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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, 01/08/2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp. Time is money saved both.
Speaker 1:Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I wrote about ChaChing, the Apple Card, minor news We have to. Oh, yeah. Please.
Speaker 2:We have to ask. Somebody sent us a bunch of weights. Yeah. And this one is a 10. There's quite a few of these.
Speaker 2:Are you trying to say something? You know? Is this is this you think you think the upper limit? But either way, whoever sent these, please let us know because there was no cards. Don't know who to think.
Speaker 1:Plates. They're very nice. Very nice. Nike bumper plates.
Speaker 2:Very fun. What what a funny thing Big sign of respect in our culture.
Speaker 1:It is. It is. It is. Anyway, there was a minor headline breaking news. Actually, her learned about it from the chat.
Speaker 1:We we discussed it right after we talked to Pat and Ravi from Sequoia that the Apple Card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JPMorgan. Nothing's really changing about the Apple Card yet. It's merely the bank back end that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. But it's even though it's a minor headline, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions, what the trade offs were. And I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about what what how would he be down with credit cards?
Speaker 1:You're giving leverage to your customers. You're giving credit. You're in the debt business. It's a different business. How did he think about it, and how did we get here?
Speaker 1:The headline is that the Apple Card program has millions of cards issued. There's $20,000,000,000 of debt that's accumulated across all the cards, and the portfolio is not doing well. So normally, if you are to if you have a co branded credit card, like a JCPenney or Macy's credit card, and it's it's aligned with the brand, typically, those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands, companies will other banks will typically say, I'm I'm buying a $10,000,000,000 portfolio, and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely, I'm gonna be able to recoup all of that from the creditors, and, also, you know, they're gonna pay interest.
Speaker 1:So they're gonna pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now there will be some defaults, but in general, you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Not in this case. Goldman is like, we gotta get this off our balance sheet. They've already lost a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost 3,000,000,000. Like, they're not doing well over
Speaker 3:the last
Speaker 2:couple of So is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue?
Speaker 1:There's a little bit of both. A lot of it is the And and do
Speaker 3:you think this
Speaker 2:is potentially because Apple's made it more difficult to to actually have Morgan Stanley, like, go after the clients? Like, is that is that Apple making certain decisions? Because I don't know. I I have to imagine it's not like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card
Speaker 1:It wasn't wildly different, but I'll get into some of the some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So the the the $20,000,000,000 card balances, that's trading. JPMorgan's acquiring that at a $1,000,000,000 discount. Instead of an 8% premium, you would expect that they would pay 21.6. They're actually paying 19 for this, and then they're gonna have to go and recoup some of it.
Speaker 1:It's not, you know, by any means a disaster, and Goldman's a large company.
Speaker 2:JPMorgan's a large I I said Morgan Stanley.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But but it's it's interesting to figure out the the history here. Before we do, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:You can see we have our consoles here branded on the laptops. Very fun. So Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1:He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple Card. So but the main problem and I think the four the like, there's a lot of things where Apple has a particular brand. I wanna talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like, how it fits into the consumer credit card consumer financial landscape. But the the North Star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So I tend to think of most high end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity.
Speaker 1:You can't just buy an Hermes Birkin bag. You can't buy an a Ferrari s b three Daytona. You have to be invited. You need a relationship. You have to be you have to get an allocation.
Speaker 1:Right? Apple, for some reason, I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari. And yet it is a wildly different experience.
Speaker 2:It's a premium brand.
Speaker 1:It's a premium brand. But because of the design and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I Yeah. Put as, like, a premium thing. I I've thought of them as luxury, and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's always felt like a luxury brand to me.
Speaker 1:Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in their they don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold, so who knows what the market price will be on those. They don't run that like that. But Jobs wanted Apple to be a no rejection company.
Speaker 1:So anyone can walk into an Apple store, buy the most expensive iPhone that they make as long as they have the money
Speaker 2:for People wanna give us money, they can.
Speaker 1:They can, which is, you know, it's it's a standard business practice, but not always in in luxury goods.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And Which is why I said it's pre premium. It is more luxury. Even though apps Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Quickly, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 1:Let me also tell you about the linear run of show today, the linear lineup. We got Dalian Asperuhoff. He's back. On the show.
Speaker 2:He's back.
Speaker 1:We're going to dig into 18 appearances last year. Yeah. 18. And he's starting strong in
Speaker 2:the first 180 this that.
Speaker 1:We're we're gonna dig into Stickerbox, this viral kids toy that was tearing up the timeline. Very cool use of AI for, you know, a consumer product. Then we have Julie Bush at Valinor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital is coming on. So it should be a fun show. Anyway, continuing.
Speaker 1:So because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have an approval process, and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive losses. So it was surprising. So Apple, when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement fairly low.
Speaker 1:And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a holdover from the Jobs era, the that Jobs philosophy of even though we're Apple, even though it's it it feels it's gonna have the patina of an Amex. It's gonna have this premium look and feel, and we'll get into the design of the card in a minute. But it it it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you needed a credit score of around a 600, which is pretty accessible. And so that philosophy carried through even from the nineties.
Speaker 1:The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card was in 2004, and I will tell you about this after I tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average byte coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look really good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast. So they actually staffed this guy, Ken Siegel, who is the creative director on the Think Different campaigns, like the one of the most iconic marketers in history, in tech history, certainly, and and they came up with a name. Jobs said, if we launch a credit card, it's gonna be called the Apple Card, and they actually wound up using that name.
Speaker 1:But it had a weird twist. So most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's diners club. It's usually you get points, then you can spend those points on travel.
Speaker 2:And you've always been a huge points guy. Right?
Speaker 1:I'm not I'm actually not a points guy at all. I have I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing. And I just ask them, which one should I get? And then I just get that one. And then five years later, ten years later, I still have it, and it's probably a bad deal then.
Speaker 1:Because it's always a great deal in the first couple years, and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they, like, retain you. Anyway, so instead of airline miles or cashback, this proposed Apple Card from 2004, you you would get points, and you could only spend the points at the iTunes store to get free songs. What a funny, like
Speaker 2:I mean, at that moment in time, that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It it's kind of a cool idea. At the same time
Speaker 2:I mean, I was a child at that time, so 99¢ was somewhat of a Yeah. Considered purchase. Yeah. Building I'd sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'm good with the thirty seconds. For sure. This is enough.
Speaker 2:Rocking out. This is enough. Play it again.
Speaker 1:But it is somewhat genius because, there's sort of zero marginal cost on music, certainly on the distribution of music. Now they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built in margin there. So that 99¢, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember, they take 30%. So they're so they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value.
Speaker 1:You go and spend a $100. You get you get a 100 points. One point is 1¢. You buy the 99¢ song, but they are taking home another 30% on top of that. So the economics would have been really, really good.
Speaker 1:But it is sort of gimmicky because people wanna spend points on a lot of things.
Speaker 2:And I'm happy to get free flights and
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And hotels.
Speaker 1:I think there's something psychological about having, you know, a credit card that you spend money on for a couple years. You get a whole bunch of points, then you're like, wow. I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had. And as opposed to, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I bought a bunch of my favorite music, and then four years later, Spotify came out, and actually, my iTunes library is basically useless. Right? Yeah. Tyler?
Speaker 4:I was just gonna say it's like same thing because like instead of a trip, it's like, oh, I bought this Chief Keef album off my Apple Card.
Speaker 2:I'll always remember that. Now my life is a movie.
Speaker 1:Will remember that. I hate being sober. The we gotta watch that that clip. I need to pull that up. So it it it they were gonna use they called them iPoints, and you'd be able to redeem them at the iTunes store.
Speaker 1:Seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later in 2008. So if they'd actually done this in 2004, launched the iPoints program
Speaker 2:When did Apple Music actually launch?
Speaker 1:Oh, much later. Much later. It it I I wanna say, like, 2016 or something.
Speaker 2:2015.
Speaker 1:2015. Boom. Got it. Wow. Gusto.
Speaker 1:The unified platform platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium bit sized businesses. So the other key feature that Apple always wanted, this went back to Steve Jobs, that they always wanted with the Apple Card, which you don't often think about with credit cards, but is amazing customer service. And so most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrate with the wallet and and but mostly, they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. When you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the Genius Bar.
Speaker 1:There's someone who's friendly. They are very good about getting you in at the right time.
Speaker 2:One of the people at the Genius Bar breaking your kneecaps. They have a room where they're just like, okay, we're, you know, we're very customer friendly here. But you have your own. We have to break your kneecaps. We're gonna take you back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Know how Apple
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They have, like, the back of house, but it's, like, almost invisible. Right? Yeah. Was, like, built in Behind,
Speaker 1:the big
Speaker 2:get taken back there, and they're just, like, nicely just, like
Speaker 1:Pay your Apple card bill. Well, I mean, that was another thing. They wanna be so customer friendly. They didn't have any late fees, no application fees, and and no no international fees, no fees at all. That was the whole pitch.
Speaker 1:No fees, which sounds really nice. Sounds really delightful to just be like, okay. I don't even have to think about fees or whatever. But it fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time because not only does the interest start occurring, but when you pay late, if you're not paying the balance, the minimum balance to maintain the card, then you then you get a a late fee, which increases the also the yield on the debt, but it also just attracts like a lower quality customer who's maybe just on their fifth credit card and is just like, oh, this one doesn't have fees, I need an extra $500 this month. I'll just grab this one.
Speaker 1:And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life. So the customer service thing was really an issue because with Apple, they have years and years I mean, since, I don't know, probably the eighties, like, the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks or Mac computers, and they built up, built up, built up. And so they have a whole workflow for how do we hire a lot of people around the Christmas time? How do we staff the Genius Bar? How do we educate people?
Speaker 1:How do we pay them? They're in the tier one cities so they can have great people working there. It's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores. So the whole model works, and they built it up very slowly. Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking.
Speaker 1:Like, the default consumer customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman banker, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your m and a team ready. Or I need to go public, potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Whether you use Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, whoever's lead left, make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange. But seriously, Goldman, they, like, it it it's a trading it's the highest finance. It's the most premier. Yeah. It's the most elite.
Speaker 1:And so when you call them and you're like, yeah. I got billed for $25, and it should have been $23. Can you fix this? Well, they need a new team for that, and they need to build up that team. And that's not that's not rocket science.
Speaker 1:Like, I I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out, but Apple also wanted another consumer friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month every month. And normally, credit cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, your bill comes on the tenth. Tyler's comes on the fifteenth.
Speaker 1:Mine comes on the twentieth. We don't really care. We don't really know. And so if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement, you're like, wait a minute. That's not the right charge.
Speaker 1:I gotta call and sort this out. You're calling on the tenth. Tyler's calling on the fifteenth. I'm calling on the twentieth. Intentionally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They do it intentionally. Because if they have a customer service organization
Speaker 2:I I always assume I stupidly Thought
Speaker 1:it sloppy.
Speaker 2:That it was just sloppy and annoying. No. I'm like, you're
Speaker 1:just Genius. Didn't Trust the process.
Speaker 2:Trust the process.
Speaker 1:Trust the process. Never lose faith. So so Apple insisted, hey, everyone's gotta get their statement right on the first. That's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need like 10,000 people ready at the phones because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do like, customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high.
Speaker 1:And so you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month, and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple Store in December and say, hey. We're gonna hire you from, November 1 to January 15. You're gonna deal with some of the returns. It's a three month gig.
Speaker 1:People sign up for that. No one's saying, yeah. I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs on the first of every month and the first week of every month, and then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three, and four of the month. That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there.
Speaker 1:Obviously, more cost, and all of this was just making the the the the actual program less profitable for Goldman, less more more a problem. And we talked a little bit about the the the fees of any kind. Now there was an opportunity. Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to to work with Apple, and they kind of bent over backwards because Apple had tried this with they'd went to a whole bunch of other banks. Remember going back to Capital One?
Speaker 1:And every bank had said, like, no. Are you crazy? You can't do this. Like, you can't give everyone in the world a no free credit card with great customer service. Like, you're gonna lose money, Apple.
Speaker 1:And Apple They're
Speaker 2:like, no. We wanna give everyone a free lunch.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so, what Goldman should have done with the customer service is they should have got to fin.ai, except it didn't exist in 2019 but does now. And fin is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. Maybe Goldman should become a client.
Speaker 1:Maybe JPMorgan should become a client. They might already be. But so the Goldman, they were making a push into consumer. They built Marcus internally
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you.
Speaker 2:I I don't know. The the name like, people names can either be so good Yeah. Or so bad. Yeah. And I don't know.
Speaker 2:I I have a I have a childhood friend
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A family friend named Marcus.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a great name. He's a great dude. Do I wanna trust him with all my money? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Funny. Like, you might you might be like, yeah. My my smartest friend is Marcus. I I love this brand.
Speaker 1:Or it's like
Speaker 2:Anyways, I I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal. Yeah. And so I I I he is in a meeting, but he fired off some notes. He's I asked him, like, why why did like, how did this happen, basically? He says Yeah.
Speaker 2:GS f ed up the plan. DJ D Soul was told to shut down Marcus and Consumer or get out
Speaker 1:That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman.
Speaker 2:Or get out of the job. So he cut all of Marcus except for savings. Yep. Then GS had a multiyear process to find a bank that Apple would approve. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? They're not just gonna say like
Speaker 1:We're out. Some
Speaker 2:some, you know, smaller, not not systemically important bank, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:GS, f ed up because Because
Speaker 5:they probably could
Speaker 2:read it. Transactional org, not a longitudinal org Yep. And really thought they were they were smarter, but never focused on the fundamentals of running the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So So the question's like, what happens next? JPMorgan obviously has way more way way more consistency here. The the other hard part for for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer facing brand. So they wanted the Goldman name in more places, and the Apple Card would have been a great co branding thing.
Speaker 1:They were fighting to get, like, the front of the card, which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple Goldman would have been really cool. They didn't.
Speaker 2:They got relegation of the Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:And the card looked awesome. I was reflecting on it. Like, I don't know if you actually seen seen it. Maybe we can pull up a picture. But the the I I don't know if it's still the case, but, originally, it was it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy, like the same way they make these MacBooks they would use to make the cards.
Speaker 1:So it didn't have those laminated layers laminated layers. I don't know if you have a, a Chase Sapphire Reserve, but those things kind of, like, fall apart after a couple years because there is a metal piece, and the metal card is typically more prestigious, but they add laminate on either side. The Apple Card went a different direction. And it had and I think they delivered on the branding side. They just didn't quite deliver on the on the on the financial design.
Speaker 2:Did you ever have one?
Speaker 1:Apple Card? No.
Speaker 2:And it's so so interesting because Yeah. Think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple Card Mhmm. You were like, every high value credit card customer in America Yeah. Not every Yeah. But the vast, vast, maybe 99 has an iPhone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Apple's gonna put this everywhere. Yeah. This is gonna be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it just it's been interesting to see, you know, this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way. Even though even though how many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another. Right?
Speaker 1:So many open up the wallet app.
Speaker 2:And still, I'm just like, I have, you know, I have a a credit card. I don't I don't need another. Right? But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Well, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Well, that it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I I I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple, but some some opportunity.
Speaker 1:I I do think that there that that there was there was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol, more of something that you pull out and it says something about you, has some badge value. But that would have been sort antithetical to
Speaker 2:lot of circles and iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's too generic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Totally. It's not like.
Speaker 1:And then also, there's just the the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore. They they Apple Pay for everything.
Speaker 2:I do yeah. I I really wonder how the how people know people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards. Right? Yeah. When you're just like, oh, I'm gonna just pay this bill at this restaurant.
Speaker 1:I mean, Just go like true PointsMaxers do care about using the right card for the right time because some cards will be better for dining, others will travel, other. Like, the Apple card gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff, and then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay using the Apple card in Apple Pay. Like, you open up Apple Pay and you select the Apple card, you get 2% back. And there's 1% on everything else. If you pull out the card, you just pay for gas at the gas station.
Speaker 1:But then there's, like, the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco, and the Amazon card that gets you a better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the the points maxers and the card maxers will get specific card, they're like, when I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card. I I I never got this.
Speaker 2:This is not my is a project for Billy McFarlane to lead. Remember, he had he had like
Speaker 1:a I I I saw his
Speaker 6:Card.
Speaker 1:Agnesis. I I saw his his latest, like, Instagram reel or something. He's just walking down the street talking about doing some event. He's
Speaker 2:New festival.
Speaker 1:New new festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him.
Speaker 2:Rough go. In other news, US venture capital fundraising falls 35 as firms stay private longer. Course, Josh Wolfe is not letting himself be a statistic. He's coming on later today to
Speaker 1:talk about fundraiser, the biggest one ever.
Speaker 2:1 and a half billion in new funds for Lux Capital. Yeah. But Kate Clark in the journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer.
Speaker 1:And before we read this, let me tell you about vibe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.
Speaker 2:Fundraising for US venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025, the most anemic stretch in at least six years with money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66,000,000,000 raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups have been flushed with venture funding. Startups that have been flushed with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny.
Speaker 2:A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors is now complicating efforts to raise new capital. And there's a graphic here that we can pull up. You can see the chart. The fundraising climate is challenging, said Beezer Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire Partners.
Speaker 1:I invited her on the show. We gotta get her at some point. She's great.
Speaker 2:We're focused on investments in venture funds. Yeah. Investors are concentrating capital in the most trusted VCs. Rather than
Speaker 1:this chart.
Speaker 2:I hate to see it. It is it is funny that over the last eighteen months Yeah. Two years, it felt like I like a lot of people were looking around and being like, wow. Our industry can exist in a high rate environment. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you look at this chart.
Speaker 1:I don't know that that's actually what's going on. I mean, does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. I I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market, the fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive, like, NAV, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are an allocator in LP, and you've put a bunch of money in a fund, and you're like, yeah, I'm ready to double down. As soon as you give me the money back, I'll give it back to you.
Speaker 1:But let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it until, oh, Okay, you got $10,000,000,000 over there? Show me the money, and then I'll
Speaker 2:And this is the year. The IPO window's open. Yes. There's a bunch of names
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That we're expecting to go out. Yep. If it starts to close Yeah. You and I will do our best. We're gonna hold it open.
Speaker 2:Hold it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Back to back. I'll push one door.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Push that. To back.
Speaker 1:Anyway Well, it's be an exciting year for anyone on public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more.
Speaker 2:Back to article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than 9,000,000,000 across new funds in December in one that was an organic soundboard. That's in one of the year's largest raises while PT's Founders Fund closed 4,600,000,000.0 in April. New fund managers, by contrast, are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment.
Speaker 2:The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices family offices, and hedge funds. Collectively, the venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing, Clarkson said of the largest AI rounds. It must be coming from other sources as well. Yeah. And and and kind of left out the hyperscalers Yeah.
Speaker 2:Too out of this, which have been a key player in some of these later rounds. Totally. Funding for USAA startups reached a record 20 222,000,000,000 in 2025, more than double twenty twenty four levels. So we have 66,000,000,000 in new funds raised, 222,000,000,000 actually going into startups. And, of course, a lot of that, again, is is non, venture capital firms.
Speaker 1:Yep. Still seems like still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of
Speaker 2:Always a good time. Always a good time.
Speaker 3:Should we
Speaker 2:talk about There's some
Speaker 1:there's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Obviously, we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of of a 100,000,000 or more accounted for about 70% of venture funding.
Speaker 1:So you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals while the broader VC ecosystem or emerging managers, seed funds, series a specialists are getting crushed. It's the best time for tech ever is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive. It's a Trump admin moles payments to sway Greenlanders to join The US. Greenland says they're not for sale. European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen. But Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days.
Speaker 2:US officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland STEMI time.
Speaker 1:STEMI time.
Speaker 2:To Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join The United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, US officials including White House aides have discussed figures ranging from 10,000 to a $100,000 per person. Doing the math, even at a $100,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57 So thousand we're talking about basically a seed round, $55,700,000,000.0 to That's doable. That's an AI. That's that's actually like
Speaker 1:But they but like
Speaker 4:Three AI researchers.
