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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 TBPN. Today is Tuesday, June 30. End of the quarter twenty twenty six. We're live from the TBPN Ultra on the temple of technology, the forces to finance capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Time is money saved both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and whole lot more all Where'd in one
Speaker 2:you raise this?
Speaker 1:Amazing news out of Ramp today. Our Karazian, one of the greatest economist to ever do it, has canceled the AI job apocalypse. We'll get into it, but it's a very interesting analysis showing that firms that adopt AI are hiring. They're going on the offensive. I've always said that this is the correct stance for a CEO to take is say, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're getting so much productivity. We're gonna crush our competitors. We're staffing up. This is not doom. We're not some like, there were all these CEOs that went into this very defensive.
Speaker 1:They were acting like they got bought for pennies on the dollar by a private equity firm. They're like, yeah. It's looking looking pretty bad for us. We're gonna have to fire everyone and cut costs because this AI opportunity never made any sense.
Speaker 3:My my point my my my
Speaker 1:Go on the offense.
Speaker 3:War. You have someone who's like, yeah. We're using AI. We're way more efficient now. We're getting more value per person on our team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so you're like, okay, great. So you're hiring more people. Right? Because you're getting more out of each incremental person.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they're like, well, no, actually, like
Speaker 1:Actually, yeah. We gotta do layoffs. A lot of these we know we've known this for a long time. A lot of these CEOs just over hired. They wanted to lay people off.
Speaker 1:They wanted to do
Speaker 3:They needed an excuse.
Speaker 1:They wanted to get rid of underperformers, people that weren't fit, like, the right fit for this particular company. All of those folks will reshuffle, find their place. Not everyone's suited to work at a giant 100,000 person company. Some people might be better off at a 5,000 person company or 500 person company or a two person company or even a one person company. There's also interesting studies showing that entrepreneurship is on the rise and it's never been better to go it alone.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Jordy. What else is in the news? Let's give you a quick overview. People were clamoring for a Rocket Lab story that never came yesterday. Rocket Lab enters the arena with SpaceX.
Speaker 1:Brandon Grahl fired up the TBPN newsletter, which you can subscribe to at tbpn.com today because we were on the horn with Professor G. We did his podcast. Very excited for that to come out. We're warmed up because we already got an hour of podcasting under our belts for today.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a four hour day for today.
Speaker 1:We got a three hour show for you. Ash is coming out of stealth. We got Aaron Bali from Monogram coming on. We got Tristan Thompson live in the TBPN UltraDump. And then Grant Gregory, Ian Rountree from Kantos coming in person as well.
Speaker 3:New fun.
Speaker 1:Folks. We're going back and forth. Fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement. Start up fundraising announcement, venture capital fundraising announcement. The money's flowing.
Speaker 1:Things are good. Anyway, Rocket Lab, they're duking it out with SpaceX. Let's go through it. Yesterday, the launch services and space systems provider, Rocket Lab agreed to purchase satellite manufacturer slash operator Iridium in a cash and stock deal that values the company at 8,000,000,000 or 20% more than the share price at Friday's close. Iridium pioneered LEO satellites launching its first one some thirty years ago.
Speaker 1:The Iridium network was the original sat phone, this huge block of a phone. You would take out the antenna out of the back and the antenna was big enough to kill you instantly if you let it get near your brain. No. Just kidding.
Speaker 4:Was very simple.
Speaker 1:Wow. But you it would be terrifying to anyone worried about microwave technology or any sort of radiation. But it was wildly successful. The company grew and grew and now it's part of Rocket Lab. Today they operate a fleet of 66 satellites.
Speaker 1:That seems low. That's because these are bigger older satellites but this partnership is probably going up against Starlink. So that it connects handsets and other devices used by ships, mining sites, U. S. Government agencies, enterprise connectivity play.
Speaker 1:The move represents yet more vertical integration at Rocket Lab. Over the years, the company has grown from small niche satellite launch provider to an integrated space powerhouse. It now designs satellites and aerospace components, serves the defense primes, has the second most launched US rocket annually, the Electron rocket, and is currently developing a reusable medium lift launch vehicle. But Jeff Bezos was probably coming for that silver medal any day now. The with the Iridium acquisition, Rocket Lab is positioning itself to compete directly with SpaceX, which already connects which already operates a 10,000 satellite fleet.
Speaker 1:Rocket Lab has its work cut out for it, says Brandon Guerrelle. Deleon had a good post about this talking about the journey of Rocket Lab we can pull up because it was a SPAC, and SPACs have a bad rep. They all went down 99.999%, but not Rocket Lab. On 08/25/2021, Rocket Lab SPAC ed at $4,100,000,000 the usual SPAC price, probably $10 a share, 4,000,000,000 valuation. It stayed at or below that price in the public markets for three whole years until September 2024 when it started to grow both revenue and get rerated.
Speaker 1:Now it's acquiring Iridium for $8,000,000,000 twice its original IPO price. Dalian says Yeah.
Speaker 3:You could buy it for around $4 and 80 ish cents a share on July 2024. Yeah. It is now sitting at a $101.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What a run. And, the whole space economy has been booming. Very, very good. It's a $60,000,000,000 company, so they're picking up an $8,000,000,000 connectivity provider.
Speaker 1:And we can play a little bit of this from the founder of Rocket Lab, the CEO. Rocket Lab is Rocket Man himself. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium
Speaker 5:was wearing this blue jacket
Speaker 1:Look at this.
Speaker 5:Was announcing Neutron. Yeah. So I guess that means there's something important to announce Wait.
Speaker 3:Pause for a second. Mhmm. Do you ever put on a jacket like that? Because let's rewind.
Speaker 1:Is this really the important
Speaker 3:It seems to be one of the more problem. Alright. Look at this. Wait. Wait.
Speaker 3:Woah. Woah.
Speaker 5:Is something important to
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 3:I don't think I have, but now I wanna try.
Speaker 5:Announce today.
Speaker 1:How do I try to put on jacket? I go like this, take the jacket off, and then when I put on the jacket, I usually just go How do I put on the jacket?
Speaker 3:Now then punch up. No no no no. Go like that. No no no no. That was way too much through this side.
Speaker 1:Like that's what I do.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah yeah. Okay. But try it the Try it his way. One arm out and then you wanna punch up through
Speaker 1:Okay. So you go one arm
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And then you're punching up
Speaker 3:to the
Speaker 1:stratosphere because he launches rockets. No. It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the rockets that leave that go to orbit. Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. Symbolic. Alright. Let's go back
Speaker 1:Let's to the keep playing the video.
Speaker 5:Man, this thing shrunk.
Speaker 1:This thing shrunk too.
Speaker 5:Okay. We're gonna go back to school for a little bit. I want to introduce you to the space application equation. Mhmm. So you've heard me talk a lot in the past about applications.
Speaker 5:It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. So you need your own launch. And then of course, need your own ability to build spacecraft at scale.
Speaker 5:We've got that too. But there's some other really big barriers to building large successful constellations in orbit. And the first one Romantic companions. Spectrum. Spectrum is a finite, almost impossible to get, and of course, not all spectrum is created the same.
Speaker 5:The next thing is, it takes a long time to build and launch your infrastructure, a long time to design and build your satellites, launch them, and even longer time to get your first $1 of revenue. And then finally, it's a long time to a sustained cash flow model, a long time to build your business model, a long time to build your customer base, and it takes just that long extended time until you've got proper reoccurring cash flow. So those of you who know me will know that I'm way too impatient for that. So we found a bit of a shortcut. Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications.
Speaker 1:Good music. Very clear video. This be one of
Speaker 5:the most transformative deals in the space industry. It's the ultimate combination for growth. And if you think back to our little whiteboard session a moment ago, this is a deal where one plus one equals three, not just two. One being Rocket Lab, we have unfettered access to space and Unfettered.
Speaker 3:Unfettered and intelligent space again.
Speaker 5:And then you think of Iridium, they have an already operational constellation, Spectrum, not just any Spectrum, extremely valuable spectrum customers and they're a profitable
Speaker 1:SpaceX just bought some stuff
Speaker 5:comes in is the result of these two things is a fully integrated self launching space superpower. One that will unlock more growth existing network and build new constellations to unlock new services and This market is officially our entrance into the space applications market, a thing we've been talking about for a long time now. But to be clear, this is not the finish line. Now we won't just continue Iridium's network as is, we're gonna build upon it to unlock new markets and pioneer new space based services. Rocket Lab's future in space applications has just been unlocked and accelerated.
Speaker 6:And with that
Speaker 3:I like this guy.
Speaker 5:I'm off
Speaker 7:to buy a new jacket.
Speaker 4:This thing's too small.
Speaker 1:See? It it goes full circle. The reason that he had to put the jacket on sort of awkwardly was it's too small.
Speaker 3:It was a part of the story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was good. That's a really good video. I like that. Anyway, will be interesting.
Speaker 1:Doesn't seem that hard to put up more satellites just lower and
Speaker 3:It's just rocket science.
Speaker 1:I think they got to figure it out. They've doing rocket science for a while. But congrats to everyone at Rocket Lab and Iridium. Deal makes a ton of sense and will be interesting to see where it goes from here. A lot of the space bulls will be picking up shares, I'm sure.
Speaker 1:Comcast Split. In 2011, Comcast, which was primarily a cable TV Internet and phone provider to something like 30,000,000 Americans bought a 51% stake in NBC Universal from General Electric. I love it. I love an industrial company that owns a media company. It's happened before, folks.
Speaker 1:It's not that crazy. Just might work. In 2013, it purchased the remaining 49% stake. Since then, Comcast has acquired the European media company Sky, the movie studio DreamWorks Animation, and through NBCUniversal spun up Peacock among other activity in the entertainment space. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast's decade long plus foray into decade plus long foray into trying to be a content plus distribution company is coming to an end.
Speaker 1:It's planning to split the businesses into two. The Comcast entity will once again becoming a become a connectivity only business, and NBCUniversal will focus entirely on content. And there's been a number of spinouts that have been happening for a while, and this is the the the final, like, big one, I guess. There's a recent history of telecom connectivity companies rolling up entertainment businesses and then spitting them out or get rid of or getting rid of them. Over the past decade, Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo, reorganized the two into a entity called Verizon Media, and ultimately sold Verizon Media to Apollo in 2021.
Speaker 1:Over roughly the same period, AT and T bought DIRECTV and Time Warner, but ended up fully exiting its position in DIRECTV and spun off Time Warner as WarnerMedia into its own entity in 2022. So interesting deal to follow along. The other good news in the space world is that after that explosion at Blue Origin launch, that New Glenn launch that was so disheartening, there were rumors that it might be two years until they got that launch pad back online, but there is some updates here. There are some updates. To return to flight this year, we're not rebuilding the same pad.
Speaker 1:We're going straight to a horizontal vertical hybrid ConOps. We are we had already been developing for our nine x four New Glenn launch vehicle using existing infrastructure, skipping a new transporter erector and creating a common ConOps across two paths. So Dave Here
Speaker 3:we go.
Speaker 1:Shares
Speaker 3:They just used the explosion as sort of like a demo. They demoed the old setup.
Speaker 1:A demolition?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But good news from Dave Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, that they're gonna get New Glenn flying again sooner than people thought. So good news there. What else is in the news today? I have a pitch for you.
Speaker 1:I have a have a business idea. I wanna
Speaker 3:Let's hear
Speaker 1:get some feedback.
Speaker 3:So Let's hear
Speaker 1:it. What's the biggest problem with being a doctor? You make a lot of money as a doctor. Right? What's the biggest problem?
Speaker 3:The odd hours. No. Taxes.
Speaker 1:You make so much money, you get taxed on on normal income, ordinary income. If you're a doctor, you're saving people's lives. You're doing the most important job in our economy.
Speaker 3:You have a doctor buddy that also runs a hedge fund, though.
Speaker 1:And and when he runs the hedge fund, he's making capital gains. Yeah. But when he when he does an operation, he makes ordinary
Speaker 3:But to me, it's personally very concerning. Don't know if I'd want to go to see a doctor that does surgery that To
Speaker 1:be fair, he's building a new clinic and he has time off. Well, he's not up and running it.
Speaker 3:But when I heard that a surgeon was also running a hedge fund, I got a little bit worried. If I was under the knife And But there were some and the market was open, I'd be a little nervous.
Speaker 1:Only on off hours, for sure. But the doctor makes a ton of money, saves people's lives, does all sorts of good things, gets taxed at ordinary income, not capital gains. So you're taxing doctors who are saving lives at a higher rate. So my business idea is with the power of agentic AI, we create thousands and thousands of Delaware c corps for every doctor. So every time that there's a doctor's appointment and you have to pay the doctor, you acquire one of their Delaware C Corps.
Speaker 1:And within that C Corp, there is, on the balance sheet of that company, basically an IOU for the services the doctor must render you.
Speaker 3:Sitting on the balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Sitting on the balance sheet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an asset.
Speaker 1:It's an asset. And so you can then depreciate that asset since you've acquired it. The doctor reaps capital gains and then you cash in your
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they can have a sort of a farm of C corp. So there's the Yes. Know, they've had them Yes. The shares for over a year.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Long term capital gains. And then and then the the patient on their way out, they sign one form, agentic AI does its thing, winds down the c corp and and cashes in the asset. And then the doctor can reap capital gains. What do you think?
Speaker 1:You think we got a business there?
Speaker 3:I think you just created vertical AI agents for tax fraud.
Speaker 1:I asked JGBT and it said, this is almost certainly dead on arrival. Not clever tax optimization, more like abusive tax shelter with healthcare law side quests. The core problem is the economic substance is obvious. The patient is paying for medical care. The doctor is being paid for performing medical service.
Speaker 1:IRC 61 includes compensation for services and fees and gross income and the IRS says you generally include everything received in payment for personal services. Wrapping the bill in a newly minted c corp does not change the income character. Well, I think we'll have to take that one to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 3:Take it all
Speaker 1:the Take it to the Supreme Court, there's a chance.
Speaker 8:I think you can wrap it in a prediction market. Right? So every single time you go to the doctor, you say, okay, there's like 0% chance that the doctor's gonna do well and then he bets yes. He bets yes. And then we'll see what happens.
Speaker 8:But Yes. You know, if it's a good doctor, then he'll be paid out in full.
Speaker 1:Adds insurance to it as well because you don't pay if the doctor doesn't do a good job.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's like insurance is built in. Built in. This is actually
Speaker 1:But It could be winnings on on prediction market capital gains?
Speaker 8:I think it's still mostly unclear. So for for the next few years, I think this would definitely be a good strategy.
Speaker 1:Okay. I like it. I like it. I you have to imagine because they say they don't use the word bet. They use the word trade.
Speaker 8:Trade. Yeah. Predict. So capital gains
Speaker 1:trading. Capital gains treatment maybe?
Speaker 3:I think it was the post last year where someone was saying like prediction markets will replace everything. If I want blueberries delivered to my house, I I go to the market for blueberries being delivered to my house and I bet $15 and I bet no. Someone else, they bet yes. They deliver me blueberries. They get the $15.
Speaker 1:Works every time. Works every every single time. We we we keep debating this this meta question of will they launch a a financially incentivized prediction market or will it purely be for social cloud? You're still in the camp of there's gonna be real dollars. It just feels like the first time Meta will be The a reason
Speaker 3:I I I believe that is because I believe they had met a Yeah. Like was reaching out to the various prediction market providers to try to be potential like partners and or vendors.
Speaker 1:But I mean, partnership can mean so many different things. Right? Partnership with with prediction market can mean we'll give you ad reads or discounted ads or we'll then your data so that if someone is on Instagram and hits the search box acting for something and Llama five or Muse Spark wants to answer it and surface data from a prediction market, we have the rights to do that without infringing on your copyright or something like that. Like, it could be a data licensing partnership. It could be an acquisition funnel.
Speaker 1:It could be something where Meta's funneling people to the prediction markets or back. Like, that whole I I I read the same article that you read and it doesn't make any sense to say, oh, yeah. I want to create a competitor so I'm gonna reach out to my direct competitors and see if I if they want to give me their customers. Like, why would they ever do that? That makes no sense.
Speaker 1:You see what I'm saying?
Speaker 3:The only thing is, like, the prediction markets have a history of partnering with with other applications and basically being the infrastructure providers. Yeah. To actually place real But Dollar
Speaker 1:any prediction. Any partner, whether it's, you know, there there was that whole suite of like No.
Speaker 3:I I agree with you.
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 3:I I I generally agree that there is a possibility that there's no dollars and CNBC. But I just don't I I New York Stock Exchange. They all have partnerships
Speaker 1:with prediction markets. None of them have like, oh, go in the CNBC app and and upload your credit card information. Like Meta's been on this path of like, maybe we'd like a financial relationship with our customers for decades and like it's never really matured. There was always this idea that you would be able to like save your payment infrastructure information and then when you see a t shirt, you could just click and one click checkout in the Instagram app or in the Facebook app. And that never really took off for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 8:So John, in this case, it'd be like you you see an ad and then it's like I place a bet that there won't be a t shirt delivered to my
Speaker 1:house Yes. Yes.
Speaker 8:And then it'll get fulfilled.
Speaker 1:This is the final boss.
Speaker 3:Hopefully. Hopefully. He plays a big enough bet.
Speaker 1:The answer to your question on can doctors reap capital gains by using prediction markets instead. Prediction market profits are taxable but the character is unsettled at the moment. CFTC regulated event contracts like Cauchy style contracts. There is a decent argument that they are financial derivatives rather than gambling. The CFTC describes event contracts as derivative contracts whose payoff depends on the specified event.
Speaker 1:It also granted call sheet status as a designated contract market. So best case, some contracts might be treated as twelve fifty six contracts. That means marked to market annually and gains and losses split across 60% long term capital, 40% short term capital regardless of holding period. So there's a chance that that's the that that's the solution. I think we might might have solved it, we'll have to use every tool in the modern financialization and technology box.
Speaker 1:The Wall Street Journal asked their readers what innovations they want to see in the next twenty years and the answers are sort of all over the place and sort
Speaker 3:always five will shock you.
Speaker 1:Number five might shock you. What innovation do you want to see in the next twenty years? Tyler, think of something. Jordy, of something. I'll read some of what the Wall Street Journal readers wrote in.
Speaker 1:Mark Mary Gillespie from Irving, Texas said solar on wheels. She wants she says, why can't cars be manufactured with solar panels integrated into the top of the vehicle? Then it could recharge the car's battery as you travel and when you park. So this is not actually a new idea. There are cars that have solar panels on the roof, but solar panels are extremely weak and so you'd to leave the car outside for like five months to charge a full electric car.
Speaker 1:Now, there have been DARPA grand challenge cars and specific almost science experiments, vehicles where they have a huge surface area and it's this massive wing of solar panels. And I think there's a plane that's also potentially be able to ply indefinitely by having solar panels that recharge a motor and it spins. But for a normal car, a single solar panel on the roof doesn't get you much in the way of charging. But she's basically asking for a stronger solar density, stronger energy density. And I'm in.
Speaker 1:I'm in. In twenty years, totally feasible. Mary from Irving, Texas. I think it's gonna happen. I think it's possible in twenty years.
Speaker 1:Anyway, traffic jam plan. I would love to see an autopilot feature. I would love I would love to see autopilot features on cars talk to each other.
Speaker 3:They're saying nuclear cars. Just get a nuclear car.
