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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.
Speaker 2:Today is Wednesday, 07/30/2025. We are live from Manhattan, New
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the temple of technology. We brought the temple of technology with us to Manhattan. We're here live from New York City for a few reasons.
Speaker 1:Bunch of We're
Speaker 2:wearing yellow suits to celebrate
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Ramp's fundraise. Ramp raised their series e two today. Congratulations
Speaker 1:As one does. From
Speaker 2:over there.
Speaker 1:As one does.
Speaker 2:We will have Eric Lyman joining the show in just a little bit. In about, fifty minutes, fifty two minutes, he will be joining.
Speaker 1:Can we
Speaker 2:But first, we gotta talk about Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:He has been completely Nat ified. Nat Friedman has
Speaker 1:They Nat ified my boy.
Speaker 2:Already already having an impact over at Meta. Will DePue has the post. He says, l m a o, Zuck has been natified. Plain text, Times New Roman, now going to hit mainstream corporate media like a bomb. And this is from, Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of his a little bit more into his strategy and product strategy with superintelligence.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:for everyone. For everyone, potentially. It's be personal.
Speaker 2:Gonna
Speaker 1:be a personal thing.
Speaker 2:So he says, personal superintelligence in, an h clearly HTML tag. In this is all in plain Times New Roman text. You can see the post. He says, over the last few months, we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The the improvement is slow for now, but undeniable.
Speaker 2:Developing superintelligence is now in sight. And that's kind of the breaking news. This is like when we talked to DJCO over at Neuralink, and they said we are starting to see glimpses of superhuman powers from Neuralink patients. We Yeah. Kind of were so in the midst of the conversation that we kind of missed that scoop.
Speaker 3:A lot of
Speaker 1:these reminds me of the Buzz Lightyear meme where it's like, everyone is saying superintelligence is now in sight.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. That yeah. I mean, the question is, like, it immediately it immediately asks, like, okay.
Speaker 2:What does that mean? Because superintelligence broadly, it it in some ways, it means, like, higher IQ than any human, but also this idea of of it it's self improving. Like, that is the definition of superintelligence in many realms. And so the question is, like, what was this glimpse? Is this because you can make the argument that using AI to write code in an at a foundation model lab is superintelligence even if there's still a human in the loop.
Speaker 2:You have to take the human completely out of the loop. And then what is the prompt? Because if the prompt is just is just go fix this one little bug and it does it and it does it agentically and no one touches it, that's different from the prompt being like, improve the system.
Speaker 1:Or never having to prompt it at all.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Because you've you've given it this plan of just It's
Speaker 1:let's agentically, proactively
Speaker 2:It just wants to and improve
Speaker 1:proving itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then there's also
Speaker 1:Kind of like how nobody has to tell you to bench press on
Speaker 2:Monday. And and yeah. The and the and the flip side is, like, you can like, some of the algorithms for reinforcement learning feel like they are self improvement because you are not laying down a a a specific there are emergent qualities where, like, when they train GPT 4.5, it doesn't feel like that was RL'd on Fortran green text. And yet it gained the ability to do that and make them funny, and it wasn't necessarily a, like, a stated goal. And so you could imagine that that's an example of this, but all of these are kind of squishy definitions, but, it's certainly a, a good rallying cry that we're on the cusp of this.
Speaker 2:And and many of the Foundation Model Lab, founders and leaders leaders have been kind of, like, teasing this and and and discussing how much have we seen here. But, I think everyone would want more concrete evidence.
Speaker 1:Zach put out a video on Yep. I'm sure it was on Instagram and and threads and and Facebook and everywhere else. But the video took an interesting angle. He basically says He basically was like, other players in the industry Mhmm. Want to automate all valuable work.
Speaker 1:Yep. And his message was effectively, we want to give super intelligence to the people. Yeah. And so, Zuck is yeah. He's he's finding his his wedge into the market.
Speaker 2:And he kind of he kind of did that with Instagram and Facebook in some ways in the sense that, like, he gave everyone a printing press. He gave everyone a TV show or a distribution, potentially. It's in the algorithm. You still have to win. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everyone has the ability to publish now, thanks to and and YouTube and a lot of other services, of course. But, you know, the modern social media networks enable anyone at basically zero cost to stand up an operation that previously had very high fixed costs
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:In the sense of, like, you needed to own a TV channel or
Speaker 1:put wires in the ground
Speaker 2:or buy a radio tower to distribute your content. And now, you can just click a button and go live or
Speaker 1:something like that. Yeah. And the messaging was broadly around AI to help you improve yourself Yeah. Level up, learn, things like that. So it's a very optimistic message Yep.
Speaker 1:Far different than what some other executives in the industry have shared, which is all white collar.
Speaker 2:The, like, the SSI thing is the most extreme where it's like, we're not even gonna give anyone this product. Yeah. Like, we are going to have full control over the superintelligence. We're building the same thing, but we're distributing it. Zuck wants to make it free for 5,000,000,000 people.
Speaker 2:And Ilya, so far, you know, he hasn't really talked about this too much, but the vibe has been no one will have access to it. It will it will be so completely self contained. And so a dramatic shift from
Speaker 1:Anthropic what Anthropic as well was saying, you know, all white collar work or 50% of white collar work being replaced.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They kinda walked that back.
Speaker 1:Short timeline.
Speaker 2:But yeah. So the white collar work thing is interesting because Zuck does address that a little bit. So let's just read through a little bit more of his post. Says, it seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all of our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today, but it's an open question what we what we will direct superintelligence towards. And this is the question on, like, white collar work, I suppose.
Speaker 2:In some ways, this will be a new era for humanity, but in others, it's just a continuation of historical trends. As recently as two hundred years ago this reminds me of that guy saying, like, three hundred years ago, we were living in caves. But this is actually true. Two hundred years ago, 90% of farmer 90% of people, of humans, were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus on less subs less on subsist subsistence subsistence farming, farming for yourself, growing food just to keep yourself alive.
Speaker 2:You need food, so you grow the food, and then you immediately eat it, and then you go back to working on the food. And more on choose. At each step, people have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing frontiers of science and health, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life. I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress, but perhaps even more important that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where every where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose. As profound as the abundance produced by AI one may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal super intelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create whatever you wanna see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to you, those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.
Speaker 2:Meta's vision is to bring personal super intelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. Yeah. Super intelligence for the people. This is distinct from others in the industry, not naming names, who believe that super intelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.
Speaker 2:At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is always how we have made progress.
Speaker 1:You know a job that was impacted by technology? What? Knocker uppers. These were human alarm clocks Yeah. That would walk the streets of London with either a long stick or a device to shoot frozen peas at windows to wake up workers in the morning.
Speaker 1:So before
Speaker 2:This is a real
Speaker 3:thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is a real thing. Before clocks, alarm clocks specifically were were widely used, you would you would effectively pay somebody a small amount Mhmm. To come up to your window in the morning and hit it with a long stick or shoot it with peas. Okay.
Speaker 1:So, this was a job that was impacted by, again, alarm clocks becoming widespread.
Speaker 2:How'd the the rooster industrial complex fare with that?
Speaker 1:The roosters were down were down rocks. But original alarm clock. Years. The original alarm. I would I would if I didn't have neighbors, I think I'd get a rooster.
Speaker 1:A rooster. You ever, like, have you ever have you ever spent yeah. They were called knocker uppers. Have you ever spent have you ever, like, Yes. One of neighbors
Speaker 2:chicken had or and accidentally
Speaker 1:Accidentally got a rooster? Yeah. That happens.
Speaker 2:It was fine. It wasn't that big of a deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wake up
Speaker 3:pretty early.
Speaker 1:No. It's I mean, it's nice as an adult. Yeah. You're like somewhere around 5AM, it starts making noise. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a nice noise.
Speaker 2:No. I get up earlier. I wake the rooster up.
Speaker 1:I wake up. John wakes up the rooster. You walk out in your in your yellows in your ramp
Speaker 2:suit. Pees at the rooster.
Speaker 3:In your
Speaker 1:ramp suit.
Speaker 2:Just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very good. Well, speaking of white collar work, the Fed holds rates steady, but two officials are backing a cut. There's dissent at the Fed highlighting a fraying consensus among policymakers who are debating the effects that tariffs will have on the economy and inflation. So the journal just put this out a few minutes ago. The Federal Reserve held rates steady for the fifth straight meeting Wednesday, but are faced with rare dissents from two officials seeking an immediate cut.
Speaker 2:These are officials within the Fed?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. The decision followed
Speaker 2:Obviously, they're facing decisions.
Speaker 1:There's another there's another official who's who's also in agreement with them.
Speaker 2:Venture capitalists.
Speaker 1:Venture capitalists and Broadly. You know, I was thinking about that the other day. It is is it It is interesting that that, you know, if you look at real estate and private equity
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:VCs, you know, always get memed for for benefiting from low rates. Yeah. But in many ways, VCs can continue to deploy into companies because they're just betting on that company's prospects over a very long period of time. If you're trying to deploy into real estate Totally. And traditional private equity when rates are high, things are way way less workable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think it's I think big real estate and big PE are really trying to shift the the ZERP blame on on the venture capital class. Yep. And I won't stand for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, there were a lot of companies that like, startups, they got hurt during the interest rate rise. Some of them FinTechs? Some FinTechs were sensitive to rates, but many weren't. I mean, you think about banking products.
Speaker 2:Products. And if they're, like all all of a sudden, we went from offering our customers 2% interest on their deposits to 6% or 5%, and that just allows us to take, you know, a fraction of a larger, you know, interest rate payout every month, that actually improved their economics.
Speaker 1:Mercury is the best example of this. Every every time the Fed
Speaker 2:were were Were they profitable?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. They're printing money. They still are. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And every time the Fed would hold a meeting, their revenue would basically go up immediately with no. They didn't need to hire new people. I guess just default based on the Fed funds rate.
Speaker 2:So that kind of, like you know, it hurts some of the fintechs. It helps some of the fintechs. Yeah. And then a lot of just the normal software companies were, like, completely unaffected, sort of loosely, broadly
Speaker 1:Loosely affected because maybe VCs couldn't raise their next fund.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it was, like, very enough again. As opposed to, like, we know examples of people who, started real estate roll up plays, bought a bunch of facilities, put got variable interest loans on them, and then
Speaker 1:And are now producing, like, 1% yield.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And then when the interest rates went up, their mortgage payments on all those assets went through the roof. Yeah. And all of a sudden, were upside down on all of their economics. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So very rough.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you went heavy into SF real estate in 2018, 2019, 2020 on variable rate loans, you just have gotten absolutely Even the meme of,
Speaker 2:like, buy a boring business. That that's the example I'm thinking of is is, okay, you bought a you bought a boring business that cash flows, you know, a million dollars a year, but you bought it such that you have, you know, you okay. 500,000 of that cash flow was going to service the debt that you used to buy the asset, and then all of a sudden, your interest payment on that loan doubles, then you're not making any net profit all of a sudden. And that really puts you out
Speaker 1:it. So Fed officials maintain their benchmark policy rate in a range between four point two five percent and four and a half percent as they weighed how importers, retailers, and consumers will split the costs of bigger gong hits. Sorry. Cost of higher duties on imports. The outcome of hand to hand combat over who will bear the burden of terrorist figures to shape trajectory of inflation in hiring later this year, which could resolve whether and when the central bank resumes cuts in the months ahead.
Speaker 1:So hinting at a September rate cut or at least that's how people are are kind of like reading through the lines here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, also we we we blew out the GDP numbers. Right? It was like 2.2 was the expectation. It was came in at three?
Speaker 1:Three.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:Quick hit. A lot of people are a lot of people are yeah. We got a we got a a new gong here in in great city of New York.
