they preferred the idea of buy now, pay later where you would first receive the product and then kind of pay for it once you had it.
Speaker 4:And that was pretty much the beginning of Klonet.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. Walk me through the the more recent developments.
Speaker 1:How big is the company today?
Speaker 4:So we're about a 100,000,000 users worldwide. Mhmm. We do about a $100,000,000,000 worth of payments volume annually. There's about half a million merchants, but a lot of them are really large. So there's like Nike, Macy's, Sephora
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Walmart nowadays. And and, yeah, what else? On on number of employees, about 3,000 people. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah. What was the what was the initial go to market? I seem to remember there were specific dynamics in Europe around cash on delivery being a unique kind of vector into growth. Can you walk me through kind of, like, what the early go to market was and how and and it it like, it seems like you almost, like, leapfrogged the technology curve a little bit.
Speaker 4:Well, the truth is, funny enough, even in The US, if you look at the beginning of credit bureaus
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:They actually
Speaker 4:a lot of them started as mail order companies Interesting. Where the first credit was provided actually by you shipping a product and asking for cash on delivery. And then the third time you ship to that same address, you would say, well, this customer seems to have money every time I ship to them, so I'm gonna provide them a small credit line. That was actually the beginning of a lot of credit bureaus even in The US back in the early twentieth century. So and kind of same thing happened across Europe, across The US.
Speaker 4:So the idea of doing, like, cash on delivery and then turning that into credit line based on the performance of that customer always having cash at hand when they were buying those product or paying for those products that they ordered, at that point of time, mail order catalog orders. Right? That that actually worked. So in the end, to us, when online came along, most people were offering debit card payments. And the problem with debit card payments is the customer ships money and then maybe receives what was on that picture that they ordered.
Speaker 4:And so basically offering credit, not necessarily for the lend for purpose of lending, but more for that kind of security of getting and touching the product before you paid for it made a lot of sense, especially in markets where credit cards were not as prevalent as they were in The US. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the like, as you were looking at the global map of expansion, what informed, like, where you go next? Like, walk me through the different markets that you had at the top of the list and how you chose to kind of rank those as you expanded
Speaker 2:the business. Soon did you know the American consumer was undefeated? I mean,
Speaker 1:you had to be
Speaker 2:you had to you had to be here. That took a lot of years. Funny enough. We like stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We like to buy stuff.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Funny enough, took a lot of years before we realized the users, Mark. I mean, first and foremost, like, when we started, you have to remember, at that point of time, there was one one globally successful European tech startup, and that was Skype. That was it. Like, Skype was the thing.
Speaker 4:Everything else had been launched out of Silicon Valley. There was no real European tech success of that size that had, like, global consumer, you know, recognition. Right? And hence, to us, it was like, okay. Where are we gonna go from Sweden?
Speaker 4:Let's go to the massive market called Finland that is half the size of Sweden because it's very close, and we kinda know what it means. Right? So we kind of started with expansion in The Nordics, then went to, like, Germany, which was a huge thing for us. Figured that out, and then went to UK. And we ever we always thought that we never, like, figured out how are we gonna come into The US market because credit cards are so prevalent.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. But the funny thing that we hadn't realized was due to the financial crisis in o seven, there was a lot of regulation introduced that made it much harder to get a credit card. One thing that kind of sounds sane is that credit card companies couldn't advertise in campuses anymore. We just want their, like, common places to sign up credit card holders.
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 4:And so there was a lot of that regulation. So it meant that between 02/1020, debit cards in The US grew like the credit cards grew volume grew about two x. Debit card volume grew 10 x.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 4:And so actually, than us figuring out how to be successful in The US, it was the other way around. The US market became more like the European markets with much higher debit card penetration, where buy now pay later and the kind of products that we offered became much more relevant suddenly for these new consumers that didn't have credit cards to the same extent or didn't have as much credit limit as they used to have historically. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the the rollout, like, in Finland, Germany, The UK The US from a regulatory perspective? Do you have to get, like, banking licenses as their approval? Is it mostly, like, regulatory, or are you more focused on the engineering challenges, setting up servers, localization?
Speaker 4:All of them.
Speaker 1:All of it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. All of the above. All of the above. But I think from a regulatory perspective, we quickly identified that it would be a benefit to be fully licensed over time. So about ten years ago, we did get our bank license, and we were fortunate that EU had implemented legislation that meant that you could take your your Swedish bank license and passport it across all the European countries.
Speaker 4:Right? So we run on the on the Swedish bank license, but it's applicable for all. And it included UK up until Brexit. Right?
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 4:So that worked for a long period of time. But, obviously, technology was an important challenge for us
Speaker 1:Yeah. As well. Are the knock on effects of having a bank license? I I I talk to fintech founders all the time where they it feels like they're in the money moving business, but then they you find out they have all this float, they're making a ton of money on treasury bills or something like that. Is there an aspect of your business where, you can actually drive more profit and bottom line on the basis of having that bank license?
Speaker 1:Or is that less relevant? And then I wanna go from there into stablecoins and what's going on and how that might be changing the market.
Speaker 4:So I think that the in our case, what you're referencing is kind of funny enough something we have underutilized in Klono, which is the ability to generate the deposits and kind of earn interest of those deposits. Right? Yeah. Funny enough. And that's something we're addressing right now where we're introducing more products and services in that area.
Speaker 4:But where the big advantage for us was, if you look at, like, the history over those twenty years of a lot of fintechs who were credit providers, a lot of them offloaded their balance sheet and did so effectively up until, at some point of time, something went wrong in the underwriting hole, and it turned out that the losses were higher than they expected. At which point of time, the people that had taken on their balance sheets realized that they wanted to shift shift the liability back to the fintech, but the fintech was not capital capitalized equipped to take that on, meaning that, like, their valuations either collapsed or the whole thing went bankrupt.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So and this happened over and over again if you look at a lot of the, like, fintechs over the last twenty years. In our case, the benefit of having deposits is we are a bank. We're fairly capitalized as a bank. Mhmm. We need to hold the same capital that, you know, any large bank needs to do in in comparison to our balance sheet.
Speaker 4:And it means that we're much better equipped. Like, even if our losses go up and down or whatever, it doesn't change the sentiment of our balance sheet. It doesn't mean that we can dry up funding. We're not dependent on the funding in the market. The whole the whole thing that went down in o seven, right, which was the problem, where basically we only have deposits and that are insured by the government and and so forth.
Speaker 4:Right? So it gives us a much more stable way of funding funding the bank, basically.
Speaker 1:Then on stablecoins, is there any benefit to you there? We've heard stories about lower fees and faster payments, and, obviously, there's a massive you know, the frequency of payments across the Clariant network is massive. Are you looking at it? Have you already looked at it? What's your takeaway on on stablecoins or the the genius act that is seems on the
Speaker 2:cusp passing CEOs on the show that have said, actually, traditional banking rails can be pretty awesome if you utilize them properly. So curious how
Speaker 9:what your
Speaker 5:views are.
Speaker 4:Think that the I have been one of the cryptosceptics for a long period of time. Mhmm. And and the reason for that is when, like, I started playing around with this stuff in ten years ago, I felt that you know, I always ask myself, like, how is this technology gonna make my mom's life better? Like, how is it gonna make our products and our customers' experience better? And I didn't really see any any benefits of the technology apart from the fact, like, people have been speculating that it's an interesting asset, an alternative asset to hold.
Speaker 4:Right? Like Bitcoin or whatever. But then I gave it a second chance, a second look. Now one about a year ago, started looking at next generation of stablecoin implications and implementations. And I very much agree with the fact that, like, now the technology is showing strong promise both in its speed, in its cost, etcetera, etcetera, versus the traditional bank rates, especially especially, obviously, in international transfers
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:In corridors that are more like you know, you're moving money from, like, UK to US, you're probably not gonna make that big of a difference. But if you're moving money from, you know, Brazil to, let's say, Greece Yeah. Oh, sorry. That was a euro country. Stupid idea.
Speaker 4:Stupid suggestion. But another one, which with a smaller currency, you're going to have a a very real benefit of it. Right? So I think that stablecoins definitely are going to be a major thing. I think also, like, crypto is here to stay and the Bitcoins of the world are here to stay as assets, right, that people find are interesting assets in their portfolio.
Speaker 4:So I don't think that's gonna change either anytime soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm always interested in in where the value will accrue with these technological shifts. Specifically, like, with stablecoins, you can imagine if you're going from two day settlement to instant settlement, well, if the customer would accept one day settlement, all of a sudden, you have one day of float that's gonna sit there that you could kind of keep as your own margin and maybe put in T bills, maybe it gets to be a big number. And so I've been I've I've been kind of trying to understand their like, when their time is money. And when, you know, when time decreases and and systems get faster, you can pass all of that along.
Speaker 1:You can pass half of it along. And and and there's different things that different companies can do based on the consumer preferences. So it's interesting.
Speaker 4:I I think you're totally right, but that also means
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That in in in some degree, which is something I tell my investors. Right? It's a race to the bottom. Yeah. Like, this payments industry has had a, you know, combined revenue globally addressable market of, like, $2,000,000,000,000 or whatever.
Speaker 4:It's not gonna stay that way. There's no there's no real good reason why it's more costly to send money than send an email. Right? There is a little bit more risk involved. There's a little bit more, like, you know, security involved.
Speaker 4:But in essence, you're just, like, shifting data between two accounts. Yeah. And so, like, in in some to some degree, that, like, that those kind of solutions will drive. Now that also means that the revenue generated from these services will be significantly lower than it is today. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's your broad not not to go too broad, but what's I I'm curious to get your broad market outlook right now. You have this interesting view into consumers, companies all over the world. It's a very interesting time right now. Have geopolitical instability.
Speaker 2:We have, you know, and and and effectively war. We have tariffs, trade wars all happening at once. Yet at the same time, you know, we've seen circles Circles got public and is now trading Well,
Speaker 1:Front seems
Speaker 2:like my I guess higher than Coinbase. Yeah. You know, so that seems like the the general excitement around
Speaker 1:Capital marches on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Capital is marching on. But but yeah. How are how are you thinking about markets broadly from your view?
Speaker 4:To me, from my perspective, because of kind of the deep interest that I've taken into AI and try to understand the implications on how to apply the technology, I am very much convinced that it will have implications on white collar jobs. If effectively, you can have, like, economical swings that, you know, recession, non recession. It may you know, higher inflation, higher cost pressure, and so forth may have some implications for consumers' sentiment of spending. And, you know, I don't like, I'm gonna spend a bit more. I'm gonna spend a little bit less and so forth.
Speaker 4:But the but the true life changing moment that affects people's true ability to pay back, right, is to a large degree loss of jobs. Right? If you if you lose your job, then it severely impacts your ability to do so. I think that the key question now is to what degree we're going to see an acceleration of loss of jobs among white collar people, which in itself then potentially leads to a recession and less spending in that group of people, which is obviously a group of people that had a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So I think that's the area that I'm, like, mostly because the tariffs so far obviously have been announced and kind of changed and then announced again and changed and so forth. And now it almost feels like if I look at our merchants, when the first tariffs were announced on Labor Day, they really did adjust their marketing spending. We saw changes in the transaction volumes. We saw, for example, some of the larger Chinese companies that we work with would shift their marketing spending from US to Europe and would try to offset more of their inventory in the European market as opposed to The US market, etcetera. But as now also, like, there's been more and more, like, turbulence around these things, people start also discounting it, saying, like, yeah.
Speaker 4:It was announced this week, but who knows what's gonna happen next week? And so we're not gonna draw too early conclusions from this. We're not gonna change, you know, the business of what we're doing until we know it's for real, right, and until it's actually gonna happen. So I don't actually see currently in the trends the direct implications of tariffs themselves in our business. But and I'm more just, like, trying to second guess if I'm gonna see a major change in the in job.
Speaker 1:And what are you trying
Speaker 2:to on job is you're kind of hedged in some way and that that I think people would be more likely to use Klarna if they have if if they, you know, in some ways have reduced spending capacity or, know, more likely to leverage a product. I'm curious tracking here. Just getting more specific around What is your updated hiring strategy throughout the net the rest of this year and next year? What what what are you, you know, hiring? What areas of your are you hiring in or or kind of shifting away from?
Speaker 4:So we about almost now two years ago, after experimenting with Chechiuti and so forth for a few months, our conclusion was that this will lead this will change our ability to get more done with less people. Mhmm. And that we believed that in an AI world, revenue per employee will be a very key metric. Because the higher revenue you have per employee, the more profit you make per employee means that you can spend more on marketing, means you can acquire more customers, which you can scale more. So if you have a low revenue per customer, you'll be less competitive, basically.
Speaker 4:And so for us, the question then was, how do we catch those efficiency gains? And so we decided to stop hiring about two years ago. At that point of time, we were about 5,500 people. And since then, we shrank to about 3,000 employees that we are currently, which is basically through natural attrition. Because, you know, in a tech company, about 20% will leave on an annual basis voluntarily because they're going for other jobs, other opportunities.
Speaker 4:And so by just being very strict in not rehiring, we have been able to shrink down the company and and and continue to do so. Now we've hired a little bit. Doesn't mean that we haven't hired at all. We've hired in some areas and so forth. But if you look at the net, you can see that we've shrank from about 5,500 to 3,000.
Speaker 4:And we and then what we've also done is internally, we've been very honest and open about this, and we've communicated to our employees that what's going to happen is the gains because, obviously, this means our labor cost is shrinking while our revenue actually has been growing. Right? So revenue as a consequence of that, our revenue per MP went from about 400 k to about over a million now, which is kind of equivalent to where Goldman Sachs is. Now next yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 4:Next step is is kind of, you know, Apple, Netflix being at $2,000,000. I sometimes joke because, like, OnlyFans is at, like, 30,000,000 for
Speaker 1:a year. Yeah. Don't go ahead. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Or don't don't don't look at Tethr. Don't look at Tethr will have you looking at net income per employee. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 4:So I'm not sure that's a great the comparison you wanna have. But the the thing is that, like, the anyway, so we are continuing down that path. And and the point is that what we've communicated internally, however, is that as the total labor cost shrinks
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:We are reinvesting that in an acceleration of compensation for our existing employees.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So as they participate in the efficiency gains, we have been able to accelerate both equity and cash compensation at Clono to our existing employees
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:More than we had in previous years. And that's kind of a way for them to share the benefits with the shareholders of the efficiency gains that this creates. Right?
Speaker 1:So if you're a new if you're if you're a new grad and you want to get a job at Klarna and make a career out of it, maybe be there for twenty years and earn a lot of stock and cash over
Speaker 2:Come for your job, maybe.
Speaker 1:Come for your job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:What should a new grad do? Should they learn prompt engineering? Should they learn to vibe code or program, or should they be focused all on networking and management skills and people skills and the things that the robots seem to be mediocre at?
Speaker 4:I think very clearly is there's one area where we have not reduced number of people at all, and that's sales. In our case, that mean, like, b to b enterprise sales. Mhmm. So we have people locally on the ground across the world in over 50 offices, you know, whether they sit in in China next to to to Xi'an and TikTok and so forth or whether they sit in Portland next to Nike or whether they are in, you know, somewhere on the East Coast or in parts of Europe. And those, obviously, there's no, like, immediate expectations that those those are affected by this.
Speaker 4:Right? Rather the opposite. Like, that human connection in in customer relationship is super important.
Speaker 2:I've never I've never seen a a chat GPT have a power lunch and a steak dinner.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Right. Yeah. It's impossible.
Speaker 2:Till we get better humanoids. Safe and safe.
Speaker 4:But on the rest of jobs, actually, it's been quite interesting because for a period of time now, we said, okay. Let's stop hiring all other competences then engineering. So if you look at that 5,500, of them, 1,500 were engineers. Today, of the 3,000, 1,500 are engineers. So, actually, the number of engineers have step kept the same, while it's all the other, like, marketing
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, analytics,
Speaker 4:whatever it might be that shrank. Now with that said, however, in the last, like, months, because of the acceleration of Cloud Code and and, you know, and Cursor and all these tools, what you're seeing is now is a group internally at Thawna who are, like, a few 100 business people that in the last two years have learned how to code. Not necessarily like the most complex things, but inspect code, understand code, interact with code, but doing so with having all the business knowledge, understanding what the customer wants, understanding a lot of things that engineers sometimes have struggled with. Like, they can't articulate why we're building the product, for what purpose, for how it's going to solve customer needs and so forth. And they've been maybe sometimes more focused on just, like, latency or technical implications or, you know, etcetera.
Speaker 4:So I kind of see a convergence now of the truly kind of renaissance people that are kind of, you know, both on both sides that can understand the code but can also understand the business. Those are the ones that are now truly becoming the most productive in my opinion.
Speaker 2:What is your framework for buying AI tools versus building AI tools internally?
Speaker 4:Right. So we we have been fairly vocal about the fact that, you know, as part of acceleration of AI Klana, one of the first thing that we remember ChatGPT came along. There was this, like, hey. I can now connect all my PDFs to ChatGPT. You know?