Speaker 1:Three AI researchers in Greenland. For all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder what I wonder how much, like, this would actually sway them because I I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to, like, either vote and then they get the payment because we promise or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote, you know.
Speaker 2:I think just start planes with cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know, just dropping it out of the
Speaker 1:air. Then wouldn't they
Speaker 3:Meaning
Speaker 1:wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong? There's gonna be another plane. We want the second drop.
Speaker 2:Here's my thing. Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or a resident, I'm sitting there being like, you're okay. We know they're willing to we we have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around 6,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We think we're worth 60. Let's let them keep, you know, the the Paramount Skydance, the Ellisons. They'll just bid and then say, yeah. Well, it's not our best and final offer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then what does Warner Brothers do? They, of course, again, they they rejected Yeah. Another bid or or recommended against it. So
Speaker 1:Greenland's prime minister Jens Fredrick Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post.
Speaker 2:Facebook. Let's
Speaker 1:go. Okay. They aren't really a decade behind over there. He says enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation.
Speaker 1:He's not a fan. You you gotta get on reels, buddy. You gotta do a front facing video. Use some AI. Get some vibe real music in there.
Speaker 1:You gotta Yeah.
Speaker 2:Get the get this the sigma male Yeah. You know, grind set.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's just his statement. Going? Enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation.
Speaker 1:And it just cuts to, the Joker. And so it's
Speaker 2:just Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to green their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain disdain, particularly given that The US and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement. Mhmm. On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain, and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relations. So this is
Speaker 1:Yeah. But they can you know, Trump can make his case. Hey. If you if you if you alone, on your own, decide to come over and hang out with us, we got some cash for you apparently. It's wild.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
Speaker 2:See average in Trump has long argued that
Speaker 1:The US needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's eye aids, in since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatching grab operation, not an invasion apparently. According to sources familiar with internal deliberations, one source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other longstanding geopolitical goals.
Speaker 1:It feels like wildly different scenarios though. Like, there's they're not going to go and send in Delta Force. I don't know. Maybe they will.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark isn't gonna be able to do it.
Speaker 2:So average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100 k saying, I'm gonna retire a couple years early.
Speaker 1:100 k is big. Yeah. I don't know. Among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a compact free association. Compact of free association, COFA.
Speaker 1:The precise details which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, The Marshall Islands, and Palau. Palau. Interesting. Vary depending on the signatory, but the US government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection. Get an Amazon Prime from us.
Speaker 1:What else can we offer you? In exchange, the US military operates freely in COFA countries, and trade with The US is largely duty free. No no tariffs. I wonder what, Greenland is, exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed.
Speaker 1:In theory, payments could be used to induce green lenders to vote for their independence or to sign in onto a COFA after such a vote. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenland Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland or
Speaker 4:do you know I was gonna say, Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the free press.
Speaker 1:What did he say?
Speaker 2:Read it, Tyler. He's
Speaker 4:well, the it's pretty long. I I don't wanna read the whole thing. But Okay. Then sing it. He's anti he he he doesn't want us to to actually like buy it.
Speaker 4:Right? It's like bad. You need to convince them to come over. Mhmm. But he does like I I think he wants Greenland to become like, in possession Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or The US to become in possession of Greenland. Right? Maybe like a a Puerto Rico situation. Yeah. So it's like a little bit
Speaker 1:Above Palau.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's above Palau. It's it's not a state, though. It's not like, you know and we're not the military in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were pitching. So so
Speaker 2:It's it's such a tough I mean, it's such a Mhmm. It is a tough sell as much as I love this great country.
Speaker 1:You mean to If I'm live in Greenland
Speaker 2:or Yeah. Just just if you're in Greenland you're kind of looking over at The US with binoculars
Speaker 1:I want that crazy stuff over here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just massive, massive infightings Chaos. Governors
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Constantly.
Speaker 2:Going to war with Washington constantly.
Speaker 1:It is interesting. The US is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics or our state level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. Maybe they're get it on it. I have another idea for Greenland.
Speaker 2:And you're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they they wanna get the
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get in the box. Get in the label box. Deliver you delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the label box.
Speaker 1:So Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income. So lot of people go there.
Speaker 2:And when and this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90,000,000, he's actually fighting I didn't think about that.
Speaker 1:Wow. He's
Speaker 2:president. He has one of the That's jobs that you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train in boxing Yeah. With a, you know, a team that you built yourself. So, yeah, he his That's insane. P like, Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire Just from boxing.
Speaker 2:Fairly quickly simply because he's gonna do a handful more fights, I imagine, then he needs about a two x from there, and he'll be good to go. Yeah. Because he's, like, keeping, you know, 97 Yeah. Of every dollar.
Speaker 1:So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100,000,000, is that to the winner? Who
Speaker 2:No. And then Someone actually gets those. Paul Anthony Joshua fight.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I think Jake got 90 something, and Anthony Joshua got just under that.
Speaker 1:Oh, Around the same.
Speaker 2:But, you know, I think Jake was
Speaker 1:A bigger draw. So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie almost. So Yep. You know, your star power dictates how much you'll sell.
Speaker 1:It is crazy that that I mean, obviously, you'd be very dedicated to the sport, but it just crazies me that you could you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one night event and draw that much economic opportunity. Yeah. Not many ads and not many pay per view sales. That's a lot of money. That's remarkable.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate.
Speaker 1:Why would anyone go
Speaker 2:grandfathered in to the Puerto Rico, the 3%. I don't think
Speaker 1:that For a long time, you could just go. But now, I think it's closed.
Speaker 2:Be there. Okay. I think they closed it. I'm still I'm sure it's still solid.
Speaker 1:It's still probably not
Speaker 2:what it was.
Speaker 1:But Puerto Rico, famously, people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97% taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there?
Speaker 1:It's cold and now you have high taxes.
Speaker 2:Well, but a lot of people want desperately want to raise taxes. Yeah. Basically, I mean, I'm assuming some people actually wanna take it to a 100%.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so if you could create a
Speaker 1:You go there. You zero yourself. And then you and then you
Speaker 2:favor of ultra high taxes Yes. You could go to Greenland.
Speaker 1:That's a good idea. Speer it out immediately. I like this idea.
Speaker 2:You just land in the country
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then you Lose all your money. Connect all your accounts with Plaid
Speaker 1:But everyone knows
Speaker 2:throughout your everything and then Yeah. Secure it out.
Speaker 1:And then, Tyler, you had a different proposal? What was it?
Speaker 4:Well, okay. So so the the the bull case for just 97 is is that, like, it's a flex. Right? Yes. I can live in Greenland.
Speaker 4:I'm so I make so much money that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I live 3% less,
Speaker 4:and I'm still balling.
Speaker 1:It is hard. I feel like every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like, who's really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:That guy's actually really rich.
Speaker 4:Yeah. But then
Speaker 1:They really made
Speaker 3:it.
Speaker 4:But then if you're if you're not
Speaker 2:It's the new Uber. Eurus. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You're not Uber Uber, it still makes sense if you basically just have the 97% tax rate the first year.
Speaker 1:The first year.
Speaker 4:So then maybe it's maybe it's if you look at in ten year increments. Right? So first year, you're basically zeroed out.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But then you got then you got a super low tax rate, then you then you just grind.
Speaker 1:For five years. So you lock in.
Speaker 4:It's almost like a you get dropped on an island, and you gotta fight your way out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sort of Lord of Flies situation
Speaker 2:Yeah. Greenland. This is a good opportunity. Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax.
Speaker 1:Sick.
Speaker 2:Is it? I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's tough.
Speaker 4:He's just He's little bro ing, David Sack.
Speaker 1:He's little bro ing, everyone. It's funny.
Speaker 2:Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California breaking from a cadre of ultra wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it. He's this is this is I'm gonna say it's kind of a pick me behavior for for for for a bean air. Yeah. He says, I'm perfectly fine with it.
Speaker 2:It never crossed my mind once. I get I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish on Nvidia? They're going 40,000,000,000,000?
Speaker 3:For sure.
Speaker 2:The ballot initiative
Speaker 1:He's like, actually actually definitely pay definitely do this right now and then stop. Because he's like, I got another 10 x in the bag. I wanna pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate now.
Speaker 2:Let's head into the comment section and put a hazmat suit. It's not really relevant what he thinks, according to Jeff. It's a question of what the policy effect impact is. Yeah. All the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year, or whatever nuts I think the state cooks up.
Speaker 2:The state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, etcetera. So Huang can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country but that doesn't make it a wise policy. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 1:Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.
Speaker 2:You see Larry dumped his place in SF?
Speaker 1:He did. He's moving out.
Speaker 2:I don't know if he's getting out million.
Speaker 1:Definitely making making
Speaker 2:still has plenty of homes in Malibu.
Speaker 1:In a somewhat related story, there is now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently, this is from President Trump. He said that what was the actual what was the actual quote from Trump? Because Palmer had a Palmer had a clip.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Truth Social.
Speaker 1:I think I think you actually do. He said, I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about he's talk okay. So, also, if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together. Our country comes first.
Speaker 1:And we can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what, 5,000,000 per year per executive at a defense company? He also said that he said, I have determined for the good of our country, especially for the in these very troubled and dangerous times. Our military budget for the year 2027 should be not should not be $1,000,000,000,000, but rather $1,500,000,000,000. That is a huge increase, 50% increase.
Speaker 1:But, obviously, there's a question of where that money comes from.
Speaker 4:Okay. Yes. Yeah. So the
Speaker 1:Oh, I have the quote here. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 4:Well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable, so they're they should be limited to 5,000,000 or less.
Speaker 1:Okay. Limited to 5,000,000 or less. So I I so Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Lucky on Bloomberg, The Close, digging into this. This is clip.
Speaker 2:They were at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think he was there for for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology.
Speaker 7:So my motivation is to try and
Speaker 8:build in the
Speaker 7:biggest thing possible. I will say, people have barely critiqued and said, but Palmer, you know, are are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment given you're competing with these companies? And I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me.
Speaker 7:I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is it's always tricky when you wanna you know, I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems. Right? It's actually the same thing with, like, Mod Retro in the gaming space.
Speaker 7:Like, oh, of course, Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space. It's like but, yeah, but I'm in the gaming space because I wanna solve these problems. It's kinda this like hedge 22. Like like, if you're outside of it, they'll say
Speaker 1:Good point.
Speaker 7:Well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me.
Speaker 9:We also have posts that president Trump is thinking more than 1,000,000,000,000 should be invested in the area of defense.
Speaker 3:The budget should grow.
Speaker 10:He should be right.
Speaker 7:Anti defense or anti defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure.
Speaker 9:What's interesting is your company is, dare I say, considering going public.
Speaker 7:Yes.
Speaker 9:Would your CEO do you think the CEO that leaves the business when it's gone public should be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order? Do you think that that's gonna be an issue?
Speaker 7:I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I I like yeah. And and you're not asking whether it should be. Like like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect you know, who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they wanna say that I only pay myself $5,000,000 until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that.
Speaker 7:If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the pop when you are working on taxpayer nine, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base. But, in concept, I think everything should be on the table, and I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes.
Speaker 7:You don't necessarily go to people and say, this is the way it's gonna be forever. You say, this is how it's gonna be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager, and your parents say, you're grounded until x, y, and z. Bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal. You you say, but but this deal has so many problems.
Speaker 7:If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have no social life. And your parents are not necessarily looking
Speaker 1:to ground you for life or something. It's so funny. Imagine that.
Speaker 7:I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not necessarily a lifetime. Let let me jump.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:great. Yeah. Mean, I think I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective, especially especially if it's especially if it's temporary. Yeah. You know, you can see this you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could over time Yeah.
Speaker 2:Be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime, where the prime had gotten like a multi $100,000,000 contract years ago, and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they were that they had signed up and were getting paid to make.
Speaker 1:They're being lazy bones.
Speaker 2:Lazy bones.
Speaker 4:Lazy And bones
Speaker 2:so, yeah, in that
Speaker 1:situation You can't be lazy bones
Speaker 2:in that situation if you have a management team that is just printing Yeah. Regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think
Speaker 1:And I think I think Palmer is sort of wrestling with libertarian ideas, how much you know, should private companies be able to do. And he and that's a separate issue. It's like a private company, if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with government, then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people.
Speaker 1:It's the democracy. And so Yeah. That's what's happening.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and the and the the you know, Palmer in another clip was talking. They they asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make a $100,000 a year. Right?
Speaker 2:That's my comp package. Yeah. And he also said, I have a bunch of stock because I started this company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works with the government cannot make more than $5,000,000 Yeah. And you're factoring in comp packages later, you could be in a situation where a company says, well, like, we can't hire the best people
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they have an offer to make $10,000,000 a year over and we can only pay them $5,000,000
Speaker 1:mean, the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening, but it would be very tricky if Anderle could not compete against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, if they need a super talented AI researcher. And maybe they're not paying them a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah. Like, the market rate for this role is 15 mil. And, like, we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing. And that would be a little bit tricky.
Speaker 1:Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream, then we'll go to Tyler. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want a multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 4:Tyler? I was just gonna say, you can already see this phenomena, you know, in some ways, you know, Tim Cook. Yes. He it's not a salary cap. Right?
Speaker 1:It feels like there's a cap.
Speaker 4:It feels like something's going on.
Speaker 1:He should
Speaker 4:be he should be be paying paid way more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What does he make? 75?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:Barely scraping it.
Speaker 4:Other Imagine if he was only five. I mean,
Speaker 1:Oh, it'd be it'd be terrible. He he would he would have no incentive to share any
Speaker 2:of greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think instead of a $5,000,000 individual cap on defense tech executives, it'd be much better to do a team based salary cap because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like, instead of 5,000,000 per executive, how about 20,000,000 for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room?
Speaker 1:Okay. We got an all star. We're bringing in Brian Schemf as the CEO. He's the CEO of Vanderbilt right now. We're poaching him.
Speaker 1:We're getting him 18, but his team is gonna be mostly interns. Or you go and you get, okay. We got four people. They're all making five. They're all decent operators, but you create much more of a sports like dynamic.
Speaker 2:That's the way do
Speaker 4:get Brian Schiff, but we can recreate him in the aggregate.
Speaker 1:In aggregate.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Todd Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promise is to choose another vendor. I agree. You could fix a lot of this at the contract level if if you sign a contract with somebody and then a year in Yeah. Year, two years, three years, etcetera, they're not delivering.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like making it so that the government can more easily reallocate those funds and actually make these companies have some accountability. More importantly, near Before
Speaker 1:we move on, just I think this whole thing is very interesting because you have this dynamic where very clearly it feels like Hegseth went and gave Trump some sort of update, and then he just, like, posted on True Social and, like, kinda crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? This is not it's not even an executive order at this point. It's just we're we're there's an entire news cycle around the new defense budget, this this is all just truth social posts, just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically. But this stuff does actually have an impact on
Speaker 2:I know. It is funny.
Speaker 1:Like, you see a big you see
Speaker 2:a long social post Yeah. And you just assume it's an executive order.
Speaker 1:It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay. This is law, but it's not. But but it does have an impact and brings people to the table, and we saw this play out with Intel where he was saying, like, Lip Buuton's gotta go. And he basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel.
Speaker 1:And then and then a few days later, he's like, Lip Buuton's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually gonna invest. I own 10% of the company now. And now the stock That's my boy.
Speaker 1:So these things are, like, aggressive, but it's this whole, like, taco chickening out, but that's part of the plan, art of the deal. I don't know. It it's a very it's a very weird, interesting, new dynamic. And I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration, but we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the Before we move on, let me tell you about Railway.
Speaker 1:Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases run-in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in.
Speaker 2:That's right. Sorry. Nir says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You just need to find one good one founder good enough to carry your entire career.
Speaker 1:That is fantastic.
Speaker 2:This is a banger and it's it's it's So true. It's banger because it's so true. Like when I when I look at across you know sixty, seventy different investments at this point, if you take out, like, two or three of these founders Hour log games. It's just like
Speaker 1:Much like being on Rust with a with an absolute killer who
Speaker 2:You're absolutely
Speaker 1:60 no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work. Yeah. But you're getting carried. You're like, we won.
Speaker 2:Two v two on Rust, and you're just in a corner and the game's over because you're because
Speaker 1:You load into Counter Strike on Dust two, and you one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups, and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. You're carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of of how I got my Overwatch account carried to, like, the absolute top? My account was, like, ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very interesting.
Speaker 2:It was me. Who was?
Speaker 1:So so I You're evil. First season of I I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack or some sort of leak from another, maybe, like, you know, some other company had my password leaked it. I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because, like, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1:You're just gonna like my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it. You can just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something. And so if you were hacking, you didn't wanna buy $60 every time you got banned.
Speaker 1:So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was, like, a sniper. Think he played with Hanzo Main and was, like, really, really good. And then years later, I got back in with my friends, I'm, like, oh, let's play some Overwatch, and we queue up.
Speaker 2:Like, Jon, what you what are And up
Speaker 1:I and I'm, like, oh, I need to do placement matches. So I do the placement matches, I'm just like losing because I'm playing with all these incredible, like, you know, the top tier. And and everyone's like, why are you guys like like, we know you're good. Why are you why are you sandbagging? Like, why are you trying to derank your account?
Speaker 1:And I'm like, I'm not. I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. And they're and they're like, no. We can see that you're like one of the greatest Hanzo players ever.
Speaker 1:Like, you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch. We've seen your account history. You're amazing. Why are you playing poorly? And I was like, I I don't know.
Speaker 1:And then I finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings. And then and then the the game, like, remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games. So finally, I had to make up a lie because whenever I'd whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, you're terrible and you're supposed to be good. And I'd have to say, oh, like, I broke my hand, so I just I'm not as good as I used to be. Like, please go easy on me.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm I'm I'm relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on, Applovin. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 2:Jordy? One more thing that was funny about this truth social saga from yesterday. So he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Lockheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff. Raytheon, etcetera. I think this was it was right after the close Yeah. And after hours. But then immediately after that, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the 1 and a half trillion dollar announcement came after talking down
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:On them. So then It's a very probably. Just a little bit later, Trump said after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries, and other political representatives, I have determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the 1,000,000,000,000, but rather 1 and a half trillion. This will allow us to build this will allow us to build the, quote, dream military that we have long been entitled to, and more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. And so anyways, you can imagine what happened to prices after that.
Speaker 2:If it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries, and then keeps ranting, talks about sleepy Joe. I think we I think it's time to retire sleepy Joe. Just let him let him be Just Joe. Retired. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just Joe. Anyways, over to Warner Brothers. Yes. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest $108,400,000,000 hostile bid and remain committed I
Speaker 1:called it Loyal. I knew nothing about this deal. But I just randomly said that I think Netflix is gonna run away with it. But we'll see.
Speaker 2:It's not journal Paramount defends its hostile bid for
Speaker 1:How high can they go? Can they go to 200,000,000,000? It seems like Paramount has
Speaker 2:They're holding out for 1,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Endless endless coffers. I don't know.
Speaker 2:But Paramount continued pushing its $77,900,000,000 bid for Warner Brothers Thursday after a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix team.
Speaker 2:On the lot.
Speaker 1:On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're they're they're ready to partner up. They're they're adding a new a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're they're having fun.
Speaker 1:And I and it it feels like like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal to directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something. Yeah. It feels like it's in the bag.
Speaker 2:And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month. Interesting. So
Speaker 1:Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 2:Anthropic raising 10,000,000,000 at 350,000,000,000. Talked about this a little bit yesterday. Yeah. Get into it more.
Speaker 1:GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and K2 plan to lead
Speaker 2:Spencer, new absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Spencer, get in the ultra dome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the third mega deal in the past year follows a 13,000,000,000 investment in September that valued the company at a 183,000,000,000. So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation.
Speaker 1:Good for dilution. The round's expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the Axon.
Speaker 2:We're still warming up this new mallet. Yeah. Kinda splintered.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Don't if you've noticed this.
Speaker 1:Maybe you know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap Gloves too. Batting gloves. I do I I would like an even longer mallet, like a full baseball. Like a staff.