Speaker 1:That's very very fallout. I I I like the what is that? Nuclear punk or something? What was that? What was that?
Speaker 1:There's like an alternate history of like the nineteen sixties if it was powered by nuclear. Not solar punk, atom punk. Atom punk is the term. And it has all these really cool things that could be powered by nuclear. Maybe we'll get there.
Speaker 1:Fusion is sort of promising that. We've talked to a couple companies that do smaller fusion reactors. And they tend avalanches one up in Seattle or maybe Washington, where it's basically the nuclear nuclear reactor, but it's it's fusion, not fission. And it's about the size of, you know, a large battery. And so you could potentially put it in a car, put it in a drone, put it in a space vehicle, keep it up there for a long time.
Speaker 1:Accordion traffic jams would be a thing of the past. What is an accordion traffic
Speaker 3:jam? I think that's when the traffic's like Oh.
Speaker 1:Going in and out.
Speaker 3:In and out. Yeah. People are stopping and going and there's that slight delay when Mhmm. Theoretically if everyone was like moving at the perfect
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know. So Morgan Clayton from Birmingham, Alabama wants autopilot features on all the cars to talk to each other so they never do that. So they know, okay, I gotta speed up. I gotta slow down.
Speaker 1:And then they're all perfectly in sync. Probably doable. You'd need some standard or something. What are you thinking? Musical vision.
Speaker 1:This is a good one. These people are thinking outside the box. This is not like, oh, I want inference at one tenth of the cost. Silicon Valley is unimaginative by comparison. But Mary Stichner Gifford from Alpine, Utah says she wants musical vision.
Speaker 1:I'd like to see the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. There are many ways to help the sight impaired read the printed word, but pianists and others need to read music at the piano. My father's sight was so bad that he had to look at the music about two inches away, memorize one or two phrases, then practice what he memorized. He gave his last recital from memory at age 94. What a legend.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for Mary Schickner Gifford's father, grandfather. Powerful. Crazy idea. Can't you just print it bigger? If you're Woah.
Speaker 1:Having trouble seeing it.
Speaker 3:You just invented the semi truck size printer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you could just print like poster board and then you could see it at the piano. Also, glasses, potentially? Solution here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I wonder I mean, it might be a small might be a a small market of people whose vision is so impaired that even with glasses Okay. It needs to be.
Speaker 1:Up close? Up close. I'm just confused by why this the invention of a device to help musicians with eyesight limitations read music. Why are we focused on reading music? Wouldn't this be wouldn't any technology that allows you to read music with your heart of sight allow you to read anything?
Speaker 3:Are we talking about
Speaker 1:technology?
Speaker 3:I mean, couldn't you have couldn't you learn individual notes and then learn the order of them Yeah. Have it spoken to you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do think maybe it. App. IPads often sit at the at the piano and you could have an iPad app that shows like sort of like one note or two notes.
Speaker 3:What about a humanoid robot that grabs your hand and bends Puppeteers you like marionette. And, you know, slams your hands.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally possible. Battery swaps. We've seen these in China where they eject them with great force.
Speaker 3:Have
Speaker 1:Magnati from Sarasota, Florida has a different idea. He says in probably less than twenty years, the technology of all solid state batteries will reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle I like this because he's phrasing it more as like a
Speaker 3:Pull up this video. We have we have
Speaker 1:We got the technology. We just need to make it less violent. We'll reach the point where the owner of an electric vehicle will be able to drive into a service station, buy a pack of batteries, each the size of an old phone book. Okay. This is a very different technology.
Speaker 1:Yep. That one's very dangerous. Let's not do that.
Speaker 3:Okay. Every time I call Nick Yeah. On our team
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:He's at he's like on some crazy quest to charge his car. Every
Speaker 1:time. Yeah. So this He doesn't have a
Speaker 3:Every hour of the day I call him. He's like, oh, I'm I'm trying to find a charger. You know, the the the the map was wrong.
Speaker 1:Launching my battery like a broadside canyon at the moron next to me that cut me off. Committing seppuku with your car. Just abandon the battery, but you take out your rival. It's a crazy thing because, like, if you eject that battery, like, you're not getting it back. It's gonna be at very least damaged.
Speaker 1:There's no way that's going back in the car. But this, of course, is a fire mitigation strategy. Electric vehicle batteries can burn for days on end. If you can eject them, you save the car, you save the surroundings potentially and create a much more safe environment. Totally reasonable.
Speaker 1:Looks hilarious in the video. Anyway
Speaker 3:Nick Nick just texted me, bro, the chargers in Malibu are all fake.
Speaker 1:They are? I don't know what that means.
Speaker 3:Don't even know what that means.
Speaker 1:No worries about charging take taking too long. The imminent technology will also herald a
Speaker 3:That's probably the new that's probably the new like I'm going to the dentist. Yeah. You know, when you know someone's like interviewing at other places and they're like, oh, I got a dentist appointment. You're like, again? Yeah.
Speaker 3:But Nick is just like, oh, I'm just charging my car. Just charging my car. Okay. It's a good excuse. Don't buy it, Nick.
Speaker 3:Oh, buy I don't buy that the chargers are fake.
Speaker 1:Here's one. Ethan Glasby from South Kingston Kingstown, Rhode Island wants a trash economy. He says push put trash to work. I would love to see an at home generator powered by bacteria that eat trash. We already have bacteria that produce ethanol, as well as bacteria that break down plastic.
Speaker 1:So both in one doesn't seem like that much of a stretch. Much like solar energy, the ethanol could be used to offset heating costs and and to keep the fridge running when the power goes out. He's basically asking to burn the trash, but I guess in a more clean fashion, all while being fueled by household waste. Just maybe don't tell your dinner guests that you are growing bacteria in the next room over. Good good little piece of advice from Ethan.
Speaker 9:She
Speaker 1:Beam me up. This is this is great one. Harold Lewis is truly living in the year 2060 or 2600, something like that.
Speaker 3:Or 3060.
Speaker 1:Because Harold Lewis from Tarrytown, New York says, beam me up. I want human teleportation in the next twenty years. It should work a lot like email, in which data composed of bits and
Speaker 3:It's bytes email. Exist as
Speaker 1:a whole in one place are disassembled, then electronically transmitted to another place where they are reassembled. What is DNA if not bits and bytes of human beings? Do you believe that if you were teleported in this fashion, you would remain? Would you be teleported? Or or is it a prestige situation
Speaker 3:not to would almost I would almost certainly have Tyler go first and just like give it a spin and Well, no. The the
Speaker 8:whole point is that you wouldn't be able to tell, but like I would actually die and there's a clone of me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? The you would die
Speaker 8:Like you would have no way of knowing if it was me or not because it it's in every way it's like all the same data.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The new Tyler
Speaker 3:be You in the pocket of big teleportation. No. It's I'm still new
Speaker 1:Tyler would be like, it worked great. And then the corpse of old Tyler who got disassembled molecule by molecule would be no longer with us and then disappeared. And that is the question in the Prestige. You gotta go
Speaker 3:Well, Paul Paul Blanco wants He something wants a smart spatula.
Speaker 1:This is so much more attainable.
Speaker 3:I'd love a cooking spatula. You mean teleportation without penetration what temperature or how thoroughly cooked a hamburger or steak is. Rare. Do we not have like a No. Like we we we literally have things.
Speaker 3:You just No.
Speaker 1:No. No. You want without penetration. It has to You just rest the spatula on top of the steak and it tells you inside the steak it is, which is very difficult because if you're searing or doing a reverse sear or something, the outside could be a wildly different temperature than what's going on inside. So how do you detect the temperature without penetrating the steak with a thermometer?
Speaker 3:A powerful x -ray. Imagine it's as
Speaker 1:big as that brain scanner thing. It's just like yeah. Here's your smart spatula. Load it up. It's like MRI ing the entire steak.
Speaker 1:That'd be a good time. Robot chef. Oh, this is related. I want a robot that can work as an executive chef in my own kitchen, says Ray Lohr from Lacey, Washington. It could call a grocer, order ingredients, insist on insisting on it all being upscale and have those ingredients delivered, unpacked, load the fridge, and then use my appliances to make dinner.
Speaker 1:Twenty years? I think it's possible. I like that. That that's right on the right, like, you know, level of sci fi. It seems doable.
Speaker 10:For what it's worth
Speaker 1:something But also that not that is we whip up in a weekend with an Arduino, the smart
Speaker 3:Some these ideas are silly, but Yes. I'm viewing it as a very literal request for startups.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. No. I like it. Quiet inside.
Speaker 1:Cheryl Franklin from West Grove, Pennsylvania says, given the negative effects of excessive noise such as elevated blood pressure, cardiac stress and lower real estate values, I'd love to see improvements in building materials. For example, drywall with built in soundproofing capabilities. Love that. Perhaps a lightweight sound
Speaker 4:It's called
Speaker 12:lead paint,
Speaker 3:Cheryl. Bring it
Speaker 1:Lead paint. That doesn't do anything to sound. Perhaps a lightweight sound blocking film could also be developed for use in existing buildings and home. I had a startup idea a while back. So you know when you have a young baby, a child, and they every time you go to change the diaper, very noisy.
Speaker 1:One of my friends put up sound panels like a podcast studio, full slat wall in the Oh, slat wall. In the nursery.
Speaker 8:Dual use technology.
Speaker 1:Dual use technology, for sure. And it and it dampens the cry so you can so you're not so echoey because sometimes if a kid's crying in a very echoey room, it really reverberates and it can be kind of crazy.
Speaker 3:And left pain is dense, so in theory, any added mass can reduce sound transmission. Maybe add a little bit of lead paint to your nursery.
Speaker 1:Lead plates. Whole lead plates, maybe. Whole Faraday cage. But here was the idea. You don't no one wants a slat wall in their nursery, in their baby's
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe if you're trying to breed the super podcaster, but most people don't want that. They want animals. They want a pastoral nature vibe, some warm pastels, some nice warm tones, something welcoming for the new child who's just been brought into this world. And so the idea was a typical sound panel, square, flat. You know, you might see the egg crate, the black material.
Speaker 1:But you you paint on it an animal. You painted on it childlike, you know, paintings that you would hang on the wall. It looks appropriate. It fits the decor of the room, but it also has the added effect of sound treating the room so that it's less noisy when everyone's yelling. Good business?
Speaker 3:Banger. Banger. There we go. Banger.
Speaker 1:Banger. Than c corps on demand for doctors?
Speaker 3:For doctors that do tax problems. Maybe. Certainly simpler. Jennifer Smith, we have made so many advancements in so many areas, but what I want most is a way to control outside noise. This is the superpower she wants.
Speaker 4:It would
Speaker 3:be so nice to be able to sit on my screened in porch and enjoy listening to the birds without having to hear nearby traffic, which sounds like drag racing these days. Well, that's because it is drag racing, Jennifer. We're drag racing in your neighborhood. If sounds are waves, can't we block some? Have we not invented an open air type of noise cancelling headphones to shield noise waves and give us some quiet spaces outdoors?
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the the simple solution here is just more electric vehicles. They're quieter. You don't sound like drag racing. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of emission standards that also reduce reduce noise from internal combustion engines, at least until you chop the exhaust and straight pipe that thing. But if you're not doing that Or
Speaker 3:you engine swap
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Your Model three.
Speaker 1:Yeah. V 12. But yeah. I don't know. Is this possible?
Speaker 1:Could you just put out a big speaker that selectively noise cancels car noise, but not bird noise? That seems possible.
Speaker 3:Seems personally, I would I would, you know, take my home. I'd I'd get really thick windows, ideally lead paint Mhmm. In the whole home, you know.
Speaker 1:You think the lead paint? I just love the lead paint.
Speaker 3:And I bring the birds inside.
Speaker 1:No. I got an alternative theory. If you got drag racers racing down your your your quiet bird infested street, you gotta go Wile E. Coyote mode. You gotta put out a fake tunnel that out of bricks, paint it with some lead paint maybe.
Speaker 1:The fake tunnel, the drag racer smashes into the bricks, they'll never be racing down your street again.
Speaker 8:Dropping an anvil on
Speaker 1:their car. Yeah. Dropping an anvil on the car, that works too.
Speaker 3:Woah. You're gonna like this one.
Speaker 1:Okay. Me. Tell me What we got?
Speaker 3:Daniel Hansen says, first, I'd like to see a dishwasher with racks that can be raised making it easier for tall people to load and unload them.
Speaker 1:Literally a thing that exists. My dishwasher has that functionality.
Speaker 3:Can you get it? Can you get it to six eight though?
Speaker 1:No. It doesn't go up that high, but you can adjust it
Speaker 3:up Wouldn't that be nicer if it was at eye level for you and you could just
Speaker 1:I guess for the bottom rack, if it if it elevated yeah. This is this is this is a contraption. This is an invention. I I agree. I like this.
Speaker 1:And then glare, smart glass for windshields that will tint itself in the spot where the sun or reflection hits it at high intensity. That's very cool, very niche. I like this. Seems very difficult to do. There are some electrochromatic windows.
Speaker 1:Have you seen is it a Porsche or maybe a Lamborghini that has it where you can you can twist a knob and it will progressively shade and and tint certain sections of the glass. The Rivian, which the Rivian team sent me to demo this week, which has been a lot of fun, has an electrochromatic sun or moonroof, I guess, because it doesn't open, so it's a moonroof. And you can change the tint, but only for the whole thing, not selectively. There are now cars that allow you to do basically stripes like every other one if you want half chrome Yeah. Half tint, I suppose.
Speaker 3:Seems a I little bit of a have a funny dynamic with my daily Yeah. Where the the the material, like, to my right, like, down into the right from the steering wheel is, like, very, like, glossy plastic. Mhmm. And so anywhere between like two and 4PM, the light just hits it and just goes into your eyes. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I I just every time I think, I'll put I'll have to like take like a shirt and just cover it. Sure. I'm thinking like
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you had like millions of nanomachines to reconfigure the structure of the of the of the armrest at a particular time to bounce the light slightly differently. That would be the easy solution. Yes. That would be a simple solution.
Speaker 1:Nanobots. I love I love
Speaker 3:Wait. We have to talk about the Rivian team because they sent you this demo unit to try R1X. And they said Quad mode. It's a demo unit so drive it as fast as you want. You can roll it.
Speaker 3:You roll it if you want. Like it's no big deal. Yeah. Just like really enjoy the car to the fullest. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was pretty surprised
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That they said that.
Speaker 1:That was great. It's actually an amazing car. I like it. The self driving feature, deeply underrated. My latest hot take is that self driving technology is commoditizing as fast as LLM technology and that companies that take it seriously and actually prioritize it.
Speaker 1:It is not some insane insane tech breakthrough that cannot be implemented in other vehicles. It, in fact, can be implemented in other vehicles. Just like we've seen Chipotle get a chatbot, we will see every car be autonomous. It will not be the domain of a single company. Funniest thing about this.
Speaker 1:You got someone who's asking for just a dishwasher that's a little bit taller. You got somebody who's asking for a smart spatula. And then you have Nolan Williams who says, I would like to see significant developments in cancer and longevity drugs. You're sitting there, you're going around with the Wall Street Journal and you're like, oh, like what did you ask for? Like
Speaker 3:Smart spatula. Like
Speaker 1:what did you ask for? Like longer
Speaker 3:life extension.
Speaker 1:Curing cancer. You're like, what? I didn't know. I didn't know it was that type of question. He says longer lives mean longer runway for brilliant people to bring forth their own innovations and pass on their knowledge.
Speaker 1:Wow. Nolan Williams. Really, really great answer. Early detection. In the next twenty years, I would like to see how new tech and AI driven diagnostics will improve cancer detection.
Speaker 1:This is definitely happening. Clement Lee from Atlanta, you're we are on the right track. A focus on seniors. I would like to see something address the risk of falls. I've I've seen a couple of things like this, different devices that you can put in your home that detect falls either while you're wearing the device.
Speaker 1:It detects the motion. I think the Apple Watch has a device as a feature for this. But I saw another, I think it was a YC company that had essentially a smart speaker that could detect a fall in a house. Very, very cool. Robotic home aids, robots that are capable of performing home health care, similar to the Chef, but obviously for someone who has multiple disabilities, Matthew Weed here from Colorado Yeah.
Speaker 3:Gotta be if if for anyone that's older and has been seeing like the humanoid form factor
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 3:decades now, And then now there's actually like Yeah. A bunch of startups like, you know, that have that are investing billions of dollars into doing it. Yeah. They're still probably like, yeah, it's just never gonna happen.
Speaker 1:I like I like these. Michelle from Canton, Ohio says, what do I wish for? A house that never needs dusting. I know. Ain't going to happen.
Speaker 1:And then there's someone else who says, Donna Helper, true doomer here says, what tech innovations would I like to see? None. We have too much tech. Keep it real. Very good.
Speaker 1:Anyway, there's a whole bunch more but you can go and read them. Let's move on to other stories in the news. We have our next guest joining in just a minute. But there's a narrative violation on the timeline. We got a narrative violation folks.
Speaker 1:David Sachs is breaking it down. This is from Ara Carazian over at Ramp, chief economist. It says, a new study of 21,559 firms in The United States finds that companies that adopt AI tend to grow faster following adoption. Firms making the largest AI investments grow employment by roughly 10% following adoption while low intensity adopters see no statistically significant change. Entry level headcount rises 12% for high intensity adopters.
Speaker 1:Wow. That is a lot considering that the whole narrative was this will be the end of entry level jobs and that doesn't seem to be the case, at least with this study. The results counter predictions that AI adoption will lead to broad job loss. The study is based on observed AI spending from RAMP, card and bill pay data linked to Revelio Labs workforce records. And what's interesting here is that, it's clear, especially from that Wall Street Journal article, people want more things.
Speaker 1:They want more stuff. People want more output from companies. They want cheaper things. They want more of those things, whether it's movies or entertainment or cars or smart spatulas. People want more.
Speaker 1:They want more specific things. They want more niche things. They want more mass market things. They want more affordable things. And all of that requires a lot of AI and a lot of people.
Speaker 1:And so you put them all together and you start growing your business and that's what's happening, at least in this data. Well, congrats to the folks over at Ramp on a banger article that made it into the Financial Times. You'd love to see whenever something breaks loose of the Ramp Economics blog, but you can go sign up for our Substack and subscribe to the Ramp blog. But without further ado, let me tell you about 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 1:And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Zach Laberge from OMEN AI. He's the founder and CEO. Zach, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:What's going on? How
Speaker 13:are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Did I get your last name even remotely correct?
Speaker 13:No. That was perfect.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Wow. Wow. Let's go. Yes.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Anyway, please introduce yourself.
Speaker 13:Yeah. I'm Zach, founder of OMEN AI. We do blood monitoring for mission critical machines.
Speaker 1:Okay. Mission critical machines. I'm thinking data centers. What do you think? Yes, sir.
Speaker 13:You'd be right. We got our start in big mining machines, you know, like the big machines you see on-site. That's where I spent a long time working there.
Speaker 3:Where does the name come from? You know,
Speaker 13:it's a it's a forecast of something to happen, whether good or bad. You know, we obviously don't want our customer machines to break and so, you know, we get So to go good on
Speaker 1:the lifeblood of the modern data center, there's water, there's liquid that's cooling the data center, sometimes in a closed loop, flowing around, getting cooled outside the data center being brought in, removing the heat from the chips. What's actually in that liquid? Is it just water? Is it water in something else? And then what happens?