Speaker 4:And, like and people were like, oh, that's awesome. The only problem with that is that, like, the truth in data modeling and data science has always been, like, shit in, shit out. Right? So if you feed it tons of, like, internal stuff that is contradicting, inconsequential, not truthful, whatever, it's just gonna get lost. Right?
Speaker 4:Just like some of our MPs get lost when they start navigating the internal work of Klarna. Right? So so the first thing that we realized is we can't silo the data anymore. We have to have a a common data model, and that meant that we started removing software as a service providers. You know?
Speaker 4:So we we closed down Salesforce, Workday. I think the next big one that would go is Atlassian, Jira, and and and so forth. But then there's also, like, a long amount of smaller software as a service vendors that we have utilized. So, actually, if you kind of count it in total, there's over 1,500 that we have closed down in the last two years. Now, obviously, some of them are, like, super small, like, some plug in to Jira or whatever.
Speaker 4:Like, it's not like every one of them. It's like a tremendously big software as a service application. And then we've kind of harmonized and standardized our data layers so that we have one data that we can then let the LLM interpret and run on top of, allowing us to to do more with less. Right? So currently, there are a few things that we will use Eleven Labs for voice.
Speaker 4:We will use, like, specific people that are really, really, really proficient. We use a company called FullStory that's fantastic to kind of catch user interactions. So there's some some places where we just found, like, this software is so strong that there's really no, you know, meaning in, like, trying to replace it. But a lot of traditional SaaS may have just been a database with, you know, some nice UI and some data and some process logic on top of, and that is easier to replicate today. And and it's not easy, but it's easier.
Speaker 4:And the problem is if it's spread out, it's inconsistent, and we need it to be consistent for both humans and LLM to make sense out of it.
Speaker 2:Well, this is fantastic.
Speaker 1:This is super interesting. I feel like we should talk regularly about the the situation with white collar workers and just the advance of AI tooling. There's so many interesting things where you have a unique insight because of your position in
Speaker 2:the industry. Question from from me Yeah. Before we jump. Do you think cookies hurt conversion rates across Europe?
Speaker 1:Do you think the policies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just just the fact just generally
Speaker 4:to do this topic.
Speaker 2:Well well, gen generally
Speaker 1:Half an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could spend half an hour. But no.
Speaker 2:But generally, like, the more clicks you need on a website to get to the eventual purchase, you know, the the the worse the conversion rate. And
Speaker 1:Maybe that's why the American consumer is outperforming.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just purely technicalities. The CTO.
Speaker 4:I think the the the challenge of GDPR, which is the legislation that led to those that cookie Yeah.
Speaker 5:Sort of shit show,
Speaker 4:is that the problem was it it came from a very good principle and idea.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And that is that we as users should own and control our data, not the companies. Right? And if you think about it, when when a few years ago, WhatsApp, there were some rumors that they have updated the terms of use, and now there was so much more privacy infringing, and everyone should shift. Right? Now how many people really shifted to Telegram or whatever?
Speaker 4:Not enough. Right? Why? Because at the at the center, the way it should have worked is you should have been able to go to WhatsApp with a click of a button, extract all the data, all your contacts, all your messages, and be able to then feed them into Telegram or, you know, Signal or whatever your choice of preference would have been. That would have been true customer mobility, and that was the purpose of GDPR is to allow that customer mobility.
Speaker 4:But because there wasn't in the legislation wasn't implemented thoughtfully enough, it it that hasn't materialized. Because in that world where you had a 100% customer mobility, the point is if you lost trust in WhatsApp as a provider of your primary chat messages, you would have instantly been able to move to something else. And the fear of losing all your users in such a very mobile world where everyone could move would have forced WhatsApp to be concerned about privacy and not just speak that they are concerned about privacy. Right? So, like, I think that and that was the original intent.
Speaker 4:But then it was implemented with these cookies, which actually creates the opposite, which is that, like, we're just tired of accepting cookies. I don't wanna go to a new website because then I have to click again on 55. Like, the the people that the people that wanted these kind of laws had the right intentions, but the implementations are horrendous and actually cause the opposite, which is less customer mobility, people less willing to shift services and try different things, and funny enough, are hence playing into the hands of the same companies that they were annoyed with for infringing on our privacy. Because as that creates just like the bigger success of these big tech companies, Full customer mobility, they're being able to take your data with you and go wherever you want, is the key to creating a better competitive Internet where, companies actually have to compete on creating more value for you as a customer rather than locking you up and locking your data up and then, you know, creating models that just forces you to use the same thing.
Speaker 1:Makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Thank you for joining.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic.
Speaker 5:Thank you for having us.
Speaker 2:Talk more.
Speaker 3:Thank you for an
Speaker 4:amazing part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:We'll talk soon.
Speaker 1:Bye. Cheers, Sebastian. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions of folks, and they're the sponsor of Aston Martin f one.
Speaker 2:That's right. Public.com. Head over.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest in the studio already.
Speaker 2:We have It's pretty good. Chu. Are you Ventures. What's going on? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Good to be here.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you. I, we didn't we didn't prepare at all, which is which is the part of the beauty of our show. We just we You just come in, you're live, and we will do it live. The show is Just show
Speaker 5:each other.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you. I've got a bunch of questions. You're always getting spicy on the timeline. Talk through a bunch. But why don't you introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Quick background, what you're doing at Cosa, all that good stuff.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I'm John. I'm one of the partners here at KV. I do a lot of technical things. So, basically, anything I've really written code on in the past.
Speaker 5:So, like, data infrastructure, dev tools, a lot of AI stuff from foundation models in the app layer if I really understand what it does. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Let's get right into it. What did you re what are you reading into the, news around DG potentially going to meta and all that? Was that a surprise to you? What what can you talk about there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it was a big surprise. I actually say, like, the funny thought that came to mind when I first heard the rumor was, like, should I be buying Meta options? Because does that mean, like, Zuck got Ilia. Right?
Speaker 5:And then that gets announced and Meta just jumps. But, like, look, it's it's pretty obvious what's going on here is that there's a giant market in AI. Right? OpenAI kinda proves that. The pie is huge, and Zuck has a shot on goal.
Speaker 5:And Zuck is not someone that likes to lose shots on goals. So if he has to pay up to get the best talent that he thinks that can actually compete, he doesn't even have to win. You don't have to be open air. He just can be number two. If he can get there, billions of dollars is worth it.
Speaker 5:Right? So, like, all of this makes sense when you think of it through the lens of, like, Facebook is a giant company, a billion dollars, $5,000,000,000. That's a drop in the bucket if you take on this new market that ends up dominating. So what do And, yeah, the last thing he wants to be is, like, Microsoft and Ms. Phones.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about the phone story? At one point, Facebook was working on a phone, and maybe the lesson that Zuck learned is that he should have put more resources into that instead of not try to do it at all.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering because there's all these different stories. VR, he's investing way ahead of adoption. Reels, he was a little bit behind, but wound up rolling out a product that I believe produces tons of profit. And so it was totally worth investing in and taking the shot at building out all those data centers to do the recommendation algorithms. So, yeah, I mean, what what what other examples do you think we should be pulling from from the from the meta history, or do you think that might be relevant here?
Speaker 5:Well, I mean, there's there's basically two things to know about Meta. Right? One is that they are fantastic fast followers.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:They either buy or they copy. I think, like, Snapchat is a fantastic example of that where, like, the Stories literally, like, that was a team that just copied stories and just executed better. So, like, if anything, Facebook is an execution machine.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And they are able to pull that off. And then the second takeaway is Zuck is willing to take bets. So, like, I think Oculus, the acquisition and the whole metaverse is a great example of that. Yeah. And you don't win all of them.
Speaker 5:Right? But, like, I think on the upside, he's won more of them in terms of, like, call it shareholder value than he's lost. So this is just another one of those. Yeah. And this one, I think he has extremely strong conviction behind more so than you like, the fact that AI is already doing real things in the real world that actually are impacting enterprises and impacting real people gives you a significantly higher confidence bar than, like, the metaverse bet.
Speaker 5:Totally. To have significantly more confidence here. I was I was talking to, like, a guy at Windsurf, who, like, runs their field engineering team. And he was like, oh, you know, I I talked to his enterprise, they're like, we're gonna buy, like, 2,500 Windsurf licenses because this was fantastic. And those guy he's like, what?
Speaker 5:Why don't you buy 5,000? Because, like, you have 5,000 engineers. And he's like, yeah. We're not gonna have 5,000 engineers. Because of Windsurf, we're gonna have 2,500 engineers.
Speaker 5:Like Wow. It's actually doing real things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yep. How how can Meta benefit broadly from AI not in the just found in the foundation model game or image generation or things like that? You know, we we've talked about just just getting slightly better at AI across the entire organization can have tremendous benefits on just improving delivery of ads and these sort of, like, basic things you were working on ML at Facebook back in the day. So I'm sure you have some some strong insights.
Speaker 5:Well, so I I think, like, there's a few layers here. If you start from the product level, the obvious is that there's new products that are going to be built. Right? There's the whole, like, Joni Ive and
Speaker 1:Same old thing.
Speaker 5:Thing. Right? And that's some kind of hardware thing, we're all guessing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:That's probably a new product. And if you just take the lens of, like, if this technology in five years gets significantly better, I have a bunch of hardware products inside of Meta. I can add more. I have a great research team that knows how to build great hardware. I know how to handle the supply chain.
Speaker 5:What can I build? There's, like, random upside there in products. Right? If you go back to the current Facebook suite, there's, Meta AI is, like, already doing a lot of this, but you have chat apps. You have Messenger.
Speaker 5:You have WhatsApp. Right? Like, you can already do chatting in there. You have a great Llama model. If have ChatGPT in there, you can just pull them into conversations and already add value that increases engagement, that increases, ads views.
Speaker 5:Right? That's Mhmm. That's automatic money there. And then if you go back to the where I worked, like, in ads models, there's a you're seeing less of it with generated by today mainly because everything is doing attention on sequences and ads. Like, ranking models are a little bit different, but people are already applying research to different layers of the ads models.
Speaker 5:And, like, if you have a 1% uptick in ad score, that's like a billion dollar. Actually, it's like a percentage increase in revenue. So, like, a billion dollars today in the future, 1% is gonna be, like, $10,000,000,000, right, if Facebook goes to x. And there's some really interesting research there. Like, I I have an a port code that I invested in.
Speaker 5:Actually, it was a distinguished Angi at Facebook or at at Meta. And, like, he's kinda got some technology that's a foundation model for ranking where you really just don't need any feature engineering. And I saw another company this morning, which is the same that's like that rips out giant pieces of infrastructure, has, like, automatic increase in ad score ranking, and you can, like, fire all your ML engineer. You probably don't wanna do that. But, like, you can fire most of the ML engineers at Facebook.
Speaker 5:Like, that's gigantic. Right? That kind of stuff is going to happen. I mean, the time scale is a question, but it's going to happen over time.
Speaker 1:Do you think that the UI paradigm around AI's interface with social networking is defined enough. I'm thinking of the example of Snapchat and Instagram Stories. It was very clear that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat did enough of the experimentation to define how vertical disappearing video and images would be distributed on social networks. And then Facebook was able to adapt that and adopt that and bake it into Instagram. When I think of who what big tech companies, which of the MAG seven is most closely cheating off of ChatGPT's homework, it feels like it's Gemini, and the Gemini app feels much more directly competitive to the ChatGPT app.
Speaker 1:I would be surprised if if Facebook or Meta or or Instagram tries to stuff an entire ChatGPT experience into the fifth panel on the hamburger menu. So I'm wondering, like, is is there is the story of Meta's AI rollout really just about ad optimization, or are we actually gonna see it instantiated in different UI and, like, interaction paradigms?
Speaker 5:You're you're gonna see it everywhere. Okay. Ads is just an obvious place. You gotta win. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:But, like, you're you're going to see it actually, someone might stick it in a tab somewhere. If if I know anything about Facebook having been there, like, if the number goes up into the right, they'll do it. So, like, yes, like, that that might happen. But, like, in like I said, inside of Messenger and WhatsApp, I think there's going to be lots and lots of usage there. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And if you think about it, like, people ask this question. I was actually a little confused at first. They're like, why did you pay 15,000,000,000 for what it sounds like just Alex Wong. Right? Like, that's my guy.
Speaker 5:And then you think about it for a bit, and you're like, okay. Well, what makes OpenAI OpenAI? You're like, yes. There's great tech, but Sam. Like, Sam actually runs that thing.
Speaker 5:And Sam makes it successful. And then, like, if you ask anyone in why even Paul Graham is like, okay. If you had to pick someone again, that's, like, a top founder inside the YC network, that's not Sam. Who would you pick? Even Paul Graham says Alex.
Speaker 5:So, like, if you're looking at products inside of Facebook or even outside of Facebook, like, pick the guy. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. I mean, it it feels like a really, really strong, like, total reset of Meta's AI strategy, bringing in three absolute hitters and turn them loose on whatever the next phase is. Jan Lakun was there for kind of the research, like, journey and the research part of the AI story. Now we're in the application story, and so go get the managers.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:How much how much should people read into, again, this is all alleged. I don't think it's been confirmed that DG is joining Meta yet
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:But rumored. How much should people be, reading into, you know, the CEO of SSI leaving to work at Meta and using that to inform their general timelines. Right? You know, if we were on the cusp of developing super intelligence in two years, maybe you wouldn't leave billions of dollars of on the table at at a company that had the potential of of of cracking that. Even, you know, getting a billion dollars ish liquid at Meta, it's great.
Speaker 2:But still, I I think it's hard not to read into into the move if it happens.
Speaker 5:I I I have no no knowledge here. Like, I I don't know Dan well enough to know, like, what his, what his kind of thoughts behind us are and what drove the decision. Right? But, like, I I can say, honestly, for myself, working with Ilio would be, like, an amazing dream, and it's kind of amazing, to do. At the same time, like, SSI is a pure research lab.
Speaker 5:So it's not like OpenAI where Sam is over here trying to build products. It's a pure research lab. And I don't know if that's what Dan actually finds fun and also, like, what he actually excels at versus, like, Meta also has a giant research lab, tons of opportunity, and, like, unlimited GPUs and money. Right? So, like
Speaker 2:And distribution to to scale products
Speaker 1:Exactly. Rapidly. And get data to feed them back into the models. Yeah. It's huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is what I was thinking about. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like, distribution, everyone underweights that. Tony's that come out of Facebook and pitch me, the thing they always miss is, no. Distribution is not trivial. It was trivial for you at Facebook, but it's, like, not
Speaker 1:a real world. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you got a billion people to, you know, click on your new button. It's like, that'll be a lot harder when you're starting from zero.
Speaker 1:Do
Speaker 2:you think I
Speaker 1:wanna think about Apple?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was gonna say, do you think Apple will make a big bet here? There were conversations reporting over
Speaker 1:the You're talking about Tim Cook going to Meta to get a pay bump? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's barely scraping by it at Apple.
Speaker 1:He's 75. Under 75.
Speaker 2:75 a year.
Speaker 1:He could probably double that if he went over to Meta.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something there. But No. But do you do you do you expect Apple to make a big bet, here? There was, you know, rumors over the weekend of reporting that they had spoken to Perplexity and Thinking Machines.
Speaker 2:Do you think they do you think that they're willing to make a big investment? You know, Siri, over ten years ago was 200,000,000. That's like a seat an AI seed round for ants these days. So, I'm curious.
Speaker 5:I'm glad it. Man, seed rounds are so expensive.
Speaker 2:You're like, don't remind me.
Speaker 5:Dude, I've been priced out of almost every round in AI research I've tried to do this year. There have been a few exceptions, but, like, it's not like I'm priced out by small amount. It's, like, two x my price or whatnot.
Speaker 1:How are you even underwriting AI research bet these days? Are you pulling out a spreadsheet and building the market size, or is it just, like, based on the vibe of this founder, I'd pay 50, but the price came back at a 100? Like
Speaker 5:I get in the doorways and go to the future, and then I figure out if it's actually gonna work. Yep.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's good.
Speaker 5:It's basically you gotta underwrite the team and then the opportunity size.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Right? That's really all you can do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 5:that that's basically what we did when we did Sakana.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was gonna ask about Sakana, the the Japanese Yeah. Language model. Very cool company.
Speaker 5:But that like, today, it's even worse. It's like, that's really all you can do. Yeah. And then part of it's like, if the price is just not there given the confidence interval, then, like, gotta step back. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. At the same time, I mean, the the the SSI deal, the Scale AI deal, like, it feels like it's potentially easier than ever to get taken care of as an investor if even if you overpaid and did a seed at 300. Like, the mag seven has money to spend on multibillion dollar acquisitions. Like, a lot of these crazy looking deals might get rolled up. But I don't know how many of these there will be.
Speaker 1:Like, you have to be you have to be backing a founder like an Alex Wong or like a, you know, Nat and Dan to to to even have that on the table.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you back a generational entrepreneur, you'll have a little bit of a safety net, but they have to be
Speaker 5:I mean, everyone's Yeah. It's it's funny. We we don't typically underwrite to acquisitions. Right? We only underwrite to Ken's company IPO.