Speaker 1:Something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe may maybe big bigger mallet, maybe some, maybe some athletic tape on there, wrapping it like, it's, like it's a baseball bat that's hit a a thousand home runs.
Speaker 2:Do you think they do you think they end up doing another round before the IPO? It's hard it's hard to imagine this is actually the
Speaker 1:The final the actual pre
Speaker 2:IPO round just because there's so much incentive to just perhaps again in a few months.
Speaker 1:I I I saw a couple people doing polls on, would you rather own OpenAI at 1,000,000,000,000 or Anthropic at $3.50 or x AI at $2.20 or whatever. Well, whatever the valuations were. And at least a lot of the a lot of the small polls that I saw, people were very excited about Anthropics valuation relative to the magic that's happening in Claude Code and and all the all the glazing that's happening. Finally, have a second AI glaze gate, but this time, the AI is getting glazed by the humans and vice It's glaze. But Cursor is not getting glazed.
Speaker 1:Shaquille says he's bearish on Cursor, says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI. We'll have to we'll have to talk to Michael Truell about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI Pildy is, but this is from Brie Wolfson on Dialectic with Jackson Jackson Dahl. The context, Shaquille says, is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Cursor, and much of much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about Cursor's culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there.
Speaker 1:All of this is very interesting and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work. All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Brie. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy, total disruption story, and Shaquille doesn't like that.
Speaker 1:And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi? And just be like, look, it's just auto complete, and it makes money, and we sell tokens profitably. Or should you be like, it's gonna Or cure should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all gonna die.
Speaker 1:Like, there's so many different narratives that you can tug on, and a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them, and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently, and sometimes I can work. Sometimes I can't. I I I'm kind of down with cursor. I like this.
Speaker 1:I I I like that Michael is just like, he's a builder, and and he tells he tells a good story about that. And, like, there are other AI leaders that are telling the doom story or telling the fast takeoff story. I don't think that Cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story, but Shaquille disagrees, but we'll have to dig into this more. What what what do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, is interesting because Anthropic, they make such emphasis on on coding. Yeah. They're like, of the of the big labs, people think of them Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 4:Probably as like the most AGI pilled. But it's like cursor is all mean, all they do is coding, and and there's a very different like Yeah. Different aesthetic. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's a it's much more of a Centaur adoption and much more of a copilot, much less of this drop in replacement for labor.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's true. But I mean, you've definitely seen a lot of the recent cursor features are are getting more and more agentic. Totally.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 4:Like, the actual product isn't, like, so completely different, at least, like, ideologically. Right?
Speaker 1:No. No. I know. I I I agree. I agree.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's something Cursor has an advantage, which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product. And so they have they have a data source on a lot of this that spec you know, peep people that are just kind of speculating and on x and and reading, like, science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. It's like, there's something to just, like, playing playing the game as you see it on the field. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could look you know, it's it's it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what's what the world's gonna be like in one years, two years, five years, But at the same time, if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more Mhmm. Like, that doesn't, it's hard to just say, oh, I'm bearish on this company because they're not they're not Yeah. Of this one, you know, podcast interview.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs, the makers of our theme song. So Rihar Jark says, you can feel the code red here.
Speaker 1:Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini three. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. Three months ago, it was at 12.9%. Twelve months ago, was at 5.7%. And I remember though a year ago when it launched, it felt like it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including generative AI snippets in Google search, or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers, and it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app, really daily driving it.
Speaker 1:It was more demo, more testing. Will this similar web data seem to show that, Gemini has been growing and taking share?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's also worth noting that this is just like site visits. And so not every visit is created equally. Somebody can land quickly on a site. That's very different from them being in the app multiple times a day.
Speaker 2:So this is not looking at app traffic
Speaker 1:That's what I love about the semi analysis chart that shows that you have, you know, users or accounts that are signed up, then you have the the the active users, and then you have how many interactions those users have, like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day. And then also, how many interactions? How long are they spending time? And so ultimately, the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on-site, attention at the end of the day. And so there is a little bit of a gap there where when they ran when seminalysis at least ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUs or MAUs in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths.
Speaker 1:OpenAI was really, really dominant. And so maybe the narrative's over stated, but it's still some interesting data. And it does show that the code red is real, and it shows that Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously. And they've gotten more traffic, which is good.
Speaker 2:Near is back. Yes. LM Arena has raised a valuation of 1,700,000,000.0 coming in with a Michael Burry shot. We're gonna have we're gonna have the founder of LM Arena on Great. Hopefully in the next twenty four hours.
Speaker 2:We'll have to respond
Speaker 1:to this viral put a thousand likes on this. Why do people not like Ella Marina? It seems like
Speaker 2:Well, I think a
Speaker 1:fantastic business. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. I I I you know, how much revenue are they doing?
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:What what kind of products are they releasing? Yeah. Like, can they get if you're I'll
Speaker 1:tell you this right now. You you you build up a huge reputation. The sterling example of what is the best LLM, the best benchmark possible, can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the best arena, the best LLM award to the highest bidder and
Speaker 2:For a billion dollars.
Speaker 1:For for $10,000,000,000, and you return all the money to shareholders after you do that. And you and you give them good vibes for one week, and then you burn your
Speaker 2:Priceless.
Speaker 1:Higher credibility. Priceless. No. Clearly, there's some, like, model routing, some infrastructural level. We I I think we've talked about this before, but the increasingly, the I think the bull case is not just deciding which which model is the best in an LM Arena.
Speaker 1:It's it's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike, and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process, how do they evaluate, how do they bring in those models, and then how do they measure uptime, how do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision. And if you can take a take take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know. But we'll have to talk to the founder about it.
Speaker 1:Do do you have any take on LM Arena
Speaker 4:fan? I don't have a take on, like, the business side. But as a product, it's very useful. Yeah. It's it's always cool to look at.
Speaker 4:I mean, they always get the new models before, so you can always see
Speaker 1:like Sure.
Speaker 4:Like, whenever a new image model comes out Oh, yeah. It's always there first.
Speaker 1:You Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Kinda see Yeah. What are the vibes. But yeah. It's a good I enjoyed the the product a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The vibe economy is potentially dramatically undervalued Mhmm. At in the leaderboard economy. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think the vibes I think over the past few months, you've definitely started to see like, okay, this Exonon is like likely being paid by a lab. I I think you've been starting to see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It definitely happens. Anyway, they probably I don't know. There there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind?
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 1:Did you have you heard about the Tailwind drama, this whole thing? Tailwind laid off 75% of their team?
Speaker 4:I read the
Speaker 1:post. Pretty rough. Yeah. The post. The reason is so ironic.
Speaker 1:Their CSS framework became extremely popular with AI coding agents, 75,000,000 downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings resulting in a 40% drop in traffic and an 80% revenue loss. And people are really, really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like
Speaker 2:they need pivot
Speaker 1:regressively to figure out some other way to integrate.
Speaker 2:Posted a a video Yeah. Or basically a a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk Yeah. And just was talking for thirty minutes. I listened to that half of it this morning.
Speaker 2:Sad story. They have a small super talented Yeah. Team. He had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners in the business plus one one other engineer.
Speaker 2:There's four of them now trying to maintain it. He's optimistic, but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month, which means that it was a greater and greater percentage Woah. Revenue. And so he was like, we're just gonna be dead in in less than a year.
Speaker 1:Because a lot of what they did, I think I I think their paid offerings were, like, selling components preassembled code. And all of the chat all all of the LLMs can just one shot a component. If you need a pop up or a modal or or a button, you don't don't need to pay
Speaker 2:was saying it'd be great if if, like, a big lab just said, hey. These are your talented team.
Speaker 1:That's a good idea.
Speaker 2:You know, join, like, an in Yeah. An anthropic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I don't know I don't know much about the founder, but it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented. And I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front end transformation of a massive surface area Yeah.
Speaker 3:Or going
Speaker 1:to a
Speaker 2:place like Lovable or Figma.
Speaker 1:That would be great too. But even even just going inside of, like, you know, a Salesforce or some sort of, like, you know, some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it. But you have this new team that comes in and they
Speaker 2:have Yeah. But I'm sure they wanna keep building Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So so maybe inside.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, the the saying lays off 75 percent of their team is dramatic. They did lay
Speaker 1:Oh. They laid off three people. Okay. Okay. Out of
Speaker 2:a four person team that Yeah. That the not not the owners of the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so sort of law of numbers sounds more dramatic than maybe it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But still, I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was it was Oh. The the founder was upset. He Yeah.
Speaker 2:Apparently, were just like commenting. Yeah. People were really mean to him. Mean to him being like Being Google. Hey, I I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they're like, you're going against, you know,
Speaker 1:What it means
Speaker 2:fee like of open source. He's like
Speaker 1:John Lutig wrote this in his piece on open source AI. The open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these incredible technologies that people can build on. But people also like freebies. And they get very mad when you take them away, and they get mad when they don't when they don't get them.
Speaker 1:Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch. And everyone loves Plaid because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Dylan. Wait.
Speaker 1:Wait. Really quickly. Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is?
Speaker 2:I do not.
Speaker 1:Well Oh. Guess what? He inspired Wait.
Speaker 5:He's a
Speaker 1:guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario.
Speaker 2:Wait. He works for X?
Speaker 1:No. He's on X. No. No. He he he joined platform.
Speaker 1:But he does
Speaker 2:I'd read that as you
Speaker 1:I I he's an incredible military hero. He has some fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. And he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions, but he's wearing, like, what looks like an IT guy outfit.
Speaker 1:So it's like a a starched white button down with a pocket protector, and he has these big glasses. And he and he's Walking out of the Blackhawk. Yeah. Exactly. So he's not wearing the normal, like, military camo with the bulletproof vest.
Speaker 1:He's just there to to, like, clean up and stuff. It's crazy. So he's a yeah. He's a he's a personal hero of mine in All time
Speaker 4:aura farmer.
Speaker 1:All time aura farmer. That is for sure true. Would love to have him on the show. He's he's done other shows, so it it it would be very interesting to hear from him.
Speaker 2:This company Flip said Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product, growth, ops, designers, interns Mhmm. And roles that do not yet have names. And then twenty four hours later, they they quoted their own post that they've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip.
Speaker 1:Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait. It says it's the Lucky Company?
Speaker 2:So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling.
Speaker 1:Of course. I I actually Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think it I think it the product, what they're trying to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's that it's that meme. I've seen I've seen people joke about that and then I saw there's this
Speaker 2:They're they're bringing gambling into credit cards.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I I I saw a poster who
Speaker 2:They're bringing gambling into debt.
Speaker 1:There's someone who, like, vibe codes different UX mock ups for funny concepts. There's that famous one by Aidan of, like, the, the Google Maps with a with a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been, and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these, and one of them is like the the double or nothing on your checkout, which is a crazy idea. I don't know.
Speaker 1:On the topic of luck, at one point, very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called five hour luck. And the whole concept would be like, it'd be a five hour energy shot, but the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky. It would make it would increase your luck. Just because people you know, energy is a stat. Why not increase luck?
Speaker 1:Yep. And I was gonna formulate it, pass some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. Was not thinking about the gambling application.
Speaker 2:Placebo element. Yeah. Mean, that Marco. That product would crush in Vegas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Imagine just taking it and being like, okay. I I I have the stat boost. I'm like Maybe you could put feeling good.
Speaker 2:Snake oil in it.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Well, Brian Johnson I he he sells a product. It's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So he's sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind.
Speaker 1:With best in class embedding models and re rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. So moving on to Citrini. Asking someone asking someone long memory. Oh, whose long memory? If they got any new ideas for 2026.
Speaker 1:This is already rich. Yes. Memory has been on a tear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bubble Boy on over on X had had some pretty, great calls late last year. I'm gonna try to pull pull one up.
Speaker 1:Well, you do. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:We can also pull up I wanna watch this this intro from This Week in Startups. Can we move on to this?
Speaker 2:Pull it up.
Speaker 1:Pull up the video, of Jason Kallikhanis finally answering the question we all had. What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on This Week in Startup. Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase that I clicked instantly. This is on This Week in Startups.
Speaker 1:His cohost asks him. And the best part about the show is that I was expecting it to be like, they tease it in an intro, and then they make you listen to and then they they cut just short of him saying, oh, one thing I wanna buy is and then boom, the start of the show. And then twenty minutes later, he gives you no. Watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant?
Speaker 1:Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you, even Jason Calacanis, will not break out the checkbook for.
Speaker 6:It's definitely private aviation.
Speaker 1:That's got I'm trying to hold Good. Jay, you deserve it. Long time.
Speaker 5:Deserves it.
Speaker 6:Great, unjustifiable expense of spending $50,000 going somewhere or $100,000 on a round trip. That seemed absurd to spend that. The other one I would say that I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car.
Speaker 10:I love Corvettes.
Speaker 1:Do it. He loves Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. Get a z r one.
Speaker 6:A big open fancy barn that's kinda like a man cave, but Texas style. Do I buy this z r x one for two hundred z r one x. $50,000, or do
Speaker 1:I Do buy it.
Speaker 2:Do it, Jake.
Speaker 6:Out. $50,000 Corvette
Speaker 1:out of
Speaker 8:your collection.
Speaker 1:I like that. The collections
Speaker 6:become cognitive load. This weekend start ups
Speaker 5:is brought to you
Speaker 1:by Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna add it. Shout out to their sponsors for making it possible. I love that.
Speaker 1:I love that he's Corvette guy.
Speaker 2:Jay Cal deserves it.
Speaker 1:He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it. Been in the media business for decades. One of my welcome to Silicon Valley
Speaker 2:was doing TPN, like, in the early two thousand.
Speaker 1:You know whose first guest was ever? David Sachs. It's the craziest thing. And they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs, and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting.
Speaker 1:And my my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival, his his conference, heard a bunch of tech people talk, met a bunch of YC founders, kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley, went to the some bar in on Silicon Valley in in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It it it was a lot of fun. He was very nice.
Speaker 2:Also in that era, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:yeah. About this. We gotta watch Should this clip we up?
Speaker 1:Oh, do you do you have it ready to go?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's on charlierose.com.
Speaker 1:It is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose, I was like, we gotta dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputer for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1:So do you have it, sir?
Speaker 2:Let's pull this up.
Speaker 1:Where is it?
Speaker 2:I put it in the team chat.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, while we while we pull that up, let's look for what's next. Unintended AI close. I can do another ad read. While we do that, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security.
Speaker 1:Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 2:How are we doing team?
Speaker 1:Pulling it up. Nikita Beer finally met someone.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Charlie Rose, the video actually does not load.
Speaker 1:Oh, it doesn't load. Oh, no. Well, well, you know what we can do? We can export it, and we can play it tomorrow on the show. Let's make a note to do that.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell.
Speaker 2:Big.
Speaker 1:And I love this. So Michael Dell said, big news, the world's first 52 inch six k monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you. Jordy, did you ever have one of these elite multi monitor setups? Or were you always like a sort of do business by phone?
Speaker 1:You've never been an iPad guy. Have you ever been
Speaker 2:I've got a I've got an Apple monitor
Speaker 1:You have one.
Speaker 2:At home. I I find it hard. I mean, as like a guy who has been building companies Yeah. And investing, you're basically an email.
Speaker 1:Phone, email, Zoom.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:It's not So it's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations. You're you're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations is what you're saying.
Speaker 2:But I do enjoy I I have an Apple monitor at home. I enjoy it, but it's nothing like this.
Speaker 1:This is incredible. So it's much bigger than the Apple Pro display XDR. Curved? It is curved. It has to be curved at that size because you're basically sitting right your face is right up against the TV.
Speaker 1:52 inches. And and it's a very it's funny in in many, many ways because let's so so first, let's play the clip from Rob Moore where he says Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode. After forty two years, Michael Dell's new products. Coming out of
Speaker 2:Has not dull. The thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:It's awesome. So let's play this.
Speaker 3:That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or
Speaker 1:photograph. But you were like
Speaker 3:I was like, this is this is like a kid on Christmas. Like, you're still
Speaker 2:It's super cool product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm I'm very excited.
Speaker 2:Told you I'll buy one of this. I think it's cool too. I'm gonna buy one as soon
Speaker 3:as it comes But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not dulling. That obsession has not dulled.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:Heartwarming. Heartwarming.
Speaker 1:And what what's really what's really, really funny is that so there's there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says it's out here. You can just buy it. And then this this this poster, Ben Badrin, the CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, says this monitor from Dell is amazing, and I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used, and even at a 120 hertz, still capable to game on.
Speaker 1:So it's like, when did this thing release? Like, it it doesn't have the fanfare of, like, a normal product release cycle where there's, like, preorders, but it's very fun, and it's been very hyped. And I I think we should get get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly, and it's not very aesthetic. And you have the opportunity to to simplify. You can actually display four different full computers, I think, at fairly high res, just tiled on one screen so you can run four different displays It's
Speaker 2:$2,900.
Speaker 1:Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.
Speaker 2:We have a major white pill.
Speaker 1:Oh, we do.
Speaker 2:Drew Tuma is reporting for the first time in twenty five years, not a single square mile of California is dry on The US drought monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought.
Speaker 2:So we are, incredibly, incredibly back.
Speaker 1:Yes. We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TBPN expose in Vanity Fair just dropped today. You go to vanityfair.com, we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece that we got to do a Well very fun
Speaker 2:To be clear, there wasn't Yeah. There wasn't a lot of work for us. But got
Speaker 1:to hang out with her. And, I mean, it was we we had to go dress
Speaker 2:up and get We did have dress up. It was it was definitely the most by far, the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of.
Speaker 1:Two cameras, medium format, medium format film.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the first time that I just mean more like the the team
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:That actually went into it. Right? Oh, yeah. There's so many different people working on on was extremely professional as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers.
Speaker 2:She's not she's not fully Not letting rebrand. It No. Keeping it alive. Yeah. They call
Speaker 1:us the J Team. John Kugen and Jordy Hayes.
Speaker 2:The J Team. And there's Off mic moment. A bunch of funny moments in here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What'd you like? What'd you like?
Speaker 2:I like the she said, there are no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company but they
Speaker 1:have Not not just any nicotine. What kind of nicotine is it?
Speaker 2:Nicotine company
Speaker 1:It's addictive nicotine.
Speaker 2:That I personally am addicted to
Speaker 1:Like all nicotine.
Speaker 2:But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air. They try to avoid vulgarity and they don't promote alcohol or drug use mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's it's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use even though in the early days doubling, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were
Speaker 1:doing the Dom episodes.
Speaker 2:But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah. It was funny. But I remember I'd be I I would tell my wife, oh, it's a it's a Dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11AM.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never gonna promote Burning Man.
Speaker 1:I can't believe you said that. It it I mean,
Speaker 2:it's it's factually true.
Speaker 1:It really is so funny when when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes, were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes you
Speaker 2:you Yeah. You're drifting.
Speaker 1:You're just drifting bits. And and then it gets written down, and it looks way different in that context, but it's good. It's real. It it's the actual
Speaker 2:a funny moment. So we were we were getting breakfast with Julia Yeah. At our usual spot. And she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an ex This good. This was right after the Coldplay saga.
Speaker 2:I said, start up CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julia says, as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were there were over 70,000. And you were saying imagine imagine if Imagine if it flopped, would be in here. It'd be like he said he predicted it Ten ten thousand.
Speaker 2:It only got 200.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But wow.
Speaker 2:So lucky day. Lucky day.
Speaker 1:Banger. It Yeah. Was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what what was that?
Speaker 1:Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know. But we're gonna figure it out and we're not going anywhere over the next Yeah.
Speaker 1:Decades.
Speaker 2:It was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix You in the studio that morning He's a moment. Which is a is a fantastic song.
Speaker 1:It's a great song. Also, at that at that lunch, actually didn't put this in, but you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it. You just kept shaking the salt shaker and I was like, this is gonna go in the piece.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:I've never noticed that you
Speaker 2:I love salt. I have this amazing story. My my grandpa was making my brother and I Yeah. Hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time, so it was just us hanging out with grandpa.
Speaker 2:Sure. And he's like, I'm gonna make the kids hot chocolate. Yeah. He, makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it.
