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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN live. Today is Thursday, 03/06/2025. And we are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance,
Speaker 2:the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, John Coogan. Right next to me is Jordy Hayes. We got a great show for you today. We got four people calling in Gary tan, Augustus, Doritko, Nicole whisk off and Billy Thalamer is calling in. We're covering YC.
Speaker 1:We're covering rainmaking. We're covering early stage seed VC solo GP stuff. We're covering flying cars that are regulated like boats, sea gliders. I love it. We're gonna go over some news first.
Speaker 1:We're covering Discord's IPO, little preemptive size gong for there we go. Jason Citroen, one of the best to ever do it. And then we're gonna talk about Amazon's Alexa Plus launch. That's kinda weird. I don't know.
Speaker 1:We'll go through it. Anyway but we wanted to kick it off with this post. Did you see this post, Jordy?
Speaker 3:I'm pulling it up right now.
Speaker 1:This post is from Gabriel.
Speaker 3:One of the top posters in the entire world.
Speaker 1:He is. And we were thinking, let's kick it off. It's towards the end of the week. I think he locked it up. I think he's brother of the week material.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 3:I think so. I mean, just putting up fantastic numbers here. For years. Unique insights.
Speaker 1:For years. One of the greatest, I mean, I think I was introduced to him during COVID lockdowns.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:He's over in Australia, I believe, but, had just has never lost a step throughout his entire posting career. Yep. Just absolute longevity.
Speaker 3:Now a lot of people hit their stride. Yep. They put up six months, seven, eight
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whatever, and then they sort of fade. Exactly. Yes. They the unique insights are lost. Yep.
Speaker 3:Stop reading books Yep. And consuming, and they're just, you know, fully in the algorithm. Yep. But, something about posting, you gotta be out in the real world. You gotta be out doing things.
Speaker 3:You gotta be getting insights from places other than the timeline, other than otherwise %. You know, gets sort of constantly recycled.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 3:Yeah. Being down under Yeah. You know, putting up big numbers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I love his his three sixty degree attack on his game. You I know about his family because of his posting, but I also know about his, deep understanding of rats, apparently. Yeah. So
Speaker 3:let's break this down. I'll go. So, Gabe is, quote, posting Ali DeBo. She says highest leverage things you can do in your twenties, travel, start a company, join a company you love. We're gonna cut it off there because that's not what this segment is about.
Speaker 3:Why don't you read Gabe's post?
Speaker 1:He says lots of egregious stuff in here, but calling travel high leverage is insane. It costs $1,500 to fly return New York to Tokyo for $1,000 You could buy 50 rats in a one to four boy girl ratio and release them in a competitor's WeWork. The iPad kids are cooked.
Speaker 3:And, this couldn't be more real. You know, we we would we would do this for competitive podcast studios.
Speaker 4:Yes. That's true.
Speaker 3:Here's the thing, John. They all zoom in to record. There's no studio to release it in.
Speaker 1:You can't do it.
Speaker 3:We wouldn't do it in their home.
Speaker 1:You can't
Speaker 3:do it. Be too disrespectful. But before we get into the rest of the show Yeah. I got a call out today. So I was up in the bay yesterday evening, and I was flying back this morning.
Speaker 3:And, I was getting on a JSX flight. Yep. And, this guy approaches me, and says, hey. I'm a technology brother. I listen to every episode.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 4:I
Speaker 3:just wanted to introduce myself. So is this guy, Cole Rotman? He's a seed, to growth investor over at DST Global and an absolute dog. And, thank you, Cole, for stopping me. It was a highlight of my morning, and I just wanted to give you a little call out.
Speaker 3:He's been listening since the early days.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 3:50 plus episodes ago, so he's an absolute brother. And then the other thing, I'm not gonna name this technology brother, but a guy, emailed me, this morning, you know, that that's been listening to the show also since the first week. Wow. And, he's going out for a seed round. He said, hey.
Speaker 3:I'd love to have you involved. I looked at the deck. I committed on the spot, and offered to make some other introductions. And in less than an hour, I introduced him to, I think, five separate people that that immediately opted in. Amazing.
Speaker 3:All, you know, would be potential leads for his round. So it's been a lot of brother behavior going down this morning. Fantastic. I'm fired up.
Speaker 1:Doing deals, doing podcast.
Speaker 3:Into the show.
Speaker 1:Building the community, building the brotherhood. Building the brotherhood. That's the goal. Anyway, let's move on. I just wanted to, you know, really you know, we call this the dojo of the dollar.
Speaker 1:We wanna respect the dollar, and we respect our advertisers. So I wanted to kick it off with an early ad for public.com There we go. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields, trusted by millions. Keep you guessing.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there's amazing transition later in the show to an ad. But now, boom, ad right at the beginning.
Speaker 3:Right in your face.
Speaker 1:Didn't think didn't think that was gonna happen.
Speaker 3:Your face.
Speaker 1:Boom. But the reason I wanna talk about public is because I saw this great post from Mads Capital. Mads says, I'm not sure I can hang I can handle a kangaroo market, bros. Because apparently there's new terminology. There's the bull market where it goes up, bear market where it goes down, kangaroo market, bouncing all around.
Speaker 3:All over the place.
Speaker 1:But I love it. It does feel like this
Speaker 3:has been my entire twenties. Yeah. Like, entire adult, adult life. Kangaroo market.
Speaker 1:The the cycles have felt shorter because we haven't been in this,
Speaker 3:like something to, you know, hope for, to look forward to. Yeah. If, you know, if you're if you're down bad Yeah. You know that a bull there's always a bull market somewhere.
Speaker 1:There's always a bull market somewhere. And what is a kangaroo market if not just a bunch of bulls and bears all crammed together in a stable?
Speaker 3:Oh, and kangaroos are cute. Yeah. They're fun. They're always bouncing around, but they're also terrifying.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're vicious when they get all jacked.
Speaker 3:If you haven't seen it, go look up.
Speaker 1:Everyone's seen it. Everyone's seen the jack oo.
Speaker 3:Not everybody's seen it.
Speaker 1:Everyone's seen the jack oo.
Speaker 3:Look up kangaroo fist fights.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 3:And, you'll find a ton of content from Down Under. I'm sure I'm sure Gabriel, who we just covered, I'm sure he's gotten into his fair share of, scuff ups with, you know, with the with the kangaroos. But, yeah, they're tough.
Speaker 1:Like to have some fun. Tough. Well, let's, let's highlight Arena Magazine. Max Meyer's newest, drop. We got these in a few days ago.
Speaker 1:They're fantastic. We love a lot
Speaker 3:of people. Saw Yes. Our ad before A full page printed. Magazine never actually got out. So we're sorry to front run there, but, the actual magazine itself is fantastic.
Speaker 3:When I read this and when I read Colossus review, to me
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Profile on Kyla Scanlan, good friend of mine. She's amazing. The gen Gen z's capitalist whisperer. Wow.
Speaker 1:Published a book, very highly reviewed by Tyler Cowen. Highly recommend picking it up. Has really mastered
Speaker 3:book review.
Speaker 1:Economics, education in the modern era. Yeah. Everything from TikTok to YouTube videos to newsletters really built like a multimedia empire, with with a very, like, sharp like, there's just so much in in the whole, like, business at econ content world. There's so much, like, just fake clickbait. Like, well, BlackRock actually owns everything.
Speaker 1:Like, they're the most powerful company, like, that whole stuff. And she just, like, stays away from that really well and, like, actually educates people properly. It's great. United Semiconductors of America, a modest proposal for American industry. Let me just look at this.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. Amazing. So highly recommend going and subscribing. You just want this on your coffee table. There's so many good stuff.
Speaker 1:There's so many good things in here. We'll probably pick an article out of here to to do a deep dive on. The art
Speaker 3:of the chariot Max Collin.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. We should have him call in. It's great.
Speaker 1:Who wants to work in a factory? Oh, and look, we're we're printing tweets. He he's printing tweets. Luke Metro got featured. Everybody wants to expand industrial cap cap capability, but no one wants to work in a factory.
Speaker 1:Kicked off an entire entire article.
Speaker 3:The only thing is I I agree with Luke on most things. Yeah. But I would argue that there is entirely, you know, the new generation is actually very excited to be in factories.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. It's almost like a bit of a a major vibe shift. You have that.
Speaker 1:And that's why we're having Augustus on
Speaker 3:constantly factory posting.
Speaker 1:Later today because he he has certainly made sleeping in a factory cool Yep. In in a very serious way.
Speaker 3:Sleeping in truck beds. Yeah. When he's out forward deployed.
Speaker 1:All of the above. Anyway, we wanted to highlight a post from Gary Tan that I'm sure we'll discuss later. He's coming out at noon, for 25% of the winter twenty twenty five batch of y Combinator. 95% of lines of code are LLM generated. That's not a typo.
Speaker 1:The age of vibe coding are is here. Fascinating. Vibe coding. So I'm sure I'm sure we'll get more into that, but, something to think about as we go through. Anyway, let's move on to Discord.
Speaker 1:Unusual whales has the post breaking. Discord is an early talks with bankers about an IPO that could come as soon as this year. And, I think this was originally, broken by the New York Times. They don't have too much information here, but we can kinda run through it.
Speaker 3:A Capital says, not sure why Discord needs an IPO other than exit liquidity payday. Because they're profitable? Yeah. That would be a good reason.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, Jason Citroen is a fascinating entrepreneur. He is he truly, like, does not fit the standard mold of entrepreneur. I think he's from Florida and then went to a, like, a very, very small kind of game development school and was totally off of the, like, Stanford Ivy League track. Started one company, wind up wound up selling it, and then just built Discord kind of outside of the Silicon Valley realm until it just became a complete monster and now has been very, very profitable.
Speaker 1:But there's been a bunch of pushback to this. I saw some posts, like, every major old line media company is now, like, super anti tech. And so Yeah. The headline from, like, IGN was, like, prepare for Discord to get even worse. Bankers are getting involved.
Speaker 1:And it's, like, just, like, I don't know. That might not be bad, but, I guess people don't like, like, the monetization. Made Instagram better. Right?
Speaker 3:I think so. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:Well, the New York Times No. And and yeah. They're you know, this all is gonna come down to price. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's possible that that the Discord, you know, it gets kind of, like, turned into a bit of a meme briefly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:It's possible that people that buy the the stock on the first day
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, or the first week or whatever don't end up doing that well. But, ultimately, this is a robust company with a massive user base. Yep. I'm interested to see their actual financial performance, but this is great for all the hardworking employees who have spent, you know, decade plus now at this point. I don't know when Discord was actually founded, you know, working
Speaker 1:away It's a pretty fascinating story. So
Speaker 3:deserve some, liquidity at this point.
Speaker 1:Jason Citrin founded this social gaming platform for mobile games called OpenFeint, and then he sold it to this company called Greed, which is a game development company, like, a holdings company, a Japanese social networking service, in 2011 for a hundred and $4,000,000. And I remember there was something weird about the earnout. I I I don't I'm not exactly sure what happened, but, then he found Hammer and Chisel, which is a game development studio in 2012. They launched a product, Fates Forever, released in 2014. There's a there's a crazy old video, I I wish I could pull up of him pitching it.
Speaker 1:And I think TechCrunch disrupt and just being like, I made this game and, you know, it's gonna be the it was basically, a MOBA but mobile. So do you do do you know, DOTA two or League of Legends, any of those? I was a StarCraft guy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so, MOBA but for mobile, but it wasn't successful. During the game development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like League of Legends using voice over IP. Yeah. Because normally, like, back when you play a game, you just hop on, like, a Zoom call, essentially, or Skype call.
Speaker 1:Yep. RIP. And so then he decided to build a chat service with a focus on user friendliness and minimal impact on performance. So deep integration to the game. The name Discord was was chosen because it sounds cool and has to do with talking.
Speaker 3:Yeah. How crazy is it that both, Discord and Slack, the two most dominant sort of, like, workplace chat products, both started as games that just built a decent chat functionality and then ended up focusing on that. Totally. Really wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like no one wants to just, like, go straight into chat. So in 2016, Discord raises 20,000,000 from Warner Media, Time Time Warner, and then, Warner Media was acquired by AT and T in 2018. Warner Media Investment Group was shut down in 2019, selling the equity. Microsoft announced it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users.
Speaker 1:They raised $1.50 Discord raised $1.50 at 2,000,000,000 valuation led by Green Oaks with participation from FirstMark, Tencent, IVP, Index, a few others, in December of twenty eighteen. And then, they kinda kinda kept growing from there, and now they will, IPO. So that'll be hot. And, of course, if you want to play the IPO, go to public.com.
Speaker 3:And, Nikkita, I'm sure will do well here. Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, do you think he still is you you probably still have his
Speaker 3:you know, sold a position, you know, based on whenever he joined. Hopefully, it wasn't priced at 15,000,000,000. But
Speaker 1:Twenty twenty one, yeah, Discord was was priced at 15,000,000,000. But, I mean, I you have to imagine they've grown a ton since then. Yep. In recent years, Discord has tried to expand its world.
Speaker 3:Those things like how do you what is what is how do you value the earnings of a network versus a SaaS company? Right? Yeah. Like, that that's gonna be the big question here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is it is crazy. I mean, they've tried when when Clubhouse came out, they Discord, like, copied the feature pretty quickly. They have, like, stages Yeah. So you can be in a Discord group.
Speaker 1:And then, I mean, Discord was always like, for a long time, I felt like it was more full featured than Slack just as a user. And it just had, like it just felt cooler. Even just, like, the dark mode by default just felt better, but they also had other integrations. But then, yeah, they launched they launched the Clubhouse competitor. But the thing that really took off was, like, during the AI boom.
Speaker 1:Like, the the server for Midjourney, in 2023 had over 15,000,000 members. And, like That's insane. Like, I I just I don't think Slack is set up for that. Yeah. And so they really figured out how to make these, like, communities, like, 15,000,000 people.
Speaker 1:Like, that that is a social network by itself. And it's a social network on top of a social network. So it it's almost like Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that decision was just criticized constantly Yeah. Specifically Oh, yeah. They're criticizing Midjourney for making it so difficult. But
Speaker 1:To not use, like, a, like, just a regular front
Speaker 3:end. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you have to imagine
Speaker 3:that, yeah, they they got a lot of benefit from that in in other ways by, you know, having it be centered around the community and shared learning and all these different Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I noticed, we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI app. I tried to use it on my phone on Safari, and it wasn't a great experience.
Speaker 3:Here's just an interesting comp because I feel like in, you know, a lot of this sort of online community activity, we have our corner here x. Yep. There's Reddit, right, which is interest based. Yep. There's Discord, which is also interest based, but, you know, company project, game based.
Speaker 3:Reddit is trading traded up to it's down 20% in the last month. Mhmm. But it it was peaking at let me pull this up here. It peaked at a $40,000,000,000 market cap just a month ago. Exactly.
Speaker 1:40,000,000,000 for
Speaker 3:Reddit. Billion for Reddit. Yeah. And they are losing, they lost, half a billion dollars in the last year Wow. And on 1,300,000,000.0 in revenue.
Speaker 3:So to me, if Discord can come out and actually, you know, who knows? I imagine they've been, you know, heavily focused on profitability. It's very possible that they could be priced beyond their last private market valuation.
Speaker 1:Yep. What's your take on, like, the post, like, the the post war on Midjourney using Discord? Because I feel like it's still an underrated strategy. Like, we were talking about Sesame, that voice AI. I tried to use it on iOS Safari.
Speaker 1:It didn't work for me. It was kind of, like, breaking. And I don't think Sesame has an iOS app yet. And one of the amazing things about Midjourney being on Discord was that it they instantly, on day one, had great mobile support on every platform
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That Discord worked on. And so it's like, yeah, they didn't have their own Mac app, but they had a Discord Mac app that essentially worked perfectly. And, of course, there were a lot of, like, narrow, like, problems. But I still think it's pretty good. And then, also, I mean, the crypto communities have been huge on Discord too.
Speaker 1:And so I'm sure that's driven a ton of new trial. And then once you're in that ecosystem, you have your Discord username, and you're just gonna kinda use it for everything. Totally. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1:It'll be it'll be fun to see, like, kind of when the s one drops and where Yeah.
Speaker 3:The value in Atlanta. Can get GameStop's PE ratio, they will be doing pretty well.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Anyways, what do we got next?
Speaker 1:The company debuted an online shop in 2023 where users can pay to enhance the profiles and add add custom graphics to the digital avatar. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I clearly remember when they decided, hey. We're gonna start Monetizing. Monetizing.
Speaker 1:Super hard. Yeah. They got me because I wanted to be able to upload, like, HD videos sometimes. Oh, and there were certain files that you couldn't share in a Discord unless it was like, you couldn't go over, like, 50 megs or something unless you were paying. And so I wound up paying and then just, like, probably forgot about it.
Speaker 1:Probably, I'm still playing. Anyway, what should Jason Citron do when he gets liquidity?
Speaker 3:Buy a million dollar watch.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And where should he go? Bezel. So go to bezel. Jason, if you're listening, go to bezel.
Speaker 3:We have an update. So for the last month, we've been telling people that bezel has 22,000
Speaker 1:information. Yeah. We have to issue a correction.
Speaker 3:Intentional. Sometimes people intentionally spread misinformation. This was unintentional, but they have, they added over 1,500 new watches to the platform Yep. In the last month. It's fantastic to see.
Speaker 3:That's 1,500 watches that could be yours. Right? Could be yours. Yeah. If you move quick enough, you could buy all of them.
Speaker 1:I think after the Discord IPO, Jason could buy all of them. Absolutely. Hopefully. Hopefully, he does.
Speaker 3:What is the, actually, I don't know about that.
Speaker 1:I think I think we should have 500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezos. The,
Speaker 3:founder, cofounder, he told me they had I think they probably have close to a billion dollars of watches listed on the platform right now. So it's really gonna have to pop for Jason to be able to acquire every watch on the platform. But, you know, that would just be pulling forward, like, you know, a couple years of their revenue. And, you know, it would it would hurt other.
Speaker 1:You're not. But you're not considering leverage.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true. It's true. Yeah. And some of these watches are, you know, think basically investment assets. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You should sell 100% of his discord stake. And go lever up and just buy every luxury watch.
Speaker 3:And. Thousand of. Submariners. Just walk around walk around just covered. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I wanna I wanna see a Submariner around his ankle.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. A little ankle
Speaker 3:a little ankle watch. Yeah. That's the next trend for for being airs like him.