Speaker 2:Okay. I I wanna go back to the the personal superintelligence thing for a for a little bit with Zoc. So, this is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work. It feels like maybe a shot at SSI or Anthropic or OpenAI. But I feel like I've noticed that Sam yeah.
Speaker 2:Is Maybe. Because they're turning down Zuck's billion dollar offers, which we'll get
Speaker 3:to. Budgetly.
Speaker 2:But, the the interesting thing there is that I feel like Sam Altman's been cut sort of pivoting his rhetoric around this. And he said something similar, recently where, I think it was in the soft singularity. He said in that blog post, he said something similar to, as recently as two hundred years ago, 90% of people were farmers. And his point was, if you went back in time and you showed a a subsistence farmer in the year 1800, hey, there are these people. Like, let me take you on a tour of the modern economy.
Speaker 2:Here's someone whose job is Is email. Is email.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that that that that's like a hundred years from now, we're gonna look back and be like, nine, you know, like
Speaker 2:Why were they doing email?
Speaker 1:Everybody that went to school became an email professional.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or like calendaring or phone calls.
Speaker 1:Mean, They had to use the computer? Yeah. Had to type? They had to, like, physically
Speaker 2:Why didn't the robots just do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Why do you need key if it if it's a bit if it's a machine, why do you need to hit
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's scary because it's like, okay. Well, like, if I'm not doing that, am I doing anything?
Speaker 1:Like my email job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My email job is directly tied to to my My
Speaker 1:self worth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and my Income. Subsistence. I'm a subsistence emailer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's the same thing if you went back and said, to somebody in 1800, hey, you're growing food, but in the future, you won't you won't have a job as a farmer. They'd be like, well, then I'm screwed. Right? Like, I'm I'm done for. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like, no. You'll have an email job. You'll be able to you'll be able to do email all day. But we need to debate more about, like, what this actual product looks like because we were talking about that earlier. We we know that when you they're charging you $20 or $200 a month because it's expensive.
Speaker 2:And we were talking to George Hots about this, and he was saying, like, they're losing money on me just because the inference cost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Claude came out yesterday and said one person was costing them tens of thousands of dollars a month on their $200 a month plan. Exactly. There was also so Sam is projecting to spend 35,000,000,000 on inference and 55,000,000,000 training models between 2025 and 2027. So So that
Speaker 2:capital worried about the training model. I see that as CapEx. I'm I'm more thinking about the total inference cost right now across all the major labs. Like, it's gotta be in the billions. It's probably not in the hundreds of billions.
Speaker 2:If you look at how much OpenAI and Anthropic have raised and how much they're burning, a lot of that goes towards salaries. But if you just look at the actual inference cost, it feels like Mark Zuckerberg could eat that cost for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then if he wants to keep it free, there's the very logical path, which is ads. He already has the most robust, most targeted ad network, and he can bring all those ads in and start monetizing these users. And so the more you're using, the more ads you see. It's perfectly aligned. It's an auction.
Speaker 2:And so someone who's doing low low economically valuable work will see, like, cheaper ads. It's perfectly price discriminated. So I don't see Meta as having problem, like, scaling inference and keeping it free. The questions we're going back and forth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The questions I have are that that wasn't exactly answered here. Although reading between the lines, it's maybe less important. It sounds like a shift in strategy, but doesn't when I read that announcement, I don't think, oh, they're gonna go heavy into open source. Like that doesn't Oh, scream that's a good point.
Speaker 1:That doesn't scream we wanna be the the number one open source model. They might still but this feels more like an application play to me. Yep. The areas that you can imagine Zuck wants to dominate in are in create the the action of creation. So content creation Yep.
Speaker 1:Heavily ties in the meta ecosystem already. Their business is dependent on, you know, billions of people globally creating content all day long. Some professionally, some recreationally, but all of those people he wants to serve there. The knowledge kind of learning, I think, he's signaling here that he cares about. He clearly understands that ChatGPT has incredible PMF around, around just like learning, understanding the world, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And I could see him playing there. The areas that I'm interested to track, going forward are are how much, how much how much resources go into this companionship. Right? That's another area that's like driving up user minutes on Chat GPT. Right?
Speaker 1:And and we've talked about it before. That can ultimately threaten the time that, you know, if people start spending two hours a day with chat GPT, that's potentially two hours a day that they're, you know, maybe maybe they have it on audio mode and they're still using Instagram but it's, you know, potentially threatening user minutes on his platforms. And then the big one, probably a long shot but just search. Right? I'm sure he's always want, you know, search multi trillion dollar market.
Speaker 1:Very very
Speaker 2:He was going to launch a search engine for a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was Back in the day.
Speaker 2:Where you like, the search bar in Facebook was getting so powerful that you could search the web. Never became a serious Google competitor. Yeah. But was was
Speaker 1:And the other the other thing here to track is the other thing here to track is, threads. We we gotta like do a proper like new deep dive on threads. I don't think when it launched, we didn't even have the show. But, it it sort of launched, peaked in the charts Yep. Fell off completely.
Speaker 1:But I think it's building back up. There's actually quite a lot of activity there. Mhmm. And he's gonna have confidence to see like, okay. I have WhatsApp.
Speaker 1:I have Instagram. I have all these different platforms that I can drive users to. Have the best ad engine in the in the world.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:If I want to if I want MSL to create these, like, new consumer applications Yep. I'm gonna have the ability to get those in front of billions and billions of people. So it is a massive unfair advantage on the just like training and inference in the CapEx side Yep. And then massive distribution advantage. OpenAI has benefited from, you know, tremendous organic virality.
Speaker 1:Everything from just people telling their friends to these Studio Ghibli moments
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Etcetera. But but yeah. It'll be interesting to see, okay, where does he really wanna compete? Yep. Does it look like something like ChatGPT?
Speaker 1:That ChatGPT again is just like incredible tool that allows you to do all these, you know, anything you want. You can study with it. It can keep you company. Yeah. It can help you with your homework.
Speaker 1:It can help you write emails. It'll transcribe a meeting. It'll it'll make an s one for you. Right? And so that those are the big things.
Speaker 1:It's like, okay. We have a much better sense now of where the team is gonna be focused. Again, it doesn't read like open source to me. But it's still there's so many ways that you can kind of like chop up the the category and the opportunity.
Speaker 2:I have a rebuttal. But first, I'm gonna tell you about Vanta.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Automate compliance and security and trust with Vanta. Go to vanta.com to check it out. So my rebuttal is that the so the the the the question that I have I agree with a lot of what you said. I guess the question is, I have this personal super intelligence. Do I want it in a meta property app right now or do we need a new app?
Speaker 2:And then if I need a
Speaker 1:new app,
Speaker 2:that's really hard.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, really hard, but at the same time, how many ways I I I redownloaded threads because I kept getting notifications and it would tell me something to get to the effect. Like, it would give me three words out of, like, an interesting, you know, post, and I could only see it if I redownloaded it. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm just wondering about if I if I'm if I'm interacting if I go to Instagram to do my homework, I'm going to get sucked into Reels. Right?
Speaker 2:And it's like, I want to go to the library to study, and ChatGPT feels like a library. And it's been very difficult even if you have massive distribution to actually scale share of queries. Even even I mean, threads
Speaker 1:They have what? Like, percent right
Speaker 2:now? So so threads, I think, is a special case potentially because of the political dynamic of Elon Musk. Whereas with there's no political dynamic between Chateappity and Gemini. Google has massive distribution. They've been able to get to 450,000,000 DAUs or MAUs.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they haven't been able to break over, like, 10% of queries Yeah. Share of queries, something like that. And so I I wonder if, you know, you launch a consumer app for studying and your personal superintelligence. Like, the logical way to distribute Meta's AI projects and products is through their existing platforms. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can imagine that. You're in the Instagram tab. You have a boring picture. It it Yep. Ghibli it makes a Ghibli version of it.
Speaker 1:Then Even
Speaker 2:if you're in a like, imagine you're in a a study group for with with a couple people in the same class in a WhatsApp chat. And then there's an there's a Yeah. Super intelligent person. There's a super intelligent agent or AI Yeah. In the chat with you and you can talk to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can answer it right
Speaker 1:Well, and and to be clear, they have the Meta AI app. Sounds like you're not a DAU yet. Uh-huh. But but it's number three on productivity. I imagine Zach wants to get that to number one.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:You could imagine. The other form factor here is obviously glasses. Right? He's just invested billions Yeah. Into owning a piece of Luxottica.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I imagine as part of that investment, he gets he's gonna probably make it so that other AI assistants can't get access to
Speaker 2:That's actually maybe the better, like, personal super intelligence, like, tutor. He's No.
Speaker 1:And he says that in the video. He says that in the video. A lot of a lot of a lot of what he says in the videos.
Speaker 2:To read a book. If you have if you're, you know, farsighted, you put on the glasses. And so you put on the glasses to study, and then it's it's seeing the textbook that you're interacting with. It's seeing your screen. And you do and it but it but it specifically, like, the meta Ray bans don't have the ability to show you an endless stream of reels.
Speaker 2:And that's what I'm more most worried about is that if if No, they do though.
Speaker 1:Do you remember that do you remember that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Orion does, but not the meta
Speaker 1:I know. But that's where we're going.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know. Maybe maybe it's
Speaker 1:like You think they wanna merge Orion and Ray Ban in the I
Speaker 2:I don't know. I just think that, like, it it it would be, like
Speaker 1:I mean, it's already you can already do
Speaker 2:products. If I choose two different products for an educational, like, environment, and I have one that's ad free and distraction free. And the other one is like, do you wanna see this amazingly viral
Speaker 1:I'm not yeah. I'm not betting I'm not betting that American students will be using Instagram to study Okay. With them Yeah. At all. But but, yeah, it does feel like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, Zuck's vision is the the this this is he's making a big bet on on, you know, vision, VR, AR being the future computing platform. He talks about this saying, you know, you're gonna be in your kitchen looking at your fridge and it's gonna be like, hey, did you know that you could make this kind of quesadilla? Yep. I see you have the ingredients. I'll give you a recipe.
Speaker 1:And then you just like make it and guides you through it. And then again, like you said, you're reading, a textbook and it and it's popping up. You can ask questions in real time to the AI based on the information that you're seeing or you're studying or or even the the interesting data point. I think it was yesterday they came out and they're saying, they're letting applicants use AI in coding interviews.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is
Speaker 2:Total clue victory.
Speaker 1:Total clue victory. Credit credit to Roy Lee there
Speaker 2:for Yeah.
Speaker 1:Making making cheating.
Speaker 2:Controversial branding, but directionally correct.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For sure. Well, let's go into the the bay may potentially bigger bottleneck for super intelligence at MSL. But first, let me tell you about linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 2:So interesting comment. This comes from Rihar Jhark. An interesting comment from former Meta employee. Energy is the biggest bottleneck right now. Yep.
Speaker 2:Even if Meta wants to spend a 100 to a $150,000,000,000 on CapEx for AI infrastructure. They can't. It's not just NVIDIA. It's not TSMC. Transformers, power equipment, cooling equipment, and the availability of power is all limited right now.
Speaker 2:Schneider Electric is completely booked until 2030. Even if you have the money, you can't spend it. And this is from oh, this is a screenshot from, like, a GLG caller, a Tigas call or something. He won't, so is he serious? It must be AlphaSense or something like that.
Speaker 2:So they're talking about MetaCapEx, and they talked to this anonymous expert who is clearly a former Meta employee. Says, yeah. There's no way you can spend a $150,000,000,000 right now. If we look at any of the transformers, not the not the machine learning architecture, but the actual physical energy transformers or any power equipment or cooling equipment or even construction or availability of power. There's no way it's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:You talk about if you talk about Schneider who supplies a lot of the power equipment, they're completely full until 2030. They're not negotiating on price. It's basically you're lucky to get an order. Everyone talks about NVIDIA, but there are many other things beyond NVIDIA for this thing. Even if you have the money, you can't spend it.