Speaker 2:He he gives us a couple cups. And we're like, oh, grandpa, this this is really this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, made it right. I it's it's totally fine.
Speaker 2:Oh, I know what happened. And, turns out he all the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salts, but his taste buds were so cooked that to him it just He was just drinking like salt. Pure salt.
Speaker 1:Hot chocolate. Sugar, notice immediately.
Speaker 2:So anyways, I am I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt.
Speaker 1:But it's very it's it's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. One of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, oh, we love blue skies. Like, it's so nice clouds.
Speaker 1:It most of the days are blue skies in California and they had to clarify like, no, like blue sky like the app. And we're like, oh, yeah. We don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on x. But it it really does give you a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot.
Speaker 1:So it was always a
Speaker 2:good Yeah. Also the the outfits, of course Yes. Unfortunately, were not ours.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:They dressed us.
Speaker 1:They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff.
Speaker 2:But you you gotta get that suit. I do. I think the suit is
Speaker 1:You gotta get yours too.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable.
Speaker 1:The the the nineteen eighties theme was very fun, very throwback. And it feels like a return to the early brand. Very much what we were doing, it it feels like it it it captured. It might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into, you know, whatever we're doing next. Anyway, we have Dalian Asperha from Founders Fund and VARTA in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Let's bring him into the TVP and UltraDumb. Dalian, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:Hello, brothers.
Speaker 1:Welcome back. Good to see you.
Speaker 2:First first appearance, you did 18 last year. We're hoping to 10 x this year. We gotta keep on a venture trajectory. So a 180 hits this year.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta commentary about New Year's resolutions?
Speaker 3:My, you know, goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year. Woah.
Speaker 1:And, you
Speaker 3:know, just lean into my new stylist, you know, sort of recommendations on, you know, just looking like a wizened venture capitalist that is, you know, ready to, go ring a bunch of, NASDAQ bells this year since
Speaker 1:go or New York's on
Speaker 3:the finish. Rain, baby.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That TB green is looking fantastic. Looks fantastic. Props to your stylist.
Speaker 1:Okay. First question, we were reading in The Wall Street Journal today that you're cooked, that venture capital is cooked. Venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. Are you cooked? Is it over?
Speaker 1:Are you going to be leaving the industry after disaster has struck according to the journal? What's your reaction?
Speaker 3:You know, you're getting this, like, you know, sort of k shaped, you know, nature to venture, you know, sort of right now, which has been happening for, you know, sort of a couple years, but it's happening both
Speaker 2:on the doing ketamine?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. We we were just k holeing and we kept like, you know, really focusing on one company just like I like Hey.
Speaker 1:We just told Vanity Fair we don't promote drugs.
Speaker 2:I always say, drugs. Sorry.
Speaker 3:We take ketamine and, we get
Speaker 6:to horses. That's for
Speaker 1:our Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Horses that we own.
Speaker 1:But the the this bifurcation that's been happening. Do you have the riding jacket on? Oh, that's a good one. This is There
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 1:This is a good merch. Rare rare Founders Fund merch. Anyways, we only, you know, use that stuff Yes. For our horses. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Yes. Riding the horses.
Speaker 1:But yes. So so so where did the k shaped split come from? Is this interest rate driven or just LPs are realizing that it's better to pile into the big winners? Give me more
Speaker 2:on that. You have a a big fund raised in 2025, but it could have been way bigger. Oversubscribe. Mhmm. Part of the issue is PT's hogging all hogging the whole fund.
Speaker 2:But but but there's instances where there's like way more demand for a specific fund Sure. Than there is actual, you you know, allocations available. And then other cases more on the the emerging manager side where they just can't even get going.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What are you seeing, Darling?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's a couple different, like, forces at play here. A part of it is, like, if you actually even just study the, like, old days of, like, you know, sort of PE, for example, when you go from, like, the, you know, barbarians at the gate days to today, PE kinda went through, like, a similar dynamic at Supercycle where you had, like, you know, cottage industry to start, then got super, you know, sort of scaled, and there were a ton of different players. And then steadily, there was, you know, a bunch of aggregation basically over time Mhmm. That, you know, led to, you know, some, you know, sort of mega mega funds like the KKRs, etcetera of the world.
Speaker 3:I think you're basically seeing, you know, basically, venture go through the same thing, and I think you started to see basically, like, that k shape really accelerate in 2021, and then it's only basically continued since then. And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things. Right? I think we've talked about this before, but, like, you know, if you look at it on, like, a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021 in terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe that I think basically, like, north of $5,000,000. It's, like, just strictly going, you know, sort of down in terms of number of companies, basically, you know, sort of per per year that are looking like that.
Speaker 3:So company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default, you basically have, obviously, you know, sort of fewer logos that you can chase, and so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company, you know, basically, side of things. At the same time, you're seeing, you know, your company stay private for much longer, and so, like, the liquidity in the public market is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies because, like, there's just a small set. There are the mega ones that are raising these, like, you know, sort of huge, huge rounds. Right?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I think it was something, like, if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and x AI, basically. I think if you added up, basically, those four companies, it was something on the order of, like, 60% of, like, the total, like, you know, dollars deployed by VCs in that year were scooped up basically by those, like, you know, sort of four or five companies. Yeah. And so I think that's, like, the dynamic that's been flowing through on, like, the VC, you know, basically, side of things where if you're one of those companies and you need to rent out, raise, like, you know, $10,000,000,000, are you really trying to go out and do that with, like, a bunch of $10,000,000 checks?
Speaker 3:Like, no. Like, you prefer to, like, you know, find capital providers that can actually give you, you know, billion dollar checks at a time so you just, like, have fewer, you know, sort of mouths around the table you need to manage. Some of this is regulatory. Right? Like, I think you need to have more than, like yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it's, like, 6,500, like, you know, institutions on your cap table before you're public, and so you literally, like, have to make sure Yeah. That these, you know, sort of things, you know, aggregate. And then there's a part of it that is, like, yeah, just been, like, power law of venture and tech only continues to be, like, more and more true. Like, you know, you're dominated by the big. It's like, yeah, there's this, like I'm I'm probably gonna butcher it a little bit.
Speaker 3:Literally, like, know, Peter said this, you know, sort of, like, you know, thing that he said for sure privately I'm pretty sure publicly too. So I don't think he'll mind me, you know, just saying it, but he, like his, like, biggest error, you know, that he says of, like, his 20, you know, sort of times was, you know, his impression was just, you know, there's not gonna be that many, like, you know, you know, 100,000,000,000, let alone, like, trillion dollar companies. But it turns out, basically, like, each individual 10 x is actually, like, easier than the last one. Basically, like, once you're you're sort of, you know, trillion dollar you know, once you're a $100,000,000,000 company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from, like, 10 to a 100. It's actually much easier to go to 10 to a 100 than it is from one to 10.
Speaker 3:And it's much easier to go from, like, 1,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000 than it is to go from a 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000. Is that right? So, yeah, that's you know, in some ways that, like, momentum beginning momentum is just, like, making sure that these, like, you know, companies get bigger, faster. They're scooping up capital faster, some of venture firms are getting bigger, faster. I think the thing where this stuff starts to break is, like, I don't think that the current default fee structure is going to be, like, where the industry is at, you know, sort of, you know, ten years from today.
Speaker 3:I won't, like, name names, but, like, there's definitely a decent number of these multistage mega funds that, you know, are doing, you know, some of their super late stage investing through both, like, fee less and carry less, you know, basically SPVs. And so at some point, if you're doing, a fee less and carry less SPV where you're investing into a late stage startup, you basically just work as IR at the startup. Right? Like, you know, you're, like, you're not making money.
Speaker 2:Walk me through. Mean, SPVs are just notoriously, like, they're they're incredible when they hit because it's deal by deal. And if you have one true banger, it's your the the GPs that are a part of that are retired. So, like, in theory, they're amazing in practice, like, actually trying to go and convince a lot of people. And you're basically staking your reputation on that deal because you don't have the aggregate deals that typically go in a fund.
Speaker 2:You're saying, kind of have to say, this is going to work and do my other SPVs. So at least you're diversified to some degree. But it's a ton of work. There's a ton of pressure. You have to promise the company that you're gonna or or promise or or imply that you can achieve, some of investment amount, and then you have to go do all this heavy lifting.
Speaker 2:So why is a why is a multistage fund incentivized to do that? Is it just to gain favor with the company? Like, what's the what's the incentive?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I think they're probably, like, hidden secret of Silicon Valley is, like, that there's just, like, a much higher percentage of capital that is deployed via, like, SPVs and co invest vehicles than is probably, like, publicly acknowledged or discussed. Like, there are very top tier tier one, you know, sort of companies, including some the ones that I listed in those, like, top five that have had rounds come together based off of a significant chunk of the round basically being done by an SPV. Why do you do it as a company? Well, at end the day, if you're like the CEO of a company, you're
Speaker 6:No.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying I'm not saying why do it as a company. I'm saying why do a fee less, carry less SPV as
Speaker 3:a Oh, as a, you know, sort of venture investor. It's a Just pure
Speaker 2:love pure love the game. I just love deploying capital. I don't need I don't need to make money from it. It's a it's volunteer work.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think it's you know, a lot of funds, the way that they end up, like, know, sort of growing in AUM is, you know, they start off with an initial, like, fixed fund structure and then, like, you know, for their best performing companies, do co invest vehicles, you know, or, like, opportunity funds to build that up and then eventually become, you know, sort of, you know, multistage and can actually, like, handle, basically, a growth fund once they've shown that some of those growth SPVs work. So in some ways So I guess in some ways,
Speaker 2:part of it is is maybe they promise LPs, like, if you back my fund in a big way, I will give you direct access. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or or it's value add. Like, if you have
Speaker 2:out of these
Speaker 1:have stake in a company and you just want that company to succeed, you're like, look. It's value add. I'm just gonna go work, get them more money on their balance sheet. Yeah. I'm not making more money off of that piece of the investment by but my original investment is getting marked up, and Yeah.
Speaker 1:The company's more likely to succeed. Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'll pretend like this is, you know, hypothetical even if it's not hypothetical, but, like, imagine you're a company like OpenAI. You need to go raise, like, you know, sort of billions of dollars. Right? You as the CEO have a lot of things on your plate.
Speaker 3:Right? You need to, like, manage the government. You have customers. You have your internal team, etcetera. Like, can you really be afford to, like, literally fully, fully, fully only be focused on fundraising?
Speaker 3:Like, no. It's, like, really hard to do that, basically, I guess, as CEO when you're operating the company. Yeah. Versus if somebody comes to you and is like, hey. Let me do, like, a, like, you know, basically, like, fee less, carry less, you know, basically SPV that, you know, lets me go out and raise.
Speaker 3:It's effectively, like, in some ways, like, you know, IR. It's somebody that's working, you know, on this basically entirely full time, and there's sort of a win win on both sides. As the CEO, you don't need to, like, you know you know, do all the, you know, sort of fundraising with the long tail of, like, sovereign wealth funds, this, that, and the other. They can go do the first sets of, like, you know, of meetings then bring you in basically for the final close. For, like, the venture investor, it basically ends up being a way where, like, you now have a really great reputation, you know, basically, with this company because you're basically, like, you know, helping them, you know, sort of pull together, a mega fundraise.
Speaker 3:For your sets of, like, you know, LPs and for future fixed fund vehicles that you're doing, you now get this reputation of, like, hey. I'm close to this, like, know, sort of super hot, you know, sort of company. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The optics yeah. The optics too, a non equity partner in the x chat says a lot of GPs wanna lead around but don't have the AUM. So just getting the optics of being like, I'm a size chat, you know, leading leading this massive round. It's like and maybe they wouldn't have been able to put it together with a with a more aggressive fee structure.
Speaker 2:It's just interesting because you on the other side, you see some of these, you know, really, really some of the bad actors in the SPV space are like, you know, layered SPV 10%
Speaker 1:Oh, Super high fees. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Not beer, by the way. Not beer.
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 3:Alright. Fine.
Speaker 2:Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you? Or are you kind of licking your Hey.
Speaker 1:They're hey. It's so good that that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook, you know, seeded by Founders Fund, and now going around and acquiring great companies like Manus. Right?
Speaker 6:You know,
Speaker 2:it's funny.
Speaker 3:I had, like, probably, like, 30 people text me being, when are you gonna tweet about it? What are you gonna say about it? I just, like, sitting there, I was just, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Where it's just like, you know, I just can't believe that this is like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well I I you know, I the my favorite meme about it was like, you know, there's somebody that, like, had, like, a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and, you know, Alex Wang and Zuckerberg going, like, hey. Can you go buy Manus for me? And then Alex is like, sir.
Speaker 3:Yes, sir. And Zuckerberg goes, okay. Cool. Thank you. Did you get me, like, you know, the, like, freemium or, the premium one?
Speaker 3:And Alex is like, no. I bought managed.
Speaker 1:Whole company. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I guess.
Speaker 1:What what do you think about, the the the mega, I don't even know, mega corns going out at a trillion? Is that gonna result in more recycling of LP dollars? Is it possible that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, couple other names get out and LPs feel like I'm gonna go back and reallocate into venture, and this time around, I'm gonna try, you know, smaller managers again? Or do you think it'll have a different dynamic? How how does that play out in a in a post successful IPO year?
Speaker 3:You know, my sort of one liner, I forget if, we joked about this in person when we were in LA or if I've done this on TVP online before, but it's like, you know, it'd be incredible if, like, the thing that props up the 2026, you know, equity market is despite IPO. Yeah. Was just like, you know, Elon just like, oh, like, Sam needs liquidity. Like, you know, what if
Speaker 2:I No. Not not needs liquidity. He needs, like, a couple 100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:He needs a lot.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. He needs, like, a lot of liquidity. Like, what if I just go IPO and I scoop up all the liquidity in the market Yeah. And make sure that I do it, like, faster than he does.
Speaker 3:But that's the thing that, like, props up the public markets because all of sudden, like, the S and P 500 has, like, you know, trillion and half added to it by, like, a single entity.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, like, these you know, yeah, there's, you know, kind of my joke at the beginning of the show, but it's like, you know, I do think that this, you know, upcoming year is poised to be at least right now, and it feels like there's, like, the perfect market conditions for where it's, like, relatively stable economy, inflation's either sort of relatively under control. You know, it doesn't seem like China's gonna be invading Taiwan over the course of the next year. Like, yes, things are, like, you know, sort of geopolitically heated, but, like, it doesn't seem like, you know I mean, know, like, we just captured the president of Venezuela and, you know, nobody seems to, you know, sort of blank and, you know, if anything, the markets are up on the news. And so it feels like you have this, you know, sort of stable and growing economy that is poised to now basically absorb, you know, probably the largest, you know, sense of entry points into, like, the, you know, public market and IPO market than it's, like, ever seen before. And then then, obviously, you know, sort of feeding into, like, you know, of liquidity into, like, the entire Silicon Valley, you know, sort of ecosystem.
Speaker 3:What is that going to do? I think it's only gonna amplify some of these trends where it's like, I think that, you know, it's going to be now more typical for companies. You know, right now, it feels odd that there's a handful of companies that stay private past a 100,000,000,000. I think now it's gonna be the default that, you know, companies stay private, basically past a 100,000,000,000. And, like, the size of these funds is going to, like, you know, increase significantly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because, yeah, your ability to deploy a $10,000,000,000 fund, much more viable when, like, you know, your average entry point is at, like, 200,000,000,000 post. Yeah. And you're, you know, expected to still be able to make, a three to five x basically on, you know, top of that because there's more, you know, some regular, you know, some paths like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You think there's any do
Speaker 2:you think there's any risk or potential for regulation as as people realize that the returns, you know, from the private, you know, as as these companies are staying private longer, if you're, like, excited about Anthropic and you can't invest until it's worth, you know, who knows what it goes out at. Like at some point, I could imagine someone on the left saying like, we need to ban companies from staying private this long because you're just letting the the wealthy kind of like suck up all the returns. And I even saw Vlad from from Robinhood posting earlier saying like, we can't know, basically coming out in defense of retail and saying like, we can't know, these companies can't just stay private forever. And obviously, he has very very incent all the incentives to, like, get these companies out so people can start Yeah. You know, doing whatever they wanna do.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. But but I I could see something like that happening, especially given that
Speaker 1:It will be very interesting as, a chapter. Just I I I know someone who who runs, a pure play AI fund, but they're not in x AI, OpenAI, or Anthropic. And so they're in some great names. They're they they they they got the trend right early, but they didn't, like, brand themselves. And even some funds that don't have, like, major positions in one of them at least they've aligned with one of them, built a position, played the game, and, like, participated in that.
Speaker 1:And I think once they all go out, everyone will see sort of the s ones and sort of know a little bit more about, you know, where the really elite firms landed in the AI boom. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Part of part of the space SpaceX s one Yeah. Potentially going out before some of these other names, then also having, you know, if you if there's a world where x AI gets rolled in, then it's like you have a lab that that a space company and a data center company that, you know, historically has been profitable. Maybe obviously, not on the x AI side, but it's it's gonna, you know, maybe get people to even be more aggressive in tearing apart some of these other s ones.
Speaker 1:We should do we we should do Jared Isaacman and and and the space update. But first, I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami?
Speaker 3:There is something a little surreal about, like, these sets of people right now tweeting about Miami where, like, the people probably, like, most strongly critiquing it in 2021. Yep. And so there's there's something surreal about being like, maybe I was, like, you know, like, right idea, slightly wrong time, just needed to wait for, like, California, not just to get hit with COVID, but become, like, you know, communistic, basically, and start seizing property,
Speaker 1:and that's gonna not be
Speaker 3:the thing that convinces people.
Speaker 1:On the Miami thing, what do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sandhill Road to Miami? Like, all the big GPs will be domiciled there. And, yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco. A lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors, the academic institutions, like the you're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as a important tech hub.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think
Speaker 3:if there's, like, something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed Miami the most, know, call it '21 through '24
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I do think that, it, you know, established itself as, like, a fundraising destination, absolutely, between, like, everybody from, like, you know, Dan Sondheim at d one, Ken Griffin from Citadel, you know, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, etcetera. Like, you know, has now very much so become a destination where, yeah, if you're ready raising a leadership round or you're even, like, a, you know, not Peter level GP, but, like, you know, up and coming
Speaker 1:I mean, also g e. Also, you have you have Keith, Catherine, Sachs. Like, there were there there were it wasn't just f f that like, there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly, you know, obviously, that evolved.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think it's just, like, it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of where, like, now the other side, you know, sort of second wave that's happening because it's, California, you know, sort of regulation. I think it's, like, clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself. And then I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, you know, you know, Francis Suarez are always saying, like, look. Ultimately, what we're best at is, like, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And I think that is, like, you know, you know
Speaker 1:That's one of our taglines that we refer to. You you know? Oh, yeah. Right. Capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Capital. But he can use it. It's fine. Give us the update on Jared Jared Isaacman. Take us through how you process the news and what you're excited for in 2026.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, he's obviously, you know, early in. I think it's been, like, you know, sort of two weeks since, you know, the confirmation. There hasn't been any, like, super broad policy announcement yet yet. But the place where he started to drop some news actually just been, like, via his Twitter profile, which has, you know, been a fun place to, you know, sort of follow along.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Our axe profile.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Probably my favorite one is there's a program called Dragonfly that NASA's been working on for a while, which is basically this so the first time that we ever flew a helicopter on a, you know, non Earth planet It was on Mars with Ingenuity, I believe it was
Speaker 5:called Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which is this helicopter we got on Mars. Sort of related to that, it's, you know, a different program, but it's a program called Dragonfly where it's roughly like a small car sized vehicle that is meant to fly on Titan. Titan is one of the oh, god. And I should not mess it up, but it's one of the what's it called? Moons of Saturn.
Speaker 3:Saturn. Yeah. Either Saturn or Jupiter. Yeah. You know, I'm a big enough space that you should know.