Speaker 1:For sure. For sure. Well, we'd love to have
Speaker 3:you on
Speaker 1:the show, Jason. Tell the story of Discord. I'm a huge fan. I've already made a huge I I made a big deep dive on the on the company and the video about it. It's a fascinating story.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on
Speaker 3:to the companies go public, by the way. We have to actually buy a big enough position to say, hey. I'm a major show shareholder. Sure. I would love to have you on the show to discuss.
Speaker 3:It's like a little, you know, saying, you know, it's a little, to more form invite.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's like you should come on the show because I'm extra conflicted.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:All the other shows, they're not conflicted. They're not conflicted. Point.
Speaker 3:CNBC can't
Speaker 1:do that.
Speaker 3:Point. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. That's great. Anyway, let's go to Andy Jassy over at Amazon. He says excited to be excited to be with the team in NYC today, rolling out the new Alexa plus.
Speaker 3:We've been waiting for this. Everyone's been waiting. Everybody's been waiting for this,
Speaker 1:across Amazon. We're harnessing the transformative power of generative AI to reimagine the experiences we offer customers. And Alexa Plus is the latest example. She's smarter, more capable, and personalized. And and unlike chatbots also takes action to help you get things done.
Speaker 1:Oh, agent. This is an agent, which is at the heart of our mission at Amazon to make customers' lives better and easier every day. I can't wait to get so weird. The first thing that popped out to me so they they they post some ads. The ads are fine, but they're using she, which is a very odd choice.
Speaker 1:I went to ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude. Can you guess what those three LLMs want to be referred to as in terms of pronoun? The opposite? All three wanna be it. It.
Speaker 1:All three, including Claude. Interesting. Says, hey. Yeah. Like, I'm not a person.
Speaker 1:Don't anthropomorphize me.
Speaker 3:Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was just very odd to hear them. It felt very old school. Like, there used to be, like, this idea of, like, Siri is a her. Yeah. And and then we kind of moved away from that.
Speaker 1:And there's been so much talk about, oh, ChatGPT isn't that good of a name. But when I heard them say, Alexa, it's a her, and I I was like, it's not. It's not.
Speaker 3:You know, one of the best investments you could have made Yeah. In the last decade or so was shorting the name Alexa as soon as Amazon introduced it. In 2015, Alexa was the thirty second most popular name for girls born in The United States. In 2022, Alexa's name, ranked dropped to 536, the lowest it's been since 1985. And in 2023, it's our our, down in the six hundreds.
Speaker 3:So really, really rough go. Yeah. Tough, tough to be named Alexa in the year, you know, 2014 prior to the launch. Yeah. Because, but then again, it's becoming more rare.
Speaker 3:So maybe there's value in that. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I would just prefer it if it was just Amazon. Like, hey, Amazon. Like, I'm talking to you. You're the company.
Speaker 1:I want you to order something for me. It's Amazon. It's an it. And Yeah. I'm happy with that.
Speaker 1:I don't need this, like, secondary thing. I don't know. It it was it just stuck out to me as, like, this odd this odd choice that feels more natural. Alexa feels like a better brand name than ChatGPT, which is, like, a mouthful, or Claude three point seven SONNET or Grok three. Like, these don't sound like names, but when I actually, like, sat with it for a second and heard the opposite, I was like, actually, I would much prefer, you know, just to talk to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and it's just it's just less weird. Anyway, let's go to Ben Thompson as for techery. He's breaking down this announcement, from the verge. Amazon is finally launching the long awaited generative AI version of Alexa.
Speaker 1:Alexa plus that if it all goes well, will may will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly. Some of the new abilities include ability to do things for you. You'll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. I feel like the last version of Alexa said that it could do that. Anyway, it's $20 a month, or it's free if you're a Prime member, and Prime is $15 a month.
Speaker 1:So you save $5 by getting both. It's very odd. That comes with access to Alexa website where the company said you can go and do long form work. Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to, go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on almost every Alexa device released so far.
Speaker 3:So they're actually trying to enter the consumer LLM game. Yeah. And they won't they're they're saying Totally. We want you to use our hardware, but we're also going to
Speaker 1:I mean, they have all the infrastructure for it. It it may make sense that they would, like, kind of offer something here, but, it's just it's just weird. So, Ben Thompson's, like, talking about, like, kind of the metal level of this. There's no video of the event. It's 2025, and they just did a live blog.
Speaker 1:Moreover, there was no video put up after the event. Amazon does have a couple of promo videos. Is this pure vaporware? Ben asks. Fortunately, the Verge did come out with a hands on report a couple of days after the event.
Speaker 1:So apparently, Alexa Plus in does in fact exist in a state that is accessible by non Amazon employees. I was, from the report. I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word, Alexa. I dim I asked it to dim the lights and adjust the thermostat to make it a little warmer. The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed, and Alexa said, I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else you need? Then I said, can you back in the floor? It replied, okay. And the Roomba just started the job. Not bad.
Speaker 1:Like, that that that does seem pretty cool. Of course, this is probably one of those things where you have to be really all in on the whole ecosystem, because if you're using a, you know, a Google Home or you have an Apple TV, all of a sudden it's not gonna integrate. But Yeah. Ben wanted to give a little bit of a brief history of Alexa that I thought would be kind of interesting. He says back to Alexa though, which first launched in 2014, we're a decade into these, like, AI assistants.
Speaker 1:And, like, the the chatbot the chatbot era, the chatbot renaissance is like a thing. And people thought chatbots were gonna be all over the place and then took ten years to get here, but now they are. Just a few months after the disastrous Fire Phone, which led to most people dismissing the voice assistant and its associate echo speaker out of hand. However, Ben says, I was immediately intrigued precisely because Alexa and echo He's
Speaker 3:always got the receipts too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a link here. You can prove it. Actually had a potential market, the home, the one place where you might not have your phone on your body and where it would be the least awkward to rely on voice interaction because you're not out in the world. Good points. Hey.
Speaker 1:Good points. I also think Amazon got two big things right with Alexa, particularly as it expanded its skills. First, Alexa was always very fast in my experience, very good at understanding what you said. This is a big distinguishing factor from Siri, of course, although Google quickly rivaled Alexa. Second, Amazon didn't attempt to do fancy fuzzy matching when it came to triggering skills.
Speaker 1:If you wanted to use a device or service, you had to say the words exactly right. So less errors, but you had to be more trained. So it's training the human to get the right thing. The second point may seem kind of intuitive, but I think it was a very smart product choice given Alexa's capabilities instead of wowing users half the time and frustrating them the other half with no clear feedback about why a particular command worked or didn't. Alexa put the burden on the user, again speaking anecdotally.
Speaker 1:I would blame myself when a voice command didn't work because I didn't say the right words. Alexa, for its part, understood what I said and told me whether it was successful or not, which allowed me to improve. Siri, to take the counterexample, would try to be smart, which actually made it more frustrating. Good point. And so this also gets to why Amazon's announcement of Alexa Plus makes me nervous.
Speaker 1:It feels way too ambitious. Alexa Plus isn't just going to turn on your lights. It's also gonna order you concert tickets and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and plan a vacation and call the babysitter. Alexa Plus will have a memory and learn, and the list goes on, which is to say that Amazon's promising.
Speaker 3:Every AI assistant product uses the same examples Yep. Yet nobody has been able to truly get product market fit with those set of examples. Right? Nobody's getting nobody's using an AI assistant today on average like, the the average consumer in America is not saying, hey. Book me a flight to New York.
Speaker 3:Yep. Even though that's, like, been the default sort of example. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. Or,
Speaker 3:hey. Can you order some Advil? Yeah. We're out. Even though it's actually probably good at that, but it's still not actually, it's it's never had enduring traction.
Speaker 3:The last time I heard the name Alexa, I was getting a massage, and the massage therapist said, hey, turn up, the volume. Really? Alexa, turn up the volume. And I was like, okay. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Like, it's good. But I hadn't I hadn't seen I haven't seen or heard of an Alexa in well, I haven't had one in Yeah. Like, probably six, seven years. Haven't seen one in a friend's house in that period of time. I thought that the the last time I got value out of the Alexa service was being like, okay.
Speaker 3:This is a pretty good speaker for, like, a hundred bucks
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Whatever it was.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's, let's finish out with Ben tying it to Apple and what's going on at Siri. He's quoting from Mark Gurman. Apple Inc's long promised overhaul of a Siri digital assistant is facing engineering problems and software bugs, threatening to postpone or limit its release. According to people with knowledge of the matter, the The company first unveiled plans for a new AI infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to its customers.
Speaker 1:But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people who asked not to be identified. Some features have been postponed to May or later. The Siri makeover is the centerpiece of the Apple intelligence platform, the company's effort to catch up in AI and spur iPhone upgrades. And so, his main point here is that, Amazon and Apple don't need to be in a rush. Both both Alexa and Siri have a decade plus head start in terms of integrations with a host of devices and services.
Speaker 1:Alexa plus and new Siri don't need to have capabilities that exceed even what the Frontier AI labs have yet to ship. Simply being better voice assistants for their existing ecosystems will make them more useful. And I should note, is the heavy is a heavy lift in and of itself. Faithfully replicating existing functionality is a hard problem. That's the power of being an ecosystem provider, and I suspect both companies should have a little bit more confidence in their relative advantage and be a little more conservative about their ambitions.
Speaker 1:And so I thought that was kind of interesting that, like, you know, we're we're frustrated that these products aren't better. But Yeah. Once you understand the the the market dynamic, the ecosystem lock in, it's like, yeah, you can Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's one of those things, like, just because you have an extreme advantage doesn't doesn't give you permission or or nobody's gonna give you props when you botch rollouts, when you release lackluster products, where where you're not creating massive Yeah. You know, sort of forward momentum. Yeah. These companies have incredible access to talent, capital, every advantage, the ecosystem advantage, and the services advantage, and we should hold them to a high standard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a good point. I mean, you go back to the, the launch of the iPhone, and I think I I the the r and d number I mean, everything about that project is insane. Yeah. I think the r and d number is, like, one one hundredth of what Zuck has spent on the metaverse, something like that.
Speaker 1:May maybe a thousandth. It was, like, basically nothing. Super fast, and obviously pulled forward, like, a bunch of technology that that, like, they we didn't really have, like, the glass screens and phones and all this stuff. Yeah. But there was no
Speaker 3:And Reggie pointed out was the point that that was an acquisition. The screen the screen tech
Speaker 1:Oh, really? In the
Speaker 3:in the iPhone was was a company that the core tech was something that they had bought.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Yeah. They, but but, I mean, at the time, Apple had, like, crazy pressure. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They didn't have an ecosystem that they could just kind of sit back on. If they didn't do that, someone else would have gotten there for sure. Blackberry eventually kind of got there,
Speaker 3:and Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm sure Nokia or Microsoft eventually would have tried.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 1:Anyway, well, the one piece of smart home tech that should be collect connected to your Alexa is, of course, your eight sleep There we go. Nights that fuel your best days.
Speaker 3:Turning your
Speaker 1:bed into the ultimate sleeping experience, go to 8sleep.com/tbpn. Get a bed. Hook it up to your smart home. Tell it to you.
Speaker 3:Use that because Totally. You can prompt your bed to start getting ready for bed Exactly. Sleep. Yeah. I have it set on on an autopilot because it knows I get into bed at 08:30 every night.
Speaker 1:So early.
Speaker 3:I love it. But, but, anyways, I can see they might actually have an Alexa integration, but, go to 8sleep.com/tbpn. It's in our bios everywhere. Check them out. I don't have a sleep score from last night, so this is a good opportunity for you to potentially get a quick win, considering I'm at a zero.
Speaker 1:You're at a zero.
Speaker 3:Well That is brutal. I'm zeroed out.
Speaker 1:Let me see. Ate sleep. Where where we where where are we? Oh, wow. Awful.
Speaker 1:36. I've never had a score so low. What happened? What? Four hours and thirty minutes?
Speaker 1:That that feels like a bug or something. I don't know. I mean, I was up late, and I did get up late.
Speaker 3:Up late. Yeah. You were up late. I passed out.
Speaker 1:Dinner with, with some friends, and so I was out I was out pretty late. Drink. I did, actually.
Speaker 3:That's it.
Speaker 1:I did have some wine. It.
Speaker 3:People if if you love alcohol that. You're gonna hate Eight Sleep Yeah. Because it just completely exposes how terrible alcohol is for your sleep, which is common
Speaker 1:I had, like, two
Speaker 3:common knowledge. Right?
Speaker 1:Nothing. It was, like, nothing.
Speaker 3:Alright. We got Gary calling in in a second. I'm very excited for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's texting me right now. Sounds amazing. Let's I think he should be hopping on in just a minute. Let's see.
Speaker 1:In the meantime, we should do a funny post or something. Let's see. Oh, did you see this, did you see this olive metallic Maybach? Of course. It really pops off the page in black and white.
Speaker 1:But, it's it's this beautiful green, and I thought we could take a moment to make a little announcement to the to the community that that green is now part of our official brand
Speaker 4:color web.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you actually in the in the lower corner down there.
Speaker 3:We actually have our legal team working on, you know, Patently green. Patenting green. Sure.
Speaker 1:You know where there's a guy who owns black or something like that? Yeah. Banta black. Have you heard about this?
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:It's not named after the SOC two compliance provider. It but it is a black that is so dark that it's like the darkest black. It doesn't reflect any light. And I think the guy patented it and defends it brutally. The top comment looks like there's a dent in it.
Speaker 1:It's not very, it's not very reflective. Anyway
Speaker 3:And how are we you should be able to make your own colors and patent them artisanal.
Speaker 1:Here's another post. OpenAI will be the first company to offer a 1,000,000 per month subscription plan for AGI. And then someone says source. It says, it's a prediction.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Kind of a, we call do we call shit posts, stuff posts? Kind of a
Speaker 1:meme post, joke posts, having a laugh, all the above.
Speaker 3:It's it's certainly within the realm of possibility, but the challenge is that if you can get an open source model for basically nothing per month that's nearly as good, what are you gonna choose? Right? It's gotta be it's gotta be orders of magnitude better.
Speaker 1:I think, it's it's it's like a status symbol. You know?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Why do you why do you pay for a luxury watch? You know?
Speaker 3:You should
Speaker 1:tell the same time with a with a quartz $5 watch.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:But, you know, Patek Philippe says something about you.
Speaker 3:Gonna be the new thing.
Speaker 1:So using $1,000,000 model that could have been, yeah, could have been monetized.
Speaker 3:Could have been course bros are gonna be pulling up, like, looking at their, like, their page of OpenAI. Exactly. Nobody's gonna be flexing Lambos and things like that. No. Andrew Tate
Speaker 1:will be
Speaker 3:like, yeah. I don't fly private anymore. But Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just have the most expensive agent cranking constantly. Yeah. Server's on fire.
Speaker 3:It's the new, you know, the the the founders that, you know, develop an ego based on headcount. Yeah. Right? So they're just, like, trying to grow headcount.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You you actually are hitting up opening eyes saying, do you have any more expensive plans? Yep. Like, I don't have any I don't have any employees at this point. I just, like, wanna be able to show that, like, I'm really, you know, I'm really about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Did you see that HBO has green lit a, unscripted, unfiltered, unhinged reality TV show about the Paul brothers? Wow. Logan Paul and Jake Paul now have a, a show on HBO Max
Speaker 3:and Already said live already?
Speaker 1:No. I think it's, the trailer drops tomorrow. This is on March 4. And Jake says this company used to make the Sopranos. So not not a great not a great reception, but, you know, my my reaction to this was like, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Like, the market demands what it demands. Like
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is gonna do really well.
Speaker 1:And it's smart.
Speaker 3:So so here's the thing. This is clearly a strategic move from Max to try to get a younger demographic Totally. That's that, they can pay more to get the show than Netflix because Netflix is looking at this and saying all the people that are really gonna wanna watch this already have access to Netflix accounts. They're on family plans as a younger demo. Yep.
Speaker 3:Whereas Max can potentially pull in some new subscribers, and so, the deal the deal makes sense. And I'm I'm, I'm not surprised at all to see it. K. And it's easy for the brothers, the Paul brothers, that is, because they've been recording pretty much every minute of their daily lives for a decade at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, yeah. Now they're gonna have to sit down in front of a camera. It's it's just
Speaker 1:nothing different. I mean, I obviously, like, deeply controversial people. Some people, like, love and hate the content. But, have you seen the slap that changed my life? No.
Speaker 1:It's a, YouTube video, but it's, like, almost like a documentary about Logan Paul challenging a Russian slap boxer to a slap fight. And it's edited so well. It's edited by this guy, Hayden Hillier Smith, who's like this, like, YouTube mastermind. And it's, like, emotional. Like, it's it's it's it's like art.
Speaker 1:And it's so ridiculous because you're watching this Logan Paul, like like, slapboxing thing. But it takes you on this emotional journey of him, like, wanting to go and do this fight. And it's, like, is this too risky? Will he have, like, brain damage from it? And it's it's it's just really well shot, really well paced, really well edited.
Speaker 1:It's exciting. It's emotional. You can see some of it here, Jordy. Look at this. And he's he's talking to his mom, and his mom's like, don't do this.
Speaker 1:Like, if you get hit in there
Speaker 3:You're gonna get one shot at.
Speaker 1:You're gonna get one shot at. Exactly. And I mean, look look. It's it's it's rough. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You can see it over there. And and and this was the moment I was like, oh, man. This guy's like, he's a good entertainer regardless of what you think of all his products and and other content. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The whole slapboxing thing. Like, just a master because he just He's just a practice.
Speaker 3:So so I we we've talked about this. I know we've talked about this offline. I don't know if we've talked about it online, but the whole slapboxing thing, Dana White went on, went on, like, this whole, like, podcast roadshow talking about how power slap is Yep. Is the number one sport in the world. Yep.
Speaker 3:And he says, we get more views than NFL, NBA, MLB, you know, all combined. And people are basically saying, oh, I actually just lost power.
Speaker 1:Oh, you did? Cool.
Speaker 3:No. My microphone. Anyways, Dana White goes on this kind of very aggressive roadshow to promote, PowerSlap. Yeah. And people obviously, all the data is public, so they immediately start fact checking it.
Speaker 3:And first of all, they're like, one, Dana, this is not actually more popular than the NBA and the MLB and all these different things. Yes. And, apparently, it's actually been really underperforming, from a rating standpoint, where it has a sort of shock value Yep. That people are drawn to on social media because you see Yep. This guy about to slap this other guy.