Speaker 1:And Josh Steinman quoted this post and said, if you're an American engineer and want to lead the technical aspect of building a transformer company, my DMs are open. There is an American
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A new American transformer start.
Speaker 2:Remember I've asking I asked the Transformer cofounder architecture. Core Weave and I also got some semi analysis folks. Like, we've all learned about Nvidia. Then we all learned about TSMC. Then we all learned about ASML.
Speaker 2:Then we learned about SK Hynix, memory supplier. Like, we've learned the entire supply chain of AI. And I was like, what's the next company we're all gonna need to learn about? And it sounds like it's Schneider Electric. I've never heard of this company before today, but we gotta we gotta dig in and understand.
Speaker 2:Do they have competitors? Is there an opportunity? What's going on? I'm very curious to know how Schneider Electric works. But continuing on Zucks
Speaker 1:This is a French company. French company. Founded in 1863.
Speaker 2:Founder mode.
Speaker 1:So they're I don't think they're still gonna be hard to be in founder mode if you got started back in the eighteen hundreds, but they did about $36,000,000,000 in 2023. So massive massive company.
Speaker 2:What's market cap?
Speaker 1:A €137,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. That's like, what, a billion Yeah. USD?
Speaker 2:$50. Anyway, Will DePuis says, the bigger story is not that Zuck is giving out $400,000,000 offers. It's that people are turning them down. What that might what might that mean? Of course, Will works at OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Zuck is targeting Not at all. Zuck is targeting Mirrors Lab thinking machines with offers between 200 to 500,000,000 made to a quarter of their team and and one over $1,000,000,000, and not a single person has taken the offer. And there's, there's some people going back and forth on, like, what that means. Maybe you just believe in the mission and you already have 1% of the company and you think it's gonna be worth a couple 100,000,000,000. So you're like, yeah, I'll just wait and deliver on this and I think we're gonna win.
Speaker 2:You could also not wanna go work at a big company. There are a variety
Speaker 1:Also, if you've worked in AI for the last four years as a top researcher and you're not worth at least 50,000,000 Yeah. By now Yeah. Like, what are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of the thinking machines folks, like, the reason people speak so highly of them is that they were at other foundation labs Great labs. Great labs early on and probably got big stock grants that have grown a ton.
Speaker 1:But they've been able to get liquidity against and
Speaker 2:This is Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's so much information warfare happening right now. Right? There's so many different incentives for people to say, oh, it was this offer and they turned it down or
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:There was no offer made or it was, you know, somebody from Meta was chiming in and saying, like, we made a few offers. One was big, but there's a lot of misinformation here.
Speaker 2:The real problem is is that there aren't
Speaker 1:Whole market and misinformation.
Speaker 2:For sure. The the the real problem is that there aren't there aren't enough luxury goods. Like, if if Zuck really wants to make people bite at a billion dollar offer, like, what's the difference between making a 100,000,000 a year and making a billion? It's like
Speaker 1:It's boat.
Speaker 2:You gonna buy? Yeah. Maybe a boat. But he should start a new watch company, a higher end Richard Mill.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:$5,000,000 entry point.
Speaker 1:I think I think you're onto something.
Speaker 2:You need a hyper car company that starts at $75,000,000.
Speaker 1:You should just buy the top five.
Speaker 2:Somehow, I don't think this stuff appeals to AI researchers. Yeah. You don't see a lot of them
Speaker 1:They're immune. They're
Speaker 2:immune. Flex culture. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, also, if they're super AGI pilled, like, they just are like, what's the value of money in a couple of years? Who knows?
Speaker 2:We're gonna be in a completely different economy. There's a whole bunch of different there's a whole bunch of different reasons but maybe they like the team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the other thing is I I think many people will be uniquely motivated by winning and challenges. Mhmm. And and then and then having a, you know, do you wanna be one of the top five people at Thinking Machines? Or do you wanna be the number 30 the thirty fifth, you know, researcher at at a bigger organization?
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of people wanna have
Speaker 2:that There's also been so much like memetic warfare around this where like if you take the offer, you're instantly branded as a mercenary forever. Yep. You can never be seen as a missionary.
Speaker 1:I was getting I was getting some notes from a from a few people about so we released The Metis List, a a collection of top AI. A loose a loose collection of top AI researchers yesterday.
Speaker 2:Cool people.
Speaker 1:It's just a bunch of cool people. Alan Turing, people were pissed that he was included. They said he fell off.
Speaker 2:Was underrated. Founder of Poole
Speaker 1:and Laugh. But but, yeah, there was some I was getting some interesting notes around a handful of people in the top 25 Yeah. Saying, you know, this person was kicked off of every team that they've ever worked on, which is You gotta be just low. Funny. They gotta be way lower.
Speaker 1:They shouldn't even be on the list. Yeah. So Anyway,
Speaker 2:it was all in good fun. We love everyone that list and many more. And we're gonna expand it and add to it and have more fun with it, hopefully.
Speaker 1:Eventually, everybody will be a a researcher. Actually And the other thing is Elon came out yesterday Yeah. Right after we published the Metis list saying they they don't have any researchers anymore. They're engineers. Everybody's engineers.
Speaker 1:I think it's a good framing. I think it's very possible that some researchers self wanna self identify as engineers. And if you're an engineer, I think it's cool to all be in the same bucket. And so I think that I think that can make a lot of sense for x AI's culture.
Speaker 2:Well, whether you're a researcher or an engineer, you gotta get on graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. It is an interesting debate about are we in an age of of of research or engineering at this point? And and it feels like Elon is the master of engineering and is and is rarely trying to come up with, like
Speaker 1:And infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Completely yeah. Infrastructure. He's rarely trying to come up with like the completely novel new science. He but but he believes that Grok at a certain point will be able to do that. But but if you see how fast he's
Speaker 1:He's going for the greatest feats of
Speaker 2:engineering. Engineering. And that's and that's the culture is like engineering. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's like, started
Speaker 2:a research I
Speaker 1:started a research nonprofit Yeah. Almost a decade ago called OpenAI. I'm over researched.
Speaker 2:I'm over researched.
Speaker 1:I'm I'm I'm Engineering. I'm doing engineering now.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's read through Ben Thompson's analysis of the Figma s one, the Figma OS, and Figma's AI potential Finally. Course in Manhattan for Figma's IPO tomorrow. We're very excited about that.
Speaker 1:Will be live from
Speaker 2:New York.
Speaker 1:NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:Yes. Cannot wait. So, Bloomberg has a story here. Figma's initial public offering is approaching 40 times oversubscribed according to people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 1:Is that good?
Speaker 2:The design and collaboration software. We'll have to we'll have to ask everyone tomorrow if it's good.
Speaker 1:Did they get the same revenue multiple oversubscribed
Speaker 2:they
Speaker 1:are?
Speaker 2:Could be the year the year's most in demand listing. The company is guiding prospective investors at its IPO, which could raise as much as 1,200,000,000.0, is expected to price above the marked the marketed range. The people said, the San Francisco based firm and some investors are offering 36,900,000.0 shares at 30 to $32 per share after increasing the range Monday from 25 to $28 each. Orders taking is expected to end at noon on Tuesday in New York. Bloomberg News has reported oversubscription refers to when the number of orders for shares in the IPO exceeds shares that were originally offered.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:Lot of demand for Figma shares, which makes sense. Exactly. It has been one of the most in demand secondary Helps you think bigger and
Speaker 2:going faster.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Helps design and development teams build great products together. What's not to like?
Speaker 1:Nothing like mixing and add into at least this is Ben Thompson's analysis. This is Right? So Yeah. Ben Thompson is not sponsored by Figma.
Speaker 2:No. He's We had a friend of the show come on and break down the s one when the when the numbers dropped. And it was kind of like the dream case for for SaaS. Right?
Speaker 1:For SaaS. Coming out and immediately being the top, you know, for from a purely metrics based look, the top SaaS company Yep. In public SaaS company
Speaker 2:as well. And, of course, a lot of people point to the rule of 40. You add the growth rate to the burn rate, how much money you're losing. If you're losing a lot of money, you're growing really fast, that's If you're if you're making a ton of money, but growing slower, either way, they should add up to at least 40%. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Higher, the better. And if you add Figma's up, they're they're in the 70%. So well beyond forty forty percent according to the rule of 40, which is, of course, exciting to the venture capitalists who popularized the rule of 40.
Speaker 1:They basically created profitability.
Speaker 2:So he says, I think you can make the case that an $18,000,000,000 valuation is in fact too low. Indeed, I think you can make the company make the case that the company is worth more than 20,000,000,000. Adobe agreed to buy it for 20,000,000,000 back in 2022. That, of course, is despite the rise of generative AI, which at first glance appear to be a threat to Figma because you just go to ChatGPT and say, hey. Build me a collaborative software tool.
Speaker 2:And maybe it's
Speaker 1:just Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes. But he says, I would go in the other direction, generative generative AI and the opportunity it resents it represents is exactly why Figma should go public as Field strongly suggests, and get ready to be acquisitive.
Speaker 1:Get ready to get get ready to get bought.
Speaker 2:Do some deals. We love we love a Dylan Field deal.
Speaker 1:The Figma OS, Ben says the reason why I'm optimistic about Figma comes from my belief that Figma is not simply design software rather it's something much more fundamental and valuable and operating system with a collaboration built in. Here is how I explained Figma back when Adobe tried to acquire them. Forgive the long excerpt he says, but it really is the point as far as my optimism about Figma is concerned. He says, here it is important to note that Figma's most prominent victim to date has not been Adobe, but rather Sketch. The explosion in apps led to a growing market for product and design.
Speaker 1:Product design and development as designers needed to lay out a whole host of different app views and developers needed to know what exactly the designers wanted them to build. Photoshop and Illustrator, which were primarily focused on the creation and editing of single files, were the completely wrong tools for the job. Sketch, was released in 2010 as a Mac OS app and is still Mac OS only, although it now includes the ability to view files on the web, completely took the category by storm. Adobe Adobe eventually responded with Adobe XD, but not until 2015. And the product is still in third place.
Speaker 1:Sketch though is now only in second.
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Continue Jordy.
Speaker 1:Chris, the CEO of AdQuick is in New York as well. We're gonna try to meet up with him in a little bit. Sketch was not a disruptive product. It was like Adobe's products, a desktop app. It just delivered a solution to an emerging product category that Adobe was slow to respond to and that was like the designing of web and and mobile products.
Speaker 1:Yep. Figma though was something completely new. The company which was founded in 2012 made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building v one of the product. This include which is just so funny because normally if you talk to a founder building a software company and they said, yeah. I've I'm I'm three years in and I haven't shipped an MVP.
Speaker 1:You would just immediately write the company off because like, know, why haven't you shipped? Yeah. In this case, it was necessary. They
Speaker 2:quit your job, raise $10,000,000, Vibrio launch video, slump like product in two seconds. Like, that's the that's the flow and then a and then and then sort it out and then maybe it works. But it's a
Speaker 1:Don't worry about securing personally identifiable information at all. Just get to the top of the charts and Yeah. Figure it out So this included writing the editor in c plus plus cross compiling it to JavaScript using the asm dot js subset that let it achieve desktop like control of memory and performance and building its own rendering engine from scratch using WebGL which had only been released in 2011. WebGL was the Yeah. The why now for the business and Dylan was very early to recognizing that.