Speaker 5:And I think most investors do that. If you think about it too, there's, like, seven of the nine seven. So, like Yeah. Shots on goal is, like, not really an investment you're gonna put, like, 200 mil post on. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That that being said, like, I made this it was a half joke. We were looking at one of these hot rounds in the seed rounds. I was like, you know what we should do? Like, we should just invest now and then sell it the next round. It'd be, like, the best buyer on the planet.
Speaker 5:And Manila, like, looks at me dead, and he's pardon me. He looks at me dead, he's just like, you'd be a great hedge fund manager. We don't do that here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 2:it's a good strategy for angels, to be honest. The angels are the only the check sizes are lower. You can get a do it.
Speaker 4:You can
Speaker 2:get quick 10 x and sell in three months.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Would you rather What
Speaker 2:what are
Speaker 1:your updated dollar SPAC or a $14,000,000,000 acquihire on your on your ROI? Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's still again too.
Speaker 1:I got pitched to SPAC recently.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 1:Wait. Why are they pitching you a SPAC?
Speaker 2:They're like, hey. Got any got any portcodes?
Speaker 5:And then he wanted us in the pipe. And I was
Speaker 1:like, wow.
Speaker 5:There's SPACs now. They're coming
Speaker 1:back. Wow.
Speaker 2:How what what's your updated thinking on memory as a lock in and a moat for different model
Speaker 1:In touch specifically to
Speaker 2:app app layer companies. You you had been it sounds like you've been pitched by a bunch of, like, plaid for memory type companies. You've been posting about this. What what's your kind of framework there?
Speaker 5:I I still don't have a clear view, to be honest. I I think it is a mode. You look at all of the the model providers, they need different ways to keep their customers coming back to them versus going to other model providers. And memory is one way to do it. If you have enough history on the person, you can tailor recommendations, tailor responses, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 5:Right? You've seen this play isn't like the first time someone's done this. Like, I think the best example of a data mode is effectively Google and search. It's literally like, oh, I get so much search data that I can do better ads and make a better product. And then, like, no one on the planet can get more search data than me because I am the best.
Speaker 5:You all come to me and you give me more data. Right? So it's kind of the same play. At the same time, like, I see why users want this memory thing of, oh, I can, like, shift memory from OpenAI over to, like, Anthropic. But then, like, I have the same question of, like, well, why would OpenAI let you do that?
Speaker 5:Like, why is Google gonna let you take their data and give it to, like, Bing? Right? It's just, like, not going to happen.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I still don't see what the outside function is where, like, an Anthropic or an OpenAI would be game for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:I mean, that seems like the entire dynamic is that it's a good idea, but customers won't demand it. It's the same it's the same dynamic as, you know, should I be able to we were having this discussion back in, like, 2010 about, like, Google's walled garden. Like, can I export all my Google data or all my Facebook data and just give it to Google to get better ads? Like that potentially but no one's demanding that from the customer side and so it'll never happen from the from the b to b side.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you worried in general about, you know, there's been a bunch of different app layer companies that are kind of b to b players that are building products that ultimately will just potentially be built into things like the Google Suite, right, and and happen where you can get sort of these sort of fast revenue ramps, something like a Calendly, but then then ultimately just get added as a functionality to core Google Workspace or or Teams functionality?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So this is kinda funny. This is like one of those questions that keep come keeps coming up is, like started with, like, GPT wrappers where it's like, oh, my startup is gonna die. And now it's like, alright. What's inside the space of these model companies?
Speaker 5:And the answer is, like, you need some story for defensibility. And I I actually don't understand why this is so hard for people to grok because, like, this has been the history of technology forever. It's like, yes. There's tech. Tech eventually gets eroded.
Speaker 5:Like, what stays along that gives you defensibility? Is it, like, community? Is it some kind of open source thing? Is it, like, workflow lock in? There's like these moats that have existed forever that everyone knows about.
Speaker 5:And for some reason, because the word AI is here, like, and VCs just like forget about the existing moats. They're like, yeah, this is like something different and new. It's like, no, it's not. It's just like technology like before. Right?
Speaker 5:So that that's really the story. It's like, yes. Things will get eaten. And, like, yes, you're already I've seen plenty of companies get killed that are shallow GPT rappers. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And I'm seeing some actually deep, like, technical notes getting overrun by OpenAI and Anthropic. And you just need the story on, like, okay. How do I get to something defensible, and can I get there in time?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What do you think about these new generation of startups? Some of them are in AI where it seems like the efforts of the team are, like, 90% marketing, and they're really, really good at getting a ton of attention, and they're being very noisy. And Gary Tan was kind of framing it as, like, maybe they're trying to win in distribution and then kind of hold on to the attention until the AI models pick up. It feels like it's almost like a necessary evil of the current market and and how fast things move that if you wanna accelerate revenue and kind of live up to the to the standards of the day, you have to be very, very noisy online.
Speaker 1:But do you see it as, like, a counter signal, or do you think that there's something that where maybe this is around to stay?
Speaker 5:It's not necessarily a counter signal. Like, it it's the same as, like, when when we pick companies, if you're too early, you're wrong. Right? Mhmm. Same thing for founders here is, like, some of these founders are fantastic, especially, like, these, like, younger founders are fantastic at getting attention.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I think, historically, with any company, any movie, any, like, pop star, any type of hits, eventually, attention wanes. Right? Yeah. So, really, it's a timing thing of, like, I need the attention to translate into customers.
Speaker 5:And if my product's not there, I'm gonna see churn.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So how long can I capture attention? Does that overlap before my product actually doesn't have churn? If I have enough timeline in the middle and I timed it right, then I win. Yep.
Speaker 2:And if
Speaker 5:I don't, then I lose. Right?
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 5:It's, like, pretty much that simple. It's, like, it's simple to say. It's not an easy game to play, but if you play it correctly, you have a giant company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The the organic attention getting it seems like a a really great go to market or, like, early beachhead, but it doesn't feel like a sustainable flywheel versus some of the other permanent go to market motions or, like, viral loops that drive, you know, meta to beat earnings every year for decades or something like that.
Speaker 5:It can get you into one. Right?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. It's an opportunity. Yeah. It gets you the shot on goal where as a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs that are maybe those PMs that say, I'm gonna get distribution, and they just put out a, you know, press release, they're like, where did all the customers go?
Speaker 1:I don't have any clicks on my Exactly. On my button. So, yeah, it it it is kind of a a necessary thing.
Speaker 2:Was a
Speaker 1:Last question.
Speaker 2:There was a market map a while back showing all the different venture funds investing in all the different labs. You you guys at Kosla are OpenAI purists, so passed on. I'm sure it's had the opportunity to invest in all the different, you know, Anthropic, xAI, Cohere, all these different players. Talk about kind of that. Was that always an intentional decision?
Speaker 2:Is it let's stick to Ventures roots and have our bet? Or was it sort of, sort of a a lucky ability to just be in, you know, the breakout, you know, winner that's the lab and the consumer app? And so, you know, talk through that decision making process, and maybe kind of insights from from different partner meetings.
Speaker 5:I I don't know if we've ever, like, discussed this intentionally until we kinda came to the, like, open eyes it thing. Mhmm. But I I think it happens kind of organically where, you you work with a founder. You work with a team. You have giant breakthroughs and giant wins.
Speaker 5:You own enough of a company where, like, their success is basically your success.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And it kinda looks like they're gonna win it anyways. Like, I mean, I I we had this back and forth in Twitter. I know, but, like, Keith was kinda like, yeah. Don't think another transformers based or another, like, foundation model company is gonna be a great VC return outside of acquisitions. And it's kinda like, yeah.
Speaker 5:How how are you gonna beat OpenAI?
Speaker 2:Like, it's
Speaker 5:quite hard. They have distribution. They have marketing brand. They can have a shittier product, and they probably still win this. Right?
Speaker 5:So, like and they have money. Money is actually very important in this game because of GPUs. So it's it's both the, like, we bet on this horse. We love this team. We work very great with them, very closely with them.
Speaker 5:There's, like, symbiotic value here. And also, like, they're probably gonna win this.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. We'd love to
Speaker 2:have you What are you, last last question. What are you expecting out of, are are you expecting to see ads in various LLMs, consumer apps this year? I'm sure you've been pitched people saying, I'm gonna build an ad network for LLMs. I'm sure you have opinions on that as well. But what are you what are you expecting to see out of the next year?
Speaker 2:Big question I have is, will the average American pay for their favorite LLM three years from now? And I've been trying to figure that out. Or will it just sort of, you know, go closer and closer to free over time?
Speaker 5:I I don't actually know. Like, I I
Speaker 2:think What do mean? You're you're a VC.
Speaker 1:You should you should
Speaker 2:have a crystal ball on your desk. You know?
Speaker 5:I like technology. And Yeah. I think there's many ways to monetize this, and people will try all of them. So, like, are are there gonna be, like, ads? Yes.
Speaker 5:People will try it. I mean, like, Arvind over at complexity already said he was gonna try it. Right? So we're gonna see that at some point.
Speaker 1:Yep. Is it going
Speaker 5:to be the model that works? Who knows? But it is, like, a nice tried and true model. Right? So there's a good probability that it does work for some set of products.
Speaker 2:I saw somebody somebody had a pretty viral post last week saying, I'm so sick of being asked to sign up for different services across the whole internet. And and then what's his name at Antonio at at Coinbase was like, I I'll tell you a model for this but you're not gonna like it. Anyways, thanks thank you for joining. Appreciate all the all the insights and welcome back anytime.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This was fun.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to
Speaker 1:you soon.
Speaker 5:Thanks, guys. This was fun.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Cheers, John.
Speaker 1:Bye. Until you can buy ads in ChatGPT, you gotta stick to ads out of home.
Speaker 2:Out of the home.
Speaker 1:Out of the home. Using adquick.com, advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the studio, Tom Mueller from Impulse Space.
Speaker 2:I'll be right back.
Speaker 1:I will, handle the intro. Cool. Tom, how are you doing? We are bringing him in in just a second, to give you more background on Impulse. I met Tom, oh, it must have been two and a half years ago.
Speaker 1:Legend in the, space community, worked at SpaceX. Also, a car aficionado who, engaged with my post about the Kugen test, which, of course, is the challenge to have a humanoid robot step into a Dodge Viper ACR and lap the Nurburgring in under seven minutes. It's been done by a human in seven minutes and one second and a few milliseconds. It's an extremely difficult challenge requiring physical endurance of the g forces, but also a bunch of dexterity and, obviously, image processing. And I was talking to a bunch of AI folks about how long it will be until humanoids are actually at that level where they could do something like that.
Speaker 1:And it took I think the consensus was around 40 twenty, forty five, something like that. Anyway, Tom, great to meet you.
Speaker 7:I don't think it'll take that long, will
Speaker 10:it? How long do
Speaker 1:you think it'll take? This is a great question.
Speaker 7:I I don't when you take fear out
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe that's a big one. I don't know. You you've done a lot more laps than I have, so please Well,
Speaker 7:they have haven't they already shown that fighter aircraft can beat a human in, you know, in dogfight? So
Speaker 1:Yes. So the difference there is that I I'm adding the challenge of the the Dodge Viper ACR must be stock. And so the humanoid must operate three pedals and the stick shift and the steering wheel, and that's a lot more challenging than just plugging into the steering column and, you know, controlling it like you do in a Tesla or Waymo. And so I think that adds a wrinkle, but I don't know. Twenty forty five, twenty thirty five, it's clearly going to happen.
Speaker 1:But oh, that that that's that that that's a good way to say that you're bullish about humanoid robotics. Yep. Do you anticipate that humanoid robotics will have an impact on your business in the next decade in terms of maybe manufacturing or something even more narrow scope?
Speaker 7:Certainly, manufacturing. Sure. I think I think for manufacturing, robotics are down big path. But I I think, you know, I I think humans should explore space, but but it's really expensive and dangerous to put humans in space. Sure.
Speaker 7:So if you really wanna, like, know, use the economies of of space, I think it's gonna take a lot of robotics. So I'm I'm bullish about robotics.
Speaker 1:We gotta per put a Nuremberg ring on Mars and then ship a bike on
Speaker 7:the moon, which I'm all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I would love a
Speaker 2:track on the taxpayer dollars to put a racetrack on Mars.
Speaker 1:I would love that. Anyway, sorry. We jumped straight into it. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction for both of you and a little bit about the company?
Speaker 7:Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I'm I'm Tom Mueller. I'm the CEO and founder of Impulse Space.
Speaker 7:I was one of the founding members of SpaceX Mhmm. Where I led the development of, propulsion systems for Falcon nine and and Dragon and a little bit, into Starship. Yeah. And left there in 2020 and started impulse in 2021. And we have our four year anniversary here coming up next
Speaker 1:month. Congratulations. That's great to hear. That's amazing.
Speaker 7:And it's been it's been doing great.
Speaker 1:And, Eric, would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah.
Speaker 11:Sure. I am Eric Romo. I'm the president of the company. I've been with the company for the last two years. I've known Tom for a better part of, god, Tom, twenty two years, I wanna say now.
Speaker 11:'23, '23. I so I was an early propulsion engineer at SpaceX, in the very early days and then went and did a bunch of, non space, non, propulsion stuff for a long time and found my way back to Tom a couple years ago.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Yeah. I mean, as I describe it in kind of, layman's terms or in terms even a venture capitalist could understand, you can get to LEO pretty easily, but you need impulse to get to higher orbits. Is that still kind of the bread and butter of the business? Am I describing it even remotely accurately?
Speaker 7:Yeah. At you know, at SpaceX, we I think we really, made LEO very accessible, lowered the cost, made it you know, you get, you know, flights going there, you know, every other day. Mhmm. So I wanna do the same for for everything beyond Leo. So get make it much easier to get to high energy orbits, to get to the moon, to get to Mars, to get to outer planets, anywhere in space.
Speaker 7:Like, let's make it much easier, much more affordable, and, you know, really start the true space age.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you were at SpaceX, did you have an idea of how valuable LEO would be? I think a lot of folks Starlink took them by surprise, basically, in terms of not just how awesome that service is if you've been on a plane and used it, but also the business that was to be built there. Did that take you by surprise? And then, is there something that you can use as a concrete example of what is exciting about the higher orbits?
Speaker 7:Well, yeah, I'm old enough to remember the first time we tried to do LEO Constellation, you know, back in the late nineties and and actually worked for some companies that that tried to do it. Mhmm. And, you know, it wasn't the right time. Technology has improved a lot, especially low cost launch, you know, better bandwidth, easier to manufacture spacecraft, all the things. So I kinda realized it was the right time when when it was you know, when when SpaceX first started talking about it, it really clicked.
Speaker 7:I'm like, yeah. We need to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so in terms of the higher orbits, what are I mean, obviously, going to the moon is very concrete. Are there specific obvious business cases or or anything that would be, you know, inspiring or or immediately relevant that Well, just somebody would
Speaker 7:Geostationary orbit is still probably the most important orbit because it's, you know, it's the twenty four hour orbit over the equator. So you you you just point your dish at that, and and you it's always there in the sky or your antenna. Or you can cover the whole you can cover the whole Earth with with three satellites.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 7:So making access much more affordable to that, I think, is a huge help. Yeah. But then I'm I'm you know, I've always said I'm I'm really all about a a lunar economy starting and and even mining asteroids and things like that. So those are the those are the things I'm most excited about.
Speaker 2:Question, I'm sure you guys have gotten asked in every single pitch meeting, so I'll ask it. Why, do you think this is on SpaceX's roadmap? Do are you guys partnered with them already? Do you expect do you expect them to wanna prioritize this in the future? Or, you know, what does that kind of partnership or competitive dynamic look like?
Speaker 7:Why don't you cover that one, Eric?
Speaker 11:Yeah. I mean, they're they're pretty busy. Right? And so this is the equivalent of the Silicon Valley startup question of, like, why doesn't Google just do that or Facebook just do that or right? They could.
Speaker 11:They could do anything. Alright? They're technically amazing company that generally can execute on pretty much anything they sink their teeth into. I think the question is, will they? And what where would this be on the priority stack?
Speaker 11:So, you know, one of our products, Helios, is really good at getting large payloads to high energy orbits like medium Earth orbit and and geostationary orbit. SpaceX can certainly do that with the Falcon Heavy, but they've been super vocal about the fact that they would prefer not to. Mhmm. Yeah. And there's operational reasons for that and cost reasons for that.
Speaker 11:But so this is a space where we think that we can actually help them and other launch providers get to a thing that they're, to some degree, ignoring right now. And then on the the small spacecraft side of things, we we make a small, highly maneuverable vehicle called Mira, which is largely usable for Space Force. So we announced those contracts with them late last year and a partnership with Androil to go to market with with MIRA. And that's the thing that's pretty far afield from anything that SpaceX is working on today. You know, that Starlink is awesome, but it, you know, kinda just sits there.
Speaker 11:Right? It's a constellation, whereas MIRROR is designed to move very quickly as its core competency.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Can you talk about the lunar economy and how you imagine that developing? Does it start with tourism or scientific exploration? Do we need an ISS like base that's kind of taxpayer funded on the moon first, or do we go straight to mining or helium three? I remember the movie Moon.