Speaker 3:It stands out. People stop. They watch it. Yep. But then the comments are almost universally Negative.
Speaker 3:The actually how people feel about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, so so anyways, we'll we'll see kinda what happens there. But,
Speaker 1:There was just a great, profile on Dana White, I think, in Forbes. I think he did a cover. And so we should we should read that on the show. That'd be great.
Speaker 3:No. We should.
Speaker 1:Then we should have him call
Speaker 3:in. Yep. No. And and then again, the challenge is, doing combat sports that involve, somebody being completely defenseless
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is, is much harder to watch.
Speaker 1:Hey. We got Gary here.
Speaker 6:Hey. How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's great. How are you doing?
Speaker 6:Good. Good.
Speaker 3:There he is.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Amazing to have you on.
Speaker 1:We we wanted to have you on for a bunch of reasons. I mean, thank you so much. It's fantastic to talk to you anytime. But it seems like YC is, like, completely transformed by LLMs writing code. So, break it down.
Speaker 6:Okay. I mean, I think we're just at the dawn of this technology, and, it's the people who already know how to code who are taking the best advantage of it. And, you know, I'd I'm seeing the haters on the Internet, coming at us, but that's fine. Come at me, bro. What's happening is that, like, you know, a % of YC companies these days have technical cofounders.
Speaker 6:And then, you're stupid not to use it. Like, basically, why would you subject yourself to, you know, spending a lot of hours on things that, you don't have to do? And, being able to go all the way to ground and debug the thing. And, you know, basically, a prerequisite of using these tools well is that, you don't need the tools.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That makes sense. How long do you think the do you think the sort of advantage that technical founders have in AI right now is going to be perpetual, or do you do you see a world in in five years where the the the the playing field has been completely leveled?
Speaker 6:You know, I still think, like, it's it's not like product doesn't matter or design doesn't matter. It you know, if anything, what it is is, it matters even more. Yeah. Yeah. The bar was lower before.
Speaker 6:The bar is much higher now. Like, back then, if you go back, like, ten or fifteen years for startups, period, you know, when I first worked at YC in 2011, almost anything that had really technical cofounders and a real problem, like, you were gonna be, you know, at least a Series a company. Yeah. Like, you know and then I don't think that that's I think that's become less and less true even today. Like, you know, there are perfectly good, very technical teams that have all the skills and, you know, are in pretty big problem spaces.
Speaker 6:And then there's competition. Like, the bar is just so much higher. So I think the way to think about it is if you're not using it, you're actually leaving, time and attention, that could be used for all the other things that you're gonna need in a perfect competitive world. And, so it's you know, all the people who are, like, you know, f vibe coders or, you know, all that, I used to say, it's cope. It's like, the world just changed.
Speaker 6:We're just trying to help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It could be And you
Speaker 6:live in that old world where, you know, you're sitting there, you know, writing your own manual tests and banging your head into the code, or you can embrace the future and, you know, get that alpha, get that edge.
Speaker 3:Talk to us about how the bar has been raised from a metric standpoint. You know, y c has always been about you have three months to make a tremendous amount of progress. It's really around, you know, preparing for for demo day. The bar is, you know, anytime you take hundreds of super, super talented people and put them under that pressure, they're gonna produce amazing results. From a revenue standpoint, from attraction standpoint, you know, it seems like the bar has jumped, dramatically, but would love some more color there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I guess, like, YC, these like, we've been really, intentional about, trying to go back to founders who are actually at right at the beginning. So, you know, these numbers fluctuate. But pretty much every time, 70 to 80% of the companies have, no revenue and, you know, probably 70 to 80% generally are unlaunched. So, it's really during those ten weeks.
Speaker 6:Like, can you go from zero to, say, a hundred thousand or several hundred thousand dollars a year revenue? But even that is, like, you know, sort of secondary. Like, the funniest thing when you really think about it, you know, think about a company that actually does make it to a hundred million or a billion dollars a year in revenue. Like, are you really going to look at the first ten weeks and say, well, you went to, you know, well, that company went to 50 k ARR, and that other company went to a hundred 50 k ARR. It's like, if you play it all the way out, like, it's all these other factors.
Speaker 6:So, you know, I think basically if you can't get revenue or customers during the ten weeks of YC, like, man, that was the wrong idea or you don't got the skills. And even then, like, you can't count teams out. Like, there are tons of teams that, deferred demo day, had nothing, had you know, they took their money and basically nose to the grindstone, like, stayed in the IDMA's. And then they went on to create things like Retool. And, you know, these are things that everyone uses now.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, man. Retool. I remember
Speaker 6:seeing that demo day. It's wild.
Speaker 1:It's passed on. Yeah.
Speaker 3:My my my favorite joke on the show is that it it like, the the the way to outperform as an LP is to travel back in time and just give John as much money as possible to invest in in his early, first and second YC batch.
Speaker 1:I remember yeah. I remember being at, you know, demo day with Retool and being like, that company looks cool, but I don't even know what I would say to them because I didn't realize you could just, like, yeah, just invest. Anyway, we we've had this, thesis, obviously, like, you know, what YC, anything successful attracts, like, haters. We've had this thesis that YC is, like, entering, like, a renaissance, like, with the AI stuff. Like, this is the best time to be running, like, the YC business model.
Speaker 1:But can you talk a little bit about, specifically, like, are do you think about yourself running YC in founder mode? And can you talk about, like, what that means and what you're doing and what's changing and how you wanna take it to, like, the next level?
Speaker 6:Of course, man. I mean, you know, some of it is, like, I'm trying to do founder mode, but, you know, shout out to the original GOAT, Paul Graham Yeah. Like, and Jessica Livingston and, you know, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, you know. Like, I'm I'm sure I it turns out, you know, you don't have to be the founder to try to run the founder mode playbook. And, Brian Chesky himself is on my board.
Speaker 6:And when I came back, to YC, the first thing he said was, Alright. Well, if you were the founder, what's zero based accounting? Like, what are you gonna do? And, you know, there are shades of that in what Elon's doing with the US government. Like, you know, I think, I just stepped in it by bringing that up.
Speaker 6:But, hey, like, you know what? This is actually how, you should be a leader. Like, you actually have to think about things, from first principles, from zero based accounting. Like, if knowing what we know now, would we do that thing that we're doing? And, you know, the enemy of every bureaucracy is, you know, thinking.
Speaker 6:Yep. So what are the biggest changes? Decision making. Do you know, doing the right thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, I think YC was always the, like, center the sort of, like, tree of prosperity. You know, I I left and spent seven years in my seven years in the wilderness, running Initialized. And, I, you know, feel I built an amazing team. Those guys are doing awesome. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I realized that actually if I stayed at Initialized and didn't come back and, heed the call of Paul and Jessica to right the ship at YC, I would be out of a business. I I, you know, I had Initialized would have been out of business if, YC itself was not going in the right direction. And here we are. Like, I think that we're doing it, and we're gonna keep doing it. And the biggest thing that, you know, it's it's just funny that founder mode was, the meme that was born at the alumni, top top alumni conference.
Speaker 6:And, you know, Brian Chesky didn't even he wasn't even, like, scheduled to appear. And I just kept texting him because he would always come to the YC batch and give his, you know, it's funny. For him, he's like, yeah. I'm gonna tell the, the, selling cereal story. And he's so generous with his time.
Speaker 6:He does that every single time. But, I remember seeing him extremely animated, telling his not his zero to one story, but his, like, save the company pre IPO story where he had to nobody believed in him. COVID was happening. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 6:And then he just buckled up. He's like, look, I made a lot you know, he admits, like, he made a bunch of different mistakes that, you know, the reason why at the top alumni event that he spoke at, that was such a, like, pivotal moment. I think that, we brought together about 200 of all of our top founders. You know, there are about 60 or 70 unicorns, represented. And I think that we unlocked, you know, easily 10 to a hundred billion dollars in new market cap, like, that very night because, there's just people who, you know, there is a machine in Silicon Valley, and it's not unintentional.
Speaker 6:It's not malicious. Like, you know, our corporate governance and Delaware C Corps are designed boards or, like, designed to maximize shareholder value. But there's a bunch of advice that people along the way tell you that, like, are self serving, that, cause you to do the wrong things. Like, you hire people who, did it at a big company before, and then you're supposed to do it that way. And it's like, no.
Speaker 6:No. Like, well, maybe. Like, you know, there are some things like maybe finance and accounting that you shouldn't innovate on. Right? And you innovate a little bit too much there, and you go to jail.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But then Well, I can do podcasting
Speaker 1:and I
Speaker 6:don't think it's for people. What's about you? You know? Be founder mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Tory, what's your gut?
Speaker 3:What do you say to people that wanna put YC in a box? Right? You guys have had some high profile, hard tech, deep tech launches recently that seem like amazing companies, and there's pushback from people that that almost wanna say, you know, you guys are
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:It's, like, obviously, completely BS because there's a long history.
Speaker 1:And the guy who's running the place was at Palantir. Like, it's you shouldn't be surprised that there's defense tech coming out of this thing once Gary takes over and starts thinking, I
Speaker 6:don't know what AI is working. But Five eyes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we we have strong opinions here around why this is great because if you're super bright, you know, engineer, technologist, you and you wanna build something, YC can teach you how to build, you know, a company. You have to build your product and and sort of own your market. But, yeah, what do you say to people that wanna put YC, you know, in a box and and say stick with SaaS, stick with software?
Speaker 6:Oh, man. I mean, YC was never just SaaS, you know. I mean, Boom is, has you know, Astronis is right across the street. They're, like, getting satellites up there. Albedo Labs, like, I mean, Albedo is super hardcore because, they basically have made spy satellites, but, you know, they're they're better than what the US government can do.
Speaker 6:And, you know, they might just replace, replace that market for that. It's nuts. Like, you know, this is a small team out of Colorado, you know, putting satellites up that are better than, like, the entire, you know, government waste machine. It's like not I guess, you know, in some set in some respects, like, it's not that surprising, actually.
Speaker 1:So Did Oklo go through their nuclear company?
Speaker 6:Yeah. We got nuclear companies. We got, you know, Helium, the fusion company. I get it. You know what?
Speaker 6:Like, I think that we're it's a weird, thing to sort of deal with for me because I always think of myself as the little guy. But, you know, I gotta realize, keep helping founders. And the reality is, like, hey, you know actually, like, it's I I wanna shout out the Gundobros. I wanna be like, you know what? Like, you guys keep doing your thing.
Speaker 6:Like, you're always welcome at at YC. Like Yep. You know. But I I know there was, like, a little bit of ex beef, but there shouldn't be, you know. Like, you know, cute.
Speaker 6:Like, I think Dustin's coming in.
Speaker 2:I see it as, like, the challenge
Speaker 3:the challenge with YC is for every, you know, 200 founders you let in, you gotta reject a bunch of people. Right? Because there's just not enough space and not everybody's sort of qualified or it's not the right sort of moment. But the ultimate evidence of the value of YC is that you have highly, highly successful founders that go back for a second time. Right.
Speaker 3:And so whenever I see drama on the timeline about YC, it's never coming from people that have experienced the product. Right? It's always coming from, you know, people that just really aren't live players. Right? Like, people that aren't really in the conversation.
Speaker 3:So,
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:So, yeah, be a be a player character, man. And if your player character is just like, you don't gotta be like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, just long term trends in making hardware a viable startup at the 500 k investment level? I mean, when I went through IC, there was this whole, like, hardware is hard. It was always, like, oh, it's gonna be so capital intensive. And yet Absolutely.
Speaker 1:We're seeing people do the YC model. And, yeah, you're probably not gonna be shipping a million units of, you know, whatever boat you're building on demo day. Like, you could serve a million customers if you're building a social networking app. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I mean, the reason why hard tech at YC can happen is, like I mean, kinda even going back to what we were talking about earlier. Like, it's not necessarily just about, you know, SaaS, did you grow 10% week on week? Like, did you hit a hundred k ARR? Like, that's, you know, sort of weak, like, spreadsheet thinking. And, the hard tech companies that do super well, they show up with, like you know, if you had a super crack team that was the team to do this, what would they be able to get done in ten weeks?
Speaker 6:And sometimes it's a prototype. Sometimes it's a demo. Like, the other thing is I have more than a billion dollars a year in capital that's basically just, like, hard allocated to YC companies, not from us, from, like, you know, hundreds of VCs who now, are all coming back to demo day in droves. And, you know, name me another place that has that, actually. Like and they're not necessarily just, like, doing the plug and chug.
Speaker 6:Like, you know, they are actually meeting the founders. They're actually making up their own minds. They are, you know, and they're funding hard tech. You know, I think we're about 90% AI and, you know, the age of intelligence is here. Dude, like, the machines are, you know, able to do all knowledge work.
Speaker 6:Like, that's, you know, insane. And then simultaneous to that, like, I'm really excited about our hard tech stuff because that's, I mean, that's that's the built world. Like, how do we actually create prosperity and abundance for one another? And, you know, God knows in America we need it. You know?
Speaker 6:Like, we don't even have we can't even make screws for ourselves. It's nuts. Right? You know? I just saw Balaji in December in Singapore, and he, like, super black pilled me on, you know, American manufacturing.
Speaker 6:We need, you know, a thousand x what we have right now. And, you know, it's not it's not that we're missing capital. It's not even that we're missing, you know, intelligence or people. Right? Like, it's the will.
Speaker 6:Like, we have to have the will to do it. And, you know, so my message to everyone watching is, like, if you're thinking about it, like, YC is a great place to be. It's not the only place. Right? But, like, we think we're trying to build, you know, one of the best places.
Speaker 6:And, you know, it is it is for AI. It's for software. It's for all kinds of technology. We are, you know, building abundance from here, and we wanna find the people who believe that stuff. It's like, let's leave all all the political crap on the side.
Speaker 6:Like, that's not what's important. What's important is we're at the dawn of, just, like, unbelievable innovation. And That's amazing. You know, all the world's, like, you know, being rewritten by by code and atoms and, you know, what what brushstroke, what line of code, you know, what what will you bring? What, you know yeah.
Speaker 6:It's what hardware will you build.
Speaker 3:Talk to talk to us about happenstance. You've I I've seen probably, like, 10 or 20 posts from you about the company. It seems to be a a personal favorite. Like, I'd love to I'd love to hear the pitch, you know, from you directly.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I I just use it a lot personally. I mean, I get hit up for, you know, I was thinking about how Sam Altman, when he, had my role here at YC, he used to have, like, basically a team of EAs. And his email wasn't, I think it wasn't even sama. It was, s a dash router.
Speaker 6:And it was sort of a, a nod to basically what I feel like I am now. Like, I get, you know, dozens of requests every day from all kinds of YC founders and, you know, people I've run across. And, that's pretty cool. I'm you know, I I relish the ability to be, like, a shelling point for people who believe in tech. And then, the best thing I can do is, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 6:Know how. Like, capital. Like, it's human capital. All these things. Like, people are recruiting.
Speaker 6:They're trying to sell. Like, if I think they are legit, I can basically it's it's the purest form of, creating value from information. Right? And so happens denses happens to be that thing for me. You know, the world is way too big.
Speaker 6:Like, my world now is, I think my I have, like, 11,000 contacts in my phone or something. It's like I, like, always hit the Yeah. I always break app like, Apple my my iPhone cannot support 11,000 contacts.
Speaker 3:Are you, are you an inbox zero guy, or do you just give up and try to make
Speaker 5:sure you
Speaker 6:give up. It's a river that I've definitely so if someone's waiting for an email for me, right, you know, I don't know. You might have
Speaker 1:to I'm sorry.
Speaker 6:You might have to
Speaker 3:He's on TVPN. Yeah. Come come ask the question in the chat. One more question for you. You put out a, you know, YC's, you know, famous for your request for startups list.
Speaker 3:Wanted to highlight one specifically that you had, called out, which was a secure AI app store. We want a new kind of app store, an OS layer that sits on your computer or phone. It should protect user data, offer one shared memory, help users find the best AI apps, and help developers build and handle payments. Talk a little bit more about that. Are you seeing, you know, teams in that space yet that you're excited about, or is this, you know, coming down the pipeline?
Speaker 6:Yeah. In full transparency, I don't know if I found one that, like, really quite fit my you know, on my end yet. It also might just be too early. The tricky thing is it's pretty clear that, OpenAI, Anthropic, and, you know, Windows, Apple, iOS, Android, like, this is sort of how the OS almost inevitably will work, assuming that people still make software. And it's just it it's more like a a thought exercise.
Speaker 6:Like, I think it is possible for someone to do this right now. And, we'll see if it happens. I'm we're on the lookout.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, speaking of gundo bros, you wanted to give a shout out to the gundo bros. We got Augustus joining next.
Speaker 6:Great to see you guys.
Speaker 1:It's a party on this show. One person after another. Well, thank you so much for joining, Gary. We'll have to have you back. Talk more soon.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's always a pleasure chatting. And, hopefully, we'll see you at YC demo day.
Speaker 3:Alright. Sounds good. For application tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. You do
Speaker 3:an immediate company.
Speaker 1:Where's the
Speaker 3:We're in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Gary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have a great day, Gary. We'll talk to you soon. Let's bring in Augustus. How are you doing, Augustus?
Speaker 1:What's new?
Speaker 2:I'm blessed, dude. I'm back in Gundo for a spell rather
Speaker 1:than fantastic.
Speaker 2:The the Near East or the mountains of the rockies. So, it's it's been a vibe. It's been sunny and warm, which has been different for rainmakers the last four months.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Wherever you guys go, it gets cold. It starts snowing, raining. It's a it's a tough life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, this looks kind of like I haven't watched the SPF prison interview, but you kinda have a prison vibe going on behind you. But, I like it. Maybe we get some drywall behind you on the next one. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But we were talking about you earlier because, Luke Metro's in arena magazine talking about how everyone wants to reindustrialize America, but nobody wants to work in a factory. And I feel like you've made working in a factory cool. Can you break down your current, factory stack? Where are you sleeping? Can we get you on an eight sleep soon?
Speaker 2:Dude, it's so funny you say that. We, we decided, like, a month ago. Okay. We're big enough now. We're hiring, like, serious scientists.
Speaker 2:We're bringing government people through. No more bunk beds in the factory. Okay. So the room that I'm in now used to have, four bunk beds in it. The room over there used to have two bunk beds in it.