Speaker 1:Like, how does it get dirty if it's in a closed loop? Why doesn't it just stay clean and fresh forever? Why do you have a job? Why do you have a business?
Speaker 13:Yeah. That's a great question. So, know, it depends on the type of fluid. Normally, it's a water based
Speaker 3:fluid with
Speaker 13:some sort of mixture of either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol. Mhmm. You know, you're seeing a big shift recently towards more like, you know, safer fluids. So, you know, propylene glycol is more preferred since it's less, you know, toxic. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:But Can
Speaker 3:you drink it? Could you have a
Speaker 1:definitely vape it. Both of those are heavily used in the Really? Cigarette industry. Yeah. No no joke.
Speaker 1:The whole v g p g ratio is a big thing in in the e cigarette world. But good that we found a good useful message.
Speaker 3:Basically smoking data center when you hit
Speaker 1:That's one way to put it. The other way is that this is the solution to the vape crisis is that drive up the price of propylene glycol so that the everyone's like, I gotta quit vaping. I I gotta save it for the data centers.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna use that now. Every time I see someone hit an e cigarette, it's like, oh, really? You're Yeah. Smoking a data
Speaker 1:Anyway, so what happens? How how does a a liquid cooling system actually degrade over time? How long does it take? And what's actually going on?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So a bunch of different things can happen in the system. You know, you see a lot of, you know, basic, like, infrastructure wear. So, you know, when your pumps wear, your seals wear, all of that stuff starts to contaminate the liquid itself.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 13:And so whether it's, like, copper or chromium from the pipes or we're starting to see some, like, on get in. What also happens is, like, the more heat that know, and the more wear that happens to your fluid, the more it starts to break down. So you go from this very nice, like, high concentration of, you know, glycol to water to then that starts to degrade, and then you start to get bio growth and other crap that gets in there and, you know, starts to eat your chips and, you know, sit on your in your pipes.
Speaker 1:Has anyone tried using beef tallow to cool a data center? I think that might be the solution. That's a real meat in the middle compromise policy position maybe. Now, what is the go to market like?
Speaker 3:Most niche niche joke of all time.
Speaker 1:What what is the go to market like? $31,000,000 raised. There's some hyperscaler mega data centers. Do they pick up the phone for you? Can you can you sell into them, or are you working your way up with smaller data center providers, sort of a walk crawl one approach?
Speaker 1:Like, what's working?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, we've just we've been working with almost every, know, kind of Neo Cloud that's out there Mhmm. In some form of pilot and deployment. It's been pretty crazy. I mean, you think about, like, nine months ago, folks were just starting to get these, you know, systems online and these clusters online for, recruiting, and now you're starting to see folks who are running dozens, maybe a 100 hundreds of megawatts worth of, you know, liquid cooled compute, and they're starting to see failures.
Speaker 13:And so we kinda went from, hey. We're selling and folks don't really know what the problems are to now everybody's like, shit. We've had failures, or we're starting to see failures. Our competitors are seeing failures. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:You know, we need to adopt something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool. It's probably pretty easy to underwrite because every hour that the data center is not functioning is leaving hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on the table. What is the actual installation process? Can you just, like, cut the pipe and then insert your device into the flow?
Speaker 1:What what how long does it take to install? How big is is your solution?
Speaker 13:Yeah. So our solution just fits across the rack manifold. So we're kind of plugging in those OCP quick disconnects, mapping it to our GPU. So it only takes a couple minutes to install. What's great about, like, you know, a cabinet is that we get power, we get, you know, network, and, you know, fluids right there.
Speaker 13:Again, coming from industrials, that was not fun where you have every machine that has completely different integration. Mhmm. You know, we get to, you know, eat a lot less pain over on this side of things.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Who did the round? What are you actually going to be spending it on? Is it just staff up?
Speaker 1:Or like, what is the cash conversion cycle like for the business such that because I imagine there's a lot of cash flowing around and they might be able to just pay you upfront. How much did you raise first? Tell us. We want to hit the gong. Jordy's warmed up.
Speaker 13:Raised 31,000,000 series
Speaker 1:We got a bigger mallet.
Speaker 3:Really one of the first one of the first rounds with this mallet.
Speaker 1:$31,000,000, is that is that hiring scientists to to iterate on the product? Is it just scale up manufacturing? What are you what are you actually putting the money to work for?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, it's really just growing up the team and growing up manufacturing. You know, when we raised our seed, like, eight months ago, it was basically just me, you know, working on this problem, you know, putting sensors on on excavators. And so we've kinda gone through this interesting process of going from one to 20, and now, you know, we're gonna go from 20 to to 40 folks by the end of the year.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:And the round was mostly, like, just really smart data center experts, and so it was led by a fund called Nava Ventures. Really a lot of strategic value from the data center space. Big LP, and their fund is Sheryl Sandberg, who is also now an investor in us. And so we're really happy to have her on board. And then we also have like CRB and a few other awesome like kind of c suite folks from CoreWeave, Pensive Wave, and some other smart place.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Sorry. Jordy, you have something? Got another question. Detection is only one piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 1:Is if you detect something earlier, you detect microbial buildup or copper leaking into the liquid cooling cycle, What does that actually what happens downstream of that? Is it that you swap all the water out or you go fix the root issue? Like, what is the technician side doing with the information that you give them?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the problem right now is, like, you have these monster labs that, like, they pull a sample from every major data center you can think of. They ship it off to their lab, and now it's like, let me wait a couple weeks to get a result back. Sure. And normally, it's pretty binary.
Speaker 13:It's like Mhmm. We either flush it, which, you is millions of dollars in downtime. I mean, you think about a loop that's like, call it a thousand GPUs. It takes four to five hours to flush a rack, and so now that's 5,000 GPU hours that just went down just to one rack. And so by monitoring it every day, you can say, okay, What are smaller chemistry changes we can make?
Speaker 13:Whether it's bio shocking, whether it's adjusting the propylene glycol to water ratio.
Speaker 6:Those are
Speaker 1:all things
Speaker 13:that the CDU can do. We just can't do it right now because we have these silly lab tests.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. Very cool. Is the business 100 US right now? What is the state of the data center build out internationally?
Speaker 13:We work with only US, like, neo clouds to date. Mhmm. You know, some of these folks have projects all around the world. So we're looking at some projects in Europe that are run by a few of our partners, but it's been primarily US based. We're based in San Francisco, we have an office in Orange County right now.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Thank you for coming on the show. Great
Speaker 1:progress. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Come back on soon.
Speaker 13:Thanks, sir. Have a
Speaker 1:good one.
Speaker 3:Cheers, Zach.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Derek Thompson has a new newsletter out. He's breaking it down. He says there's never been a better time to get rich working alone.
Speaker 10:Is he
Speaker 3:saying the goose is not valued?
Speaker 1:I think he's saying the goose is not valued.
Speaker 3:He's saying the goose is not valued.
Speaker 1:He says the debate about AI and jobs often breaks down into two extreme groups, both of which have an evidence problem. On the one hand are the doomers who say AI will take everyone's job even though unemployment remains low and the unemployment rate for prime age Americans is still very high. On the other hand are the deniers insistence that AI is a worthless scam prevents them from seeing the many ways it's changing work and the economy broadly. If you want strong if you want a strong and evidence based take about AI and jobs, I have one for you, quote from Derek Thompson. There's never been a better time for workers to get rich by going independent.
Speaker 1:This is the golden age for tiny startups with big revenue. The evidence. Charts one and two with the number of solo entrepreneurs and tiny startups is taking off. Great news. Chart three, there's rising evidence that these small firms are more likely to use AI and sell AI related products, whether it's software consulting or design.
Speaker 1:Chart four
Speaker 3:saying that the matter is not the eggs, it's the goose itself, because the true value is the power to keep laying eggs?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Okay. Continue. I just want to make sure I understood.
Speaker 1:Today's micro startups are becoming multimillion dollar firms faster and more frequently than any generation of firms that Stripe has measured. Today's article is about the rise of the Solo Act in The U. S. Labor force and its implications for the future of business. Social life, more solo entrepreneurs, even more aloneness.
Speaker 1:And the fiscal in America's fiscal crisis, more pass through firms, even less tax revenue for a revenue starved government. Interesting. So if if you have a bunch of talented people that would be earning money as doctors, but then they go in and they wind up starting a business, then, yeah, maybe maybe that's lower tax. That feels like that's further off when I looked at cap gains rates. Like even if you brought cap gains in line with ordinary income, it doesn't close the deficit gap whatsoever.
Speaker 1:It's such a small portion of the tax revenue base. But interesting that he's calling that out. Would love to know more about where that trend line actually converges. The interesting thing, is this a bull case for
Speaker 11:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I don't I don't really get the pass through firm's point. Like you still end up paying
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be I I don't know if it's pass through. It might be So I guess in a mature c corp, the company is paying taxes and then also the the employees are paying taxes. And so this is why most people don't set up a c corp if they're just a solo entrepreneur. Because they don't want to pay corporate taxes and then also personal personal taxes on their on their income.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But like one way or another, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1:No. No. It's actually like double taxation. That's why you use an LLC. Because you pass it through and the and the income that you distribute is not taxable at the corporate level.
Speaker 3:I know. Know. But I'm saying like overall Yeah. Yeah. Overall
Speaker 1:No. I
Speaker 3:I the money is being taxed one way or another. Less
Speaker 1:Currently, like a just a Meta employee. Meta pays their taxes and then the Meta employee pays income taxes. If that Meta employee spins out, starts an LLC and then is making the same amount of money that they were making at Meta, the overall number of dollars that's going to the government is lower. That's what he's identifying. Now, do I think this is a crisis just yet?
Speaker 1:It would need to go a lot further, I think, to get there. But I understand, like, the math that he's laying out. It is a risk factor. But is this a bull case for coworking spaces? The rise of solo entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3:Nothing is bullish for coworking spaces to me.
Speaker 1:It's rough. Why is it bad? Why has no one been able to make a good co working space?
Speaker 3:Because I think it's just nice to have your own space. It's the same I mean, the same logic would be like, why don't they make an you know, why don't they make an apartment building where you get a tiny little I mean, they do do this.
Speaker 1:Why don't they have a pod?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's basically like imagine if you rented your apartment and it was actually like as big as like one
Speaker 1:Why don't they make like a smaller version of a house that you can rent that's like in a building with other other like of these mini houses?
Speaker 3:I'm just saying like a a 20 a 10 foot by 10 foot room that you rent and then all the amenities would are
Speaker 1:happily live in the Unabomber Shed. You were saying that it's the pinnacle of lifestyle.
Speaker 3:I I did think the picture of it in storage looked cool.
Speaker 1:But it needed a slight But
Speaker 3:the difference there the difference there is like that shed on the right property
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Would be very cool.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true.
Speaker 3:But but the property is a is sort Yes. Of an
Speaker 1:But people don't feel that way about going into the office. They don't feel like, oh, this is a co worker. Like, people feel worse about a co working space than they do I like, your your sentiment is correct. Many people feel this way about co working spaces that they are unproductive or annoying. But people don't feel that way about going to a campus with a bunch of buildings and a bunch even like cubicles or like desks that are pretty close Shared.
Speaker 1:Together. Shared Effort. Space. But it's everyone's on the same team.
Speaker 3:Shared culture.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you need to create a kiretsu of every company in the in the co working space potentially. I don't know. We'll figure it out. But, fortunately, we have our next guest from Etched in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:We're very excited for the launch of this company. I did an interview with Gavin. What what was that? Two years ago or something like that? You were laying out the the idea for this company very early on.
Speaker 1:You made a ton of progress. Take us through the story. Begin at the beginning. Introduce yourself first.
Speaker 12:Well, I'm Gavin. I'm the CEO and one of the cofounders at Etched. Yeah. And we are building rack scale inference hardware.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And what that means is that we're building the full system
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:That is chips, boards, platforms, racks, clusters, as well as, of course, software, and importantly, the production lines
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 12:To build those things at scale.
Speaker 1:So the original viral sound bite that got so much attention around your company was the idea that you were going to bake the you were all in on the transformer. You said AI will advance but the transformer is here to stay. That architecture will be here to stay. And so we are going to fully commit to the transformer and we're going to sort of etch that into the chip. How real is that today?
Speaker 1:Has that that thesis feels like it's been born out very well, but it feels like you've added a lot of new strategies to the portfolio. How are you thinking about the the bet that you made two years ago?
Speaker 12:We looked at a lot of early research directions, and we realized the key things that models need are way more compute and way faster memory.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:If you think about inference, there's two key parts, prefill and decode. Mhmm. Or prefill, it's a compute bound problem. You need to have more flops, more operations per second on each of your chips. Yeah.
Speaker 12:And on our GPU, the bottleneck's actually thermals. You can't really run our GPU more than around 50% of what it could theoretically do, or it'll melt. So we're introducing a new technology today called low voltage inference to try to solve this problem. And what that is is you bring the voltage of the chip down dramatically, which allows us to have way, way better efficiency in terms of how much power is drawn per unit amount and thus fit way, way more flops onto the chip. Why
Speaker 1:can't pausing there. Why can't you super cool the chips? Liquid nitrogen or dry ice or something to make it colder so that you can run it at a 100% power?
Speaker 12:It's a great question. If you look on the Internet, there's some videos of folks trying to super overclock CPUs
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:By using these things on them. The problem is you actually can't go a whole lot above where they're meant to operate.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:For example, virtual CPUs can go ahead and do four, four and a half gigahertz.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:I think the world record's on the order of eight, nine gigahertz with the liquid of cryogenic helium.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And the problem is you have to get the heat actually out of the chip that you can't physically go touch the resistors with your liquid nitrogen. You have to go ahead and go through the silicon itself, and that by itself has a good deal of thermal resistance. Mhmm. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Have to solve the power problem if you want to run inference.
Speaker 1:So low voltage, and then the other side of the equation. Take us through that.
Speaker 12:Well, for decode, it's all about bandwidth. Mhmm. And it's not just bandwidth on a chip, but bandwidth across your cluster. And that's why we have this technology, what we call cluster scale memory.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:It reduces the amount of time it takes to communicate from one chip to another dramatically. And as a result, we can go use all of our HBM and HBM bandwidth and SRAM and SRAM bandwidth in our scale up domain as a single coherent pool. And that means if you're a user, you can go get much faster tokens per second speed as while still keeping your costs low.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:How are you and the team dealing with various bottlenecks across the supply chain?
Speaker 1:How did you get TSMC to work with you as a startup?
Speaker 12:TSMC has been a fantastic partner to us. We are so, so grateful. And one of the great things about them is they're very technical. You can just sit down and say, hey. We believe this will be a big market for these reasons, and we need your help to figure out how to go codesign transistors that can run at a much lower voltage.
Speaker 12:And that was a particularly challenging piece. As you bring the voltage down, manufacturing gets way, way tougher. We would not have been able to do it without a great fab partner.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Where else are there bottlenecks right now that you're experiencing?
Speaker 12:I think all across the chip supply chain, there has to be much more build out. Mhmm. People don't realize how big of a market inferences going to be. Right now, only a couple million people have access to the frontier models.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And those are going to have to get deployed to 8,000,000,000 people across the globe. Mhmm. And that's not even counting AI agents that exist already and will exist in the future. Mhmm. There need to be way, way more tokens produced, and that requires both much bigger assembly lines, many more factories, and some new technology.
Speaker 1:Two years ago, you predicted that AI would not kill everyone within two years. You were correct about your prediction. How are you feeling about the the general prospect of doom?
Speaker 12:I mean, don't understand it. I think right now is an incredibly exciting time to see all the breakthroughs that are getting made. Mhmm. Things like the unique distance conjecture, stuff I learned about in college. And to see that now get cracked by an AI model, man, what a time to be alive.
Speaker 12:And we are still so early. Models will keep getting smarter. And, like man, I could not be more excited for the moment right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what is the
Speaker 3:Why was why was, like, now the time to come out of stealth? You clearly have had no issues getting customers. Sounds like there's a billion dollar pipeline that you're working through. But what made you decide to talk about the business today, and and what are you hoping to get out of this this little media tour?
Speaker 12:It's all about talent. I really strongly believe that our company's best asset is the people we've been able to hire. And I give a couple of examples. Look at our platform team, around half of them are from NVIDIA. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Or if you look at the VP responsible for designing that thing behind me, that used to go run NVIDIA's HDX and DGX programs that made up most of their revenue for a hopper and black ball. And people like that just moved the needle so much for a business, especially in a hard space like semiconductors.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And not to mention, we're not working on our roadmap. Finally, have gen one. If wanna go do multiple generations in parallel and take really big ambitious tech bets, you need the best of the best.
Speaker 1:Are you a car?
Speaker 12:A car?
Speaker 1:Are you a car? There's a debate around whether modern large chip companies are interchangeable with one another. Whether the moats around the
Speaker 3:software Like if you have a logistics business, you can buy trucks from multiple vendors
Speaker 1:I can get a new car tomorrow. I in fact, I am demoing a new car right now. I got in it. I connected my phone over the Bluetooth and it works just like any other commodity product. That has not been the pitch in semiconductors for years.
Speaker 1:For years, we've been told about moats, about how complex the software is, how hard it is to write efficient software that runs on a particular chipset that you had to be all in on one ecosystem. And with the advent of agentic coding and insanely high rewards for figuring out how to run on other ASICs or other chipsets, It feels like chip companies are becoming more car like. How do you think about your moat as you go into the future?
Speaker 12:Well, I would say a Toyota and a Ferrari are not the same thing. If you look at the speed gap there, you see what? A two x. Mhmm. And I think chips similarly is very, very meritocratic.
Speaker 12:If you're able to go up and be faster, you can go command a huge premium just like the fastest cars can.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:The difference here, the way cars work under the hood is very similar. There are no more connectives that you have in cars. Mhmm. I was thinking chips over the next couple of years, there's going be a lot more technical innovation, and I'm very excited to go ahead and show the world, not just the current gen, what the roadmap for these things looks like. We believe we can go push low voltage inference and cluster scale memory much further and get even bigger unlocks here.
Speaker 3:So next time you get that question, say, I'm not a car. I'm a Ferrari.
Speaker 1:It doesn't make any sense. So so is the source
Speaker 3:Makes makes perfect sense, John. Sense.
Speaker 1:Is the source of strength, is the reason that you will have positive margins in the future, intellectual property, trade secrets, patents? Like what is the shape of owning that technology and not just being copied and commoditized by other chip companies?
Speaker 12:I think it just comes down to those things matter. We, of course, do. Red secrets and patents. But you need to build a lot of products
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And you have to go out and have really great economics as well. Yeah. Being faster isn't enough. Mhmm. You have to go be able to do that at a price people can afford.
Speaker 12:You see folks stretched thin today. Mhmm. And that's why when we think about doing the thing, we want to go do the whole hard thing. Mhmm. That means building not just the chip, but the board, the platform, the rack, the cluster, and especially the production.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. What is the last AI innovation or product development that has updated you on your strategy? If anything, I'm thinking about the transformer based LLM obviously, a huge moment. But then we got diffusion models and image models. We got agentic software that requires CPUs and other memory constraints.
Speaker 1:You got reasoning models. Has there been any development where you've either said, I'm glad we're on the path we're on and we need to double down on that, or we need to slightly adjust our strategy to deliver the best performance for the latest and greatest use case.
Speaker 12:Well, the thing that's been the most exciting for me has been seeing the models get so big. Mhmm. Get so big and demand be so large. Yeah. When you're thinking about economies of scale, it always comes down to how much is there to go serve.