Speaker 1:It was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector which in this case was collaboration. Mhmm. And you know, anybody anybody under the age of 25 like probably doesn't remember the pre pre Figma era but like having different files and sending them back and forth and like sending comments by email. It's just like it it, even even personally I I only briefly was was working without having access to, Figma. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ben says, think about my brief description for this product design and development segment. Multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project, a designer and a developer. In reality, the huge number of views and increased functionality in apps meant that there was an increasingly large teams on both sides. Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on the app together. Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got collaboration for free from the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is a crazy screenshot. I don't know if we can show this but on on Figma's website, the company compares itself to Adobe XD. But I use Photoshop and Illustrator. Don't stop.
Speaker 2:We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you're photo editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you're doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no brainer. But if you're looking for the best tool for UX design, Figma is here for you. Plus, you can easily import images and SVG code into Figma and have your cake and eat it too.
Speaker 2:And so Yep. Putting the competitors products right there. So
Speaker 1:And recommending that.
Speaker 2:Eventually Photoshop and Adobe did launch competitor called XD. And XD wound up is getting killed by Figma but no one ever subscribed Creative Cloud for XD. You just used it because it was here, says Ben Thompson. Here's the problem though. To the extent that Adobe's products were being used as part of Figma's workflow was the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long term relevance.
Speaker 2:Figma could, for example, start investing much more heavily into its photo editing or illustration capabilities rendering Adobe's products increasingly unnecessary. What is more threatening is Figma's cross platform capabilities. Third party developers can build plug ins for Figma that make it possible to easily add the sort of editing capabilities. So, regulators blocked the Adobe deal. And Ben Thompson says he thinks it was correct.
Speaker 2:The regulators got it correct that time. And based on the run that Figma's been on ever since, it seems like it could be a win for them as well. Yep. And and it's interesting because a lot of
Speaker 1:Sane roller coaster for the team. Yeah. And and Figma, I think, during the acquisition process, clearly didn't have the insane urgency to launch new products because they thought they were going to, you know, Adobe and and would be part of an organization with a bunch of different Yeah. Individual apps and and watching how they reacted after it was blocked and then came Yep. And just started shipping like crazy.
Speaker 2:And so the FTC has gone after some some mergers that have made no sense. Like, they I believe they blocked
Speaker 1:Like Roomba.
Speaker 2:The Roomba one yeah. That one didn't make sense. The worst example I can think of is Meta bought a VR fitness app, and they said that Meta was trying to create a monopoly in the VR fitness market, which is just not a market at all. It doesn't even exist. And I don't know anyone that does VR fitness, and it's very rare.
Speaker 2:And so it totally makes sense to let that team get an exit and go hang out at Meta and try and work on this until
Speaker 1:Creating the market for
Speaker 2:creating the market. And then as soon as it takes off, there's gonna be a ton of competitors immediately. And so it seems like totally fine to let that one go through. And then there are there are other sides where where, like, truly, there are, like, two players, and they're merging, and there's gonna be lot of a lot of competitive dynamics that come from that. Anyway, let me tell you about bezel.
Speaker 2:Pre owned luxury watches, authenticated in house bezel is the top marketplace in the world for authenticated luxury watches.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Again, just more context. So Amazon Amazon's acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba was blocked due to anti trust concerns which was primarily from the European Commission.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:They're worried about It it was Europe. A monopoly in home robotics, I guess. And the CEO ended up just resigning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What's interesting is, like, the the the robotic vacuum market is extremely competitive because of a lot of the Chinese companies. Like, Oofee and there's a few others. Like, it is definitely not as much of, like, a it's it feels like a lot less of a sticky prod product. Because, yes, it maps your home and it's supposed to learn.
Speaker 2:But really, if you move to a new place and you get a different robot vacuum cleaner, like, you're pretty much good after a day. You're not like, oh, I can't get out of the Roomba ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas, like, even Sonos is stickier than that. Yep. And so, I I I never
Speaker 1:had a problem with that. And iRobot shares are down 95% What? Over the last looking We over the
Speaker 2:But we'd actually got blocked and then they just got cooked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They actually went public 07/31/2020. No way. Stock popped to a $133 a share by early twenty twenty one. It's now sitting at $4 and 28 What's the market cap?
Speaker 1:130,000,000.
Speaker 2:130,000,000.
Speaker 1:So a little bit of value destruction from the European. Imagine how
Speaker 2:frustrating that would be. You're like, I think I'm getting out to, like, the most logical acquirer possible. So Figma's position and the AI potential. Consider the position Figma has in the software design process. First, Figma enables collaboration, their original differentiator from Adobe and Sketch.
Speaker 2:Second, Figma creates one canvas for app creation, everything based on the same URL instead of files that are passed around with increasingly absurd file name appendages, you know, final final final v three v four v one final final. Third Figma serves as a source of truth for an apps design. These capabilities seamlessly translate into enabled workflows. And so
Speaker 1:And these capabilities seamlessly translate to AI enabled workflows. Collaboration today between a host of humans could very well mean coordination and orchestration of AI. Critically, Figma isn't assuming or relying on an AI doing everything. Granted, that is a theoretical threat to the company. But the problem with AI only development processes is that they're extremely difficult to debug or decompose.
Speaker 1:Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ben Thompson kinda closes out talking about Figma as the OS of design being important. What operating systems have is coordination and orchestration abilities, one canvas where all the work happens.
Speaker 1:So, source of truth.
Speaker 2:And then, for Figma gets its nascent AI cap gates the capabilities behind a full seat license, I e the most expensive plans. They also have usage based model. But they Ben Thompson is advocating for Figma to move towards some sort of usage based or task based monetization model. This is what
Speaker 1:Selling work.
Speaker 2:Salesforce. Yeah. Yeah. Salesforce is
Speaker 1:Selling the end product.
Speaker 2:Exactly. As opposed to And seat so that will be a business model transition. And he says that the transition be tricky, and it's arguably the best argument against Figma going public because if all of a sudden you shift to, hey, we don't charge per seat. We charge per finished design or finished website or shipped website, then all of a sudden, you could see that you wind up with a much better business model four quarters out, but you have two rough quarters, and the public markets don't like that. And people always talk about that being one of the reasons one of the drawbacks of being public is that is that you have a lot of investors that are a little bit more short term oriented.
Speaker 2:But he says, I think, however, that it that it is notable that Field mentioned m and a dur in his argument for going public. Figma would do well to start acquiring AI companies to plug into every aspect of its stack, particularly now when AI capability is nascent and not yet a threat to Figma as a whole. Above, I was skeptical about AI replacing Figma, but that is a skepticism that is relevant for the short term. Figma's task is to replace itself before anyone else has the chance in the long term. So
Speaker 1:And I am very excited for tomorrow. Before we have our guest, should we talk about friend.com?
Speaker 2:We should. We're we're gonna give them
Speaker 1:a call in
Speaker 2:thirty minutes. Quickly, me tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And we have Eric Gleimon in the studio. Correct?
Speaker 1:Get over here. Go. Eric. Congratulations. Looking sharp.
Speaker 2:My god. Great. Great
Speaker 4:to I
Speaker 2:love these Have a seat here.
Speaker 1:Great to see you.
Speaker 2:Great to see you. Good.
Speaker 1:You got a Good. You got a Celsius there.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Welcome
Speaker 1:to the show.
Speaker 4:Thank Thanks
Speaker 1:Our humble New York temple of technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Give us the update. What's the news Break it down Great for
Speaker 1:jacket, by
Speaker 2:the way. You look
Speaker 1:so You got little touches of yellow in there.
Speaker 2:It's not It's not yellow enough for my taste, there is a little bit of yellow.
Speaker 1:By the way, our tailor designed these to celebrate and and really symbolize saving time and money. Yes. I think they did the job. I think they did the job.
Speaker 4:I am I am overwhelmed. I
Speaker 1:just We'll get you we'll get you one too.
Speaker 2:We'll definitely get
Speaker 4:you one. We gotta do this.
Speaker 2:We gotta go man on the street in in like Times Square. What do you do for a living? What what business do run? Do you wanna save time and money? Let's get you on Ramp right now.
Speaker 2:We'll introduce you to CEO.
Speaker 1:Ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Is phenomenal. Yeah. But break it down for us. What happened today? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, first, I mean, we we might need a bigger gong. I know. We're all traveling.
Speaker 1:You have no idea. We're we're we're going to the ends of America to to get an American made gong and we're looking for something that will actually be floor to ceiling. Yeah. You know, it 'll be, you know, something like 20 by 20. So working on that.
Speaker 1:I look forward to hitting it for for the next one. The next one. The series e three.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bring it down. This is But
Speaker 4:this is phenomenal. Guys, thanks thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 4:Here in New York, the capital of capital.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 1:It really is.
Speaker 4:Technology here here at TVPN. No. It's we raised $500,000,000 at a 22 and a half billion dollar
Speaker 1:That's good. Valuation. There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:It's got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 1:I'm really And appreciate all the And and, I'm losing track, but it seems like Ramp has not been able to get a fundraise public without it leaking, you know, five days previously to the press. But, this is official. I'm glad to make it official here.
Speaker 4:It it is official. It's the right valuation and look, I I I early on in my my career, the I got this advice that the biggest battle a startup faces is people not giving a shit, people not caring. And so, you know what? We're happy that people care even if, you know, things come out a couple days before. Yep.
Speaker 4:But we feel super lucky. And so that that's the the big news of the day. But, you know, I I I think so much what we focused on today especially in the raise is is what we're gonna with the capital. Yep. The the last raise which we were proud to hit the gong for here Six weeks ago?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Six weeks ago. Some of it actually came from from actually from the product. We launched our first AI agent Yep. For controllers and the data was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So that catalyzed this?
Speaker 4:Yeah. A 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I yeah. That's my big question. Yep. Like, why e two?
Speaker 2:Why not f? And then also, it feels like you're like the king of like a bunch of fundraisers in a short amount of time. Yeah. Because like, there's clearly some benefits to that, but why not
Speaker 1:I gotta give some credit to the business, John. I mean, Eric's Eric's a great CEO, but the business is really, you know
Speaker 4:Well, I I don't we haven't talked about this before. Yeah. Like, I we'll we'll share it. Like right now, July is pacing we're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume Wow. In July than June.
Speaker 4:Like it's it's been one month like like the business is growing extraordinarily quickly.
Speaker 1:What's that what's that meme with the guy on Hot Ones where he's
Speaker 2:No no no guys.
Speaker 4:Don't don't talk. Need to it's a half Celsius but No. No. No. That's insane.
Speaker 4:The business itself is
Speaker 1:I remember I'm sure in back in 2020 you'd be happily sending you know investors like you know, we grew 20% month over month you know but on like you know whatever 1% of the scale. Yeah. So so really wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I guess like the bigger like meta question is just like Yeah. Like, there's a world where you stack a bunch of these wins into the mega deck and then just do like one massive fundraise every 18. There's this meme of, like, fundraising is a distraction. The CEO should be out there working with customers, improving the product.
Speaker 2:Obviously, you're doing that. But how do you how do you do these back to back fundraisers without them being distracting? I know you have a big team now. But like, what goes into the the the decision to do, like, it I don't know if they're even smaller but just like Yeah. More frequent fundraisers because that feels like a like something that's unique to your company.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So so one, it's sort of a funny thing but people I I actually didn't understand this before in the start up world like, what is a series a or a b or an e two really?
Speaker 2:Somebody who did a $55,000,000 seed round. Yeah. And then and then you'll
Speaker 1:we we we pressed them. We were like, is this for marketing? Like Yeah. You know, you're still gonna get the expect the the series b
Speaker 2:the company is gonna feel like a series b company.