Speaker 2:A lot of the dropouts and engineers were living here. We had a tradition for a bit where if you move from across the country, you either had to live in your car in the parking lot or in one of the bunk beds. So That's amazing. That was fine. Well, last
Speaker 3:The the peanut gallery on x is gonna start saying, oh, it's time to short Rainmaker. They don't sleep in
Speaker 1:the office anymore. They're too legit.
Speaker 3:They're too legit. They have too many government officials coming in to try to get their bit you know, to try to work with them. That's what I
Speaker 1:was thinking.
Speaker 3:But at the
Speaker 2:very least, we're staying in Gundo like some other unnamed Gundo companies that
Speaker 1:Oh, a little bit of drama.
Speaker 3:Scoop? Drama. Scoop. Now we don't need it for I
Speaker 1:I always thought that Gundo was, like, the place that you can eventually graduate out of because once you need a hundred thousand square feet, like, it's just not it's just it is a small city. So, you know, I I I'm rooting for the for the the the Gundo incubations that go on to do greater things and eventually need to expand and eventually rename whole cities in Texas. You know, that's that's what I hope for you. But can you give me the quick, like, the latest pitch on how you're describing Rainmaker? I know it's evolved a little bit.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the core product that you're selling right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Rainmaker is making Earth habitable by making it precipitate more and more rain and more snow in arid environments. So farms that don't have enough water, ecosystems that need to be restored, and cities in arid regions that need water. We're making that happen with advanced remote sensing, so radar, lidar, satellite data. We're using open source stuff and some month, some things of our own that we're gonna tease a little bit later in the month.
Speaker 2:Our own radar, to find the right clouds to seed and then fly our own severe weather resistant and anti icing capable drones into those clouds, spraying a mineral called silver iodide that freezes the liquid in the cloud into big enough snowflakes so that they, fall and stay as snow, or if it's warm beneath the cloud, melt back into rain.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How many drones have you crashed?
Speaker 2:Between you, me, and, not the Federal Aviation Administration. No. We've cracked we've cracked dozens of drones. We, we have one corporate value at Rainmaker, and it's that we like the taste of blood in our mouth. And that's sort of an extension of, like, you know, the Elon thing about chewing glass.
Speaker 2:It's kinda just a bummer. Right? And, like, building a deep tech company is especially hard. But if you have loved yourself into loving interfacing with reality in such a way that you get, like, good feedback, you learn how you failed, you learn what to do better next time, you end up with a bunch of people kinda like, Rocky, you know, that, like, just fight harder and do better the the more they get punched in the face. And so, we've crashed a lot of drones on snowy, wet, cold mountain tops, and, everyone's better for it.
Speaker 1:What's the balance like now for you in the field doing the engineering work, building the actual product, selling, and then government stuff. You're in a suit. You're testifying. You're, you know, there's you're shaking your head when someone's, you know, espousing a conspiracy theory about you. We've seen the viral clips.
Speaker 1:How do you balance those two things?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm, I'm going back to Tennessee, this year because they're actually trying to elevate the punishment for weather modification to a criminal offense. And, in addition to that, I'm gonna go to Florida. Rainmakers
Speaker 3:arson's legal now, but if you wanna make it rain Yeah. We're putting you in jail.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I I think you'd be just as productive in prison. Like, you're already kind of in prison. You're just more locked in. It'd be a minor setback if they lock you up. I'm sure I'm sure the rest of your bros would, like, break you out in some heroic scheme.
Speaker 2:Or you can or you can make calls like a like a dawn from the prison. Right?
Speaker 3:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I guess going off of that, big question for me is whether modification is so charged. You're in this beautiful situation where you piss off both you piss off people in the center sometimes.
Speaker 3:You piss off people on the left, people on the right. You know, people on the on the right might say, you know, that's you know, you you it's just wrong to be changing the weather or have some concerns there. People on the left are just, you know, maybe anti science sometimes. How how has it been trying to thread the needle? Obviously, you're not trying to make everybody happy, but you need to get people generally bought into what you're doing to make things happen.
Speaker 2:Dude, water's a nonpartisan issue. Whether you want ecosystems restored or you want want more water for your farm or you want urban development in your city, we wanna bring you water. We can bring water more cost effectively than even desalination. And then when it comes to, like, the real fringe edges, because everybody in the middle is bought into that mission of abundance, right, for whatever their, particular issue is. You know, I personally believe that, like, Genesis one twenty six is the first commission that God gives man at the beginning of time.
Speaker 2:It's to steward the earth, the seas, and the skies. Rainmaker is trying to embody that value set and be good stewards of the world as we take dominion over the skies. And so that plays to some extent with the more tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the right. And then when it comes to the left, some people think that, like, you know, anytime you modify anything on the planet, humans always make it worse. And that's just, like, not true.
Speaker 2:But even if you believe it to be the case, like, we've we've messed up the planet so badly already, we might as well take deliberate action to try to repair it. And so people on the far left are are generally more game with that.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Has, what are some of the most ambitious projects and and places? Obviously, we went out to, what was that place out in the desert we went to?
Speaker 2:Alton Sea.
Speaker 1:The Salton Sea. That that was a really cool case study. Are there other kind of, like, like, long term projects that you think, are kind of on the bucket list that you wanna make amazing one day?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The Great Salt Lake is in a deficit of about 500,000 your feet of water per year.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The Bear River is the primary tributary into the Great Salt Lake, and it has mountains with lots of juicy clouds from Utah to Wyoming to Idaho, all that flow into it. I think that restoring the Great Salt Lake is like an American priority and a must. And even more interestingly than that, something in the distant future for Rainmaker is, the Winter Olympics in 2034 are gonna be held in Salt Lake. Okay. And China in 02/2008 had this whole big show and dance where they made it rain before the parades, so it didn't end on the Olympic games.
Speaker 2:Yep. We wanna show a force a decade from now to make more fresh pow for all the Olympic games in Salt.
Speaker 1:Nice. Speaking of China, the first I think the first time I ever met you, you mentioned you came in just, like, completely, just aggressively telling me that China was reforesting the Gobi Desert by planting a bunch of trees. That's obviously not your business. But, like, is anyone working on that? That feels important if you're really thinking about, like, terraforming certain parts of America, and, like, reclaiming and just improving different biomes.
Speaker 1:Like, how does that play in? Is that just a different start up? Do we need another company to build that? Is that something that you would eventually expand into? How does that all play into this, like, whole plan?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Rainmaker long term is the terraforming company. Right? We want to take any ecosystem and make it both symbiotically flourishing for humankind and, the environment. There's no companies that I know of doing reforestation, although there's a bunch of university labs that are spraying, seeds from drones.
Speaker 2:Really cool, weird, clever thing where when the seed, hits water, it unravels and sort of acts as like a little natural drill to drill the seed into the ground. That's pretty cool. I haven't seen it commercialized yet. And, someday, I do want Rainmaker in the business of all sorts of different terraforming stuff, like planting trees, literally boiling the ocean, by the way. If you boil enough of the ocean, then you can create more clouds.
Speaker 2:So we'll we'll
Speaker 3:here first.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a metaphor there.
Speaker 3:Is, boiling the ocean. Boiling the ocean. Eventually.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you in twenty years when you're still grinding at this. We're like, yeah. I I I'm I'm still trying to boil the ocean.
Speaker 3:Yes. One, I just have to say, you know, I I feel like I've seen pretty much the entire Augustus arc. Obviously, met you at right after you're graduating, in New York. You were fixated on this problem from our very first conversation. I I always, you know, and it's been amazing to watch and and and be a small, investor.
Speaker 3:You have found the, you've you've shown the the perfect ability to balance attention and progress. Right? So many people would have said, Augustus is so good at getting attention that it's almost bearish. Right? Because founders can get on this sort of negative feedback or sort of positive that, feedback loop that becomes negative where they're so good at posting and they're so good at the Internet that they just get sort of fixated on that, and then that becomes their sort of, dimension of progress.
Speaker 3:How have you balanced sort of yapping and building? And, you know, I wanna give you credit for not being at a lot of the popular events over the last year. Right? There's, you know, multiple of the events that we went to were places that I know you got an invite and I know you turned down. How what is the next, you know, two, three years look like, for you in terms of balancing, yapping, knowing that you need to be making, you know, massive forward progress on the business as well?
Speaker 2:To give credit where credit is due, it was in no small part, Coogan's shot that was called where he said, like, listen. You guys are gonna get out over your skis and seem like even more of a bunch of goofballs than you actually, in fact, are. And so we we deliberately decided, about the middle of last year just to kinda go, like, media blackout. And I've talked to a bunch of my employees that have said, like, yeah. I worked at other companies where the founder was a really big yapper.
Speaker 2:And, yes, you need to be an evangelist, but then, like, the founder doesn't know some, like, fundamental crux of the technical problem, and the company blows up because of that. And so I, you know, we were talking about, like, our publication strategy and some media stuff, and we gave it to our PR people. And they were like, hey. Can you dumb it down and make this less technical? And the funny part about that was, like, our science team already told us, like, you guys are gonna make us seem like idiots.
Speaker 2:And so we have we've done extraordinary things, particularly in the last five months, and I'm so proud to work with people that I do. And, you know, not to be like a coming soon guy, but, in, the end of this month in April, we're gonna start to unveil the products and the progress that we've made, across the entire Western United States. And then, I've alluded to online The Middle East a little bit. We've done some stuff there.
Speaker 3:Nice. Actually, the progress the progress
Speaker 2:business, the Fox Business pod was taken from a mountain top in The Middle East, and I didn't share that a lot. That was fun.
Speaker 3:That's amazing. Cool. When I read your last investor update, I genuinely was shocked because I people don't have any, I I don't think the average person has any sense of how much you guys, how much progress you guys, you know, have made in the in the last year and a half. It's it's really incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Narrative violation.
Speaker 3:Not for not for Augustus.
Speaker 1:Not for Augustus. But yeah. I mean
Speaker 3:For the for the peanut gallery.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The peanut gallery. But we're that's where the show exists.
Speaker 3:What, I wanna get into some of gallery. I wanna get into some of the bigger sort of more important questions. What, what are you benching these days? Oh, dude. I imagine it's I imagine it's gonna be, like, the last time I lifted, it, like, you bring an intensity to weightlifting that is inspirational.
Speaker 3:I don't even know if we've I don't have you ever gotten a proper lift with Augustus? Like, he's going in there.
Speaker 1:I've seen the rack in the office.
Speaker 3:He's bringing the same intensity that he brings to building to every single set.
Speaker 1:But it's hard when you're traveling. It's always hard to get in the gym when you're traveling. So break it down. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Dude. So, yeah, like I said, this is a medium. I'm, like, 37 lighter than when I started Rainmaker. That's mostly muscle. So I I don't think my one rep maxes are what they used to be, but we still have the smelling salts on the rack downstairs.
Speaker 3:So I mean I was telling John. John, woke up Monday, like, deathly ill. And I and I was saying we need to get smelling salts just here on the set so that if we need to really
Speaker 1:We need a podcast with the same intensity that Augustus builds, you know, hard tack. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 2:I would I would rip Lucy smelling salt.
Speaker 1:We we we actually got some in the office, back in, like, 2016, '20 '17 when we were building the company. And it's a it's a wild ride if you haven't done the smelling salts. It's intense.
Speaker 3:What, what area of the broader hard tech industry are you most excited about? Obviously, you're a % locked in, but, yeah, I'd be curious, like, what is the space that, you know, when when you're sort of looking, left or right, what what's most exciting? I know that on a long enough time horizon, I'm sure you plan to enter many of those spaces, but, in the near term, what are you excited about?
Speaker 2:Fission, fission, fission, fission. You might not be very surprised, but, my dear friend Isaiah Taylor is, absolutely kicking ass when it comes to nuclear. And I think blowing the lid off a lot of people's expectations about how long it takes to build a reactor to get power positive. I also think, like, a really important point, you know, when you you brought up before how how you do publicity, how you do media. The Valor Atomics war zero unveiling was an incredible event, and the aesthetics were off the charts.
Speaker 2:And, like, a lot of people said, oh, look at the facade. Like, that's so over the top. But also if hard tech isn't cool, I think something that people don't understand about the gundo is, like, it's been a very deliberately engineered aesthetic effort to make hard tech sick. Because if it's not, then everybody's gonna end up in finance again. The next generation, the lower class of Zoomers, we're gonna end up doing software engineering.
Speaker 2:So making things incredible and cool, I think, is really important. And then having the technical chops to back it up and unveil a spectacular thermal thermal prototype, like, that is is really sweet. And, I'm excited to go hang out with, the tailors in The Philippines to see war one
Speaker 3:come online.
Speaker 1:It's the the future should look like the future, and bringing those aesthetics to bear can can have a benefit, as long as you're also delivering the real thing and it's not vaporware. Right? Is there a new class of gun do startups that are coming in? Because you built this universe, the cinematic universe that was kind of around you and whenever there'd be a profile, Isaiah would be there. A couple other guys would be there.
Speaker 1:The nearest crew, the Pico grid crew, a couple other folks, Dirac. Right? But is there is there a new addition that we need an update on Gundo, or is there just, like, a whole separate crew that you're not even overseeing as the godfather of the Gundo?
Speaker 2:Dude, yeah. So the Gundo book club is a lot of these dudes rather than being, like, I don't know, '23 through '27. They're, like, '19 through '23. Totally different cohort.
Speaker 1:A
Speaker 2:lot of cool companies. Teddy
Speaker 3:Cohort. From from Durban
Speaker 2:finally made it, to the from Georgia. It was really cool. Ares is sick. Chris, what's his last name? Ottoman?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. He is building subsea vehicles. There's a whole new click, and, we're almost out of touch with this. You know, part of what made Gundo possible and, like, the initial odd vibe real possible was we were all running, like, pre seed companies.
Speaker 2:So we had a lot of time on our hands and kinda just, like, jump around. And so we didn't even get to know these guys as well, but they're a super tight click like the original founding group of Gundobra's.
Speaker 1:That's cool. What are you thinking about, supply chain? There's been a lot of debate over, you know, Chinese drone motors and how hard it is. I mean, I've talked to the Andro guys who are like, yeah. Like, there's all sorts of pieces that are just hard to get.
Speaker 1:I was hearing, I I think you were at that talk where, someone was highlighting that there's only, like, one tin smelting factory in America now, and, like, it were it's just like there's all these weird things where, like, you just can't get American made tin or you can't get American made. So I'm sure you're thinking about that, but, also, you know, early stage is not super critical immediately to be completely clean supply chain. But what what what are you seeing as the supply chain develops? And, are there any other companies that you've been able to, like, kinda build on top of? I know at one point you were saying that, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You just walked across the street. There was a drone company that was helping you build the drones. Can you talk about the supply chain a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it is definitely still tough. Rainmaker has the luxury of not being a defense company, so the government requirements that we have are definitely different. I'm still a nationalist and a patriot, though.
Speaker 2:So in any circumstance where we can buy American or from an American colony like Taiwan, I'm pro. When it comes to, like, immediate supply chain in Gondola, I think everybody has or has already or is having a part made by Rangeview, from Cameron Shiller's company. Yeah. And so, like, having an investment casting foundry right there is pretty sweet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How you get someone to innovate in, like, winding motors, not totally sure. But, like, boards, I think, actually, we are going to see, if not just because of soft banks, hundred billion dollars that they maybe do or don't have, we will see a lot more of in The United States soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's cool. There's one there's one American drone company that does small motors. I think they're up in Seattle, and I think they I think they might have got they might have been family owned. They got bought by private equity, and then they shipped off to China.
Speaker 1:And so my dream is, like, someone goes in and does the PE and brings it back because, like, they clearly had some talent and some kind of core core competency here. But, I'm sure lots of people are working on it. Jordy, you got another question? Should we let Augustus go?
Speaker 3:No big questions. I know you gotta get back to work. Yeah. What are you hiring for right now? How can we help you find them?
Speaker 3:Who's the most critical next hire?
Speaker 2:Thanks. Before even I answer that question, I briefly lived in Southlake, Texas, which is where Quinn Yours is from. So, yes, actually, the the QB of UT Austin, I was mistaken for multiple times. I saw that reply.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:And so, I don't know. That was pretty funny. But who am I hiring for? Go to makerain.com/careers. What we're interested in most now are, radar scientists.
Speaker 2:So if you have either worked at the low level on board testing qualification or meteorological weather radar, so that's more of like a university grad student position that never thought they'd be able to get into industry because nobody's ever cared about the weather in the private sector. Those are the people that we want most. After that, though, I would say aerosol chemists. So if you've worked at Jewel, if you worked at large industrial facilities that are making a lot of smoke, that's of interest. And then, government affairs.
Speaker 2:If you're a a seasoned yapper from the hill, then we'd love to talk to you.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Amazing. Well Thanks so much for joining, Augustus. You're always welcome on the show whenever you have
Speaker 3:the news. Man. We need one of those, quarter zips there. They look fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Send them over to the studio.
Speaker 3:We'll wear them. Special episodes. Whenever it's raining, we'll wear them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's good. Gotcha. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon
Speaker 6:again soon.
Speaker 1:Talk to us.
Speaker 3:You're the man.
Speaker 1:Stay safe out there. Get some rest.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Should we get into some timeline?
Speaker 1:We should. We should. We should do a bunch of timeline. We have, what, an hour and a half, something like that, until the next call in. Oh, no.
Speaker 1:We got, like, forty five minutes. Okay. Perfect. So did you hear that Italy has soured on Starlink? I have some reports here that What's
Speaker 3:their what's
Speaker 1:their problem? Doesn't wanna do business, and I had Grock rewrite it in a comically Italian accent, and I'll read some to you. The Italian Goverde, they're having some bigger doubts about finishing this 1,600,000,000.0 deal with Elon Musk, Starlink. Bloomberg, she say, mama mia. People whispering that the worries come from The US pulling back like a scared of Linguini from the promises to keep Europe safe.
Speaker 1:Bada bing bada boom. Starlink, he's a god of some competition. Capisce? They talking about satellite communications right here in Italy. It's like known as secret pasta recipe.
Speaker 1:The report, she say, Elon Musk, he's he's taking a big risk hanging out too close with the Trump administration. Forget about it. Already, the stats in Europe, they show Tesla sales dropping faster than a meatball off the plate. Bloomberg, she say on Wednesday that Tesla shares in China, oi dia mia, down 49%. That's a no good, like overcooked spaghetti.
