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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 06/17/2026. We are live from the TV panel to end the tunnel technology, the purchase of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:Big show today.
Speaker 2:Big show today. Lots of guests coming on. We got newcomer coming on. Mark Gurman's coming on. I
Speaker 1:am super excited for Eric to join.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't have time to listen to that many podcasts, but I love listening to Eric.
Speaker 2:He's been on an absolute tear. His Kara Swisher interview was very good. His Ed Zitrin interview was very good. He's been
Speaker 1:He throws on the gloves. Yeah. And he's almost like a Matador. He's almost like a Matador. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's interesting because, yeah, he he I don't know. He just has like a very balanced view and keeps the conversation going and pushes people and gets things going back and forth. So very excited to chop it up with him.
Speaker 1:Anyway And then we have Merrill Yeah. From Graphite Yeah. Who made one of the plays, the absolute greatest plays of the year Truly. Selling to Cursor and which, of course, shortly after that sold to SpaceX and is now up even further.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The TBPN effect, really. Graphite was a sponsor, of course. Love it.
Speaker 1:We we did as much as we could.
Speaker 2:We did.
Speaker 1:Then we have Carter.
Speaker 2:90% of the hard work.
Speaker 1:Right? Then we have Carter from m thirteen jumping on. We have doctor Swami from AWS joining and then the Gurmanator, of course, and a number of other founders.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Big show. Anyway Thanks for your Snap. Snap Spectacles. We talked about it a little bit yesterday.
Speaker 2:Feedback has been mixed. Not good. People don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Khaw's glasses? What glasses?
Speaker 2:This one. Not this one. The next one.
Speaker 1:It's This really
Speaker 2:one.
Speaker 1:It's really tough because if if a startup ship these, everyone like, they would they would they would be able to raise half
Speaker 2:After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Honestly
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:The funny big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now. That not those. That's too much. But you flip back, I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the, oh, they're big because I saw a bigger version.
Speaker 2:And I like these. They're a little bit blocky. Yeah. But it's like a style choice. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm getting I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing.
Speaker 2:I might pick up a couple pair.
Speaker 1:If a startup launched this product
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And was able to do the demos that they can do Yeah. We've tried this product. Number of the demos. That startup would would be able to raise at, I would say, easily 1,000,000,000 just based on current market conditions. But they're a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a, you know, public company that has spent somewhere in the range of 3 and a half billion dollars building this product.
Speaker 1:So The the feedback from the market Yeah. Has not been great from Stocks activists has not been great.
Speaker 2:2% of the last five years and just in the last five days down another eight and a half percent. And Evan Spiegels has had been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. We'll we'll see where all this goes. The question is like how how expensive is this effort? How how core to the business is it?
Speaker 2:How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect should be an AI winner. You know? Just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation, you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era, clearly, a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early days when the stock was up, when the market was booming.
Speaker 2:And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the AI era, not the wearables era. But
Speaker 1:Tyler in the chat says, snapped down 92% since peak
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Per So you can imagine a lot of the a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But to be fair bandwidth. Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. I know, I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap. It must have been ten years ago.
Speaker 2:And they bought a couple of companies and have been working on this. Then, of course, they did have the first version of Spectacles which were like the Meta Ray Ban displays or the Meta Ray Bans. No screen but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received but never quite got to escape velocity where it really moved the needle for the business. But very clear, you know, interesting R and D thinking.
Speaker 2:Anyway, Evan Spiegel is gonna have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gurrell because Brandon Gurrell came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, I don't I don't think I get it. And I'm like, that's fine. We'll we'll read through your piece. We'll we'll take we'll we'll steel man it. I'll steel man it.
Speaker 2:No problem. But first, I'm gonna steel man CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:I think it can steel man itself, though. It can't steel man itself, honestly.
Speaker 2:Let's get through Brandon's.
Speaker 1:Hit it.
Speaker 2:So Snapchat showed off Specs, its new augmented reality glasses at Augmented World Expo twenty twenty six yesterday. Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver pair of glasses that you'd have on all the time, everywhere. Maps, HUD, review of restaurants in your visual field, prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards and more general AI powered assistance stuff like measuring distances for you so you don't have to use a tape measure.
Speaker 2:The broad mix of features combined with the facts that specs are fairly pricey, dollars 2,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear. So Brandon Gurrell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs, the the what do they call that? The The bar? What's that thing on the on the glasses that goes in the back? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Whatever that thing is, it's a little thick. It's a little heavy. There's a battery back there, probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. You imagine wearing that for four hours, maybe it gets a little bit tiring.
Speaker 2:We will see how
Speaker 1:Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear. He's training. He sees Zac is is, you know, gotten into MMA. He doesn't want to be left behind. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we don't know.
Speaker 2:So Brandon asked Tyler
Speaker 1:says it is the arm
Speaker 2:The arm.
Speaker 1:Of the sunglasses.
Speaker 2:It was
Speaker 1:Oh, Tyler's
Speaker 2:Tyler's Yeah. Going to Tyler's going to the Midjourney event Yeah. Which will also be interesting. There there's a whole bunch of interesting hardware stuff happening in the midst of the AI boom. Midjourney's launching a hardware device tonight.
Speaker 2:No one knows exactly what it is. Surprising, it hasn't leaked.
Speaker 1:They gotta lock down over
Speaker 2:there. They gotta lock down. It's great. Also, I I think maybe journalists don't think it's like the hottest scoop to go after, but still really impressive. I'm on the edge of my seat to figure out what they launched because incredibly talented team, incredible business, incredible founder.
Speaker 2:And David Holes, the founder of Midjourney, started Magic Leap, an augmented reality or a virtual reality company that would track your hand over this little device that was sort of the size of a stick of gum, basically. And you could strap it to the front of a Oculus Rift and it would track your hands while you were in VR. That company, at one point, sold to Apple almost and then got rolled back and and then sold to another company and raised a bunch of money and then David ran it all up again with Midjourney. It's a great story. Anyway, I love I love the Midjourney story.
Speaker 2:But I'm very excited
Speaker 1:about Back the to specs.
Speaker 2:Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really gonna drop over two k so they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin. I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a is this a is this something that has, like, badge value if you pull out, like, nice range finder, like a title list bag or something with a with a great brand?
Speaker 2:So it feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA tour. The the the heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really so
Speaker 1:many cool use cases.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But are any of them
Speaker 2:Is that true?
Speaker 1:Killer use cases. No. I'm just saying
Speaker 2:Is that true?
Speaker 1:I'm saying like that's a cool use case. You're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is gonna fit into your room. I don't Yeah. I can I I do that Mentally? When I'm doing
Speaker 2:You do it in your
Speaker 1:Like, if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that. But that's like a specific moment in time. Yeah. Maybe once every couple years at most. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot
Speaker 1:of people Yeah. I feel like, you know, some people are kinda constantly adding furniture here and there, but a lot of people, it's kinda you Yeah. Set it and forget it. So, Very very like, again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time.
Speaker 2:Glasses. I'm googling Robert De Niro's Casino Glasses. Yeah. These are pretty pretty bulky here. We can we can share this in the chat here.
Speaker 2:Boom. Pull those up. Let's continue. So you can buy rangefinders for around a $150. They're not fragile.
Speaker 2:Also, a lot of golf got a lot of golf heads, they're out there for more than the battery life. They're more they're out there for more than three, three and a half hours. Three and a half hours might be enough for nine on a busy course. They're doing six hours out there sometimes. So you don't want be out there with your going to reality glasses and they die on you.
Speaker 2:Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects. Our startup is going to be willing to drop 2 ks for every employee who wants to collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's specs page as things you can do with the glasses and the features do seem super cool. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a 2 ks price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features.
Speaker 2:I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone. Like people were already carrying phones and the iPhone was like we debated this before, but had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then the fact that it also was an iPod was an extra feature, and then the fact that it was an Internet browser was another feature. But it replaced like very, very basic things.
Speaker 1:And then we got Google. As cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, I I think it needs to replace a very a very regular everyday interaction thing like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80 inches TV. But 80 inches TVs are like $500 now. And so you got to get it to be better and you got to have enough for everyone in your household to have one and it's got to be a better experience.
Speaker 2:But in that world
Speaker 1:The other challenge is like a lot of these I mean, like a lot of these use cases I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And that's like the big Like a $2,000 Yeah. Yeah. A $2,000 device Yeah. Doesn't really align to their what I believe is their core Yeah. Demo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so Google capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this? Again, I don't think they look that bad, but there is this question of, know, is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first.
Speaker 2:I guess the taste memo never made it to snap. You're enough of a dork to have these on your face and you won't even get the chance to say, may I meet you? Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says, I think I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit.
Speaker 2:That's ridiculous. They're gonna sell a few to people that wanna demo them. There's there's fans that buy every product. Palmer Lucky has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them.
Speaker 1:Let's pull up pull up this post from a capital Yeah. Because this might be a
Speaker 2:Yeah. If we can watch this, this this actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs. You just have failed.
Speaker 2:They cost $2,195. The stock's down more than 5%. The sound effect is rest. The sound mix is really good. As well.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new The sound mix. The fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really what does this.
Speaker 3:Stock's
Speaker 2:down. So funny.
Speaker 1:The smile. I feel I feel really bad for the Snap team.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I I think this I I think like the I want them to win, but I don't I I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're gonna need Yeah. To justify further investment
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is my current unless you're Yeah. Unless, you know, Spiegel just doesn't care Yeah. And, you know, continues to double double or triple down, which is totally possible. Yeah. But I think at at a normal company, this would this would kind of be the the last shot.
Speaker 2:It's tough. You're competing with like, these hyper efficient Chinese companies. There's this company Xreal. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler.
Speaker 2:Took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple $100 and you get a screen that's like not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen screen inside, but then it projects like a 200 inch TV in front of you. And these are actually sort of it's more chopping at the daily use cases and less doing like frontier technology.
Speaker 2:So you can play video games on them because you just plug the HDMI from the Xbox into the device. And then you just have a big screen in front of you. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming, there's a whole bunch of different things you can watch movies on it. Do do the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that Xreal is on a a path to, like, commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where it's not Not
Speaker 1:to mention meta Ray Ban displays are seven ninety nine. Yeah. And I'm sure I do believe that these have more quite a bit, like more features, functionality. They have a bigger developer network.
Speaker 2:But a lot of the Ready? A lot of the killer features of like on demand AI instantiating a generative UI, answering a question for you, That can be done with a Call of Duty HUD. That can be done
Speaker 1:with a Duty. This, like, again, it's it's cool, but I I cannot don't know anyone that would do this.
Speaker 2:And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users. Like, I was I was you know, we were talking about this with YC yesterday. It is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being, free, we're not seeing breakout Apple Vision Pro development. Like the Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scott, he wants to demo it, comes with a really, really impressive demo where it finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. And and through the wall, you see this like dinosaur land.
Speaker 2:You'd love it as a dinosaur expert. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your It's like a velociraptor type Let's of double check that. And and a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels like like it almost you almost feel it because it's so it's like tracking your hand and lands. Very cool.
Speaker 2:It's like a five minute demo that the Apple team clearly worked very hard on. That feels like something that could be expanded on very cheaply in the age of vibe coding, and yet no one sees it as an economic opportunity. Developers are just they'd rather build an app for the iOS App Store. And so no one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, where is the ecosystem gonna come from if they're not selling millions and millions of units and people are ready to purchase games or see ads or do anything that could monetize a business built on the back of this platform?
Speaker 2:It's a very, very tricky proposition to get a platform like this up and running. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a 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. And Harley had some big news today. We can play a video from Shopify later in the show, but David Holes is saying you'll want to see this.
Speaker 2:They're announcing their first hardware project tomorrow, which is today at 6PM. I believe Tyler from our team will be in attendance checking it out, reporting back. Stay tuned for a livestream of our in person launch event in Francisco. If you're in town and want invite, reply below. There are a few slots left, so go check it out if you're in S.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:You know, this this hardware project, I guess, some ways is probably funded by by Meta and the licensing deal Oh, yeah. They have. The other thing about Midjourney
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Privately held company. Right? They haven't they don't have like
Speaker 2:Shareholders.
Speaker 1:Tens of thousands of shareholders that have lost money on the business. Yeah. And so it's almost like pure upside. Yeah. Whereas I think like part of the reaction to the negative reaction to Snap is like looking at all the comment looking at all the people
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You know, sharing negative things. I can imagine like 90% of those people have like owned the stock at some point Yeah. Or another Yeah. Have lost money on it. And so they're just like already inclined to have like kind of a negative view
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On anything the company does. And not not give the leadership the benefit of the doubt really in any way at all. So but very very excited for this and hardware is hard but I think the more the more shots on goal the better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil, people going back and forth. So yesterday, a former Eksa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup Taste Labs whose mission is to end AI slop. Quote, This requires turning a fuzzy subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design, her post says.
Speaker 2:More specifically, Taste is says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of vibe coded projects. They all sort of look the same. Of course, there are examples of really cool projects. But people were starting to say, Oh, this has like the vibe code look to it, or this model is not good at front end, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Her goal is to fix that. Ty's post her post was immediate immediately went viral generating tons of opinions on x and getting over a million views in twenty four hours. People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the steel man is that a the AI aesthetic AI's aesthetic output can be improved and that it's perfectly reasonable for a start up to try and capitalize on that opportunity.
Speaker 2:I want to talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you and then I have a take about where the business So I think the main
Speaker 1:thing is main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't wanna hear that word anymore. Yeah. I don't wanna hear that word anymore. Because
Speaker 2:the last six months, maybe last year it's been like the the the code word. Like, what will we do in the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and so, yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word Sure. The even the conversation. I I we've never even like waded that deeply into the conversation. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'd like to keep it that way. That being Just said
Speaker 2:to set the the table on the critique, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important and the outsiders don't see San Francisco As
Speaker 1:being tasteful.
Speaker 2:As being particularly tasteful people. Yeah. From a fashion perspective, from an art perspective or a curation perspective. It's sort of known as the t shirts and athleisure community and that's it's sort of it's optimized. Devoid of taste by design.
Speaker 2:It's about efficiency, not taste.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then and then I'll say one more thing and then and then I'll I'll steal man Taste Labs. Yeah. But so the main thing is like when I think of when I think of like taste like like product taste, like I think of like Linear. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Right? Linear has like always been very opinionated Yep. Very quality driven. They want to grow quickly because of how great the product is. Yep.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, very very design driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste. Right? The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like copying you.
Speaker 2:Right? Sure.
Speaker 1:There's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear. Right? Yeah. From their website Yep. To the actual product.
Speaker 1:And so taste is something that people curate themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But then the the as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally like not tasteful. Jumping off menu. Right? Then it's not original. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think taste has, you know, you need some originality to be able to combine combine, you know, do one plus one equals two. Mhmm. And another example is like
Speaker 2:Is it one plus one equals three?
Speaker 1:Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. One plus one equals one plus one
Speaker 2:equals equals 11.
Speaker 1:One plus one equals two. That's the that's the ad.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That fake start up ad. No. So another example is like Squarespace. Sure.
Speaker 1:Like Squarespace took like high end website design and then just monetized monetized it. Right? Anybody could have a pretty website. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you started to just I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website or Mhmm. Did this person make it? Okay. It's a Squarespace website like and not it's not really that much of a knock but like the it wasn't like the the company's own taste that led Mhmm. To that output or or the people that they worked with.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI labs Mhmm. Create better looking outputs
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And working on that problem Yep. Feels like a pretty good way to get to build a a at least temporarily a pretty big business Yeah. Because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about Totally. Hyperscalers even care about. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. And so I think that while Taste Labs, you know, got a lot of flack over the last 24 Yeah. They probably their pipeline probably exploded. And I bet they get a ton of business out of it. Yep.
Speaker 1:And very unclear what what this business looks like in, you know, five years like a lot of the other companies in the category. But I bet they I bet they print in the short term.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling
Speaker 1:So the name the name is like perfect page, babe. Yeah. Taste labs. We're building
Speaker 2:Taste.
Speaker 1:Final. Taste in a lab. We built it. We made it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful and the end product would be exactly the same because you're just that's just your negative dataset and everything else is positive by that design. But a lot of the data labeling projects have just been, does the button work? Does the does this render properly? Like, is this just is this functional?
Speaker 2:And some of that's been able to be, you know, looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded just tagging. Okay. Does the does the photo have six fingers or five fingers? Like, was a useful useful piece of data labeling that happened probably two years ago.
Speaker 2:Now there's a bigger question about what actually looks good and then how do you represent like a diversity of tasteful designs such that you don't everything just just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI generated has the exact same flavor. Like, the it's not this, it's that, but for design would be the bad outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is like already extremely easy to clock.
Speaker 2:Right now.
Speaker 1:And I got a deck last night. A friend of mine Yeah. His company. And my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design? Because it's totally possible the answer is yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is gonna know that
Speaker 2:You're slopping
Speaker 1:it up. Tried to one shot this. Yeah. Which again, for some businesses is fine and some investors is fine. But it's going to turn some people off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People are going all back and forth on this. This highlights our fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed. Even if you make AI imitate taste, whatever that means, it still won't mean anything.
Speaker 2:Taste emerges from craft, meaning, subjectivity and genuine care. That's sort of true, but just increasing the quality of design is valuable. But yes, it is a tall order when you use the word taste because so much baggage has been assigned to that. Well, you know what the most tasteful database is? It's MongoDB.
Speaker 2:What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. You know what else is tasteful?
Speaker 2:Chris Larson from Ripple has been buying an absolute absurd amount of cars recently. He got an F1 GTR, a 09/18 Spyder, a P1, a T50, an Enzo, Acesto Elemento has probably spent like 50,000,000 on cars in the past year. I think it's more than 50,000,000 if you total all those The
Speaker 1:p one he has is insane. Where is that?
Speaker 2:Is that in the comments? Green.
Speaker 1:It's a green on tan p one.
Speaker 2:Green on tan. Looking good. Post them all there on the Cesario collection on Instagram. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The dark green is a good good good image. This is quite the collection that's emerging. Well, very tasteful. You can go check it out on Instagram because we love that.
Speaker 1:Speaking of it, I mean, taste in Silicon Valley would could be a Mansory body kit on a on a Model three.
Speaker 2:Oh, which
Speaker 1:is that says, it's kind of like this high low approach. Mhmm. Says like I'm practical. Yeah. I want a car that gets me to point a to point b.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I wanna look I wanna look good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's sort of like it it it's a metaphor for taking like a sort of slop filled base model and then stuffing taste down it with a bunch of fine tuning.
Speaker 1:Because everyone when they think of Mansory, they think of like Taste. You know, really high taste.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Depends. Who will be doing the labeling? Will it be Mansory people? There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate potentially.