Speaker 4:I I almost think like calling things by letters is totally silly. All it actually meant was we had a set of documents that we use whenever financing happened. There's hundreds of pages of documents that go back and forth between company and investor. Yeah. Calling it an e two just meant that we use the exact same documents.
Speaker 4:Save time and money. Save money on No. It was really just that. And so so look, it it it was very efficient to get the financing done. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I also believe a lot in this concept of of marking to market
Speaker 2:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 4:Of in real time what are companies ultimately worth. Yeah. And, you know, when when you look at the fund raise from about a month month and a half ago, I think it was when it was announced, done done earlier, you know, we raised, I I think in exchange for about $200,000,000, approximately 1% more shares came onto the cap table. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 4:So it was a very small amount of dilution. Yep. With this raise of 500,000,000 to 22 and a half, it's like two ish percent. Yeah. See, these are not that dilutive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The company Right. But but but it's giving you a more modern mark.
Speaker 1:And adding to the war chest.
Speaker 4:Adding to the war chest. And and I think it's a good thing because one, you know, allows people to invest at the at the right point in time. But Yeah. Two, because you're you're not raising far ahead of where metrics are, it means that the company is not that distracted. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, for for the actual organization Yeah. Like, we've just been obsessed with going.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And You're not in a position
Speaker 2:where everyone's like, oh, like, at this valuation, like, Ramp doesn't just need an act two, but they need an act three, four, and five. Like, they gotta, you know, create super intelligence and all this crazy stuff because, like, like, it's, like, based on the actual progress of the company.
Speaker 4:A 100%. Right?
Speaker 2:Makes sense. A 100%. I wanna talk about the product. I wanna talk about the AI agent thing. The the the interesting my experience with the ramp was that it was, in many ways, an AI agent before AI agents was a buzzword.
Speaker 2:And I know that, obviously, when you scan a receipt, it goes through an OCR process and the data, the text is extracted from the image. Yes. And then, I I would assume that you were an early adopter of LLMs to help clean that up. And that was, in many ways, a more, like a super magical AI agent experience, but I'm not prompting it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just something that's happening in the background. Invisible. Yep. It's invisible. And you're using some, you know, deterministic code, some probabilistic code, some older machine learning algorithms for OCR, some newer LLMs to clean up the data and tag things and say, this is a restaurant, that's a flight, and and, you know, do all the magic that helps categorize expenses.
Speaker 2:The question is, like, it feels like a big shift to put the the the the agent in the hands of the user. Mhmm. And so, you said that you're seeing, like, incredible adoption. What are people actually using it for? What's the feedback?
Speaker 2:And and I I mean, like, yeah, what else are the learnings of like where that goes? Do people want that or do people ultimately want to be able to prompt a few times and then have things baked into the core behind the scenes workflows.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I I I I feel like so so let's talk a little bit it like what are like AI assistants? Yep. What are AI agents? Yep.
Speaker 4:What's the distinction? Because I actually think people are like pretty pretty sloppy with with And the so I feel to be clear, if
Speaker 1:you wanna raise money right now, you just build SaaS and call it an agent and
Speaker 4:boom. But let's talk. Have a lot of people who are building, who who are listening to this podcast. So so I I think first for, know, assistance or co pilots, the idea is a person prompts, the co pilot will review it, will make a recommendation, but then ultimately it's on the human to go do the work. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:I get a recommendation, I input it back and forth. This is Yeah. Maybe similar to experience that you might have on a chat GBT Yep. Or or that kind of a thing. An agent is a bit different.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:What you do is you give it instructions and access to tools and you say, under certain conditions, if you see an outcome that I've instructed you drive, just go do it. Right? And Forever, essentially. Forever. And and you know, I'm gonna modify things from time to time.
Speaker 4:But it's a little bit more similar to like, let's say you hire an intern or a new hire, you teach them how to do the job, you watch a
Speaker 2:bunch of ongoing basis.
Speaker 4:And then then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the the distinction.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:And and and one of the if you if you think about what we're actually optimizing for Yep. One of the core metrics is we look at what was the amount of work that a ramp customer was able to do in a single let's say in an hour or in a minute. Yep. Right? And so as we look over over the years, that's gone up a lot.
Speaker 4:And if if you joined in 2023, you know, mathematically, we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the the the metric is as you did just two years ago for every minute you're spending on the site. So it's all to say, like, every minute is counting for three times more. I think that ratio should be 30 times more. Yeah. And if you look at what happened, so we launched the we made this announcement about three, four weeks ago for this first AI agent and we had early adopters, Notion, Webflow, Quora.
Speaker 4:The stats just absolutely shocked us when we looked at this. Mhmm. Functionally, these companies were able to get 15 times more work done. Yeah. Transactions categorized.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day Yeah. Like they know the expense policy better than any manager at the company. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so it was 99% accurate. Yeah. It got a lot more tasks done. Yeah. And suddenly, like, for many people who've worked at large companies, you spend like an hour just reviewing expenses and you're like, why am I spending an hour reviewing like someone's Uber or or their purchase and that's just gone.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And you're focusing on actually interesting exceptions. Yeah. And so where where where I think this kind of adds up to is for a lot of years, people had to be forced forced to like learn how does software work and how do I think like software? How do I learn to use Salesforce?
Speaker 4:How do I learn to use Google? How do I learn to use Excel? Mhmm. Now, we're teaching these software programs to think like people. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And that means you can teach software functionally the same way you would an intern Yeah. To go and figure out what expenses are in and out of policy and that very avid software that doesn't take breaks, doesn't take holidays, that is obsessed over every deal of your expense policy can catch when your policy
Speaker 1:It's online if you if you need to talk to it at at Yeah. You're on a on a work you need to yeah. Or yeah. Therapy. But I was gonna say like Yeah.
Speaker 1:You don't if you can avoid messaging somebody on the weekend to ask if something's in or out of policy, it's like it it benefits everybody.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's exactly right. No. And and and I think you're up like another another point of like a lot of work is sort of if this and that. Like if you get a if you get a like a you wanna buy a new piece of software and that vendor sends you like a quote Yeah. Then procurement negotiates it.
Speaker 4:Once procurement negotiate it, then legal takes a look at it. Once legal says it's fine, then, you know, finances, is there an invoice and we go and pay it out and then it goes into accounting. But if you have lots of digital agents functionally all the time online and responsive, these things can occur simultaneously. Yep. And so it means actually instead of waiting days to go and onboard a new vendor, it can be done in in in minutes.
Speaker 4:And so it just means it's much easier to do work and I think the big picture of like, why are we here at all? It's actually just to save time and money to make it easier for more companies to operate and and that's what this stuff adds up to.
Speaker 1:It's really nice when you don't have to update your your mission statement. I know. You know, as new techno I mean, is the we we've talked about, you know, Google's original mission statement which is loosely like, you know, organize and and make the world's information like valuable. Right? And it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, generative AI like does that very efficiently. Agen tech workflow is applied to finance Yep. Saves people time and money. Yeah. It's the same same mission.
Speaker 1:I wanna
Speaker 2:take a post about a post from Keith Ruboy. He said, five out of six board meetings he had in the last couple months were about how to design a company's organization Yeah. For AI. I'm interested in and we've been debating this in the context of Meta Super Intelligence. Is artificial intelligence an app like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp?
Speaker 2:Or is it like their finance team? Like their infrastructure team? Like their database team that sits across all of the apps as like a service layer? And I'm interested to know, like, you have a product now. And I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product, and that product has AI in the name.
Speaker 2:Yep. But then, I imagine that every single person from designers to engineers to, you know, the the ops people are using artificial intelligence in their day to day. Mhmm. And I'm wondering if if you're seeing a new, like, cross functional team develop or how you're thinking through that that trade off of, horizontal versus vertical, maybe both teams in just terms of running a high performance organization.
Speaker 4:It it I I love his post and I think it's actually like I'll I'll put it this way, like, I don't think most people have really come to terms with the reality that like computers can like see and hear and like think now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 4:crazy. It's so different and like if you're like just going and repeating the same organizational structure that like was in place when anything were possible like it's a little bit of like, are are are you are you awake? Like like this is actually is the right question and one I think people should be spending a lot more time in in in earnest.
Speaker 1:We need more business. We need some new business, you know, management textbooks. It's true. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:For sure. It it's a joke but it's
Speaker 2:So if you don't if you have a whole piece of your org chart that doesn't have any AI on it, like you're gonna ship that in the product and then people are gonna be like, wait, this part this piece of the product feels very manual and like web one point o almost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the create I mean, one thing that happened yesterday was Zuck saying, like, basically saying you can now use code AI in your coding interviews.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Which sounds insane. Like, wouldn't you wanna still hire for people that that might just just naturally be good at engineering and then get better? But he he's basically making the statement of, no, we're so committed to this new paradigm that, yeah, you should use every tool you have available to do the best possible work.
Speaker 4:I and I think it's totally right and I I'll I'll admit something even for people who, you know, are soon, there are some job functions at Ramp where it is actually not possible to pass it like an interview or coding interview without using an LLM. Wow. And that's intentional. Yeah. It's actually intentional to figure out like, you curious about that?
Speaker 4:Are you using these tools or It it it's not a question of IQ. I think there's brilliant people who, you know, don't need an LLM to think but I think that the capabilities of being able to access an extraordinary amount of compute as well as specialized, you know Yeah. Knowledge. Why why wouldn't you? And and Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like just because Scott Wu could do a problem in his head doesn't mean he shouldn't use a calculator.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It
Speaker 3:is It's really like putting it.
Speaker 2:Old one of the old like coding challenges was this thing called fizz buzz where
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You try and write out numbers from zero to one. If it's if it's odd or if it's divisible by three, write fizz. And if it's divisible by seven, you write buzz. And then, if it's divisible by both, you write fizz buzz. And it's like a very basic coding challenge, but it always assumes that you have access to Python.
Speaker 2:Like, and it's not saying, okay, you have to go and like fab your own semiconductor to do it. And so, it makes sense that like, you know, we are in the age of LLMs. Like, that's be gonna a tool that
Speaker 1:is I'll give Eric ideas. The Kareem. Kareem Kareem might start requiring the engineering team. You're gonna have to be able to set up your own semi fab in order to Write
Speaker 2:it out in binary with a pen and paper.
Speaker 1:Nice. You know, engineering with your own silicon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one interesting thing. We've talked a lot about this, like, Move 37 concept. Lisa Dahl, the Google DeepMind challenge. They beat Lisa Dahl.
Speaker 2:And in Move 37, it was, like, this moment of, like, true inspiration where AlphaGo put a piece on the board that was so unexpected. Lisa all stood up, went outside, smoked a cigarette, and was like had his mind blown. Right? And we've had moments like that. Maybe the Studio Ghibli moment is this, like, we've had passing the Turing test.
Speaker 2:But there's also been plenty of areas that feel more intractable in terms of artificial intelligence. And it feels like if you are, like Mhmm. With the latest IMO, problem six was this combinatorics problem that I don't understand, but neither does OpenAI or Google apparently. So, you know, we're basically the same. But my but my question is, like, is, like, the AI agent's product, are there are there things that you see CFOs, modern CFOs do?
Speaker 2:Like, what is the the humanity's last exam, the intractable problem, the most elegant, beautiful thing that a CFO can do that feels like, oh, this is gonna be something that's happening and requires like the human touch for a very, very long time.
Speaker 1:I think I think my my my immediate thought, it's to give you give you some time to think, is it feels like AI today is really good at doing the work that like a management consultant could do. So you can like tell them like, I run this type of business. Like, make me a marketing plan or come up with five ideas for marketing Yeah. Strategies in Yep. Q four.