Speaker 12:If the market's relatively small, you can justify small factory, but not some gigantic mega cluster. And with what we're seeing right now, with these many, many trillion parameter models, with these quadrillion token demands that we're seeing that are increasing every month, there has never been a better time to go ahead and invest in those economies of scale.
Speaker 1:That's great news. Last question. The customer, are you focused on serving hyperscalers, the frontier models, neo clouds, open source models, all of the above? How do you think about that?
Speaker 12:All of the above. Mhmm. We wanna go out and do is build tech that you can go ahead and see. Don't make your tokens faster and your tokens cheaper. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:And that is working with the full stack.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Well, congrats
Speaker 3:on Talk about the round. Who participated? We have a gong, and it would be an honor to hit it on your behalf.
Speaker 12:Well, I am blown away at the quality of investment we've been able to get on the cap table. Folks like Jane Street, folks like a folks like a Metallic Alliance that goes to market. Yes. I'm seeing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is it is a very interesting group. I mean, obviously, a lot of a lot of traditional venture capital firms that focus on
Speaker 3:technical people also one hit for Jane Street, one for HRT, one ship for two sigma, one for jump, one for Scott Roy, one for Peter Thiel, one for Hinton. Scott Wu. Wu. Patrick O'Shaughnessy. What a great Zach Dell.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 12:Think the people Scott Velsky. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Valky, Kareem. Wow. This is I I best best party round of the year. You really put together a good list.
Speaker 1:It's a Coachella poster. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So great to meet you and congratulations the whole team on the launch. Looking forward to the next conversation.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 12:My pleasure, guys. See you, Gavin.
Speaker 3:Goodbye. Great.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You know who won't be raising capital at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon?
Speaker 1:These fly by night peptide companies. Because the peptide battle has commenced, says Jessica Adams, FDA recommends against adding all seven peptides under review to the five zero three a bulks list. Is that for bulking up? Is that a list of things that get you bulky? No.
Speaker 1:I think it's things that cannot be produced in bulk. But the FDA has has effectively delivered a a blow to BBC one five seven for ulcerative colitis, KPV for wound healing, TB five hundred for wound healing, MOTS C for obesity and osteoporosis, amidylotide and d s I p for opioid withdrawal, Cmax and epitallion. You can tell I do not know my peptides by the way I'm pronouncing these. Anyway, a lot of people are fans of this stuff. Sorry if this is a dark day for you.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are in the camp that the FDA serves a functional purpose here to review these things and make sure that they are effective and safe for public health. Ben. It's a blow for them.
Speaker 3:Ben texted, We're just about to take all of these. No, yeah. A lot of people are gonna be upset here. I think a lot of people would also say that this is like maybe good if, you know, there could be some very real downsides with any of these. I was texting with a friend in healthcare this morning.
Speaker 3:I said, What does this mean for peptides? He said, Donezo. And I said, Can't sell anymore? He says, Unless RFK overrides the FDA, not legally. Then I said, but they were already in a gray area, now they are explicitly banned.
Speaker 3:Question mark, he said, they've been banned other than research use and haven't been enforced for human use. So they've been banned, but there hasn't been enforcement. Justification for taking them off the banned list was to kill the gray market. A lot people have been taking peptides from random websites online. They either don't even have active ingredients or they're contaminated or the other effectively just just nothing.
Speaker 3:And he says, think the real companies that are we're moving into the space net new in anticipation of this changing are in a real pickle. Yeah, so we'll see. They now face a newly constituted pharmacy compounding advisory committee making the July meeting one to watch. That will be July '24. So we will keep following.
Speaker 1:Well, in other good FDA news, nicotine pouches finally got MRTP, which is modified risk tobacco product. ZYN is the first one to go and ZYN can now market and put on the label and advertise that it is better for you than cigarettes, which is such a mild claim but it's huge for the industry. If you know what this means, it's an extremely high bar. Have to run a bunch of tests and whatnot. Every product in the category currently says this product contains nicotine.
Speaker 1:Nicotine is an addictive chemical. But the products forever have not been able to say this is better for you than smoking, which is the obvious benefit that every company wants to make. They want to make that claim. There's a ton of literature out there. A lot of it's from Sweden.
Speaker 1:A lot of it's from international. The FDA has to review it on a per product basis to make sure that your particular product maps to the data because the Sweden data that everyone points to is about snus which is a tobacco product. It's not exactly the same as white nicotine pouches that actually don't have tobacco in them. But anyway, the FDA has to review each one. They reviewed ZYN and they gave them the MRTP approval.
Speaker 1:It's huge news for the industry. It's very good news. It's good news for everyone, I think. Anyway, the other news is that NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are building an AI lab, a 1,000,000,000 lab for drug discovery in San Francisco. Eli Lilly's CEO Dave Ricks talks about their data advantage.
Speaker 1:Some scale biotech bio players are just training on public data, but there's only 4,000 ever approved drugs. Lilly alone has 3,000,000 failed drugs. We're learning from failure, which is interesting. So a lot of big, a lot of big talk about the next biotech boom. There's acquisitions going on.
Speaker 1:Anthropic bought a company. There's all sorts of predictions about the impact that AI will have on bio, whether that will accrue to the labs or the biotech companies. Who knows? We'll Maybe figure it both. Maybe everyone.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, of consumer surplus. But we have Aaron Bolley from Monogram in the room. Let's bring him in to the team. You know, Ultradome.
Speaker 2:Aaron, how
Speaker 1:are you doing?
Speaker 10:What's Thanks, happening
Speaker 7:guys. It's great to be here with you guys.
Speaker 3:Finally. Good
Speaker 1:to have you. Finally. Long overdue. Talk about the launch today, talk about the fundraise. Introduce yourself a little bit.
Speaker 1:Tell us about Monogram.
Speaker 7:Okay. So I'll try to do it in a different order. You I'm Aaron. I'm the I guess most people know me from the two other companies I started, Udemy, the online education platform, Grand Public, hopefully most of know me by then. I started Carbon Health.
Speaker 7:Big tech enabled healthcare company. And now the new company, Monogram, we have very stealthy about it, intentionally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7:Essentially, we like monogram, which we launched today, just like I asked you five minutes ago.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 7:Thank you. It's a general purpose and
Speaker 1:So congratulations.
Speaker 3:Sorry. Now we can continue.
Speaker 7:Okay. So
Speaker 1:Jerry's on Wednesday. Yes. Continue.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's a general purpose AI application for everyday use.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:But what makes the difference is with other AI applications, you usually have a chat based interface.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:You ask a question Yes. You write some text, you you get some text back.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:With monogram, you ask something and then you get a complete visual interface back.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:It's essentially like a it's like when you think about computers had command line interfaces back in 1980s And then we switched to graphical user interfaces where everything became visual, interactive. Yeah. We are franked, we are we will be the first company to do this in AI.
Speaker 1:I love it. I've been seeing glimpses of this with ChatGPT images. So I wanted to know the rate of air conditioning in every European country because there's whole debate over France, they don't have air conditioning there. I wanted to know how France stacks up and instead of asking for a text output I just said go get the data and then generate me an image, a graphic of that. Of course, it's not interactive.
Speaker 1:It's not HTML based. It could be so much richer. And people are seeing glimpses of this with vibe coding but it hasn't come to the consumer. I'm interested to know, have you found a beachhead? Have you found a killer use case?
Speaker 1:Like I feel like
Speaker 3:Yeah. I guess assuming like assuming every single person listening Yeah. Uses AI 20 times a day, you know, even if it's just casual asking questions, etcetera. Yeah. Are the kind of prompts that you would traditionally take to a normal language model that people should try with Monogram?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:First of all, like, if I explain, this is one of the things that when you see it, it becomes very obvious. Yeah. But it's hard to sometimes describe. But the big difference is we generate a visual interface response in roughly one and a half seconds.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 7:ask a question and you immediately start seeing something. Right? So it is not a do this work, make some research, and get me back with a dashboard or report. It is I ask a question, I lift my finger from the audio button, then, like, in a second you start seeing the
Speaker 1:That's really cool.
Speaker 7:So what we to be honest, we didn't know what use cases really work with the technology But what we realized as, like, testing the application ourselves is it works best for the like very simple day to day use cases. Mhmm. Like I, for example, say, okay, the Oscars are alive, so which movies were nominated for Oscars this year? Yeah. And can I find something to watch?
Speaker 7:And maybe some good thing from a South American director. Yeah. Just really open ended questions, like, where do I eat? Is there an In N Out on my way to the airport from here? Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? So all like these like day to day questions and then, like, what you realize is like, yes, like, if you ask the same question to Chekipiti, it will also ask, right? Behind the scenes, we are using we are using OpenAI's model. Mhmm. But we do quite a bit on top of it to make this response very interactive, like you get information architecture right, you get a lot of interesting visuals, and when you tap on something, you get even more information.
Speaker 7:Right? So it's really just a day to day search discovery basic question. That's where we actually start seeing the most, like, kind of in in Germans Is
Speaker 3:it so it's voice first? Yes. And talk about talk about that. I mean, John John was like such a is such a power user of voice. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Took I was I was a laggard, but now I don't even like to prompt without voice because I I can get a much better result if I just talk for twenty seconds and then give it a bunch of context and then it'll give me back, you know Yep. Closer to So
Speaker 7:I'll answer this from first principles, right? So I'm first principles person. So talking is a lot faster than typing. Roughly four, five times more information can be converted to audio per second. So but the problem with voice is when you do voice mod, you have to listen.
Speaker 7:Listening is very slow. Listening is maybe four times slower than reading.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 7:But if you think about them, there's something even faster than reading. That's what you see. So if you can, the fastest, the most efficient, the most like I would say frictionless experience for me with AI is voice in and then visual output back. Yeah. Except when you have visual output, sometimes you can tap on things, right?
Speaker 7:Tapping on a card is a lot faster than saying, can you get more details about this thing? Right? So so we support every form factor, but we design everything around audio as the primary inputs, camera a little bit the secondary, and keyboard with it, and a third input. They are all really in the outputs, like, we we do have some audio output, like, have a short answer, but maybe 90% of the information is conveyed through the visual interface and you're getting a short answer, like, kind of with a text to speech back.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So cool. I wish I could bet on how quickly Apple tries to buy you. Because I I I'd be like I'd be like, term sheet by end of week.
Speaker 1:So, yeah. I mean, the the you're this is your third huge company. Like, do you have I mean, I guess it's like, where where do you want to go with this? What are your aspirations? Because you've checked a lot of the boxes on the entrepreneurship journey.
Speaker 1:But then I'm also interested in like, it's not, you're not building the same business three times in a row. There are certain founders that do that very successfully and it's impressive. But between Udemy, Carbon and now this, very different companies. So what lessons, what strategies are you actually taking through the three companies that you feel like, oh yeah, I'm running, you might not think it, but I'm running the Carbon playbook in this particular area. Or I'm running the Udemy Playbook here a little bit.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. So the common thing between those three companies was that, look, what my brain gets obsessed on is how do I make something that is complicated and has high entry barrier and make that accessible to more people?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:With Udemy, when everybody was focused on higher education, online degrees, we focused on how do I learn Photoshop, like in a week. So it was the most mainstream of the education companies, and that's where we got a ton of success. Yeah. And the difficult part was not being overly caught up with what was hot in Silicon Valley at that time, right? With carbon health, when everybody was going after premium, cushy healthcare, we were more focused on how do we make healthcare that everybody can access better.
Speaker 7:And I think here, now, all the focus on AI has been the coding agents and how to make really complex enterprise workflows work. But what I'm really obsessed on is if I make AI a little bit easier to use, will it just benefit more people. So it's just like again, there's not a ton overlapping as you said. Like, I also do like a new challenge for myself, so I do like rotating things over. And I would say healthcare was difficult, so it's nice to do a software only.
Speaker 3:Pure play consumer app. This is expert mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is. Exactly. How are you thinking about image models, diffusion models? I saw a really cool demo for something that looked like a website but in fact was real time diffusion.
Speaker 1:You probably know the one I'm talking about. Looked like a of a beige cityscape and you could sort of zoom in and it was all being rendered in real time. That something you see yourself implementing in the future or is it a distinct different arc of the technology tree?
Speaker 7:So the answer is yes and no.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So I don't believe AI output in pixels as the primary form factor. That sounds cool, like maybe ten, twenty years later
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:It might be the reality, but in the near term, like, you will want something that's more of a representation of the user interface
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:As the as the layer, so I think pixels is probably not the form right output like medium. But diffusion models, I'm obsessed with. So every time a new diffusion model comes in, we say, oh, is this the the day we switch from L and M's to diffusion based models because that sounds like the right architecture for what we are doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But they haven't been realistic enough. Like, we have been trying everything. Right? So, essentially, the way monogram works is there's one major model, right? Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Because when you ask a question, there is language in the interface, so you just need a language model or something model that can do language. But then there's a lot of, like, maybe two, thirty parallel things are happening at the same time. So it's a very different agent architecture. So we do have we have some of our own models, some fine tuned models, but the one, like big one, so I think eventually that the main model will the diffusion based, not LM, like transformer based, but not today. Like, I think their tech is still not good enough to be able to handle this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe in the future. Super cool. In the App Store now, iOS exclusive, Android as well. What are you thinking?
Speaker 7:It's iOS exclusive. We'll we'll be working on verification, desktop, Android. But part of the idea here is because the entire interface is built by AI, we are just building clients. Yeah. This will become the most cross platform
Speaker 1:I imagine it has to be so fast, especially in the age of vibe coding. Like porting can has to be so simple now. Instagram took like five years to get to Android. Yeah. I imagine you have a shorter timeline.
Speaker 1:So good luck for the
Speaker 3:Tell us about the round.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Tell us about the round. So the round was led by DST and Lux. It was a 40,000,000 RC round. Woo.
Speaker 1:You're already in. You hit the gong for the launch and you hit the gong for the round as well. It's a double gong Thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Very cool. I'm super excited to play around.
Speaker 1:We'd love have you back on the show and chat more soon. Have a good one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Great to see you.
Speaker 7:Yes. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Figma. If you're designing the next banger app, get in Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And our next guest is in the waiting room.
Speaker 1:We have Larsen Jensen from Harpoon Ventures. He's the founder and general partner. How are you doing?
Speaker 10:What's up, boys?
Speaker 1:Good to
Speaker 12:see you.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having What's happened?
Speaker 1:Good to see you. I'm obsessed with the portfolio. We can go into that. But introduce yourself first and get us up to speed on what the fund is doing and what the news is today.
Speaker 10:Sure. Jordy, John, great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Larsen Jensen. I'm the founder and GP at Harpoon Ventures, early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in technology and the national interest of The United States and our allies when appropriate.
Speaker 10:Today, we're announcing that we're raised we raised a $155,000,000 fund for. So Whoo. Fired up.
Speaker 3:There we For the gong,
Speaker 10:wish I was there to see
Speaker 3:it in person. We wish you were here. This new mallet setup we have, it really like you just feel the full force of the gong coming right back at you.
Speaker 10:That's sick. I felt it on my end.
Speaker 6:Thanks
Speaker 3:guys. Good. Harpoon Ventures, great name. Great name. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Would you Take us back to if it was necessary, would you invest in a company that you was using WhaleBlobber to power data centers?
Speaker 10:Is this even a question? Of course I do that. Like, if it's necessary, it might be necessary. We need all the energy we can get. So let's go.
Speaker 10:We
Speaker 3:do. No. It's a great it's a great name.
Speaker 10:This the show I'm on. So, yeah. Take
Speaker 1:us back in time. Give me a little bit of the journey to venture capital because you have a fascinating you actually have the nontraditional background that so many VCs wish they had when they say I went to Stanford and then I worked at Google before becoming a venture capitalist.
Speaker 10:Lot of guys say they're an operator in the background of what operator meant. It was special operator Yeah. In the career that
Speaker 3:I came Same stolen valor.
Speaker 10:It's it's interesting to hear. When I showed up to Silicon Valley, I was like, I'm an operator. I'm an operator. I'm like, I don't know. Was the same kind of operator that
Speaker 1:I was used to, but
Speaker 10:I guess different, you know, different ecosystems have different terms, which is fine. Yeah. Definitely sure sure.
Speaker 3:The real operator should start saying like, yeah, was an employee. I was an employee.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Basically. That's cool too. You know, that's cool.
Speaker 3:Just trade. Just trade.
Speaker 10:Exactly. So, yeah, I grew up in the Central Valley Of California. My parents are almond farmers. Went down to USC. Fortunately, I was pretty good at swimming and worked pretty hard at that.
Speaker 10:Brought me to two Olympic games o four and o eight. I got a silver in o four, bronze in o eight. O eight is where Phelps got his eight gold. So, you know, if there's anything that's common about my my trajectory is I'm sort of like a nothing compared to the people that work in the industry or in the careers that I'm in had to compete against guys like Phelps and Lockheed and that whole generation, when I was swimming. And then similarly, you know, moved into the SEAL teams thereafter.
Speaker 10:Wanted to serve my country in a different way than just serving on the playing field, but do so on the battlefield. Felt like I had the, know, hopefully, courage. I guess we would see some of the determination and and the hard work to make it through SEAL training, which fortunately did, and then deployed in combat to Afghanistan. Had the opportunity to be an early adopter to Palantir. They told us we were an early customer, but you never really know what the government what the truth is across history.
Speaker 10:But they said we're early adopters of Palantir, and I was just mind blown by the capability. And that gave me the tech bug. So decided to apply to Stanford. And if I got in, I'd move up to the Valley. And if I didn't, I'd do another rotation in the SEAL teams.
Speaker 10:Fortunately, got in.
Speaker 1:You did go to Stanford.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Traditional background.
Speaker 3:Traditional background. Traditional background. Wait. I got Traditional background. How was
Speaker 10:was a DEI hire up at at Stanford Nice. At the time.
Speaker 3:How was how was Bud's as like an Olympic medalist swimmer? Like Dude, it was fucking hard. It was really hard. Okay. But was there was there any points where you're like, oh, it's kinda easy.
Speaker 1:I feel like I'm just kinda
Speaker 10:Well, yeah. The swimming was was a piece of cake, like, you know, as you can imagine. I was literally the fast I mean, I'm still the fastest American of all time in the 400 meter freestyle. So if it wasn't easy for me, we'd have a real problem. So it it was it was it was easy.
Speaker 10:I don't say that to brag. I'm just saying you asked the question like, you know, was was it was it easier hard?
Speaker 1:That's what
Speaker 10:I everything else.
Speaker 1:So what was the hardest part then? What
Speaker 10:for me, it was boats boats on heads, which if you've seen the videos, you're, like, carrying these, like, inflatable boat rafts and running around and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 10:Yeah. It looks like they'd be in a background like a backyard pool. Trust me, they're not. These things are a couple 100 pounds, and you're carrying those on your head for for weeks on end. In the case of Hell Week, you pretty much always have them on your head.
Speaker 10:And so that was brutal. So anything that was impact oriented, I'm still feeling today. I think a lot of guys are. I mean, you're when you're loaded up and and and rucking around the mountains, I mean, you're doing so in full kit wearing, you know, 200 pounds, almost of gear on top of where you're already whatever your existing body weight is. So it's brutal.
Speaker 10:And, you know, I I was definitely not the best at it. Wasn't the best swimmer. Wasn't the best SEAL, but was fortunate to be part of the community. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:So take us from Stanford to Venture. What were some of the first investments? What was the strategy back then? Where'd the money come from?