Speaker 1:But, oh, wait. Musk might pick up some extra business in The US at least for Starlink. Salute. Word on the street. They say the Federal Aviation Administration might ditch Verizon like a bad batch of risotto and go with Starlink instead.
Speaker 1:That's a spicy meat ball. Amazing. So thank you to Grok.
Speaker 3:That's the first, like, belly laugh that, an LLM has prevented. That might be a world first.
Speaker 1:Yes. Grok Grok is undefeated of humor. I really I really enjoyed that. Anyway, yeah. So the news, Italy does not wanna do business with Elon Musk because he's close to Trump, and Trump is not supporting, I guess, Europe.
Speaker 3:Grok actually followed this up, by the way, and said, how's the dad, You want me to cook at the pizza next?
Speaker 1:A ridiculous character. I love it.
Speaker 3:You know you know, funny story. So, the domainpartyround.com
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Was a domain owned by a a catering company in Milan, and I had my buddy who lives in Milan Okay. Negotiate for the deal. Yeah. And they we ended up, you know, settling on a fair price. But I it's, thought it was hilarious that party, you know, party round, the sort of word that was, you know, such a part of of Silicon Valley, lore was being, you know, operating a a catering a pizza company.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. Party round.
Speaker 1:Speaking of party round, did you see do you know Andrew Edinger?
Speaker 3:Of course.
Speaker 1:Okay. So did you see this breakdown he did with your company?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're you're you're
Speaker 1:the stuff of thread guy lore now.
Speaker 3:Well, so an Andrew worked.
Speaker 1:Oh, he worked there.
Speaker 3:He worked.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 3:He was on the team Awesome. Running a bunch of brand, stuff. So yeah. Do you have that pulled up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I thought this was a cool post. I feel like my I'm
Speaker 3:concerned that my version
Speaker 1:posts? I'll
Speaker 3:take some hard posts. You got the hard
Speaker 1:posts here? You're gonna have to skip through to find the, the Andrew Edinger posts towards Oh, I found it. You found it?
Speaker 3:Okay. It's at the end.
Speaker 1:It says capital was founded on the premise that
Speaker 3:Bangor back story. Andrew Edinger, is a good buddy. Joined the, joined my team in 2022, I wanna say. And so he was breaking down a lot of the work that, that went into, as we transition from party round to, capital x y z. He's breaking it down.
Speaker 3:So he says capital was founded on the premise that banking is commoditized and a great brand can win. Early signs pointed towards that hypothesis being true. Capital was an evolution from the cult followed fundraising app. Party round known for an all out assault on Twitter and appointment viewing drops, a quote from Packy. But after a year and a half of bill I gotta say with Packy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Packie almost every single day for over a year straight would would repost our stuff. It was an unbelievable ask. Most people would have folded. Yeah. But we had Josh on our team that would just message him and say, Packie, please.
Speaker 3:And he would basically guilt trip him into it every time. Packie Packy always delivered. And that was when Repost still actually carried a little bit of weight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 3:He says, but after a year and a half of building that brand, party round was, evolved into capital positioning as a bank for founders, raise hold, spends, and and send funds all in one place. And, Andrew highlights here, we we launched this founder series, which is still available, capital.xyz
Speaker 1:series. Footage of Will Menitis in that Very very rare.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's actually the only video of him online.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 3:It actually might be. Yeah. Anyway, so we we the the idea for that campaign was, you know, whenever you thought of financial institutions making con video content, it was always about, you know, some small business owner or things like that. I wanted to make the sort of, like, chef's table of, you know, highlighting founders. And so we we made the series that highlighted and a number of other, early stage founders, ended up getting nominated for a Shorty award, which was cool.
Speaker 3:I don't think we won. I was annoyed about that. Yeah. And, and then, we had a couple sort of rough, instances. We had FTX collapse, and we had a bunch of crypto, related sort of customers.
Speaker 3:We also had stablecoin functionality in our product, and we were we were building a, hybrid fiat and stablecoin bank. Yeah. And so when FTX collapsed, the entire sort of legacy finance world went really, really sort of bearish against crypto for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so we had to shut down all the stable coin functionality, and come out as sort of a more commodity, neobank. And then a few months later, SPB collapsed, and we did we only had, we only had 250 k of FTIC coverage. Yeah. And our, you know, our most important customers had millions of dollars in deposits because they were, obviously, you know, venture backed startups. And so they they looked at us.
Speaker 3:They looked at our underlying, banking partner, which their stock dropped, like, 90% because there was a sort of regional run on the bank and ended up doing a deal, with Roe, you know, very quickly to, you know, move our customers over there. But, anyways, cool story. I'm really proud of the work that we did there, and then I've worked with Andrew since then. Andrew, was, heavily involved in, Aurora. Cool.
Speaker 3:And now does a bunch of other great work for Yeah. For companies. So
Speaker 1:And and the whole team went on to do it. It's Yeah. I didn't realize the team that you, like. Yeah. We keep seeing these people in, like, the Geordie cinematic universe.
Speaker 1:It's like the gun, no bros. But seriously, it's like, you know, we're talking to, yeah. So also Brandon.
Speaker 3:So so Brandon Jacoby first ever hired. Jacoby. He's at x now. Yep. Dominating timelines.
Speaker 1:And it's so so helpful to have someone at the company that you're, like, building the stream on. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can just text.
Speaker 3:Brian Armstrong. Brian Armstrong, our CTO, is over doing meta AI stuff at Meta now. That's awesome. Dylan, our head of marketing, started a company with two other engineers on our team, sold it to Uniswap That's
Speaker 1:so which
Speaker 3:you can play it Yeah. Today. They they have this whole, like, online survivor game. Yeah. That's cool.
Speaker 3:You know, there we have, another one of our designers is at RampNow. Yep. That that went viral recently because he sort of, like, fixed something, you know, in an hour as they tend to do so. And then you have, Spencer who's over, one of the founding engineers at Delphi. So, I'm very proud of the team that we built.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, they're all doing, fantastic things.
Speaker 1:We'll have some breaking news. Elon Musk replied to one of our clips.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 1:It's about Sean Maguire. Sean Maguire was talking AGI plus robot. Tesla lets you do unlimited work in the real world. Foundational model at XAI lets you do unlimited knowledge work, and Neuralink lets you merge. We really enjoyed talking to Sean yesterday, and Elon Musk says, pretty much I'm open to the other ideas, but it seems like that's what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:So thanks for engaging, Elon. We'd love to have you on the show. Anyway, let's, let's keep going.
Speaker 3:What do you got?
Speaker 1:Wander. Sponsored post.
Speaker 3:Wander.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 3:Of course. Wait. Wait. One, two, three.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place.
Speaker 3:Find your
Speaker 1:happy place. And wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.
Speaker 1:If you're going to Italy, you're putting the pressure on them to bring Starlink over, book a wander. Fantastic, stuff. We love wander over here.
Speaker 3:I mean, you gotta follow, follow at wander. Follow, John Andrew, the founder, but follow Kyle Tibbets. He's our he's our dear friend.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And every single day, he is just racking up the impressions. He is a CMO over at wander, but he's also delivering
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:Delivering, you know, impressions himself. So He inspired He's posting some of
Speaker 1:these time to book a summer vacation.
Speaker 3:Look at this look at this house in Cape Cod.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:Unbelievable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we we gotta have Chris Williamson on the show at some point, but Chris has this fantastic, philosophy about the it's like the vacation dividend or something like that. It's like this funny mental framework where basically if you book like, if you just spontaneously go on a vacation or you go go to the Super Bowl, you get all the joy from that. And then you also get the joy from thinking back to, like, your Super Bowl experience or your your your stay in a fantastic wonder. But he thinks that you should book, a trip that's, like, two years out.
Speaker 1:So basically, you're looking forward to it for two years or, like, you know, you should always have you should always have a vacation booked, like, a year or two years out. And, also, not only is it, like, obviously cheaper and easier to book and there's more inventory when you book far out, but your schedule's clear. And then Yeah. And then you'll be like, I've had this book for two years. I'm not gonna pass this up.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with it as opposed to it's very easy when you're in the flow of things to just be like, I'm never I'm never doing it. I'm never I'm never doing a birthday weekend or something. And, so, yeah, get on wander, set those dates far out, and book something with you, your friends, your family, your company. Do something to reward yourself. Treat yourself.
Speaker 1:Do you wanna Vittorio? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:We gotta have him on the show to explain all this because it's a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo. I don't understand. Yeah. But Vittorio says it's here. You
Speaker 3:gotta get him on the show and say, okay. Break down this news like, you're explaining something to a podcast.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I know you already broke it down for, like, the x user, and, like, and, like, x, like, like, tech Twitter.
Speaker 3:About somebody that that talks forever.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Who, like, basically can't read and just talks the whole time.
Speaker 3:Anyway We have a friend who's very smart. He can't read. But Yeah. Fantastic. Intelligence is Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a separate thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know?
Speaker 1:Literacy is not for everyone. You can still do great things. As Vittorio says, it's here. Cortical Labs just launched the first commercial biological computer. Human neurons directly integrated into silicon chips, programmable and adaptive living computation, synthetic biological intelligence.
Speaker 1:Traditional silicon based AI has a fundamental limit, huge energy demands, rigid structures, and limited adaptability. AI today consumes massive computational resources, yet still struggles to mimic human intelligence. Biological intelligence, b I, he's coining it. Coogan's law says, doesn't have these limitations. Real neurons inherently adapt and learn, have high efficiency around 30 watts per unit, natural self organization, and have more flexibility, perfected over billions of years.
Speaker 1:And so congratulations to Vittorio on the launch. If you wanna learn more, he has a wonderful thread here that goes on for 20 posts.
Speaker 3:Does he work for this company? I'm confused.
Speaker 1:I actually don't know.
Speaker 3:Or he's just sharing,
Speaker 1:He's just posting maybe. I don't know. I think it's his thing, but he's got a million views on it, and that's what we really care about here. He got eight k likes on this.
Speaker 3:That's really what matters.
Speaker 1:So, Vittorio, call into the show, break it down for us. Congratulations. And if you need to promote it to an even broader audience, why don't you go buy a billboard on AdQuik? AdQuik delivers out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home experience, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. So congratulations. We're
Speaker 4:gonna have
Speaker 3:to think that Jeremy we we've joked about this a few times, but Jeremy Giffon needs to do the one on one billboard ad campaign.
Speaker 1:We mocked it up for him. So if you didn't listen to the show yesterday, Jeremy Gaffan has a fund that is,
Speaker 3:buying Specializes in he specializes in buying situations. Buying companies that are are good businesses that Yeah. That have been overcapitalized Exactly. Have extreme
Speaker 1:Rebuilding the cap table, re incentivizing the management team, the founders, figuring out who can actually get the most value out of this company, and and and and making sure that, the VCs can move on to another kind of home run swing. And
Speaker 3:so our idea was to do personal entry style ads where it says accident, you know, call
Speaker 1:Capt table accident?
Speaker 3:Call Jeremy and Bell? John's amazing copy was Capt table accident. Capt table accident. It happens sheet accident?
Speaker 1:It happens all too frequently. We have some personnel news.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Kristen McDonald is thrilled to share that she has joined Eniac Ventures. She says, I moved to venture because I wanted to work and with and enable bold entrepreneurs who are willing to to or pushing the boundary of technology forward. When I met the Eniac team, it was obvious they shared that vision. The firm was built from the ground up to be a trusted ally and support system to founders at the earliest stages. I'm honored to continue working alongside had Hadley and the rest of the team.
Speaker 1:As you may know, they are some of the best people you could ever have in your corner. And I have a funny story because, I'm I'm not super close with, Eniac or Hadley, but I in college, I interned at a, startup that was about series b, called Vlingo. It was a competitor to Siri. Siri was originally an independent project.
Speaker 3:Sounds like a company name from Silicon Valley, the show.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. And so, Siri came out of the Stanford Research Institute, SRI. That's where they got the name Siri. Yep.
Speaker 1:Siri, and Vlingo started, there's a Nuance is a voice recognition company. They make Dragon Naturally Speaking, one of the first voice recognition companies. And, they had, some of the smart kind of AI, ML engineers had had left Nuance, started this company of Lingo, Stanford. So these guys were, like, MIT guys or, yeah, out in, like we were in, like, Harvard Square, Cambridge Square, something like that. And then Siri was out in Stanford.
Speaker 1:Apple buys Siri pretty early. And so we were basically cut off from the iPhones. The whole business plan was, like, get on Android and get on Blackberry, and you wanna be installed as a default app. And they it was just like a very fascinating thing. They were doing all these cool things.
Speaker 1:They actually ran a billboard campaign. This is hilarious. I'm not doing another ad read, but, they did a billboard ad campaign. But they did it outside of, RIMS headquarters, who makes Blackberry in Canada Yeah. Specifically to get the attention of Blackberry executives Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Because it was a consumer app. It was anything that you could download. I think they had, like, a $20 version, a $5 version, a free version, etcetera. It was something that you buy and you use, and then you could and and then you could use a a voice mode just like Siri, on your Blackberry. But, they wanted to be installed by default, and they wanted a big deal done with Blackberry.
Speaker 1:So they bought billboards outside to make it look like they were were, like, a big company, you know, right outside. And then all the all the the, the executives at Blackberry would, like, drive in and be like, oh, Flingo. Like, they're they're a good company. Like, I gotta we do business with them. And Hadley worked there as this, like, kind of business development, MBA type.
Speaker 1:And I just remember him coming in and he was super young. And and during, like, the all hands meeting, he would stand up and kind of break down what the business was doing. And I was just like, this guy's the man.
Speaker 3:Sure. Because I
Speaker 1:was like a kid. I was an intern at the time. And the CEO, they they the the founders were like these MIT scientists. Yeah. But they brought in a kind of corporate CEO who was a he'd been in war.
Speaker 1:Basically, he'd been in Iraq deploying, like, mobile technology, basically, like like cell phone towers. And he was so, like, hardcore. He had bullets on his desk with, like, the names of the rival companies on him. It was a really it was a really crazy, like, experience, but it was really cool because, like, a series a, series b company, 50 people building a tech product growing. Like, it's just a unique thing to be in.
Speaker 1:I I I it it wound up being like an okay outcome. They sold the company. I think everyone did pretty well. It wasn't like a generational company or anything, but it was just cool to see, like, okay. This is what a startup looks like at this scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it was really cool. And, and I remember that we did some deal and, and and Hadley, like, got, like, bottle service, and he let me come and drink at his table. And that was huge to me as a college kid. So, you know, it was great.
Speaker 3:Sweet. So Now and one thing, yeah, congratulations to Kristen McDonald. This is huge. The the the title partner has been diluted
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Over time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:But getting partner at a fund like Eniac Yep. Really means something, and, it's it's awesome to see.
Speaker 1:It's great. Should we go to Evan Armstrong? Let's do it. Evan Armstrong says people are not ready for what's coming. Anthropic published a post today that casually announced the upending of the social order by 2027.
Speaker 1:If LLMs can do all listed below, the vast majority of American labor is automatable. We are entering an economically, politically, and emotionally dangerous period. Buckle up. And the and the quote is from, this blog post. As our CEO, Dario, writes in Machines of Loving Grace, we expect power
Speaker 3:title, by the way.
Speaker 1:It's reference to All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which is a Heinlein book, I think. We expect powerful AI systems will emerge in late twenty twenty six to early twenty twenty seven. Powerful AI systems will have the following properties, intellectual capabilities matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines, including biology, computer science, mathematics, or engineering, the ability to navigate all interfaces available to a human doing digital work today, including the ability to process and generate text, audio, and video, and the ability to autonomously control technology, instruments like mice and keyboard like mice and keyboards, and the ability to access and browse the Internet, the ability to autonomously reason through complex tasks over extended periods, hours, days, or even weeks, seeking clarification and feedback when needed, much like a highly capable employee would, the ability to interface with the physical world, controlling laboratory equipment, rub robotic systems, and manufacturing tools through digital connections. What do you think? Twenty twenty seven?
Speaker 3:Is it over? We're just getting started.
Speaker 1:Just getting started.
Speaker 3:No. I I mean, this is a challenge.
Speaker 1:Of comedy. Interesting. The final eval.
Speaker 3:That, anthropic is crushing software engineering Yep. Struggling on the comedy side. Yep. And that's okay. Not everybody has to be funny.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I, you know, you read this and you're like, oh, massive job displacement, but the the question is, like, is there just a thousand times more work to be done? And when I think about Mars, and when I think about Dyson spheres, and when I think about, like, all the crazy things that we wanna do as humans, I'm thinking, like, yeah. Yes, and. Like, let's have every human piloting a thousand AIs, and let's all work together, and let's all
Speaker 3:work more. Friedberg had a really great point, which we covered last week around, you know, if you have these incredible, incredibly powerful AI systems, what are the sort of massive, you know, incredibly daunting sort of large scale projects that could be accomplished by just having a lot more intelligence. Yep. So anyways, I don't think, I think we need to go into this with, you know, generally with optimism. And then still, I think I I still personally reference people like Tyler Cowen, who I think are less directly conflicted
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:On these things because he's not out there trying to sustain, you know, you know Evaluation. Evaluation. Right? He's just sort of focused on, what he believes is, is the truth, and making predictions based on that. So we'll see.
Speaker 3:But it's certainly the most, I would never I wouldn't have wanted to be born at a different time.
Speaker 1:No. Totally.
Speaker 3:It's, it's truly, truly incredible. Yeah. It'll be very exciting. This morning Sorry. Completely unrelated.
Speaker 3:Pretty soon, we're gonna see, people joining x. Not not pretty soon, but but isn't it funny to see somebody in ten years when people are like, why do these boomers call everything tweets? Yeah. And quote tweets? Like, what are they talking about?
Speaker 3:Because, like, they will not have they wouldn't have ever experienced Twitter. Yeah. It'll just be, like, the most obvious way to out yourself as as a boomer. Yeah. Or maybe an LLM that's just trained on a bunch of, content from, you know, the early twenty twenties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Well, regardless of whether or not AI takes every job, you're gonna need to use AI and use software to close your books using ramp. Time is money.
Speaker 1:Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 3:I actually have a cool post from our Karazian, who we've talked about. He's an economist over at ramp. So he looked at the top SaaS vendors on ramp for March so far. And, I'll run down the list here. So by new customer count, OpenAI topped the list.