Speaker 2:Sources familiar with the matter, disputed semaphores reporting. There was a back there was a whole bunch of back and forth about is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war for Roku? And they're taking shots at each other. Semaphore, what you got?
Speaker 2:Ben Smith says congrats on helping with the cleanup. They could have gone to Variety and chose you. I'm not even sure what this mean tweet means, Sharon. Clean up on aisle semaphore, my dear Ben. All I'm saying is they're now saying on the record that they're not interested in Lions Gate, never were.
Speaker 2:Would have been happy to amplify your scoop They're fighting. They're fighting. The timeline's in turmoil. Anyway, we have the perfect person to discuss journalistic timeline and turmoil back and forth. I don't know.
Speaker 2:We have Eric Newcomer from Newcomer. He's the founder and writer. Welcome to the show. How are you doing there?
Speaker 6:Finally.
Speaker 2:Finally. I'm so sorry. First apologies. It's been way too long. You know I've been This
Speaker 1:should have been This
Speaker 5:should have
Speaker 2:been I'm not kidding. I've I've listened to every episode and you've been on an absolute terror and I'm sorry that we went back and forth. We both barely live in in or in Twitter d m's and so every our our chats are just like, yeah, let's do it. And then like five days later, oh, sorry, dropped it. Oh, sorry, I dropped it.
Speaker 2:But anyway, I'm glad you're here. How are doing?
Speaker 5:Here here we are. You know, I tweeted, this is a big moment for me. I'm glad. Literally, I'm having Ben Smith recording my podcast tomorrow. So couldn't have been a better
Speaker 2:You can get to the bottom of
Speaker 5:I've even dug into this. So it's like you're giving me notes
Speaker 1:Materials. Yes.
Speaker 5:To ask him about it.
Speaker 2:You gotta ask him the hard questions. What happened with the minor scoop around?
Speaker 1:I You have the landscape. I I really we were saying it when the show kicked off.
Speaker 2:Generational run.
Speaker 1:Generational run with Generational run. And and I when I listen to your show, I I'm like taking notes. Because like you you actually have a really I was calling you like Matador. Oh, yeah. You're with like you're with like a bull and you're trying to get them to like kinda run at you but then they run at you and then and you sidestep.
Speaker 2:It's really good.
Speaker 1:It's really good.
Speaker 2:And And it's just I I don't know. It's very kind.
Speaker 7:Do you
Speaker 2:feel like you op you occupy like an interesting space? Because I feel like you're not some like tech optimist pumper insider. Right? Like you have, you know, what, six years in Bloomberg serious journalistic chops. But then you interact with people who come at you with, like, crazy anti tech takes and you're able to sort of, like, play the pro tech guy in some ways.
Speaker 2:It's very confusing sometimes.
Speaker 5:You know, I I'm someone who came up through journalism.
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 5:I was working the last guy in through the normal, like, I was in my hometown paper, the Macon Telegraph, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, New York Times, like interning my way up, just doing the journalism thing. Thank God Jessica Lesson brought me to work for the information. I was first employee. So I was like, oh No way. Silicon Valley thing.
Speaker 5:Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was working out of her, like, apartment in Dolores Park. Cool.
Speaker 5:And then I, yeah, worked at Bloomberg for six years. Yeah. And, you know, started to really get Silicon Valley. And so when I launched Newcomer, I did write that I wanted contrarian optimism. You know, I I felt like I started my time as a tech reporter being more negative than most because that was the era of Sure.
Speaker 5:You know, sort of the gadget blogger. And then by the end of my time at Bloomberg, we had sort of the infiltration of, you know, the political reporter who was really gunning for Yeah. Facebook or whatever. And so it went from everybody's too soft to everyone's too negative. And I really just wanted to write for, like, your audience, you know, people in Silicon Valley, people who got it, didn't wanna have to explain who Marc Andreessen and Ben, you know Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And Bill Gurley were and just sort of write for the people. And sometimes that's positive, sometimes that's negative. Puts me in a sort of weird situation sometimes.
Speaker 2:So I I feel like I'm also having trouble putting you in a bucket as like commentary interviewer, scoop master, scoop athlete. You get some scoops but it's not the only thing that you do. Like we talk to a lot of people who are just great yappers and they've never gotten a scoop and that's fine. And they have great commentary and they can talk about anything that's amazing. And then there's other people who are just great interviewers and they every week they're delivering like a best guest.
Speaker 2:And then there's other people who are the scoop athletes and you never really hear them give a take or their opinion but they're like pestering everyone in signal all day long I suppose. But is that by design? Is that something you see like fragmenting over time as you build the organization? Like what is there a method to the madness or is it just like you enjoy all three things so you bit down
Speaker 5:you know, you do best what you enjoy. Never heard anyone call me an athlete before a Scoop athlete.
Speaker 2:The Scoop doggy dog. I think
Speaker 5:Scoop you know, we're essential reading. Think the best takes are ones where, you know, you go talk to people who know and then you're
Speaker 2:like Yeah. It's not just like
Speaker 5:I made this up. It's like, yeah, I talk to people. It's gonna be the right. You know, I want my predictions
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To come true. I think the best coverage, you know, doesn't just sit down smart today. You know, you look back and you're like, oh, we saying Google was undervalued when stock, you know, wasn't getting the credit. You know, you wanna feel like we were right. Like, look back and read the record and that's how you build a
Speaker 1:record financial advice?
Speaker 5:I want people to make money. I wanted to I was not, you know that's not the goal, but I want people to read it and they make more money and so it feels like it's worth subscribing. But yeah, we do we do whatever we want, you know. Yeah. Newcomer, it's from in a
Speaker 2:the content Yeah. From a personality driven, but you do have other folks on staff. And then diversity of revenue streams, right? Ads, subscriptions, and events. Like was that deliberate on day one?
Speaker 2:I feel like a lot of people focus like don't know. It's interesting. It's worked, but it's like it feels contrarian in the new media sense because most people just be like, oh, I want to be like Ben Thompson only subscriptions or TBPN's only ads or someone's like really in the conference business or they do that like way later. It feels like you were able to land three planes simultaneously pretty quickly.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I mean, today, event sponsorship is our main revenue stream with newsletter subscriptions being our second Mhmm. Largest. I mean, I did the Substack thing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:In 2020 in the pandemic, and it was like, this seems like fun. Finally, something in startup world applies to me. I'll jump on that. And I was one of the top tech Substacks. 2023, I had not jumped on crypto.
Speaker 5:Right? Like, I'm sort of a crypto hater. But 2023, I'm like, I don't know, chattybt, this seems real. You know? This is actually the tech trend that people have been waiting for, not something that was, like, getting ginned up.
Speaker 5:So I had access to a beautiful office in Hayes Valley, my friends. Now their company is Weekend. We put on the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. It was just sort like this worked. People were enthusiastic.
Speaker 5:You know, Ali Goodsey connected with Naveen Rao and Mosaic ML acquired the company for $1,300,000,000. You don't get better press than that,
Speaker 2:you know? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Business Insider put in a beautiful headline, you know. Yeah. And so we were off to the races. We're literally doing our mid year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Next week. So ramping up for that. So, it's events, subscriptions, trying to I'm out I'm out hustling trying to follow your sponsorship playbook. So if you want to put in a good word for people, the newcomer all around, like I'd
Speaker 2:love it. I mean, the the the or the pre roll or the mid roll host red ad in your podcast I think would do very well. And I and I I mean I I I like that it there's no ads when you're sparring with somebody. But you did have the mic drop at the end of the at the end of the Ed Zitrin episode, which I very much enjoyed. And, yeah, if you'd snuck it out in there, would have been like, you earned it, you know?
Speaker 2:Would have been good. Yeah. Anyway, talk about about how you're thinking about covering some of the big stories right now. Like, SpaceX is is dominating the news, but it's an interesting company to cover because Elon's like one of the first like go direct CEOs. He doesn't do a lot of like management interviews.
Speaker 2:You you don't really like do interviews with other people. Like we have somebody from we we have a VP of Agenic AI from AWS coming on the show. They're happy to talk up and down the stack. You don't get that access at SpaceX necessarily. How do you think about what your audience wants to hear from you on SpaceX?
Speaker 5:I mean, yeah. They control their own social media network. Yeah. They can publish directly.
Speaker 2:What do they mean? Apparently, they're not doing SEC filings or something. Do you see this? They're not doing conference calls? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just doing on X. But those are putting on X. It's hilarious.
Speaker 5:I mean, for the most part, the newsletter really covers, you know, earlier stage startups. On our sort of Friday is like a step back and so we cover SpaceX a lot there. I mean, all this money is about to flow into Silicon Valley. So just everybody getting rich and that being great for the startup ecosystem is definitely one theme, and who's getting rich and who got in early
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Is certainly important to us. And then, we can't help ourselves but say this is like madness. I feel like even people buying the shares
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, know that it's sort of a part psychological stock where it's like, well, are is there other money that's gonna come in that's gonna boost this thing up? And it, you know, as someone who's fairly bullish on Anthropic
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And OpenAI to some degree, like, SpaceX just feels like total lunacy given the sort of insane TAM story that you have to believe.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You're getting some of our commentary that it feels it feels somewhat ludicrous but trying to root it
Speaker 2:in Yeah.
Speaker 5:The s one and just keeping it in the numbers
Speaker 2:these seems valuable.
Speaker 1:Reporting on where where the SpaceX employees are gonna be doing their, you know, upcoming purchasing activity. Homes. There's like There's variety. Get ahead of No. There's like there's there's there's like a variety of like communities where
Speaker 2:Are you gonna say the one you're thinking of?
Speaker 3:If you
Speaker 1:look at them, there's only a few homes listed. And I'm like, I know like I I was There's like a There's a car club. This this this Oh, yeah. Race track and it's called Willow Springs. It's an old race track.
Speaker 1:They're putting a car club there. I I I know for a fact that a bunch of them are signing up I'm a little bit I'm a little bit nervous that there's that share too many interests with the SpaceX
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. Being priced
Speaker 2:out, buddies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. One one less, I guess, serious question. Do you think mocking VC should be illegal? Because there's been a little bit of a of a some drama on the timeline.
Speaker 2:Or do you think in in in if you take if you major in venture capital in college, they should teach you about the Streisand effect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Might be another one.
Speaker 1:No. But there's been some drama on the timeline this week with with VC Braggs and I'm just I'm wondering, you know, Silicon Valley has a lot of power in Washington right now and I'm wondering if now is the time to push to make it just straight up illegal to
Speaker 5:And end the scourge, like it's it's just Yeah. You know, I You know, we tweak we tweak venture capitalists. I get venture capitalists. Guess I'm humoralist list humoralist on this. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I don't know. I VC always needs to be better at taking taking criticism. Sometimes you're up. Sometimes you're down. It's like better to be in the mix.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, the SaaS, you know, gets helps you clean up your message a little bit. So I'm I'm always Oh.
Speaker 2:I enjoy that. Sorry. S a s s not s a a s. Yes. It's like SaaS.
Speaker 2:I I mean that that that does get to something else which is like do you are do you get AI fatigue like we do sometimes where we're like, oh. Like the Snap Spectacles thing we spent twenty minutes on at the top of the show. And like is it the most consequential story, consequential is technology? It's an $8,000,000,000 company. It's a new consumer product.
Speaker 2:But it's something that's like tangible that at least you can like dig into. How do you balance like what is tangible and interesting to the reader with where the market cap is actually moving, which might be at the Frontier Labs or the Databricks of the world that's a little more abstract?
Speaker 5:I feel so lucky to cover venture capital because you get to cover interesting stuff. That makes a lot of money. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, I could
Speaker 5:I could write about oil and gas and it's like you'd fall to dollars, but it's like super boring.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 5:To me, venture's already pretty exciting. Like, writing about AI, you get to talk about
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Artificial general intelligence Yeah. And like, whether it's sentient. And these have like it has real like business consequences. So I don't really get tired of the AI story. I mean, certainly, AI is dominating, you know, basically all the investment activities.
Speaker 5:So it becomes a huge focus of ours. So, no, I'm less likely to get dragged into the Snap Spectacle stuff. I mean, it's always fun to watch for new hardware, but just this this question of, you know, are workers getting totally disrupted? Will, you know, change the course of American business? We have these enormous IPOs.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. So it's one of the more enjoyable times to be a business reporter where the stuff you wanna write about, which is a new intelligence being birthed by Silicon Valley matches, you know, the market caps and what's interesting. And so following the money for the most part has been, you know, a super gratifying story. And so we tend we tend to stay pretty focused on that.
Speaker 2:How are you answering that question of, like, job displacement? Obviously, there's, like, economic numbers. There's also just sort of reverting back to, your own personal experience. Like, are you seeing competition on Substack from, like, slop farms?
Speaker 5:Definitely. Yeah. I think Tim Ferriss
Speaker 2:just wrote about this.
Speaker 5:There's at least one guy clearly ranked above me who's using AI to write the stuff which is just fascinating.
Speaker 2:And where does that leave like like, have you have you have you grappled with, like, what the response is? Because it feels like the the like, the scoops are very, very protected in this or, like, AI resistant, but maybe, you know, history or breaking down or analyzing or taking a press release that's already out there, synthesizing some data in history, that's maybe a little bit more commoditized. But how are you grappling with it?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, think coming from a perspective, being a person, so transcending just a writing style, but it is literally
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Someone in a publication is accountable is defensible. But certainly as the sort of writing quality of AI gets better and better, I'm I'm I'm not ruling out the possibility that it's super disruptive. Yeah. Like you said, scoops. I think the sense that, you know, the information is coming from real humans that, like, I'm in the business of knowing what other humans Mhmm.
Speaker 5:Are thinking is fairly defensible. But, you know, we're using AI to build, you know, like our ticketing platform for our events.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:One one of my reporters was talking about using it just to build his own, like, story tracker. I I think we're trying to be creative. Like, I'm I don't want sort of AI written stuff in our stories, but I do sort of have ex existential questions about, you know, like the fifth sentence in the third paragraph. Yeah. AI puts out a better version than you were gonna spend the time to do.
Speaker 5:Is it really a disservice to readers that you went in and like punched that up? And I, you know, I think it it's probably good for readers. So it's hard to have this super hard line of all Yeah. Human written stuff because we certainly want it for It's a great copy editor. You know, I pay a human copy editor, but still I run stuff through Claude and it's amazing how much it's catching both, you know, it'll catch like million billion type errors Oh, and obviously all sorts of minor typos.
Speaker 5:So
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm imagining that, like, I I I feel no, like, sadness about you never writing the line they declined to comment ever again. Like it is it is fine Right. If that is it can be a Python script. It doesn't even need to be Gen AI.
Speaker 2:It can just be like an if statement because that line is in so many news articles.
Speaker 5:We can have ones that's like take out all the perfunctory lines of stories that they feel inclined to put, then you can, you know
Speaker 2:I would like that version a lot of When
Speaker 1:you think about disruption for for like a newsletter or media business, however however you wanna describe it, the the only person that I think would actually be able to compete like, you weirdly need, like, a network. You need, like, trust. You need, like, you need there there's so much, like, information that I would say informs your work and and other other journalists that that run similar businesses that's just like not anywhere online. Like it truly only exists in, you know, a small like group chat or or places like that. And so the question is like, I don't think a fully I don't think AI can like actually just like somebody with AI that is able to build up the trust and the network and the kind of understanding of the space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That person is like, if they're willing to just use more AI than you and like they don't care about like the slop allegations or whatever, then maybe they have some type of advantage. But I still feel like more than more than ever, there's so much information that that you need to run a great media business that is not anywhere on the Internet. It's not in podcasts. It's not on acts.
Speaker 1:It's you just have to go actually talk to people.
Speaker 5:We we play nice with Art for Rock. But honestly, it's, you know, people in the industry giving it away for free. Mhmm. You know, the desperation for basically content marketing, meaning that some people do a good job of taking sort of their data and using it to to get attention. Like, you think about, I don't know, ramps AI spend data or something.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, that stuff, you know, used to be sort of the fodder of like a Wall Street Journal type story. And so to some degree, I think everyone being smarter that they need to have actually like great content to get people to pay attention
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is is one of the vectors of attack not attack on media, but just competitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, walk me through the the ramp AI spend is like an example of like going direct in the sense that they publish themselves, they tweet about it, they go on podcasts about it. The ADP jobs data just gets released on a newswire and then contextualized by the Wall Street Journal. But if ADP all of a sudden hired some really charismatic employee to go on podcasts, that would be like the same effect
Speaker 5:the old way of doing it would be you try to embargo it to Sure. A couple outlets Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 5:they felt like they were really getting something. So then their readers feel that this is a differentiated thing that they're receiving incrementally more reason to subscribe to that publication. So so it it used to be a dance that you'd basically be giving Mhmm. The media sort of favor and sort of unique access Mhmm. That that we sort of lose over time.
Speaker 2:I have a question.
Speaker 1:Do you, ten years from now, would you Can you imagine having, you know, ten, twenty journalists 10, on staff joining joining forces, you know, sort of rebundling? Or do you like being unbundled?
Speaker 5:I I mean, you know, I have, you know, Madeleine Renbarger, Tom Doton, Jonathan Weber writing for me now and they're sort of a core part of what Newcomer is today. And certainly, you know, with unlimited resources, part of what I wanna spend the money on is great journalism, It's good sort of It's amazing that, you know, most cynically, like, our content marketing for events is profitable, generates subscription revenue, people demonstrate real value, you know. It's like you The the journalism provides of a great way to remind people about the amazing events we're putting on. And so I think it's super synergistic. So yeah, I'd love to keep building up a newsroom, but I don't really believe in a sort of re bundling of SubStax.
Speaker 5:Like part of it we're all building separate brands, you know. Newcomer has its own brand proposition. And a lot of the other sub stacks people like just are sort of, you know, I love reason. Lenny is like crushing it. Right?
Speaker 5:But Yeah. It's a very different thing focused on product managers. And so if you even look at tech and business sub stacks, we're so different that I've never really been a believer that there's gonna be a rebundling in that sense. But some publications like the Free Press or the Ankler Yeah. Myself get to a level of scale where we become start to look more like publications.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It certainly didn't really happen on YouTube. Like, there are a whole bunch of different creators and MrBeast has a whole team and offshoot channels, but with the MrBeast brand and the promise and the editing and but but they it was never like, oh, MrBeast is roll up other creators because that's not the way the the setup has worked. Talk to me about Mafia. I think we agree It's not.
Speaker 2:That we don't need other venture capital firms with game shows but
Speaker 5:Don't copy copy TBPN and do a new thing. Yes.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And and I I love that for that reason. But do we need a game show with just journalist competitors? Like an American Ninja Warrior with just sub stackers. What do you think about that pitch?
Speaker 1:Or Nitro Circus.
Speaker 2:Nitro Circus would be good.