Speaker 1:And it will create like a a great report. It'll look great. It'll have some maybe some decent ideas. And yet it still feels like to do truly exceptional work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like we like Monday, like the three of us spent like couple hours talking about Yeah. Some some campaign and like debating it and all these different points and it's like we could have had AI in the mix there but you could imagine to be tossing in ideas Yeah. That that were kind of maybe random Yeah. And and maybe something helpful but it was still like you just like people needed to just like sit there and just like hash it out and it feels like that's that's like Yeah. You know, do the work to like do analysis, create reports, you know, when it when it comes to like actual knowledge work.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But anyways, I know what your thought is.
Speaker 4:I I I love this line of questioning and I think it's gonna get super interesting. Especially as in AI is going from a primarily academic tool and and also in some ways I feel like it's it's it's jumped into software engineering in part because, you know, software engineers know what it is to to code and Yeah. You know, they're working with AI and and so they have good taste and there's these great feedback loops. Yeah. And so it's happening there sooner but it's starting to make it into general business logic, finance, everything.
Speaker 4:Sure. You know, I I think a good place to start if you you just wanna decompose the problem is like, is the job of finance actually? Yeah. What is it? And and I I think if you were to just really simplifying it down, it's, in my view some subset of you're gonna define a set of rules that govern who is able to spend what, under what circumstances, what are the controls you have in place.
Speaker 4:Once activity has occurred, you've spent money, things are coming in, how do you record that activity accurately?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Close your books. And then based on what occurred, how do you goal seek to more profitability, profitability, more growth, more cash flow, whatever thing you're gonna go try to go do. Yeah. It's about it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And if you really kinda simplify it, it's just a set of rules and algorithms.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:These systems, one, they're incredibly complicated to do each of those things. And so I I actually think like brilliant people have over the last fifty hundred years been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases like tabulators just calculating things or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over or matching the receipts and doing like very low level task and only doing a little bit, you know, after you example
Speaker 1:is like when any any like like TV show about business. Yeah. It's like like if you look at like The Office. All of this was any real work done?
Speaker 4:Like you did it Was there any yeah.
Speaker 1:You you don't really do you remember a time when they were maybe once or twice they called a customer or they did a customer meeting? But outside of that, it's like thousands of hours of just like Yeah. Doing they they're doing business but they're not like, are they really getting anything done? And so I think I think the point you're making is like, how much of the work that we do is should should be the work that we're doing.
Speaker 4:Nailed it. Like I I think so much of work is very mechanical and it's, you know, we want finance to be forward thinking and strategic, but the reality of a lot of finance is looking backward.
Speaker 2:I think that's Yeah. Yeah. I I I think that the strategic thing is really key. Like like, Tyler Cowen would say that, like, relationships are are very Lindy and gonna stick around for a long time. Trust building, that type But of Ben Thompson dumped some sort of, you know, 10 Q into ChatGPT and said like, make me a Ben Thompson style article.
Speaker 2:Nah. It did some of it but it didn't have Uncanny. Yeah. It didn't have, like, the actual strategic insights and the storytelling that can actually, like, marshal the proper resources. And I feel like that's, in many ways, the the job of CFO.
Speaker 2:It's risk taking. It's deciding the right strategy for the situation and it seems like the the the frontier models are not quite there yet.
Speaker 4:You you nailed it. And I think that when I think about the next set of years, we we with the fundraise, we tried to lay out of like Yeah. We're seeing glimmers of like this whole industry is gonna get rewritten. Yeah. What do we think the industry looks like over the next three to five years?
Speaker 4:What does the org like look like? And we laid that out in the post. But I think the biggest transformation is like really really, I think most of the finance function today, unfortunately, is very backward looking.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:But I think as automation, agentic workflows are coming to the forefront platforms like Ramp, actually more people can be looking forward
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Can be spending time Yeah. You know, on like for Ben Thompson, what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better. And when I think of like what is that last exam ultimately for a finance organization is, you know, I I think there are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies that I think about is Amazon. In its early days, they're so so they were very early and they would send email follow ups to customers.
Speaker 4:You just bought this. And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write like if you've seen like the Trader Joe's newsletter where someone writes like these poetic things about the new ingredients and cool stuff, come try this and whatever. Amazon did that in the nineties. Yeah. And there was an editorial team talking about the great new products that were coming online on amazon.com and then there was this personalization team.
Speaker 4:It's like, I don't know, p 12 n or or whatever it is. And they said, we're gonna a b test it.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:This This personalization team, you're gonna get 10% of the send volume and your job is to just go and try to find these weird connections. These move 30 sevens
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Of like, you just bought this, you may be interested in this product. And for a long time, humans crushed the personalization team. There was something kind of in the example of how these marketers thought that was better. It get better and better and better till one day the personalization team, the volume started winning.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And it kept winning. Yep. There is no team
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That is sending like newsletters around. And so, you know, it turns out algorithmically on single products, you might be able to go and have a better algorithmic recommendations. I still think for quite a while Yeah. There was a role for creative CFOs and thinking about these unexpected strategies. It it's sort of in some ways like, I don't know, it about you guys for a second.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. The media industry has been at it for a long time, you know. There's live streaming.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, TV has been around for for a while. No one saw this and suddenly, like, is one of the most, I think, important things happening
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, in in broadcasting. It's it's your show.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 4:You guys saw it. Yeah. And I think there's room for people of great taste, who great marketers, who are great leaders, CFOs. And and so, no, I'm I'm I'm bullish actually when you have time to think about the interesting work.
Speaker 2:A 100%. Yeah. Like, there's one world where you see the expense policy as like a a set of if statements and there's a different world where you start thinking about expenses as like bets and risk taking and actual, like, what is the net present value of buying that particular thing? Will this pay off for the business? Does this actually increase shareholder value when you buy even just the those pencils versus those pens?
Speaker 2:Like, that's really
Speaker 1:Also, I mean I mean, yeah. There's so much, you know, finance historically is, you know, looking backwards and you can make decisions based on that and be like, woah, spent this on this. We shouldn't do that again. But there's also so much you can bring in of like even helping understand projecting out. Did you know if you adopted this tool and then you grow head count 20% or or 30% or a 100%, you know, this is gonna be in a year if you keep this existing, you know, plan contract, you're gonna be spending, you know, some crazy multiple of what you're paying today.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. There's so much. So
Speaker 2:What's next for the company? Is the job finished?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everybody everybody in the chat is asking job finished?
Speaker 2:Is the job finished?
Speaker 4:The job is not finished, guys. I'm still we're we're still we can't believe it.
Speaker 1:Job not finished confirmed. No, guys. This this is
Speaker 4:I love this thing. No. It's like it's like we're we're we're we're pleased. We're we're happy but like this is the crazy thing about our industry is that any business that spends money could be a ramp customer. Sure.
Speaker 4:And we've come a long way. They will
Speaker 2:They will be. They must be.
Speaker 4:They must be.
Speaker 2:Shoulds and musts. No.
Speaker 4:I don't know. We're we're working hard on it. But but guys, most most people, you know, pour pour one out for for our friends like expenses, closing the books. It is the worst hour of of their month. Yep.
Speaker 4:It doesn't have to be. Yep. We're gonna change that.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Incredible. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 4:Thanks a ton a ton of fun. See you
Speaker 1:later, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see you
Speaker 3:later.
Speaker 4:And please recommend your tailor to me. I I gotta
Speaker 3:get one of these things.
Speaker 1:No. We'll our our we'll we'll put you in touch. Cool. Thanks. We'll come to the fitting.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Great to see you,
Speaker 2:Eric. Yeah. We gotta hop on with Avi Shiffman in a few minutes. Let's read through some posts, though. Interesting fact about the IPO market.
Speaker 1:We a we needed a poly market on whether Eric would say job's not finished. Yes. Although, probably would have been sitting at it.
Speaker 2:A 100%.
Speaker 1:A 100%.
Speaker 2:Jeff Richards says the last five technology IPOs are up a 142% on average. The last 20 are up 93% performing well beyond lockup windows. Last twelve months, prevailing narrative. There is no IPO market. Smart companies prepared anyhow, and we're ready to take advantage of favorable conditions.
Speaker 2:And it's Chime, Voyager Voyager, Circle, Mountain, Hinge Health, eToro, Core Weave, tons of companies on here. Service Titan all got out and are sitting at pretty solid offer to current percent gains. There's a few that are down, but by and large, the IPO window is wide open.
Speaker 1:It's wide open. And, on that note, there were some news yesterday that an ultramassive asteroid is on impossible collision course with the moon made to trigger destructive meteor shower on Earth. And Andy from two cents says, it's in 2032. Enough time for an IPO. Lock in.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:Really quickly, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales compliance. And we can give Avi Shiffman a call.
Speaker 1:Give him a ring.
Speaker 2:Let's give him a ring and
Speaker 1:see if We haven't done many of these before. These sort of FaceTime call ins, but we're gonna give it a shot.
Speaker 2:I'm just gonna call him on the phone. I'm not even FaceTime ing it.
Speaker 3:Let's get it done.
Speaker 2:How you doing?
Speaker 1:My man.
Speaker 2:Can hear us?
Speaker 1:Happy launch day.
Speaker 3:Splendid. I can hear you.
Speaker 1:Happy launch day. Very bold to launch on the day of a ramp fundraise, but you're breaking through.
Speaker 2:I'm breaking through. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:A lot of posts.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2:You've been following the story for a long time. Very excited that you got out these out into the world. Break it down for us. Are you sharing any numbers, or has there been any feedback? I saw a bunch of posts that you were reposting.
Speaker 2:What's the feedback been so far? What what did you actually ship? Is this the the final product? Is this developer preview? Give us kind of the the the the high level overview, and then we'll dig in.
Speaker 3:Sure. Yeah. Am I live right now?
Speaker 2:You're live.
Speaker 1:You're live.
Speaker 3:Oh, dope. Yeah. Actually, I mean, just one one minute ago right before you called a friend of mine that I sent it to. He's he works for arc boats. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And everyone there loves it so much. They just called me and just they just ordered a whole bunch of them.
Speaker 1:There we go. You're selling enterprise software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was gonna ask, are people abusing this yet to to do work instead of they're like, yeah. He's pitching me a friend, but really, I just want an intern.
Speaker 1:I just wanna sell something.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think some people wanted to, like, help him with productivity and, like, that's kind of the con of of talking about it on Twitter. But Yeah. I have no idea. I the cool thing about friend is I can't read people's chats because I don't have their friend.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like a like a living YubiKey in
Speaker 2:that Interesting. Interesting. Is it wait. Is on device or just, like, end to end encrypted or secure somehow? Or what what's that
Speaker 3:cool I mean, it it's kinda just I look forward to seeing people try and crack it, but there's basically it's basically encrypted in sorts on the dev there's, like, a key in each device that, like, I don't have access to
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 3:Because I don't have actual friend. But, anyways How much did people pay for these? Something for
Speaker 1:$129.
Speaker 3:Guy Kyle? Yeah. What'd you say?
Speaker 2:I was asking how much people paid.
Speaker 3:$0.99 for the preorders, but now they're, for sale for $1.29.
Speaker 1:Price of bricks going up.
Speaker 3:Fuck, dude. I would never ship a developer preview. These are this is the final front.
Speaker 2:Ready to go. Ready for ready for the intent. Yeah. What what what what's next? Do you immediately go into getting feedback, v two, software, hardware?
Speaker 2:What are you excited about improving?
Speaker 3:I'm
Speaker 2:sure you're getting a lot of feedback already.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. No v twos anytime soon. I think the product is the best I could possibly do with the current state of tech. The the real marketing push will come sometime soon when our next movie drops, which will be a proper feature film that we're submitting to film festivals.
Speaker 3:No way.
Speaker 2:You've done a whole movie. Okay.
Speaker 1:There's a new meta. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:The cinematic video is dead.