Speaker 1:But what what are what, like, what are the rest, what does the tech tree look like as we build out the moon as a as a capability?
Speaker 7:Possibly all of the above. Like Okay. Mining helium three certainly could be a good starting point because it's even right now on Earth, we don't flood the market. It's on the order of $20,000,000 a kilogram. So you can certainly if you can get it on the I don't know the part of getting it.
Speaker 7:Like, you gotta mine, apparently, millions of tons of regolith to get it. Okay. But if you have it there, transporting it back is, $1,500 to that cost. So it's definitely it's it's economically doable assuming that you you have you have, you know, a can of it. But I I think if if if you're doing megastructures or or or massive manufacturing in LEO pretty fast, you'll figure out that it's 23 times roughly more efficient to bring mass from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the Earth just because the gravity well is so much lower.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And I think that's that's when the real use of the resources of the moon will happen just to get to get material to lower orbit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I've always thought that the moon was also just a great staging ground for Mars. You imagine if you're up there, the moon's always facing Earth. So something goes wrong, you know, the sci fi version.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's a crack in your in your suit. You can just dive in an escape pod, and you're aiming in the right direction. Whereas Mars, you have to deal with the transfer window. It's a whole different problem. And if we can get really good at living on the moon, we're probably gonna be able to get good at living on on Mars.
Speaker 1:I I am interested in kind of these questions about when the one of the great stories about SpaceX is that it feels like it's a relatively smooth handoff of capability in terms of, launch capacity from NASA to SpaceX, from the taxpayer to the private sector. At the same time, I love that NASA put a helicopter on Mars because I can't imagine that would ever happen no matter how crazy the VCs are. I don't see that happening and being underwritten against any sort of ten year, twenty year, you know, life cycle of return on investment. And so my question for you is, like, what type of space projects should we be pushing into the, you know, the the NASA world, the government funded world, the even the nonprofit world versus what is commercializable today? And do you see both as important going forward that we that we kind of have this, you know, taxpayer funded r and d, the really fringe scientific experiments, and then we commercialize thing when they're ready?
Speaker 7:Well, I I think two things really that I'd like to see from from NASA mainly Mhmm. Is is answering the big science questions, like, is there other life out there?
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And and also let's explore what's out there. Like, I just posted a picture this morning from the the new Vera Rubin Observatory. Amazing. You know, just amazing stuff that you could continue to do things like that. And but I think as far as develop, they should develop technology that's that that takes a lot of money to develop that maybe commercial companies aren't gonna invest in now.
Speaker 7:Like, I think the next thing, you know, Jared Isaacman was talking about is is NEP, and I'm I'm always counting that too as the next step in propulsion. So rather than than build a giant rocket that competes against people that already build giant rockets, why don't they go develop the next thing? Mhmm. Next the next technology. I think that's probably the best use of taxpayer money through NASA is to advance science.
Speaker 1:How do you think about oh, sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 11:I was just gonna say, fundamentally, I think NASA needs to figure out if it's a jobs program or
Speaker 10:if it
Speaker 1:had goals.
Speaker 11:Right? I mean, I think that's a that's a thing. Like, SLS made no sense in in the commercial rocket economy. Maybe it did when it started planning twenty years ago or whatever, but in for the last decade or more, it's made zero sense. But yet it's still kinda hanging on because congress wants to fund jobs in Alabama, which is, you know, maybe a noble purpose.
Speaker 11:But, you know, is that the purpose of NASA, I think, is the thing that they need to figure out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about extraterrestrial life? Do you ascribe to the dark forest theory? Or, like, do you think it's promising? Do you think, you know, we will have an answer to this in a few years?
Speaker 1:Do you think we're getting closer? What is your take overall?
Speaker 7:I yeah. We need we need to get we need more information, definitely. I I hope it's just life is extremely rare. It's not, you know, some some great filter that's that's still ahead of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That'd be good.
Speaker 2:What are the what are the the kind of upcoming events in the next one to two years in commercial space that you think can be major catalysts for the industry overall that maybe you guys are working on or or that that you wanna see from the industry broadly?
Speaker 7:Well, something that we're not working on, but it's something that that SpaceX are developing is Starship. I I I have really started this company realizing that Starship and other, you know, reusable rockets are gonna be be bringing massive amounts of cargo to to LEO, and it needs to go other places. So that's what's the premise of this company. So I'm excited about Starship finishing development and becoming a commercial, you know, commercially viable spacecraft. And then Mhmm.
Speaker 7:What we have really you know, we have the the mirror that that Eric talked about earlier, and energy is really for for government and defense. And then we have Helios coming on online here next year. We're developing it right now, which is basically adding a third stage to Falcon nine and other mid sized rockets. And that's what it can allow us to get, you know, more easily to to high energy orbits. So those are the two big things for us right now.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Super excited about lunar landers, Mars landers, all kinds of cool stuff.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be awesome.
Speaker 11:I was just gonna tack on. I think you're seeing one big trend is that Space Force, the the rhetoric of counter space or space defense activities has really ramped up in the last six months. In the public sphere, there's not been a lot of investment in in, you know, sort of space on space defense. But in privately, SpaceSource has been talking about that a lot more. And then they started about six months ago really publicly, not coincidentally with the change in administration.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And so the the question, I think, for companies like ours is, you know, do dollars follow that rhetoric? Is there an increased investment in that sort of thing? And then on the commercial side, I think you have an awful lot of operators who are trying to figure out how do they carve out a niche and survive in a post Starlink world. How do they figure out, you know, what their space is as a commercial comsat operator that, you know, once you have the dominant Starlink player in the
Speaker 1:I'm interested to hear about the challenges of developing rocketry or or engines at different scales. I've heard this story that one of the reasons the Raptor engine was so successful was that it wasn't a mega project in the sense that you didn't need to bring in a crane necessarily to work on it. There were more smaller modular pieces. Is that true? And then I'd love to know, about the challenges of of scaling up and making bigger rockets.
Speaker 1:It I was tracking obviously, I want Starship to work as soon as possible. It feels like it's a really, really tough challenge, and it feels like it's a harder challenge than the Falcon one or the Falcon nine, which, you know, went it did it did crash several times, exploded several times. You know, SpaceX is a much more mature con company, and so you would expect that it's not just, you know, the first time that they're doing it. It's actually something fundamental about the larger scale engineering that's going on there. So can you share anything about that?
Speaker 7:Well, we've become a lot better at developing rocket engines, you know, over the last, know, twenty years, certainly. When when we started SpaceX, there wasn't really it wasn't like startups would do rocket engines. That's why I had such a hard time hiring people in the early days because nobody believed in it. And that now there's many teams all over the world that are developing liquid rocket engines, and it's it's never easy. It's not.
Speaker 7:But, but it's it's doable. And modern, you know, modern tools are affordable and and available, and certainly modern manufacturing techniques like three d printing is is almost cheap code for for rocket engines. But when you're doing something like Raptor, which is extremely high pressure, full flow stage combustion, very advanced engine, the most advanced engine ever, It's just it takes the difficulty to 11. So not surprising that there have been setbacks. Also, one of the hardest things to do, in in in launch vehicle recovery is getting back in upper stage.
Speaker 7:You know? You saw we had pretty good success with Falcon nine getting back to first stage and certainly flying the boosters back and land awesome landing. But second upper stages are are coming in with a lot of energy, so really hard. They're gonna solve it. It's it's Just a matter of time.
Speaker 7:Yep. This time.
Speaker 1:Well, it is rocket science after all.
Speaker 2:You know, you'd love say it. People don't people don't use that phrase. It's not rocket you know, this isn't rocket science anymore because we've gotten really good at
Speaker 1:There's a lot of stuff that is rocket science.
Speaker 7:Absolutely. Heard that? Come on, Tom. It's not rocket science.
Speaker 1:It is rocket science. Well, I'm sure you have a lot of rocket science to do. We'll let you get back to it. We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. This is a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks for
Speaker 1:the answer. Guys. Have a great rest
Speaker 3:of Next
Speaker 2:up, we have Derek Thompson. Breaking news. From Truth Social where Okay. News breaks.
Speaker 5:News breaks apparently.
Speaker 2:Trump says, Iran has officially responded to our obliteration of their nuclear facilities with a very weak response, which we expected and have very effectively countered. There have been 14 missiles fired, 13 were knocked down, and one was set free because it was headed in a non threatening direction. I am pleased to report that no Americans were harmed and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, if they've gotten it all out of their system
Speaker 1:They've gotten it?
Speaker 2:How much? And there will hopefully be no further hate. Okay. I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice which made it possible for no lives to be lost and nobody to be injured.
Speaker 7:Wow.
Speaker 2:Perhaps Iran can now proceed to peace and harmony in the region and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Speaker 1:That'd be good.
Speaker 2:It's a good way to it's a strong way to end your post now if you wanna come across presidential. Yes. Just bolt on. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, we have our next guest, Derek Thompson, the, author of Abundance in the studio.
Speaker 2:Welcome to
Speaker 1:the stream.
Speaker 8:Great to be here. Thanks, guys.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the move.
Speaker 2:A a businessman now.
Speaker 1:You're a businessman now.
Speaker 9:I'm a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a c I'm a CEO.
Speaker 1:You're a CEO?
Speaker 9:I mean, I'm everything. You you name whatever piece
Speaker 2:Wearing hats.
Speaker 9:Corporate suite that you wanna name. I I guess I am that. I'm CTO. I'm COO.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:Feels great. He's about to become a hyper capitalist. Vibe shift.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Talk to us about the move. What I I mean, we're gonna gonna go into a bunch of stuff, but give maybe just start with a little bit of background and then the decision to move.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Sure. So I I I've been running for the Atlantic for seventeen years,
Speaker 1:which is, like Seventeen?
Speaker 9:Honestly, like, freaking disgusting to even contemplate.
Speaker 2:I don't see Wait. How how old were you when you joined?
Speaker 9:I wanna say four. I mean, I'm pretty much better about myself. The answer is 22. So I joined in February. Wow.
Speaker 9:After graduating from college, I was like a comms intern for a while. Mhmm. I'm currently the comms intern for my Substack. So it's right back to that old position. Cool.
Speaker 9:And I wrote for sixteen sixteen point seven five years at the Atlantic, and it was great. And the truth is, like, I've always had, like, a little bit of wanderlust. I've always felt like I had a bit of an entrepreneurial bone on my body. It was never a great time to leave because the Atlantic is really a wonderful place to work. They let you write about, in my position, in my case, about whatever I wanted.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Tech, science, economics, social mysteries, conundrums. And finally, I just thought, you know, abundance, the book has become a lot of things. It certainly become something almost like something that could be a full time job. Like, if I just wanted to reply to and engage with, like, the political feedback, that would be its own job.
Speaker 9:And part of this was like, this is an opportunity to do something on my own, to do something that's really independent, not put the Atlantic in a position where they're, like, a nonpolitical organization with a writer who's doing some things that are explicitly political. But also, like, I just kinda wanted to know and this is what I said, I think, in my original essay. Maybe you guys felt like this when you started this, this show. Like, what does my mind feel like when I wake up in the morning with a new job, a new task for it? Right?
Speaker 9:Like, you work at, like, a maybe, like, a VC. Right? Or you work at, maybe a private equity firm. And, like, you wake up and, like, do you process the world? You process the world the way it's most remunerative to you at that private equity firm or at that VC.
Speaker 9:And when you change your job, you change your mind. Right? New tasks, new questions, new mysteries are unlocked. And I wanted to do that for myself. I wanted to, like, wake up with a new set of questions, and so that's what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:Was there a price that could have kept you at The Atlantic? Many people say everyone has a price, but it feels like legacy media is not set up to retain superstars. And I imagine
Speaker 9:No. Look. The Atlantic paid me well. And Yeah. And the book paid me well.
Speaker 9:I'm I'm really lucky from that standpoint. There's not really a number. Right? Like, know, $1,000,000,000. Okay.
Speaker 9:Now suddenly, you're talking about something completely silly. But, like, I wanted the the freedom the freedom to say, alright. Like, I'm 39 years old. Right? If I stay for another eleven years, I'm 50 years old.
Speaker 9:Like, now I'm basically on the other side of the hill. At some point, you wanna, like, be in your sort of in your your electric prime. Be like, what what is my mind like? What is my life like when I give myself an entirely new task of starting my own company, of thinking about the world from perspective of I'm writing for myself, not writing for this invest institution. So, no, I I don't think there was a number.
Speaker 9:And I also think it's important to say, like, the Atlantic is one of these places that as much as independent media is growing, and, obviously, I think that's great, there are a couple empires that are going too. The Times is growing like crazy. The Atlantic is hiring like crazy. They pay their writers over overall, I think, quite well. So this was not really about about money at all.
Speaker 9:This was about, being in a fortunate position to take, to take a risk that had nothing to do with money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you just cared about money, you'd become an AI researcher and you join Meta. Yeah. Get a 100,000,000. It's a
Speaker 1:Well, we gotta pitch him on private equity because he sounds like he doesn't wanna be a private equity guy, but I think scale the sub stack start acquiring, rolling up other other independent journalism.
Speaker 2:Could happen.
Speaker 1:Could happen. I I I do wanna talk about, advice from Ezra about this. Obviously, you wrote a book with him. He's been at the New York Times. He's been started his own thing.
Speaker 1:What was his advice to you as you kinda stepped out in this next, next era?
Speaker 9:Question. No one's asking that that question before. So I told Ezra three days before the book came out. Mhmm. We had just done here, I'll set the scene for you.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We had just done Freed Zakaria show, and it was one of the first interviews that we did together. And we were in the hut are you were you guys are based in San Francisco?
Speaker 1:We're in LA. Polygon.
Speaker 9:Okay. Cool. So so in New York, Hudson Yards is that, like, enormous, like, skyscraper mall. Right? And we go, like, get some food and get some lunch.
Speaker 9:And we sit down, and I say, hey. By the way, just so you know, I'm starting to think a little bit about doing something independent. Mhmm. This was before abundance became what it was. This is before a single book had been officially sold.
Speaker 9:So I I kinda think I wanna do something on my own. And he said, you know why? Like, the Atlantic's a wonderful perch. And I honestly told him I told him what I told you. I was like like, the job of, like, being a content creator.
Speaker 9:Right? It's a it's a weird and wonderful job. Your job is to wake up in the morning and think, what do other people want from me that lives in here that I can put out here and give to them? It's a really weird and wonderful job. And I feel like that work requires a certain amount of churn and experimentation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:If you're stuck somewhere and the I didn't feel stuck at the Atlantic, but I was there for seventeen years. If you were in one place for seventeen years, there's a certain amount of experimentation that you're essentially choosing to block yourself out of. Yeah. Right? And so I I told him, like, I really wanted to to experience, like, you know, what different kinds of questions, what different kinds of writing styles and podcasting styles, maybe eventually, like, know, video podcasting styles Yeah.
Speaker 9:Would would eventually be unlocked by going independent. I I think that's a lot of the the appeal of substack appeal for people in a certain place or or Beehive or some of these other places. Patreon is really getting into the game here as well. Yeah. It's this opportunity to be like, alright.
Speaker 9:What does it what does it feel like to be a content creator for myself? I'm not answering anybody else, and I'm taking on all of the responsibility and the stress that comes with, you know, being my own boss. I feel like that's an experiment that more people should run on themselves.
Speaker 1:What about the timing of the launch? Always hear about the big bump that comes from, like, a big podcast appearance or something like that. Is there a world where you think you should have been doing email capture in the lead up to the book? So when the you did the interviews for the book, people could just go subscribe immediately. Is this the ideal time?
Speaker 1:It seems like it's it's really well timed because the, like, the book has really, really done extremely well, and so you're you're in this, like, capturing moment. It would have been probably much riskier to launch this a year from now, but, did that factor into it? Did you did you think about doing it before or later? How'd you land on this time?
Speaker 9:Look. Here's here's here's a framework that I that I thought about. It's not like the only framework that in in my head is separate Obviously, having a number one New York Times bestselling book is a good opportunity Yeah. To do something new.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 9:Because a certain number of people are already paying attention to. Like, there's a certain amount of obviousness there that I don't wanna be, like, cynical or or conceded or vain, but I think it's just flatly true. Mhmm. And there was a certain calculation that was like, if I do want to do this in the next ten years Mhmm. Does it really make sense to think am I gonna have another another number one bestselling book in five years?
Speaker 9:Like, almost certainly not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In ten
Speaker 9:years gonna polyamore it on. Like, it is an incredibly fortunate and, frankly, just strange thing. I mean Yeah.
Speaker 10:Don't think there's
Speaker 9:no there's no reason for you know this. Our book did not hit number one on week one. It did hit number one on week two or three or four. It hit number one on week five. Like, a a discourse built around the book Yeah.
Speaker 9:That allowed it to sort of, like, hover in the two to three range and then spike to number one in a way that my book agent said she's never seen this before. Like, no book, she said she said, I've had a lot of books hit number one, none for the first time in week five. So it was it was a really original not original. Really, maybe, unique experience in terms of the way that it hit the discourse.