Speaker 3:LinkedIn was second, Cursor was third, Canva was fourth, and then fifth was Anthropic. By new card spend was Elastic, LinkedIn, HubSpot, ZoomInfo, and Sales Force. So that was interesting to see. I'm gonna read out some of the standout. So Elastic was a standout.
Speaker 3:They were the the top vendor by new cards. Ben is an AI search company that builds software for businesses to build their own AI driven search platforms like personalized e commerce searches for consumers or AI searches for customer help centers. They're a public company, so their stock recently surged following an earnings beat. So narrative violation, AI company with earnings that's public.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:Wild to see. I'm looking it up looking it up on public right now. But jumping back to the post, they also XAI was a standout, and, so they seem to be pretty doing pretty well. Had a surge of sign ups in February, and then, the Claude three point seven Sonnet launch also drove quite a lot of new volume. And they can see here.
Speaker 3:So ramp data shows that as of February 2025, only 4.7% of US businesses have adopted anthropics model compared to 19% for open AI. Yeah. So kinda, like, doesn't seem super surprising. I'm actually surprised that Anthropic has that much adoption.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think it's the developer usage that's driving that.
Speaker 1:Yep. I I was thinking last night about the question of, like, acceleration because we're not seeing it yet in certainly GDP, but all like like like to the, to the Satya Nadella point. But also, there there's a very interesting abstraction layer for, like, the progress of humanity just around the amount of energy that we're generating. Yep. This idea of, like, Kardashev one, which is, I believe, 10,000.
Speaker 1:We're at point six right now. I think it's 18 terawatts of, electrical capacity globally. And, if you you it's hard to find a time in human history when we were generating 10,000 times less. So if you forecast how long will it take to get to 10,000 times more, where we would be essentially consuming every every amount all the energy that's coming to the Earth from the sun, essentially. It's like Kardashev one.
Speaker 1:And then Kardashev two, I believe, is like the Dyson sphere on the on and where you're where you're capturing all the energy from the sun in every direction. Right? Yeah. And if you and if you forecast it out based on the base rate, which I believe is 2.7% growth pre 1970 stagnation, it takes, like, five hundred years to get there, which feels like forever, especially given like, I I think that this anthropic post is maybe a little aggressive, but it does feel like we're on the cusp of something. Like, we're going to be able to do more things.
Speaker 1:And and so my my base case is maybe, like, we go back to, 2.7% growth, whereas we've been at around 2% energy growth for the last, five decades. But even if we grow at 2.7 for the next twenty years, by 2020 by 2045, we'll only be double the total energy capacity, which it'll be a lot. It'll be 38 terawatts or something like that. But it's but it's interesting to see if if that becomes the main bottleneck for all of this is, like, doing things in the physical world. Nat Friedman has this take that's, like, yes, the AIs will be super intelligent, but they won't be gods in the sense that they still have to obey the laws of physics.
Speaker 1:So no time travel, no teleportation, all of these things don't happen. So so Yeah. At a certain point, when they want to build a new nuclear reactor, like, they do need to dig things out of the ground and move them, and there's there's, like, a physical cost to that. And so, we like, it's you know, there's that whole
Speaker 3:Humans yearn for the minds. Yeah. We can help the AIs. Mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole meme of, like, feel feel the acceleration. And I feel the acceleration in the in the in the LLM progress arena a little bit. Although, you know, over the past few years, it feel it felt like we were really accelerating going from GPT 3.5 to four.
Speaker 1:And now it feels like we're kinda tailing off and hitting some sort of local maximum.
Speaker 3:Failure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need some major breakthrough.
Speaker 3:He doesn't care about benchmarks.
Speaker 1:And then we need to build a lot more capacity because I I I think even if we have the p h super PhD researchers, like, we don't have enough servers. We don't have enough data centers. Like, there's just there's still just more to do as as humanity to really, like, unlock something that feels dramatically different in terms of, like, oh, this this world is, like, true post post industrial revolution, post second industrial revolution or whatever. Anyway, let's move on to something, completely unrelated. Connor McDonald over at Ridge.
Speaker 3:Connor McDonald, he says direct to consumer cut out the middleman and replaced it with an endless labyrinth of deteriorating ad channels and organic reach. And I'll give some backstory here. So I, my career sort of came online during the height of the d to c sort of boom. I remember, I actually had a college class that was about d two c. And then Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then almost basically, the professor was fixated on what was happening over Wharton and how all these big consumer brands were coming out of Wharton Yeah. The the MBA program there. I think, Warby is a good example. I think maybe some Harry's or the Shave like, something was happening at Wharton to generate these companies.
Speaker 3:And Yeah. There was a sense, like, Facebook ads were very cheap at the time in comparison. They basically got generally more expensive Yep. Year over year. And people were realizing, working with distributors, you know this from Lucy, working at distributors is a nightmare for every every company.
Speaker 3:Right? They they sort of sit between you and the retailer. The retailer sits between the distributor and the end customer. And so there's these layers and there's this idea of if you could sell products online, Facebook ended up being the best distribution channel for products probably in history. You could scale brands tremendously fast overnight, and a lot of these businesses ended up just raising just obscene amounts of capital, on the idea that that, basically, if, ad rates didn't go, price prices for ads didn't go up a lot, you would have been able to just print money.
Speaker 3:It was like a money machine where spend a hundred dollars on Facebook, get $500 back. You could just do that perpetually. So I became close friends, with Connor at the time, and and, we we, you know, helped him out with Ridge and then, you know, got to work, out of their office for a while. And, Connor's daily life was just finding, you know, basically navigating the labyrinth, which he describes here of, you know, optimizing existing ad channels, trying to test and find new ones. Even, you know, the Connor and the Ridge guys were smart early on to not put a huge emphasis on organic social.
Speaker 3:It was never, sort of a huge priority for the company, and that ended up being the right decision because all these brands that had built big businesses off of organic social media, Facebook at one point was just like, yeah, like, you don't this is not this reach isn't real. Your reach is not reach. You know, we're we're basically there was a period where organic social almost didn't matter at all. And, so, anyways, if if when I see, you know, I'm invested in a number of, different sort of consumer product companies, people like, Pat, Pat, Packie's brother, Dan McCormack, who's intensely good at this similar archetype as Connor. He's just sort of constantly focused on optimizing, paid acquisition.
Speaker 3:The Rohrer CEO, Brian Brian Keller, my business partner is, like, world class at this too. And so the brands that are doing well right now are are ones that are hyper fixated on, like, performance optimization. And it really is this, scientific process of experimentation and, you know, proper, you know, balancing these sort of super, super complicated task where, like, the idea of ecommerce is so simple. You make a product, you put it online, you you run ads against it, but then the reality is, like, this constant, stressful labyrinth of, you know, trying to make the equation of ecommerce work. You got two.
Speaker 3:That means you should shotgun one. John's got a couple Celsius.
Speaker 1:I mean, we we we really gotta do the deep dive in Celsius because, born in the d to c era and yet not a d to c play. At all. And I think I I think that's kind of the the next I mean, Ridge is certainly, still heavily ecommerce focused, and they've developed a fantastic team around that, but they are going into retail and growing that category. And I think more and more teams are realizing that omnichannel early makes a lot of sense, but it's a very different skill set. It's very, very hard, and it's it's it's just a completely different culture motion.
Speaker 1:I mean, I remember reading this book by Mark Rampolla, The High Hanging Fruit. This guy, started Vitacoco, this coconut water company that he sold, I think, to Pepsi for a lot of money. He he did very, very well. And, he was telling the story of how he got, a distributor network in New Jersey on board, and he went to the distributor and was just, like, showed up with an f one fifty. Whichever one of you guys sells the most coconut water this week gets this f one fifty.
Speaker 1:And that was like the best money he ever spent.
Speaker 3:That's wild.
Speaker 1:And that is just so different from, let me look at the spreadsheet and see what was our ROAS to CAC and click through ratio on this ad. And what was the two second retention on this video ad? And how do we get more UGC? Like, the d to c playbook is just completely different from, like, oh, you know a guy, you know, which is the very much like the retail, old school. So blending those together, really difficult.
Speaker 1:But when you'd get it right, the company can really, really rip. Yeah. Anyway, should we move on to, Erewhon this, Erewhon that? My grocery store has a stolen phone laundering laundering machine and lets me open carry post from Sam Austin. You're a big Erewhon guy.
Speaker 1:Are you gonna be switching?
Speaker 3:I might. I need to find out where this is.
Speaker 1:This is wild. I I don't understand the stolen phone laundering. I guess it's a it's a machine, and it says, safely and securely, an iPhone XR could net you up to $65. You just dump the phone in there, and it immediately gets you instant cash. Pretty crazy business model.
Speaker 1:I wonder who's behind this.
Speaker 3:I wonder if it has any way to figure out if the iPhone's actually unlocked or factory reset. You would hope that they require you to have a factory reset phone.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this is I wonder how much I mean, obviously, they're joking that, oh, this is about laundering stolen phones, but, clearly, stolen phones would be an issue with a system like this. Yeah. And I wonder what safeguards the company has in, has in place for that. But I thought it was funny because they're taking shots at Erewhon. And I just wanted to highlight it.
Speaker 3:Defend Erewhon.
Speaker 1:Anyway, back to tech, back to business, back to the serious stuff on the timeline. Epirus, announced a $250,000,000 series defund raise to hyperscale Leonidas production capacity. Leonidas is a solid state software defined high energy, high power microwave technology that delivers unmatched counter electronics capabilities tested and proven as a scalable counter swarm solution. Another, another answer to those drone swarms that we keep seeing on the timeline. Very cool, defense tech company, a Joe Lonsdale project, I believe.
Speaker 1:And, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so there's a lot of reasons why this company
Speaker 1:is working for them.
Speaker 3:There's been, there's been, some naysayers around this tech. Right? So Yep. This is non kinetic, which means it's entirely using, energy. Yep.
Speaker 3:Directed, towards these sort of swarms. The reason that this is so important is there's a lot of places in the world that need to be secured against drones. Yep. That you can't shoot bullets into the air. So a picture at a, know, so Allen control Allen control systems makes a ton of sense on about Battlefield.
Speaker 3:Right? So sort of turret that you, you know, can put on a truck or a tank or, you know, stationary
Speaker 1:Gun on a truck.
Speaker 3:Gun on a truck. Gun on a truck. Especially But the challenge is you can't put that on top of a, NFL stadium. Right? Because it would just involve firing bullets in the air, you know, into a city.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Completely doesn't work.
Speaker 3:And so if we're gonna have, effective defenses against drone swarms in these sort of non battlefield environments. Yep. Also, there's a volume there's like a volume problem too. Right? If you have a drone swarm of a hundred, are you gonna be able to reliably hit, you know, a hundred of these?
Speaker 3:And so we need both kinetic and, non kinetic solutions and, huge vote of confidence for Epirus. And I believe, this is an eight VC company. Yep. Joe Lonsdale had a post. He said directed EMP is becoming a critical part of warfare and deterrence.
Speaker 3:DoD bases, ships, vehicles, planes, satellites, and other defense systems will all use these capabilities to dominate the battlefield and to protect war fighters and civilians in various contexts. So cool, both, wartime and civilian applications.
Speaker 1:It's great. Let's go to Shweta. She says, your fear of being cringe is limiting your the ceiling of your potential.
Speaker 3:Well said. Yeah. Everything you want is on the other side of cringe.
Speaker 1:And a phone call that you don't wanna make, which is which is a form of cringe. Like, you're cringing thinking about making that phone call in the Jeremy Giffon parlance.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I see Julian Weiser is commenting here saying we're killing cringe. Yeah. Let's just stop. Everybody just let's put a year long pause on cringing, both the act, the word
Speaker 1:Then use the word. The word did get played out very quickly. Right? But, yeah, you gotta put yourself out there. Take risks.
Speaker 1:I mean, the beauty is that I mean, I I I felt this very deeply when I started the YouTube channel during, during, COVID, because it's so awkward to be on camera the first time. And you put yourself
Speaker 3:Being a you being an adult man saying I'm gonna be a YouTuber.
Speaker 1:There's a million things that are wrong with it. Right? So I just didn't tell anyone. And I just put it out on YouTube, and then the bad ones didn't go viral, so Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I feel the the Shweta's argument here is that you should have just been promoting them aggressively.
Speaker 1:I guess. I guess. But there is something to, like, at least on YouTube, like, letting the algorithm sorted out and figure it out and and just getting the routes in and stuff. And yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe I should have
Speaker 3:been You'd be at 10,000,000 by
Speaker 1:now. Yeah. Maybe maybe. Who knows? But, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the the beauty is that it it it you have to be really, really bad to get to go viral in a negative way. Most of the time, if you do something that's received as cringe or or negative or or dumb, like, it just doesn't get views, and so it doesn't matter. So put yourself out there. Let's go to Robin. Robin says, when SF realizes their Waterloo pipeline is actually just a pipeline from, like, four high schools in Canada, they're gonna go nuts.
Speaker 3:Yeah. To be honest, John, the smartest VCs I know are actually going even further. They're offering to fund the middle school
Speaker 1:Middle school.
Speaker 3:Schools that go to those high schools. So they're going to these these, you know, middle schools and saying hundred k uncapped note. Just take it now. And, we just wanna look when once you get through Waterloo, once you're starting a company Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, people have people have copied so much of, like, Peter Thiel's stuff. No one's no one's done the more aggressive Thiel Fellowship of, like, drop out of middle school, drop out of lower school. Like, stop everything. Yeah. We'll give you $200 to to to to to skip third grade and and try and build a company.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't be surprised. But, yeah, probably stay in school, kids. I
Speaker 3:think kids are listening to this.
Speaker 1:I think you can wait I think you can wait until you graduate high school at least to start a company.
Speaker 3:Dad? I saw the episode Yeah. Back in 2025. Yep. You said that there could be some potential in dropping out of middle school.
Speaker 3:I wanna make the leap.
Speaker 1:Yep. Did you see the MCP meme going on yesterday?
Speaker 3:I I didn't see the meme.
Speaker 1:I mean, people are just posting about it. But, Greg here says, benchmark idea. You fund a model, an AI model with $200 in a Stripe account, and you give it access to the Internet and a large list of MCPs. Measure increase in balance at fourteen, thirty, ninety, a hundred and eighty, and three hundred and sixty days. No developer intervention.
Speaker 1:Most models wouldn't even be able to spend their first dollar. This is the universal or not universal basic income. It's the, what is it? Artificial economic intelligence. Just once the model can make money, then we're in business because that's very quantifiable.
Speaker 1:It's a new it's a new benchmark. Yeah. And I like this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's it's, it's gonna be very funny when there's just, like, online activity that does not make sense to humans Yep. Or just, like, some equivalent of these sort of Nigerian, like, prints scams or some of these, like, you know, you get DMs from NFT projects saying, hi, boss. I'd like to, you know, promote, you know, whatever, this sort of spam. There's gonna be this sort of AI slop, money making sort of, programs running that that you're just gonna see as a human, and you're just like like, come on.
Speaker 3:But then it works, like, one out of it every 10,000 times. Yeah. And so that then it becomes a sort of viable, economic model. So Oh,
Speaker 1:man. I saw a great AI scam. I got a breakdown for you. So
Speaker 3:Hit me.
Speaker 1:It's a thirty minute AI generated deep faked lip sync video of, like, a a priest and then a number of different pitchmen and celebrities telling you about a special prayer. And if you say this prayer, wealth will come to you. But they just keep talking to you for thirty minutes telling you all about this prayer and how valuable it is and how it will transform your life. And then at the very end, after thirty minutes of watching this AI slop, that's very clearly, like, the mouth isn't aligned properly, but it's, like, close, it there's, like, a add to cart button. And the add to cart button is just, like, you pay them and then you get, like, this prayer that you can say.
Speaker 1:And it's so funny because they they walk through the pitch and they're like like, oh, yeah. Like, I saw this in the Corridor Crew video. Like, oh, yeah. Like, you know, like, we we have to we have to pay for, like, our servers and stuff to host this prayer. And so you you you have to pay a little bit.
Speaker 3:We can't just give it
Speaker 1:to you for free. I don't know. It's probably $20 or something. But, the the the Corridor Crews been doing great great, videos. They're VFX artists, but they also work with all the Frontier AI visual tools.
Speaker 1:And so they they they highlight a bunch of these AI schemes. One of them that was really funny that I saw was, they AI generate an image of, like, a sweater that's like a cable knit sweater, and it looks all, like, like, Irish and, like, regal, like, you're out in, like, the forest or something. And it's on this, like, you know, blonde model, and they run an ad on that. And then when you go to buy it, what they ship you is not a sweater. It's a t shirt with a sweater printed on it.
Speaker 1:No. Because they clearly have the machinery not to make the sweaters, but just to print anything on a t shirt.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 1:And so you get the AI design that they sold you, but but it's just printed on a t shirt. It's so funny. But at the same time, the quarter crew guys were talking about, hey. They're they're actually gonna do some, like, AI generated camo t shirts.
Speaker 6:We're the only
Speaker 1:They're, disclosing this. Hello. Do we have someone joining? Perfect. Perfect timing.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 5:Tongues.
Speaker 3:What is it? Nikki Wiki?
Speaker 5:Oh my god. Rory, I can kill him.
Speaker 1:We've we've I think we've mispronounced your name so many times. Is it whisk off?
Speaker 5:Wish off. Wish off.
Speaker 1:Wish off. I'm sorry. Well, now now we'll know. So, anyway, thank you for joining. Give us a little kickoff.
Speaker 1:Introduce yourself. Tell us about your fund. Tell us about why you're here today.
Speaker 5:Oh my gosh. Yes. So, one, thank you so much for having me, huge OG fan. So Nicole Wishoff, solo GP. I run Wishoff Ventures Cool.
Speaker 5:Which is a fund focused on pre seed and seed stage companies, North America, and super unsexy businesses, which happy to unpack. Started in 2021, have three funds and about 80,000,000 in assets.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 5:And just trying to freaking build this thing as I fly it. So
Speaker 1:How'd you raise the first fund?
Speaker 5:First one was 5,000,000. I was still operating, so that's my background. And I had met a ton of VCs, raised a few hundred million at, start on the startup side of of the world and learned about VC fund to funds. So Bain, Thrive, Foundation, all of those guys want access to great companies early. And so got a call from a VC friend that was like, you should raise a fund.
Speaker 5:You're angel investing. Let us give you, like, half a million bucks. Yeah. The rest is history. So I I raised, 5,000,000 pretty quickly.