Speaker 10:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, my Venture career sort of started pre Stanford. I got lucky and got an internship at Andreessen Horowitz, which was awesome. Great learning opportunity to go there pre GSB.
Speaker 10:Similarly, did between years over at Lightspeed of the GSB. And then after Lightspeed had the or after the GSB had the opportunity to go to Lightspeed for about a year. And I just really had this like any crazy founder might have, like this harebrained idea or a gap in the market, something you're so passionate about that you can't sleep without. And that was me in terms of investing in technology for the national interest. And at the time, there really wasn't a fever for this.
Speaker 10:Now there certainly is. Thank God. But at the time, there really wasn't. And I I sort of had this idea that's maybe not that novel, but I effectively said, hey. What if we could create a private sector In Q Tel?
Speaker 10:Wouldn't that be pretty cool? And that's what I set out to do. So fortunately, pitched the GPs and the team over at my former two employers at Andreessen and Lightspeed, and they're our first LPs ever in Harpoon to sort of go out there and start taking it taking that mission to the market. So that's what we've been doing. When back in 2018, when we started, the market was obviously very, very different.
Speaker 10:Most of what we did was very much known as dual use. At the time, that meant very much enterprise technology, and we would try to work with them to help them break into a government market that these founders didn't really know existed, but we and our team knew existed from our lived experience, I guess you could say, for cybersecurity tools or next generation data infrastructure, what have you, for autonomous autonomy platforms, all the things that people sort of like know today are applicable to the government market. But back then, it was super faux pas, man. It was crazy. I was I I felt like I was gonna get laughed out of town.
Speaker 10:It almost was. And so now we're doing much more defense focused things because I think the founder ecosystem provides for it. I think that we've evolved along with the ecosystem. At the time, there really wasn't very much national security or government focused, you know, companies or or engineers or talent. Now there's a ton.
Speaker 10:I I jokingly say that I go ahead. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Go for it. Go for it.
Speaker 10:No. I was gonna say I I used to go to these conferences that the government would put on, you know, in and around the Pentagon and Crystal City and all these places as a venture guy. And, like, there'd be, like, nobody there. There'd be, like, no, like, high horsepower entrepreneurs. There'd be no other venture firms.
Speaker 10:Man, what am I doing going to these places? There there's nothing for me to invest in. And and, you know, ultimately, now that's all changed, and I'm so happy about that. We're we're going we're celebrating our nation's two fiftieth birthday this coming weekend. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Hopefully, all of you are celebrating the fourth in in in traditional good fashion. And, you know, I I think that now to see the ecosystem what it is is just just tremendous. I'm super fired up about it.
Speaker 3:Where how are you thinking about early stage defense? Like, are you still do you are there still pockets of of white space
Speaker 1:and opportunity? Like the boom of Or
Speaker 3:do you really need to be doing like hardcore r and d like Yeah. Like like it's it seems like the last five years there was an opportunity to do hardcore r and d like actually new technology or just like deliver a capability that's necessary and kind of leverage existing technologies and just deliver a great product Mhmm. For a need. Whereas it feels like there there's less and less like, you know, we have a bunch of great maritime focused companies now kind of every major category. So does a new company need to do like, you know, real r and d and come up with something totally novel or or compete with existing or there's still is there still like pockets where you're like there needs I to be
Speaker 10:think both are true. Like one, you know, I want the discombobulator. I wanna invest in that. I don't know exactly what it is, but Trump came out with the discombobulator and said that that's what helped in Venezuela and, like, I wanna find the next version of that and I wanna back that technology. Yeah.
Speaker 10:Buddy of mine that that that I'll that that that we might need some r and d on that. You know, I also have a buddy of mine who I went to OCS with. I'll keep his name off the tape here just, you know but he testified to congress on the UAP phenomenon, which I know you guys are deep in as well. And I I texted him not too long ago and I'm like, hey, man. We got some alien tech.
Speaker 10:I'm ready to go. All the rest of this stuff is like, I don't know, not really doing it for me. And so we had a quick call, but, you know, didn't didn't end going anywhere. So if you got any founders out there that are, you know, want Listen. To engineer I got assigned a poster of Bob Lazar in my office.
Speaker 10:I'm super fired up. I go deep on this.
Speaker 1:Are you Jesse Michaels guy?
Speaker 10:Listen. I I I dive into anything you'll give me.
Speaker 1:There we go. Send me
Speaker 10:some books. Send send me whatever you got. I'm ready. But, like, ultimately, I think that there's plenty of meat on the bone for other novel capabilities to come up and get funded. I I think for us as a venture firm, I used to superimpose my view of what should be created on the ecosystem, and we've effectively stopped doing that and just tried to be, you know, good judges of of founders that are high octane and have a huge vision.
Speaker 10:And when we're surprised and we believe them, we wanna back them as early as possible, which is another evolution of the firm. When we started, I don't think we had the brand, the reputation, the credibly or the credibility to credibly lead some of these these rounds. Now I think we do. And we launched our Black Flag Accelerator, which is helping us go earlier, creep into doing more pre seeds and seed stage investments where we've led a lot through that. And so I think the future is bright for entrepreneurs, you know, chipping away at a variety of different problems.
Speaker 1:You're wearing a flag on your hat. It's the Stars and Stripes, beautiful American patriotic flag. Black flag, I associate with pirates. They're not on my team. Why why black flag?
Speaker 10:Well, I I should have wore my other hat. So I got the Jolly Roger over Okay. The red, white, and blue. I should have wore that one for you guys, you know, figuring that you'd bring that up.
Speaker 1:Are they on our team? Have we recruited the pirates? How does it work? Yeah. We we we
Speaker 10:recruited them. They're on our team now. Okay. Yeah. I got it.
Speaker 3:This is an American pirate.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 3:Patriot I
Speaker 1:like it.
Speaker 3:Pirate hybrid.
Speaker 1:I mean, if
Speaker 10:you look at mean, we we thought about this for a while. And if you look at all the squadron patches that are out there for aircraft squadrons, you know, various SEAL teams, special operations, etcetera. Like, they all have some pirate themed I like that. You know, insignia. So it's actually not all that Believe it or not, we're we're pretty thoughtful about the name Harpoon and the name Black Flag.
Speaker 10:We've actually thought about the pros and cons, and some people might not like it, but you can't you can't win over everybody.
Speaker 3:I like Tell us how did you what is your overall take as an Olympian on the enhanced games? How did you process it? If, you know, if this was, like, before your venture career and you were done with the, you know, Olympics, would you have considered going in there? I want I want your whole take.
Speaker 10:You know, I I should have tracked it more closely. You guys are probably much better read on this than I am. But on the swimming, I I, you know, I believe somebody entered that wasn't enhanced at all and still won and did a best time, I believe, in the backstroke, which is interesting. And I saw some jokes on Twitter about people saying like, these guys are already enhanced. They don't need to be even more enhanced.
Speaker 10:And I think that's just a lot BS. Like, we get drug tested so much. It's insane. We could go a whole offline segment on what it's like to have the drug tester show up and watch you go to the restroom, take your blood, and all of this stuff unannounced. You have to fill out where you're gonna be for literally a quarter in advance down to the day.
Speaker 10:And if you miss three tests in a row, it's the same as being, you know, being Disqualified. Positive test.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:So, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that you might not be attracting to the enhanced games the right athletes right now. I don't know how else to put it. I don't know if they're the gold medalist, silver medalist, bronze medalist that are showing up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So it's a gold medalist is still gonna outperform the, like, number eight guy who's taking those guys' asses. For sure.
Speaker 10:Like, I mean, like, it is it's
Speaker 2:not just me.
Speaker 10:It's like anybody who's, like, who medals. Anybody who medals, like, there's a big drop off between, like, meddling and sort of finaling and then not finaling. And so Yeah. You know, I would have sort of welcomed it. I think an interesting aspect of the enhanced games would be, like, let's let's load these guys up and put them head to head with, you know, whoever the modern may Like, Katie Ledecky.
Speaker 10:Let's see if they can beat Katie Ledecky.
Speaker 1:I mean, there that that was part of
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 1:interesting production of the enhanced games was that it did tell you something about the real games and that and that there is a gap there and that was in and if you look at it as like a a science experiment, it was a cool experiment that we got to run and I think we all learned a little bit from it even if it wasn't this, oh, yeah. Obviously, with the with the drug regimens, they just blow everyone out of water, which is sort of what some people expected. But that wasn't really the message of that campaign.
Speaker 10:And no, it was a really cool experiment and great great to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. You're fantastic.
Speaker 3:Where are you based?
Speaker 10:Diego, California, but I'm on the road. I'm actually in New York right now, but, you know, I'm back in San Diego quite frequently.
Speaker 3:Alright. Fund five. Come on. Come on live.
Speaker 1:Hang out We'll come
Speaker 3:back, boys.
Speaker 10:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:To hang We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI.
Speaker 1:Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Ricky Rosta from Oasis Devices. Ricky, how you doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:How you doing?
Speaker 9:Can you
Speaker 1:hear us? Introduce yourself.
Speaker 9:I can. Can you hear me?
Speaker 1:Yeah. All good. Can you hear us over the
Speaker 3:drumming and the air horn?
Speaker 1:It's a very chaotic entrance. You get hot dropped in here. You're trying to drink your coffee in peace. And all of a sudden, it's welcome to the Ultradome. But welcome to the Ultradome.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself.
Speaker 9:Awesome. Thank you, guys. So I'm Ricky Rosa. I'm the founder and CEO of Oasis devices. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And we're we make smart ring to try to replace the keyboard. What we're interested in is the next platform of computing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:Are are smartphones the final form? I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody knows. Mhmm. But once you take that as
Speaker 10:your I'm baseline
Speaker 3:I'm praying every day. Yeah. I want to throw it Yeah. In the
Speaker 9:Yeah. You and me, brother. So so once you take that as your baseline, you can start to explore.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But what we noticed is that you can only ask people to take one step from current
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And it is very easy to get, you know, tangled in in, you know, crazy new platforms and and devices and and and that sort of thing. But you you can only you can only ask people to change things so much. You cannot ask them to change the entire workflow overnight.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:We've spent years in the idea, mate. It's trying to figure out, you know, what would be a good use cases for for smart rings and and and and and different things. And what we landed is private dictation because what rings are really useful for is bringing them very close to your mouth and whispering. And it just so happens that we also have a trackpad in our ring that allows you to edit. We spent a lot of time making sure that it has the
Speaker 14:it had the
Speaker 9:resolution for navigation for smart glasses. But smart glasses are, you know, a little bit slower to take off. So we we channeled all of that development into editing what you see on screen. And so we made it work with Whisper Flow. Yeah.
Speaker 9:The founder tonight is an angel investor in our company.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 9:Nice. And so that's what we're launching today.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Very cool. What what does good look like in terms of churn and retention for a new device? Because I imagine that the product looks great. I imagine it will work and I imagine people will keep it on for a long time and use it.
Speaker 1:But the baseline is so low. I mean we had an Apple Vision Pro in the studio this morning and the team was trying it out and like laughing and enjoying the demo. But that product has to have like 99% churn and same thing with most VR headsets. A lot of hardware companies like if you can just find that smiling curve of, you know, the conversion rate of a few people that come on, do you how are you thinking about actually getting people over that goal, that honeymoon period where they try something Well,
Speaker 3:I'll you I'll tell you why I like this approach Yeah. Is you're one utilizing a device that is already a daily Mhmm. Product in the workspace. Yep. Utilizing like audio transcription which like WhisperFlo.
Speaker 3:I was at dinner with a buddy last night and he's showing us like his whole Whisper Flow setup. He's obsessed obsessed with it. And then you're utilizing the ring which is also a form factor that people are used to by now that Aura Ring is proven. Yeah. And so you'd like take that combination of like people wanna be transcribing more.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They're using their computers all day long, you deliver it in a form factor that is like, you know, understood already that people are comfortable with.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think that's a recipe for potentially a hit. But again, yes, the the sort of median new consumer electronic device has like 0% retention. Yeah. So it's still very hard.
Speaker 9:Well, will say I use the Vision Pro every night.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 9:know if that
Speaker 1:helps or Two, hurts
Speaker 2:one. My
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. I love I love new hardware. But but I I I admit that there's that it's always hard to get people on. Yes, is it important that this is both effectively a peripheral for a daily driven device and then also a fashion accessory?
Speaker 1:Is that important that it's both?
Speaker 9:Yes. So the way that we think about retention is and this is why we struggled so much in years past is we really needed to find a use case that was a must have, not a nice to have. Yeah. Right? And so with WhisperFlow, you know, you can speak loudly to your computer, but it just so happens that in, you know, crowded offices, coffee coffee shops, those sort of public environments, you can't speak out loud.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And so, it really helps to have to have a peripheral that you can speak quietly to. Mhmm. Once we move to other platforms like iOS and and glasses eventually, then the fashion accessory or the fashion point starts to become more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also feels I like don't know. Because you can wear AirPods and you can talk to them. Can you not whisper to AirPods? Because even if you can, even if it's the same functional device, it's way different aesthetics talking into a ring and having earbuds in that feel like, okay, this person's like out in their own world.
Speaker 1:But I imagine with the microphone a lot closer, the ring allows you to speak at even a lower level and produce a higher fidelity transcript. Is that correct? Correct.
Speaker 9:Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay. That's cool.
Speaker 9:So so the outperforms AirPods but also it has the modality of touch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which
Speaker 9:is Which allows you to do more yeah. It allows you to do to edit the things that you see on screen. It allows you to navigate. It allows you to completely interact with AI and your computer and your workflows without over touching the keyboard.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 9:And and this point this point is important because what we think is that if we can it's a big if. But if we can get people to interact with laptops without touching them, then the output piece of it Mhmm. Becomes a little bit more fluid. Yep. Now, it's it's a smaller ask to ask people to put the display in glasses or display in in another device.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Right? So but but you really need to to solve the input part first, and that's kind of what we're going after at the moment.
Speaker 1:The demo is someone using basically a Word document. Is that intentional? Why not a code editor? Why not an LLM inter interaction back and forth? Why why why text specifically?
Speaker 9:Well, we we had we we do have a demo of the person using ChatGPT Sure. And, you know, Opcode and that sort of thing in the launch video.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But for the b roll, it's just like more aesthetic to have the text in it.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. I was just wondering if there was a hint at like where you see the first killer feature with with writers or with someone who's doing more like word document based knowledge work as opposed to something who more of a program But I I don't I don't know. Maybe I'm reading into it too.
Speaker 9:Remember remember, WhisperFlow is like Yeah. Like a platform agnostic tool. Yeah. Yeah. So they see retention across emails, Word documents, you know Yeah.
Speaker 9:Coding tools and and the rest. And so we are an extension of that. Mhmm. So we we cannot sit in the same plane as them. You know what I mean?
Speaker 9:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the status of the company? How big is the company? Have you raised money? Where do you see all this going?
Speaker 9:So we're pretty small. We're like a five person team. We're scattered across the globe. We have, you know, people in in Australia, Abu Dhabi, China. We're we're an eclectic bunch.
Speaker 9:We've raised a few angel rounds and we shipped our beta this January.
Speaker 1:That's great. When do you want to go into public release? Where can people sign up to learn more? Where can people
Speaker 9:We launched our our pre order campaign for the microphone and trackpad version today. Yeah. And that's gonna be shipping in small batches from two weeks from now till Christmas. We're gonna roll it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great. A testament to the modern
Speaker 3:Let's life.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll order one, Tyler. If you can order one and then and then try to put us, you know, I don't should I ask to be put at the at the front of the list or near the front of the list? It'd be it'd be nice to get in the next in the next month would be awesome.
Speaker 1:Be great. Well, thank so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Very cool device. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Thank you. I appreciate it, Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 1:Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:And our next guest is in the waiting room. We have Andrew Rao from TaxWire. Andrew, how are you doing?
Speaker 11:Hey, guys. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Rob. We're on show. Welcome.
Speaker 11:Jordan, great to see you.
Speaker 1:I know you guys know each other, but for the audience members that don't, maybe introduce yourself. Tell us what you're building.
Speaker 11:Yes. Jordy, good to see you. Did not did not have it on my bingo card ten, three, four years ago, whenever whenever it was. Like, we I I worked for you with you at at Party Rountree Slash Capital that we would be talking about taxes on on your podcast. Back.
Speaker 11:We're back. We're we're so back. Congrats to both of you on all the success. But but I'm I'm Andrew Reyes. I'm one of the cofounders of of TaxFire.
Speaker 11:We are a full managed solution for global self tax compliance, and we just raised $25,000,000 because death and taxes are forever. And I think I think that we probably our bet is that they'll Ryan Johnson will solve tax solve death first, so we're we're here to
Speaker 7:solve taxes. Taxes are huge.
Speaker 11:I got the I got the hat for us.
Speaker 1:Okay. I
Speaker 3:see that. You're actually hoping that he solves that to just have more more customers.
Speaker 11:Bigger TAM. Exactly. Because the tam just keeps keeps growing. We just have more consumption in the economy. GDP goes up.
Speaker 11:There's more taxes. Hopefully, can improve the the the subway system in New York with some of those tax dollars, and we just the good times keep rolling.
Speaker 1:Why business to business taxes? Why not go after TurboTax?
Speaker 11:Yes. It's a great question. My my immediate initial reaction is because Intuit has a hell of a lot of distribution, and so that's probably that's probably one. But no. No.
Speaker 11:More for for me specifically, had this problem in a really big way. And a company I was at before this very much felt the pain of mandating indirect tax compliance. Mhmm. And I I think it's it's a market that's dominated by a bunch of companies that are very old. I I think about $5,000,000,000,000 in taxes remitted in sales tax and VAT by enterprises around the world.
Speaker 11:It's a very big problem. There's a bunch of very not so customer obsessed software companies and services firms like the like the Big Four, Avalara, etcetera Yeah. That dominate this market. And it's a it's a pain point that I had before this. And then we so it's mix of market opportunity, and our customers are finance people.
Speaker 11:They're super smart, but they do not have the expertise or time to be managing their their taxes. So we we deliver deliver that outcome for them.
Speaker 1:And reality check me reality check me on this. I would assume that sales tax enforcement is increasing significantly. In the early days of the Internet, There were all these crazy loopholes where if Amazon's based in Seattle and you buy something in Florida, they don't pay tax. I think a lot of those loopholes have been closed, so more and more ecommerce companies have flourished on the back of Shopify and other platforms Stripe. And but so there's more people selling products all nationally, and so they have a much higher sales tax burden.
Speaker 1:Is that roughly correct for the secular trend?
Speaker 11:Rough roughly correct. The secular trend is is kind of like a few things. One is regulation. So there's that regulation has been rolling out, and what we're seeing now is that a lot of states are now actually starting to roll out taxes of not only, like, more enforcement. They're using AI to do to do audits.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. A lot of states are increasing sales tax as well and trying to increase audits of companies that have been complying now because they're getting squeezed on income tax. Yeah. They're getting squeezed on property tax. Gavin Gavin Newsom in in California is trying to start taxing the software industry.
Speaker 11:And then very similarly in in VAT around the world, there's a lot of enforcement of of real time reporting and e invoicing that's coming down the pipeline. So it's a it's a nobody gets voted out of office for raising sales tax or raising VAT, whereas income tax or property tax can hit you. So you're seeing big enforcement. That's like just a, I'd say a secular tailwind. And then the incumbents in the industry are not incredibly AI native or customer friendly, and so you've also kind of got this general customer frustration that gives a new player like us a lot of tailwinds to solve.