Speaker 5:I'm not building my business around it. I'm happy to go on.
Speaker 2:You you participate?
Speaker 5:As yeah. Yeah. Sign me up. But as you guys know, the challenge of media is sustaining it. Right?
Speaker 5:Sure. Like, I mean and kudos Yeah. To Mike Solano at Pirate Wires. Obviously, he's delivering day in and day out. He gets it.
Speaker 5:But I do think for like show concepts, it's fun to get excited about the idea. Yeah. But the business is in the long term, like, there variety? Do you have something great day in and day out? So some of these things, it's like, yeah, when you have, you know, the top people you'd want for a mafia show, it's exciting.
Speaker 5:But is there like fifth episode with you know the c tier founders is much of a sort of much watch must watch on
Speaker 2:on But that's what's interesting about mafia is that it's not a new company. It's not an enterprise that needs to sustain. It can be just
Speaker 5:A fun thing.
Speaker 2:A fun thing that goes as long as it needs to. It doesn't overstay its welcome because it's not this self provide because they have 60,000,000,000 in SpaceX coming to to to hire some camera crews that they need. You know Right. Like that that that is the nature of like I'm I'm I'm I
Speaker 5:haven't watched I I have not watched the full thing. Tom Doton on my team wrote wrote the piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But I do think, you know, the traders is so exaggerated and there's a reason for it. I still I I'm not saying that I could host it that way but there is a reason that Hollywood and the TV business is so exaggerated.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And I I think they still need to up it e even more, the the the sort of drama of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I saw some people like chirping at the fact like it only had a 100,000 views on YouTube and I'm like that is insane for tech. Yeah. Insane.
Speaker 2:Totally the greatest. And and like like who like like the the the the guests like who knows There's these only a couple.
Speaker 5:Couple in tech world
Speaker 2:right now. There's only like a couple thousand founders that matter to a top tier venture capital firm. There's only a couple founders that couple thousand founders that even know who these people are. Of course, like, some of the contestants were bigger names, but but by and large, these are insiders around the table.
Speaker 5:It worked for Chase Gunners Fund's money, but now that Trey is great. Yeah. They're in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:How how are you thinking about the evolution of the tier one? It feel the tier one VC. It feels like the tier one the tier one VCs of of, you know, when you started newcomer are not the same the same today. They're they're constantly spicy. This is the
Speaker 5:the question of all questions. I mean, I wanna say first of all, I mean, I I would always I'd put Sequoia, I guess, number one to to answer the question. I think I wrote a piece
Speaker 1:Well, I'm not even telling you I'm not I'm not even telling you like to to give me Name them all? Uh-huh. Name them all. But but you're welcome you're welcome to, but this this will be a scoop for us.
Speaker 2:This will be a scoop for us.
Speaker 5:Who do I think are the top top No.
Speaker 1:No. I I just mean like to me to me there's been a very like a very very material shift and no one has like really said it out loud. Mhmm. Like there hasn't been I think you'd be in a position to actually do this because you have to go talk to the top 100 founders Yeah. Under $10,000,000,000 market cap or below and say like at series a, you basically like make them choose who they would pick Yeah.
Speaker 1:Every single round.
Speaker 2:You've done this. Right?
Speaker 1:And and there's been there's been some like random there's been some like random kind of like surveys Yeah. And like games that you can play to try to get at it. But like, I think if you actually had it like, you were What was the
Speaker 5:core job? I've seen this idea on Twitter. Like Yeah. And people who is the firm or who where's the real switch? Or who do you think the swaps would be?
Speaker 1:I just I think that there's a very at least when I talk to founders, like, founders wanna work with not necessarily like other founders, as in like a founder who had an IPO, but they wanna work with the founders of the firms. And so there's like a new generation of like, you know, the Thrives and the and the Green Oaks and things like that, where where I see them as like really really
Speaker 5:Probably is dominating. They would Yeah. Were certainly coming up soon on my list.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And like and and, you know, when you get in a situation like hyper competitive like series a, series b, like those guys are like really sharks. Right? And like where do they where do they where do they, you know, fit in?
Speaker 2:The fall off of Arthur Rock, not our fur rock, but the original Arthur Rock needs to be studied. The guy funded Apple, Intel, absolutely insane portfolio, goes out investing with Bernie Madoff. He gets outed for that in 2009. There's a firm that really fell off from the top
Speaker 1:did he just get screwed by Bernie or he was
Speaker 2:He probably got screwed. It's not even that bad but I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, how much do you think returns are gonna drive this? Right? In the cool venture story, like getting in Anthropic right now or obviously Yeah. Making much money on SpaceX, it's like you look at Spark doing the round that people underestimated. That that's clearly been really good for them.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, Lightspeed dumped a ton of money. Yeah. And and Menlo, you know, I think it was key key to them. So there are firms where I think it's had a big impact on their reputation, but I don't know if that matches.
Speaker 1:I think that's helpful I think that's helpful with LLP's, but like the reason that it's an interesting question is like, okay, who has the best overall brands? Right? Who has like the most like halo? Who how which which firms do founders actually wanna work with? Right?
Speaker 1:Who has the most who has like the most access to capital? Like, all these things factor in. Who did like who did the the
Speaker 2:Elo. Like, if you
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Between these two firms, which one are you picking?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, people that bet on Anthropic
Speaker 2:But that's completely different thing from actually measuring the quality of the venture capital business that is being built. And people still conflate two different goals. One is the the sexy seed round to multibillion dollar exit in a very short amount of time. Cursor is a great example of, like, it's just classic venture capital. You got in sub 1,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:You were out at 60 within three years. It's just incredible venture auto. Right? Incredible venture capital. But then but then there's a different game where that investment returns 3,000,000,000 in three years.
Speaker 2:And then there's a different one where you put 10,000,000,000 in a lab at 500,000,000,000 and it doubled and so you made more money. And in the at the end of the game these venture capital firms are businesses. The job is to return cash flow like to create cash. And so, yeah, oh this fund had to raise more money. That's not really a critique.
Speaker 2:That's a critique of like what's the definition of venture capital? Should we include growth stage investing in that? Should we include your public business in there? But like as a financier, as an entrepreneur of a financial company, all you care about is how much cash are you returning to your investors and to your GPs. And so there's two very different games that are being played.
Speaker 2:One is for clout and credibility and the other is just how much raw cash is this business throwing off? What's the value of the firm?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I look at it like when I when I in the in the most simple view, I think about a a series a or a series b and a founder gets 10 term sheets hypothetically. And then you run that and you ask a, you know, a 100 founders that, like who comes out in the top three. That that to me is like the most interesting because that's like a generally gonna be a leading indicator for like who Sure. Who has the most aura, you know, kind of
Speaker 2:The aura list. The newcomer
Speaker 1:aura list. The newcomer oralist.
Speaker 5:We've done we did Founders Choice a while ago Yeah. Which was these guys.
Speaker 2:Elo.
Speaker 5:Right? That was more like, you know, it was a little more like founder friendly experience. We've published, you know, an LP did a survey of manager. So we we try to there's so many different ways to slice it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And yeah. I I mean, getting great returns, I think it has some impact on, you know, you know, you're heft with founders. Founders like winners, people who are making a bunch of money. But I agree, you can't just look at returns and say those are the ones that are gonna get picked
Speaker 2:by There's also an interesting dynamic particularly with Sequoia where for a long time they had a reputation as being like not particularly founder friendly. I mean, it is the genesis of Founders Fund is like the whole PayPal drama around Sequoia, right? And it's like, what if there was a firm that was founder friendly? And then that went off and happened. And now, obviously, there's an entirely new team there.
Speaker 2:It's a new strategy. But I talked to founders who are like, yeah, they're not friendly and I'm getting in the gladiatorial arena with them. Like it's a lion and I'm going to ride it. Like and they're excited by that and they're like, yeah, if I don't put up insane returns they're going to fire me. That's encouraging.
Speaker 2:Like I need that. I need to grind harder. And so there's this weird thing where if you're measuring just on like who will have your back unconditionally, there could be some really terrible venture capitalist out there who's not going to help you but also never going to fire you. And they're just kind of like, yeah, I gave you their dumb money. But so there's a lot more to the shape of like the thing but that adds aura too because like you can be I mean we had Andrew Reed on the show and he said Sequoia won't stab you in the back, we'll stab you in the front.
Speaker 2:I was like, that is high aura.
Speaker 5:From their lips.
Speaker 2:I and I'm like, I I mean, I'm not in a position to raise my arms to go ahead right now, but like, I was like, I kinda wanna work with Andrew. Like, after that, that's great. Like, I like that. And that is a good good defining line there. Anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think, you know, good founders like tough investors. Yeah. But, yeah. I I agree.
Speaker 5:You know, competition and capitalism forced all these venture funds to realize that founders were their main customer and Yeah. Therefore they needed to say they were super founder friendly. And, you know, I I think Benchmark's doing a good job with the rebuild but having
Speaker 2:Ship them a thesis.
Speaker 5:Travis and Emile running around being like, hey, screw founders over. Like, I don't
Speaker 2:It's like Ev Randall was drinking beers in college when that happened. Okay? Let's back off of that truck for a little bit. Let's not visit the son or the sins of the father on the son. Right?
Speaker 2:Is that in the bible? On on this list, I you know, the competing with the Midas list or doing some other list or like how valuable are lists in terms of like actual moving the needle for your business? Like early on at TBPN, we did the the Metas list, which was like a list of AI researchers and it converted a decent amount of email subscribers because we had like an email capture flow. We weren't like directly monetizing it, it was an interesting experience. We did a couple of those like sort of stunts.
Speaker 2:But I'm interested to know from your perspective, is that is that less of a priority? I always hear that like scoops get people to to to pay. They jump the paywall after a scoop. They got to read it. Whereas an opinion piece might not.
Speaker 2:Even if it's going viral, people might just summarize it.
Speaker 5:We we did a survey with wing of top venture capitalists Oh, to rank up and coming companies. And that does really well. It's like great marketing for us, you know. Everybody on the list tweets it out. Yep.
Speaker 5:But we we don't really put much behind a paywall because it's sort of meant to be read. And so then it's not a very good like subscription driver. It's more just like brand building awareness influence. And so so really the challenge of any list is are you gonna put it behind the paywall? And for the most most of the time, you wouldn't Yeah.
Speaker 5:Because you want it to get shared. And so I think they're good for brand and, like, list building, but not great for subscriptions. Whereas putting, like, documents or behind the paywall, you're gonna get this resource of companies that you might invest in or whatever. You know? Behind a paywall, you know what you're paying for and so people are just much more likely to convert.
Speaker 5:So, you know, I when that LP I mentioned earlier did a survey about venture firms, you know, we put that behind a paywall. I think that did very well. So if we're willing to put it behind the paywall, they can do well. But for the most part, the list you're talking about, you know, we Yeah. We keep in front of the paywall.
Speaker 2:I feel like there's still I I feel like a lot of people ascribe the the value in the Midas list and what Forbes does to just the fact that it's a list and everyone wants to be on it and it has, like, legacy and brand and that's real. But underrated is how incredible the photography is in a Forbes feature. You can hire a a great photographer and still not hit that level of like magazine covered look. And if you offer that to someone who's going to win the list, if they understand media and the power of like a really high quality photograph and a and a photo that will live on and sort of immortalize them for like maybe a decade, you see a lot of people and their top Google result is still that cover that they did when their company hit unicorn status or something. You're like, wow, they look great there.
Speaker 2:And then you meet them in person and they're like, oh, was a decade ago. Got some gray hairs now. But but offering that as like a trade is a is a interesting interesting
Speaker 5:had like two photographers running around our last Super Bowl Valley event. So I couldn't agree you more. They like getting great photos of these people out of these events
Speaker 2:different than just the LinkedIn profile photo against the wall. Something that has action, background, texture, like, these things are harder to recreate than people think. They they take it for granted because they show up everywhere, but they're usually because of a special thing. Nothing's higher status than the only thing higher status than the the Midas list is the the Alami stock photo watermark, Getty images watermark at Sun Valley. That is the highest status symbol in Silicon Valley in my opinion.
Speaker 2:You can't you can't buy it.
Speaker 1:I just have one more question. Are you going to voluntarily switch to API based billing for your AI usage?
Speaker 5:Because because I'm corrupt for Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He said you you said AI was useful. You said
Speaker 2:Call out.
Speaker 5:And Citron has this view that journalists shouldn't be getting monthly subscriptions because they're falsely subsidized and we're under we're not really paying what it costs.
Speaker 2:Sure. We need to be paying $8,000 of cost. Don't think I'm that much
Speaker 5:hyper like, I I think Plaud and OpenAI Yeah. And Robbin and OpenAI are getting a better deal out of me probably than I'm using. I'm not I'm not sure I'm getting this arbitrage.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. You can run those those prompts of, like, estimate the number of tokens that I've used over time. And, like, a lot of people run that and they're like, wow. I've been paying $200 for like $20 worth of tokens like they're off of
Speaker 5:I think I'm getting had. Not the other
Speaker 2:way around right now. Yeah. Is AI useful? We'll figure it out eventually. We'll figure
Speaker 1:it out. Figure it out together.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for taking the time. This is ton of fun. Let's do it again. Amazing.
Speaker 5:So happy to do it.
Speaker 2:Well, long time we saved we saved this for you know today. It's been really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.
Speaker 1:Later.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex since we're talking about it. Codex is the most tasteful workspace for no. Powerful workspace for getting work done tastefully with AI agents whether you're tastefully writing code, tastefully analyzing data, creating tasteful content or automating tasteful business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to tasteful.
Speaker 2:Usually. Usually.
Speaker 1:Next, we have Merrill.
Speaker 2:This is a scoop. Getting a SpaceX employee on the show is difficult. Not many people can do it, but we can because we got Merrill. How you doing?
Speaker 1:Rocket man.
Speaker 2:Doing great. Rocket man. It's rocket man. Dweep, I I wanna go way back in time. Did you ever have the I wanna work for a rocket company as a kid?
Speaker 2:I wanna be an astronaut because you sort of wound up pretty close to it.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. I mean, it was I don't know. I remember watching like that. Like, do you ever watch that movie October Sky?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. I love that shit.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I remember. That was, like, that was, like, one of my favorite movies growing up.
Speaker 2:It's, like,
Speaker 4:a NASA phase. And yeah. So it's it's kind of crazy. Know? Somebody on Hacker News the other day commented, like, it's funny how adding trying to add StackDiffs to GitHub has resulted in the Graphite team now building rockets.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Here we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That is it's remarkable. It's like it's almost like a side quest in the in in in the long arc of history you'll be deploying on the moon and and Mars beyond. How has it been? What what what has the last couple weeks been like?
Speaker 2:Has it been sleepless? Are you able to still continue growing the product, building the product, or has all the news been infiltrating you? Like, what's the what's the psyche been like over the last couple weeks?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's been it's honestly been really exciting on on the ground at Cursor.
Speaker 2:Like Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Everybody is everybody's fired up about about, like, the compute partnership and what that's unlocking for us on the model training side. We also just had our first big conference compile at Fort Mason yesterday. So the marketing team was was really working hard to get everything together for for that and make that a great event. And, yeah, it all kind of led up to yesterday being a crazy news day of the the SpaceX announcement and then, you know, the three big feature releases that compiled yesterday, including Origin, the Gentle Kit Forge that that we're working on. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So, So it's been a it's been a frenetic past few weeks, but everybody's really fired up.
Speaker 1:Did you guys expect the announced like the the sort of second part of the the announcement between you know, deal between Cursor and SpaceX to get as much like attention as it did? Because I was seeing people that seemingly hadn't seen the first the announcement of like the fur the first part of the deal. And a lot of people felt like they were processing it for the first time Sure. Which kinda makes sense Yeah. In hindsight.
Speaker 1:But in our little bubble, I was like, great. Like, obviously, they were gonna do this deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I sort of had the I guess I had it in my mind that you already have a SpaceX badge, but that was not the case because this was a partnership and now the deal has been announced. Is that correct?
Speaker 4:Interesting. Exactly. There was the the announcement of the option to acquire, and then the the other you know, the announcement yesterday was the exercising of that option. Yep. Now, I mean, I still don't have a SpaceX badge Sure.
Speaker 4:That, you know, where we have to wait for for the deal to close. Yep. Then we can actually start working together. But Yeah. Now now it's like just the just antitrust and all the all the other pieces.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. Well, congratulations. Do want to talk about See Walk me through the thesis there. I mean, there's been plenty of gripes about how much code is getting pushed to the Internet generally. How teams are working together, agents are working together.
Speaker 2:We're in a CPU crunch now. How much of this is just taking a developer workflow that already exists, speeding it up versus reimagining it from first principles? Like walk me through the thesis for this product.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think the origin really started from a simple realization, which is that every single piece of the software development life cycle that we have today, every tool, every piece of infrastructure, was all designed for a world where humans write every line of code. Yeah. We've tried to scale that as best we can over the past year or so, but we're really seeing many of those pieces just crumbling under the pressure. And first and foremost, just having making from first principles, designing something that can handle the scale of agentic coding, that's yeah.
Speaker 4:That's the the most important thing is, like, is it scalable? Is it reliable? Is it performant? Like, can it handle hundreds of agents working in parallel at once? And that's really what we've what we've designed Origin to be is, like, the the first example of Git infrastructure that is really built for for the agentic era.
Speaker 4:The other piece of this is that then building kinda building on that, if we own the infrastructure, we can start to build it with agents in mind. So it's not just it doesn't have to be just like the git or objects. It can be you can start to store agent traces. You can see the whole history of every action the agent has taken, everything it referenced. You don't have to have it's kind of silly today that you'll use one agent to write the PR, but then as soon as the PR is opened, like, that agent just goes away.
Speaker 4:It's like, why does that not carry through and help you then, you know, address review comments, resolve CI failures, fix merge conflicts, and really, you know, we wanna get to this vision of of more, like, full self driving PRs that can really bring themselves out to production when in many cases without human intervention.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I I have a bunch of different things there.
Speaker 2:I guess the the question is yeah. How, like how important is speed in this context? How important is actually like the volume of code? You see a lot of these like someone will post like, okay, I just vibe coded this. I pushed this change.
Speaker 2:Whatever model they're using did really well. They got the job done. And then somebody will go in and look at the PR and be like 100,000 lines of code to change the color of the button? Like, this is evidence of slop or this is evidence of poor computer science happening. Do you have a stance on the is the answer to slop more slop?
Speaker 2:We going to get less sloppy, more terse in the writing? Is that something that's coming? Or do you need to design a system where the new normal is, yeah, changing the color button of color might be 10,000 lines of code change. That's fine. Let's also store the reasoning trace in the whole in the whole, you know, back and forth and everything that the agent was doing so that, you know, yeah, it was it was, you know, ten years of development time for one small change.