Speaker 1:Was that a directly
Speaker 9:popularity of
Speaker 1:the democrat? Was that a product of, like, the the the podcast appearance strategy I saw as we're going and you both of you guys going on, like, a really wide swath of podcasts and and bringing the message to places. And I think a lot of authors, when they launch, they think, like, I'm gonna do, like, five big things on week one and then, like, you know, I'm done. But it it felt like you were kind of taking the message to all these different pockets of the Internet and really capitalizing on it over a long time. And it didn't feel like it was necessarily like, okay.
Speaker 1:You got 50% of the audience in week one and then 10% and then 10% and then 10%. It felt more like you're having different frames on the same conversation again and again and actually building that momentum.
Speaker 9:Yes. So if we were doing, like, book publishing economics one zero one.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? Okay. The book publisher controls very little distribution themselves. Right? There's very few channels of exposure that the book publisher controls themselves.
Speaker 9:Right? Even if you love reading nonfiction, my guess is that you aren't going to randomhouse.com to check out their nonfiction titles every Tuesday when the new nonfiction titles come out. Right?
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 9:What do you check? The New York Times book review. Podcasts that you listen to.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 9:Other sites that review books. Right? TV interviews. Those are the channels of exposure. When you're a book author, you're basically in a position of begging.
Speaker 9:You're in a you you you go to Fritza Carr and you say, please, please, can you talk to me about this book? Yes.
Speaker 5:And you
Speaker 9:go to Barry Weiss and you say, please, can you talk to me? And you go to the far left podcast, you say, please. If you go to the right wing podcast, you say, Brett Yeah. You know, Ben Shapiro, please.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You're asking, please, please, please, of everybody and their assistants and the assistants producers and the producers' assistants. You're begging the entire world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Made this and and almost every author is doing that. Every author is in this position of begging because often other people control channels distribution that they don't.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 9:Now in Ezra's case, he he arguably has with the Ezra Klein show, like, the medium of exposure that is most successful for launching books. So that's unique experience for me and my coauthor. That said, two things. One, I would guess that if you really looked into the numbers, what sold this book early on, despite the impression that you gave that this book was on a lot of different podcasts, what sells books is still television. And the reason why is not because television is bigger than podcasts.
Speaker 9:In a weird way, it's because television is shorter, and it's a worse product. But a worse product gives you a better amuse bouche for the book. If I talk to Lex Friedman for four hours about abundance
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 9:Exactly how many more hours do you want to spend inside of abundance?
Speaker 1:Like That's a
Speaker 9:great point. For me.
Speaker 1:That's a great point.
Speaker 9:Talk to Frieda Caria
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:For ten minutes about the book. It's this little that makes it people think, oh, that sounds exactly what I want. The future democratic party, the future of liberalism. So my feeling is that while podcasts are important Yeah. Because in a weird way, the product of a book is even more the conversation about the book than the product than the book itself.
Speaker 9:The best way to sell a book, weirdly, even in this, like, podcast heavy moment, is still television. That's my that's my unempirical Yeah. Vibe y bet right now.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I mean, I noticed that with I mean, Ezra on his I believe it's his own branded podcast channel put out a twenty minute video essay outlining the thesis for the book.
Speaker 1:It also that video did very well. I believe it went viral and got maybe millions of views. That that feels like number one bestseller on on that week. But I think that happened on week one, not on week five, which is interesting.
Speaker 9:Which is weird. Yeah. I mean, so what happened was, John Green, the author of the fault in our stars, who's become a nonfiction writer, wrote a book called everything is tuberculosis. And that book, I I I don't think I can share the inside numbers that I have.
Speaker 1:But he smoked it.
Speaker 9:We did great week one. We that book kicked our ass. Like, we weren't even we weren't even close. Like, I don't if you guys are the what kind of sports fans you guys are. Like, that book was, like, the Miami heat.
Speaker 9:I'm say, that book was the Cleveland Cavaliers. We were the Miami heat.
Speaker 2:Like, every summer was
Speaker 9:a blowout. It destroyed it.
Speaker 2:So, like,
Speaker 9:we we weren't even close, number one in
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 9:Week one. And that does go to show that that with book selling, it's all about channels of exposure. Yep. And who's already a celebrity Yeah. Owns their channel of exposure.
Speaker 9:Yeah. And so the book publisher, by giving them a lot of money, is essentially buying their channel of exposure, and that's partly what they're paying for. Yeah. But, yeah, the strategy you know, beyond strategy, there's this question of, like, how do you sell how do you sell a book?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Then there's also this question of, like I I don't mean to get, like, weird existential, but, like, what what's the job of a book? Like, what's what's its job? And I think the job of a nonfiction book is to get people talking about it. Of course, you want people to buy it. But, like
Speaker 2:Or start your presidential run.
Speaker 9:Or start your presidential run. Yeah. Honestly, you should
Speaker 1:do it
Speaker 9:the other way around. Because the best way to get attention for yourself like, if you dudes if you guys run for president as a ticket Yeah. You'll get a ton of media exposure.
Speaker 1:A ticket? We haven't even thought about that. That's hilarious.
Speaker 9:Then you'll build then you'll
Speaker 1:build buy
Speaker 2:your book.
Speaker 9:Totally free. It's totally free media. Yeah. Because all these people, the New York Times is like
Speaker 1:They have to talk to you.
Speaker 9:Guys doing in the Washington Post.
Speaker 2:Like, what
Speaker 9:are these guys doing? Right? You get all this free media exposure.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Then everyone knows your name. Then you go to a book publisher. Then they give you a lot of money, and then you have this this, platform that's been co constructed by media organizations that were
Speaker 2:Media industrial
Speaker 9:companies. Even though they didn't even mean to. Yeah. Sure. You should not write the book then go for president.
Speaker 1:Should you
Speaker 4:should do it
Speaker 9:the other way around.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 9:But the but the the the product is the conversation. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 9:The reason to go on podcast, the reason to go, you know, on on shows like this Yeah. Is because, like, you want these ideas to get out in the ether. Like, no one should write a book if they don't wanna talk about it for fifty thousand hours because that is the experience of writing a book. Yep. You finish it, and then if you're lucky, you talk about it for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, talking about things actually in the book. This has been fascinating so far. I've really enjoyed this. But, one of the narratives that I keep coming back to is the the story of California High Speed Rail.
Speaker 1:I grew up in California. I have friends and family members who have worked on that project, actually. And I think for a lot of technologists and Californians, these the comparison between SpaceX and the California high speed rail, story really draw a very clear conclusion in people's mind, which is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Mhmm. And I'm wondering how you do you think that that narrative of, you know, one was literally rocket science, but at the same time, we had put things up into space.
Speaker 1:It wasn't entirely a new capability. The other was a train, which, you know, we've had trains for generations. And we tried to build a train, and we tried to build capability to get to low Earth orbit. One feels very successful, and the other feels like we didn't get anything out of it. And I think for a lot of people, the takeaway is let's not have the government even try and do things.
Speaker 1:Let's let the private sector do as much as possible. And that trade off between if there is an economic feedback or there is a profit motive or a payback, that will act as a better incentive to actually get the result that people want, which is transportation or the ability to get space. How how how how how have you grappled with that anecdote specifically?
Speaker 9:I'm a liberal who believes in a large role for private sector innovation.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:There's no question that SpaceX is an extraordinary company that has done things for rocket technology and especially for rocket efficiency
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That no other company in the world has done. No other individual in the world has done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:How many people hasn't moved to space? Space?
Speaker 1:A lot.
Speaker 9:How how many?
Speaker 1:Like Dozens?
Speaker 9:A thousand?
Speaker 1:Hundreds? I don't know. It's just the ISS. In California?
Speaker 2:This is our this is our Iran population question. Yeah. This is our million.
Speaker 9:50,000,000. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In California.
Speaker 9:To build infrastructure
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:That is a public good for 50,000,000 people is a different challenge than building technology whose proof point requires several dozen. It's an entirely different challenges. And that's why we
Speaker 2:need Yeah.
Speaker 3:I would just I
Speaker 2:would say, like, SpaceX has provided Yeah. Internet infrastructure
Speaker 1:for billions of people. As the people in this case, like, because that's the the that's the benefit that people really want.
Speaker 2:Public benefit is that people in Iran right now can
Speaker 1:Can get
Speaker 2:satellite Internet. You know?
Speaker 9:And and and I and I think that that the value of Starlink is is sensational. Yeah. But when you're talking about like, I mean, when you think about, like, broadband technology Yeah. Like, broadband technology is already being built by a lot of private companies. Right?
Speaker 9:So, like, it's not as if the creation of Starlink is taking away what has historically been a public service and is creating a private company out of it.
Speaker 5:Like Yeah.
Speaker 9:Broadband companies exist. Like, Charter exists. Comcast exists. So I think it's great that there are private companies that are working on that. When we're talking about questions like public goods Yeah.
Speaker 9:When we're talking about roads and bridges, things that are frankly quite difficult to monetize, and it's not entirely clear that we want to, like, directly monetize them. Like, do we want to charge poor people a certain fee every time they use a road or a bridge, or does it make sense to live in a rich society with a progressive tax structure such that we can tax the rich a little bit more than the low income and use that money to create a set of public goods that makes life better for everybody, that allows, frankly, low income people to use those roads, to drive into areas where they can provide services for high income people such that everyone turns out better off. I I see a large, large role for the federal government and for state and local governments to look out for public goods. And to me, when I say public goods and you look at the actual budgets, the federal, local, state governments, overwhelmingly, what we're talking about is health care, subsidized health care. We're talking about education.
Speaker 9:Yep. And we're talking about infrastructure and transportation, things like roads, things like bridges. I think there's a huge role for government to play
Speaker 8:these places. I'm I'm totally
Speaker 1:with you.
Speaker 9:I I I I like having both. I like having mixed economy. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Muscular government and also, even more I would like to see, and the book is probably about this, even more purposeful pro tech, pro science strategy. Because the truth is, if you look at what SpaceX did for rocketry, why haven't we done that for Alzheimer's? Why isn't there, like, a SpaceX for, like, chronic inflammation Yeah. Or SpaceX for carbon capture technology? Yeah.
Speaker 9:So I I see a huge role for both of these things. I don't think that the success of government in some places proves that the private sector can't do certain things very well or that the success of SpaceX means that the government should get out of the business of building bridges.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I agree with you on the roads and bridges thing. I guess my my my worry is, like, the free market solution to how do I the real problem that you're solving is how do you get people from LA to San Francisco? How do you move people around California?
Speaker 1:And the free market solution is a one hour Southwest flight that costs $100 or a Camry that drives you there and maybe costs $20 in gas or something like that. And so the free markets kind of solve, like, if you have six hours, you can do it in $20. Or if you have one hour, you can do it for a $100, and you kind of choose those. And we kind of came in with, like, we want something that's cheaper for two hours, but it there wasn't this, like, massive market pull. And so the it was more like the decision to to to create that interim solution Right.
Speaker 1:Just just never really happened. But, I mean, we
Speaker 10:You know, we've been kinda moving to
Speaker 9:Just just stop there. Yeah. I love Southwest. I love flying on airlines. I at no point in my life, am I like, what we need to do is, like, nationalize United.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Do that.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 9:Like, built LAX?
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 9:Right? Like, you need public infrastructure or infrastructure that is partly publicly financed
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 9:In order to create a kind of platform technology Yeah. Platform for the private sector to to succeed. Yeah. In this way, if you look at the history of Elon Musk's companies, like, what is the total number of government contracts and loan guarantees that SpaceX and and Tesla have benefited from in order to become the companies that they are? I'm pretty sure it numbers in the billions, especially when you count all the NASA contracts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess the question is,
Speaker 9:like, should we huge Yeah. Huge opportunity for a public private partnership to to give us some of the outcomes that we're most proud of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. With the California High Speed Rail example, the question, I I I guess, is is it was it a mistake for the government to pick high speed rail as an important project? Like, was it a misranking? Should have spent more money on roads and or was it just the execution?
Speaker 9:I mean, billions of dollars are spent on a on a rail system. I mean, $33,000,000,000, were essentially, tacitly approved by a bond that was voted on by the public. Yeah. And several billion dollars were actually spent constructing rail that isn't connecting anything to anything right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So,
Speaker 9:clearly, if you were looking back, like, the total of met the total number of man hours spent and dollars allocated on high speed rail has not been worth it for people who live in California. Yeah. I don't want that failure
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:To indite the good that the public sector can do any more than I think you would say that the failure of one SpaceX launch proves that SpaceX is, in fact, totally overrated. Like,
Speaker 2:right Yeah.
Speaker 3:How much,
Speaker 2:switching gears a little bit, how much are you digging into general research funding? We had Andrew Huberman on the show last week talking about his concerns around NIH.
Speaker 9:Tell me his concerns. Can you I actually I didn't see that. Can you
Speaker 1:summarize So he had a he had a long interview with Jay Bhattacharya. Yeah. And and essentially, the proposal is to cut government funding to university labs and research and scientific research labs by something like 40%, and that's a pretty significant chunk. He was very worried about this. There are some unnecessary costs potentially that he highlighted, but in general, this is the is the research that cannot be underwritten by the private sector because it does not if you're just doing research on how do we fall asleep or, like, how do we how does the brain work at a very abstract or what is the what is DNA?
Speaker 1:You can't patent DNA as soon as you discover it, and yet as soon as you've discovered boom. There's a huge, huge, you know, massive boom in in bi in biotechnology, but it won't be captured by a single patent holder on the underlying
Speaker 9:stuff. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so So that just feels like an area that you could really dig and dive into in an area where it's okay to be kind of skeptical of this hyper capitalist viewpoint and, you know, venture backed companies can solve everything when
Speaker 1:when someone is smart as people in world are It's it's broad. It it it's it's a it's a ton of funding of a whole bunch of different research areas. They're all they all can't be underwritten by the private sector in any way versus being very prescriptive. We need to train from here to here, and we are gonna hire the people to build it. That feels like much much harder for the government to get right.
Speaker 9:I I I agree with the way you guys are thinking about this, and maybe it means I agree with the way that Andrew's thinking about it as well. I think what's happening at the NIH right now under HHS is horrendous. I think if what you wanted to do Mhmm. Was to reduce America's annual deficit by $18,000,000,000, which is what we're cutting from NIH
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:You could either cut NIH like, the the the the of scientific discovery for it, not just The US, the entire world. You cut NIH by 40%, or you could cut the corporate income tax cut by 0.4%. Like, why why not why not just, like, kind of reduce the size of the corporate income tax cut by a microscopic percent and still fund scientists Yeah. To discover the basis of Alzheimer's and chronic inflammation and multiple sclerosis and pancreatic cancer. Yeah.
Speaker 9:You said it really well.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Knowledge can't be patented, period. Like, when the first scientists who looked inside the Gila monster's mouth discovered that there was a little hormone there that seemed to suppress its appetite and regulate its insulin, you can't patent a lizard's tongue. But our knowledge, our subsidized knowledge of the liquid on top of the lizard's tongue gave us GLP one drugs, which now appear to be something like a miracle drug for everything. I mean, they don't just help people lose weight. They don't just help people reduce inflammation.
Speaker 9:They literally seem to there's a study going on right now that they might reduce rates of Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's might be caused in part by inflammation in the brain. And if g o p one drugs work by not only reducing obesity but also reducing chronic inflammation, they might ironically or, incidentally, be a neurodegenerative drug that works through the gut brain, interface. That's fucking crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we see
Speaker 9:this by looking in a lizard and no smart VC. Like, Marc Andreessen's brilliant, but he would be an idiot if he told scientists if he gave scientists tens of millions of dollars to just look in the mouths of a bunch of reptiles. That's dumb. That sounds really dumb, but it's really wonderful to have a publicly funded organization that asks scientists who simply discover the truths of the universe with the hope that if it's true, someone along the line can find a way to make a product with it that makes money and saves people's lives. So I think we need a really aggressively funded NIH and NSF.
Speaker 9:I think what's happening right now in the Trump administration is really, really sad. And, Jay Bhattacharya, if you're out there, I would love to talk to you about what's happening at NIH because I know you a little bit. We've talked a little bit. I know you don't want this deep down, and I would love to talk about how we could amend NIH policy to truly make Americans healthy again and make America great again because cutting NIH by 40% ain't ain't it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the frustration from Andrew was seeing, you know, the increased Yeah. Spending and and trying to reckon with the the two, decisions there. Let's switch to something less politically charged. Can you give us the highlights of your conversation with, mom Donnie?
Speaker 2:You released that this morning
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right right before we got on the air, so we haven't had a chance to listen. But I'm sure it was, I'm sure it'll be entertaining.
Speaker 9:Look. Let me, give you my reaction as a, like, a person and then it's like a political thinker. He's unbelievably charming and engaging and, and thoughtful. Like, you know when you know when you're talking to someone who's listening or who at least is very good at performing the act of making you think you're listening to them? Like, I only know this guy for thirty seven minutes, but, I loved our conversation.