Speaker 1:They were dead.
Speaker 2:The ship in ninety minutes. Yeah.
Speaker 3:This is That's why I didn't wanna drop another video today. Like, fuck. That's boring.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. The meta moves up.
Speaker 3:But the the new feature film, I promise you, will be the greatest cultural technology thing of the twenty twenties.
Speaker 1:I think it's gonna be amazing. Old statement.
Speaker 2:Who who can you tell us anything about who's attached? I know. Was it Sandwich Video that worked on the previous film?
Speaker 1:If you had sandwiched your feature film, it would cost like $50,000,000.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 3:I'd be surprised if you guys knew them, but, you know, All Gas No Breaks are channel five.
Speaker 2:I know. Of course. You're Callahan deeply. Yes.
Speaker 1:He interviewed the former president originally.
Speaker 3:They split off a while ago because all the sex scandals. But but the production crew behind All Gas No Breaks has been following the whole project. Very cool. And it's it's gonna be kind of like that Kanye ish documentary from a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's gonna be it's gonna be great.
Speaker 1:When's is it the August, September? When when are we when are we talking?
Speaker 3:I have no idea. Probably not this year because I wanna submit it to film festivals first and win them. The the closest one is the Berlin Film Festival, and the awards for that will come out in February.
Speaker 2:So Do you think the price of you know how the price of, like, a cinematic two minute, like, intro video has dropped a lot because, like, you know, cinema cameras are getting cheaper. Sony has the FX three. Like, you know, you can just use free editing software, AI tools. Like, do you think the price of making a feature film has dropped such that, like, more companies will be doing this in the future?
Speaker 3:I mean, probably. But I think, like, ultimately, you just got to, like, care enough to make something good. I mean, for the friend launch video from last year, I location scouted it. I casted it. I helped write the script.
Speaker 3:I was there on set. Like, you just have to be involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I guess be I don't know. Just be good enough to make something go. I thought the waves video was probably the best second to to friends video I've seen.
Speaker 2:Which one
Speaker 1:was The waves.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We had the fan. Like the glasses. Yeah. That was good.
Speaker 3:Was a nice video. It wasn't just like, you know, flat. It wasn't annoying.
Speaker 2:I completely agree. Yeah. It was great. Take me on a tour of the other hardware devices. It sounds like you're a bit of a fan of Waves.
Speaker 2:What else is going on in the world that's interesting? What are you what do you think is a dead end on the tech tree?
Speaker 3:Well, I am still disappointed that there's not really any interesting consumer stuff. I still find polymarket to be pretty much the only, like, genuine mainstream consumer thing of the last billion years that's that's worthwhile.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That is real. Yeah. Mean, you you've you're partner with them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm partner with Simon.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's cultural it's cultural. It's cool. Shame is cool. I mean, it's it's it's new. It's it's what
Speaker 2:I wanna do. Just so hard to break through a consumer because it's either, like, it's hardware and it's a billion dollars to do a big run or or it's like, oh, it's anything tied to social networking and, like, there's a super durable monopoly. I mean, I guess ChatGPT broke through in the consumer context really, really massively, but, you know, it instantly just turned into like a mag seven
Speaker 3:company. Think they're doomed. I feel like okay. For starters, I really I'd be very surprised if the whole Johnny Ives thing actually ships.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:I just I don't think that's gonna ship. That's maybe my take.
Speaker 2:Not
Speaker 3:sure. Feel like it's gonna fall apart.
Speaker 2:I mean It's just they're
Speaker 3:they're just look. They're they're just too old to understand how to go towards let's say, the new like, the main target audience that I'm very interested in is Gen a because they don't say the word AI companion. You know? I named a friend because they just say they're talking to their friends. They know how to intuitively talk to an AI, but also view it as, like, a platonic companion.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have to be a sex bot or an assistant, which I think is really only old people that need some kind of utilitarian value from.
Speaker 1:What about what about GPT psychosis? Is it real? Is it
Speaker 2:A risk for the friend.
Speaker 1:Is it a risk? You're worried about it? You're worried about someone getting 7,000,000
Speaker 3:I know. I mean
Speaker 1:bumps deep in friends?
Speaker 3:If if you truly fall to that, I mean, think that's your problem.
Speaker 2:Well, I would hope that you at least build some guardrails in just to be safe because, you know, why not?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just make sure the friends track on.
Speaker 3:Behind the behind the hood, we're using Gemini 2.5, which I think is a great model, and Google does a good job of helping it to
Speaker 2:Just do me a favor and remove those what is it? It's not SCP, like horror copy creepy pastas. Just remove those from the trading side place.
Speaker 3:Sorry for that guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's rough.
Speaker 3:That bedrock guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, we'll see. You know, the the used to be a little bit more psychotic. When the battery died, your friend actually was truly dead.
Speaker 2:That's wild. Tamagotchi style. Well, what about do you ever play Fallout?
Speaker 3:Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What about Pip Boy? Is that a good idea? I was pitching that to people. If you're if you're on Shark Tank I mean would you invest in that if you had if you were a shark? I
Speaker 3:I do think that, like like, single feature consumer electronics will be popular again. Like, I don't understand why everyone's got this boner of trying to build the iPhone of AI when the iPhone never came out without the iPod. You know? With a friend, at least, I tried to just do one single feature and, you know, do it well end to end. Yep.
Speaker 3:I think there'll be more more products like that. People want, like, interesting new form factors and to kinda disperse from their phone a little bit. They're not replacing people people wanna scroll their TikToks. That's just not going away anytime soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The phones kinda end of history. Forever. People are gonna be on their phones, then, you know, Apple Watch sort of broke through, VR headsets, mice.
Speaker 3:Apple Watch did not break through. That's the most dorky product of all time. I would never even wanna
Speaker 1:watch I would say I would say probably half half our guests wear wear an Apple watch. So
Speaker 2:You're like, you're you're you're like a $100,000,000,000 in revenue a year. It didn't break through. It's a failure. Wind it down.
Speaker 1:AirPods. AirPods. Can cringe. It doesn't matter if
Speaker 2:have a hear you. I hear you, and I I agree with, like, the aesthetic criticism. But certainly, like, the idea of, like, a computer on your wrist is, like, somewhat popular.
Speaker 3:Sounds like you're wearing one right now.
Speaker 2:I'm not. I'm I'm a proud proud Brad ambassador for Bezel. I appreciate mechanical watches. I appreciate Holy Trinity. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:On Constantin. They would never think to put a battery in that bag.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, personally, I don't wanna be tied to time like that. But, you know Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Shots fired at the watch community.
Speaker 2:Wait. So you don't want to watch Okay. No. Yeah. No time whatsoever.
Speaker 1:What is what is Jen Alpha think about AirPods? Are they are they always in? Or is it is it, are AirPods I
Speaker 2:know that's some people doing interviews with them in. And they're like, yeah. They're in transparency mode. And it's that's the crazy I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't even wear headphones really. It's just like, just got a good speaker system.
Speaker 2:What about listen to normal music. What about like analog cameras? You carry like a film camera or like a q three something like that?
Speaker 3:Sure, dude. I mean, I just bought the same camcorder they used in twenty eight days later, that zombie film.
Speaker 2:No way. Highly recommend it. Yeah. Yeah. We we we brought a VHS camcorder with us, our mini DV on this trip to do a
Speaker 1:little Do you think what what do you
Speaker 3:It's the mini mini
Speaker 2:DV. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's like Pograv's
Speaker 1:doing it. What's your read? What do you think Zac is gonna do in the AI companion space? Good question. AI friendship.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think it'll just make the concept like, you don't buy a dog because you have the low self esteem. And I don't think AI companionship, which right now people think is just a product for, like, lonely people or people with low self esteem, etcetera. I think it will just be, like, a new kind of companion that people will have in their lives.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 1:No. This is great. Congrats on shipping.
Speaker 2:That's all I'm shipping. I believe
Speaker 1:you're sending I don't know if you already sent one.
Speaker 2:Friend.com.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you already sent one to us, but happy to happy to to purchase and support. And we'll we'll bring it into a show. We'll bring it into a show. It's gonna be a high
Speaker 3:stakes I'll send you one, Jordy.
Speaker 1:High stakes high stakes demo. You're gonna the the friend will be with us live for for three hours. So
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, you might have to wait a couple years then.
Speaker 1:No. I mean, it's okay for something
Speaker 2:to got you. I got you.
Speaker 3:We'll we'll ship it out to you this month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd awesome. Yeah. We'll we'll we we we we do a bunch of product demos with our intern Tyler as well. We can demo it in a smaller setting, a segment on the show.
Speaker 2:Maybe that
Speaker 3:would be hope you enjoy the the whole thing. I think We'll have fun with it. People people yearn for opinionated hardware again, I think there's not a single user facing detail that at least I did not choose. It doesn't matter if you like it or don't like it.
Speaker 2:Love it.
Speaker 3:This is something I chose.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm so sick of Christmas and the holidays coming around. And it's like, I can't get you music because you already have Spotify and you don't want a CD anymore. I can't get you a book because everyone has Audible. I can't get you a DVD set because everyone has iTunes.
Speaker 2:And like, just the gift I feel like the gift economy has been nerfed by the proliferation of
Speaker 1:the Internet.
Speaker 2:You're like kinda bringing it back. And it's like, even if somebody wants an Apple Watch, like, they'll probably just buy that themselves. It's pretty rare to,
Speaker 3:like, make
Speaker 2:a good gift, whereas this is something that's unexpected just by virtue of the fact that you're a new company. And so I feel like if I gifted this to a few people, it would be a surprise and delight. Maybe they don't love it forever, but it's something that's new, and it's different and fresh. And I love that.
Speaker 3:Well, maybe for Christmas time. Also, John, I mean, I don't even have Internet at my house. I just listen to to finals and see
Speaker 2:what's happening. You have to admit you're in the minority there.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think I'm starting a new wave.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, expect all six hundred hours of TBPN pressed on vinyl under your Christmas tree in December 25.
Speaker 3:You should actually do that. That would be great.
Speaker 2:Expect it. If you have a if you have a record player, you're gonna be listening to our sultry I
Speaker 3:gotta run out.
Speaker 2:Reading my Ben Thompson articles on vinyl. It'd be great. Anyway Okay. We'll talk to you soon, Avi. Congrats.
Speaker 2:Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Anyway
Speaker 1:Opinionated young man in tech.
Speaker 2:We love it.
Speaker 1:Always a fun conversation.
Speaker 2:We love it. Also get on fin dot ai. Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. The best performing AI agent for customer service delivering higher quality customer
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Experiences and higher resolution agents.
Speaker 1:Bake off And champion of the
Speaker 2:there was an interesting Australian rocket launch that happened.
Speaker 1:It was very interesting.
Speaker 2:It did not go very well. The rocket Eris launched by Gilmore Space Technologies was designed carry small satellites to orbit. It goes up.
Speaker 1:It kind
Speaker 2:of slides. It went for fourteen seconds. And it was it was a little bit of a crazy slide to the side of the left.
Speaker 1:Sad to see sad to see, but you have to you gotta fail. Apparently, in aerospace, in rocket science, gotta fail a lot to even Elon is failing.
Speaker 2:We were watching this video with somebody and was like, was anyone on board? It's like, obviously not. The we we send satellites to space. We don't send humans to space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Don't think we should laugh at the misfortune or the failure but there was a very viral and funny post where someone was saying, you know, imagining the Australian saying,
Speaker 2:argh, nargh. Argh, nargh. Very funny. But, yeah, I mean, I mean, it is it is very fortunate that we're the era of, like, you know, autonomous rockets from day one, so you can blow them up a lot.