Speaker 2:It's fine because, you know, hard drives are cheap.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I certainly don't think that the the future is 10,000 lines to change a button color. But I I do think that the volume yeah. Fundamentally, just the volume of code and the volume the throughput that we're seeing Mhmm. And all pieces of infrastructure have to handle now is is just growing exponentially.
Speaker 4:And Mhmm. You know, we've seen we we've seen now, you know, a lot of teams are are now doing, like, you know, thousands of of pushes per hour. Mhmm. You know, and previously, they were doing, you know, tens or hundreds. And that's a lot of what we've been been trying to make sure Origin is able to handle is is that scale.
Speaker 4:So we we've run some simulations recently where we're doing, like, you know, 80 clones and 22 pushes per second with no downtime. And, you know, it's it's obviously just this is just like us testing internally, but Yeah. It shows that, like, the architecture holds up and it's scalable and it's not yet the when your agents are ready to work at that speed, Origin is not going to be the bottleneck for them. But I I do think that we'll we'll then need to the other thing I think this will enable though is, like, more agentic review, more back and forth, like, more more autonomy and more more, like, spinning out of of changes and and refining of them before a human ever has to look at them. So, yeah, hopefully, we can avoid the case where you'd have, like, a 10,000 line PR that's that's doing a meaningless change.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How is how is growth overall? I feel I feel like a lot of people watch an acquisition happen or a series of acquisitions happen, and they're sort of like, okay, like that's the end of the story. Or they I mean, it's really easy with Elon Musk to look at it and be like, okay, well, like this is an incredibly talented team but this is data centers and space stuff. This is mass driver on the moon project.
Speaker 2:Like the main mission is now, you know, not relevant and so it's less focused. But I imagine that you're just seeing growth in the core business still because
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Teams are still, you know, getting up to speed on on pushing code and and using all these tools. What has growth been like post acquisition? What have been the big drivers? What what does that tell us about the way just the broad software development market is evolving?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we've seen since since the acquisition, we've seen, you know, continued growth in the in, like, the graphite business itself. But really, think the the most exciting thing for us has has been seeing the level of interest from companies of all sizes in in what we're doing with Origin. So Mhmm. We set a goal for end of July for, like, wait list sign ups that we wanted to hit, and we we hit that in the first twenty like, the last twenty four hours since we announced the product.
Speaker 7:So it's
Speaker 2:That Gong is also for the acquisition closing, which is maybe a bigger deal than waitlist. Honestly, like, traction on an actual product is probably more relevant than any financial milestone because it means that people are actually interested in this stuff, which is good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's Right.
Speaker 4:It's every time we've talked about it, you know, at at Compile yesterday, you know, on customer calls, it's like, you know, Compile got a huge round of applause. Like, it's just it it's so obvious this is a a problem that every single company is facing right now, and it's solving this this burning need. And that's why we're we're so excited about what we're doing. And, you know, really thinking to your point around around acquisitions, like, thinking back to to the Graphite days, like, one of the hardest lessons that we learned from building Graphite was that your product is only as good as the infrastructure that it's built on fundamentally. And it might seem obvious, but it's it's a really hard lesson to learn.
Speaker 4:And we are always limited by, like, wait and see, availability, you know, even just UI extensibility. Our customers felt those limits. You know, when when our infrastructure was down, we were down too. And the it's funny now. There's this whole wave of companies that are are going to their favorite agents and saying, you know, copy Graphite's poor request page.
Speaker 4:Make no mistakes. And, you know, shipping something out there, and they're really quickly finding out, like, why it's so hard to to do what we did. And even even then, I think we were never really able to to create, like, the the level of experience of just, you know, totally seamless to high performance interface that we wanted to because we were we were limited by the platform that we built on. With So Origin, you know, now with with in the backing of of Cursor and the combined team, we're finally you know, we're now able to, you know, truly realize and accelerate the vision that we had from the beginning of the Graphite days.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about AI doom, job losses. Is there any risk that AI puts DJing out of businesses? Are DJs going away in our AI future? Or will the DJ, the humble DJ, always have a place in our society? What do you think?
Speaker 4:I think there's always you know, it's always been about more than
Speaker 2:You've actually always been able to just press play on a premixed.
Speaker 1:You've always
Speaker 2:And yet we still are It's like, maybe
Speaker 1:you're ironically, like a really good White pill. White pill for just jobs overall. Yeah. It's like
Speaker 2:Yeah. You wanna see a human up there and and
Speaker 1:Even the most yeah. Even the most the most well known DJs, they have like a set that they could just go up there and play and
Speaker 2:dance around and of course of that. But anyway, great to catch up. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1:coming the for you. Happy for you.
Speaker 2:What an inspiring story. A true overnight success.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:2020, baby.
Speaker 4:Overnight success of six years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:A lot of sleepless nights. But thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Great to see you, Merrill. Congrats.
Speaker 2:Congrats so much. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TBPN UltraDome.
Speaker 2:We have from m thirteen. How are doing?
Speaker 6:What's happening, guys? How you doing?
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show. We're doing great. We're great. Give us your review of the World Cup so far.
Speaker 6:Oh. That was definitely the best game in US soccer history. You know, historically, The US has always been competitive but just could never find the back of the net. So to find the back of the net that many times, that was Mhmm. Nothing short of spectacular.
Speaker 1:I had a I had a my my I turned it on. I'm watching for, like, not like really focused on the game. I think I was like in the middle of something. But I was like, wow, we cannot get the ball on Paraguay's side, like, for the life of us. And I realized like I had the I had the the Paraguay's flag look like our jerseys.
Speaker 1:So we were actually playing quite well. We were we were pressing them the whole time. But I didn't know. And I was oh, wow. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:We're we're doing great.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully, The US gets excited. Like, we hosted the opening night of of the World Cup the night before at our house, and I was texting people going, hey, we're hosting this event for US soccer. They're like, what's coming?
Speaker 6:I was like, the World Cup. The last time I was in The US was only thirty two years ago. But, yeah, we'll see.
Speaker 1:Come a long way.
Speaker 2:Do you track, like, economic impact from World Cup? Are you reading into it? Some people are saying, like, that's the reason why we're seeing unemployment so low in a time of AI disruption. It's like there's a lot of hospitality hiring. Do you read into this stuff?
Speaker 6:I don't do a whole lot. I mean, it's interesting both between the World Cup and the Olympics. Right? They always put out these studies, and the question is, are you losing a shit ton of money, or
Speaker 7:is it
Speaker 6:who's making the money? Yeah. Yeah. I can tell you the car service in Seattle, they're definitely making money. The company's gonna be $2,500 for a thirty minute trip when I land for Friday's game.
Speaker 6:So, you know, there are definitely people who make
Speaker 1:Woah. Woah. Surge surge pricing? Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Surge pricing of effort for Porsche. $2,500.
Speaker 6:But it's a great economic lesson.
Speaker 2:It's a in Vegas for f one. It was the same thing. It's a couple thousand bucks just to have a car take you from your hotel to the event. It was crazy. Anytime that there's huge demand.
Speaker 2:So you're thinking more long term. Take us through the basic thesis for the fund, some of your historical investments. Obviously, it seems like you're not thinking quarter to quarter based on, you know, unemployment rate data of this month and whether or not the World Cup is causing unemployment or to decline or spike. But what is the thesis the fund? How long have been doing this?
Speaker 6:I mean, we started m thirteen ten years ago. We just celebrated our ten year anniversary.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Where's name come from? Success.
Speaker 6:Everyone thinks we're El Salvadorian gangsters.
Speaker 2:Okay. MS
Speaker 6:thirteen. Sadly, I'm not that that gangster, but brightest cluster of stars, brighter than all the stars that comprise it. It's always been our philosophy. We can connect the dots and create more value.
Speaker 5:Got it.
Speaker 6:But, yeah, you know, fast forward ten years later, you know, we've been the Cedar Series A investor in 17 unicorn, so sometimes better to be lucky than good. Incredible. You know, on days like last Friday when we invested in SpaceX at 15,000,000,000 and banged out, you know, 150x, you know? We all need more days like that. That's incredible.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Thank you for the sound effects. That was well deserved,
Speaker 2:I think.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and I think even at some point we'll start talking about AI, everyone thinks like we haven't seen this before. And I think the key is as a VC, you have to learn how to invest in cycles, right? Like we felt like the world was white hot in 2020 and 2021.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Turns out it's even hotter now. Right? You think about a lot of us like m thirteen and Therese, and all of us, we are investing in consumer software Sure. Social media, things like ride sharing. That was the implication of the technological breakthrough, which was the iPhone, right?
Speaker 6:And so there's always kind of these ripples, and so, yeah, now, you know, we got 35 people, offices, New York, San Francisco, LA. Always trying to think what is that next ripple? What is that implication of that technology? How do we invest where the world is bending? And, you know, I think SpaceX is a great example.
Speaker 6:You invest in outlier people who could create outlier companies, and you you you hope you take enough shots on goal that sometimes, you know, you get those those big outcomes.
Speaker 2:SpaceX, Ring, Matterport, you're not afraid of hardware. Where'd that come from? What's your thesis on hardware enabled technology companies going forward?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, like, take AI today. Right? Like, my housekeeper knows it's gonna change the world. Right?
Speaker 6:That is not that takes no skill. Yeah. The skill of a VC is to understand where to get the best risk and probability adjusted outcomes. Sure. Right?
Speaker 6:And to do that, you've got to find the right value layers. Right? So, yes, foundational models are enormous. They also come at high prices with a lot of competition. The thing I talk about all the time these days is, if you think about the last cycle around consumer software, social networks, it was innovators competing with innovators.
Speaker 6:Right? Zuck competing with Evan. John Zimmer competing with Travis. I would argue in this cycle, it's innovators competing with innovators who are now competing with the most well funded innovators on Google, the Microsoft. Well, even before then, you got to open it, and
Speaker 2:Oh, sure. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 6:Then you have the 10 biggest tech companies in the world. Yeah. And I would argue for the first time in history, they actually have the advantage. Right? They got the tech, the talent, the data, the capital, and the technical expertise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Google entering AI feels very different than Google entering social networking.
Speaker 6:For sure. Right.
Speaker 2:Very different.
Speaker 6:And so and so when you think about this market, you really gotta think long and hard about where do you get that exposure to AI? Where are the value layers? Right? We invested in a company called Prepared, you know, in the very early days. It sold earlier this year for about $900,000,000.
Speaker 6:Was using AI and technology to disrupt nine one one, thank you, nine one one call centers, right? They had no competition all the time.
Speaker 1:Hopefully not disrupt the call centers. Not disrupt the actual practice.
Speaker 6:Turns out nine one one was still using landlines. The rest of us just weren't calling using a landline.
Speaker 7:So, you
Speaker 6:know, simple stuff like that. So, in this market, right, it's all about, like, where and I think adventure, right, the multi stage funds play a different game than someone like us. Right? We invest out of a $400,000,000 early stage fund. We're playing for alpha.
Speaker 6:Right? And so we're pure play seed series a specialist. And so you gotta be disciplined about how you enter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:What the competition is, things like that.
Speaker 2:So where does the capital come for doing SpaceX at 15,000,000,000? Obviously, a fantastic investment, but not in that sweet spot of seed series a. Right?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. Our first fund, to be fair, was kind of stage agnostic.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 6:But I think a lot of it is, look, all the letters are fungible. The way we think about it at m thirteen is there's only two types of companies in this market. Those trying to find product market fit and those who found it who are hyperscalers. Right? And so the end of the day, you're looking for venture scale returns, and then, you know, the thing we talk about all the time is everyone just says venture's risky, and they kind of throw up their arms.
Speaker 6:That's like kind of true, but if you're trying to colonize Mars, that is riskier than if you're trying to get someone to order a black car on an app. Right? So there are different spectrums of risk. And so it's always, you know, trying to figure out is the risk worse than the reward, and that's the game of venture.
Speaker 1:Have you been disappointed in the growth of the LA ecosystem?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, I laugh because I remember people telling me that San Francisco was dead three years ago. Mhmm. Turns out it's a little less dead than expected. The way I describe LA is right now it's it's having a siesta.
Speaker 6:Right? Take a little nap, kinda like in Spain, between one and 3PM. Mhmm. We can't forget, you know, about four hundred fifty billion dollars of enterprise value was created outside of some of the big ones like SpaceX in the last cycle. Right?
Speaker 6:And so you think about this cycle. Right now, we're still talking about the technology, AI. There's no doubt that's gonna come from the technologist sitting in San Francisco. But, you know, you guys know other industries. When you think about the second and the third wave, there's no doubt in my mind some of that will come from LA.
Speaker 6:Right? Nobody understands media, content, creators. It's why you guys are sitting in LA. Yeah. You're the best of the game at that.
Speaker 6:Right? And so I think it's too early to count out LA, just like it was too early three years ago to count out San Francisco. Yes, there were a lot of needles on the street, and it was pretty, right, everybody was leaving, but like, yeah, it came roaring back. So I think as you think about what are the new business models we're not even thinking about because of AI? What are those ripples?
Speaker 6:There's no doubt some of them will be coming from
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I I am I am bullish on the South Bay. Gundo? El Segundo. El Segundo.
Speaker 1:South Bay broadly. Continue to be bearish on, on like LA, actually LA, the city. Like, it's hard for me to imagine. I can't imagine a $100,000,000,000 company coming out of Venice, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, places like that which is it's painful to me but I think it's the reality. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, I haven't passed on that company yet. But but yeah, it's interesting that like it feels like the South Bay is like really working. El Segundo is really working. You know, SpaceX starting in an El Segundo warehouse. Like, that's all working, but I feel like the the original like LA startup movement can't even claim.
Speaker 2:Silicon Beach.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can't can't claim that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I don't think you'll find a $100,000,000,000 company coming out of LA. I think you might find some 10 to $20,000,000,000 companies. And the reason I say that is, you know, the $100,000,000,000 company, the trillion dollar companies are gonna be foundational models and things like that. Concentration of talent.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think the application layers. Yeah. It's like there's a reason Snap is here. And there's a reason Tinder was founded here and
Speaker 1:stuff like that. Know but it's painful that like Suno Suno should have been in LA.
Speaker 2:Should have been in LA. Yeah. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right. And it's and it's what like Boston, New York, maybe they have an SF office. I forget what
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 6:think like the DreamWorks of AI, like, has to happen in LA maybe. But it won't be on
Speaker 2:stuff from LA. Like, New York is the home of, like, the the on the street, what do you do for a living TikTok or, like, the person that's playing the the drums and streaming that. Like, so many of the, like, the the Internet democratizing content and then the competition from Atlanta, Toronto, and
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, international. There's the big we were just reading about the the director of the Avengers, hugely successful filmmaker, obviously, in the Disney portfolio, is moving to London because they're doing the next round of Marvel films out there. And so, yeah, we just lost like a pool of talent here.
Speaker 6:Yeah. By the way, Jordy, I was gonna tell you I'm very jealous that you live in Malibu since my house burned down in Malibu
Speaker 1:ocean breeze. Last year or 2018?
Speaker 6:Last year. Yeah. Oh, brutal. I told my wife the night before we went to bed, was really panicked. I was like, sweetie, we we literally live across the street from the firehouse.
Speaker 6:I'm like, not far from nobody. Trust me, our house burning down. Obviously, we were wrong and we're still the lucky ones. A lot of people were way less lucky, but We
Speaker 2:lost loads.
Speaker 6:Man, missed that that beach breeze.
Speaker 2:Are you
Speaker 6:gonna rebuild? Yeah. Gotta start this fall.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we'll see you in ten years. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, the permitting goes faster or something. I don't know. It seems like a rough rough go also in the Palisades.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about consumer investing, like consumer products?
Speaker 6:Yeah. You know, like two and a half years ago at our LP day, we talked about how we thought for the first time in probably four or five, six years that we thought AI would make the application layer more interesting because we've been doing a lot of the underpinnings. Right? We invest in the future, money, work, health, commerce, so that is a pretty high swath. But we are doing mostly infrastructure stuff.
Speaker 6:I think we've been right on that. It's hard to get the application layer around AI. Just things are so frothy and moving so quickly. I do think I don't know if it will be for us anymore just given the size of our funds. I I do believe the next billion dollar d to c brands will be built as AI companies that happen to sell a product.
Speaker 6:Right? You the reason guys like us did so many, you know, d to c things and then stopped doing it was at one point the math made sense.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Right? You could create unicorns of the math. As the cost of Facebook acquisition increased, right, the math no longer made sense. I think for the first time in history, the math will make sense here for the next two to three years. The reality for m thirteen is we need generational companies when you operate out of a $400,000,000 fund.
Speaker 6:So I don't know if it will
Speaker 1:even if you're even if you're doing a a true seed and you can do two on 10, and then it's billion dollar exit, and like you're like, okay, it doesn't actually can't return the fund.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's a problem. Like, most people just don't think about the math of venture. It's great to say, oh, I had this exit or that. But yeah, you need at m 13, we always say every check-in the base case has to return half the fund.
Speaker 6:So we need 3 to $5,000,000,000 companies in the base case and we have to hope, you know, we have companies like OpenFX doing stable coins or we need to find that next SpaceX and you need to find those Decacorns that that's the only way the math works.
Speaker 2:Sure. What's the team structure like? 2,000,000,000 under management now, $400,000,000 fund that feels like enough room for some principals, some VPs around the table, but how how what's your philosophy to growing the firm? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So my brother and I founded the firm. Good. Obviously, the way we talk about it is we wanted to build the venture firm that a founder would have built for themselves. Sure. So every single person is an operator by background.
Speaker 6:In fact, we only have one person that's ever worked at a VC that's either crazy or that's by design.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Right? In our model, you know, basically some of those operators now invest for a living, right? And so that's the typical venture model. Mhmm. We say they're accountable for company picking, right?
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Obviously, we've historically been good with 17 unicorns at that, but they're trying to find where's the TAM, where's these great founders. We have a large a team called our propulsion team. They are former operators who actually don't invest for a living. They actually stay as operators.
Speaker 6:Right? But now, instead of over a single company, they operate over a portfolio. And, you know, we've backed, I think, 11 previous unicorn founders in the last two funds. These aren't people that need help, but where we invest at the early stages of seed or series a, they're not gonna have a head of data and a head of talent And and a head of so we can use these very experienced operators, like we have guys like Carl Alomar, who's built Digital Ocean from pre revenue to a $5,000,000,000 IPO. He now reminds me, I think it's 19,000,000,000 today, so he tells me, stop talking about 5.
Speaker 6:But, you know, having a guy like that be able to fill in the gaps, look around corners for you at that series a is incredibly valuable. So, yeah. So we have about 12 people that deploy the capital, you know, a handful of partners Yeah. Like you said. So, you know, I think for us, we obsess about our junior talent because those are our rising stars.