Speaker 3:So you raised this money during the SaaSpocalypse. You overpowered the SaaSpocalypse. Yeah. But I'm sure you were getting asked like, you know, how like how did you answer how did you answer the SaaSpocalypse question? Because now, right, I'm sure when you kind of close around or at least you had a term sheet signed, the SaaSpocalypse was over.
Speaker 3:Everyone was like, you know, we're back. But Yeah. But how did
Speaker 11:think were super back. Super back. The SaaS pocalypse is over. But, you know, I I think it seems super being super honest, it's like we the benefit we're we're we're benefiting a little bit from the fact that a lot of the people we compete with are services as much as they are software companies. And so that there's, like, more spend to eat, which lets you kinda lean into.
Speaker 11:We we get we are categorized as, like, AI native SaaS or AI native services software. And and some of that is that we genuinely, like, are actually delivering an outcome. And so our customers don't think of us as software or services. Like, we have tax experts in house. We do literally everything that goes into under our tax compliance.
Speaker 11:We we ripped and replaced something for a consulting firm literally this this week for for one of our customers. And so it's it's so some some of it is that we are we are benefiting from AI versus being someone who's being being displaced maybe by AI, and and so it's mostly a tail end. I I think
Speaker 3:You're doing the displacement. You're coming after you're coming the the hundreds of thousands.
Speaker 1:I am the apocalypse. Exactly.
Speaker 11:We are we are the we are the apocalypse, and we we probably we probably our category probably benefits from it, which is something that maybe I can't take much much credit for. I think I think it's probably painful out there for for some folks in in way that maybe it's not been for us.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking
Speaker 3:Amazing progress. It's been awesome to see the journey and yeah congrats to the whole team on the milestone. Sure you'll We'll be back talk
Speaker 1:to you soon. Of course.
Speaker 11:Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Own the data platform. Just do it.
Speaker 1:Why Cheers. Cheers.
Speaker 3:Not? Our next
Speaker 1:best is Michael Anderson from Framework Ventures raising a huge force of fund. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TV in Ultradome. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 14:Doing well. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're doing fantastically.
Speaker 3:Honestly, the view here
Speaker 1:this is not view. Where are you?
Speaker 3:View mugging us.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 10:We don't even have any we we
Speaker 3:don't have any windows in this in this here. This is Like thousands of feet in the air.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hanging the castle. Hanging in the castle. Looking good. Anyway Where
Speaker 10:are you
Speaker 3:calling in from?
Speaker 14:San Francisco. The Transamerica Building.
Speaker 1:Nice. That's a good one. The Pyramid. I like that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Enough about The View. Let's tell let's talk about you. Please introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us about the fund. Give us the news.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So, Michael, one of the two cofounders of Framework. The quick history is, my cofounder Vance and I started it seven years ago. Mhmm. We're both working, for, you know, tech companies.
Speaker 14:I was at Snapchat. He was at Netflix. Quit our jobs. We're obsessed with crypto, moved into my parents' house, and started the fund. Now we've raised our fourth fund and manage a couple billion dollars.
Speaker 1:Did you have any outside capital in the first fund? Like, what was the because I imagine with crypto, like, you can just invest in tokens and, like, if you're good at trading and you're early, like, you don't necessarily need institutional capital to get started. But what was the early day what were the early days like?
Speaker 9:Yeah. We we had
Speaker 14:an institution as our first backer.
Speaker 1:Okay. Cool.
Speaker 14:And it was a small $15,000,000 fund. And we we started framework really with a thesis, you know, and a lot of people started with trading or a hedge fund thesis. Ours was actually the opposite in that we felt like nobody was going after the early seed stage of venture investing in the crypto web three space in 2019. And so that's what we started with. So it's always been, you know, venture thesis.
Speaker 14:And I think our first, you know, our second our second fund, a 100,000,000, was kind of like the first institutional fund with multiple institutions. And now we've got Ivy League endowments and sovereign wealth funds and off to the races.
Speaker 1:That's great. What was it like in the early days? Was was the crypto community really geographically distributed, or were you focused on investing in America or California or San Francisco specifically if you're going after those early stage crypto founders?
Speaker 14:Yeah. Good question. I mean, we we moved back to San Francisco. We were actually in Vance and I were in Los Angeles. We moved back to San Francisco thinking, Well well, that's the hub of tech.
Speaker 14:Yeah. And we found ourselves basically traveling to all the entrepreneurs at the early days because crypto was global phenomenon. You had pockets in Asia, you know, Australia, UK. I'd say largely now, it's still it's still pretty geographically distributed, but there's still most of the tech is happening in kind of the the hubs that you would expect. So San Francisco is definitely one of the top places these days.
Speaker 14:But, yeah, it was a lot of lot of travel those early couple years.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what's the what's the conference strategy now? I feel like there's debate on like, you know, how many how many conference what's the perfect amount of conferences to go to in a year as a crypto investor?
Speaker 14:That that is the the topic of conversation.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 3:a billion dollar it's like a billion
Speaker 14:dollar question. Travel that much. Come on. No. You gotta do an Asia trip.
Speaker 14:You gotta do a a Europe trip. You know, make some travel out of it. It's they're they're always in fun destinations. I think a couple years ago, went to the Blockchain Week in Singapore and then stayed for the f one race.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's good.
Speaker 14:It's it's always a good time.
Speaker 6:What
Speaker 3:what what are you kind of forecasting in in crypto right now? Like what what you guys have done well by predicting, I just, you know, it's a balance of like having some idea of of the future and just backing great entrepreneurs, but like what are you what are you excited about with this new fund to invest in?
Speaker 14:Yeah. So I I think when we started in 2019, we saw crypto as sort of the next frontier where the smartest entrepreneurs that we were meeting with, you know, the whiz kids popping out of the Stanford Harvard's are, you know, working on crypto, working on cryptography technologies. And I think that that's still the case. But I think what a lot of what we're seeing now is people who have domain expertise in different areas, different industries who are saying, help me do the crypto. I think this should be decentralized, whether it's energy, nuclear, AI, or, you know, hard hard infrastructure.
Speaker 14:They're coming to us and saying, hey, like, know how to do energy trading. I've been doing it for the last decade. Help me build a distributed decentralized utility so that we can go disintermediate, you know, the utility the utilities. And I think that that is kind of the the new thing. It's not crypto just for crypto's sake.
Speaker 14:It's crypto getting imbued within, you know, really hard tech industries. So it's not really, like, its own thing anymore. I think now it's just kinda become pervasive in in everything.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So the fund's grown. The aperture's probably widened in terms of the industries that you look at. What stayed the same, throughout all four funds?
Speaker 3:I'll I'll take a I'll take a crack just remaining bullish on crypto when everyone's calling you an idiot loser is like a really good way to make money I think. And I feel like you guys have have done that. Yeah. Just like, you know, it seems like it's about having a tolerance for being looking silly. Sure.
Speaker 3:And that that can look like remaining bullish during, like, moments where everyone's like, honey, you're still you're still doing that crypto thing, you know, at Thanksgiving?
Speaker 14:Oh, so so many years of that. You know? It's just gonna be another one of those. When it's a good time to buy, it's a bad time to sell. When it's a bad time to sell, it's a good time to buy.
Speaker 14:Yeah. So I think, you know, riding the waves for sure. And we hold, you know, digital assets in the fund, each one of them. But I I think the thing that has been consistent is really just the venture thesis Mhmm. And then following the founders.
Speaker 14:And the founders who, you know, we are seeing like, we have a investment in a company called Mecca. We got to know them because they were previous entrepreneurs that sold their company to Coinbase. They are not doing anything in crypto currently. Could eventually, but it's, you know, how we got to know them was through crypto and they are building, you know, a data platform for robotics AI. So those types of investments, I think, are just a consistent thread for us.
Speaker 14:And when we find world class founders, we're gonna back them multiple
Speaker 3:times. Interesting. Awesome. Cool. I haven't been following the my strategy, Michael Saylor.
Speaker 3:We have not been following the story closely. Can can you get me up to speed in just like twenty seconds what's going on over there? I mostly just see like the deranged like, you know, AI images that he puts out, you know, where he's like on a lifeboat just like it's like, why are you putting that image in my head?
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 3:funny one. Literally leaving. You're, like, escaping the Titanic.
Speaker 1:It's like, wait. Am I on the lifeboat with you? Yeah. Am I
Speaker 3:on the Titanic? Wait. Is this inspiration? Am I am I supposed to?
Speaker 14:I I I think, you know, the the the quick story is that whenever you mix financial engineering and crypto, something bad usually has happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 14:And I think that that overfitting of the narrative is kind of what's going on with him right now. But he's building this entity that has multiple layers to it, whether it's convertibles, whether it's preferred, whether it's common. And he's financing it, you know, in different ways. And the question is, can he continue to do with all of the legs of the stool, or is one of the legs gonna fall
Speaker 6:out? Mhmm.
Speaker 14:And I I think, you know, the the narratives of him blowing up are overblown. I think he's got the smart people around. I think it's tough when crypto's down this this much, but this is exactly what happens in all of these cycles. If we go back to, you know, the the calluses on our hands over the last, you know, nearly decade of doing this, this is exactly what plays out all four years. So I think we're just in the middle of that right now, and I I think he will be proven right eventually.
Speaker 14:It may just take him years. And talk about somebody who's been willing to just stand in the face of all of the the negative publicity. He he's the best at it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. That's that's a good point. Awesome, dude. Well, great great to meet you. Congrats on on the new fund.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, looking forward to meeting more of your founders.
Speaker 14:Appreciate it. Great to meet you guys.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents.
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Speaker 3:of the goose itself.
Speaker 1:It is the goose itself. Have you ever heard of a hectocorn, Jordy? No. I'd never heard of this either. But apparently, it refers to a company worth more than a $100,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:You got a unicorn worth 1,000,000,000, a decacorn worth 10,000,000,000, and a hectocorn, which I'd never heard before. But, you know, somebody wrote it in
Speaker 3:Learn something new every day.
Speaker 1:Learn something new any day every single day, especially on this show. Well, our next guest is investor and NBA champion Tristan Thompson. We're very lucky to be joined by him here in the TBPN Ultradome.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 3:guys are pretty I'm
Speaker 1:so sorry. I'm so
Speaker 2:Yes, you are.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 2:You are all of it. You are a tall drink of
Speaker 3:milk. Holy snikeys. What's up, man? How
Speaker 2:are you? We're doing
Speaker 1:knocked Yeah. Yeah. Why don't you stand up?
Speaker 3:Not even close. No. I'm happy to let you guys do your thing. I just wanted the audience to understand that John is an NBA sized man.
Speaker 1:It's true. And and on the camera, everyone thinks I'm five ten.
Speaker 2:And then John, and you guys like made my seat the shortest one right now. Like, seriously. You're like, this guy's a he was a center for fourteen years at this height. How do you
Speaker 1:do it? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 3:Anyway. It's great to have you.
Speaker 1:It's great
Speaker 3:to have you.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here. By the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Congrats.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank For landing you?
Speaker 2:No. No. For having that success in acquisition and all that. Know, come on now. That's
Speaker 3:big time. You. Thank you. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, I I wanna start with, I mean, tech and investing. I mean, we can go through your career, but I'm interested in in sort of how you first caught the bug, how you first got interested in technology investing, just your journey to financial management, understanding more of your strategy and sort of like oftentimes there's like mentors or books Mhmm. Resources along the way like what was your journey?
Speaker 2:I mean I think for me and you know I won't give like the cliche like, you know, I think other guys are like, you know, I think I didn't start really investing into things outside of the the traditional Yeah. You know, state treasury bonds
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the S and P 500, the stuff that Fidelity and Wells Fargo tell you money market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You have a
Speaker 2:second deal. Let's be real, like, know, because you know, I tell the young guys is, you know, you're
Speaker 3:gotta first just be focused on being really good at basketball Yeah. But you get the second deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you get the second deal. I got my my my second deal, 82,000,000. Yep. Know, I I switched financial advisors because of the the one I was with.
Speaker 2:Bang bang bang. I
Speaker 1:was was gonna go over. There you go. Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow. This is high energy. I love Wow.
Speaker 1:But no You got two deals.
Speaker 2:You got
Speaker 1:the one.
Speaker 2:No. I started getting into alternative assets and getting into tech and Sure. Investing in companies, whether it's consumer or tech or
Speaker 1:Were were you getting pitched VC funds? Like invest in the VC funds?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, like Carlyle Group and then and all those guys, you know, back then I was with Morgan Stanley, so they would give us those opportunities because they had them as a client.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that was calling like my early kind of like get my feet wet. Yeah. But obviously as I got older and and and wanted to dive into more, but obviously having the capital to have that exposure Yeah. You know, I started to, you know, look into more and and start to talk to founders and, you know, get ahead of the curve. Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's probably good start.
Speaker 1:Nice. It's
Speaker 3:probably good to start like taking deals from Morgan Stanley because obviously or or or a partner like that because not every deal is gonna really hit or be that great. But better than just looking at whatever's coming through because I think when people start investing especially in private markets, they everything looks great in a pitch deck. Right? It's like, oh, I'm looking at the forecast. It's like they're going to a 100,000,000 in like three years and then you realize like, okay, well that most that's in most decks and it's about being able to pick out, okay, what's actually gonna do well versus what's gonna flop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I feel like one of the hardest things is you see one deck and you're like, this is a great idea, great team and you don't realize that there's three other teams that are doing the exact same thing. They started two years earlier and they're better. Do you think about trying to when you identify a trend that you're interested in, you want exposure to, are you trying to pick the one winner, get a huge stake in one winner? Or do you want to have some sort of diversification across the market?
Speaker 2:I think for me, it's first of I always bet on the founder. Yeah. Right? It's betting on the horse. Right?
Speaker 2:I think that's the most important thing. I you know, these pitch decks, before they're a 100,000,000. Now they always tell you they're a billion dollars. And now they always look so good, but I think for myself, I try to lean on what my peers are doing as well. I've been so fortunate to have some guys that have, you know, have early ICOs in Ethereum, or the guys that have done great exits, and whether it's a family office, or it's the guys that are in funds, you know, that have had that experience, because for me, the reality is I am still one of the younger guys
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That are in the in the space. Right? I try to lean on other people and honestly, people have been so good to me and kind of like kind of helped steer me the right way because they're like, Tristan, we want to see you win. We don't want to see you come in and just give money to everybody Yeah. And there's Paul.
Speaker 3:Not get much back.
Speaker 10:And not
Speaker 2:get much back. You know, remember Olaf, a buddy of mine who's on the early Coinbase
Speaker 1:Curse
Speaker 2:of yeah. Me. You know, he said, Tristan, you also got to be prepared that you're going to invest in 10 things and eight are going fail. Yep. But the two that do well, he said, don't worry, it's going cover all your capital unless you put in.
Speaker 4:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:I also had that mindset as well, but I always like to bet on the founder, on the horse. It's like a horse race.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm the most bullish
Speaker 3:about. Was there was there any athlete entrepreneur investors that you look up to maybe from the previous generation or people that were or maybe underrated investors that people don't know about? Because I feel like Yeah. People know about the the Shacks of the world, the guys that are super commercial but anybody that's maybe more underrated?
Speaker 2:I mean, I look at Shaq and Magic because I think they were able to use their NIL to pivot to chapter two and leverage that to great opportunities. Right? Like at end of day, the fact that Magic Johnson can open up movie theaters at affordable and get acquired by AMC, that's big time. Right? That's like like, that's that's creating a movement.
Speaker 2:But I think, you know, guys have done a good job as, you know, of course, like the Steph Curry, our Andre Iguodala Yeah. He's done a good job. But, you know, the reality of us athletes, if we make good investments, we're going to tell all you guys.
Speaker 1:All the guys that
Speaker 2:are like doing very well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know.
Speaker 3:Talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's no one under the radar.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If I'm doing a 25 x, I'm
Speaker 1:not just going
Speaker 2:to hide in Indiana and not tell you about it. Do
Speaker 1:you think that there's a there's a fork in the road between NIL sponsorship, just get the cash but put your name everywhere there it makes sense, tons of brand deals but not a lot of equity ownership versus more behind the scenes equity ownership just investing. Is that a fork in the road or can you do both reliably? How do you think about that trade off
Speaker 14:I think
Speaker 1:there is one?
Speaker 2:I think for us as athletes and anytime I go into, you know, into the meetings and and I'm on calls all the time Yeah. I'm going to whether it's Milken or I'm at Medici or I'm at Tolkien
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, I we only get one chance at this, right? And I think for us, because when we come in, everyone always we're always playing down by five points, down by 10, because they're like, alright, another athlete in here that's going to write a check and, you know, he's going to like
Speaker 1:I will be cursing
Speaker 2:here, but we're always going to like h o e ourself out.
Speaker 1:Right? Okay.
Speaker 2:And and that's what we I want to be very selective at the end of the day, I don't want to be the guy that's for everybody. Yeah. I want to make sure if I'm going down one lane, if I'm going to invest in a robotics company, I'm going to invest in tech, drones, I want to try to find one or two. Yeah. Not just be with 10 guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because you don't want to be that guy. But I but in terms of the NIL, I think it's very important as well because if you look at it right now, who's the biggest influencer on planet Earth? Elon Musk. Oh.
Speaker 2:You would advise that Kim Kardashian, but you but we might
Speaker 1:say Elon. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:So but because but like, he's realized that, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you know, these guys back in the day in the nineties, early two thousands, right? They would never put themselves out there and sit on Squat Box and No way. Go on CNBC and talk about their product. But now you realize that the great founders, you are going to do a press run. You're like Drake and you're going to do an album rollout because you want to create the FOMO for retail for when you IPO Yeah.
Speaker 1:Palmer lucky too. Yeah. Very, you know
Speaker 2:And you got the look. Michael Sandler's got
Speaker 1:like The look. Bar can't look.
Speaker 7:The look.
Speaker 2:And then Elon's got the like He's fashion. Doesn't look human and then you got Larry Ellison. It looks like he's like he's like look maxing and everything. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Larry Ellison does look really young.
Speaker 2:You can do a look back. So like, I get that and I think that's why I think
Speaker 3:Allison really is the OG looks max.
Speaker 1:Yes. He is. He's got the chiseled and No. It's remarkable. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Remarkable. It's like He's 80 or something.
Speaker 2:And then there's no sun in that stuff like that. That's a good find. Right?
Speaker 1:But but he sails. He sails all the time. Yeah. He's a he's a big boat guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:So maybe he's getting the sun there. Yeah. Who needs to be around the table when you're negotiating with a company? Because Olaf, fantastic investor. I imagine that if he's writing a check, not many people are being like, hey, we'd also like to put you in our Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 1:But with you, I imagine every founder comes to you and they say, well, we'd like an Instagram post and we'd also like you to be in an ad. And all of that is a separate negotiation. Are there agencies that you work with? Are there are there is this something that you can puzzle out? Is it is it all just one big bucket or do you just say, hey, let's table that and let's just do the equity deal here and then let's talk about partnership later.