Speaker 3:But what's cool about it is Titan both has four times the density of atmosphere as Earth does, but also basically seven times less gravity. And so with the combination of the two, you basically make it, like, 30 times easier to fly. Woah. And so you and I could literally just, like, be on the surface of Titan literally basically just, like, wear some wings. And, like, if you just ran, like, relatively quickly, like, you know, if you even be Usain Bolt, like, even in our level of fitness, basically just go and flap our wings, and, like, we would basically start flying.
Speaker 3:And with, like, a little bit of, like, exoskeleton or anything like that, you get a 100%, like, fly as much as you want. And so Dragonfly is just, like, small car sized, like, flying car, basically, with, like, a nuclear battery on board. Yeah. The program had been, like, you know, definitely a little bit behind schedule, behind budget, etcetera. But, like, you know, Jerry basically came out very publicly on Twitter being, this is one of my favorite programs.
Speaker 3:This is the type of, like, bleeding edge science that, like, NASA should be doing. And so I do love that he's kinda leaning into, like, you know I don't know. You know, my dream job would absolutely like, the one thing that would make me, like, upend my entire life and quit everything would be like, if I was offered NASA administrator, I think I would do that immediately. And if that was you know, if I was in the job right now, like, yeah, I think the thing that we should be doing is, like, NASA should be doing just, like, the crazy bleeding edge, like Yeah. Stuff that just, like, no private company is gonna do.
Speaker 3:Like, a fucking, like, flying car on Titan is just, like, objectively, like, insane. But, like, there's a world where they're gonna be able to basically, like, livestream, you know, or, like, stream basically, like, video of this, like, car going around Titan and, like, you know, flying through dunes and stuff like that. It's, like, so so, you know, sort of cool. And then on the flip side, you know you know, they've, like, figured out how to just, like, you know, really focus on the commercial private market for, like, the things that are much more near term and what the commercial industry is capable of. So I don't know if you guys saw it, but tweet this that, you know, basically, this year, we're gonna have four separate totally net new commercial lunar landers, basically, land on the moon this year.
Speaker 3:Wow. It's Intuitive Machines has one. Yeah. Astrobotic has one. Blue Origin has one.
Speaker 3:And SpaceX?
Speaker 1:The SpaceX now? No.
Speaker 3:It's not SpaceX. They don't really have a plan for Firefly. This Yeah. Firefly.
Speaker 1:And,
Speaker 3:you know, for its worth, the, like, Blue Origin, you know, Mark one lander is, like, the size of, like it's like a two story house. It's like a it's gonna be the biggest man made object that we've, like, ever landed on the moon. And I will say, like, you know, until a quarter ago, I was probably a little more skeptical that, like, you know, Blue Origin was actually gonna, like, land this thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Now it's like, you know, you see that the New Glenn is actually, like, launching, landing. It's like, man, they maybe have, like, really turned a corner on, like, you know, their engineering and systems, you know, design. But the the cool thing is, like, even if Blue Origin f's it up, there's also, like, three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it or getting, like, paid, basically, commercial revenues to go do this. And to me, it's just like this, like, breakout year that I still think is, like, I don't know, underpaid attention to and under discussed. Like, yeah, this is the analogy that I tried to provide is, like, this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just, like, you have, like, the, you know, basically, year before where it's, I don't know if you know, but in February, we're gonna be sending humans basically back to the moon for the first time, not on the surface, but to, like, orbit the moon.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, like, that's going to the moon. Four different landers basically on the moon. It's, like, all in preparation for if that all goes well, there's, like, a really, you know, decent likelihood that, like, next year, both have, like, boots on the moon and, like, 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that, which is just like I don't know. 15 year old Deliad would just be, like, so, yeah, so excited.
Speaker 1:We gotta sponsor the biggest moon landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They gotta go up there. We gotta just put them on the moon, settle it once and for all. Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on. He thinks that
Speaker 2:it's What not kind of evidence would would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally Finally believe it. I'm kidding. I put on the I put on the put on the tinfoil hat for another thing. Yeah. Trump's been going pretty hard on fentanyl, trying to stop it from coming into the country.
Speaker 2:At the same time, you've seen an explosion of Chinese peptides. Do you have any concern that this is a this is all just a big SIOP, and we're trying to get a generation of people in The United States to just inject themselves If
Speaker 1:they put tinfoil in the peptides Yeah.
Speaker 2:Random resources. People don't realize you were saying you've lost a bunch of weight just by being a Chad. No peptides needed. I get a little concerned because every it feels like in the last two weeks, you have everybody's like, oh, I guess this gonna be doing peptides. And it's like, this like, the the source and the purity of these things matters so much.
Speaker 2:You're injecting these things into your blood. This is not something that you just wanna mess around and find some random Chinese website and just hope that they're the test results that they have on the site are are actually real.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I will say, you know, I, you know, regret taking the, you know, sort of, you know, COVID vaccine. I'm not sure that, like, you know, for my, you know, age and health is the, you know, right risk reward. I am definitely, you know, not yet ready to start injecting my body into a bunch of peptides.
Speaker 3:Who knows? You know, they've got some nanomarkers on there where the Chinese release of virus. It's, like Oh, boy. Specific to those peptides, and they've designed it. The yeah.
Speaker 3:I'll I'll provide kind of, like, an example of this about how paranoid the Chinese are, so the tin foil for, like, Xi Jinping. Sure. He had this meeting in 2023 with Biden in San Francisco. If guys remember when, like, they came and, like, cleaned everything up for, like, the Xi Jinping visit, there's a bunch of, like, memes around that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:After a, like, sit down meeting that they had, like, I think it was, like, down in, like, Monterey or something like that, A, like, Chinese official after meeting came by and sprayed basically everything that, like, Xi Jinping had touched, everything that, like, you know, he put his lips on to, like, eat his drink. And the, like, you know, US official basically asked him, like, hey. Like, you know, what is the thing that you just use or sprayed? Reasonable question asked. And it was a basically, like, a DNA degrader Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Because they were so worried about the idea of, like, somebody in America
Speaker 5:Cloning.
Speaker 3:Having Xi Jinping's DNA and then potentially optimizing a virus that is, like, super specific and optimized for him. And so the Chinese are thinking about, like, you know, DNA specific viruses. Makes you think, like, you know, they might be designing DNA or, like, peptide specific, basically, you know, viruses that are targeting, you know, sort of individuals or groups. That is Anyways. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's crazy. I was thinking I was thinking he was worried about us cloning Xi Jinping, and then he's fighting himself, a younger version of himself. He's oh, no. The new US president.
Speaker 1:I hate him, but he's my own
Speaker 2:got to it.
Speaker 1:They got
Speaker 2:to negotiate. It's just Xi, Trump,
Speaker 1:and the younger of them. Hundreds of Xi Jinping's just storming the How
Speaker 2:did you process the the the true social post about the Military budget. Salary cap
Speaker 1:Salary cap.
Speaker 2:And and the budgets.
Speaker 3:Just, you know, incredible to have him as the, you know, as the commander in chief. Somebody that's like, hey. Actually willing to, like, you know, crack the whip on this stuff where it's just like, yeah. Like, why should these companies be optimized for, like, shareholder returns and, like, executive salaries rather than, like, making sure that they're delivering for the war fighter? And it's crazy to me that it's not like you know, he, like, did the broad industry thing, and then, like, don't know if you saw it, he, like, specifically then started calling out Raytheon where he was just like, they are not, like, responding to feedback.
Speaker 3:They're not delivering enough and, like, know, went down to the individual logo. And so That's great. Yeah. I think it's, you know, sort of, you know, yeah, incredible piece of, you know, sort of policy and, like, you know, bold commander in chief and, like, you know,
Speaker 2:obviously, I think now, it's an incredible post.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a policy.
Speaker 1:Right? But but but that's the nature of these things. Like, we saw this with Intel. It had some crazy policy.
Speaker 3:It can just be, like, you know you know, settle acquisition policy where it's like I mean, you know, secretary Hetzak could go implement, you know, who he wants to buy from without asking congress for permission. So
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. Okay. So if it even if it's just directional, it doesn't need to be new law. It doesn't need to be an executive order to have an effect to have an effect on the stock price.
Speaker 1:But, of course, the defense tech stocks actually mooned because the because the defense budget is potentially going up by 50%. Do do you have a read on this, how big this will be for the industry? Is this a boon for startups in defense tech, or do you think that, you know, the the the big primes of the world will just, like, quickly get their act together and then go hoover up a lot of that new budget?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think
Speaker 3:there are going to be a set, you know, that are, like, leaning in. Like, you know, one of the examples, I think I think it's, like, BAE has, like, either done a whole set of, like, sort of collaborations where, like, I think they have, like, a collaboration with, like, applied intuition on one of their ground vehicles. Like, you know, they have, like, something with Merlin, I wanna say, on, like, one of their, like, you know, basically, like, airplanes that they build. I don't to go back and look. But I remember, like, reading through of one their, like, you know, quarterly earnings calls or, like, know, maybe there's, a tectonic, like, the, you know, defense newsletter articulating, like, all the various partnerships they had.
Speaker 3:And it's like, yeah, they're clearly recognizing, like, they have things that they're good at. They're make they're good at, like, making the ground vehicle and the frame around that and the wheels, etcetera. They just, have a whole manufacturing line, etcetera. They're not as good at, like like, the avionics, the software, the automation, etcetera. And so, like, they're leaning in on startups.
Speaker 3:There's clearly primes like that that I think are, like, really leaning in and very forward. And then you have ones that, like, clearly seem to think, oh, this is just, like, a total fad. Like, you know, the, like, you know, Trump administration isn't gonna really push on this. Mhmm. And so, yeah, I think it's, like, a huge opportunity for both the primes that are leaning in and appreciating that they need to, like, actually be much more aggressive, you know, invest more in r and d, partner more with startups.
Speaker 3:I think it's great for, like, obviously, like, neo primes. Mhmm. And it's just there's a huge opportunity where it's like, think if you add up, basically, like, SpaceX, everybody, all the neo primes, as you found in the last video, basically, like, you know, fifteen years or years, they still represent basically, like, less than, like, 1% of the total, you know, basically, DOW budget. And so there's still a ton of upside from some of the big guys basically stumbling. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, the Raytheon's of the world are definitely not reacting as well, but it's time to say that, like, every prime is getting caught caught totally flat footed. Like, some are definitely, you know, reacting to this new environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, it's 1PM. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:This was
Speaker 1:great. Thank you so much for taking the time as always.
Speaker 2:See you. Only a 179 More appearances. To go.
Speaker 3:179 more
Speaker 6:to go, baby. 99 beers
Speaker 3:in the wall.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 2:Nice to you.
Speaker 1:Happy
Speaker 3:Play a voice. Bye. See you.
Speaker 1:Up next, we have Arun Gupta, the founder and CEO at Stickerbox, Happy Co. The, creativity first AI product went viral over the break, and I'm excited to talk to him. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra down in my room. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to have
Speaker 5:you, man. Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Excited. Could you please, kick us off, since this is the first time on the show, with an introduction on yourself and the company and just some of the background here?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Absolutely. So my name is Arun. I'm the cofounder of Hap it Go along with my good friend, Bob Whitney. Previously, I was in Y Combinator back in 2009, same batch of Stripe.
Speaker 1:Wow. Oh, Jesus. Amazing.
Speaker 5:I actually dropped out of Yale in the middle of my junior year.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:And six months later, was lucky enough to get in, talk to Paul Graham
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:On a weekly basis. It was amazing.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's let let let's actually just dig in there since we have some time. What were you building in 2009? What was the mood on the ground at YC in 2020 in 2009?
Speaker 5:So we were actually one of the very first hardware startups. A lot of it was, you know, Reddit had just happened. Airbnb that's right before us. You know, there are a lot of b to b stuff, a lot of consumer things. We built a personal sleep tracker.
Speaker 5:So it was a wristband that you wore while you slept. Yeah. And they used sleep science called actigraphy to track your sleep cycles and wake you up at the right time in the morning.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So back when Fitbit and Drawbone were, like, doing your
Speaker 2:whole thing so early.
Speaker 1:You're so early.
Speaker 2:So early. How how I mean, it must be have been painful to see Hora and and whoop and basically have have, like, the right have the the right idea and and what what Yeah.
Speaker 1:What we what was the blocker? Was it supply chain or distribution? Like, I I mean, I I went through YC in 2012, or first company, first idea, same thing, where a lot of it, like, wound up getting built by someone else years later. But, what was your experience like if you were to do the postmortem?
Speaker 5:Honestly, for us, it was big data. So back in 2009, everybody who worked on big data worked in biotech or worked on Wall Street. Mhmm. So you couldn't really hire them away unless you had a ton of money, and all the money is in data analysis.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Right? So, like, Uber, Aura, they're analyzing tons and tons of data points and giving you all this information about how you can live better, eat better, be more healthy, and we just didn't have that. So the business really flies when you have a subscription that works. Yeah. But without big data analysis, it's really hard to build a subscription that works.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's crazy. I remember 2009 was, like, the dawn of Hadoop and, like, distributed systems that you had to orchestrate. It was like it was like doing a multitraining LLM AI infrastructure. Like, you couldn't just be, like, put all the data in one database and, like, Google handles it or AWS handles it or MongoDB handles it.
Speaker 5:Like, And, like, non rotation databases became a thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All all all these we take them so much for granted now, but back then, it was such a pain to orchestrate anything. You're you're you're running, like, true infrastructure just to do, like, basic stuff by now by by today's terms.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. Yeah. So so what led you to start this company? When did you start this company? What were you doing in the interim?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So after my YC company gracefully shut down
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I started another company called grail.com, and Grail was basically
Speaker 2:a fashion Grail? Wait. The the good fashion company. That's so that's
Speaker 1:so cool.
Speaker 2:I didn't somehow Wow.
Speaker 1:Do a lot guest.
Speaker 2:Don't always have time to do we don't always have time to to do research. Yeah. But on your printout, Grail didn't make it in. I've used Grailed for a decade now.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Started Grail in 2013 and by Benford in San Francisco. No way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Were were you a collector of, like, fashion items? Yeah?
Speaker 5:Big time.
Speaker 1:Big What were you into back then? What was the first product
Speaker 2:that wear from hearts to an investor pitch?
Speaker 5:No. I I I never wore it to an investor pitch. I went to see the investors, was wearing more Laura Biana.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 5:Belt cut. Right? You know? That's the vibe.
Speaker 1:And that's still, like, what, five years before, Shamaath starts, introducing it to the valley via the All In podcast. That's that's fantastic.
Speaker 5:Exactly. No. Back in the day, it was really about, like, workwear and, like, raw denim. Mhmm. And then it became really big through collabs.
Speaker 5:So there was, like, an H and M Balmain collab that was really big. There was the Yeezy that dropped. There was all the Nikes that dropped.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then Supreme obviously had their massive moment. But, no, I was really into, like, all the OG Raf Simons stuff. Yeah. Actually, if you remember, ASAP Rocky did a video. I forgot what the song was called.
Speaker 5:Like, please don't touch my Raf. Yep. And I think in that video, he's wearing there's, like, three of my personal collection pieces in that video. That's amazing. That's crazy.
Speaker 5:What was so what
Speaker 1:was the what was the, like, the customer acquisition funnel at that time? And I'm interested to hear how I've heard a lot of founders talk about, you know, if they got started years ago, they were maybe doing, like, Minecraft bots. A lot of people were doing, like, sniping for sneaker drops, sneaker bots. Did that play a role? Was there an automated portion, or was it mostly organic?
Speaker 1:Like, walk me through some of the trends that were happening at the time with Grail. And then I promise we will get to Stickerbox. That's why I wanna talk to you, but this is fascinating.
Speaker 5:Stickerbox is the most exciting part. But, yeah, Grail, really, was all about community. Honestly, from day one, it was a community and all the way through until the end. Because we were, like, very heavily focused on men's versus women, so it's about seventy, thirty men's versus women's. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And at the time, in 2013, people were like, do men even wear clothes? And I'm like, yes. They're people. Obviously, they're right. They wear clothes.
Speaker 5:But men's fashion was, like, not a thing at all. So we were able to sort of, like, ride that wave and see sort
Speaker 2:of like riding the Instagram Yeah. Wave in some in some ways. Like, that had to be be the biggest catalyst. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I talked I used to talk a lot about how people when you were like, hey. What are you into? People will be like, oh, I'm into, like, Nirvana or, like, Radiohead. And then when you're like, what are into there?
Speaker 5:I'm like, I'm into Noah or, like, Supreme or, like, Jill Sonne, something like that. Right? So it's like your personal aesthetic became more defined by the clothes you wore because we became such a visual society through Instagram rather than the music you listened to, which is more maybe of like a Myspace Yeah. You know, OG type thing.
Speaker 2:And there and and you guys had people building real businesses on the platform. I I have my my oldest friend teamed up with a college buddy of mine, un unrelated to me, and started selling on Grailed, ended up building their own brand called No Maintenance that that that's now, you know, thriving. But they got their start just reselling. That's how they made generate the revenue that they needed to actually do their own inventory runs. So
Speaker 5:yeah. Very cool. Boutique. A lot of fashion designers too. I think Reese Cooper probably, you know, started out on Lovers.
Speaker 5:Out.
Speaker 1:There's a Yes. There's a viewer in the chat that says, I bought my first pair of Rick Owens dunks from Grail. This is so cool. Salute.
Speaker 5:That's awesome. That's amazing. Yeah. They're, like, $7.
Speaker 1:Probably. Yeah. At least, stop
Speaker 2:pulling them.
Speaker 1:So then, yeah, take me through the the idea to get back in the arena for the third time. When did you start the company? Was this post chat GPT moment? I mean, I I I feel like we've talked about this on the show. Like, there is such an opportunity for interesting businesses here in the age of AI.
Speaker 1:But do
Speaker 2:And I was always saying Cool. Everybody wanted to build these AI hardware devices for adults. Yes. I'm like, I have a phone. Yes.
Speaker 2:It is an AI hardware device. Yeah. They don't market it that way but
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:I mean, Apple kinda does. But so I was like, I don't need another device that like helps me order DoorDash. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But my kid I don't want my kids have I don't want my have my kids have an iPad. No. But creating a product Yeah. I always thought, like, if you made a product that lit just let kids ask questions.
Speaker 1:And well, the Rabbit r one. The Rabbit r one came out, and they used Teenage Engineering. It's this beautiful orange package. Very cool. But a lot of the reviewers who were adults were like
Speaker 2:We're just comparing it
Speaker 1:to their comparing it my iPhone. And and and and I never got around to actually buying one and giving it to my four year old, but I was thinking that, like, it feels like a great kid's toy. And then there is still the narrative of, like, great technology, Stardust toys. So I always thought it was a great market to go after. But what was your inspiration?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I can take zero credit for creating the sticker box. It was all my cofounder, Robert Whitney. He is the original inventor along with his son who helped him basically co develop the device. And, basically, the story is pretty classic.
Speaker 5:You know, his son was like, hey. I want a coloring book of tigers eating ice cream. And he was like, oh, I don't have that, but I can just print it off, you know, an an image generator, and then you can color it. And then he's like, okay. Great.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna print that and then color it. And then he's like, now I want lizards riding skateboards. And then he prints lizards riding skateboards, and then you see this magic moment go off in the kid's head. And they're like, wait. I can say anything?
Speaker 5:And,
Speaker 2:like,
Speaker 5:for us, like, we're a little bit more jaded, I think. You know? We're like,
Speaker 10:oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:AI, LLMs. It all works. For a kid, they're like, I just came up with this idea, and not only do I see it, now I can hold it in my hand and color it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was I was I was with my three year old yesterday using an image model, and he said, in his words, he was like, it's like magic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. And and and I think the physical aspect is is just an it's so important. When I I I use image generators with my son, and I have AirPrint, and I will print the photo even though I'm running out of ink left and right because of the, you know, full page color photo. It just goes out really quickly.
Speaker 1:But it's amazing, and it's way different than just being like, oh, here's a Ghibli of your toys. To be like, here's a thing that you can put on your wall. You can enjoy
Speaker 5:Physical representation is huge.
Speaker 1:Or color it in. Like, it's a coloring book now. Like, there's so many cool things that you can do.