Speaker 6:You know, too many VC firms are a bunch of usually males that have had success and kind of hold on.
Speaker 3:I think you need the
Speaker 6:best 22 year old kid from Stanford. Hungry. Compsi. I think you need the best 32 year old. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You know, I'm gonna find the next unicorn founder because I probably had dinner with him last week, but I'm probably not gonna find the 22 year old kid who just dropped out of Stanford and did that. It's probably gonna come from one of the junior people on the team. And so in everything we do, we always say, we didn't wanna create a a better VC. We kinda wanted to create a different type of VC. And so we take cues from the best of the best, and then think about, again, if we were a founder building a VC, how would we build it?
Speaker 1:How do you think the SpaceX IPO is gonna impact the luxury real estate market?
Speaker 6:Oh, I am so fascinated
Speaker 2:by this.
Speaker 6:I mean Well,
Speaker 1:I'm just looking at I'm I'm thinking about YC and how there's like there's a lot of new sent to millionaires and there's not a lot of inventory over there. And knowing wise knowing SpaceX people, they like to be outdoors. A lot of them probably like to ski a little bit. I think there might be a supply demand mismatch, at least at YC.
Speaker 6:Yeah. We'll Maybe we should your house in Malibu, my house in C, we try to get a premium for it, get some Anthropic or OpenAI You
Speaker 2:Oh, you can sell your house for stock now?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Seriously. But, I mean, I think it's gonna be absolutely fascinating. Right? Because you think about when OpenAI and Anthropic IPO, a bunch of VCs are going to make a ton of money, but those people's investors are endowments, institutional pensions, things like that.
Speaker 6:When you think about SpaceX, right, it is every guy in YPO. It is every guy at the Country Club. It is every guy at Burning Man.
Speaker 2:Oh, sure.
Speaker 6:Even if they did a 150 x like we did, they 10 x, they five x.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You got in some SPVs.
Speaker 6:Right. Think about it, like, there has never been this much value return that was literally 80% in SPVs. Yeah. Right? And so I think it's fascinating because some guy just made 3,000,000, some guy just made a 100,000,000, some guy just made a billion.
Speaker 6:And so Yeah.
Speaker 1:Think it's gonna be you know, the the the team specifically.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And the team. Yeah. And so when you think about it, like, when you fast
Speaker 2:family forward with SpaceX IPO shirts. And I was like, I don't know that they're, like, like, bankers. I don't know that they were at the IPO on the inside. I think they just, like, got in early, made some money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now they're really proud, and they're part of, like, the retail army, essentially.
Speaker 6:But I think it will be good for venture. I mean, I think there's no doubt planes, houses, private schools, country clubs, all of those things. Right? And we should talk about coupling our houses together. We could get a premium.
Speaker 6:You get two for one. I mean, that's an efficient
Speaker 1:trade. The starter starter pack.
Speaker 6:The starter the starter centillion to mayor pack. You get Malibu NYC all in one transaction. But I do think it's just good for venture in general, right? Because people have realized these things just take a long time, right? Like, we invested at 15,000,000,000 and still took ten years to return capital.
Speaker 6:So I do think it shows people in success. Right? Although these things take a long time, that is a lot of money coming back to the system.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last questions? We gotta hop on with ABS in just
Speaker 1:Let's do it again soon. This is great. And, yeah, we'll feel free to call in from a World Cup game or something like that.
Speaker 6:Alright. You guys going to any of them?
Speaker 2:I I don't have anything scheduled.
Speaker 1:Nothing nothing scheduled.
Speaker 2:We hit FOMO at the last second trying to get in. Yeah. Is this the Knicks tickets? Is it a 100,000 to go or is it more reasonable if you just want to see the game?
Speaker 6:More reasonable. More reasonable.
Speaker 2:Okay. It can get crazy. I mean, I'm sure if it's like, you know, America Well, you're telling everybody about it. Now
Speaker 1:the prices are gonna go crazy. Right.
Speaker 6:But during the next commercial break.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you,
Speaker 2:This was fantastic.
Speaker 6:Thanks, man.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:And then we will tell everyone about Figma agents. Meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Very excited to be partnered with Figma. And we are also excited to have doctor Swami Sivasubramanian from AWS.
Speaker 2:He is the VP of AgenTik AI, and he's here with us on the TBPN UltraDome. How are you
Speaker 1:doing? What's going on?
Speaker 3:I'm I'm great. Hey. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thanks for hopping on. Why don't we start with a little bit of an introduction since it is the first time you're on the show? Tell us a little bit about, how you fit into the AWS organization, what you're working on, and then we can go into AgenTik AI.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I'm the vice president of AgenTik AI. I've been with AWS now for, like, twenty years. Mhmm. Created various things Overnight success.
Speaker 3:From, like, our data for Hold on.
Speaker 2:What was it like twenty years ago? I feel like AWS is barely 20 years old. Were you, like, the first person on the team? You and Andy were hanging out and racking servers?
Speaker 3:Kind of. Actually, literally, AWS was would fit in a single conference room if you can't That's believe amazing. And I mean, I joined as an intern. My internship project was to build a database called Dynamo. And yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, that turned out to be a bit of a success, so they gave me a job back.
Speaker 2:So That's great.
Speaker 3:And then I started the database joined the database team, started bunch of databases. Yeah. Then moved on to analytics and started AI for AWS.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 3:And now Yeah. Now that you see all the things with Bedrock and SageMaker, all the AI tools, now as the world is moving more agent tech, I kind of spun myself out of what I was doing Yeah. To focus all in on AI agents. So that's kind of my background.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I imagine that, you know, the the the typical database business, the analytics business, all of that is growing, but it it's it's being driven by more agentic AI use. Talk about the new releases, the new launches, and I wanna know how do we compare and contrast continuum from context? Where how how do companies use the right tool for the job here?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, first of all, we live in some amazing times with AI agents because the art of possible has fundamentally changed. But when you look at it even where you see, actually, enterprises are struggling today. First of all, on putting agents to work Yeah. They are still stuck in this world of, I call it, the walled gardens, where they are stuck into bottlenecks where if I go on vacation or even when I go to sleep and wake up, I get signals from, like, my Outlook to Slack to various other messaging tools.
Speaker 3:So the time I spent to even catch up used to be, like, crazy, like, least an hour before I know I get to my job. Mhmm. So why why was it that case? It's not like we didn't have AI assistance in every one of these tools. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But what was missing was it didn't have the context to fill in the spaces between these various tools. So that's why today, actually, we launched something called Quick Autonomous Agent. It actually works on your behalf. It gathers all the context across tools so there is no more walled gardens, but it still has something enterprises know. It has built in governance and security.
Speaker 3:That's why the likes of GoDaddy to NBA to everybody is using it. You are showing it live today, and the art of possible, even when we demoed it live, people couldn't believe it because now you can actually catch up and generate a PowerPoint deck in a matter of minute to a detailed dashboard when you talk to your data lake and generate insights, all these things are changing. That is one example of bottleneck we are removing. The second one I talked about was in the world of security. Security is a big area of our intersection of how software is getting built and security is changing in a big way because, yes, the rate of change in how you can generate code is becoming very, very cheap.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. But, also, the response security is also becoming big. So speed and security are almost at a trade off in every organization. So what we launched today is a service called Continuum. In many ways, the approach behind it is make security not a discrete thing companies do.
Speaker 3:It's like how antibodies actually fight viruses. Always on continuously fighting is the way we thought about it as well, as an example.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna dig deeper into those, like, continuously running AI agents. I think when people think agentic AI, they go to coding agents because everyone's had the magical experience with those and seen the impact and the spend and the token maxing that happens when you deploy AI agents across a huge workforce of knowledge workers, heavily software engineers. But I'm I'm more interested in in the less understood agentic workflows that are happening maybe deeper and autonomously in a business. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm trying to get to a world where I have that case study at the tip of my tongue for every time I book a flight, it runs an agentic workflow to make sure that my seat on the plane is correct. Or I don't know. I I I don't know how to contextualize it but I know it's happening and I know you're seeing it. So walk me through some of the agentic workflows or agentic AI work that's happening even if no one shows up to the office. It's a it's a company holiday and there's still tokens being spent.
Speaker 2:What does that look like? What is the shape of that work?
Speaker 3:Actually, I mean, that is one of the key things that we are going to start seeing explosion of agents in a big way. Even today, for instance, you, in your summit, the CIO of Southwest Airlines talked about how they are building agents on top of actually agent core, which is our core agent platform service. And they were able to build these amazing new capabilities to do things like crew planning and various others. Mhmm. These are not like very humans are just generating codes, but how that's where they are going.
Speaker 3:Three and four instance are using agents to now be able to do more efficient sales call planning. GoDaddy is able to actually leverage, some of our quick agents to automatically reduce something like fifteen thousand, hours of manual work that they are able to do. These are, like, examples of agents. Again, not created just for purely creating software, but these are agents running under the hood, and they are able to produce value. And this is gonna be where the next big agentic workload is going to happen in many ways, and that's what we are excited.
Speaker 2:What what is demand like for model routing these days? AWS is fascinating because you've sort of maybe it's brilliant by design, but sort of the Switzerland of AI in the sense that there's partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI. There's a whole bunch of other foundation models that are available on AWS. What is demand like? Obviously, different teams have different preferences and cost tradeoffs and they might say, I want to be with this particular Claude model or this particular GPT model.
Speaker 2:Other companies might just say, I never I never want to be caught using a frontier model for something that doesn't need that doesn't need frontier So optimize it for me. Is that is that something that you're seeing demand for already?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think for the industry itself, when I started Bedrock, one of the things we were different compared to everybody else's. We always had this belief no single model will rule the world. This was not a popular belief at that time, but but now it seems so obvious. But then amazing thing is now that you are the Switzerland as you actually speak, in q one alone, the adoption for our Bedrock, Generative AI LLM platform, what we are starting to see is in q one alone, the amount of workload that, request rate that we are seeing is greater than all of the previous years combined.
Speaker 3:That is the the amount of growth we are seeing.
Speaker 1:Crazy. And,
Speaker 3:it seems to have no signs of slowing down. It's because the rate of actually adoption, especially as people are moving from proof of concepts to production, is just accelerating because they are seeing real outcomes. And that is one of the reason why so much of innovation is going into things like Bedrock and agent core, not just on the model front, but also how we are supporting the things like disaggregated inference and all the agentic capabilities such as launching new context. So these are the capabilities that's gonna make actually enterprises move from just cute prototypes that are sitting in by the demo to their, execs to actually production to see real value. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And this is why I do think there is so much upside in the future.
Speaker 2:How do you think about AWS as a sort of like a thought leader for for enterprises rolling these features out? I'm just thinking about, like, we're going through this transition of like there's a new technology. You need to use it effectively. I feel like a big piece of why AWS was so successful was because it powered amazon.com. And if it's good enough for amazon.com, it's good enough for my business or whatever I'm doing.
Speaker 2:And it feels like now there's an opportunity for AWS to sort of set the agenda on what it's not token maxing. It's not token minimizing. It's token optimizing. It's ROI maxing or something like that. But how are you communicating to your team, to the teams within AWS about how to use AI effectively?
Speaker 2:Sometimes you just wanna get everyone up to speed, just go and test everything. And then sometimes you want to be, you know, setting a tone that a company that says, hey, look, we don't have a lot of free cash flow here to throw at this new hot technology. If we're going to use something, it has to deliver ROI almost immediately. How are you carrying that through your organization and into the companies that partner with AWS?
Speaker 3:I mean, it's a great question because if you look at the industry, and this is true even at Amazon, we first started with everyone should get familiar with these tools. So we were trying to get everyone to adopt so that they know how to use these tools. Mhmm. Now that they have become so familiar, we are now making all the tools available between, like, Kira or agentic code Mhmm. Putting solution to Cloud Code to Quake as our business user productivity solution.
Speaker 3:Within Amazon itself, tools like Quake is used by hundreds of thousands of people, let alone Keyroad to many others equally on the software development. Now we are come to a point where we internally and this is true for our external customers such as Delta and Southwest and many others as well as we give organizational breakdown. Within Amazon, we say, hey. Every VP under that team, how much usage is happening? What is their cost breakdown?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then we roll it out. This is true for Kiro, and pretty soon it'll be true for Quik. And within Bedrock, which is our Gen AI platform service, we actually integrated with AWS Cost Explorer so that we can actually have people spare I mean, monitor their spend Yeah. In terms of our at a per user level, per model level, and a per organization level too. The moment you have visibility, then you know Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Where people are spending, then you can understand ROI. In fact, the interesting thing what we saw was that my teams and there are a few teams in Amazon. I call them frontier teams. These are teams that, don't see 50% productivity improvement. They see 10 x to 20 x productivity improvement.
Speaker 3:And when you see their bill on token, it's not actually, like, a $100,000 a month. It's actually even in the keynote credits, it's something like around 2,000 to $3,000 a month. Sure. That's not that much for 10 x to 20 x productivity. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I do think this is gonna keep going as the world becomes more and more agent tech. Because once they move to coding to be just launched our release agent because you increase code velocity. Everyone talks about coding, but this is the myth. Suddenly then, everything gets stuck because you need to deploy it to real world. And deploying it to real world is a bigger challenge because you can't just increase the volume by 10 x a year, and then deployment is going at one x.
Speaker 3:That means everything becomes a technical debt. So we made that agent tech, and then we made pen testing agent tech. Mhmm. So I almost jokingly call it saying, like, hey. You need to ride it correct, ship it fast, and constantly keep it modern.
Speaker 3:And the only way to do it is you need to have all of it be done by agents, and that's exactly how we are now moving towards.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launches.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Great to
Speaker 2:meet you. Talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Bye. Hey.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Again forever. Of course.
Speaker 1:Great to have you.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room.
Speaker 2:So we'll bring in Thomas Suarez from Raven Renaissance. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Boom. What you got on your face? Introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Tell us about what you're building. I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 9:Cool. Hey, guys. Yeah. It's great to be here. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So I'm Tom, the founder of Raven Resonance. We're a team of engineers and designers who have been building and wearing customized AR devices for years and decades. So we're working on Raven Prism which is the first ambient computer in the form of glasses.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Did you launch did you launch this on Monday knowing that the specs announcement was happening? Was that was that somewhat intentional or just kind of random?
Speaker 9:So it was actually more of a preview. So we are doing our full launch later this year but we were gonna be at the conference anyway and we figured it would, you know, show some show some of our hardware and software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because it's augmented world. It's a conference for augmented reality generally. Do you like that term or is that term getting stale at this point?
Speaker 9:I think it's it's interesting. Augmented reality is kind of a a loaded term in some ways because there have been so many devices over the years. But I think for us, the term ambient computing feels really right because it's about, you know, technology being there when you need it and gone out of the way when you don't. And I think that's kind of what this device is is for. Yeah.
Speaker 9:I I wore Google Glass for many years and, you know, of course, there there's a lot of baggage that comes with that, but there are lots of wearable computers that have tried these sorts of things over years. And I think finally, the industry is starting to converge on something that that makes a lot of sense for daily wear.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are you positioning the product? What are the key stats that you're particularly proud of? Everyone talks about price, weight.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe even before that, like, I wanna know about your product, but like in your view over the last few years as you've been using these products, developing them, like what is what is the ideal product? What does it do? What are is like should we be thinking we were debating earlier just like, do we need to be thinking about like killer use cases, like specific things that people do every day or do, you know, a lot of the the specs demos. There were some some of the things that were being demoed. I was like, okay, that would be cool.
Speaker 1:Like, I'd maybe do that once a year. Right? Like measuring like a room, like how a piece of furniture would fit in. That alone is like even if it's 10 times better than using like a measuring tape or something like that, that's not gonna get me to like, you know, be a daily user or something like this. So like, how have you been thinking about like what is the ideal product?
Speaker 1:Because I assume that's what you're building towards.
Speaker 9:Exactly. Yeah. So as someone who wore this for over twelve years, I can say that or not not this particular product but, of course, you know, wearables in general.
Speaker 2:Time traveler. I wish.
Speaker 9:I wish. The there are two main categories of of use cases that I think are really relevant. The first is microinteractions. So this is something where you're in and out of the display within five to ten seconds. So this is things like next navigation direction, a notification that comes in, which sounds really distracting, it's actually really nice to not have to pull your phone out of your pocket.
Speaker 9:You know, changing your music, all that sort of stuff. Even next cooking instruction, whatever, those are micro interactions, in and out in five, ten seconds or less. The other one is reference material. And so this is where you can AirPlay your phone screen up. You can pin up reference, contextually relevant information.
Speaker 9:So if you have something that you're working on hands free or with your hands, you want something that is hands free that's gonna give you that information and ideally, you can ask an LM or ask an AI to help you with that task. So those are the two categories of experience that we think about as being really necessary. There's also kind of a third one which is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from Specs. And I think, I mean, certainly there's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now, it's kinda like you wanna build toward, you know, what is the iPod of AR before you build the iPhone?
Speaker 9:And we really need to get something out that, you know, is a nice form factor, that's lightweight, that people are going to actually want to wear.
Speaker 2:How do you think about field of view? I'm sort of split on it. I used to be FOV maxer. I used the hollow lens and was like, this is unacceptable. Tried the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 2:It's much better. But then when I think about the Call of Duty HUD, the meta Ray Ban displays, I'm like, actually, for a lot of those micro interactions, next turn direction, next cooking instructions, something like that, just put the information right there. It's fine. It's hands free. I'm actually maybe fine with a smaller FOV if everything's designed around that constraint from and it's not trying to be omnipresent.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So, field of view is an interesting one because there's a couple different ways to think of field of view. One is in, you know, the absolute number of degrees diagonal on your vision. Typically, these devices are, if go to the really big VR headsets, you're going be closer to 100 degrees. Something like this, this is actually 30 degrees but that's actually a lot of space.
Speaker 9:That is equivalent to a 16 inches MacBook at arm's length, which is a lot of space, especially if you have a high PPD. We find that it's actually field of view and pixels per degree.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 9:And if you have a high pixels per degree, you have high resolution. Yeah. Which means that if have a high pixels per degree but a low FOV, then you actually end up with something that is akin to a laptop in front of you. And so, when we think about, like this device is Linux based, It allows you to SSH in. You can run pretty much any application that will run on ARM 64
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 9:Which is, of course, the same architecture as Mac. And and so you can you can run, you know, properly as a computer.
Speaker 2:Okay. World locked versus head locked. I feel like one of the problems with the HoloLens was that everything was world locked and you turn your head and the narrow FOV would clip the sphere that you put there and all of a sudden you're looking at a half sphere and it it draws your attention as opposed to if it's just headlocked, like the screen stays where it's put and it leans in and it does the best that it can with limited FOV.