Speaker 2:So the way I approach it is like this, right? So obviously you have the initial call and the conversation and you figure out what this what this marriage is going to look like and what and if I'm just capital, if I'm just capital then you're not going to I'm going to be more behind the scenes. Mhmm. But if I really believe in it, I feel like I can help your GTM Mhmm. And create the narrative and story to be to show what you guys are building, and if I believe in it as well Yeah.
Speaker 2:We are going strategize, and I've been very fortunate to have people that come from the venture, people that have, you know, from multi coin and
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And that the around those Yeah. Those guys, you know, they've been very helpful with like Tristan. Like if you look at how someone's like Tristan, you got to be very delicate at how you do things. Mhmm. And and for me, it all depends.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. There's definitely been a lot of investments that I no one knows that I'm invested in. Yeah. Right? You know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Some of the best opportunities like they waiting
Speaker 1:until it's a 25 x and then you'll go on the tour. Yeah. Because it might be a zero and you're not going to talk about Oh, no. But you know what?
Speaker 2:Sometimes you gotta you gotta get your hit lift. Was down Of three of course. So it it all really depends. Yeah. But I love being part of if I really feel bullish about something, I love being part of the journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because for me now, I still have the hunger and drive of winning again. I love winning championships. Yep. And this is the next form of doing it, but instead of wearing a jersey, I'm wearing a Tom Ford suit and tie, or I got this nice I don't know what color you guys call this, but I
Speaker 1:top of the mountain, but is there an even higher mountain? Is there a drive to survive? Play? What would make the NBA even bigger if you could do anything?
Speaker 2:I don't know if this is legal, Okay. Imagine if you if the I don't NBA could do this. Okay. But imagine if like so we have this something called the player post career income plan. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'm going to give some tea and I don't need to say this, to be real. Right? So the player post career income plan is where basically we take a portion of our capital and we put it into let's say like the Voya or the principal. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. We give them our money, we give them a percentage of of our biweekly check
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they hold on
Speaker 1:to it. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's good if you have, you know, bad spending problems and whatnot, and that is is what it is, but you get nothing out of it. Don't make no yield, no interest. Right? But imagine if we were able to kind of create like a MBPA
Speaker 3:a blend. We follow the sport of business as know. Mhmm. So I don't I don't I don't know really anything about this this kind of program that you're talking about. You give them money, you don't get any yield on it then they just give it back to you at a
Speaker 2:certain Yeah. The reason why they created this is you guys remember the ESPN 30 for 30 broke. Yeah. Right? There was a lot of high profile athletes that unfortunately Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it happens, right? Because at the end of the day, we come from, especially myself, I've come from nothing. You give us millions of dollars and it's it's we can't rely on people back home to help us. It's like the blind leading by.
Speaker 1:And you just get a ton of Yeah. Run. You think, oh, this is never going to stop.
Speaker 2:Yes. Something that the NBA and I and I and I appreciate Adam Silver and David Stern Yeah. Taking the interest and say, hey, we don't want our players to pull out of their four zero one k at 35, 45 Yeah. Because, you know, you get heavily penalized Yep. The tax, everything.
Speaker 2:So we're going to create a player post career income plan. Mhmm. The day you're done playing, we are going to give you a check monthly Mhmm. To get you to 55, 60 years old. Sure.
Speaker 2:Right? Which I love, and I think that's so smart. Yeah. But imagine if now we're able to take some of that capital Yeah. And and get some exposure to some of these great, you know, investments.
Speaker 2:Like, imagine if, think about this back when SpaceX back in 2022, right? If I came here and said the NBA PA Association's going to give endowment of of 500,000,000 a $100,000,000 Mhmm. To get into some allocation of space.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty good one to get into. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm not saying go in and buy a bunch of Sally Beauty supplies. We're saying something a little bit more protective. Right? A little bit more that we
Speaker 3:I just don't understand why so so if there's capital that's been put aside Mhmm. Coming out of your paycheck and it's sitting there, somebody's getting yield on it. Oh, yeah. Who's getting yield?
Speaker 2:Not me. That's crazy. That's crazy. But I will say this though. I will say those too because then Kevin's been like
Speaker 3:So they're like, yeah, we're we're taking care of the players. Meanwhile, they just have this huge pool of capital that they're
Speaker 2:Well, I will say
Speaker 3:that seems a little bit No. But
Speaker 2:I will say the NBA has done a great job Yeah. With the four zero one k. What they've done that no one else does is that they will match whatever you put in the four zero one k a 120%.
Speaker 3:Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:great. Which is great. That's fantastic. So the NBA does a really good job protecting the players and and trying to put the players in the best position to be successful, which I appreciate. So that's you know, you got to give a little It's start.
Speaker 2:It's a start. And it's like, you know, no one's ever a finished product. Every business can get better. That's why Mhmm. AI, robotics, that's a big thing, right?
Speaker 2:Especially in the workforce.
Speaker 3:What guidance do you give to young players that are real prospects? Maybe they're getting you know, about to become a teenager, they're on the path to college, hopefully the NBA. What advice do you give them around navigating like the Internet? Mhmm. I imagine like, you know, same way for any endeavor, people that have some type of following or notoriety or aura, they can get better deals done.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But what advice are you giving? Because you you know, I imagine like that wasn't even something that you had to deal with at the time, but then you obviously leverage social media now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I wish those NIL when I was playing, you know, back then when I was playing, I was getting the money through the back door.
Speaker 1:Now you
Speaker 2:get it through the front door. Right? So I wish I was getting that $11,000,000 direct deposit or that wire to my account back in the day, but what I tell these young guys is that, you know, just just be careful, like, protect what you've built. Right? Because everyone's going to want a piece of you Sure.
Speaker 2:And the reality is that we are not going be the smarts in the room. We are going to be basically the squirmy fish in the cesspool, and people are going to want to, you know, eat us up. Right? So you got to really lean, and and I tell guys, lean know, I'm sorry guys. I'm just yeah.
Speaker 2:This is part of being a big man, a center in the NBA. Yeah. We're not pretty, we're very ugly with it, we get down and
Speaker 1:dirty. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:But no, but I think it's like lean on your peers and older guys. I've I've always been the one, whether it's LeBron, whether it's Kevin Love Mhmm. Whether it's Antoine James, Anderson Bearge out. I've always went to my older and my vets to ask questions, and don't be afraid to, you know, be vulnerable. Because I think that's the one thing for us as athletes, we're we fear to say, man, my my shit might be screwed up.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I might have might be in some bad deals or I might have a bad financial advisor. Yeah. That's the one area where we where athletes become small.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And that's not something we should do. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 3:What about AI and sports? I'm sure you get pitches all the time. I'm at you seem to like to invest in really big categories you're going for the you're going for the 100 x, the the thousand x. But what's exciting to you at the, you know, at at the intersection of AI and and you know basketball?
Speaker 2:Well, think, you know, I would nothing would make me more happy if we had a fourth referee and my friends think I'm crazy if that referee was, you know, we used AI.
Speaker 1:It's worked in tennis.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's worked it's worked in tennis. And it's even in in soccer
Speaker 3:And World they have they have this band or something like that.
Speaker 2:They're canceling goals on paraglider, canceling goals on can't remember I'm Canadian.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we scored, they're like, nope, bring it back VR. But I remember like being a kid watching the world come, I said, that never used to happen. Yeah. But now they're utilizing AI technology to try to make the game more efficient, but especially in the NBA in the NBA in the playoffs when it's a one possession game and you know, when they're saying it's a charge or block, or I mean we were we were a victim of it. Game one against Golden State when LeBron took took the charge on Kevin Durant and then they called it a blocking foul Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And they switched and I think and we lost that game and I think we got swept in here, but that was a turning point in the series Yeah. Among other things. But yeah, I think like Yeah. Yeah. That was like I I feel like that's the next step for sports and AI and I think, you know, AI has taken over so many different sectors in the world.
Speaker 2:I think sports is like the one area that it's been like the most like it's like the slowest one. It's like the last one to the party. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's like people on the court at
Speaker 2:the end. Yeah. But in reality it's like guys.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. Just mean outside of that performance
Speaker 1:What about
Speaker 3:like like recovery.
Speaker 1:Game Well, think about this prepping.
Speaker 2:Thing about last year in the playoffs, you had Jayson Tatum, Tyrese Heilenberg, and and Damian Lillard all tear their Achilles. And Adam Silver said, we got to start using AI technology to protect our players. Sure. Right? Because don't get around.
Speaker 2:Sports science is great, but there's another level to this.
Speaker 1:Of
Speaker 2:course. You can have your best players in the faces of your league
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Go down to the most important time, where's the moneymaker time
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is the playoffs. Yeah. So to to hopefully that answers your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I know.
Speaker 2:I think that's the next step for it's more for sports sports medicine
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And science. And I would I wouldn't mind a little you know, fourth referee just to clean up some stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 3:How are you what what's your personal biohacking stack? Are you doing anything? How how long do you want to live? You thinking like 90? I'm surgery.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. Literally put it in my legs there. No. But for me, I'm very big on peptides.
Speaker 2:I want to look good for a long time, guys.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Alright?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let me show
Speaker 3:you guys.
Speaker 2:I want to look good Yeah. For a long time. Yeah. I want I'm 35. Want to look 25.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I want to keep this skin good.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:I want to keep this jaw chiseled. I want to stay in shape. So I will do listen. I'm very I look in the mirror, look in the mirror myself a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I want to look good every day.
Speaker 3:That's good.
Speaker 2:So whatever I need to do, I'm about it. So yes, I do a little, you know, little toot toot for the hair. Yeah. Toot toot toot. So you know, I gotta make sure I'm right.
Speaker 1:I love it. I'm sure you've traveled all over the world. If there's one city where you could put a new NBA team, where would you put Oh. Anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2:Oh, in the world?
Speaker 1:Anywhere in the world. NBA team. NBA teams. That's like Oh.
Speaker 3:Mean is that not a kind of a dumb question?
Speaker 1:No. No. Dumb question. What do you think that's the point? Just like it would be exotic.
Speaker 1:Would be interesting to go play there. Don't know. That's what that
Speaker 2:I would say I would say Marrakesh. Marrakesh. Oh. Or I would say, I mean Dubai has a team right now, but Dubai is so beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a magical place.
Speaker 1:See, dumb question. Interesting answer.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How about how much time do you spend in Morocco?
Speaker 2:You know, I'll be honest, never been there yet.
Speaker 1:You just think Morocco? This has never
Speaker 3:been You gotta go. Gotta go.
Speaker 2:Caleb Hound goes there every year. He calls and he's like, TT, you have to come. He's been invited last three. He's like, TT, you have to come. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then one of the agents that work for our sports agency at Clutch Sports
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's Morocco. He's like, TT, you have to go. You have to go. It's beautiful. It's magical.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So that's why I say Marrakesh, but Dubai has spent a lot of time there. Mhmm. That place is magical. They're forward thinking.
Speaker 2:They love entrepreneurs. They're what we're about. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're all about that's what
Speaker 1:I love
Speaker 3:Morocco's great. Morocco's great. You've been? Surf trip.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Probably nine years ago.
Speaker 2:Now I see it in the hair.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There you go. You spent a lot time in Laguna.
Speaker 3:Malibu.
Speaker 2:Oh. Yeah. They're closer. Clatter.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:What like, do you think you'll ever get bored with investing?
Speaker 2:No. You know, I I'm I'm actually so excited.
Speaker 3:Because there that actually does happen. Like there's Yeah. Some like the generational investors, specifically angel investors that are doing it for the love of the game and then they just get a little bit tired chasing the next deal. The issue is if you're good, you just get you get too rich and then you're like, what's the point?
Speaker 1:It's the It's the boat. If get the boat, you'll just be on the boat.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know it's it's not about the invest you know, I love talking to people and like these meetings and the calls that I have Mhmm. You learn so much like for instance like, I have a call with a gentleman that's creating a nuclear energy company. I just want to learn him learn about what he's thinking, his thesis, why Yeah. What he thinks, where he thinks the world's going.
Speaker 2:Because I just love the education. Right? It's almost like classes in session. Yeah. So of course, yes.
Speaker 2:Do I like investing? Do I like winning? Of course. Yeah. Like when I did a hype short, everyone thought I was crazy, but now I'm laughing to the bank when I when I closed out my hyperlinkage trade.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:So that's
Speaker 2:what I was happy about. So I like being right. Yeah. But I like I like the story telling because I think I I I I bring everything back to team. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and everything's a team. You guys are a team. The guy the gentlemen of you guys back here, they got they love you guys at that. You got a squad here. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everything is team Yes,
Speaker 3:sport.
Speaker 2:It's team sports. So I love to always hear how how this team is trying to operate and what they're trying to accomplish, and if I can come and whether it's capital or whether it's leveraging my resources or intros
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I want to do that, especially if I believe in who you are.
Speaker 3:Would you ever would you ever raise outside capital from other players? Say, hey, I don't want you to invest a 100% of your money but give me give me 2% of your next deal. I'll deploy it and and so they can kind of like get the benefit of everything you've learned.
Speaker 2:Well, know, I've been running a lot of SPVs the last two years. Sure. And I've had some great success. I mean, I just, you know, one thing I'm very bullish on is Prometheus and I just invested you know, their last You
Speaker 3:the Prometheus allocation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I got the Prometheus allocation to friends and family. Shout out to family. You know, shout out mom for the, know, the seventeenth birthday at Jeff's house. Shout out mom, I love you.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I definitely, you know, allocate the Yeah. It's beautiful and God is good to me and and I want to give you know what I
Speaker 1:really want to do?
Speaker 2:Want to give guys the same opportunity. That's also why
Speaker 3:That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. You work to get to the point where Yeah. You get that slug but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think it's like now instead of keep SPV, maybe at some point I might want to you know around q four, maybe start a fun for for me and my people and you know, give guys the opportunity that I have and it's globally. It's not just in America, you know. It's you know, yesterday I was sitting with some gentlemen that work with the QIA and they've been really good, and they've been very open doors to me, and they showed me nothing but love and respect, and I love the people of Doha and Qatar. So I want to give the people the opportunity that I have, because I think it's about paying it forward, and that's about being a real team player.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And me being a center, I didn't score 20 points a game. I did if you need me, if Kevin Love was out the game. Yeah. But you know, for me, I'm getting the low double double, I'm getting the rebounds, be a star in your role.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And now, my role now is pivoting to be, you know, helping my guys that are still got the jerseys on, or the young guys, or the guys that are retiring. Yeah. Give them the access opportunity to make their money make money. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Head start.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Robotics. You're excited about robotics. What specifically? Humanoids?
Speaker 1:Non humanoids? Wheeled stuff?
Speaker 2:No. I think you
Speaker 3:know What's your timeline to a humanoid being able to beat you one on one?
Speaker 2:So This is the real
Speaker 3:because that's like it might be it might legit be Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like Turing test. We got the Tristan test.
Speaker 2:Well, the day that I go one on one versus a robot, if I lose, I better make sure I have so much peptides in my shoulders and vices where I can rip it apart.
Speaker 1:Better have so much allocation in robots that beats I better be
Speaker 3:money on the robot that's whooping you
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then it's over.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But no, I'm I'm know, you my thesis on robotics right now, it's and Jensen Wong said it two years ago, it's about physical AI. And I think robotics is physical AI. Humanoids, I'm not we're not there yet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, I'm not going to sit here and say I would want a robot taking care of my nine, eight, and three year old. Not saying that. What I'm saying for the physical AI, it's it's more so, you know, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in one area like healthcare, agricultural
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, construction, landscaping, right? All those areas, robots and robotics can help. It's making it's making the owners be more efficient on the business aspect. And especially one area I like to touch on is is agriculture, right, the farmers, right? Because, you know, back in the day, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of detractors right now are autonomous.
Speaker 2:They're doing it on their own. But back in the day, you people, labor workers doing it, and you know, a lot of these farmers were spending so much time on the labor and missing out on the business growth and opportunity Yep. Which was killing their margins. So now, us using more autonomous, you know, machines and robotic, even like what what Jeff's doing with now, the packaging, what he's going to have in Amazon with Prometheus. Right?
Speaker 2:It's not just, you know, the drive the car, the Amazon. No, it's more like the packaging. The arm, phew. Yeah. So it's more efficient, which that's what I'm super bullish on, because I want people to find ways to improve their business and less relying on the manpower.
Speaker 2:Let's us focus on building the business side. And I think one area that I that I'm very excited about is like the agricultural space and how we can improve that. Yeah. Because those farms are important to us. People always forget, like we're talking about AI and energy and all crops are important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And there's a labor shortage.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You ever start a company? Whatever started
Speaker 3:Go through YC, run
Speaker 1:it up.
Speaker 2:Oh, like like I'm oh, I mean, listen, those guys have man. No. One thing I will say on this, guys, I I am a capital allocator, so I do believe in a lot of people and when I don't mind writing checks. So if there's the right opportunity, maybe one day, could create my own accelerator. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I've thought about it as well. Mhmm. You know, especially
Speaker 3:Yeah. Go head to head with Gary Tan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but but founding the fund is the entrepreneur. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, doing doing a multi do you know how they do multi family offices? Yeah. Like doing like a multi family accelerator. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where it's like, Gary, you you you could vote
Speaker 2:for like a 100 in, because I know like Ycombe, they just put two fifty and then they want like 10% back. Gary, we bust it in half. Okay. Ten and ten.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Ten and ten.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ten and ten and when I'll put the 100, you put the the one fifty. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, thank this is so much. No. No.
Speaker 2:Guys, thank you
Speaker 3:guys for rest. Yes.
Speaker 2:No. I love it, man. We're all in the same place. Thank you guys so much. I'm a big fan, huge fan.
Speaker 2:Watch you I'm guys so glad we're able to
Speaker 1:make this work. This is awesome I
Speaker 2:would love to
Speaker 1:come back again. This is electric.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to soon. Yes, Gentlemen,
Speaker 2:thank you guys.
Speaker 1:See you. Much love everybody. Thank you. Yes. Me tell you about public.cominvesting.
Speaker 1:For those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we are back to back with two guests in the TBPN Ultra Dome.
Speaker 7:Finally. The men.
Speaker 1:The men. They made it in. 11. We we we got shirts. Oh.
Speaker 3:Like it.
Speaker 6:Logo as of this morning.
Speaker 1:I like it. Very nice. Well, walk me through the logo design. Well, first introduce yourself.
Speaker 6:Tristan just gave our pitch by
Speaker 3:the Yeah. You guys must be co investors. Welcome. Co investors.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:I'm sure.
Speaker 3:We got a Castilian shirt?
Speaker 4:We got a Castilian shirt.
Speaker 1:I like the
Speaker 3:nearest orange.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize that they were they were verticalizing orange. It's a good color. Anyway, sorry. Quick introduction, names, titles, everything quickly and then we'll go into
Speaker 6:Ian Rountree, founder and general partner at Kantos. Yeah. Grant. Joined by?
Speaker 4:Grant, a partner at Kantos.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. When did you guys get started
Speaker 6:investing? Ten years ago. Ten years ago. Almost exactly.
Speaker 1:Overnight success. And the latest, the newest fund. Take us through it.
Speaker 6:New fund we just announced is 70,000,000. Last fund was 50. We kept it.
Speaker 3:It's even louder. It feels even better than I expected to. You feel it in your bones. Feel in your bones.
Speaker 1:Felt the
Speaker 3:First of all, did you ever did you ever consider Rountree Capital? Because you got Sequoia, you got the Green Oaks, like, there's already a long lineage of iconic firms that are sort of tree related or themed. Not for a second. No.