Speaker 5:Put it on your notebook. On your water bottle. But I think that's what my cofounder Bob really understood is that this physical representation, these physical stickers are just what's so powerful for children. Yeah. And it really is such an imagination accelerant.
Speaker 5:You know? It's like, these ideas, they they're in my head, but then once they come out of my head onto paper, he was like, wow. This really transforms what they're able to do.
Speaker 1:And there's two there's two sides to this. There's, like, the cynical be a good parent, no screen time, like, print stuff out. That's better from, like, fighting the iPad king thing. And that's true. There's a lot of evidence of that.
Speaker 1:That that that's a good thing. But it come you come to it with, like, a negativity of, like, I'm avoiding a bad outcome, so I I feel like I'm taking my vegetables. But I just think that, like, there there are there's, like, a Lindy, like, a beautiful thing about text texture and physical things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have we have, like, an old like, it's not a Polaroid camera, but it's, like, this really bad digital camera that then will print out Yeah. Kind of pictures on it. So I what I one thing I like about sticker boxes, it's not like these kind of products haven't existed. It's just like integrating
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like putting it all together.
Speaker 2:Technology into it, and it's a form factor.
Speaker 5:And that's the g. Right? Yeah. My cofounder brought the product to my house. He had already built it.
Speaker 5:He had it in a cardboard box.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:It looked awesome. And I look at it in one second, and I'm like, it's all about how you put this together. Right? It's like not like these things didn't exist. It's all about your product sense and basically, like, how you intuitively were like, this is the right kind of product for a kid.
Speaker 5:Yep. Autonomous self, you know, serve stickers Yeah. Lasting physical pieces. Yep. Pretty magical stuff.
Speaker 5:So But we'd like to say, you know, that the it's an AI product. And like you said, AI for kids and AI hardware for kids is amazing, more magical. But we like to say that the AI itself disappears behind the magic of the device.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 5:Because it's really not about the AI. It's about the idea. Like, the idea is the hero, but the sticker is the hero. It's not the device or the screen that are the hero. It's the kid's imagination that becomes the hero of the story.
Speaker 1:So talk about the prototype. It sounds like your cofounder did all the hard work. He's the workhorse. You're the show pony, apparently. We'll give him all the credit in the world.
Speaker 5:But good to say.
Speaker 1:But it but it but it it it seems like he was a tinkerer or hacker, was able to whip something up pretty quickly. Imagine, like, are are Arduino, Raspberry Pi? Like, are there wires everywhere? Yeah. And then and then do you go to a co packer or a manufacturer?
Speaker 1:Is this something that's, like, pretty turnkey and there's a solid ecosystem around, or was it a long, multiyear process to actually get the first one made with high quality?
Speaker 5:It was difficult, you know, because, like, these things are thermal printers. Right? So he came with, like, the idea fully formed and, like, a lot of it already baked. But to turn from a prototype to a production product that, you know our Christmas load was insane. You know?
Speaker 5:Just the amount of kids unboxing on Christmas and then hitting the servers, like, he was stressed. Yeah. Okay. I'm like, you know, rightly so. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But to get there, it's it's difficult because when you think about it, this thermal printer, it's meant to print receipts.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's meant to print text on receipts. It's not meant to print images. And if you look at the fidelity of the images that's being happening, it's like think something like 300 DPI, like, on the image. It looks beautiful, you know, and, like, that is sort of, like, a little bit of our secret sauce is, hey. We're able to make these images look really great through a combination of many different things.
Speaker 5:But that's something that he was able to do really, really well and something that we had to work with custom, honestly, with the factories Yeah. To try to get them to to make it happen. So
Speaker 2:And you're sold out. You're sold out. I I just bought one while you were here with us. Thank thank thanks to Shopify. It makes it really easy to check out.
Speaker 2:But it's gonna get delivered in February. It's been selling like crazy. You guys are just trying to keep this thing in in stock?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So we had a ton of units available for Christmas shipping. Those went in, like, two weeks or less, and then we just kept selling. Like, we had the December 28 ship date, those sold out in, a few days. January 6 ship date, sold out in a few days.
Speaker 5:Then we had a February 17 ship date, and I was like, February 17. It's, like, not even it's, like, a, like, a month and a half away. Those sold those all sold out. Now we're in February 24. So can't keep this thing in stock.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But we're we're ramping up manufacturing, and we're gonna do our best so everybody can get one.
Speaker 1:So is the 2026 strategy really get solid on the supply chain so you can scale a ton? And then are you focused on, like, ruthless ramping of digital ads? Or do are you more likely to go, let's get Walmart, let's get Target? Because I can imagine it's selling really well on both, but you probably don't wanna do both as an early stage startup at the same time. You wanna be really have your ducks in the row in a row.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's sort of a classic trap that startups get into where Target is like, yeah. We'll buy a million units. We'll buy 2,000 units. Yep.
Speaker 5:And then they sit on the shelves because you don't have the marketing support them. So you're have to roll appropriately. Yeah. So for us right now, really, it's like, we've got this core image to sticker generation loop down cold. Sure.
Speaker 5:Where do we go from there? You know? Kids are making characters. Like Yeah. Some kids have this, like, stick man and capy barre character, and they go on adventures over and over again.
Speaker 5:So, like, let's let them name that character and then reuse it. Let's let them send that character to their friend's box. Let's let them upload their own likeness into the box and say, hey. Let me do me and my mom on a picnic in the moon or, like, me riding a dinosaur or what have you. And, like, basically, what these kids are doing is what we feel like is we're basically enabling the next generation of storytellers.
Speaker 5:Right? So the next Spielberg, the next Ryan Coogler, the next Miyazaki, they're growing up with the sticker boxes. They're, like, imagination accelerant, and it's letting them tell these, like, little graphic novels or little stories where they're reusing these characters, and they're basically developing their own IP. Yeah. So leaning more into that and creating more features for them.
Speaker 5:And, honestly, I think the other thing that we are just so happy about is how it brings families together. Because it's for kids, obviously, but, like, it's really fun to use. You know? And, like, the nice thing is is, like, when it's, like I'm, like, at the thing, at the table, you know, and, like, the dad is, like, in the background and, like, hovering, and then he's like, you know what? Let me do one.
Speaker 5:And then, like, you know, the uncle or the mom or the cousin are, like, all coming together. And they're like, oh, you did that? Let me try to remix your dragon and make it, like, a metal dragon. Let me make your metal dragon breathe fire. Let me make it breathe fire in a volcano.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So it really brings everybody together. So I think focusing more on these sort of, like, whole family experiences as well as the single player sort of, like, experience with the individual kid as well is something that we're my cofounder is really focused on. Yeah. It's something he really believes passionately in, is using the just to bring people together and as a really positive activity for parents and kids to What
Speaker 2:have you guys done on the the pay like, on on the actual material side? I know, you know, people are very afraid of receipts.
Speaker 1:Put out a post about Yeah.
Speaker 2:Don't touch receipts. I saw you guys avoided gonna like BPA and BPS, but maybe talk about some of the decision making there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:This was another thing that was really difficult. So BPA and BPS are obviously a hot button topic, but if you produce paper thermal paper and you test it, often there are trace amounts of BPA and BPS in the paper. And for us, that wasn't good enough. You know? I was like, just because it's below the California proposition 65 limit doesn't mean that it's, you know, BPA or BPS.
Speaker 5:Completely free.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Limits are not safety.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, Ross, it's like it's a kid's product.
Speaker 5:It's safety from the ground up. Everything. From the images that are generated to everything that happens with the device. So you can touch all these stickers. There is no BPA, no BPS.
Speaker 5:We tested in batches from the factory. It was really difficult to do. It actually delayed our launch by a full four or five weeks. We could have launched four or five weeks earlier if we're willing to accept sort of, like, this trace element of BPA BPS in the paper, but we were like, no. We, like, refuse to release this.
Speaker 2:That's gonna be a good that's gonna be a good angle because I imagine you guys are already getting copied by a bunch of different manufacturers. Knockoffs, I'm sure. And it's like, yeah. You can use the knockoffs, but our Do you know
Speaker 1:if there's a
Speaker 2:know, the kids Guaranteed.
Speaker 1:Talk about safety with regard to image generation. Obviously, some of these engineer image generation scope crazy.
Speaker 2:Just fair warning.
Speaker 1:But it But put that dragon in a bikini. Let's not have that happen. We want the dragon breathing fire. I wanna know about what models you like, how model agnostic you are, because I imagine that if you even if you just change the model to something better, even if the style looks better, you're like, well, that doesn't look like the dragon I'm used to generating. So there's some sort of, like, lock in there.
Speaker 1:At the same time, you might be optimizing for cost. How are you thinking about the software side?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. And for us, it's like it's really a a product for kids. Right? And I think chat GBT, when you do image generation, it wants to make everything look sexy.
Speaker 5:That's kind of the bias. Right? You even upload your own photo. It's like it wants to make you look super buff like you're a superhero.
Speaker 1:Well, that's because I put that in my in my prompt by default. It has to or else it's a it's a but, yes, it it looks very, like, polished, refined, smooth skin. It looks it's a glow up filter. There's something going on there. And and those For us the system prompts matter.
Speaker 5:Safety is number one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's it's basically a multifactor system. So we have a patent for the sticker box device itself, but we're actually also working on a patent right now for safety in the sticker box system. And it goes all the way through from the text Mhmm. All the way through to after the image is generated.
Speaker 1:Oh, that
Speaker 5:makes sense. When you say the text, we analyze the text for safety. Yep. We remove bad words. Yep.
Speaker 5:We analyze the prompt for, you know, how likely it is to generate something safe or unsafe.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:Then we go through an enhancement process where the sticker is steered towards being something geared for a child. Sure. So it's actually rewritten in some different ways Yep. In order to do that. Then we generate the image, and I'm oversimplifying a little bit here.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And then e after we generate the image, then there's post image generation checks. And those post image generation checks are on, I don't even know how many variables. Right? There's, you know, all the sorts of bad things, like hate speech and nudity and violence and, you know, all sorts of different things.
Speaker 5:And we basically have all these confidence intervals and scores that go into it, but it's this huge system. Like, you think about airplanes. Right? And airplanes are like this complicated system of, like, many, many, many checks overlapping with each other, and that's what creates, like, the robust safety system. It's a similar system here, right, where we have many, many, many checks at basically every area of the process because the last thing we want is for a kid to get something that's unsafe or for a parent to question it.
Speaker 5:Like, for us, our big mission is what if AI were built for kids? And I think that the boogeyman in our heads is that social media was not built for kids. Social media was built for adults.
Speaker 2:Grock was not built for kids.
Speaker 5:Grock was not built for kids. I mean, chat AI is not built for kids. It's built for businesses. Right? It's built for adults, and it's built for businesses.
Speaker 5:But for us, we're like, what if we could just reimagine AI completely and just say, okay. What if this was built for kids? And that's why we didn't put a chatbot and a teddy bear. That's why we made a sticker image generator.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Right? Which completely different direction.
Speaker 1:Talk about latency with all those checks. I imagine none of this is happening on the device. You're going to the Wi Fi, to the cloud, to your servers, hydrating the text with an LLM. That's not super fast. Then generating an image isn't super fast.
Speaker 1:Then sending that back down to the box and printing it, that's not super fast. How fast do you think you can get this? Do you wanna do it on device at some point? Do you how and and then what user experience sort of tricks are you using to make the latency and the lag tolerable?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So great questions. It's actually really fast, mostly because of the work that my cofounder Bob and his great engineering team have done.
Speaker 2:So I think the top Bob?
Speaker 5:Sticker. Yeah. Bob is my partner. Bob Whitney. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bob the builder? That's incredible incredible nominative determinism.
Speaker 1:I wonder who you're going back.
Speaker 5:I mean, there's not a better moniker, honestly. That's right. It's a great I think common. Sticker I might be I might be off by a couple a second here too, but I think time to sticker is, like, six to eight seconds. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So you push it pretty quick.
Speaker 5:You have the sticker in, like, six to eight seconds, and that's with all of the content moderation. Yeah. Everything Yeah. There. But one of the nice tricks that you mentioned.
Speaker 5:Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. And and because you're not doing, like, chat GBT level HD four k, it's probably faster to actually generate the image. Exactly.
Speaker 5:Yeah. But I think the other thing that you said that's really interesting
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is once you say it, right, you say it, and then it hears it, and then it displays your text on the screen. And that's a nice moment. That's an intermediary moment Yeah. That makes it feel not as slow. Right?
Speaker 5:Or it makes it feel a lot faster. Because you're like, I just said this thing. Woah. There it is on the screen.
Speaker 1:I'm reading it the words, and then you're probably seeing
Speaker 5:the image. Pause. Yeah. And then there's a pregnant pause, basically, and then the image comes in. But that moment between saying what you have, seeing it on the screen Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And that, like, like, just slight delay to when the image comes out, because it appears on the screen and then prints basically at the same time
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's like a lot of suspense. Yeah. And it's basically like relief that happens kind of in your head. Right? Like, it's like when a joke lands.
Speaker 5:You know? It's like you have something happening happening happening, and then there's the punch line. Yeah. So there's this sort of tension that's built up, like, in the process, and then it lands, and it's just it feels really good because you're like, oh my god. I said that, and now it's real.
Speaker 1:That's very cool.
Speaker 2:So You have a background at Grailed. Can we expect any Stickerbox fashion partnerships? I want the Bottega Weave version of the Stickerbox. I want the Chrome Hearts. I want, you know, full full That
Speaker 1:would be really good.
Speaker 2:I want something I can, you know, leave on on the table and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I I am interested, like, do you do you see yourself more, expanding vertically or horizontally? Do you think you might be, like, a multiproduct toy company or more of like a camera and printer company that maybe winds up making a device that's delightful for an analog photographer who goes on photography trips and wants to print things quickly? Do you see yourself focusing on a particular demographic over time or expanding one way or the other?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think right now, we're really focused on AI for kids. So, like, what does that look? And in terms of, like, multi devices, we obviously have tons of ideas. You know?
Speaker 5:A really fun space to be in, but I think that there's just so much gold inside of this creation machine. Yeah. Right? So it's, like, kids maybe not might not be the best illustrators. May not be able to be animators.
Speaker 5:Right?
Speaker 1:They might
Speaker 5:not be able to use Photoshop or or whatever super well, but they can still bring their ideas to life with the AI, and they can still print them. So I think focusing more on creativity and investing more in the sticker box is definitely where we're going for the time Imagine three d printing.
Speaker 2:Do a do a d printer. A 2,000,000,000 do a $2,000,000,000 training run for your own model.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I've I've heard cost that much.
Speaker 2:I've heard enough. 2,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Do do do you think you'll wind up fine tuning and running a custom model or some open source, like, fine tuned on some optimized hardware? Or or is is the cost of this
Speaker 5:this year. My Okay. My cofounder Bob is very interested in creating our own model. So definitely from the up on our own model with our own training data. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because when you talk about safety, that is the number one holy grail. You know, not to put a pun on it. Yeah. And then But you want the training data to be completely safe, and that way the model can't generate anything that's Totally. And that's what really matters.
Speaker 1:And then in terms of in terms of, like, the business model, obviously, it it feels like razor and blade model because you're buying the box, but then you're also buying ink and paper, and that's how you make money. Do you have a subscription as well?
Speaker 5:So there's no ink. It's all thermal printing. Oh, yeah. Black and white. Sure.
Speaker 5:So there are the paper refills. Mhmm. But we want people to use the device, so we're kind of just pushing as much paper at people as possible. It's Yeah. Very, very cheap.
Speaker 5:We're, like, you know, we're not we're not trying to make a lot of money off of it right now. We want people to use the device. Yeah. So you get, let's see, 200 stickers for $6
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Which is pretty good.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And free shipping on all of those stickers for everybody who's watching. So if you buy stickers off our site, it ships for free, and you can buy as many as you want. And then, yeah, we're trying to put more features in. So, like, let's say, like, you have a box and I have a box. I send you my tiger character, my tiger astronaut, and you use my tiger astronaut in your box, and maybe we make a story together.
Speaker 5:And my tiger astronaut and your wizard go into the castle, and then we go underwater, or we do these things. So, like, basically, creating more features for people to create together, for them to create more with each other, and just do more sort of, like, I more ideas and more more more intellectual property and more content, basically, creation. Ken.
Speaker 2:In the x chat says, what about licensing deals? Would would you ever do
Speaker 1:We're joking about Supreme and Karl Marx, but Disney and stuff. That's They've got a one year one one year Email you. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One year exclusive.
Speaker 5:Arun@hapago.com or rootingstickerbox dot com.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean I mean, the the what's it called? The the Yodo player has a bunch of cards that you can buy that have specific stories, licensed music, licensed short stories that are read aloud. And I could see some sort of partnership there being super lucrative where you could buy this pack and then be able to generate this type of character. That sounds
Speaker 5:That's exactly what we're thinking. Sticker packs of parent companion app. You unlock Team Ninja Turtles. You unlock Hello Kitty.
Speaker 1:You unlock whatever
Speaker 5:you want. And then, honestly, let kids create their own stuff. Right? Yeah. If kids create their own dinosaur superhero, let them sell that sticker pack.
Speaker 5:Right? And then their kids can download it as well. That's exciting. But, yeah, licensing it would be a huge play because it's super fun.
Speaker 2:I wanna see sticker box millionaires. Eight year eight year olds that just happened.
Speaker 1:I mean, Grail had this ecosystem too. Give us the fundraising news. I wanna hit the gong. Give us the fundraising news.
Speaker 5:Oh, yes. So we raised $7,000,000 to hit that gong.
Speaker 6:For the kids.
Speaker 2:For the kids.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad.
Speaker 5:It's always for the kids. It for the kids. But, yeah, dollars. Mavron, who is behind Love Every, which is another Montessori kids product. Yeah.
Speaker 5:They were our lead investor. And then Beth Ferreira oh, sorry. We got had Jerry Lou from Mavron and Jason Silver, and then we got Beth Ferreira from Serena Ventures. Serena Williams for fun, also put in a significant amount of money into our round. Do
Speaker 2:you have Bob carrying all the weight there?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Bob for now, Bob is, but give me six months in.
Speaker 2:Six months. Let's go. Okay. Let's
Speaker 1:go. Breaking news here. Let's go.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Seriously, my wife I'm sure my wife is watching.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 2:Yeah. So great to meet you. I'm excited. I can't wait to get mine.
Speaker 1:What a white pill. Yeah. And and good luck this year. It sounds like it's gonna be a massive one. And please come back on the show when there's more news.
Speaker 1:We'd love to
Speaker 5:chat. I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to
Speaker 5:We're trying to be a positive force for good. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of negativity around AI. Yeah. And I think for good reasons in a lot of cases, but for us, it's really
Speaker 2:Use as much use as much water in the data science as you want. I'm happy with my electricity bill going up because of
Speaker 10:this one.
Speaker 1:For this, my electricity bill can go up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to rest of your day, and have a nice 2026. Goodbye. Our next guest is Julie Bush, the cofounder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises.
Speaker 1:They recently closed a massive series. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. It's so great to be here. I feel like you've had a thousand of my friends on, and it's good to finally make
Speaker 2:the show.
Speaker 1:Well, we've literally had some of your friends on. We've had the we've had Colin from friends and family on the show. Yes. The friends You
Speaker 9:had Colin. Yes.
Speaker 1:Founders fund.
Speaker 9:Fund
Speaker 1:is one of earlier today. I
Speaker 9:I spent a decade at Palantir, so I've Awesome. Out. Overnight success. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We got all of them. But for those since it is your first time on the show, please give us an introduction on yourself and Valinor.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So Julie Busch, cofounder and CEO of Valinor Enterprises. And, we're bringing a new business model to defense and national security. Mhmm. You guys know as well as I do that the barriers to entry in this market are so high.
Speaker 9:And so we've built something really unique. We're an operational holding company to service the long tail problems. The the unsexy things that nobody is able to go after because the barriers of entry are are so high. So you're really incentivized to go after the moon shots like the next generation fighter jets and the Golden Domes, but there's basically 80% of the the market that's just untapped.
Speaker 1:So walk me through operational holding company. What are you adding to? What are you holding? How old are these companies? How big are they?