Speaker 9:Yeah. So that also it also depends on I think the world lock makes sense for those facial experiences. Again, you need a large field of view. Yeah. For something like a head up display, I don't think world lock makes much sense.
Speaker 9:Yeah. You really just need something that there's all sorts of tricks that you can do in the human computer interaction.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:For example, if you have edges on the screen, then it's obvious that you're clipping. If you allow some padding, any pixels that are black are actually rendered as transparent. So any black pixels around your icons and things like that are going to appear, know, in screen spaces as transparent, is the way we think about it.
Speaker 1:How much is capital a constraint? Because you're competing with companies that are willing to throw billions of dollars at this problem, and so far, I don't necessarily think it's getting them that much closer than It used to
Speaker 2:be for any hardware company. It was like, oh, you'll need $5,000,000 to do that. And now it's like, oh, yeah. Like, no problem. All the toolings have cheap and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you can outsource the whole supply chain if you need
Speaker 1:Also, it's never been easier to raise $5,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, even a big number, oh, we're gonna get a 100,000,000. It's like, yeah, there's gonna be 20 of those raises this month.
Speaker 9:So it's interesting. When we started this company, a lot of investors told us that it was gonna cost, you know, it's going to be over $100,000,000 to bring this product from idea to design, you know, early design, EBT, DVT, PBT, whatever, all the validation stages and up to mass production. We're going to be shipping later this summer to the first batches and then we're launching later this year officially. But, yeah, we've done it with under 8 figures.
Speaker 7:Wow.
Speaker 9:And actually, there are a lot of smart glasses. We consider it as kind a different category than ambient computing, but there are a lot of smart glass companies that will go to kind of an ODM, typically in China or somewhere else, and they'll take a reference design. That's not what we've done. We've actually we're manufacturing in The US. We do source components from all over, of course.
Speaker 9:But we do all design in our lab in San Francisco. We build the batches. This unit was actually built in our lab in San Francisco, assembled. We think that's really important, especially for rapid iteration. That is one of the ways that we've been able to, the very small team, iterate quickly and get to a product that we're really proud of.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking of marketing messaging? Sort of to bring it back to that idea of, like, the killer use case, it feels like a lot of these pitches that we see for VR, XR, AR headsets, like they get a little scattered and all of a sudden they're trying to be 25 different things. A lot of the demos don't if you're not a golfer, do you care about the golf thing? But I imagine that you get some of that flexibility for free by layering on top of AI. Because if you're a front door to AI and everyone knows, oh yeah, AI can do knowledge retrieval, it can also write code, it can also generate images, Then you're like, oh, we don't need to explain that.
Speaker 2:You can just say this is a better way to interface with any AI front door or any AI system. But how are you thinking about, like, the marketing messaging focusing that in? Or is it more valuable to pitch, like, broad developer platform? Like, who who is the core customer?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So I I think there there have been plenty of devices that have tried, you know, pitching the developer. At least this is dev kit. Dev kit. Kit.
Speaker 9:And that's not really that useful because Yeah. You get developers who who get it and and they they play with it. They might go on a shelf for the next few years. Really, in order for a device like this, even a dev kit, to be useful, there has to be something in it, like some killer app. People ask this all the time, What's the killer app of AR?
Speaker 9:You know, there's a that's an interesting question because what was the killer app of the iPhone?
Speaker 2:The phone.
Speaker 9:It actually is dependent on
Speaker 1:The beer app.
Speaker 9:True. But it's dependent on
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, my take on the iPhone is that is that when Steve Jobs introduced it, it was a phone, an iPod and an Internet communicator, basically a web browser. And that was the killer app. Then the App Store came in the future revisions and then you got Uber and DoorDash and all the games and stuff. But it was enough on day one that you were like, well, I I've been carrying a phone.
Speaker 2:This is a sleeker looking phone. I'll replace it. And so whenever I go to VR, AR, I'm always like, this should be a replacement for my my, you know, 24 inch monitor that I plug my laptop into. Or it should be a replacement for a home theater or a 65 inch TV or another screen because in many ways, it is just another screen. So are you replacing the smartwatch?
Speaker 2:Are you replacing the phone? Are you replacing the iPad? Like, you got to sort of laser in instead of just trying to be something that's like entirely net new. It's hard like like the AirPods were headphones first, you know.
Speaker 1:The other thing with glasses that's interesting is just how many how many hundreds of millions or billions of people like already rely on on glasses to see. Yeah. So that's a market where Yeah. It's much less of a you're not actually selling them a new device. You're selling them the same thing that they rely on plus a computer built into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's
Speaker 2:like I think a lot of people like the Metairie band display specifically to use for phone calls and for just music. Like, they'll just, oh, yeah. I'm going for a walk in the park, and I'll just take these and and play music on these instead of headphones. And and and it's like then you can get into the, you know, meta Ray Ban displays and like interfacing with AI and all that other stuff. But I would imagine the majority of the time is spent like taking a couple photos, pretty basic.
Speaker 2:Everyone has a phone, but this is a little bit easier. And listening to calls and and listening to music. But yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. There's there's certainly I mean there's there's a lot of use cases tech for particularly for technical creatives.
Speaker 4:So Sure.
Speaker 9:Certainly developers, engineers, but also musicians and filmmakers and there's there's that kind of niche is what we're going after at first And then, of course, it kind of becomes more mass market consumer after that. We also have enterprises that are interested and we have some enterprise customers as well because we design for a very strict set of design constraints than consumer and then, you know, translates to enterprise. But one of the there's a couple other things that we, you know, we really care really deeply about. Not only Linux architecture, we're, to our knowledge, the only ones kind of with this type of device doing that, but also all day power. So we have these guys on the back.
Speaker 9:This is called Raven Prism and then these are the Raven Wings. The Raven Wings just come off. And this is actually an expansion port not only for the hot swappable battery system where you can take both batteries off and you can get all day power, but also for future modules. So we're gonna release an HDK later this year Mhmm. So people can actually start building their own hardware modules on it.
Speaker 9:And then the other thing is privacy. I think one of the one of the challenges that this industry has faced is particularly around the camera
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 9:But as but also with just user data in general. I think it's easy for us, you know, we're in San Francisco to remember, oh, yeah. Yeah. Know, everyone's gonna be okay with this. But people are often not okay with all of the privacy implications of this, and we're seeing a lot of backlash on certain devices.
Speaker 9:So a couple of things that we do is we actually have a physical camera cover on here. So you have to kind of take that off in order to use the camera. And it allows you to have this basically, to alert other people around you when the camera is in use. And then there's lot of advanced cryptography that we do kind of at the lowest levels of the stack as well and make sure that user data is protected. And we've had a pretty positive response to that so far.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:great. How many years until a billion AR or augment what what did you call it?
Speaker 2:What was it? Billion DAUs of glasses.
Speaker 1:Smart glasses.
Speaker 9:It's hard to predict. There's an industry saying that, you know, AR has been two years away every year for the past thirty years. Yeah. And it's kind of true. Yeah.
Speaker 9:So I I I don't think I could fully predict it. I think it's reasonable, I mean, Meta has been shipping a ton of devices. It's kind of growing the industry, is really nice. I think it's reasonable to say that we'll at least be in the kind of millions per year, or we are in millions per year, but I think we'll be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions per year in about four or five years. And then a billion daily active users you know, could be ten years away, it could be less.
Speaker 9:It's it's really, you know, it's hard to say. But I
Speaker 1:think a fantastic that start. I can you're running the just from the short conversation that you're running the company to make sure that you are in business with a fantastic product like when that moment happens. Like I was looking at the the, you know, the specs just looking at the reaction to the specs launch and like Spiegel and Snapchat are in a unique position and that they can kind of just ignore what shareholders, you know, think about their their where they invest. But that being said, like, it's hard to think about them spending another 3 and a half billion dollars, you know, on this effort or or just just given how I expect these the the product to be received in its current form. So I think if you're set up to like, you know, keep keep burn low, really really keep iterating, actually using the product all day long, which like, you must be you must have used a product you must have used like AR glasses more than anyone else on the planet.
Speaker 1:I imagine, like, don't know anyone. Oh. We know a lot of people that love technology. I don't know anyone that's been like a sort of like DAU for for this long. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I think that's like what it's gonna take to to make a product that that people actually use every day.
Speaker 2:For sure. Yeah.
Speaker 9:Yeah. It it really You need the the first hand experience because it's there's a, you know, there's a lot of design decisions that happen for mobile that are not clear Mhmm. For, you know, for this type of device. Mhmm. And so it there's no replacement for just, you know, using it every day and to there's, yeah, it's it's very important.
Speaker 2:How on earth can you do eye tracking in those? You really do eye tracking in those?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So actually, so this this device that I'm wearing, this is this is these are the same kind of form factors. It's just kind of final materials, right? But there's actually two little cameras in there.
Speaker 7:That's
Speaker 9:great. There's one there and there's one there. And those are hooked up to a separate kind of coprocessor, which is on the other side, which is also for privacy. Yeah. So that the main SOC never sees the the raw camera images.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. But that coprocessor, yeah, takes in the data from from the eyes and then we have some some models that give a a gaze vector over to the SOC.
Speaker 2:That's remarkable. I I was convinced that that anything with internal eye tracking like that was going to weigh, you know, 600 grams, a thousand grams for a really long time.
Speaker 9:Not anymore.
Speaker 1:Not anymore.
Speaker 4:Congrats on We're doubling down on it. I love it.
Speaker 9:Yeah. We're we're pretty excited for people to try it because it's quite a magical experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We're very excited for you to Really
Speaker 1:great to meet you. Time. And come back on whenever you want it whenever whenever you have stuff to talk about.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Absolutely. We're we're gonna be doing doing a launch in San Francisco next few months.
Speaker 2:So Amazing. Exciting.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you the progress.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Thanks. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about console.com.
Speaker 2:Console builds AI agents that automate 70% IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got the Gurmanator in the rest in the waiting room. Mark Gurman, how are you doing?
Speaker 7:Miss going, guys.
Speaker 2:We miss you. I miss you.
Speaker 1:I hope you're the news is like it's been and every everything everything I read reminds me of you.
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah?
Speaker 2:That's funny.
Speaker 1:I see Siri. I see Apple. I see Apple Foundation model. I see everything. I just think the germinator.
Speaker 2:Okay. Have you recovered? Is is is was last week exhausting? How are you feeling?
Speaker 7:No. Last week was good. Yeah. It was an interesting conference. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I'm glad they were able to keep the the keynote time down to under an hour and a half. It was one of the shorter WWDC's. It actually felt that they had taken that five minute section from WWDC twenty twenty four where they introduced all those new Siri features and then took it and spread it out and milked it for an hour, basically redoing it. And you know, for those not familiar, basically this year's WWDC was all about new Siri features, the big one being personal context. So you could ask Siri, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 7:Someone asked me for my calendar info for June, July earlier today. So I said, Send an email to so and so with my calendar availability for the next two months, and it was able to do that. Other ones could be like, take the note that I wrote about XYZ and text it over to that person, right? These are real world workflow features that I've been using all day for the last week or so, which makes it, a, all the more ridiculous that Apple had to delay that stuff two years ago as it took two years to ship. Yep.
Speaker 7:But the most insane part about it is that Apple's responses to these delays all downplayed the features. They said, Oh, we spent a hundred and eighty minutes talking about Apple intelligence, and only five out of the hundred eighty minutes were delayed and not shipped. They basically positioned these as, Oh, when it was a delay, it's not a big deal. Now that I'm using it, these are actually the only features that matter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:That they announced two years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They could have delayed Genmoji. Shouldn't have delayed look up your calendar because that's a functional use that people are going to do.
Speaker 7:Yes. And just to be clear, the new Siri is really good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And 95% of the people, sorry to say this, are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre installed. Yeah. The way I look at it is that ChatGPT does a bunch of amazing things that Siri AI can't do, but Siri AI also does a lot of amazing things that you'd go to for ChatGPT. So if you're 95% of the population using AI chatbots and you're using it for looking things up, it's basically the new age Google. It's going to be able to do that.
Speaker 7:It's going to be able to answer questions for you. It's going to be able to do edits for you. But there is like a ton of pro level things that ChatGPT does that Siri AI can't do.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:So I made a list the other day of things that ChadGPT can't do. Big time research, big time analysis of multiple different documents and PDFs and comparisons. People use it for tax preparation. People use it for in-depth health things. So there's a lot you're going to want to use it for.
Speaker 7:So I could see people having both. Siri AI on the pre installed, and then you're going to subscribe to Achat GPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you for some of that extra oomph on top of it. But Seer AI is gonna be useful for a lot of people, and
Speaker 5:Yeah. And you
Speaker 7:know, one easy way to say it Yeah.
Speaker 2:We Or
Speaker 7:just just hold on. Sure. Look at it as like iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we we we debated this, like, have you ever googled anything?
Speaker 2:And I still Google things pretty regularly, and then I go to LLMs for more pro stuff, and then I go to agentic AI for other things. And, like, there's, like, using the right tool for the job that I think people are are processing and absorbing. What what what do you think in hindsight actually delayed these features? Because it does feel like the technology was there a year or two ago. Was it the negotiation, the deal with Google?
Speaker 2:Like like, was this a technology problem or a business problem?
Speaker 7:It was a mix of both. One was the underlying stack and the underlying foundation models that Apple had two years ago were not very good.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 7:And so they needed to go back to the drawing board because they couldn't roll these features out only for them to fail, which is ironic given they rolled out the rest of the Apple intelligence and new Siri features that hardly worked well and were not impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:If you've used the new betas, you can tell what has happened here. The under the hood models are so much better. Based on what I have heard internally, Apple believes that they're basically six months behind OpenAI and ChatGPT in terms of the use cases that they have right now. So Siri works great. Search works great.
Speaker 7:Image Playground, which is their image generation tool, the same underlying tech stack that powers Genmoji, it's like close to what you're getting from Gemini and close to what you're getting from ChatGPT. So everything basically just works now. It's a great experience. Mean I the first beta is sloppy and it's buggy, as you would expect, but they've taken something that was way less than mediocre, and they're giving people a baseline now that's actually functional. I would look at it as this way.
Speaker 7:When you take the iPhone out of the box, it has all these pre installed apps. They're not great, but they work, and you could, you know, use your phone based on what comes out of the box.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:What a what Apple had with AI was not that. Yeah. The preinstall stuff just didn't work. Yeah. But then you can go to the App Store, and you can get a much better messaging app and best much better browser, email app, 10 times better versions of all the preinstalled apps.
Speaker 7:That's the case with AI, whereas now the preinstalled stuff is baseline, and it works great, but you can go out and get even better stuff if you want.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How high is how high are the walls of the walled garden? Like, you gave that example of look up your calendar. I use Google Calendar. Send an email.
Speaker 2:I use Gmail. I'm not in the I'm not even though I'm like an iPhone Mac user, I'm not fully in the Apple ecosystem. Is this gonna work for me or am I gonna bump up against different walled gardens as I try and go
Speaker 1:like, I don't use Apple Music. I use Spotify. Sure. Can I tell And the shortcut paths be
Speaker 2:able to
Speaker 1:tell Siri, like, make me a playlist with these Sure? Free artists. Yeah. You know, and make a Spotify playlist. I'm guessing no.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 7:Well, it is too early to tell. It really is going to depend on how broad Apple's developer tools for the new Siri are going to become over time. The first set of tools are there. They're a bit limited. It depends on how closely Spotify and Google and all those other companies are going to want to work with Apple.
Speaker 7:I would say it's going to be a slow burn. I would say that, you know, if it was Google, I would want my applications to work better with Android and Google Pixel so I can get these cool AI features and bring people more into my ecosystem. So I would say even if they opened up the tools to the degree that you guys are explaining those scenarios for, I would say it's not going to work as well as it would if you're tapped into ecosystem and the other Apple services, which is a shame, but I think over time Apple will get there. And let's not forget, Google is doing very similar stuff right now with Android 17, and a lot of these scenarios I've explained on the iOS side of things are completely available to what you're seeing on the Android side of the world as well with this new Android hub. So if you're deep in the Google ecosystem with Gmail and Chrome, you know, you get a good experience on iOS, But my Pixel friends, they get a great experience, especially with, you know, the new Android stuff rolling out.
Speaker 2:How are you thinking oh, wait. First off, were there any surprises? Did anything surprise you?
Speaker 1:Nothing surprised me.
Speaker 7:Were there any surprises you
Speaker 2:had in the BDC?
Speaker 7:I think I was a little surprised that there wasn't a little bit more. It seemed like, you know, well, that's it. Like, I I I knew, you know, everything that was coming in the keynote and, you know, beyond. I actually just put a story out about how there's a new iPhone Air coming out in spring just a few minutes ago, so happy to talk about that. Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right. Next I would've spring twenty seven.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So
Speaker 7:So I would've expected more out of this out of this dev conference.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. Let let let's switch gears to iPhone Air. Seemed like there were some good reviews. I've seen a couple of people carry them, but it felt like it wasn't selling as well as people expected, and so it might just have been a one off.
Speaker 2:But there is another one coming. Like, what is the correct story or framing around the iPhone Air?
Speaker 7:So Apple's engineering data, and this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, the two biggest complaints for the first generation phone are the battery life and the camera. And Apple knows this because they came out with that battery attachment on the back, is crazy. And then they tried to market the single camera on the back of the iPhone Air as being four lenses, whatever that means. So for this second version, they're upping the battery life. And I don't necessarily think that's because of a bigger battery pack, but I think it's the efficiency gains you're going to get from two nanometer in this new A20 Pro chip.
Speaker 7:And then the other big addition will be a second rear camera for ultra wide angle photography, which a lot of people really like on the iPhone 17 and the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models. And so it's going to be a really nice upgrade. And I think at $999 a little bit less expensive than the iPhone Pros, having a little bit better battery life, having that second camera, that's going to be a really compelling offering. And so I would say, you know, 30,000 foot view, what they're doing to the iPhone over the last year past, in the next few years, what they've got, like this three to four year period of the iPhone, incredibly impressive. They're knocking it out of the park.
Speaker 7:I mean, the iPhone last year, that launch, the 17 Pro and Pro Max, extremely strong, and the next few years are remarkable as well. This fall, the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the first foldable phone, which I'm calling the iPhone Ultra, I believe that will be the name, but let's see. You know, still a little early. And then next spring, you'll have the regular iPhone 18 and the iPhone Air two. We'll see if they call it the 18 Air or the Air two.
Speaker 7:And then next fall, you'll have the iPhone 20 and iPhone 20 Pro Max, those being the twentieth anniversary models, complete redesign, curved glass, slimmer bezels, smaller dynamic island, and all that. Lighter You'll have
Speaker 2:I like how you just Cleaner.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's gonna be nice.