Speaker 9:I really, really loved it. I think he's wrong about a lot. I think rent freezes are a terrible idea to increase housing supply. I think fundamentally, you you cannot try to cap the price of something whose supply you're trying to increase. The way I put it in the podcast is I was like, you want grocery stores in New York to be better.
Speaker 9:If you pass a law that capped receipts at grocery stores at $50, what do you think grocery stores would start doing? They would stop they would stop stocking the shelves because you can't make money selling nice stuff to people if it's illegal to make $51 on the receipt. Yep. So in the same way, if you cap the price of a good and you're trying to increase its supply, you're you're you're you're tying the hand behind your back that you're trying to use. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:He was respectful, but we disagreed about that point. We disagreed about the fact that I think I'm persuaded that while I'm not against public sector unions in the big picture, if you look at why New York City subways have among the highest, transit construction cost in the world in a per mile basis, one part of it is that their union staffing levels are four times higher than the international average. You you cannot build you cannot build anything efficiently Yeah. If the first rule of your company is your staffing levels have to be four times higher than all your competitors. Like That's really rough.
Speaker 9:Doesn't work. So I asked him whether he was interested in talking to public sector unions, which are a democratic ally. Of course, if he was interested in in in building public transit efficiently and increasing public excellence. Again, he disagreed. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:That said, I was really impressed by his insistence that he wanted to be a politician who was outcomes first and process second. And there was a certain amount of ambivalence that he seemed to communicate to me. Again, maybe he's lying. I don't know him that well. He's a nice guy on the phone.
Speaker 9:There's a certain amount of of sort of procedural ambivalence that I really like in a politician. Like, if, if Jay Bhattacharya came on your show, right, or or if RFK junior came on your show or whoever else in in tech policy, someone in on, who's doing AI policy, and they told you that the outcomes that they wanted were the outcomes that you wanted. They were ambivalent about what process it took to get those outcomes, but they were going to try their damnedest to make sure that when they left office, those were the outcomes that everybody could agree about. Right? There's something that's, like, very refreshing and, like, nonideological about that perspective, and I heard a little bit of it.
Speaker 9:That said, you know, I'm
Speaker 2:Is that is that tying into changing his mind around how police should be funded where he
Speaker 9:We talked about he's him changing his mind on two things. One, he told the New York Times he's changed his mind in the role of private developers in housing. I think he used to be more on the side of, like, the government should build up the houses. I'm more on the side of the government should fund some of the housing construction, but, like, we've got private companies that are really good at building housing. Let's let's not do what the private sector is already doing, too much.
Speaker 9:But the other thing he changed his mind about, as you said, is defund the police. He talked four years ago, five years ago about defund the police being, a slogan that he believed in. And now he really, his policy is fund the police. He thinks that police don't solve crimes fast enough and that in many cases, they're forced, and this is clearly true, to act as social workers rather than police officers. And so if you got a police officer or, say, a 100 police officers who have to basically be, you know, street therapists and social workers all day long, how are they gonna solve crimes?
Speaker 9:How are they gonna stop crime? And so he said he's changed his mind there a little bit as he talked to more police officers. And the end of our conversation was, I thought, a really refreshing point that he made that he thinks that his job he sees his job as surrounding himself with people who aren't too fast to say yes to all of his ideas. He likes being around people who challenge his ideas. And I think that's I think that's a useful thing for really just I mean, anybody, any politician or executive.
Speaker 9:And so there were many things in the conversation that I was impressed by. But, you know, also, fundamentally, I think it's just important to say there's there are very big differences between socialism and liberalism. And he's a socialist, and I'm a liberal. So we're not gonna agree about everything, but you have to be able to talk to people you don't agree with.
Speaker 2:What are you hoping to see out of tech, the intersection of tech in Washington in a post Elon White House world?
Speaker 9:You know, we gotta get beyond this this insanity where the administration attacks on progressive thought become attacks on the kind of talent America needs to train and attract and retain to keep our dominance and to keep the really valuable information clusters that we have here. If we attack Harvard because we're pissed off at them and force all of the international students to leave, or if we encourage some of the smartest people around the world who, deep down, wanna be at Caltech, wanna be at Harvard, wanna be at Duke, we push them to be in London and Beijing and Shanghai. We are losing so many great ideas, so much agglomeration, the interaction effects that happen when you put a lot of smart people together in America. Like, it's important that Silicon Valley is in California and not in Brazil or France or Poland. Like, there is a special sauce to America, I think.
Speaker 9:You wanna you wanna attract and retain these people. I wanna I want us to rationalize our talent and immigration policy and not have it be a kind of, unfortunately, like, assassinated bystander in this war between the Trump administration and a progressive movement that they think has gone too far. I think we really need to to get back down to, a reasonable basis on on immigration policy in particular. And then I would like to I would like us to add back the funding to NIH and NSF. You know, our I'm sure Andrew talked about this a little bit.
Speaker 9:Like, is it possible that there are so called indirect costs? Right? Money that I work at Harvard, let's say, you're NIH. You give me some money for my Alzheimer's study. You also give me money for Harvard.
Speaker 9:Is it possible that though that Harvard money, that those indirect costs are too high? Yeah. Sure. Let's have a public debate about that. Let's have public testimony.
Speaker 9:Let's not cut NIH by $18,000,000,000 and say, well, hopefully, we're only cutting the the fat and then the muscle. So better immigration policy, and, and and better science policy, number one. I wish I had a good answer on AI. I don't know what the hell the next five years look like. I feel like the smart people that I follow change their mind every six months.
Speaker 9:Sometimes they accelerate. Sometimes they decelerate. I wish I had, like, this sort of crystal ball that could tell me what, like, optimal AI policy coming out of Washington looked like. Right now, I don't. But, hopefully, in the substack, I'll be able to get some answers there.
Speaker 2:Well, we're excited to follow along. That was great. Thank you for joining. This was great.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Yeah. We'd love have you back. We can talk all day.
Speaker 9:Alright. Great. I'll do it.
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Talk to
Speaker 1:you soon. Later. Bye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I went way over. Stack over. Thought we were five minutes over. We
Speaker 1:got eleven minutes over. We have a have a light system in the studio, but the golden retriever does not concern himself with the lion does not concern himself with who's in the waiting room. We have our next guest from Juniper Square. Thank you for waiting. Great to talk to you.
Speaker 1:And we got some news.
Speaker 2:We got some news.
Speaker 6:What do we got? Be here, guys.
Speaker 1:What do we got?
Speaker 6:We got two things. We got a $130,000,000 series d. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:I've been waiting to do that all day.
Speaker 6:Glad we got it out. Yeah. And then we launched our AI product that we call Junie AI. Congratulations. That's our second
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Bit of news.
Speaker 1:Now that we got the important stuff out of the way, who are you? What do you do?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm I've become a fan of what you guys are doing.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it.
Speaker 6:It. Glad to be on the show. It's really interesting. Yeah. Thank
Speaker 2:So keep it up.
Speaker 1:But yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So my name's Alex. I'm the cofounder, CEO of Juniper Square. Nice. And Juniper Square is an eleven year old technology and services company.
Speaker 6:All of our customers are private markets GPs.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:So venture capital firms, private equity firms, real estate investors, crypto, private credit, you name it. If they raise an outside fund
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Then we help them with fund administration. We help them with technology to manage that fund, reporting. Basically, everything is not the investing, and we've got close to 2,500 customers now, trillion dollars that were responsible for stewarding at about 750 employees.
Speaker 1:2,500 customers. Is that is that not all of them? Like, how how many investors are there? I feel like I I saw that number on your website. You need to update it, by the way.
Speaker 1:It says 2,000 on your website. You're a 2,500. Yeah. We gotta get those numbers out. But I mean, I I feel like there's I mean, we try and talk to I thought we talked to all the VCs.
Speaker 1:We've had we've done hundreds of interviews. I thought we talked to them all. Apparently, there are more.
Speaker 2:There's some left.
Speaker 1:How big is this market? It it feels like like, you know, you talk about private markets investing. That feels like a small market, yet series d is at a 0.1. Like, you're building a big business. How big is this market?
Speaker 6:Right, so you have to kind of take it by asset class, right? Because VC is relatively small as an asset class, both in terms of the capital that it manages and the number of GPs or investment firms that are out there. Private equity and real estate are respectively probably five times as big as venture. So there's thousands and thousands of just think of all the middle market private equity kind of LBO growth focused firms out there, think of all the different real estate investors focused on, you know, apartment buildings or retail or whatever. There's probably about 20,000 GPs globally
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That matter.
Speaker 1:Was this Zerb crash hard for you? Was that a slower growth period for your business? Because it seemed like it was really rough for all the VCs and a lot of investors pulled back, but it's not as like they really shut down their funds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's more like net new fund creation slow.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, was that a real driver or were are you just going after the existing players and so the new ones don't necessarily matter as much?
Speaker 6:No. We definitely felt it. And you're right that we're what we're sensitized to is in a given quarter, a given year, how many new funds were created. Mhmm. Our market share is so low that we still can sell to existing funds, and people switch their providers all the time, but it's always easiest to get the new funds that's raised.
Speaker 6:So we had the double whammy of you know, big focus for us is commercial real estate. So when COVID hit in spring of twenty twenty, you know, it just took out retail. It took out hospitality and hotel. And commercial real estate was it it was really tough slaying Yeah. From, like, 2020, you know, really until 2022.
Speaker 6:And then the rate hike started, and commercial real estate's, you know, heavily CapEx intensive. It's super rate sensitive. And then we had the big bust in, you know, public markets correction. We had the the big overhang of everyone investing at, you know, 100 x revenue multiples in 2021, 2022.
Speaker 1:We're gonna bring those back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're working
Speaker 1:we're working on it here.
Speaker 6:The the sober the sober days of a 100 x revenue multiple, which we're kind of back to now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There he is.
Speaker 1:How do you get through all those times?
Speaker 6:It's recovering. It's coming back.
Speaker 1:How'd you get through the tough times? Did you have to do layoffs or change the direction of the business? Were there any pivots in the story? Kind of
Speaker 2:Specific meditation, track.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Up Sign
Speaker 2:up meditation actually. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Bring it down.
Speaker 6:Yeah. All of the above, you guys. We we had to do some layoffs for sure, like everybody. I mean, we were going into you know, the Fed started hiking rates in, like, late twenty one. But by spring of twenty two is when we had that huge correction
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In the public markets. And by that summer, it was clear that companies like us and pretty much every high growth late stage tech company was spending too much. Right? We were all investing for revenue growth, and we all had to pivot to invest for growth efficiency.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:So we did a round of layoffs then like a lot of people did. It was the first time I ever do that as an entrepreneur. It's not fun by any means, but it was necessary. But then the big thing for us is, you know, we started out as a technology company, but then we added, in 2019, we moved into the world of fund administration and we became a full service fund administrator. And fund administration is like a really critical market for private capital.
Speaker 6:There's probably $3,040,000,000,000,000 dollars of private capital out there in the world, and all almost all of it needs a third party administer administrator. So we we kind of moved into this market that was, like, 50 times the TAM of our previous market, concurrent with this big correction happening. And so those forces ended up working out that, like, the company did really well, and we continued you know, we grow we've grown really quickly through a really challenging market period.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So it wasn't without its bumps and bruises, but it's overall, it's been really well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What Talk about the new AI products. Yeah. I imagine it's a difficult one to build. You can't really, like, LPs and investors can't really tolerate hallucinations, you know.
Speaker 2:I can imagine it it, you know, a product that
Speaker 1:works I don't mind if you leak my fund returns to my direct competitor. No problem. Well well
Speaker 2:Less less of that. But if you're trying to understand fund performance Totally. And things like that or reporting, you can't like, oh, I'm sorry, I misreported. TVPI. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So that is the crux of the challenge is, I mean, as you guys know, you talk about it a lot on the show, You know, generative AI is probabilistic,
Speaker 11:right?
Speaker 6:So next token prediction is probabilistic in its nature. And the kind of work that we do of reporting on financial assets is deterministic, right? Like one plus one always has to equal two. It can never equal one or three or anything like that. And so the real trick is and if you guys ever know, if you've ever taken a pile of invoices or something and uploaded them to ChatGPT or any LLM and been like, hey, tell me the invoice amount for invoice number eight.
Speaker 6:It's terrible at financial data extraction. And so the big hole that we have in the market that we're filling for our customers is if you're an asset manager, if you're a financial services firm, like a venture capitalist or a real estate investor or whatever, one of the key things you have to do is you have to report to your regulators. You have to report to your LPs. That reporting is like you're putting your brand and reputation and your ability to raise more money in the future and everything behind it being accurate and correct. And so the trick is, how do you leverage all of the power of generative AI?
Speaker 6:This, like, all these summation use cases, document extraction, the chat interface that we've all become so accustomed to. How do you fuse that with a set of deterministic tools that do all the precision stuff? The precision math so that, like, you're calling functions in Python to run some code to answer a question. You're not trying to have a next token prediction be the answer of that. And that's basically what this platform is, is it's multi model.
Speaker 6:We have a bunch of different models running inside of it. And the idea is, think of it as like a model orchestration layer, where if you're a private markets GP, there's a lot of work you've got to get done. You want agents for different things. Different models fit different use cases. And you need a way of orchestrating all of that work, ensuring it's compliant, ensuring it's accurate, and that's what this layer does.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Anything else?
Speaker 2:This is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We yeah. We gotta have you back on. We're running behind today as you saw, but we really appreciate you stopping by.
Speaker 2:We're gonna get Congratulations on making it through the fire and come back on when you have more news.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk soon. Happy to be here,
Speaker 2:Congrats you and
Speaker 5:the team.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Alex.
Speaker 1:Bye. Yeah. Really quickly, how'd you sleep last night?
Speaker 2:I hope I'm hopeful.
Speaker 1:I'm on a run. Ninety four. Let's hear
Speaker 2:from last night, I'm gonna be 94. 86.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go for John.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. Ever ever ever ever since I got sick, I've been Off the trail. Trailing you by by, like, 10 points.
Speaker 1:Off your game. Well, we got Justin back from Decagon in the studio. He's certainly been on his game. How are you doing, Jesse?
Speaker 2:Going on? Welcome. Welcome to the craze.
Speaker 8:Good to see you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thanks for hopping on. Give us the news. What does the company do, and what's the breaking news with you?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Hey, everyone watching. I'm Jesse. I'm one of the cofounders of Decagon. If you don't know about us, we're essentially an AI customer service agent.
Speaker 8:And so what this means is, you know, imagine next time you're, you know, booking a hotel room or something. Right? There's an AI agent that's there that you can call or or chat with live, and it knows everything about you. It can book rooms for you. It can upgrade.
Speaker 8:It can answer questions about your loyalty points and and so on. And so, essentially, what we do is we work with these large, you know, usually consumer businesses that have a lot of customers and a lot of, you know, contact center volume. And we're we're there to both, you know, drive a ton of efficiency for them because now their human agents don't have to deal with these more mundane issues. But, also, we are able to give a better customer experience for the, the actual customers. So that's what we do.
Speaker 8:And then today, we're very excited to announce our series c co led by a 16 z and Excel at a 1.5.
Speaker 2:Let's go. Give it a bigger head, John. Oh, there we go. There we go.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the early the early beachhead for the company. I feel like LLMs are so generalizable, and yet go to market is so specific. Every vertical industry has slightly different customer service needs, whether it's a Shopify store that needs access to an inventory management system or refunds or Stripe versus a SaaS product. What has been most interesting to you? What's been where where has adoption been the strongest early on?
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's a good question. So I would say that with most of the use cases out there, the the ones that have, you know, had the had the most impact from AI has been ones where there is a little bit of complexity, right, where you where you need the AI to go and take actions for you or look up data for And it it's kinda adding this extra layer, beyond what, you know, traditional chatbots have been able to do. Mhmm. Because I'm sure both of you have used chatbots in the past.
Speaker 8:And Yep. Usually, it's a pretty frustrating experience because
Speaker 1:It's it's horrible. Yesterday, I was trying to cancel, I was trying to cancel Spectrum Internet at my at our old office.
Speaker 2:Good luck, John.
Speaker 1:And couldn't do it on the website. This is a 100% deliberate by them, by the way. Couldn't do it on the website. Of course, like, you know, this is a crud app. I should be able to click a button and update the
Speaker 2:if it's intentional.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. It's 100% intentional. They broke one password, I couldn't log in. Finally, they say, hey. Text us.
Speaker 1:And I'm texting with their chatbot. It texts me natural language, but then asks me to click a drop down for two different options every single time. Finally get through all that flow and they're like, you need to call us and by the way, we're closed today. It was awful. It was
Speaker 2:the worst thing. Is is that is that is that some maybe friction in the sales process where people are like, I get it that you wanna make this more frictionless for our customers, but you're gonna increase our churn Yeah. You know, 10%. Yeah. We have Are
Speaker 1:there actually trade offs there? I'm super interested.
Speaker 8:Yeah. No. That that is that is one use case. Right? So to to your question, what use cases are good?