Speaker 1:What can I compare it to in other piece other holding companies that I might be familiar with?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We're we're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech. And so for us, we're we're holding product companies.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And, you know, that's usually software software defined hardware. Mhmm. We started a little over a year ago, and today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the in the works. So we're actively working on three more and we likely will add two more before the 2026.
Speaker 9:So we're moving pretty quickly here and we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned, autonomous systems Mhmm. To combat casualty care.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:So think about parts of the the market that are really really critical. But again, like there hasn't been innovation there in Sure. In decades.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So talk to
Speaker 2:me about So so this so this is an example of a company like, a company that maybe at scale, like, could only ever be a $50,000,000 revenue business if they get every key customer. And so it's hard to like raise a lot of money Mhmm. At for an opportunity like that and build out some crazy go to market team and and and so they can partner with you to get that distribution and basically get this platform to make it easier to sell into the government. Am I saying that right? Or am I wrong?
Speaker 9:Yes. Exactly. Like, we can both build and buy companies. We hold them. We're the majority owners of them.
Speaker 9:We we run we centralize all the go to market and all the operations. Mhmm. And that allows us to move really really quickly and then we decentralize engineering and we basically run them like product lines but their own they're their own subsidiaries. So we have a ton of flexibility. We're their capital allocator.
Speaker 9:So, know, I I know you guys also were following defense tech hype. But Yeah. We're able to get great outcomes for our GMs and the engineering teams and the subsidiaries because, you know, they're not out there fundraising. Like, they're focused on building a great product and we're we're basically doing everything else.
Speaker 2:And and as I imagine part of the thesis here is you have like hundreds of new defense tech companies and and and government contractors created. A lot of them will build great products but maybe not get to the scale where they can, you know, IPO or anything like that and and you can come in and actually provide like an outcome and then the opportunity to actually continue to scale that business. So Absolutely. Maybe maybe like a year or two years from now, they'll they'll be even more opportunities on on the buy side.
Speaker 9:That's right. That's right. I I mean, I when I think about the market, like, I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say, like, we wanna be the most sustainable company in this market or platform of companies in this market. And, yeah, I think earlier you said so what about like, is this like are we looking at, a $50,000,000 TAM here for this product?
Speaker 9:I mean, I like to think a lot of what we're working on there, like, hundreds of millions of dollars to hands behind them. Yeah. They just don't have to be 10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:Right? Like, they don't need to be Andoril. They don't need to be Palantir. And right now, everyone's getting pitched to be like like, I'm the Andoril of X.
Speaker 2:Of X.
Speaker 9:I'm the Palantir of Y. Yep. And there's really only gonna be a handful of those companies.
Speaker 1:Speaking of Anderol, are you Adam Porter Price's worst nightmare? Are you guys going up against each other to try and buy companies? Or do you target different market segments so you don't actually run into each other in back to back board meetings when a company is choosing to sell?
Speaker 9:No. I mean, I actually see him as a great partner for us. Steckman, you know Yeah. Sends me lists of things they need. Right?
Speaker 9:Sure. So they could be buyers of our of our assets. Yeah. Just like I think the primes could be. Like the other large primes, they need more innovation than Anderol does.
Speaker 9:Right? Yeah. Just so happens APP is
Speaker 8:like
Speaker 9:brilliant M and A for Anderol. Right? So I actually look to him as someone who is is really important to us. And
Speaker 2:So have you guys sold any any of the businesses yet or is that a is that a future?
Speaker 9:No. I would say we're we're a little early for that. Right? Yep. But I do think, you know, it could be interesting in the next eighteen months to see what happens.
Speaker 9:And, of course, like each one of these is is their own individual strategy. And like we can hold them too, and we want to hold them. We we want I I think we can make a lot of these companies profitable really quickly because we can drive down their operating costs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you processing sort of the defense tech hype waves? You know, Ukraine happens. Everyone wants to talk counter UAS. Taiwan heats up.
Speaker 1:Everyone wants to talk about surface vehicles and rebuilding the Navy. Those are important projects, but you can get sort of whiplash. There are there real pockets of value when there's a lot of energy and maybe a lot of executive orders and Truth Social posts about a category? Or do you want to sort of zoom out and be looking for more opportunities that might become big narrative arcs in the next five years or something like that? How do you think about these defense waves?
Speaker 9:I love this question. I you know, I've been in this market twenty years. I was at Palantir ten years, built out most of the government business there. I think when there is a crisis or there is a you know, we the pandemic was a a great example of this. Like, it does create a different level of action within the government.
Speaker 9:I think this is part of why, you know, right now with Department of War, it's it's great to see them putting, like, sticks and carrots out there because it's creating action without a crisis. I don't think we wanna wait till there's a crisis for, you know, us to be in a bad position. But I do think the hype comes in waves and, you know, you can seize it. I think Palantir does a really good job of seizing that. That's something I really learned there.
Speaker 9:And and for us, you know, we are looking at things that are timely. There are things we are not gonna build or buy right now just because we know where this administration's priorities are for the next three years. But I do think you wanna be ahead of the curve. So we have a product called dispatch, for example, which is essentially an autonomous power station for unmanned systems. You know, the drone market is like proliferating and drone dominance is a huge program in Department of War.
Speaker 9:But you can't extend autonomy if you still have personnel in the way that are powering your systems. And so this is like a docking station just like you would like charge your iPhone for for anything on the blue UAS list. And, like, that's a little bit early. But I think, like, we're gonna seize on that because it can be a first mover in that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about dual use technologies? When I look at the legacy Primes, almost all of them have wound up at least with some sort of commercial business. Palantir, obviously famous. Andoril, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around, maybe with a camera on it.
Speaker 2:They have general dynamics. They have Gulfstream. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and it sort of just sometimes it just happens over time. Sometimes it feels deliberate, and you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the company says, hey, we're gonna do this military thing, but then eventually there's this obvious add on in commercial or oil and gas or something else. Do you think the dual use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How how are you processing the dual use nature of some of these technologies?
Speaker 9:I love this question. I think it's I think it's a distraction, honestly. Like, for for Palantir, it was critical and like really when you think about Foundry and those platforms, those are meant to be for like any use case in the world.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 9:You know. So the fact that it is dual use makes sense for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual use because that makes you that means your TAM is so much greater. And again, this is why I think 80% of the government market is like being left untapped. Because most of the use cases are single use. And like honestly, that's really critical too. And I think if you your products over time can become dual use.
Speaker 9:Even if you are thinking that they have a single use focus initially. And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's incredibly difficult. When you think about compliance, have to like re architect your entire platform for it to become FedRAMP high or to meet impact level accreditation status. So I'd much rather see our products if they like they don't have to become dual use.
Speaker 9:They can be single use. And I think the government needs single use products. But many of them are already dual use. You know, some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers and like that's valuable too because it establishes commerciality. But it has to be focused.
Speaker 9:Like, your first customers have to be in government, in our in our ecosystem. And, I just think dual use is way overhyped.
Speaker 1:Talk about the fundraising strategy to date.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So my seed round, was myself, Trace Stevens at Founders Fund, Paul Kwan at General Catalyst, and Graham Verstandig at Red Cell Partners.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:All of which I like deeply trusted or I never would have done this. Like, I'm a little bit of a unique founder, mom of two. Mhmm. You don't see a lot of defense tech women founders. But But you know, I Tray and and Paul and Grant were people I deeply trusted
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:When we started this process and they've been incredibly supportive of this journey. And I think they recognize the need for a new model in this space. And so as we've continued our kind of fundraising strategy, it was important to me at the a that we brought in Colin and kind of friends and family capital. You know, he's an OG Palantir CFO. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Seeing what it's like to build a generational defense tech company from the inside. Someone I deeply trust. We were executives there together. And I also think they're brilliant capital allocators. And at the end of the day, we fund our companies.
Speaker 9:We are a capital allocation machine. That's great. And so they've been an awesome part
Speaker 1:of Congratulations on all
Speaker 2:We got a gong. We we got a hit for you.
Speaker 1:Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Speaker 9:Thank you. Thank you. Rest of week.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll come back on again soon. I'm I'm sure there'll be plenty of news to discuss.
Speaker 1:Sounds great.
Speaker 2:Cheers, Julie.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Goodbye. Bye.
Speaker 2:Up, we have our Lambda lightning round. We got Winston Weinberg, the cofounder of Harvey. Look at this thing.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like the sound of that. Oh. Good job.
Speaker 2:Woah. We have Yo Tom from Syera, and then we have Josh Wolfe to cap it off. So Let's bring in Winston Weinberg, the CEO
Speaker 1:and cofounder of Harvey from the Restream waiting room into the CBPN UltraDome. Winston, good to see you. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 6:Good. I like that cloud.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 6:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:It's powerful.
Speaker 6:It's on one of those. It's powerful. It's like Thor coming in.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. I mean, you you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough
Speaker 2:No thunder. No lightning. No have a we have a cloud guy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's a huge problem. Yeah. You guys could hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd great.
Speaker 1:We can.
Speaker 6:He's actually a blimp guy.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's it's it's pulsating right now. Well, thank you so much for
Speaker 2:taking time. So this was really well timed Yes. Because we just got our December legal bill. And I love I love our I I genuinely our our lawyer is like very good friend of mine. I love love
Speaker 1:But but he handwrites everything.
Speaker 2:You know? No. Not quite.
Speaker 1:He's using a typewriter.
Speaker 2:Not quite. He's being as efficient as he can. But but you know, every company has a lot of work. And interestingly, I just I just feel like legal bills because they are variable Mhmm. And the work is important.
Speaker 2:But I just feel like it's always a surprise. The number is always bigger than you expect it to be. And I'm excited to head head into a world where Yeah. That bill can be smaller for a lot of companies and get better work. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So hopefully, I know the work that you're doing is
Speaker 1:But, yeah, kick us off with the the State of the Union. Where is Harvey today?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So it started three and a half years ago. So I mean, god. It's I think it's felt like every day, it either feels like it was yesterday or it was, like, fifty years, something like that probably. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And just kinda oscillating back and forth. Started selling to kind of, like, very large law firms. Now we've expanded to selling to large corporations as well in mid market. And what we're really trying to do is kind of have, a operating system that's in between. So it's for all lawyers, and it helps them basically provide those services, you know, more cheaply and can do the the work faster.
Speaker 6:I think, to be honest, to your legal bill, and I'm a little laggy. I don't know if that's on me or you.
Speaker 1:I think that's just the the the you're you're watching the show. So so Oh, baby. I don't you
Speaker 2:you seem like you're in real time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You look fine to us. Perfect.
Speaker 6:I'll take it. Yeah. I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's gonna not be as expensive. Mhmm. But there will be other type of legal work that you're gonna need done.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so your overall legal bill will probably be the same. Yeah. But that line items will look different is my guess of how this goes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. More more more hours spent on the actual high leverage Yeah. Work versus Yeah. You know, just generating a document What changed last year with heart?
Speaker 2:Like, what were the big inflection points for the business last year? Because I just noticed this, you know, having friends that were lawyers. I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. Just like they had they they they they were kind of like one shotted by Harvey at some point during the year, which is like that is what you're if you're building an AI company, you wanna build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like, woah. Okay.
Speaker 2:I I really believe now.
Speaker 1:And you also wanna start building it when it's a little rough around the edges and then let the models get better. And then and then you hit that moment and you're ready.
Speaker 6:There's yeah. There's you basically, like, there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better. Right? So I think of this is honestly, like, there's three type of employees or, like, folks that you work with, like colleagues. Mhmm. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context and every single piece of information to do the job, and then they can do it.
Speaker 6:The second is you say, hey, man. The same way that we did x y z last week, could you do it again? Yeah. And then they do it. And then the third is folks just do it without even any of the context.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is how do you make sure that for a specific task, all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform. Mhmm. And then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. And it's actually, like, a very hard problem at scale because if you think of what you're doing, you're kinda building, like, a like a legal brain or like a partner brain. This is what they do. They get a task from, you know, one of you guys, and they break that task down into all these, like, 10 subtasks, and then they, you know, give that to other associates, etcetera. It's a really hard thing to build.
Speaker 1:ChatGPT launched CHATGPT Health yesterday. How do you think the consumer prosumer legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to LLMs, consumer LLMs today
Speaker 2:They're definitely going.
Speaker 1:And just ask, hey. Write this this thing.
Speaker 2:And is that is that an area that, like, you guys Yeah. Don't have any In house counsel
Speaker 1:Yeah. Product or something?
Speaker 6:So in house counsel, definitely do. So we serve a lot of Fortune five hundreds. Mhmm. And that's that's actually that's growing, I think, last quarter.
Speaker 2:Let's give it up for
Speaker 3:a lot
Speaker 1:Fortune 500. Thanks. Give it
Speaker 6:up for them. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up
Speaker 3:for them.
Speaker 6:I think last quarter, it was like 41% or something like that Okay. Was actually corporates. Yeah. So that's that's there we go. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Give me one more of those.
Speaker 1:Close. Go.
Speaker 6:That's the cloud. If you could you combine the cloud with that? That'd be great.
Speaker 1:Combine the and the sound of it.
Speaker 2:Well, I to be honest, I thought you said 41% of the I I thought you're saying 41% of
Speaker 3:the Fortune 500,
Speaker 2:but that'll be soon. I'm sure.
Speaker 6:Here. Here. I'll come back on when that happens hopefully soon, and we can do, like, a blimp cloud Yes. And that sound all combined with some, like, Thor lightning So we are interested in this and like helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is actually if you're a citizen of Singapore and you are filing a claim below 20,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim.
Speaker 6:And then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. One of the yeah.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that like were Spider Man meme? Yeah. Well
Speaker 6:well, so what we're actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages, both parties can decide. They have to both consent to this. Mhmm. But they say, hey. I'm gonna submit these facts, and Harvey is gonna help me draft it.
Speaker 6:Right? Because it it's hard of the consumer to, like, know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the the complaint and things like that. But both of us will agree that we're gonna submit this into Harvey, and then the outcome is gonna be binding. Mhmm. And that's, like, eventually, would be actually incredible because a huge problem in Singapore is and it's an even bigger problem in The United States is just access to justice in general, right, where people actually can't get any of their claims met.
Speaker 6:One, because the average price of a lawyer is $353 an hour in The US, which is astronomically too high. Right? And then the second reason is the courts are just, like, absolutely overburdened. Right? And so any of those systems that you can do to help that really moves this over along.
Speaker 6:And so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. I think eventually, we'll look into this, but it's not on our road map right now.
Speaker 1:What are your big predictions for 2026 just in terms of AI progress? Are you building the business that expects another jump in, capabilities? It feels like a lot of people were talking about Cloud Code being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that, or is it sort of just business as usual?
Speaker 6:Yes? No. I mean, we we we you you have to build everything assuming that it's gonna get better.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And what you do is you actually just try to create a culture of trying to build really complex things. Yeah. And we have a lot of how we do this is we have a lot of, like, design partners. Mhmm. And so we work with, like, private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build, like, a really extreme use case.
Speaker 6:Mhmm. A lot of the times, it fails. Mhmm. And that's actually okay because it fails, and then we realize, oh, if the models improve x y z, then it would actually probably work. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And then we bucket that, and we wait, and then we try it with a new model. Oh. And eventually that stuff starts to work. Right? So a lot of it is like how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks, get the feedback of what needs to improve to to actually complete that, and then you have that set and ready to go as a use case.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How much how much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? Any anybody that has had any, you know, experience a lawsuit will understand that, like, you know, something that that really should be a decision that, hypothetically, if you got a few the right people in a room and everybody was, like, mature, you could just kind of, like, figure it out. And and obviously, people try to do that with settlements. But then you end up getting, like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out.
Speaker 2:Hypothetically, if, you know, two different parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can Yeah. You can basically, theoretically, kind of, like, decide something almost instantaneously. Then in theory, you could then appeal it in Harvey, and, like, basically run it again and then appeal it again. And so it just feels like there's gonna be you're kind of fighting hundreds of years of precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways, even if we have the technology, maybe lawsuits are still these and any type of legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to, like, facilitate this. Like, I guess maybe a better way to think about this is, like, there's three categories. One is, like, the process and the system. Right?
Speaker 6:And, hopefully, you move that along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks, and then it has to change. The second is, like, all of the context that's relevant. So can you, like, collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just, like, the underlying technology. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, you need all three of those. I think there's gonna be a lag. I think exactly right. But there are a lot of you know, we just talked about what we we do in Singapore, and there are a lot of kind of forward looking folks that are looking at this. The other thing I'd say too is, like, we see more movement on the transactional side because at that point, it really is just up to the principles.
Speaker 6:Right? So both sides of the deal wanna do something, you can do it. Right? And, honestly, like, a lot of the best lawyers on Earth, they're deal makers. Like, that's what they're doing.
Speaker 6:Right? They're actually like, oh, the reviewing of the documents, yeah, that's kinda just like table stakes. It's actually they give massively really valuable business judgment advice. Right? And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually get the best.
Speaker 2:The greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company want you know, they sell their company once or they start another company, they sell it again. But that's nothing compared to the the lawyer that's been through 200, you know, transactions.
Speaker 1:Yep. That makes sense.
Speaker 6:And they're in the room, and and that's that's happening more and more. The the lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are, actually, increasingly. Right? And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is gonna change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services.
Speaker 6:I also think that's really good for lawyers. Because the reality is, like, people will go to law school because they see TV shows like Suits, and they wanna be like the lawyer on that TV show. Right? Or the Lincoln lawyer or whatever. I don't know.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I love Matthew McConaughey.
Speaker 1:Very
Speaker 6:good. And so they they wanna be a lawyer like it is on TV. Right? And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, the the your career is gonna look closer to that. It's gonna look closer to, like, working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals.
Speaker 6:So that's why I'm really excited about it. And we work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is gonna
Speaker 2:look like. Happening, like, law school applications or, is that, like, local like, a local top, tons of people are are deciding to go to law school. Some people are concerned by that because people are gonna saddle themselves with with debt or spend a lot of money, and and they I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How how have you been processing that? Are some of these law schools, like, I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe relationships with them?
Speaker 6:So we we work with a a lot of law schools. And so we've announced our, like, program last year. And at this point, I'd have to give you the stats, I think we're at, like, 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you.
Speaker 6:I would also one one thing I wanna say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually, like, a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school. I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer, you can make a change in the world. I I I genuinely believe that, and you can. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think actually what happens is when you're in, like, tumultuous times, a lot of people say, hey. I actually want to change this. Especially, you know, when you're applying to law school, you're younger. Right? You're in a younger generation.
Speaker 6:And I think that's actually a lot of the reason why, you know, these applications increase over time.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool.
Speaker 1:We could talk for so much longer. I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Congrats to the whole team on on all the progress.
Speaker 1:And thank you for reducing our legal bills. We will talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:We're shifting around
Speaker 6:the budget. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll see you soon. Next guest is Yotom from Siera with some fantastic news. He is in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV PM UltraDome. Yotam, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to see you there.
Speaker 10:How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're fantastic. Since this is your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
Speaker 10:Gladly. I'm with Tom Seger. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Sayera based in New York City. Cool. Sayera is in the data and AI security business.
Speaker 10:Yeah. We make sure that, all of the data that goes into these AI systems remains private, remains secure, we enable enterprises to adopt AI.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. How'd you start the company?
Speaker 10:I started the company out of a friendship and a partnership. My cofounder, CTO, and I go back sixteen years at this point.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 10:We were standing in the same line to standing in the same line to to enlist when we were 18.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I had the pleasure of working side by side with him in the military service. Uh-huh. And I knew that I always wanna work with him. So the moment he said, let's start the company, I said, okay. I'll, I'll go with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's What what did you guys do first?
Speaker 10:What do you mean? We did the cybersecurity in the IDF in the Israeli military.
Speaker 2:Sure. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay.
Speaker 2:So this is your first this is your first company?
Speaker 10:This is our first and last. I don't think we're There doing
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:Love that. One shot it.
Speaker 1:Well, what's the key to getting, large enterprises on board as a first time entrepreneur? It seems like that's like, you know, a lot of people vibe code something, get some ground up adoption. It seems like you've gone to the top of the market. What's what informed that strategy? What's been the key to success?