Speaker 2:By day leaks. I'm like, exactly what Apple's gonna do.
Speaker 7:It's funny. It's incredible. And then the second foldable phone. So it's a jam packed 2027. Twenty twenty seven is going to be Apple's biggest product year in its history.
Speaker 7:That's great. I'm pumped as the consumer.
Speaker 1:Will they As someone
Speaker 7:who covers
Speaker 1:Do think do you think they will ever try to create the conditions to get somebody to own a everyday consumer consumer to try to have multiple phones? Like, will they create as will they create a product like set of features that's like a digital twin where you have like your iPhone Ultra and your iPhone Air run two phones. And you just I am
Speaker 7:yeah. Breathes.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I don't know what I'm going do. As someone who lives and breathes this stuff, don't know what I'm going do. Because I can already tell you right now, I want the new iPhone Air. Yeah. I want the iPhone foldable.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I want the iPhone 20. So it's like, I don't know what I'm going to What a first world problem to have. We're talking about not even two phones, but now I want three phones. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So It like for
Speaker 1:them, I I don't think you're gonna be the only one. And it it's always been interesting to me, you know, people complain about iPhone pricing, but there are not that many products in the world that are as, like that have as much utility as an iPhone that you use as much as the iPhone. Like, if the iPhone was $10,000, there'd be a big market for them. Right? And so I feel like Apple over time
Speaker 7:Don't give them any ideas.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. But I just feel like over time, it's like, how do we make more money? It's like, well, you make a feature so that you have like you can have like, yeah, this is the iPhone I use on the weekend. This is the iPhone that I use during the work week or whatever.
Speaker 7:And They should do that. They'll probably get a lot of they'll probably get a lot heat for that depending on how they they articulate it. Hopefully, don't hire you as the marketing person for that because they're just gonna come across
Speaker 1:Well, I'm just giving them business ideas. Like I think like I'm I'm giving them what whatever it is, 1,500 a year for iPhones. I've I don't even know the pricing but they could probably get they could probably get more.
Speaker 7:They will. I mean, I would expect the prices to go up on all of these things. The foldable phone obviously is gonna be $2 plus. The other thing to note is in iOS 27, they actually have a feature where They you think can they can
Speaker 1:price the ultra higher than specs.
Speaker 7:They're on their mind. I think they'll be I think they'll be higher than specs. But they added a new feature who? Snap?
Speaker 1:No. I'm joking.
Speaker 7:Oh, we can get to that.
Speaker 2:Specs are very highly priced. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But iPhone or iOS 27 has a feature where you can synchronize a single phone number and carrier account between two iPhones. Oh. So it does have that on the phone number side of things. Mhmm. But you're not gonna be able to, you know, pick up a make a feature to have the weekend stuff and
Speaker 10:Yeah.
Speaker 7:During the week stuff and the night stuff. That'd be cool, though. I don't know. Screw it. Maybe I'll get the foldable two and the 20 at the same time in a year from now.
Speaker 7:So we'll see. You're welcome, Apple.
Speaker 2:Does the foldable eat into iPad, or is it purely additive?
Speaker 7:I think it's purely additive. I think that Apple has positioned the iPad itself at this point as a companion device to the iPhone and the Mac. I think they've done a great job at that. So I I don't think the foldable is going take away iPad sales, particularly because of the price delta is so high. There will be a new OLED iPad mini coming out soon, which I think a lot of the iPad mini fanboys are going be pretty pumped about.
Speaker 2:That's great. What about, what you got for the Apple Vision Pro fanboys like myself? What are we doing in AR, VR glasses? We just talked to, the founder of Raven Renaissance. He's making augmented reality glasses.
Speaker 2:Obviously, Specs launched as well. Is there any movement there or anything from WWC on the software side that might actually hint at or translate into wearables?
Speaker 7:Vision Pro added this new feature where it uses the external cameras to give you a sense of your external environment and object identification.
Speaker 6:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:That's going to be a feature at the heart of new AirPods coming out at the end of next year. It's a project called b seven nine eight where they have cameras on the AirPods that can help you with navigation and seeing the world around you, cloud processing, feeding that data into Siri AI. Same functionality will come to the smart glasses from Apple. Non AR, right? No displays.
Speaker 7:Those will be rolled out at the very end of twenty twenty seven, hopefully in time for the holiday season, but they're a little behind on those. Augmented reality glasses from Apple I would expect much later in the decade. New Vision Pro. So the Vision Pro is on ice. You're not going to see another new Vision Pro redesign, but what you are going to see is a completely rethought, revamped, from ground up mixed reality headset from Apple.
Speaker 7:So
Speaker 2:K. I'm listening.
Speaker 7:K. I'm thinking twenty twenty nine, maybe end twenty twenty eight, but it's gonna be a long time.
Speaker 2:Where's Vision Air? We got the Vision Pro.
Speaker 7:They killed
Speaker 2:it. Make it lighter.
Speaker 7:They killed it. Well, this is going to be a lighter this is going to be a much lighter
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:End to end retooling, revamping of the headset. It's not a Vision Pro two. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's a start from scratch type of product.
Speaker 2:Give me the Vision Make it 25 pounds on my face.
Speaker 7:Yeah. It's going to be you know, it's interesting. When the Vision Pro launched and they were looking for different ways to take this product and, you know, give it a market, this is going to sound surprising to you, but obviously on one hand they were looking at how do we make this thing cheaper and lighter?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:One of the directions they were actually also looking at how do you make this thing even higher end? How do you make this thing even more expensive? How do you make this thing even better from a technical CHOP standpoint? How do you reduce the latency? Should we do a model that's specific for medical grade, for enterprise, for these high value targets that maybe would be willing to pay $5,000 for this machine, a business class version of the VisionPRO.
Speaker 7:Ultimately, they're not moving in this direction right now. It's all about that end to end retool.
Speaker 2:Where does Apple sit on enterprise versions of their products? Like, the Mac Pro, is that the last time they had something dedicated? Like, Mac Studio? Do they think
Speaker 1:of that as, an enterprise grade product? Pro is an enterprise product.
Speaker 10:I feel
Speaker 2:like MacBook Pro is extremely consumer, but I I don't know. Like like, how how did they think about, like, actually, you know, segmenting out that market?
Speaker 7:It's been a while. They had the Xserve servers Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Fifteen years ago. Yeah. You can make the argument like the Mac Pro, Mac Studio, what have you. But I the the thinking in Apple is make these baseline products for consumers that consumers love, and make them so enjoyable that you're going to want to use them at work too, and then provide the software tools that allow you to do that.
Speaker 7:And if you remember, 2008, the iPhone renaissance starting then, a lot of credit goes to the price, cutting the price down to 189. A lot of credit goes to the App Store. Some of the credit goes to three g. Some of the credit goes to geographic distribution. But the one thing that people leave off when they talk about where did the how did the iPhone go from here to here is 2008 is when Apple added enterprise support for the iPhone.
Speaker 7:And so getting these things in businesses is really, really important. For the Vision Pro, just like HoloLens, Magic Leap, and other ARVR companies before them, they had no choice but to go all in on the enterprise or not go all in, go a little bit deeper into the enterprise than they normally would like with their products because that was their biggest market.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Today, all of Apple's other products, watches, phones, iPads, Macs, they have really big, you know, footprints in the enterprise, but the enterprise is still only a sliver of the overall market. Yeah. You know, 90% of their sales are consumer.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:Vision Pro, you know, the split is is a lot bigger in favor of enterprise.
Speaker 2:Any update on the lamp?
Speaker 7:The lamp? Oh, the tabletop robot. Yeah. I still expect that to come 2028. We're going to see the smart home display.
Speaker 7:I know, I know, I know. Smart home display probably at the as early as the end of this year. Okay. That's going to be an amazing product.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And I think it's going to be a blockbuster, and I think it's going to be a gigantic seller. Just imagine having this thing on your desk, your wall, your counter. You can walk up to it, it could recognize you, it could pull up the stuff you know, you and let's pretend Jordy and John live together. Jordy walks up to it, all of Jordy's stuff comes up, John walks up to it, all of John's stuff comes up. It has this personalized Siri.
Speaker 7:You can grab all that stuff from the device. It has FaceTime. It has intercom. It has smart home control. Control your music.
Speaker 7:You can watch video on it. I think it's gonna be really, really great holiday gift when this thing finally comes out.
Speaker 2:How will it control the music? Like, are they gonna finally make a run of matching Sonos, which is in a very, very tough spot as a $1,700,000,000 company? Are they gonna try and make a run at
Speaker 7:Is that it? 1,700,000,000. Wow.
Speaker 2:7,000,000,000 down
Speaker 7:What's Peloton?
Speaker 2:Peloton. Let's see. Peloton market cap, 2.4. So bigger. It's crazy because, like, Aura Yeah.
Speaker 7:Has, a $10,000,000,000 valuation. Right? I mean, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, I mean Sonos. Sonos has frustrated a lot of people with the software. They rolled a bunch of stuff back. But in terms of actually offering a consumer, prosumer level experience with, you know, WiFi connected speakers that are available in more than just one SKU or two SKUs, you know.
Speaker 2:Like, yes, you can go all in on the Apple speakers, but then you just have a ton of really small speakers around
Speaker 1:speakers built inside of my walls. And it gave me insane they're not Sonos, thankfully. But I was like, it gave me insane Sonos PTSD because I'm like, imagine you have an issue with
Speaker 2:Well, you take the aux from that and you plug that into whatever you want, some sort of receiver, but Apple doesn't make that receiver right now.
Speaker 7:Like, you know, Apple had such an opportunity with the HomePod and speakers and they completely blew it. Because of AI, because they didn't create an app ecosystem around it, because they made it exclusive to their, you know, customer base, no Android support. The list goes on. Pretty disappointing. They haven't given the HomePod a meaningful update in six years since the HomePod mini launched.
Speaker 7:They did a little minor refresh to the HomePod in '23, but I thought when the first HomePod launched in 2018 that they were going to be able to really go all in on speakers, different form factors, different versions. When this But smart home is one of two pillars for Apple right now, AI wearables and then AI smart home devices. And so you'll see the smart home hub, you'll see one other thing in home security. You'll see that lamp as you call it. See a refresh of
Speaker 2:the home. Tell you what, Apple, exactly.
Speaker 1:Lamp and the home security combined, and you have killer lamps.
Speaker 7:Can release Sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1:You can release
Speaker 7:And then you combine it with AI.
Speaker 2:Are there wait. Are there any Apple products with motors in them that I'm not that I'm
Speaker 6:not familiar
Speaker 7:This will be the first one with an artificial arm, and it's a motorized Apple product that can move around in space. And so if you think about it, this is a piece of the legacy of the Apple Car because this project was part of the Apple Car AI and mechanics and part of that division, and it was one of the things that got left over. In fact, the person who ran the entire Apple Car project when it shut down, Kevin Lynch, this was the guy who ran software for the Apple Watch for a very long time and helped build that product from the ground up. Mhmm. His project now is the lamp.
Speaker 2:The lamp.
Speaker 1:Lamp man. It's not quite a
Speaker 7:lamp. It's a big deal going from running the Apple Watch to the Apple Car to the Apple Lamp.
Speaker 2:Do you believe the conspiracy theories that suggest that the Ferrari Luce is just a rebadged Apple Car?
Speaker 7:No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 7:No. No. The the Apple car looks like a new age VW bus. Oh. You know?
Speaker 7:I think the Luce would have been successful as a $150,000 Apple Yeah. But as a $700,000 Ferrari, I think they missed the mark. Well, who knows?
Speaker 2:You might need to buy one to get access to other cars. Like, Ferrari is a very complicated business model. You never know how it'll
Speaker 7:it'll do. But No. It's fun it's funny. I saw people go, like, on chat GPT after the Yeah. Lutro was announced.
Speaker 7:They typed in make me an electric Ferrari. They're like, I made a better design in fifteen seconds.
Speaker 1:Hard to do. Yeah. What what Mhmm. Any any predictions with for specs? It feels like at a normal company would would launch this product and then probably shutter the program.
Speaker 1:I expect I wouldn't be surprised if if Spiegel triples down. But it just feels like I I I cannot see the market for $2,000, you know, pair of smart glasses that still feel like they're not going to add a tremendous amount of value to my daily life.
Speaker 7:I like Evan Spiegel. Like some of the stuff Snap I is think the design of the glasses actually looks pretty cool. I haven't tried the latest prototype yet, but I think they're well designed and a nice product. The question is if there's going to be a killer app for it, and right now it doesn't seem to be the case. I think the price actually isn't terrible.
Speaker 7:You know, the vision when we started talking about these things half a decade ago was they needed to get to smartphone prices. Smartphone prices are now $2,000. Yeah. But if you can get this thing down to a grand, which I don't know how that's ever going to happen, you're talking about something fairly fairly compelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Meta Ray Ban displays are at $800. Mhmm. You think they're losing a bunch of money on that?
Speaker 7:I think they're losing money on them. I don't think people are buying them. Mhmm. I basically met at what they've done is they've created a three tier system. Tier A is the non display glasses that look exactly like normal glasses and don't have a display, and those have been extraordinarily popular because of the Luxottica brands pushing those.
Speaker 7:Tier B has been the meta display, which is this little HUD, a little heads up display you have in there, and you use the wristband controller. The third tier is the true AR glasses. I don't think that mid tier with the HUD is going to last. The price is relatively solid, but I just don't see that as something people are going to be compelled by. You want dual display.
Speaker 7:You want binocular displays. You want immersiveness. Then on the other hand, if you tried the Vision Pro, you're spoiled, and so it's like, really, do you want to use any of these things? Did I see a photo of you on a plane wearing a Vision Pro the other day?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 7:I watched whole movies Which one of it? It was one of you two.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was me.
Speaker 7:It was you. John. Okay.
Speaker 1:John. I'll watch our
Speaker 2:entire Lawrence of Arabia from start to finish in a Vision Your
Speaker 7:hair is so similar. I can't tell who who who's who anymore, but that's me on a plane. Yeah. Like, I love that thing for movie watching. It's amazing.
Speaker 7:If you've installed Vision OS 27, have you installed it yet?
Speaker 2:No. Better?
Speaker 7:The new Siri is pretty good on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then they have this new environment. I don't remember which where it is in the world. It might be Iceland. It's really remarkable. And then you can set any of your panoramas now, the good ones at least Sure.
Speaker 7:As your environment. So a few little bells and whistles tweaks in Vision West 27. That's right. I don't think it's this yeah. It's not the software
Speaker 2:on Sunday. Take a panorama of the UltraDome, and then when
Speaker 7:I'm on the plane, I'll
Speaker 2:be able to sit here, rewatch our interview on that screen there.
Speaker 7:That's funny.
Speaker 2:In full immersion. Midjourney Hardware
Speaker 1:Release. Any predictions? Have you followed it at all?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I've been looking at this closely. We're going to be covering it tonight. I believe the launch is 6PM.
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 7:The head of hardware engineering is someone who came from the VisionPRO team. He was a manager of the VisionPRO hardware team. It seems like they've been working on this for a couple years. I would file this immediately in the category of products that may never launch or may never be bought by anyone. Wonder what we'll sell more, yeah, experimental, the specs for this product, probably the specs, to be quite honest with you.
Speaker 7:I think the last thing someone sent me before I came on with you guys was that the product is going to be large in size, so I don't know what that necessarily means, and I guess that would rule out a headset of some sort.
Speaker 2:Smart kegerator. Who knows? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I just thought, like, some I I my my head went to, like, local compute something that Sure. Tiny box. Something for like prosumer creators type of thing. But
Speaker 7:I don't think that's interesting. I think you need something image based, something visual. Not another Mac studio.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Last question about WWDC. The parental controls, the focus on it feels like Apple's solving some of the, like, societal anxiety around, like, are phones bad for kids, our phones bad for people, all this. It was existential. Like, what do you think they were driving there?
Speaker 2:Was that message received because obviously AI is everything everyone talks about. But how important are those features? Like, what were your takeaways from how like, why they chose to focus on that so much? How important are those features? And then will that actually move the needle on, like, young device adoption?
Speaker 7:Couple things. Regulators around the world are going absolutely nuts about this stuff. Mhmm. Smartphone addiction, social media, etcetera. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And Apple needs to address all this stuff before it becomes their next EU related problem or EU like problem.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 7:The other thing is AI, and not that Apple has had great AI on the phone, but obviously the fears of AI taking over things. Yep. And then the other thing I would say is they launched Screen Time, I believe, in 2018, which is their parental control, the name of their parental control system. It's just been an unmitigated disaster that hasn't worked properly for like five or six years. Bug And so they really needed to revamp it.
Speaker 2:But it was bug driven? Because I've noticed sometimes I'm going to screen time and it'll be like, the washingtonpost.com is twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes, and I'm like, I had one tab open and it was just like churning and sending something.
Speaker 7:Super buggy. Yeah. Kids being able to just do whatever the hell they want on their phones even if they're not supposed to. Yeah. Just a bunch of issues.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And so they needed to do an end to end revamp, and it's smart timing given they've really they've finally got the AI in place. And then you've got a lot of people who are like, I don't want digital devices anymore. I want an m p three player. Bring the iPod back.
Speaker 7:Right? Get this screen up All
Speaker 2:my luckies out there banging the gong about retro futuristic devices, the game It's a
Speaker 7:real thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 7:think it's a real thing?
Speaker 1:Would would Apple ever do a rerelease of the like an iPod? Like, because I
Speaker 7:feel I don't like think so.
Speaker 2:No. That's not their style. That's Palmer Luckey's domain
Speaker 6:I think
Speaker 7:this is well, you guys know how this feature works. Right? Like, turn it on, and then over time, you can expand the feature set, who people can contact, applications you have. So you can really, you know, turn the iPhone into a dumb phone now and then let it get smart over time. It's actually a remarkable concept, and I think if executed well, it's pretty compelling and all the other phone makers are going copy it.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Happy birthday, son. You're 17. You get to unlock the calculator app now. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Enjoy it. Don't go too crazy with those numbers. Who knows? Thank you so much for taking the time to come great.
Speaker 7:Thank you guys. See you next time.
Speaker 2:Soon. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world?
Speaker 2:Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it folks. Stop making Just serious.
Speaker 1:Every founder that we talked to that raises capital at NICEE Yep. Loves it. Oh, they love it. They say it's incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:NPS Just do go do it.
Speaker 2:NPS was legit Yeah. Through the roof.
Speaker 1:When you're raising that series d or f Yeah. Why not just
Speaker 2:Just do it at
Speaker 1:the Head over
Speaker 2:New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:The New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:We got Ryan Daniels from Crosby, the cofounder and CEO in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN UltraDome. Ryan, how you doing? Good to see you again. What's the latest?