Speaker 5:I think, like, 20 ish LPs. Was doing it on the side, decided I loved it. And then in '22, raised 20. Last year, raised 50. So it's like it's actually happening.
Speaker 3:Such a such a narrative violation. One, solo GP that didn't have a Twitter account before you like like, the the fund came before the Twitter account Yeah. Which is rare. Yeah. Two, started in 2021 and and have delivered, you know, from from all the data that that I've seen, phenomenal performance.
Speaker 3:And so it's just, no. It's it's been amazing to see. How did you so many people never find their voice online. It felt like you did quickly, and it's just it's natural. And and, you know, I we know people that spend five hours a day to try to produce x content that just completely flops, yet it seems like you have this Oh
Speaker 5:my gosh.
Speaker 3:Effortless ability to just I think you treat it like a like a personal like, notes to self almost, but it just resonates. Yeah. How long did it take you to kind of find that voice?
Speaker 5:I I would say it was from the start. Though it wasn't intentional, to this day, don't have any drafts. Like, I could I think but maybe I have four in there from, like, drinking too much and, like, you know, be like, maybe I should wait until tomorrow. I have rules. I've probably I tell my LPs I have three rules for Twitter.
Speaker 5:I can go through those. But so I was in a group chat with, like, Alex Cohen who, like, shit posts. I'm like, you guys know Alex and Erin Frank who's now an investor at Lightspeed Erin. Don't kill me. And we're in this group chat.
Speaker 5:It was never on Twitter. Not even as, like, a I'm scrolling just to see what, like, lurking. So I actually didn't know how, insane people are to each other on it. So I came in and I was like, cool. This is like a cool app.
Speaker 5:In '21 because Aaron was like, Nicole, you're a VC now. You have to, like, use Twitter. And so I hard launched with a $5,000,000 fine. I have, like, my first viral tweet probably, like, a week later, and it was something like I don't know if you guys were even you probably know who I was. This was, like, through a couple years ago.
Speaker 5:And I said something like, Ken confirmed that it is 10 x easier to raise a $5,000,000 fund than to get 500 Twitter followers on x, like, the now x. And Alex Cohen retweets it and is like, you guys, throw Nicole a bone, like, she's a loser. And, anyway, like, totally takes off. So I always say, like, the first thousand was tough. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And since then, honestly, like, I think I think a few things, one, I keep them super short. I try to never say, like, start them with I, and I'm like, hey. You know, had a thought last night, blah blah blah. And then have an opinion on whatever I'm talking about. And then the shorter they are, the more they rip.
Speaker 5:And so I've stuck to that. I try to just say what I think. It is absolutely backfired. I see. If I don't have one once a quarter that, like, doesn't, like, bury me alive and VC Braggs is, like, taking it to the moon, then I'm not doing it right.
Speaker 5:And so I just have to like, I just lean into it, but that's, like, kind of the motion that I've, that's been happening.
Speaker 3:What do you advise your portfolio founders around using x? Because there's no perfect way to use it. There's downsides to everything. I'm sure met a lot of your top of funnel deal flow, I'm sure, is through your network, but I'm sure a similar amount is through x. And so I'm sure you you invest in companies and they're like, okay, Nicole, teach me how to sort of unlock the platform.
Speaker 3:How often are you advising them to just focus on your business and just ignore the platform versus when are you telling them, you know, hey. You can get some value here.
Speaker 5:So, honestly, because I'm doing pre seed seed and it's so early, there's so much other crap to figure out that, like, if they're focusing on getting, like, you know, 10 followers a day, which you guys know you're building this thing too. Like, in the beginning, it's slow, and then it's not. But, like, it takes a commitment. It's daily. They could be doing so many other things to derisk the business for the first at least two years.
Speaker 5:So I typically don't wanna have that conversation until, honestly, series a, series b. Yeah. They've got, like, more of a team. And I've by the way, I've advised plenty of companies and try to get it going, and, like, it just there is no time for it. There's no consistency.
Speaker 5:So I think it's largely a distraction. Though, I'll caveat this with some people are just naturals. I think you have it or you don't. I don't think it's like this learned skill. Like, look at Nikkita.
Speaker 5:Like, ask him if he ever got help with, like, tweets. You know? It's just that he's just a natural at saying what he thinks and having thick skin, and it just works. So if my founders are asking me for help on building a Twitter strategy, it usually means they shouldn't be doing it. And that's most people generally, not even my founders.
Speaker 3:How sharp are your elbows? Your precede seed. You're you're I'm assuming you're trying to get, you know, 10%, ownership. I'm sure there's some flexibility there. You put out, like, wouldn't say an you don't have an aggressive persona, but but, you know, we can tell you're really, like, an athlete.
Speaker 3:Right? Like, are when you're competing for rounds, are you trying to take as much as you possibly can, or do you take a more collaborative approach these days?
Speaker 5:I I'm a firm believer that it takes a village to get a company off the ground. So I would argue something totally different. If you're a series a, take the whole round. You're adding, like, strategic value. You have a can do that.
Speaker 5:So if my founders are like, hey. One fund wants to take the whole a. I'm like, go for it. I think if your series like, if you're a pre seed seed, you want all the strategic angels. They're, like, one call away from an intro to Walmart or, like, a huge brand that you want or, like, those little things that people, like, do for you early on, like, actually, I think do do help the business.
Speaker 5:First customers, first hires. So I always try to take, let's say, for fun too is I wanted to get 5% typical dilution of precede seeds, like, 20%, maybe 15. And so I'm I'm never usually having issues, like, getting that. By the way, I hate hot deals. They're they never were.
Speaker 5:I've done all the deals, all the multistage funds at precede seed. They're, like, my worst, like it it's I shouldn't say they're it's they're still in business and it's going well, but, like, they're not standing out and shining any brighter than other companies. Like, this is super hard, and, also, I paid two x what I should have. Yeah. And so I hate noise.
Speaker 5:If there's a ton of funds running in one direction, I just run the other. So, like, sharp elbows, no, but I try to be super realistic about rounds and structures. Yeah. And and really collaborative is the short answer.
Speaker 3:Where have you made investments that you're still excited about that you're done investing sort of broadly in the category?
Speaker 5:So well, I feel like I'm I'm dipping my toes back in even though I left for two years. I think, look, lending is really hard in a high interest rate environment. Right? Like, your facilities are so expensive that, like, your burn is, like, through the roof. So for a lot of companies that were trying to build insure techs or lending businesses, they got, and they only had maybe 2,000,000 in the bank.
Speaker 5:They just can never raise another round. Or I was looking at those businesses thinking, like, if I even see this, you're not gonna be in the clear for at least two to three years or another fund is comfortable underwriting this type of business. And so, I I I mean, I got my MBA, I feel like, right when I started my venture journey on, like, great markets and horrible markets because fun one is 2021. And I was like, oh my god. I'm so fucking good at this.
Speaker 5:And then, like, '23, I was like, I am so bad at this. And then '24, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna stick around and, like, you know, figure this thing out. So I think lending's dicey, but now I'm getting excited about it again. So, yeah.
Speaker 1:What's the vision for the fund, going forward? I I saw you just hired two people. Is that right? Is that how big the firm is?
Speaker 5:Yes. So there are three of us full time and then, like, outsourced to agency for some of this social stuff and and all of that, which is really expensive, actually. And so, yeah, I wanna keep the team super small. I wanna stay scrappy. I scrappy.
Speaker 5:I think you start to get lazy when you start building layers of the team. Like, I wanna be fresh. I wanna be on calls. Like, I wanna be in the ground, like, just doing the work with companies. Longer term, look, I wanna be the fund, in North America and the categories we invest in that, like, pre seed and seed stage founders, like, want to work with first, above anybody else.
Speaker 5:And that takes time. Like, that's a lot of that's brand. Like, how do we build this repeatable motion of, like, everyone knows who I am and everyone wants to work with me, and I reference well because I, like, do the work. So
Speaker 1:What about super long term? Private equity arm, asset manager, wealth manager, going public, we're still investing doing catalyst. You know? What why not you?
Speaker 5:I think I had a a tweet once that was like, listen. May I be so successful in venture that I have, like, a p e arm? I have a growth arm. I'm doing, like, the roll ups. I have a fund of funds.
Speaker 5:I think the last piece was like
Speaker 1:high frequency.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I was like, I have every single thing that absolutely no one knows how they're performing because we'd like, no one can manage at all, like, which I would say are a lot of these platforms. Like, no one could tell you how their fund to funds are doing. Like, it's yeah. Maybe, you know, honestly, like, I I I'm a big fan of small and nimble.
Speaker 5:Like, I think if you realistically, if you wanna put a great returns, returns, and I think USV has been amazing at this. Like, if you ask them and they're doing series a and their funds are sub 300, like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:They that keeps them up at night. And, like, 50,000,000, that doesn't quite keep me up at night. I'm excited. But I think, like, going over $1.50, and you can guys can pull this up when I hopefully, if I don't ever do it. But if I do, I'd be like, Nicole, but
Speaker 3:We'll have you on for the news, and then we'll pull up this this this clip, and we'll say,
Speaker 5:no. Like, Nicole did everything wrong. No. But look, I I think there's value a lot of value. And if we wanna say that we can legitimately ideally more than three x, I always try to aim for, let's say, five x plus, which by the way, not even $10,000,000 funds three x ever.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's just really hard. Then we need to stay nimble, and it's all portfolio construction. So just follow the math and then yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we have five minutes. I I I wanna hear about the company. What's going on?
Speaker 5:Oh my gosh. You guys so I was not planning to do this, but I was like, John, I might just, like, hard launch a company I just, cofounded.
Speaker 1:Do it. Alright.
Speaker 5:So Yeah. Just break it again. This is the exclusive. This is, like, no joke. So, raise money for it.
Speaker 5:No one knows about it except the person that funded it and, like, my LPs. So, I have been investing in just to, like, to tee this up, in software companies serving data centers. I think if you follow the power, you and the infrastructure, you'll know where AI is going. Mhmm. So, and then my partner was simultaneously consulting data center a guy building data centers in Waterloo.
Speaker 5:So we're both like, wait. There's something here. So we, cofounded a business called Kratos, which I think is a good name, but, you know, Kratos AI.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:And we are building next gen, AI data centers. Not great venture bets. So there's founder shares in the funds, but no check from the fund in it, though we've raised money from strategic family offices. More of like a private credit. Think like 75% debt, 25% equity.
Speaker 5:And we're making the case that there's tons of capital going towards hyperscalers. If you're a hyperscaler, you're saying, look, we're gonna own the market, and there's only gonna be a few of us, and everyone's gonna use our data centers. And we totally disagree. I think if you're for training, it makes a lot of sense. For inference, you need you don't need as high latency.
Speaker 5:So we could be, like, a hundred miles or less from, like, the tier two tier three cities, and still have solid latency for inference. So, if you start asking around and hopefully people are listening in like, I had a founder tell me in, like, the YC, like, alumni channel, all these companies, like, are like, hey. Like, who has data center, like, colocation capacity for us? Like, we wanna, like, like, save costs from hyperscalers. Like, where can we go from here?
Speaker 5:Either there's a huge market for these, like, 10 to 25 megawatt data centers. So, working on our first location, 20 megawatts. You guys, this is, like, the craziest thing I've ever done.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 5:I don't have an active role because, like, the funds are the baby, but I can certainly help with distribution and fundraising. And the last thing I'll say is these are really expensive projects. So these are a 20 megawatt facility net, like, brand new constructions around a hundred million. Mhmm. And so and, again, we don't wanna give up too much on the equity side, but there's something here, and, we're going for it.
Speaker 5:So I
Speaker 3:like it too because even if it's even if it's not a traditional venture bet, if there's common shares in the fund or however you structured it, you could return your fund, I imagine, off of just this one, company, which is amazing.
Speaker 1:It's awesome.
Speaker 3:You've done the last question I have, you've done Yeah. You do a bunch of stuff in supply chain. You're a venture capitalist, so, obviously, you're also a geopolitical expert. It comes at the territory. How are you do you think these sort of trade wars are are are are good for a number of your portfolio companies specifically focused on supply chain management just because there's gonna be, suddenly it's it's sort of the the thing to talk about.
Speaker 3:It's sort of this pressing issue. What what and and more broadly, what advice are you are you giving to those, companies in your portfolio?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'd say that there's really, like, one or two that it could directly impact significantly. One being a company that's, like, literally in logistics. It's freight between Mexico and The United States. So, like, part of me is like, holy crap.
Speaker 5:Like, what's the impact there? Look, ultimately, we have to show dominance. So, like, I'm very pro every every type of flex that the administration is putting on both Canada and Mexico, which are most relevant to what I do. And so let's can go, honestly. Like, I think, ultimately, I'm hoping that we're bluffing, to get what we want.
Speaker 5:So my bet is like, oh my god. Keep delaying. I think I just saw the headlines of Canada. They're like, like, Trump's delaying it, like, thirty days or I don't know what it is. So, anyway, I'm I'm I I love the flex.
Speaker 5:I hope it's only a flex, but it would impact what's going on at least for for a couple of our companies. So I'm, like, keeping my fingers and toes crossed. But, again, we have to exert dominance, so I'm happy with the administration and what we're
Speaker 3:I love the energy. Augustus Dorica was on the show, earlier, and he's called Taiwan an American colony. Yeah. So you guys are both in the
Speaker 5:same way. Love
Speaker 3:it. Nicole, it's so great to have you. Congrats
Speaker 1:on the new company.
Speaker 3:We would love to have you on whenever you have portfolio news, whenever you have fun news. You're always welcome on the show. You are a brother to us. Yes. Technology brother.
Speaker 5:Love you guys. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bye. Bye. Soon. Now we have, Billy, are you there?
Speaker 1:Billy?
Speaker 4:Hey guys. How's it going?
Speaker 1:It's going great. I'm going to read your post and then you'll, kick it off. Enter the sea glider era. The world's first sea glider has hit the water room for 12 passengers and a % battery powered. The test vehicle is human crude from day one.
Speaker 1:60 five foot wingspan, 15,000 pounds. Trials are underway. You're in the back of a car. Break it down. What'd you launch?
Speaker 1:And how's it going?
Speaker 3:And to be clear, this has always been John's vision for the show is that you could just basically anywhere you are in the world, you just pull up your phone and you're on the show. So welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for calling.
Speaker 4:What it is. No. Thank you, guys. You know, the, the start of grind for sure. So we're we're hustling right now.
Speaker 4:But, awesome week for Regent. So we're we're four years old as a company, building sea gliders, which are all electric flying boats for regional transportation, dual use. So we're doing regional routes. So imagine, like, Manhattan to the Hamptons in under an hour for $60. Going Miami, out to The Bahamas or Key West, all around the world.
Speaker 4:So this is the first prototype vehicle. This summer when we fly it, it'll be the largest electric flying machine in history, 15,000 pounds for now. First big milestone is just getting it on the water and starting some testing.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Can you talk about the advantages of being regulated? I believe it's regulated as a boat, but you still get the speed of something much faster than a boat. And that seems to be maybe the key insight here that allows you to just move faster, bring this to market, and deliver kind of a flying car almost or a new plane, a new mode of transportation in a way that's just, so much easier and faster and more like a startup pace. Break that down.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's exactly right. My background was in, the aviation space, and so I was engineering in sort of the beginning of the EV total hype cycle, which I think we're still very much in.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:We're starting to see some consolidation there, but, you know, I I drank the Kool Aid. We're building those vehicles. We then flew a few. But the sort of the thing I kept hitting my head against the wall was the limited range of, an electric aircraft flying on batteries. You can't really go that far, and also this billion dollars decade long certification pathway.
Speaker 4:And so we realized that if we sort of brought this electric aviation technology and put it in the maritime domain, we actually solve both problems. The the first is that as long as we stay within a wingspan of the surface of the water and stay over the water, there's actually a special class of vehicle called a wing and ground effect vehicle. We made up the word sea glider because, wing and ground or wig is very difficult to Google. You you don't get vehicles when you Google wigs. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so but there's this regulatory regime where they stay under the coast guard jurisdiction because, operationally, you're in the waterways anyways. You're not going into airspace or deconflicting with air traffic. And then on the other side, flying low altitude on this cushion of air, like birds are flying over the water, you're actually, really aerodynamically efficient. So we can go much longer range than any other electric flying machine. So we solve both problems.
Speaker 1:That's cool. Can you break down some of the advantages of going electric? I remember when we talked, it's not just about saving the planet and avoiding emissions. It's also about efficiency and, and, like, actually being maintenance and less parts. Can you break all that down for me?
Speaker 4:That's exactly what I told Bellion in our first pitch meeting. It was, it was exactly that. Right? It's, you know, we need to build this business around sustainability of the business model, not necessarily sustainability from an emissions perspective of the product. So, the driving cost in short haul aviation, if you think of how an airplane ages, it's actually the maintenance cost, the age by the cycles.
Speaker 4:You take off and land and you're impacting your landing gear. You're expanding and contracting your fuselage. When you pressurize it, you're heating up and cooling your engine. So the driving cost on the short haul is actually maintenance. And the shorter the route, the more cycles you do, the more you age it.
Speaker 4:So it's sort of this runaway effect. If you switch to an all electric system, now you have very few moving parts. They age by the hour. There's not a lot of heat generated. And so for short haul, electrification makes a ton of sense, and that's actually where the the range sort of buys you with electrification.
Speaker 4:I don't need to cross the ocean. I'm trying to connect people to the metropolitan centers, and there's this huge hole in the market because we're talking about routes on the order of a hundred to 200 miles today that can get up to three to 400 miles with with better batteries. So these are routes where it's too far to drive anyways. You get caught in traffic. We don't really have high speed rail in America or even around the world, but it's too short to fly because you're sitting in the airport longer than you're in the airplane itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've never seen a plane with 10 propellers on it. Why 10, not two? Big ones.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, so we had, our quarter scale prototype that had the the eight propellers on the wing. Our full scale now has 12 propellers across the web. So what we're doing, this configuration is called a blown wing. It's not that clever a name.