Speaker 10:I think for us, it's been a combination of listening Yeah. Using our two ears
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 10:To really, really, really listen to the customers, understand that they know very well what they need to fix, why things are not working, what hurts, why things failed in the past, combined with the ability to engineer the super, super high velocity Mhmm. And really solve complex problems in super complex ecosystems. I think that the combination of these two things together has been our secret to success with the large enterprise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What scares you the most about how AI is being adopted in the enterprise today? Like, when when are you talking with a customer and you're like, woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a good question.
Speaker 10:Wow. Where do I start? I think that there's so much pressure being put on the security risk and compliance teams to get out of the way and let AI be rolled out. I think that the level of security capabilities that's being bundled with the AI from the AI providers themselves is very, very insufficient. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And I think that in many, many regards, with the gap, the exposure that is being created is quite meaningful, and, and we're going to see the the results of that in the coming years.
Speaker 1:What's the, what's the key to creating differentiation in the cybersecurity category? It feels like there's a lot of companies that are established. They're not asleep at the wheel, and yet you've grown very quickly, gotten very big. How how are you positioning and creating, white space?
Speaker 10:Yeah. So the first thing that is really unique about cybersecurity is that in most of what we do in our lives, we get measured on how well we do on average.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:In cybersecurity, we get measured on our weakest link.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Doesn't matter if you're an eight on average. If you still have a two or a three
Speaker 2:It's bad.
Speaker 10:Something bad is coming your way. Yeah. And because it's you know, we're not defending a static target, we're defending a very dynamic target. The threat vectors are changing. The IT landscape is changing.
Speaker 10:The regulatory landscape is changing. There's always going to be exposures. There's always going to be soft spots.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:I think for us, our focus on data, the ability to understand and differentiate between the 1% of data that really matters to an organization. If that data was leaked, breached, exposed, that will create a bad year for them, not just a bad weekend. Yeah. Right? And the 99 of data that map that clutters, which is so much of the data they have, Based on the ability to do that across the enterprise at the enterprise scale, we've really been able to build a holistic data security and AI security platform that helps the organization achieve so many outcomes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the latest fundraising news. We gotta hit the gong for you.
Speaker 2:Is this like a friends, friends, and family round?
Speaker 10:Yeah. I I I happen to have friends with $400,000,000.
Speaker 2:That's a Very good. Question. Good good friends to have. Yeah. Great vote of confidence
Speaker 1:to Blackstone's get in. A series f. You're gonna run out of letters soon. So hopefully, we'll see you at the New York Stock Exchange soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Cheers. Goodbye. And up next, the moment you've been waiting for, Josh Wolfe, the co founder and managing partner at Lux Capital.
Speaker 1:He'll be joining us in just a second. We will go back to the timeline in the meantime while we wait for him to join. Did you know that the founders of Home Depot were 49 and 36? And they both each of them had three children each when they started the company, and they'd both just been fired from their jobs when they started Home Depot.
Speaker 6:Were they
Speaker 2:fired from? Same same company?
Speaker 1:I'll read from this. Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus, and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with $2,000,000 raised from 40 friends. They had to put the ultimate friends and family round together, none of whom were wealthy by your standards. The average investment was $50,000. After Bernie, age 49, and Arthur, age 36, had been fired from their previous jobs and with three children each, no health insurance, that's a nightmare, no savings, heavily mortgaged homes, they were effectively broke.
Speaker 1:The rest is history. From nothing, Home Depot has grown into an empire with an enterprise market capitalization of over $250,000,000,000 that employs that provides employment to more than 400,000 workers, thousands of whom became millionaires investing in the company's stock while while the founders have given away in excess of 1,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Incredible.
Speaker 1:In charitable donations Incredible. And still counting. Wow. What a run for the Home Depot founders. Well What a run for Josh Wolf.
Speaker 1:Moment you've been waiting for, we have Josh Wolf in the restroom waiting room, and here he is in the TVP and Ultra. Josh, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Look at this setup. That's fucking good. You
Speaker 1:look fantastic. How are doing? Did you have a good break? Are you off to a good New Year?
Speaker 2:Seems like it.
Speaker 1:It's a
Speaker 6:great new year.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And what's the news? It seems like you're kicking off 2026 with the bang.
Speaker 8:We we raised a new fund. We we're excited. Yeah.
Speaker 1:How much is crazy?
Speaker 8:We raised a billion 5 and Billion 5.
Speaker 5:Oh, we get
Speaker 8:the gong.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 10:Excited about the gong.
Speaker 8:You know, crazy. I remember Yes. Twenty years ago, twenty plus years ago, we raised our first fund, and it was a 100,000,000, and I struggled to hit it. We got 92.1. I'll tell you, to this day, remember literally every single person that said yes or no.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Every single person. Everybody. Yeah. How many of them are still along for the ride?
Speaker 1:Do you go back
Speaker 8:to 12 people who are OG Lux investors that are, like, part of our family that I love beer.
Speaker 1:At this point. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. Okay. Yeah. There's been we we cover
Speaker 1:Narrative violation. The Wall Street Journal today is saying that you're cooked. Saying US venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. How did you get it done? What are the markets like?
Speaker 1:Is this Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are what are the big when
Speaker 1:you see a headline like this, 35% down, and yet you're doing well, what's the secret to success?
Speaker 8:I think I think it's right. I think the headline is right. You know, all spoke, I want to say back at
Speaker 2:Hill and Valley. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And we were talking about the minnows and the megas. And I had made this thing that maybe was like a sort of prediction, but in anticipation that basically you were gonna have this bifurcation where you would have a long tail of the small funds that were gonna basically disappear, and I know you guys hit on that earlier. Yeah. But I was with one of my large LPs, I was like, think you're gonna see 30 to 50% extinction rate, sort of involuntary exit. And this Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's that idea of, like, a a lot of people are on their last fund. They just don't know it yet.
Speaker 8:People never been through a cycle. They have inadequate reserves. They haven't invested in succession planning. They're in the wrong sectors. They are in sectors that would have too much capital.
Speaker 8:They don't have enough. And they were basically in a market where everything was going up into the right and they looked really smart. And they're not idiots, but, you know, usually in up markets, people look smarter than they are. In down markets, they look dumber than they are. And in this particular case, the prophecy was like 30 to 50% would end up disappearing and going extinct.
Speaker 8:And this LP laughed at me and he's like, Josh, it's gonna be 90%. So he was even more aggressive. And I and I think that's gonna happen. Some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed, and you're seeing that. GC bought, you know, a group out of Europe, and you'll see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms.
Speaker 8:Those are the minnows. At the other end, you got the megas. And the megas, you know, there's probably five or six firms that are basically, like, 8 to 100,000,000,000 AUM today and growing. I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs probably from Andreessen, GC, GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi asset platforms, and they're amazing investors.
Speaker 8:They're great people, but it's just changing the game. So you've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers. A few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered and grew. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think, to go public.
Speaker 8:So it's it's a it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms, you know, in the middle Yeah. That are, like, between 1 and $3,000,000,000 that can do like early 100 k checks and late 150 to $200,000,000 checks. And and I think for the next few years, that's gonna be the the place to be.
Speaker 1:It's a good place
Speaker 2:More to positively, how excited are you for this moment to have this amount of capital to deploy? I've read your letters as long as I've been in in the in in the industry, and it feels like Lux as a fund, it was really built for this moment. Everything from, you know, hardware to bio to AI, all these things that you've been writing about forever feel like they're having, you know, such a moment.
Speaker 8:It is. And I gotta be honest, it's as much as the team is out on the edge scouting it, it's really about the founders that we back. Yeah. So you look at, you know, Brian and Palmer and Trey and Matt and Andrew, like, they have just absolutely crushed it. You know, this was at a time when nobody wanted to fund defense seven years ago.
Speaker 8:Being able to be founding investors in Anderle, seeing the success that they're having, the success that I anticipate from here is just incredible. You look at Casor and Applied Intuition, I gotta say amongst 350, 400 companies that we've funded over the past twenty years, It is one of our only cash flow positive businesses, and they're just also crushing it.
Speaker 2:Let's give it
Speaker 1:up for
Speaker 5:10 They will they will get a gong,
Speaker 2:you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Many times. Many times.
Speaker 8:You know, cognition and hugging face, and and we've got an amazing team. You know, I mean, you know, Brandon Reeves and Grace Isford and Peter Abert and Shaheen Farshi and Lan Zhang and Dean Schacker, like, Shaq Veda, like, they're they're just all out crushing it and I'm very grateful. I feel like we've got the best team on the field and more importantly, feel like we've got the best founders. Eric at Modal and the team at Ramp. And I just feel extremely fortunate that we get to partner with these guys.
Speaker 8:And it's like the gift that keeps on giving. So my biggest thing to my team right now is don't screw it up. Don't You know, we've a good thing going. Be humble.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You are only as good as your last deal, and serve our entrepreneurs and make them successful, and they will make us successful. And I feel very grateful.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking about this year? What are you focused on and most excited about personally from an investing standpoint?
Speaker 8:Most important investment that we've made as a firm internally has been our young team that is just like, again, kicking ass now. But in terms of sectors, I'd say generally about a third of what we do is aerospace and defense. We're doing that globally. You know, we're air, land, sea space, cyber, and beyond, and now subsea and subterranean, which is wild. That's something that Palmer himself was talking about years ago, and I thought it was crazy.
Speaker 8:But, of course, we've seen that in everything from the Southern border to to Gaza and Israel. It's a real thing. And so we're now in The US, we're in The UK, we're in Israel, we're in Bulgaria. Us and Delian
Speaker 2:Oh, EnduroSat.
Speaker 8:Right? Exactly. We're in Japan.
Speaker 5:Love Don't
Speaker 2:they have see some cash flow? I thought Enduro had some cash flow.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's cash flow, but just like economics.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It is
Speaker 8:a great a great founder, great business. Yeah. I'd love to do something in India in defense, and I'm very bullish as, you know, you may have heard about this IMEC corridor between India, Mideast, and Saudi and UAE, and Israel and Jordan, Mediterranean, and Europe. And so I just think that whole thing in the aerospace and defense segment, US and allies, is gonna be a big deal. You see Trump putting out, you know, a billion a trillion 5 on the defense budget, enormous amount of spend.
Speaker 8:You had the clip from Palmer earlier today, was awesome. And the incentive alignment so that the bloated bureaucratic beltway bandits are starting to realize like it's not just about hyping your pipeline as a defense company, but actually delivering real material and weapon systems to the warfighters. That's pretty critical. So that's one sector. Biotech, you know, has been in the doldrums for the past, I don't know, two years.
Speaker 8:XBI is up 50% in the past six months, and I think you're gonna see an enormous resurgence in cutting edge biotech, particularly at the intersection between AI. We were founding investors in this company Evolutionary Scale that we took out of Meta, and then CZI ironically ended up buying them just a few weeks ago. So I think you're just seeing more and more of that. And then everything in embodied intelligence, the next wave of AI and compute infrastructure is not just gonna be two dimensional AI. It's gonna be three d.
Speaker 8:So some of that is bio, some of that is robotics, some of that is automation, industrial. But I think that you're gonna see some huge deals, some really big dollar deals around this idea of embodied intelligence, where physical intelligence and locky groom and and the team are just incredible. But you'll probably see two or three other things that are adjacent areas, not specifically robotics, of how do you take some of the great inspirations of our low power brains and embody that so that we're not having hundreds of thousands of GPUs and NVIDIA clusters, but instead doing both edge inference Mhmm. And really interesting biological inspired ways of having AI into the three d world, which is gonna be wild. So excited about all that.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start to become a venture capitalist. We we are seeing this k shaped dynamic. A lot of small funds
Speaker 2:Well, not necessarily a bad time to be a may maybe not the best time to start your own fund.
Speaker 1:But I want some advice for someone who is who who can't be talked down from it. Maybe Join the person who's going great Join a great fund. Is that your advice? Or what if someone says I wanna start
Speaker 8:a fund?
Speaker 1:I wanna start a fund.
Speaker 8:When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the .com boom bust. I was like, let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing. They're gonna be brilliant people. I mean, I gotta be honest, like Yeah. You know, whether personally some of the partners or the or the firm in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are gonna be launching funds.
Speaker 8:And they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell. You know, have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they are out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs. And I would never count those people out. Now, they're gonna need capital over time, and there'll be people that we partner with.
Speaker 8:But over time, they will go from a small fund to a big mega fund. Mhmm. So I'm actually I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund. It is one of the
Speaker 5:great entrepreneurial things to do.
Speaker 2:Totally. But but, yeah, if you go back to 2021 where where the numbers that we're referencing and that the journal's referencing, it's like, if you knew founders, people would be like, well, here's 20 mil. You know? And it's like, I don't think we need that many more funds like that. It's like, you want the you want the life's work allocator who has a differentiated view Code of your firm.
Speaker 2:Etcetera. Yeah.
Speaker 8:If somebody was saying in twenty twenty three, four, five that you're gonna start a media business that is gonna become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to younger generation. Be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like, what? But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche. You've got a vibe.
Speaker 8:You're you're just it's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do that venture? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture. As long as they're thinking about how do I do this in a really distinguished differentiated way, and I can be so good that they can't ignore me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How, what are your LPs thinking about the IPO window this year, next year? It feels like there might be trillions of liquidity coming to the tech industry. Is that going to have an effect on the at the early stage, at the next the next stage of scale ups? Will that affect VC dynamics?
Speaker 1:Or is that kind of just you know, a foregone conclusion at this point?
Speaker 8:No. I think that you're gonna have a big set of IPOs. I mean, everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 8:Probably six to 10 companies, I think, this year Mhmm. Have such high demand. Yeah. They've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think and you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir and Alex and the team are amazing.
Speaker 8:But to me it is less about Palantir and more about huge amount of pent up demand for next generation defense tech. I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Andriel, no idea on the timing, size,
Speaker 5:all that
Speaker 3:kind of
Speaker 8:stuff, but the demand is gonna be really high, know. And you see it in the private markets now. Just as a proxy, we used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies either sort of at last round price or maybe at a discount to NAV, know, the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly the ones that could be or will be going public, are at premiums. And so I think the demand is really high.
Speaker 8:It will usher in a next generation of companies and it will happen in AI compute. You'll see it in some of the big foundation labs. You'll see it in biotech. I think you're gonna see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs. And it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation.
Speaker 8:And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense. This arc from Google having its employees protest, you know, working on Project Maven, to seeing the rise of Andoril, to seeing Trump's, you know, lashing the existing bureaucratic prime.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 8:then you see mega IPOs and these next gen companies that didn't exist ten years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes. I think it is gonna be a bellwether for the industry. And it is great to be American. It is great to have American capital markets. Capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well treated, and it is here.
Speaker 8:So super bullish.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well said. What what does an object need to what qualifies an object to get on your shelf here?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:You you gotta be part totem of my like nostalgic childhood,
Speaker 3:you know.
Speaker 8:I've got I don't know, know this is the the cyclone, which is the scariest roller Oh, coaster
Speaker 5:in That's where I
Speaker 8:grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Will never forget my scrappy roots. It's a wooden roller
Speaker 1:coaster, right?
Speaker 8:It is a wooden roller coaster. I'll tell you, it is the scariest roller coaster in the world. Not by virtue of speed or descent, but it is sold, your ride may be the last. And the thrill of that is like, you know, mind blowing. I've got my first Game Boy, you know, if you had Palmer Yeah.
Speaker 8:Got rocking the new mod retro. Yeah. I've got my first Nintendo Donkey Kong. Oh. Nice.
Speaker 8:You know, slip I it's So like when I was this is my childhood, you know? It's from science fiction to science fact. It's what all the little totems that have made me.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Incredible.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for giving us the update. I'm sure you'll be back on many more times this year.
Speaker 1:It's gonna
Speaker 2:be a massive year, I look forward to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to soon.
Speaker 8:Guys, congrats on what you built.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being part of it. Whole team. Multiple times last week last year, we got to hang out, and it was really, really fun. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Look forward to. Peace.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. The last thing I wanna talk about is this new Fujifilm camera. Has a very interesting feature that allows you to take photos from any period in time.
Speaker 1:So instead of baking in filters or lenses or anything that you could that you could change, you can it it you hold it like an old Fujifilm camera, but there is a dial on the side that will let you select a decade. So you can say, I want the photo. I want this particular photo. The next photo that I take, I want it to look like it was taken in the nineteen thirties. I want it to look like it was taken in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1:I want it to look like it was taken in 2010. It will That's wild. Emulate that directly on the device, bake that into the file that it gives you.
Speaker 3:Is it is
Speaker 2:it film only, or does it actually give you a digital?
Speaker 1:I believe it's I believe it's digital. Let's read from this. It says as at the FUJIFILM new product experience event, I tried out the generation Checky Instamax mini Evo Cinema that can shoot oh, it can also shoot videos. A design that evokes eight millimeter film cameras. It comes equipped with a dial called the Jadai dial that lets you enjoy effects inspired by the nineteen thirties and nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1:Of course, it offers the fun of Checky and it's model and it's a model that also lets you enjoy that analog like operation feel. So I believe it's a video camera that will spit out an m p four on a memory card that you can upload to whatever you want. Maybe we should get one around the studio. We should get one that's connected over HDMI into the stream, and we can and we can use that like we've used the VHS camera in the past that you may have seen here on TBPN. Anyway, anything else we should
Speaker 2:cover Trump just ordered the US government to buy 200,000,000,000 in mortgage bonds to drive mortgage rates down. Says he's bringing back the American dream.
Speaker 1:More debt for the American taxpayer.
Speaker 2:Interesting. More debt for the for America to to bring down rates for Americans.
Speaker 1:That could be good, I
Speaker 2:guess. Could work. Yeah. We will see.
Speaker 1:There's also a new Hyundai Waymo And Wait.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is
Speaker 1:It's estimated to cost $42,000, which if true, is like a 10 x decrease in the price of the Waymos. Political reality being a little bit spicier says this is the end of the cyber cab before it's even born. The and the ability to adapt the Waymo sensor tech to almost any vehicle means Waymo can pick and choose vehicles based on grade, market fit, and other variables. So you could be in a rougher environment with a lot of potholes. You you you you build a Waymo out of a G Wagon, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Maybe I like it.
Speaker 1:You're if you're on clean streets, you go with
Speaker 2:something cheaper. This Will. I. Am has a
Speaker 1:Oh, this is
Speaker 2:car. It's a three wheel
Speaker 1:Also, we just Really quickly, I need to clarify this because we have to issue a correction. This is completely fake news because there's a, apparently, there's a, community note on this that says this is actually a different company's Hyundai IONIQ five self robo taxi. It's not Waymo's. So we will see where this all
Speaker 2:Completely fake news. Anyway But apparently, Will I m has a new Micro Mobility EV. It's three wheels. This thing looks absolutely insane. Greg Greg Brockman was was fired up on it.
Speaker 2:Looks straight out of Tron. Mhmm. I I like the look. And we should get will. I.
Speaker 2:Am on the show to talk about Trinity.
Speaker 1:That would be great.
Speaker 2:It's it's it's gonna be they're selling this on Kickstarter?
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:That's I
Speaker 1:wonder, yeah, sort of a motorcycle that doesn't require as much balance. I wonder where this would be the most popular. It certainly looks cool. It feels it seems like a fun thing to go for a drive in. I wonder if it's more experiential or supposed to be something that you would actually commute in.
Speaker 1:Driving through Los Angeles, and that feels a little treacherous to me. I don't know that I would actually choose to do that, but maybe maybe it was a replacement for the golf cart.
Speaker 2:Very, yeah, very curious on price point as well on where this will land. But we'll work on getting Will. I. Am on the show to talk about it. Thank you for tuning in today.
Speaker 2:Super fun show. So many great guests. Billions doll billions of dollars in fundraises.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I can't wait for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:I can't wait for tomorrow either. And we will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to TBPN's newsletter at tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Thank you, folks.
Speaker 1:Good night.
Speaker 2:Have a great afternoon.