Speaker 2:Good to see you, guys. Welcome back. You're bench maxing. You're bench maxing.
Speaker 1:Bench maxing.
Speaker 10:Always gotta benchmark.
Speaker 2:Tell us about benchmarks. What are you launching? Why is it important? Break it down for us.
Speaker 10:So today, we published a benchmark. It's the first benchmark that we know of that just looks at it's it's simple in theory, but a negotiation between two lawyers Mhmm. Like, as far as we can get to completion.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:And I think the main takeaway is there's a lot of art to negotiating, and the way that lawyers negotiate contracts is really complex because there's so many moving variables.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:And this is what we do at Crosby. We try to get those closed faster. And so for the first time, we can actually measure, you know, how do agents do on the first red line? That's fine. We kind of know that already, but how do they go over and over through the process where the judgment of a lawyer really takes hold and they just try to figure out who is their counterparty and how can they get them to yes.
Speaker 2:Next step, you gotta train a voice model to be able to yell on the phone at the other client, at the counterparty. Let them know that you're not doing another turn of the forms. The battle of the forms is over. Now, obviously, there's a lot that goes into this. Talk about the data.
Speaker 2:Are you getting good red line data, ground truth data from firms? Are they happy to partner with you on this? Like, what is the value prop to actually get the correct data? Are you doing it yourself through a data firm? Like, what's the strategy to get the ground truth here?
Speaker 2:Because it is it's not the same as, like, a math problem that you can just verify with Lean.
Speaker 10:Yeah. That's that's, like, that's the key point of it. And and, like, you're totally right. Like like so we worked with Micro One really closely on this with Ali and his team. They've been amazing.
Speaker 10:They have, like, a really great legal focus that they're building out. And, you know, we have our own captive law firm here. That's been our kind of stick from the beginning was in order to get the full benefits of what agents can do in law, start your own law firm, sell end to end legal work. And as agents get better, our our our margins get better. And we worked with Ali, and and the hard thing is, like, there is no right answer.
Speaker 10:And we basically had large groups of real lawyers negotiating all with the same positions for the same parties and seeing, like, how much of those lawyers agree with one another on the right way to respond to those other lawyers. And so we could just see the overlap. And as the negotiation went longer and longer, we saw a ton of deviation between those lawyers, which is fascinating. Like, they're all very senior. They're all very experienced.
Speaker 10:This is a real negotiation. But at the beginning, the lawyers kinda more or less did the same thing, and we just saw the way the agents, we then built a rubric based on how those lawyers actually worked and tried to create some sort of, like, ground truth for the best way to negotiate. But, like, to your point, like, I don't know. Maybe if we just did everything in all caps, the candidate party would just accept it, and we could yell through the margin. So you have to try it.
Speaker 2:That's why you pay the big bucks if you got big Yeah. Big lungs and can scream. What like, it seems like all the models did very similarly. 50% 50.5 for GPT, 5.5, weird numerology there. 5.5 gets a 50.5.
Speaker 2:Gemini 3.5 flash got a 45.1. Opus 4.8 got 44.4, and Fable five got 47.3. That seems surprising. I mean, seems like the window for testing was low. Or is that something like Fable is more tuned to cybersecurity bio, those sort of reinforced learnings, those those feedback loops, and maybe it hasn't been applied to to to legal yet.
Speaker 2:But what was your interpretation?
Speaker 10:I we put a big asterisk on Fable because we got one testing run through and then we lost the access. Wow. So we we still would wanna do a few more. Sure. If and when
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:We get we get access back. You know, I think I think it's not surprising. I think what was most interesting to us were a few things. Mhmm. One, in the first red line, like, first review of document, you know, thing, and and agents, like, really did poorly.
Speaker 10:They scored they scored poorly there because they couldn't service those first issues. Mhmm. As the as the new issue went went on, we knew the issues. Models did quite a bit better. But the biggest thing was models are really likely to just say yes and accept some term because you wanna keep the deal going, and that was part of the instruction.
Speaker 10:And that's just not good lawyer. Right? Like, a great lawyer knows how to kinda make you feel like you're getting your your side, but but still push the deal forward and and and protect the client. And that's where the real judgment came in. And so, you know, in our mind, we have a lot of work to do because we we want our agents to be able to take the work off our lawyer's hands, to be able to think through something and say, hey.
Speaker 10:Like, we pushed back on this for this reason and really get the counterparty there.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:So, you know, I just think the models did better than we thought they would, but there's a lot of work to do.
Speaker 2:We're having a little bit of interference. I have one more question, Jordan. Go for need to get in? Just wanna know about the value of the harness because it seems like all of these models are sort of neck and neck Yeah. You know, within a few percentage.
Speaker 2:What happens if you wrap them in a very bespoke harness that your team builds? Can you get to 70%, 90%? Like, where do you think the the upper bound is on this benchmark?
Speaker 10:Yeah. That that's a great question. And, like, every you know, everything's published. It's all open source. So, like, the harness that we use everything can all be replicated.
Speaker 10:Yeah. There's a lot of ways to push. I think, you know, we've invested a lot in in the harness that we wrote specifically that's really good at editing Word documents. That's turned out to be a really hard thing.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 10:And so there's ways to push there. You know, I think ultimately, you know, more and more bespoke models that are, like, really post trained on just, like, making judgment calls, stating their reasoning will be an area. So, like, both of those things help. But at the end of day, like, there's a ton of intelligence in, like, just the closed models and I think it's not being fully exploited. So, yeah, all all areas to explore.
Speaker 10:That's the right questions.
Speaker 1:How has your team experimented with token maxing? Like, met you guys are, you know, heavily funded. You're building an AI Yeah. Law firm. I imagine you're not telling the team, like, you know, be be conservative with tokens, especially because you can just, like, learn faster and and it's kind of the whole point of, of the business.
Speaker 1:But where does token maxing make sense with with legal? Have you already found an equilibrium? What is your overall kind of, like, ethos around it?
Speaker 10:I feel like as a company, we're not, like, successful enough to be, like, worried about token cost yet. We're still in a place where we can just be, like, putting as much money. And I think more and more law firms, like Kirkland just allocated half $1,000,000,000 to building their own AI stuff, are just trying to figure out you know, they're charging they're charging huge amounts of money for the labor spend of legal. So they have a lot of room to throw money at tokens. And so long as you're, like, basically spending less than the equivalent of a thousand dollars an hour on tokens, which is even for this so hard to do, like, you're still coming out with a good margin.
Speaker 10:So, like, we you know, we're we're spending a ton. You know, we we we did a lot of work with Fable. We got early access to it, and and we spent a lot of money with it. And, like, you know and so I think there's still room to go because ultimately, it's it's either the model or the human, and and and the models are still cheaper than, you know, hiring expensive lawyers for some of the tasks that we don't think we need lawyers for.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry for the technical difficulties, but, yeah, great great to get the update.
Speaker 2:And we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest
Speaker 6:of Goodbye. Your
Speaker 1:See you, Ryan.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest Isaiah Granet, is the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's up, dude?
Speaker 8:I'm doing good. This is like the coolest thing I get to do for this fundraiser announcement. Fantastic.
Speaker 7:We'll kick it
Speaker 1:off. Know. I know. It's way too fundraising.
Speaker 8:How much
Speaker 2:did you raise?
Speaker 1:This is way overdue.
Speaker 2:How much did you raise?
Speaker 8:We we raised 50,000,000.
Speaker 1:Hit it again. Hit it again because it should have.
Speaker 2:We go. Congratulations. Now, tell us what do you do? Long overdue.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So you guys know when you you call basically any big company in The US and you have to deal with one of those really annoying bots, we replace that with AI. But our specialty, we like to say, is, like, we wanna do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies. We do the really complex, hard to handle calls, then we do that without OpenAI. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here.
Speaker 8:Yeah. They're off to anyone else.
Speaker 1:So So you're training your own models?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Correct.
Speaker 1:And okay. So so more specifically, like, are you working, like, 911 calls? Is that is that I imagine that's not your focus, right? Because it or or maybe it is, but I know there's some companies that that just focus on that. Are you thinking like hospitals?
Speaker 1:Like, what what what kind of give us some more maybe concrete examples.
Speaker 8:Hospitals, airlines, and, yes, 911 calls eventually. So we're actually working on a product offering for that right now. I can't say too much about that, but I I do have this weird feeling that, like, poetically, I'm gonna die by a botched AI 911 call one day. And that's kinda my mission in
Speaker 1:the Don't man it. Don't yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta you're a time traveler going back in time.
Speaker 1:I gotta warm myself in order to You not you gotta save yourself. What what how describe this mark like, describe voice a describe the Voice AI market. Right? Like, you guys have some competition from the Frontier Labs, but it seems like less competition than than maybe one would think or maybe it's like feel almost certainly has to be less competitive than, you know, coding agents, right, where you have, you know, thousands of companies and the labs and the hyperscalers all competing.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. And you'd be surprised. So, like, two years ago, we were we were one of the first companies to do this. This is, like, well before the labs.
Speaker 8:And I have a little binder of screenshots of different VCs that I'm sure talk about their voice AI pieces today who said no one will be talking to AI two years from today. And by the way, very unpopular if you go into a fundraiser reminding them that they said that. They don't like that. No. I I don't recommend that.
Speaker 2:Clean gloves for sure. We've been on that point of like like no one will be talking to AI, it seems like are you actually increasing the length of phone calls? Like I'm seeing like the typical call last thirty to forty five minutes. That feels like too long honestly. That feels like a long time.
Speaker 2:Are people asking your models to
Speaker 1:write only.
Speaker 2:Python for them or something, and they're transcribing it one one character at
Speaker 7:a time?
Speaker 6:Like, what's going on?
Speaker 7:Be a
Speaker 8:little roundabout. But, yeah, we we do calls with, like, 90 year old patients doing forty five minute long remote patient monitoring calls.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:And so if you want them to put on the blood pressure device, right, and you want to figure out if they're having a heart attack, you have to hear about their grandchild first.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 8:That is an immovable object you have to get through.
Speaker 2:Sure. Okay.
Speaker 8:These are lonely, lonely Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So you actually have to somewhat like put guardrails on obviously, but not the guardrails can't be too narrow to the point where you're a phone tree because you actually do have to open up the customer, open up the the the user on the other end of the line and and start actually having a conversation before you can do a more complex interaction. Interesting. Oh, So do companies yeah. Do companies have like specific ideas about that preconceived notions whether they should or shouldn't do that, whether that's table stakes? Like, what does that look like?
Speaker 8:So we we work with a couple of like really big banks. Yeah. And one of them had a minute and a half long disclosure we had to leave at the start of every call.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:I know. Thank you.
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 8:I I I worked that in there. So if you're a big bank watching this, please disregard everything else I've said and just reach out. But we we had to have a minute and a half long disclosure.
Speaker 3:So if
Speaker 8:you wanted to have a human being talk to our AI, you had to sit through a minute and a half Wow. Of straight reading out different things to them. And then they would get on you know, we get on calls with them, they'd say, like, it it it's varying. Right? Like, not every bank's like this.
Speaker 8:We work with some really big ones that are less painful. Mhmm. But they're like, yeah. How do we know the AI is not gonna say something racist?
Speaker 7:Like Sure.
Speaker 8:Sure. Pretty sure that it won't. Yeah. And you have to go through this really intensive testing process. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that these call centers and these really big ones that we're dealing with, every business has tried to get rid of them every possible way they can.
Speaker 8:They only exist because there's a gap between what the business wants to offer and what it can offer. And so when you hear about, like, AI receptionists or you hear about ecommerce, where's my order calls, that's not what we're doing. We're doing the hard part of the $250,000,000,000 a year spend in The US, and that is really early. That is, like, astoundingly early. I don't think people realize how early it is.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Makes sense. What is I mean, you're talking to big banks. Like, what is the actual go to market motion funnel? Is it all sales driven or are there inbound?
Speaker 2:Do you have an inbound team? Or is there any, like, sort of, like, self serve option at this point?
Speaker 8:We have 350,000 self serve users, but most of it is actually inbound leads. So we do viral marketing every once in a while. You guys might have seen this, but we had a billboard. This is back before it was like cool to do billboards Okay. That said still hiring humans?
Speaker 8:Uh-huh.
Speaker 4:And it had
Speaker 8:a phone number on it.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 8:Not stop hiring humans. That is a different company that Yeah.
Speaker 3:Ripped that off. Okay.
Speaker 8:We're not happy with You
Speaker 1:guys were the you guys were the first.
Speaker 8:We were the we were the first, and I actually got a chance while the founder of that other company was getting a haircut to go up to him and tell him what I thought because I found out
Speaker 1:what was happening.
Speaker 2:The haircuts haircut crazy right now.
Speaker 6:Out of
Speaker 1:the audience.
Speaker 8:Oh, it's sort of a captive audience. Right? Yeah. The the poor the poor people did not know what was going on and why we were so upset at each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you invented billboards. Yeah. So, him to come in and not only run a billboard but to use similar language is just, you know
Speaker 8:Same same everything. I was like He's like, oh, I'm a big fan of your billboards. I'm like, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ted Turner.
Speaker 8:But, yeah. So we we bought the rights to Soulja Boy's Voice, for example. Soulja Boy, like Crank That. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 8:Kiss Me Through the Phone. Yep.
Speaker 7:So we've done a lot
Speaker 8:of viral marketing and we managed to get CIOs, great people to come in and actually come to us. Yep. We do a lot of outbound too, but primarily
Speaker 1:CIOs, famous Soulja Boy. Yeah. Soulja Boy help you win in the enterprise?
Speaker 8:Like you would not believe because he was really popular around the time that most of the CIOs were like High
Speaker 2:school. Teenagers. High school. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Or, Yeah. You know, young
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. He probably crushes it like AWS reinvent in Vegas.
Speaker 1:Are there any any any of your customers actively using Soulja Boy's voice for their customer service or is that just like
Speaker 2:to I'm gonna read a disclosure to you for a minute and a half, but I'm bringing in Soldier Boy Advance. I think that's a win win.
Speaker 1:Be retention there would probably be Yeah. Really quite good. Yeah. Why not?
Speaker 8:Yes. Actually, there's a lot of mostly, there's there's a lot of restaurants because apparently people really love it. But we have his name published under a different name on the platform. So we have Soulja Boy's official voice, and then we have a a name that's hidden for the other one. The other voice is very popular.
Speaker 8:So there are a few enterprises that if you stumble upon it and you call, you might not realize it, but you're actually
Speaker 1:talking to
Speaker 8:Soldier Boy.
Speaker 1:The one and only. Wow. Yeah. Talked about working with Paul Lieberstein. Never Behind get to Toby on The Office.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 8:I never get to meet the celebrities. It's always the marketing team. He was incredibly nice to work with, very pleasant. Ramp had Kevin or Brian, and I I have to be very careful about the names, and not mixing them up. But we were like, who's the most boring person that we could possibly think of?
Speaker 8:Because the company's name is bland, so it kinda comes with the territory. Sure. And everyone was like, well, Toby from the office. Paul, I think, was humored by that. Took it very graciously, and we ended up having a lot of really great interaction with that.
Speaker 8:And and sort of goes along with our our marketing, which is fun and engaging, but not maybe disruptive to the where you're like, these guys, I wouldn't trust them to handle my 911 calls.
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Imagine The entire imagine calling 911 and Soulja Boy picks it.
Speaker 10:Soulja Boy.
Speaker 1:That that would be worrisome. I gotta I gotta say. Oh, wow. But good lead gen.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, thank you so much
Speaker 1:for coming on the show. Who who did who did the round?
Speaker 8:So it was our insiders plus Dell and HubSpot. So we actually went very corporate on this round, and we were excited to have them. And yeah. So you guys will be hearing more thoughts on the new model and stuff.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Great great to finally meet you. And And, yeah,
Speaker 7:congrats on all having me.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. In market news, more Fed officials have signaled a rate increase as the next move. The Central Bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Walsh's first meeting as chairman, but nine of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase by year's end, up from none in March. And so the market is selling off down about a percent today based on that. Also a g seven meeting that's happening between AI leaders.
Speaker 2:Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and and Dennis Sivasubramanian from Google's DeepMind at a summit in France on Wednesday discussing AI export controls and all things AI. The AI leaders are huddling at lunch with the G7 in France. And I'm sure there'll be more things to come out of that. There's still more back and forth on export controls. The Fable five is still embargoed in some way, and they're working through that.
Speaker 2:There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also, US has held off on blacklisting China's deep seek. More than a 100 firms and more than a 100 firms that are deemed security risks. That was part of the the Fable five rollout was that there was a South Korean telecom company, according to the reporting, that had access to one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. And that firm, that Chinese that South Korean telecom company had potentially ties to China in some way.
Speaker 2:And so the US government was skeptical of that South Korean telecom company, and so there was a debate over that and whether or not that crossed a bright line. And so from The Washington Post, Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned, the list of companies that would be getting the most advanced models had ballooned, roughly 50 additional entities had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify new recipients for days. When Anthropic finally turned over names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company. The administration suspected, alleged, of having ties to China, officials said.
Speaker 2:And so that is the the key of the dust up there. But we'll be continuing to follow that.
Speaker 1:Other news, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Bayer, who Mhmm. Is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory was in a in a
Speaker 2:Plane crash.
Speaker 1:Plane crash.
Speaker 2:In Laredo.
Speaker 1:Guess early early this morning coming back from Mexico to Austin. Yeah. I unfortunately never never got to meet Joshua, but Yeah. Only heard tremendous things about him and he really was a important figure in the Austin startup community. So Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends. Indeed. And, yeah, really, Yeah. Really Rest in peace.
Speaker 2:Well, we should close on on positive note in some way. There's a whole discussion over SpaceX potentially using the high share price, the incredible valuation to acquire more companies, create a roll up. There's a piece in the Financial Times we can we can run through another day. But Bill Ackman shares a hall of fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.
Speaker 2:A tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the Cursor acquisition closing or being announced that the option has been exercised.
Speaker 2:But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there gonna be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll up? Will SpaceX buy Neo Cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets, like TeraFab has been talking.
Speaker 2:What what's involved in that? I mean, they're they're they're trading at what? 10 times Intel at this point or something? I don't know. What is Intel market cap?
Speaker 2:But there's so much they could do. They it's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600,000,000,000 company. So that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain.
Speaker 2:There's a lot in AI world and the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they want to go. But it would be a very different direction. And so everyone will be watching it very, very closely. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple cast and Spotify.
Speaker 2:Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you
Speaker 1:And hello to Keith tomorrow. Who seemingly just joined. Hey, Keith.
Speaker 2:Couple hours late, but
Speaker 1:half Three of you hours late, but we're happy to have you here.
Speaker 2:Come back tomorrow.
Speaker 1:All have a tremendous afternoon. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close as well.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it every day. And have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.