Speaker 8:It is where you need a little bit of complexity because Sure. In the old days, the reason why you can't do that today is because it's really easy to game that system.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 8:They made a decision tree, then people someone would make a Reddit post about, hey. Here's how you actually cancel easily, and everyone will just do it immediately. Yep. And and impacts the revenue. Right?
Speaker 8:So Interesting. The nice thing about LMs now and the thing that really unlocks is this level of nuance. You're able to create much more complex flows and sort of situations that are tailored to specific users. Mhmm. And because of that, you're you're able to cover way more ground.
Speaker 8:Right? So we have customers, for example, that use us to process refunds. We have customers that use us to, you know, either book flights or reorder of credit card or or things like that. And that's really powerful because it just wasn't possible before. Right?
Speaker 8:Before you're kind of in this more, you know, dumb decision tree that you have to get forced down a certain path.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And maybe that path is kind of what you want, but you want, like, something slightly different and you're just forced to go down the path. You get stuck, and you get escalated. Right? So that's one of the main benefits of of these LMs.
Speaker 1:Last question from my side. I know we're we're going crazy on the timing. But in my previous jobs when I've hired a really all star customer service agent, the thing that's always impressed me is when they're able to expand out of their role as just customer service, just doing specific flows, and actually turn into sort of a salesperson and actually turn the interaction into customer education or upselling or cross selling or, know, hey. Yes. You said you wanted to cancel, but I think you wanna cancel for a reason that we can actually alleviate by switching you around or or giving you a discount or doing something like that.
Speaker 1:Some of that can be deterministic. We've seen this with like, are you sure you want to cancel? We'll give you 20% off. But the real best customer service agents tend to do it with more touch. Is that something that you're seeing already being able to be handled by LLMs?
Speaker 1:Do you think that's coming with more agentic workflows? How do you see the role of the customer service agent or human evolving over the next couple of years?
Speaker 8:We work with our customers a lot on that exact concept, which is what is the definition of customer experience over time? Mhmm. Because when you start, you you're generally working on the low hanging fruit, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, processing transactions or looking up information and
Speaker 1:Even FAQ. Right?
Speaker 8:Right. Exactly. But if
Speaker 2:you end up
Speaker 8:having a really, really good AI experience, and if you if you just think about it with the products in your life, right, you're just gonna interact with it Like, it's not that you're gonna it's like, oh, I'm done with this. If it's a good experience, you're gonna interact with it a lot more. Yep. And that opens up a much broader surface area for what customer experience means. You can start being proactive instead of just reactive.
Speaker 8:You can start looking at revenue generating use cases like you just mentioned. Right? And it it doesn't just have to be a a cost center, which is what a lot of enterprises look at customer service. Right? It's
Speaker 5:like Totally.
Speaker 8:Oh, it's this thing that's not really strategic to us. We're just gonna put it off to the side and try to save as much money as possible. Yeah. AI is changing a lot of that, and, you know, a lot of the the customers that use decking on are super excited by this concept that, hey. If you have a good system there, it almost becomes essentially a concierge for your product.
Speaker 8:Right? It becomes like a a new UI that customers can use to interact with you. Because if it's really good and it can do everything, like, yeah, maybe people are just chatting with it instead of using an app or kind of going through a bunch of, you know, drop downs and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. What's happening in the call sorry to interrupt. What's happening in the call center BPO market right now? Or or is there already pretty massive impact from companies like Decagon, Intercom, Sierra, etcetera?
Speaker 8:The yeah. The call call center market is definitely thinking about this space a lot as you can see. Right? When when AI first came out, a lot of their stocks went down by quite a bit because it's it's one of the most obvious use cases for for AI. Would say the the best BPOs out there are are really figuring out how to become AI native and either partnering with solutions like us or spending a lot of effort in in building their own.
Speaker 8:I think partnership will probably be the realistic path because when customers when end customers buy these services, they they usually kinda see BPOs as a service provider. So there is room for partnership, but, that's typically the way way it'll happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, just the advent of software as a service or just websites in some ways reduce the amount of humans in a sales interaction because you could go through the Shopify checkout by yourself, and yet there was still a role for the human. So I'm sure that will be evolving. But it's exciting stuff.
Speaker 9:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 2:Congrats on the round. Congrats on picking up Max Skarnickia a couple of months ago, star sales leader. I went to I went to college with Max. No way. He's an absolute Chad.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Was telling me about you earlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:shout out to Max. Anyways, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Have a good rest of your day. Next up, we have Yaxine. Yaxine. Welcome.
Speaker 2:Hey, Chaz. Has been waiting.
Speaker 1:Yaxine, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:You are on
Speaker 2:mute, brother. No audio yet. But I do love that.
Speaker 1:Got the weight rack. Is that
Speaker 2:a weight rack? Or
Speaker 1:Looks like it. Hello,
Speaker 7:test?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can hear How are you doing? Testing.
Speaker 10:Oh, we're good. I haven't set up my DAC yet.
Speaker 1:So No. You're good.
Speaker 2:You're good. What's happening?
Speaker 10:Let me just ask let me just check like, let me just look at something on
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. We'll we'll we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.
Speaker 2:Okay. The poster who needs no introduction.
Speaker 1:He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard, a
Speaker 7:web are the names?
Speaker 10:Of the hosts of
Speaker 2:John and Jordy. John
Speaker 10:and Jordy. Hey. How's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yassine.
Speaker 10:Apologies.
Speaker 1:Good to meet you.
Speaker 10:Hello. Thanks for thanks for the introduction. I appreciate the time as well. And I'm, like, actually, like, huge fan of you guys. Like Thank someone someone I someone I I used to work with introduced me to you guys.
Speaker 10:So Awesome. I, like, found a lot of enjoyment.
Speaker 2:That's great. Oh, it's great to have you on. How have the last few days been?
Speaker 10:A little bit stressful, to be honest. Good. I've slept three hours every single night because, posting on Twitter has been so fun. And, unfortunately for Fun
Speaker 9:or stressful?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting. Yeah. And, that's, not good for me, but I I will basically just not stop posting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salaries? You're making in the 7 figure mark. You gotta really ramp it up a little bit.
Speaker 10:I to go on 4chan, and he's like, people will be like, yeah. I'm, making, like, million like, a mill 2 mill at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making 2,000,000 at these AI companies. So I started making, like, seven digits of this at an AI company, I was like, wait.
Speaker 10:Like, these guys weren't actually lying. Like, did you actually make that much money at these AI companies? That's great. And it's, like, pretty fun work too as well. So yeah.
Speaker 10:For what's worth, like, I didn't work on AI. Worked on,
Speaker 1:like,
Speaker 10:bugs that really annoyed me on Yeah. The app. And that's why I joined, actually. So I joined X because there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. Fixed quite a lot of them.
Speaker 10:So I'm pretty happy with the work I've done.
Speaker 2:X is the product I use that I find the most bugs, yet I'm not Wait, I don't abandon the product. That's it takes
Speaker 10:a interesting thing. And it's because there's like it's a very large app. Right? So the scale is huge. And you guys are like a right tail users.
Speaker 10:Like, you guys are famous. Like, the, you know, the podcast of the tech bro podcast. Sorry. The the the host of the tech bro podcast. You guys are famous.
Speaker 10:So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. Like, how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. Sure.
Speaker 10:But for most people, like an engineer who's, like, creating a test account and, like, clicking around, it's not gonna be buggy for them. For what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to really talk to them and understand what their pain points are. For what it's worth, X does a really great job. Mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is is is run as as a company.
Speaker 10:And, like, just working there, I got to learn a lot about, like, how to get engineers motivated and, like, really, like, get shit done. Like, it's it was awesome work there. Was, like, super super fun.
Speaker 2:How how, do you wish you had the opportunity? You were working remotely the entire time and that was maybe counter to the broader x culture. Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office? Or do you think
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the person who hired me was like, dude, let me tell you, you're gonna have to get to the office. My wife so at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So I let them know. Congratulations.
Speaker 10:Because yeah. So the kid is born now. He's seven months old. So by the time I joined, was like, okay. Well, we're we're gonna I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move.
Speaker 10:But as the kid got older, my priorities started changing a bit. And I so I was kinda, like, considering and talking to my wife about, like, different ways I could come to politics. I I could totally work remotely, like, and be productive. I think after the x and x AI merger, the information attractor got so strong, and the talent at x AI, they were, like, ship they're shipped so much. Like, I used to be able to read every commit.
Speaker 10:Like, I used to actually just, like, sit there on my email and, like, click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went to the code base. But after the x AI people joined, it was just like literally no way. It was
Speaker 1:so they're like you're
Speaker 10:and I mean, I I told one of the x AI guys this. It was like, you know when when you have, like, dinosaur shit and you which was the Twitter code base, and you get extreme pressure, which is x AI talent.
Speaker 1:Get diamonds.
Speaker 10:You get diamonds. That's how you're Diamonds. Was so bullish after that. It's like, they're really pushing on it. It's like really awesome.
Speaker 10:Want and I and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like, I wanted to go. I think it was, like, probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, can I, like, maybe come, like, twice every quarter or something? It was and he was, like, super I mean, Fortsworth, by the way, like, my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised.
Speaker 10:Totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. Right? But it's if you're watching this, it's okay, dude.
Speaker 10:Don't worry about it. You're seriously, like, some people like, the probably the best thing, I think, like, working at X is, like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys were, like, are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. Like, my manager literally could just figure anything out.
Speaker 10:It felt like he was already onboarded onto everything, but he could actually just, read the code, look at the logs, and figure out what the problem was within thirty minutes, and it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No. He's actually just that good. So I really loved working with him.
Speaker 10:He's a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I I guess I kinda kinda guessed what happened, to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. But anyways, it's been really great working there. Mean, so I was I was gonna go to visit actually, were planning to visit Palo Alto.
Speaker 10:My wife is going going on a trip with her mom with a baby. And I was like, okay. That's one week I know I'm just kidding. Don't wanna go on a trip because I had work to do. Not anymore.
Speaker 10:So I'm probably gonna go, and it's gonna be pretty fun. But, like, I was gonna I was planning for that week to go to Palo Alto. But, but also my manager was like, can you come, like, next week? And I told my wife, and she's like, literally, like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to, like, scarf food in her mouth for, like, the few seconds that she had. She's, like, literally dying.
Speaker 10:So first time parents. Right? So we're kinda getting used to it. But yeah.
Speaker 2:No. It's a crazy it's a crazy change. What, why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X, Dingbored, and then I wanna talk about the future. Is that the
Speaker 10:exciting stuff? So, you guys can I'm probably gonna, like, work a bit more on Dingbored. There's a bunch of bugs that I wanna fix. I just didn't have the time with my full time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever.
Speaker 10:Dingboard.com, if you wanna make a meme in seconds, fifteen seconds, meme. Was a paid user. Happens.
Speaker 1:I was a paid user. Loved it.
Speaker 10:It was amazing. Thank you very
Speaker 1:much for Actually, very, very good.
Speaker 10:You know, like, your money actually helped pay for this? Like, this is Let's go. This is John Kugen.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 10:2% of this is John Kugen. Right?
Speaker 1:No. It was it and and You should
Speaker 2:give him naming
Speaker 1:rights. Is
Speaker 2:naming rights. Sell the
Speaker 1:naming crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages, and I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called, like, Photoshop Mix or something, and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it, and then they put ads in it, which was I would I was dealing with, and then they just shut it down. And it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't great, but it was okay. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom.
Speaker 1:And and so I'm using two different apps, and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always I was always a fan of of Dingboard.
Speaker 10:But I was actually, like, the process when I joined them. I was in the process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web like, applications and sorry. On iOS and Android. Yeah. It's it's actually like, if you guys if you guys are nerd, there's there's something called SOQL, okay?
Speaker 10:SOQL is made by this Swedish guy, I think. He's retired kind of. He works three days a week. Yep. And on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross platform GL graphics library, like, I guess, like transpiler.
Speaker 10:So you write it in one GL language.
Speaker 1:It'll it
Speaker 10:will produce the the metal version for iOS. It'll produce the the version for Android, and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code, and the code can be basically like, it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps. And then John Kugen and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on x.com.
Speaker 1:So ready. This is the future I was promised.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It feels like an incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.
Speaker 10:I mean, like, the reason I made it was because I was, like, making memes on my Yeah. Software engineering diagramming tool, and then they, like, started adding a watermark, I was like, fuck this. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking ruin my meme making tool.
Speaker 10:I am going to war. Yeah. Two weeks. Then
Speaker 2:I have
Speaker 1:some history. You had you had sponsors. This is I love this. There were sponsors when you would open a new ding board file. They would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan I mean,
Speaker 9:it's still there. Still there.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's still there?
Speaker 10:It's still there. So, mean, semi analysis, Dylan Patel, you guys should go check out his Substack. He sponsored me for three months, and he stopped sponsoring me, and I was too lazy to remove it.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. He's my boss. So I love it. It's all good. He's not a Substack, but he's actually on he's on passport with Ben Thompson.
Speaker 1:But, anyway, he's the man, and we love him. And but the big but the big question is, like, Dingbord, you're super popular online. Yep. Why didn't you go and raise, like, $15,000,000 from a gross
Speaker 7:age fund?
Speaker 10:Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Ugh. Like, raising money with managing people? I'm so knocked down. I'm so knocked down.
Speaker 10:I could serve like, literally, dude, like, this I have two plugged in right now, and I don't have enough power going to my house to,
Speaker 1:like, plug
Speaker 10:plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged. Yeah. But, like, I could serve literally a fucking million people.
Speaker 1:Okay. Fucking million. So we're gonna blow your mind. We're gonna blow your mind with this. But sometimes you can raise 15,000,000, and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket.
Speaker 1:Oh. You don't have to hire that many
Speaker 2:people. Yeah. So you could raise, 50 on 500
Speaker 1:and Exactly.
Speaker 2:And it's, you know, take take 40,000,000 straight to
Speaker 1:the bank. Yeah. Just just to kinda set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.
Speaker 2:Safety net.
Speaker 10:I feel I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never interest a founder who asked for that.
Speaker 2:No. He's he's he's joking. He's joking.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm joking. I'm Roy Lee Never happens.
Speaker 10:You don't you don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey.
Speaker 2:New dad. New dad. Or or new dad. Just gotta figure it out. Gotta figure it out.
Speaker 10:I've gotta figure it out. I'm I need I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need.
Speaker 1:I this is
Speaker 10:I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next ten years. But, like, Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Cluelly Yeah. Who he he got, you know, kicked out of his university, a disgraced tartan feather. He has no choice.
Speaker 10:I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was racing. I would have written I don't I I need the money. Right? Like, I got a kid.
Speaker 10:I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the fuck he's doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're you're a Roy Lee defender.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 9:But Yeah. So so so here here's about
Speaker 3:here's about I want a
Speaker 1:number for Ding board. Like, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of
Speaker 10:number so we can ring the Gong for peak MRR was, like, like, I I mean, I don't I don't remember. I'm not raising it. I don't want funding. Probably He
Speaker 3:is raising.
Speaker 1:10.
Speaker 10:Ten Ten
Speaker 1:developer. Let's hit the gong for you. Let's let it go. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Honestly honestly, ringing that for your fans too because you're Yes. You you genuinely you're you're a Internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question the question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender. Yeah. What what what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement sort of like rage baiting verse, you know, you sound like a much more even keeled, you know, on on the show right All
Speaker 10:my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad. Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it pisses people off. I really believe it.
Speaker 10:Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. It makes them just like and but, like, the when you're honest, like I I mean, like, you know, I'm I'm a big believer in, like, honesty and stuff like that. And, like, like, when you're honest, like, you kinda, like, also the same amount of haters that you gain gain, you kinda gain twice as much as, like, people who, like, are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kinda drown it out.
Speaker 10:So, like I mean, the reason I'm a I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got, like, an email which was a bunch of, like, really scary legal words, like, nondisperishment. I had, like to, like, Google what this meant. Like, I didn't even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay.
Speaker 10:Wait. I'm not gonna sign anything. I'm gonna wait for a lawyer. And, and then Roy Lee did this thing, and I realized, like, know what? Like, Roy Lee is a fucking legend.
Speaker 10:He's got skin in the game. Like, Roy Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retard. I'm gonna be a retard.
Speaker 10:I'm gonna be a retard online, and I'm going to have to win. And then I'm going to I'm obviously capable of winning, but if I have, like you know, like, the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who, like, work super hard, like, super smart and, Elon's done. He's got compounds. He's got tons of children he could spend all day with. He's got all the toys he could also wanna play with, all the engineers he could talk to.
Speaker 10:If I was him, I would just goof around with fun toys, but he's actually trying to get to Mars. I feel like sometimes it's like I think about being Elon, I could never be him because I would give up at 20. I'll be like, All right, I'm done, dude. This is me. I did my part.
Speaker 10:I'm gonna chill with my zero turn tractor and my two acre lawn.
Speaker 2:You gotta know what you want.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right? So but, like, I think that's what happens to a lot founders is they get enough money.
Speaker 10:Like, Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky, it was like a chip on his shoulder. He was like he was like, fucking Jason Cal. I'm gonna fucking get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed.