Speaker 1:No? No. Where where where's where's the name come from? Where's the logo come from? I wanna know what the
Speaker 6:So so I named the term Cantos Yeah. Because the the the chapters of an epic poem
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 6:Are Cantos.
Speaker 1:Oh. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I always I always thought we're drawn to startups Yeah. Missions that are greater than ourselves. Yeah. We wanna be we wanna be part of some grander story.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think of founders as a modern day hero Yeah. And and the start up as the epic. And I had these delusions of associated grandeur that I might partner with people who, like Yeah. Change the world a way that's remembered in in story and song. Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was the was the strategy early on? Like, were you trying to lead rounds? Were you going very early stage? Whatever would work?
Speaker 3:What strategy?
Speaker 6:Yeah. The strategy was write checks into start ups.
Speaker 1:Okay. Just get allocation about Got it. Okay.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Wish I called fund one fund zero because it really was just Sure. Like lessons. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Troubled together 4,000,000
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Writing tiny checks Sure. Sure. Just Sure. Trying to learn.
Speaker 1:4,000,000. Wow. What a start. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like the yeah. The lessons there are probably there's some people that should be would probably be better off if it started with 4,000,000 because it really is a constraint, but that breeds ingenuity, I'm sure.
Speaker 6:Well, I I also was like, you know, I I was early at SoFi. Yeah. Crazy to go to the US Men's Opener at SoFi Stadium, by the way. That's crazy. Surreal.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I joined them, and they were, like, 20 people. Yeah. And just started Yeah. And that deal,
Speaker 3:I think it's, like, 20,000,000 a year for twenty years, so 400,000,000 to just get the name Just the names. Think they bought it. What percent of
Speaker 6:their market cap was up?
Speaker 3:I think aren't they on a rip? You probably sold a long time ago. I did, unfortunately. Paper hand. Paper hand.
Speaker 3:I This is only it's only $23,000,000,000 stock.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but but, I mean, that's perk of being in the private market.
Speaker 6:I sold secondary to Silver Lake, I think in the series d Okay. Maybe. Yeah. But that helped me get Yeah. Us off
Speaker 1:the ground. So but but so fund zero, fund one, you know, whatever the right tool for the job is, whatever the right deal is, you'll get in as long as it's a good company. How rigid are you today? Do you wanna be specific specific first money in seed series a? Do you wanna take a certain ownership perspective percentage?
Speaker 1:Like, what guardrails do you have, if any?
Speaker 6:We feel like the constraints breed creativity in a way. You wanna be focused enough that you signal to the market what you do, and we kept the fund relatively small because we want to be able to look a founder in the eye when we write a 1 and a half million dollar check, and me and Grant and me, our principal, can look a founder in the eye and say, your company at this stage is a meaningful percentage of my network.
Speaker 1:Is important to
Speaker 6:you. And if you get too big, you you you can't really say that Of course.
Speaker 2:Straight
Speaker 3:fit. Yeah. When I think about the names like Niros, Castilian, there's a bunch of others, like, I'm that the the 70,000,000, like, feels like, yeah, very intentional about, like, we wanna actually just keep doing what we're
Speaker 6:doing. Totally. That that said, a lot of the best investments look like exceptions. Mhmm. You need to know when to bend.
Speaker 6:Sure. And Grant led Castellian seed round when he was at entries. And Yeah. The first thing he said when he joined Kantos was, hey, I know they're a
Speaker 1:big series a, but
Speaker 4:Vaughn, let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. The logo. The new logo. What's the etymology?
Speaker 6:So this is a a quill. Yeah. And and For writing. We also we also like that it implies a vector. Sure.
Speaker 6:We talk a lot about tempo, speed, velocity really matter Yeah. For a startup, because time compounds Sure. Just like money. Sure. And, I like that it looks like a diving peregrine falcon or something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Dude, I was just watching videos about a pair of falcons.
Speaker 1:This is what you do in your free time?
Speaker 3:My four year
Speaker 1:old fastest
Speaker 3:creature. Yeah. Fastest creature Yeah. Or they they may Incredibly violent. They just go after other birds.
Speaker 3:Like,
Speaker 1:not in terms of the size of the companies, but in terms of the the rate of formation. It feels like post andoral awareness, there was a boom. There were a lot of founders that came into the category from other areas, experience from SpaceX, etcetera. But is it picking up still?
Speaker 3:You guys have the blessing of like, you're in Euros, you're in Castilian. Yeah. You're not like, oh, we need it. We need our drone. We need to find more.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And a lot of founders, a lot of would be founders, if they're if they're at like Boeing and they're bored and they want to do something more exciting, they like, they could go work at Nero. So, you know, like like, there are so many options now if you want to go have an impact at the early stage broadly that you might not need to start a company. But what are you seeing on the ground?
Speaker 4:Well, one of the ways we look at these like, the cinematic universe here broadly Yeah. Is go down, like, the top, you know, 100 companies by market cap. Yeah. And as soon as you start to not recognize the names, it turns out that those industries are super big and massive. Yep.
Speaker 4:Defense was one of the ones that now there's enough people like Andrew Roll
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Valenteer that paved the way. Mhmm. And people are realizing that the venture scale outcomes from one of the amazing things about Kantos when I was at Andreessen was just observing how Ian and the team were able to find these categories that people still didn't feel comfortable about. I mean, Tristan's talking about Ag. Right?
Speaker 1:Like Yeah.
Speaker 4:Ten years ago The people love of were like, oh, let's do AgTech. And everyone's like, it's a horrible place. You're never gonna make money. Yeah. And then, you know, we turn around a few years later and Kansas is leading the seed round for Shinke.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And it's like fish killing robots.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think it was the pre seed. Weren't you guys in the pre seed or what are
Speaker 6:It small was seed. Small seed. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There's some crazy ag tech thing. We have the founder of the laser weeder on.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. No. I There's a Have bunch of cool
Speaker 1:you heard about this? No. It's a it's a tractor, but everyone's worried about pesticides. Very obvious solution is just fire a laser at the exact weeds, so you just burn it. No one has a problem with, like, having a burnt weed next to your tomato.
Speaker 1:So it's fully
Speaker 4:No pesticides.
Speaker 1:Free. It's way better. And it's just something that's you obviously, like, you can back of the envelope how that's built very quickly. But it's enabled by computer vision and, you know, small actuators that can adjust the way the laser's going. And there's a whole bunch of, like, somewhat commodity technologies that are just put together in this very interesting way, creates a great product.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But how you package it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. It's one
Speaker 6:of the lessons
Speaker 1:Like beast to come.
Speaker 6:When I got in deep tech it's like, technology is not inherently valuable in and of itself. Yeah. It's it's valuable in so far as it solves a problem
Speaker 1:Yeah. And
Speaker 6:creates value in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And if you're better at packaging things that are off the shelf Mhmm. In a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money Mhmm. That's a lot more interesting than like, oh, did my PhD in this crazy thing and it sounds really cool. How do I sell this Yeah. By the way?
Speaker 6:Where
Speaker 1:do you see yourself punching the hardest in terms of value add? Like, you're you're making investments in a way that you are an important voice around the table to the founders. That that's clear. But are they coming to you with go to market consult consultation or hiring or strategy or marketing? Like, where do you feel like you're if a founder calls you about a particular problem, you're excited to talk about it as opposed to saying like, oh, this is kind of new.
Speaker 1:Can help as much as I can.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean there's all there's all the like when I'm fundraising next we're
Speaker 1:sort Oh, sure. Sure.
Speaker 6:In house bank or whatever Yeah. All the relationships. And we have we have very high hit rate there. So know like over 90% success rate in getting your next round.
Speaker 1:And that's and that's actually co investors too. And that's an advantage of being a $70,000,000 fund is that there's no signal to like, yeah, I'm actually not doing the $100,000,000 round. It's like, yeah.
Speaker 4:The other I think the other thing that's different about Cantos and maybe we talk about like, you know, joining from injuries and going here. Sure. Like, I think one of the things that's really clear about Ian and the team was they're so concentrated. Yeah. And so, yes, we don't have the follow on signaling dynamic Sure.
Speaker 4:Here. But we also when we go to another firm and say, we think this company is amazing Mhmm. They're gonna take it that much more seriously. Mhmm. And also because we're concentrated, we can just devote more time to our relationships here.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So we have a lot more context on any company in our portfolio probably than the rest of the entire cap table.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, you know, there are times when founders don't want us to be involved because they're busy and they're they're crushing. Sure. But most often, early on, you need a lot of help. And that's where I think, like, we've just they've been doing this for ten years. I've been doing a good amount of time too.
Speaker 4:Like, we have enough pattern matching. And I think the other thing too is for these categories, like, I'm fired up that everyone's coming in to the cinematic universe here. Mhmm. But also not a lot of people, I think, have, like, as strong opinions for how to build a company or what types of founders you need you need to have. And I think with the lessons here, we can package a lot of that and have this cross pollination between the portfolio companies.
Speaker 4:It's pretty distinguished and helps out a lot.
Speaker 2:But but a lot
Speaker 6:of times the founder, they they have the intuition. They know what they need to do deep down. They kinda just need to hear from someone they trust that, like
Speaker 13:yep.
Speaker 6:Like, when we when we invested in, right, they were still licensing robots to fish farms.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 6:And they kinda dabbled in in selling fish, having their own brand, but they weren't capitalized well enough to go do that. Sure. And so we stepped in. We were like, hey, why aren't you doing that thing anymore? And Safa was like, honestly, because
Speaker 4:Everyone's saying no.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We were like, that's absolutely what we should do. Yeah. And and he it was like, we had given water to a man in the desert. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He wanted
Speaker 6:to do it. Knew he needed to do it. The other investors were being more coy about it. Sure. And we were like, no.
Speaker 6:Let's go direct, man. Like, use your own robots. Don't sell them. Just sell better fish with those robots.
Speaker 1:Vertically integrated. It's great. Yeah. Where's the office? Do you have an office here?
Speaker 6:San I'm in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:San Francisco.
Speaker 4:I'm in LA. Yep.
Speaker 1:If you could open an office anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Speaker 3:What
Speaker 1:No. Post LA, and then maybe there's a boom in Austin. Where's the next next boom for entrepreneurial talent, hard tech, defense tech? Where's interesting?
Speaker 6:Texas has been good to us.
Speaker 1:Texas? We're
Speaker 6:investors in SoluGen and Venus Aerospace
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:In Houston Sure. Resurgent Industries in Austin more recently. There's there's a couple CEOs that Mhmm. That live there as well in the portfolio.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. We're gonna see a bunch of these states, though, start to be really compelling. Like Yeah. LA is so strong in many ways because Tesla and SpaceX.
Speaker 1:SpaceX. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Austin starting to get that with a bunch of other companies there. Yep. What we're also seeing though is that so many companies were started in the Gundot. They kind of graduate to Torrance or Hawthorne. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But then eventually, Castellian for example, they're not gonna be able to test their missiles Yeah. In LA. Obviously, terrifying. And so a lot of these companies graduate. Radiant, same thing for nuclear So many times
Speaker 3:you meet a Gundot founder and you're like, don't test your product.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Don't do it here. You can do
Speaker 3:it somewhere nearby. We're we're not too we're not far enough away for me to feel comfortable. You start
Speaker 6:somewhere else. You move to the Gundo.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Series a, you move to Torrance. Yep. And then you start building a factory.
Speaker 4:In Texas. In Texas. Tennessee.
Speaker 3:New Mexico.
Speaker 6:I think you'll probably see we've seen a number of companies out of Seattle because a lot of the Starlink team is there. Oh, interesting. And like within SpaceX, that's a crack team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 6:So you'll you'll see people that probably wanna
Speaker 1:stay Avalanche, the fusion companies up there and there's been a few others that we talked about.
Speaker 12:The lumber
Speaker 3:manufacturers. What is great luck from an R and D cycle or an execution standpoint? Because like it really just feels like there's such a like on TBPN, 90% of the time we're having founders, 95% of the time we're having founders on that are like actually like shipping and making like Yeah. Really meaningful progress. And then there's like the 5% of hard tech founders.
Speaker 3:Some of them raise a lot of money and were sort of curious but are not really shipping and that's Yeah. Kind of like that's people people A lot of people have been burned by companies like that over the years where it's like cool idea, deep tech, and then they just don't They keep raising money but don't ever make anything, don't ever get like real contact with the market. Maybe like quantum related company.
Speaker 4:Well, there's different types. There's different classes of companies. Like, we have some that Like, we we put out a deck last year on what we're calling like the state of adventure capital. Yeah. There we go.
Speaker 4:Delayed. Delayed. And it's it's like 286 slides and there's a chunk in there that talks about like how deep is the deep tech company. Sure. And, you know, if you're doing Quantum or like Fusion, that's gonna take a long time.
Speaker 4:The the time to revenue is long, CapEx, whatever. I think the companies that we like are higher up in that score
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Where the the time to iteration is really fast. You want to build, break, and iterate. And I think what a lot of people got wrong in prior hardware eras is they just assumed, yes, like you only get a few shots on goal. You have to be really deliberate. Sniper shot it out.
Speaker 4:You can't spray and pray your way to greatness here. But that doesn't mean that you can still not, like, test quickly.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:If you look at Niros, if you look at Shinke, Castellian, all of them are, like, constantly in the field fielding their systems, seeing what's working, what isn't. And they know early on that those are not gonna be the best ways. But the most expensive part in building in hardware by far are the people. It's not the hardware. And you hear Elon talk about this all the time.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Like, the cost of Star Shield and Starship Yeah. And all these systems there, in the grand scheme isn't a lot. It's the hours of of labor that go into it. And so the sooner that you test out and see what breaks and refine it, I think the better off.
Speaker 4:I think we're seeing a bunch more founders that have appreciated this, that have learned it at SpaceX or in other places now. And they're coming out and doing a lot more. But, you know, I I think there's like the other challengers, a lot of people that are coming in and are excited to make a bet in defense or energy or what have you, they they, I I think, are missing that way of evaluating companies and their ability to test quickly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You you have to get on the learning curve
Speaker 4:as as soon as possible.
Speaker 6:You can't you can't sit in a lab. You need you need to feel technology. Yeah. And we find that getting back to tempo, vector, speed, like, we find that if we're diligencing a company in, like, a week Mhmm. I used to think, oh, that's not a lot of time.
Speaker 6:Of course, they won't have made progress. Yeah. But we started we've backed so many people now that, like, a a week to them is, a month to everybody else.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And they'll just blow your mind with how quickly they move. And if you don't again, that compound. If you don't get that feeling in a week, you're not gonna get it in a month, a quarter, a year, all of a sudden, a decade Yeah. You know, is a lot shorter than it used to be.
Speaker 1:Are you feeling the pull of the AI vortex? It feels like we're seeing like
Speaker 3:Like, no. Not at all. No. I didn't notice it.
Speaker 1:No. It feels like it feels like we've seen a number of hard tech companies sort of pivot or expand into AI related projects, boom, supersonic. Like, Castilian, I can imagine that somebody's gonna try and figure out how to bolt that into the ground.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm sure. Energy Solidar
Speaker 1:Heroes is gonna wind up being, like, security for AI data centers or something. Obviously, they have fantastic businesses, but like are there examples or like how do you negotiate or what do you what do you say to a founder who's saying like, yeah, we have a we have a six out of 10 market right now. It's gonna be a couple years, but I got an interesting call from a Neo Cloud, and they think that they could put our thing to work.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It it it we're having this conversation recently. Yeah. We we we made we made a general robotics investment that that's still in stealth. We're really excited about it.
Speaker 6:And it will be general, but again, we wanna get on the learning curve. I really wanna commercialize as quickly as possible. Yep. And we're thinking about where do you start.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:And we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. And one of the ideas was like, should we start a car wash? Okay. You know, have these like robot arms Sure. Wash your car for you.
Speaker 6:I love it. And then we're like
Speaker 4:But they're snooky good businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. True. True. I don't And think they've been rolled with self driving cars, the Waymo's, they'll need to go
Speaker 12:somewhere But while
Speaker 1:they match it.
Speaker 6:You know who has a lot
Speaker 3:more money to have?
Speaker 4:Data center
Speaker 1:company. Maybe data centers could use some of two,
Speaker 6:it seems like a pretty obvious answer. I think there will be a lot of technologies that can ride that wave.
Speaker 1:When I
Speaker 6:when I first invested in Radiant, we were we were talking about military applications. Totally. Yeah. And the behind the meter application for data centers There's so much. Which is not even really on the radar.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That way, I interviewed Doug a couple years ago and I was like, so, like, you're gonna get calls. And he's like, we really like the idea of going to Mars and stuff. And I'm like, you'll get there.
Speaker 10:Yeah. I
Speaker 1:bet you're gonna power some AI stuff first.
Speaker 6:Well, we got hand all the energy companies got handed a huge gift.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's great.
Speaker 6:We had no growth in in Yeah. In the grid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nothing.
Speaker 6:Thirty years? Yeah. Now all
Speaker 1:of sudden And there's these like niche applications, like oil and gas exploration, stranded energy and stuff. And now it's just like yeah. There's obvious obvious Yeah. Demand. It's gonna be so much easier for these folks.
Speaker 1:And then all the technology will get commoditized and it'll go everywhere and it'll be great. And you'll still get
Speaker 3:What's what's the state of IP coming out of Mhmm. Like universities today? Is that is that a pipeline of
Speaker 1:Graduating of me. We have
Speaker 6:a no PhD policy
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:At Cantos. I learned this the hard way. Really? Like, I mean, there's there's some PhDs that are like like the salt agent guys, like John Gedmark and Astronis, who are very business minded. Yeah.
Speaker 6:But if you find someone who's, like, trying to commercialize their p h
Speaker 1:their doctoral Sure. Thesis
Speaker 6:you've got this hammer, you're looking for that, like, hardly ever works. Yeah. You're also trained exactly the wrong way
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:When you're defending your your thesis
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, it's all caveats and what could go wrong and you get dinged if you, you know, overpromise and
Speaker 4:It's like the old school way of thinking about hardware. Mhmm. Like, it's just it's like East Coast mindset of we're gonna sit in an ivory tower, think about all the ways that this could make a lot of impact as opposed to just, hey, we're just gonna, like, Shinke is just gonna put the robot on a fishing boat and see what breaks and turns out boat, bro. Yeah. Let's do it.
Speaker 6:Yeah. You'll find like the, you know, the the SpaceX
Speaker 3:Put the gun on the truck. That's not Where
Speaker 1:are you doing this, Byron?
Speaker 3:No. Yeah. This is John's like bit on a That's not Allent Control system where he's like, oh, the the gun on the truck company.
Speaker 1:But they failed to consider that there's a YC company. There's just gun on the ground.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Nine mothers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Nine mothers. Just gone on the
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Multiple use cases. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Gun on everything, I suppose. Anyway, congratulations on the fund. Congratulations on it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Decade in. True. Decades to go. That's that's the idea.
Speaker 6:You know, we we if you look at our website, cantos.vc, we have these plaques and sort of our version of Trajan's column because we aspire to back people whose companies will be engraved in stone and metal in a thousand years. And if that's not you, don't email us.
Speaker 3:I love it. I love it. Know who your know who your your customers are.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Hit the gong for us. I want you to take them for a spin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Take this. This guy's big whacked out thing. Interesting. Thank you for watching TBPN.
Speaker 1:We'll be back tomorrow at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 3:Hang out with us. We'll close it out.
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