Speaker 4:We we blow the wing with the propeller wash, coming off the the props. And so we're basically tricking the wing into generating high lift at low speeds because the wing sees fast moving air even when the vehicle's moving slowly. And sort of the whole unlock of the sea gliders, if you're like, you know, this isn't that new. We have seaplanes. Why are we doing this?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, the whole point is is that seaplanes and flying boats in the past have these, planing holes. And so if you've gone over, like, 10 miles an hour on a boat in any sea state, you'll know how bumpy that ride gets. So sort of in the best case scenario, it's bumpy and uncomfortable. Worst case scenario, you can't take off at all. That's why seaplanes have never really scaled, and they're sort of restricted to lakes and rivers.
Speaker 4:So we needed to solve the wave tolerance problem. We do that with hydrofoils. So, if you're familiar with, you know, America's Cup, SailGP, the eFoil surfboards
Speaker 3:looking at going with SailGP here in in LA in LA.
Speaker 1:Have you gone?
Speaker 3:I haven't yet.
Speaker 1:We're thinking about going. It seems awesome.
Speaker 4:You need to go. And it's it's so it's like you and you will intimately understand how the wave tolerance of the hydrofoil works because it just lifts you off, and it's like a magic carpet, and it's kinda surreal. So, it also makes you appreciate what our flight control system is doing because balancing yourself, takes a little while and you fall on. But the point is we get wave tolerance up to five feet on this vehicle. So the model is if your commercial airplanes are flying, the sea gliders are going too.
Speaker 4:We can take off in five foot seas. Hydrofoils have a limited top speed because of the drag of the water. And so we needed to lower the takeoff speed to overlap with that hydrofoil. We're that out. We slow down the takeoff speed enough to take off from the hydrofoil.
Speaker 4:So that was actually the other reason why we electrified. Again, the the sustainability is is a nice benefit, but it's secondary. We electrified because it's economical, and we electrify it because it's a pretty good way of distributing propulsion on on a wing, rather than a bunch of different engines or gearboxes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 3:Long term, are you planning to own the entire traveler experience from booking to operating the routes to obviously making the aircraft? I can imagine this as kind of a JSX that actually owns and, you know, develops.
Speaker 4:Certainly in
Speaker 3:I think we hear you.
Speaker 1:Can you hear us?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We definitely thought about it. Do yeah. Do do you got me?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're good. I'm on the road. You still got me? Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're good.
Speaker 4:Cool. We definitely thought about it, in the early stage. The the eVTOL companies are sort of doing that end to end thing. For us, we said, like, this is a brand new mode of transportation. People are gonna need to build trust on it, and what better way for both passengers to build up trust and, candidly, investors to build up trust in this wacky electric flying boat company, than to have sort of established brands with all already existing operations be our customers.
Speaker 4:So our customers are airlines. Our customers are ferry companies. Our customer is the marine corps and the high speed logistics mission. But those are the entities that are buying sea gliders and operating it. We're we're the the Boeing or Airbus here.
Speaker 4:I I when we founded, I said we're the the Boeing of sea gliders. That's become a little taboo. So now I say we're the Airbus of sea gliders, which makes me hurt as an American, but Yeah. Here we are.
Speaker 3:Oh, well. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Can you give us a little background on where the company is, how big you guys are, what you've raised, what where you're going next, who you're hiring, that type of stuff?
Speaker 4:Yeah. We are based in the Silicon Valley of the East
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:Of Rhode Island.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 4:So, you know, it's actually a a a growing technology. Anduril's moving into town. There's a few, drone boat companies and underwater companies. So we're really seeing a a growth in Rhode Island. You know, to see ocean state, awesome test environment for us.
Speaker 4:Some of the best boat builders in the world. Newport, Rhode Island, home of the America's Cup. So, it was it was a really great place for us to set up. We're about a hundred people now. We actually just broke ground on a 255,000 square foot manufacturing facility also in Rhode Island.
Speaker 4:So we're gonna be building sea gliders here. We're gonna be scaling to another, few hundred, employees as we spool up our manufacturing. Expect to, open that facility in early twenty six and deliver sea gliders and enter service, probably starting in Hawaii or Miami or some of the top two that our early customer wants to go to, and that entry to service in, like, late twenty six, early '20 '7.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Amazing. George, do you have any deals?
Speaker 3:We gotta host the show in one of these bad boys as soon as we can. It's been a dream of ours to do it from the air.
Speaker 1:I wanna take it out to air.
Speaker 4:Summer in Rhode Island. Gotta come out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We yeah. We gotta go out there. Well, I mean, thank you so much for calling in.
Speaker 1:Give us giving us the update firsthand. We'll we'll we'll share the video and and repost the clip. It's, it's fascinating stuff, and, we really appreciate everything you're doing. So thanks for calling in, and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Give us
Speaker 1:a callback when there's more news.
Speaker 4:You got it. I'll see you in roadie. We'll go out and see you later.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. See you in roadie.
Speaker 1:We'll see you. Bye. Cheers. That was great.
Speaker 3:That's wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know I don't know if you can pull up that video, Ben, but, they have some video of the of the plane, and it's, yeah. I mean, it's it's remarkable. Like, it just feels like I mean, we talked about this with Gary, like, the the pace of play. And it's maybe just like the capital markets are more mature or something, but, like, it just seems more doable to get a, you know, like, tens, 20 million, 50 million together, and then go and build a big, you know, prototype and actually fly it around.
Speaker 1:And people are figuring out how to do the right lobbying, how to do the right yeah, all the regulatory stuff to and finding the regulatory arbitrage. That's my favorite thing about Regent. Like, I think that the tech is cool, obviously, but it's so fascinating that they were able to build something that operates in the maritime domain and just accelerate everything that they do. So, I love that. As soon as I heard that, I was like, oh, this is, like, this is something that I really wanna follow.
Speaker 3:It is such a futuristic feeling craft that is perfectly practical.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can take a look at it here. I mean, it's pretty it's pretty sick.
Speaker 1:The biggest A lot of
Speaker 3:people on Apple Podcasts are having a bad time right now.
Speaker 1:A bad time. Well, we will describe it. It's a cool plate. And do you see? They christened it with champagne, and they didn't have to use one of those terrible machines they use in Europe.
Speaker 1:America, undefeated. I love it. But, yeah, I mean, 12. I guess, three engines on each wing, and it just coasts along the, the surface. And we had a friend of the show asking us, when are the when are the billionaires gonna start building hydrofoil yachts?
Speaker 1:I think this is the the beginning of that trend. We've talked about the the land yacht that can dig Dig deep in
Speaker 3:the earth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, yeah. This is the this is the next evolution. Anyway,
Speaker 3:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 3:We love to see it.
Speaker 1:And then close out the show.
Speaker 3:That's our first time having a guest call in, while on the back of a an Uber. Yeah. And it worked.
Speaker 1:It worked.
Speaker 3:We had a brief moment, but he's, yeah.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, that that that is my goal for the show. Someone posts something, they're announcing it, you know, you'd go on, you know, you wanna amplify it, just come and talk about it on the show. And so, we'll I'm sure we'll do a lot more of those. I love this post by Alexander Wang over at Scale AI.
Speaker 1:He says reminder of American exceptionalism, US companies make up 74% of global market cap. Returns of the S and P since 02/2008 are 297% versus the rest of the world at four negative 4%. It's pretty ridiculous. And it it it's fun. It's funny because, like
Speaker 3:Hit the gong, John. Yeah. Hit the gong for America.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's funny because, like, the the the narrative in in so much of the media is, like, things are more chaotic than ever. We're so divided. Everything's terrible. And it's, like, you know, the the the when when the right wing's in power, the left wing says it's all terrible. And when the left wing's in power, the right wing's in terrible.
Speaker 1:But when you zoom out, even just, you know, fifteen years, you can see that America's doing pretty well. Pretty well. And, I I remain extremely bullish on America. But there's not more much more to say about that.
Speaker 6:All of
Speaker 3:our guests today have been extremely long, America. Exactly. As they should as Americans.
Speaker 1:There was some bad news about the American economy. There was a big miss on ADP payrolls. You saw this from Joe Weisenthal. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:They expected a 40,000 new jobs added. It came in at 77,000. This is just one economic indicator. But if you've been following the markets and kind of the back and forth, the kangaroo market. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is it that's what it's called. Right? Bouncing around. This is one of the data points that people have been pointing to. We don't go too deep into the the economic data, but, you know, everyone is everyone's worried about, you know, job prospects and job growth.
Speaker 1:But, let's go to Jeff Lewis. He says overheard at Blue Bottle. Technology brother a I love that he's using that term. Hadn't heard anything from Mach since that hit piece. Thought they were dead.
Speaker 1:Technology brother b says, no dog. It's called Show Tell.
Speaker 3:Show Tell. Mach A
Speaker 1:reference to had a new
Speaker 3:mock had a new video drop. I think it was Tuesday. Yep. Very, very cool. Yep.
Speaker 3:It seemed to have made a bunch of progress. Yep. And, you never let a hit piece get you down.
Speaker 1:Just keep building.
Speaker 3:They're not they're not, they're not, you know, given in to the to the negativity. So I'd love to see it. Jeff was an early investor, in mock, and he has is building a reputation for sticking with founders when the media, has turned on them. Yep. And I think that that is one of the most important reputations that you can build because it's easy for an investor to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Be your best friend when everything's going great. Yep. But to double, you know, double down on on supporting somebody when they're in the sort of darkest period of their company is what is what really Totally. Totally. Very cool.
Speaker 3:And I and I, talking with Jeff's team right now about having him come on the show That'd
Speaker 1:be great.
Speaker 3:Very soon. So excited for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I hope he's wearing a a tank top, looking absolutely shredded, and Absolutely diced.
Speaker 3:Jeff's always known that it's underpriced to be diced.
Speaker 1:He is. He yeah.
Speaker 3:And, open, we want we would host a temp check, weekly for Jeff.
Speaker 1:Segment on the shelf.
Speaker 3:Weekly segment.
Speaker 1:We need temp check segment for sure. Week.
Speaker 3:Jeff, you don't have to do any production.
Speaker 1:Well, you well, I mean, you do have to continue working out.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's That's the key thing.
Speaker 1:You gotta But you could
Speaker 3:do the temp check while working out.
Speaker 1:You gotta spam the delts and get the shoulders poppin' and get the bicep Spamming delts. Because, yeah, we we we don't want we don't want a scrawny Jeff Lewis on the show.
Speaker 6:Oh, that
Speaker 1:would be obsessed. But, you know, as long as the takes are hot and, he's sporting founders.
Speaker 3:Positive. It's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I hung out with Ethan, I wanna say, like, a year or two ago. And, I mean, obviously, the company's been, like, up and down. There's been this hit piece that everyone's mentioning. But, he just seems like someone who's, like, really, really driven and is going to do something at some point very cool.
Speaker 1:And he's just, like, a good person to have on the America team.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I think they're iterating on product too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. And they're
Speaker 3:They also to be clear, they announced a US army contract Yeah. And that they're building a weapons factory.
Speaker 1:It's great. Yeah. We need more people building more cool stuff. So, you know, I'm I'm I'm excited to see Ethan get through the the the rise and fall and rise again, and I hope that he's successful. Let's go to David.
Speaker 1:VCs are living out again, vibe shift.
Speaker 3:I didn't put that in.
Speaker 1:You didn't put this in?
Speaker 3:I I don't we don't talk about politics.
Speaker 1:I don't know who who they're talking about, but
Speaker 3:it is hilarious. Clear that if you wanted to be contrarian, you had to,
Speaker 1:VCs for Kamala.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That that was the actual contrarian for was to sign the list Yep. Even though
Speaker 1:the Although Gavin Newsom, people are saying, like, he's completely vibe shifted his way and went on some, Charlie Kirk show. Do you see this?
Speaker 3:That was him having Charlie Kirk on his show.
Speaker 1:Wait. Gavin Newsom has a podcast?
Speaker 3:He has a podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. Really? Okay. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, clearly, there's going to be a, there's gonna be a vibe shift. And, but but everyone's lost on this. Everyone's like, I don't see it. We'll elaborate. Like, who nature is healing?
Speaker 1:People are having fun with it. Who knows? Anyway, Flock Safety's raisin. Katie Roof has a scoop. Andreessen's leaning around.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 3:a Jeff Lewis company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is. We should have a lot to talk about when the when the funding finally breaks. 7,500,000,000.0 for flock safety. They make cameras that sell to police departments and a bunch of other equipment.
Speaker 1:Kind of the palantir of local governments, that's been, like, a big question is, like, is that possible? It's such a different sales motion because you're not just going lobbying in DC. You have to go district by district. But when you get in and when you're installed, it's very, very sticky, very low churn.
Speaker 3:Yep. And so,
Speaker 1:I think they have great finances, great great cohorts, great company, interesting team. And I wanna get to know them more because it seems like a really cool company. And it seems like like a very important task, obviously. Anyway, let's move on to Autism Capital. They say, if Steve Jobs were alive were still alive, he would issue a letter to all stockholders saying he's about to dump all of Apple's extra cash into perfecting augmented reality because we have an imperative as the steward of innovation to drive humanity forward and build the tools of tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Interesting rare, like, hard post. I feel like, this account mostly posts, like, news and clips and stuff, but, yeah, breaking. Also, his his post on x would be fire. He'd be arguing and calling people the r word all day long. I don't know if that'd be that good, but
Speaker 3:Here's the here's the here's the main thing is that Steve Jobs wouldn't need all of Apple's extra cash, which is an incredible amount. You talked about this earlier.
Speaker 1:I think they have 60 right now, 60,000,000,000, but they have returned over a trillion over the past, like, fifteen years.
Speaker 3:Yep. Apple spent an estimated hundred and 50,000,000 over thirty months to develop the first iPhone.
Speaker 1:A million? Oh, million.
Speaker 3:Hundred and 50 million. So so
Speaker 1:That's so crazy.
Speaker 3:Steve would have, seen what's possible. You know, obviously, there's been inflation and, you know, whatever. You could come up with a bunch of excuses, but, you have to imagine that that he, would be running it like a startup internally and saying, you know, and and sort of going founder mode.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. It seems like the algorithm would probably be just, you know, make make, like, crazy, aggressive decisions and compromises until you find something that actually has product market fit with yourself. Like, do you believe that Tim Cook daily drives an Apple Vision Pro? Or do you think he's churned from it?
Speaker 1:Churn for sure. I think everyone kinda churned. Yeah. Except for, that one guy. I forget.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there there was one writer who who who mentioned that he was still using it. I have a friend who still uses it every once in a while, and I I I I want to be using it. It it it's it's so close to being to being good, but it's not quite there. What else should we close the show out with?
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a great one from Matt Lasky. Wife just taught me the professional way to say told you so is this was identified early on as a likely outcome. Going to be using this a lot. I love this one. I just thought it was funny.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I put this one in.
Speaker 1:You put this one in?
Speaker 3:We gotta start we wouldn't honestly use that because our our our culture is well, no. Our corp our our culture internally is we we try to make,
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, you know take a victory lap on
Speaker 1:a I don't know. I told you so.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if you're working and you're trying to Yeah. You know, take the job of your CEO Yes.
Speaker 3:This is a great line. This was identified early as a likely outcome and, you know, really take the victory lap on a on a poor outcome.
Speaker 1:Yes. Where else should we end up? There's some other news. Apple unveiled, Mac Studio with m four Max, m three Ultra. Every time I see one of these, I'm like, it's like nothing, but then I'm like, I want one.
Speaker 1:I always just want the latest thing. Even though Packy was making fun of them for the new iPad that looked exactly the same, I was like, that would make me happy for five minutes.
Speaker 3:For five minutes.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Unboxing of Apple
Speaker 3:Six hundred dollars.
Speaker 1:Still feels good. And then you're like, oh, okay. It's just like I'm not using it. Yep. Or I I don't notice once I open up the Chrome tab.
Speaker 1:And the other news is Alexis Ohanian is now bidding for TikTok with a blockchain integration plan.
Speaker 3:Yep. So we He's coming on the show. He's coming on the show tomorrow to talk about it. He also is relaunching Dig with Kevin Rose, which is which is awesome. I actually gotta reminds me.
Speaker 3:I gotta email back his team.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yep. We're gonna be on he's gonna be coming on at 12:30 tomorrow Fantastic. To talk about everything he's cooking on. He was gonna come on, today, but he was traveling. I said he's got this amazing home studio.
Speaker 3:I told him, wait wait till you're back home.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Come on then. So I'm excited to have him back on. I say we save some of these posts. Let's end on a joke Okay. From Base Baron Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who's been an early listener of the show. We invested by following him when he had 200 something followers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was like buying Bitcoin in the nineties.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Or Solana in the in the early two thousands.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Base Baron says, I love Ramp so much that I broke up with my ex girlfriend because she used someone else for expense management. Call that my Brex.
Speaker 1:I've read this, and it's so funny when you read it.
Speaker 3:It's so funny.
Speaker 1:Silly.
Speaker 3:Good one. Anyways, great show today. Yep. I I thought our guests were were fantastic.
Speaker 1:I thought there was a lot of fun. And Good mix. I think we're dialing in the format. Little news, little timeline.
Speaker 3:We gotta put in the invites for the guests that you might join and you might be interrupting another guest. Yeah. But it like, think of it more as, like, you walk into a house party.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know if we wanna keep the house party vibe going or maybe we wanna use the the waiting room, which is like a feature on Zoom, but, we'll keep dialing it in. Stay tuned for more. We're never satisfied. We're gonna keep changing it up, keep you guessing.
Speaker 1:This was, just two weeks ago, and we'd never had a guest. And we'd done something like 60 episodes. And now we've had, more guests than most people have in a year of podcasting. I think we had, like, what, 15 already this week or something like that.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. Anyway, by the way, we got some breaking news. From the chat. Rory shared that, Intuitive Machines, Athena lunar lander landed on the moon this afternoon, but the company has no idea where it is.
Speaker 1:What? Oh,
Speaker 3:well This is live. I'm on the New York Times' famed technology publication, New York Times. Says Intuitive Machines, a Houston company aiming to repeat a 2024 landing, said its spacecraft. Athena has power and is communicating, but may not be upright. It's unclear how that might impact the mission.
Speaker 3:Imagine going all the way to the moon and then kind of botching the landing and then you're on your, you know, your rovers turned to the side. That is, that is rough. So this story is unfolding.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck to them. If you need somebody to go up there in a space suit and tip it over, I'm happy to do that. I'm fully expecting
Speaker 3:John six eight, by
Speaker 1:the way. I'm fully expecting to go to the moon within my lifetime. Yep. That's something I'm very confident of. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's gonna happen.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, that's our show. Thanks for watching.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you tomorrow.