Speaker 10:I'm gonna do it again.
Speaker 2:And he
Speaker 10:did it again. He 100% did it again. By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer.
Speaker 10:I love both of them. I'm and and you know what? Jason is like the it's like it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker. Right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason.
Speaker 1:He's the Joker of Jack. Okay.
Speaker 2:Never mind. I see it.
Speaker 10:He's a Joker for Palmer Lucky.
Speaker 1:For me, the
Speaker 10:Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs.
Speaker 1:So never mind. Getting into the story. We're we're learning what actually happened.
Speaker 2:We're unraveling it.
Speaker 1:Don't worry about it.
Speaker 10:No. I I never said anything about my no worry. Don't worry about it. No. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What's next?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean yeah. So what's what's next? All in on Dingboard? Oh.
Speaker 2:Building out the team?
Speaker 10:Okay. So Dingboard is doing great. I'm gonna, you know, keep on growing it and, like, try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some I've been building things. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:This is the Dingbot.
Speaker 1:The Dingbot. The Dingbot.
Speaker 10:See this?
Speaker 1:What does it do?
Speaker 10:I three I three d printed this.
Speaker 1:What does it do?
Speaker 10:This this is an ARM ESP 32 attached to a a motor driver attached to a stepper driver sorry. Sorry. Stepper motor.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:Some three d printed things that I made with dincad, by the way. Dincad.com. It's currently down because I had no time to to work on it, but I have, like, a local host version.
Speaker 2:Dinkad is coming back. Breaking news.
Speaker 1:Popsicle sticks. No offense.
Speaker 10:Oh, here's here's the genius of it. Okay?
Speaker 1:It is
Speaker 10:I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and, like, you have an iPhone, it's, like, good for, like, thirty years. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 10:But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have
Speaker 1:to buy a new one. Oh, it's cash flow. There
Speaker 2:we go. There we go.
Speaker 1:Get them in the boardroom.
Speaker 10:And you know what? It's like you have a Dobby the elf robot that's, like, cleaning the house and, like, you know, it costs you $30 and it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking yeet it. Like, kick it across the room because it's, like, $30. You can just buy another one.
Speaker 10:It's like it's like that's the future.
Speaker 1:You're not
Speaker 10:worried about Shitty
Speaker 2:you're not you're not worried about, you know, getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot? Because it'll come back to get you at some point.
Speaker 10:Oh, no. You just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know? It's like Dobby's like, you know, please, know, please, sir. You just program it.
Speaker 10:Right?
Speaker 3:Like Oh.
Speaker 10:And he was on his YouTube Shorts, he was, like, trying to, like, find the the doorknob, like clicking like like, not clicking around, but, like like, reaching around. It was actually kinda kinda brutal. But, like, that I think that's, like, the real AI risk for what's worth, like YouTube Shorts specifically.
Speaker 1:So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you There's anything more retirement.
Speaker 10:I was courting yesterday. I was courting a $300,000,000
Speaker 1:offer. I mean, to get you back into a mega corporation.
Speaker 10:A mega corporation
Speaker 1:is gonna take 80,000,000, a 100,000,000, 120,000,000. What gets you to take the job for
Speaker 10:the most I probably, like, find it really hard to say no to, like, 2.5 probably. Like but I I don't think, like, the companies I work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean, think they do.
Speaker 2:Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies?
Speaker 1:I'm talking big tech.
Speaker 2:You could run a process right now.
Speaker 1:Big tech. So I know you don't wanna work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?
Speaker 2:Alright. I'm gonna just start doing an auction here. I go I got a message for 500. 500. Do I have a 600?
Speaker 2:600. Alright.
Speaker 1:700. Our our our internal goal is to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15,000,000 with 5,000,000 in secondary.
Speaker 10:I I could raise real money, like, super easily, and, like, I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I I have friends. I thing is, like, I'm a very honest hard worker. Like Yeah. The places I worked at, I could I could go back.
Speaker 10:Like, I have, like, a really strong network. So I don't really need a job. And, I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. Yeah. But if I wanted to join in terms of, for me, mission alignment is super important.
Speaker 10:Like, I really need to, like, use the product to actually enjoy
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 10:So I sell sell some Dingboar t shirts on Shopify. Nice. And I'm, like, aligned with, like, Toby's awesome. Yeah. And then Coher, I think, is, like, a really interesting place to work for because they're on to come up.
Speaker 10:But mostly, like, I mean
Speaker 2:He's in Canada. He's in Canada.
Speaker 1:Hold on. Yeah. Break down Coher. That that that is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden, and I I I think it's incredibly founder.
Speaker 1:But but but it does seem like, you know, there's gotta be some sort of, like, geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.
Speaker 10:I think I just think they're based, dude. Like, I just yeah. I just
Speaker 1:think they're fucking based. Yeah. So it's just pure pure culture. They'll figure it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, like,
Speaker 10:you know, like, it's it's it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or, California Yeah. Yeah. Canada. Okay.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 10:think they're fucking cool. Like,
Speaker 2:it's Okay.
Speaker 3:Kinda they need
Speaker 2:a poster in residence. You could basically you deaf or not? You could a thousand x their their their impressions.
Speaker 1:Do you listen to Death Grips?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. It goes it goes it goes Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because because Aiden's a big Death Grips guy.
Speaker 10:So just bumps Cohere on top of Shopify.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He did a he did an interview in a Death Grips t shirt. I saw it, and I
Speaker 10:was like That's amazing.
Speaker 1:That's actually amazing. This guy's a killer.
Speaker 2:But what what's what's wrong with just becoming a full time poster, getting a sub stack setup, getting a nice
Speaker 10:I think I'm gonna try to become, like, an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 10:And I'm not gonna race. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to to do this for. There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way, which is like doing, like, reinforcement learning for, like, control of robots, certain types of robots. I think I figured something out after listening to a popular Lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software.
Speaker 10:Mhmm. And I'm pretty good at software, and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly, it's not hard enough
Speaker 1:to start. What what
Speaker 5:It's it's
Speaker 1:easy, actually.
Speaker 2:You you you proved with that that it's easy.
Speaker 1:Explain that with the, reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking, like, you're gonna do stuff in simulation and then transfer the got the now the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that, Dylan Patel was posting about with, like, the robots on the, you you know, on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like, what are what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?
Speaker 10:So I don't think, like, humanoid robots is what I would do. I think
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 10:would do whatever is possible. Like, talk I have a pretty good solid network. Like, talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 10:Zurich. I don't know how to pronounce
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:And just be like, hey. Like, just give me feed me the papers and, like, some shitty Python code I'll clean up and make good. Sorry, researchers. You got
Speaker 1:you guys are not code coded. He's out of the game. Someone's gotta build a robot that picks up the leaves.
Speaker 10:Exactly. Exactly what because it's like, I'm so fucking sick of, like, going outside and just, you know, just, like, poking out all these dandelions. I'm I'm absolutely so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like, literally, three d printer, like, you could you could even three d print the wheels.
Speaker 10:Like, you can get, like, $5 off of AliExpress. An ESP 32 costs, like, $3. I just impulse buy them. I, like, get my ex ad revenue payout, and I just, like, spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My my my house, like, constantly has, like, these random AliExpress packages.
Speaker 10:I just, like, maybe build, like, a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for, $300, you know, kinda new I
Speaker 10:could also sell it for $25 on subscription, you get a new one every month.
Speaker 1:Oh. There we go. Yes.
Speaker 2:There we go. It's people taking their Dobbies.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Subscription is hard for if it breaks, it's like, I literally will tell the users, hey. I'm just, you know, a dude in there's a CNC shop here that does wood. So, like, they do wood CNC. So I'm gonna make the robot chassis out of out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa.
Speaker 10:And I'm gonna laser, you know, laser on, like, made in Ottawa on it. Except, you know, modulo, the the motors inside that will be made in China until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess, like, the the the core insight I have after doing Dingboard and, like, honestly, working for a lot of these big tech companies is, like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like, I'm gonna try to do this. I'm gonna realize, like, holy shit.
Speaker 10:Like, all of the cat software fucking sucks. Mhmm. And I'm gonna build it because I can. And, like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 pro, just, like, ripping on my credit card What about Grok? Gemini 2.5 pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper, it's faster, and it's good enough.
Speaker 10:Like, I'm not, like, giving all of my work away to I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. Like, it's not that hard to write React. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of, like, doesn't avoids using too many if statements. Stop.
Speaker 10:Just stop using if if statements and, like yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Okay. Okay.
Speaker 9:So but but here's the thing.
Speaker 2:You need you're you're you wanna build a
Speaker 5:bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You need some cash flow. Why not set up
Speaker 1:Go back
Speaker 2:to my set up, you know, some type of subscription. You have
Speaker 10:a lot of fans.
Speaker 1:A
Speaker 2:lot
Speaker 1:A
Speaker 2:lot of people wanna give you $10 a month, you can hack for Honestly,
Speaker 1:that was the Dingboard subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The issue is Dingboard
Speaker 5:is so hard to sign
Speaker 2:up for. How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now?
Speaker 10:Go to dingboard.com.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm
Speaker 10:on Never Okay. First of all, Jordy, never dealt my conversion levels ever again. Like, I am a conversion I can convert anything to anything. I am I am Okay. I am a conversion god.
Speaker 10:Okay. Go to dingboard.
Speaker 2:Wait. You're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you wanna inspire yourself to grind harder.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Go to dingboard.com.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have
Speaker 10:to sign I didn't
Speaker 9:even have
Speaker 10:to tell you what to do.
Speaker 2:Legend. Legend. Alright. I'm signing in. I'm signing in.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm here. What do I DingScribe. There we go.
Speaker 1:Once you're
Speaker 10:subscribed wanna know what DingScribe
Speaker 2:even means?
Speaker 1:Cannot do DingScribe.
Speaker 2:$12.99 per month. You gotta get your numbers up, dude.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A
Speaker 10:109 per month? Two actually don't have the code. It's like on my server.
Speaker 1:You gotta do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price and then it just auto converts up. That's the that's the real ticket.
Speaker 10:Or I could just double the price.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and they just get more and more. It should go up by 10% every Dude,
Speaker 10:I'm not doing that. We got some YouTube shorts kit Surprise some kids brain shit.
Speaker 2:Alright. I I'm a ding pro subscriber. I'm dinged up. No. You're a ding scribe.
Speaker 10:You have to get dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scribe.
Speaker 1:Ding scribe. Ding scribe. You're part of the crew.
Speaker 10:You're part of the crew.
Speaker 2:I'm ding maxing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 pro. Are you cursor guy? GitHub copilot cursor?
Speaker 1:Whatever. Do Never. No. No. You're saying cursor.
Speaker 10:I'm new. Okay. I have a custom framework I've written for Neovin. So, basically, what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Okay.
Speaker 10:Claude and before Gemini was good. Claude and then OpenAI's models Okay. They go down all the time. Like, it's infrastructure is hard to serve at scaling. I don't blame them.
Speaker 10:It's like that's a hard problem to solve. Yeah. So I have, like, always I always have a model available. Like, even if both of them are down, like, could hit deep seek over Yeah. Open router.
Speaker 10:Right? Like, it's a facade. And can
Speaker 1:you do that in cursor by just switching the model router?
Speaker 10:Switching? What was there a hockey? So for me, it's
Speaker 7:like Oh. Have a weird
Speaker 10:I mean, let let me let me let me flex on you guys a bit. So I this is my keyboard.
Speaker 1:Flex flex away.
Speaker 2:Woah. Keyboard. Oh,
Speaker 10:there we go. Woah. Poor nice nano, by the way. Yeah. I guess I got a I got a homie from from China built to make it for me.
Speaker 10:And so, basically, space space what's it? Space I don't even remember. It's all space I is l l l m provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 pro.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 10:Space k is Gemini Flash, and it all renders in a single markdown file.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 10:And I've created commands for these models. So, basically, like, depending on the fence, so three, three apostrophes, and then there's gonna be the command name. So, like, edit file. Yeah. It can I can give basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me?
Speaker 10:And then I actually manually
Speaker 1:Sorry. Is this open source? Like, you know, people
Speaker 2:put their dot
Speaker 1:files up? Like, can I, like, like, can I install your your setup?
Speaker 10:So, no, it's not open source mostly because people are gonna start posting issues, and I'm just not interested in fixing them.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm
Speaker 10:just gonna do it for myself. I'm, like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like, I'm you know, I know how much this
Speaker 1:is If it's not a resource, you get a raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.
Speaker 10:It is a cursor competitor, and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not gonna sell for money. Just I think what's gonna naturally happen is, like, when people see me do use it, they're gonna have ideas of their own, and then they're gonna build it for themselves. Okay.
Speaker 1:Like,
Speaker 10:the the whole point of so it's it's a Neovim plug in kind of. It's, also a server, it plugs into a bunch of I'm I'm good at software. So part of the part of the problems with so Neovim, like, is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So the best software you can get is software you can read and understand and you can actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself.
Speaker 10:Because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to write my own frameworks. Cursor, I'm sure, is a great product,
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:But I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. Like, for example, like, I wanna, like, implement TreeServer across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a I have a file which has a bunch of file paths, and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm
Speaker 1:in. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And I manage it manually by, like, literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And, what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree Yeah. To be able to jump around with an LLM or, like, train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck, man.
Speaker 10:Like
Speaker 2:What about, you're gonna make any products in the parenting space?
Speaker 10:Oh, yeah. So actually, have an idea. I had an idea. So I I use an e ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update a software and I never write anything private on it.
Speaker 10:So Mhmm. Go it's it's I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna put it public. So I have an e ink reader slash, like, tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write. Instead of texting him, I wanna make, like, a kind of like a radio e ink display, kind of like an Etch and Sketch, which you can write on, but it synced to your parents' Etch and Sketch.
Speaker 10:That's so cool. I will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one. Yeah. And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over over distances. Right?
Speaker 1:Write messages.
Speaker 10:I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably gonna build that. If you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it. Like, literally just go do it.
Speaker 10:Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not get a three d printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stop putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts.
Speaker 10:Stop.
Speaker 1:Get ready. This is gonna be a YouTube short. We're gonna edit this. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Will be on TikTok, maybe. Yeah. We gotta get the meters.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Minecraft speed run
Speaker 1:and then, like, meet top of me. Surfers over you, anything. AI slob over
Speaker 2:kids do you wanna have?
Speaker 10:So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God and yeah. That's how many kids.
Speaker 2:Good answer. That's great. What else what else do have to say to the people while you're here?
Speaker 10:Thanks for doing your this podcast, guys. I know how hard I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And, like That's fine. Doing live and stuff, like, it's it's a pain in the ass.
Speaker 10:So keep it up, guys. I know, like
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 10:And and and the the the the live the live, the video team at x are, like, generational talents. Like, super, super good people. Like so, like, just, like, find someone to, like like, find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and, like, actually talk to
Speaker 2:I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been Come come back on whenever you wanna talk about your projects. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'd love just hang out and chat.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Thanks. I really appreciate you guys. And yeah. So keep it up.
Speaker 10:Thanks. Awesome.
Speaker 2:We're we're excited and and I'm excited to be ding maxing. Just offer offer a premium tier like, I don't know, like $10 a month or something like that. Maybe we become, know Oh.
Speaker 10:I mean,
Speaker 7:if you
Speaker 10:guys want an ad space, I'll sell you right now. Like, spit handshake. If you wanna put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll let's say
Speaker 7:$12.
Speaker 2:$12.
Speaker 1:Okay. Mean, that was We'll
Speaker 2:we'll talk to our we'll talk to our CFO.
Speaker 7:Alright. Alright. Alright.
Speaker 10:And guys do
Speaker 7:a hard
Speaker 2:Our CFO our CFO will talk to your CFO.
Speaker 1:But but can we get the semi analysis deal where it's No. Perpetual? It's $12 once, so we get it forever? Because what if you
Speaker 2:Is it a one time or It's
Speaker 1:a great option. There's a lot of upside here.
Speaker 10:It depends on how good your your podcast is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully, Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Absolutely. Alright.
Speaker 2:We're excited to follow.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Talk to you soon. Godspeed. Have a good one. Bye.
Speaker 1:Next up, we have to talk to you about wander.
Speaker 2:Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and a twenty four seven concierge
Speaker 2:He should get a Wander.
Speaker 1:He should. He's gonna be traveling around interviewing at all the top companies. Wander would be a great choice for him. We have had a great show. We were gonna play you a an interview that we did earlier today with Shervin Pishovar, but there are some security issues unfortunately.
Speaker 1:And so we're working to potentially blur the background and we will get you that interview as as soon as we possibly can. But security
Speaker 2:Comes first.
Speaker 1:All threat. It comes first. And so we will we'll obviously relay some of the key takeaways. And honestly, it's such a developing story. I feel like already the story has moved and we should just have him back on again soon from a more secure location and make sure that everything is above board.
Speaker 1:But thank you so much for watching. We had a lot fun.
Speaker 2:Tuning
Speaker 1:in. And we will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great Bye.