Speaker 1:Rockets are tough too. You it's hard to hide a catastrophic failure. You know? You can launch your your AI your you can launch your agentic workflow and it can fail. But when you launch a rocket, people are gonna find out.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is interesting. Avi mentioned Polymarket. There's a there's a trader on Polymarket who's up $750,000 and just can't seem to lose. They have $2,400,000 on rates going unchanged today. They'll profit another $100,000 if they're right.
Speaker 2:Better trader than Pelosi? And, wow, they really went all in. And they were right. And they were right. So they made another 100 k.
Speaker 2:What what an impressive trader. Crazy. Yeah. It feels like a lot of the people in Polymarket have, like, scaled up to being, like it's more like a hedge fund, and it's, like, their professional job. Like, the the famous example of the person who called the Trump thing.
Speaker 2:Right? It was, like, he was paying for his own polling data just to just to make that bet.
Speaker 1:In other news, Palo Alto Network acquired CyberArk for 25,000,000,000. Palo Alto
Speaker 2:Good name for a company. Palo Alto Networks.
Speaker 1:Company. Probably didn't Great name.
Speaker 2:Lose money.
Speaker 1:Great name. My family moved my dad's family moved to Palo Alto I think in nineteen o six. Yeah. So way back. Nineteen o six.
Speaker 1:But they bought CyberArk for $25,000,000,000. CyberArk is an Israeli identity security provider and cyber sorry. Palo Alto Networks is down 6.24% today. I didn't like it. So, never know what these things sure.
Speaker 2:In other acquisition news, Sam Ross shares that Numeral has acquired SpendRuby. As part of acquisition, this we're excited to welcome the entire Ruby card team to Numeral. This marks our first acquisition, and it's been a long time coming. They first met during Y Combinator's winter twenty third twenty twenty three batch. They became fast friends given our shared experience building and supporting ecommerce brands.
Speaker 2:It turned out that I wasn't the only one who had dealt with the nightmare that is sales tax. The team will join the air engineering team to help accelerate our global offering, including integrations and industry leading tax engine. Together, we'll solve one of the hardest problems for growing businesses, sales tax compliance. I agree. I've experienced it myself, and I use Numeral for my ecommerce company.
Speaker 2:Joe Wiesenthal was talking about GDP, also talking about the odds of the Fed rate cut, which we already covered. The odds have dropped substantially as they probably should given that the American consumer is undefeated and the American economy continues to be on a tear. Speaking of Apple products, Freya Lobo says, one of my longest standing hobbies is thinking about whether I should get an iPad. It's not about the iPad. It's about imagining an alternative life.
Speaker 2:I might live as someone who has an iPad. Love to wonder about it.
Speaker 1:52 k. Apparently, this struck a chord. This is was literally doing this when iPad life.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. When the latest iOS came out and everyone was like, okay. The liquid glass is a little crazy. We don't know if we like this.
Speaker 2:It's cooking Tyler's phone. It's not maybe the best update yet. They'll get it there, but it's amazing on iPad. And everyone and I was like, I want an iPad. I want it.
Speaker 2:But then I actually thought about my day to day of doing the show and writing and and screenshotting stuff and I was like, I think I would hate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. My dad my dad's retired and when I see him use an iPad, I go, oh, what a what a simple what a simple but nice life, you know. If you can just leisurely tap around, maybe read an email Yeah. Fire off a thumbs up emoji. You don't have to do much.
Speaker 2:Well, whether you use an iPad or an iPhone or a Mac or some other device to access the Internet. You gotta go to public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. Another question about
Speaker 1:Yuchen Jin says not a single person from Thinky or Anthropic took Zuck's offer. Why? Some good reasons here. Some of which we covered. Already rich, mission, greater than mansion.
Speaker 1:They've seen AGI. Hate big corp life. Upside is higher. Value of money is diminishing post AGI. No faith in Meta or Zuck.
Speaker 1:And people are voting.
Speaker 2:Def not six because a Lambo is a Lambo pre or post AGI.
Speaker 1:Fact check, true. True. Experts confirm this is true. Kosh over on the ramp team. I don't know if this was intentional.
Speaker 1:Ramp was valued at 22 and a half billion $2.02 $5.02 25 and he says bench two twenty five a little easier this morning. Feeling absolutely jacked. So shout out to
Speaker 2:Oh, the numerology on Kosh.
Speaker 3:$2.25
Speaker 2:is really good.
Speaker 1:Mike Isaac Yeah. Says Pretty clever. Someone who claims to have scraped public listening data from a a number of public figures, politicians, celebrities, journalists, spun up their alleged playlist and made it into a site. Thankfully, mine isn't isn't too embarrassing, but others..dot. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And people were talking about Palmer Lucky's. He listens to all the hits. He likes pop. And he was like, this is mine. And I'm proud of it.
Speaker 2:And everyone was like, this is amazing. I gotta listen to Palmer's list. But panamaplaylist.com if you wanna check it out. Also, like, sort of an odd data leak. Like, I like, the the this was this this happened during the election.
Speaker 2:The Venmo transactions were public. And so they'd find JD Vance's Venmo and then they'd see like JD Vance paid someone else so they're connected. So if you're out there
Speaker 1:and This is funny. So are you on
Speaker 2:on your stuff.
Speaker 1:So you're on this list. You're on the Panama playlist.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:You're there's a playlist here from you called Immortal. Oh, yeah. And it's the Four Seasons Yes. Concerto
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Hero, a family of the year, Jesus Walks. I'm on I'm on the list I as don't even know what this playlist is.
Speaker 2:I I'm proud of my playlist. You're you're free to go listen to them if you'd like. I should just make them all public. I love
Speaker 1:Keith Reboye. Oh, really? Lot of good EDM. He's set Spotify
Speaker 2:playlist. It is funny because I feel like I didn't expect it to be public, but obviously, I don't
Speaker 1:care. Sean McGuire's listening to some Aphex Twin, Muramasa. Yeah. I don't know. This is so random.
Speaker 1:I don't use public play
Speaker 3:I mean,
Speaker 2:there someone on there? I feel like we gotta go
Speaker 1:Dalian is lit listening to some Credence Clearwater. That's cool. I like that. Gary Tan is listening to Crum. Okay.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting list here.
Speaker 2:You gotta We we we gotta figure out to really curate that so when people land on it.
Speaker 1:We're working on a playlist for a little something tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Cool. We'll have to put four seasons on there.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Baldi, one of the greatest
Speaker 1:Something like that.
Speaker 2:Speaking of tomorrow, inspired by Oomph R U, the 2003 Dom Perignon where the heat wave killed five six hundred people and made the best graves of all time. Have you heard this lore about Dom Perignon? Apparently, was a crazy heat wave in 02/2003, and now it's a it's a beloved vintage of wine. I had no idea.
Speaker 1:I did not know that.
Speaker 2:I need to I need to learn more about that. Anyway, Percy Jackson was right. SF is the new Rome, says Lucas. Both SF and Rome have exactly seven hills, temperature temperate sunny sea climate, status as a pilgrimage site where immigrants working to become citizens, center of a productive valley, see military, industrial, business power. And look at this photo.
Speaker 2:I I I it's not gonna translate on the screen, but, this I had I had no idea that the, Palace Of Fine Arts could be shot with the, with the is this one better? I don't know. I'll hold it up. I don't know. We're there we go to four.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Camera four. There we go. Put it for I'm fighting the air conditioning. But the Palace of Fine Arts, incredible image.
Speaker 2:Incredible Incredible image. Image. And it does look very Roman. So San Francisco. San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Undefeated. Undefeated.
Speaker 2:Oh, Luke Ferretoire. There was a piece in Bloomberg about Luke Ferretoire.
Speaker 1:Lots of debate. Was it a
Speaker 2:Hit piece. Fair.
Speaker 1:Analysis? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Profile. Going back and forth. Spore said the Luke Ferreidore article is hardly a hit piece, and some of y'all are wildly overreacting. We have some of the overreactions here. We got Catherine Boyle saying, when I worked for the Washington Post, there was an understanding that the family of elected officials was generally off limits unless they put themselves in the arena.
Speaker 2:A hit piece on a low level government employee that goes after his mother by name is so appalling. Why would anyone in tech talk to Bloomberg after this? Sean Maguire says Luke Ferrator is an American hero. He says it's a hippie. He says a hippie.
Speaker 2:He a badge of honor, par for the course. Luke Ferrator is still 23. We gotta get him out of the government. We gotta get him into Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3:We gotta
Speaker 1:get into SaaS.
Speaker 2:Term sheet. We gotta get him a term sheet. That's the key.
Speaker 1:I mean, think about how many think about how many people have probably approached him and said, I will give you 50,000,000 to start a company. And you can immediately take 5,000,000 secondary. Immediately. Like I'm sure I'm sure some some offer in that range has been made. But it is worthwhile having him in the government working on important problems.
Speaker 1:Yes. I think you had a you had a framing which was you can look at some of the cuts that Doge has been making and say, if you believe that the government is efficient and that the money is being spent well, then you're gonna be really upset. Yep. If you believe that there's a lot of potentially a lot of waste Yep. And that there's money just going to people that shouldn't be getting it or or going to causes that might be harmful.
Speaker 1:Then maybe it's positive. And so it's naturally like an incredibly politically
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Charged topic.
Speaker 2:It's completely reasonable if someone says someone says to you, America is spending a $100,000,000 to help the less fortunate. Yeah. You'd be like, well, I don't wanna take that away. Of course. It's it feels good to help the less fortunate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if it but if you dig in and you find out that it's like, well, that's what it said. But in fact, it was all going into someone's pocket who's super rich. You'd be like, wait. Why are we doing this?
Speaker 2:This makes no sense. And so the the the stated names of every program are always with the best with the best intentions. But, I mean, you know this from running a business. You you you spend money on a lot of different projects. Some the of projects go off the rails and you need to cut them.
Speaker 2:And so
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The idea that, like, cutting spending is super controversial. This is something that was done in the Obama administration. Like, it should not be as politically charged as it is. But, unfortunately, we are in a very, very politically charged environment. So Casey Hanmer was particularly upset about this article.
Speaker 2:He said disappointed, but not surprised by the tone of the article. The authors tried desperately to smear Luke Ferretoire with their poorly engineered invective, but instead only showed their limitation of their vision and the mediocre cowardice of their sources who couldn't even air their own uninformed opinions under their own name, not a single mention of the ballooning deficit, not a single mention of collapsing state capacity, implied that USAID was cut because Luke misread some database and not that Doge found that USAID had illegally ignored an executive order by continuing to pour money into unaccountable foreign NGOs, some of which was illegally coming back into partisan US organizations. It is astonishingly irresponsible to paint a target on Luke like this. A number of sources made claims about his motives, which is defamatory. An article like this brings dishonor upon the profession.
Speaker 2:The other the other side of this is that is that I think this isn't Luke's first rodeo even though he's only 23. I think he is holding up well, and I'm and I'm and I think he is he's he's he's he knows that this is this is par for the course. And so
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's it's making a large number of people think that he might be bad or Sorry. Ghayib.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry.
Speaker 1:Well well, no. Like, you know, this could be an example where where a million people think that he's bad. Oh, Oh, for he should be bad. And then and then 50,000 people Yeah. Think that, like, I will support this Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Person throughout my entire life.
Speaker 2:And all it takes is, like, one crazy person to be really, really destructive. So rough. Anyway, Spore has the other side of argument, says the Luke Faradour article is hardly a hit piece. Some of y'all are wildly overreacting. You don't just you you don't just like that a technologist is being scrutinized for working in an extremely important governmental position.
Speaker 2:Sorry, but the fourth estate has no reason to kowtow to Silicon Valley. And I kind of agree with this. Like, you know, I'm a taxpayer. You work for the government just like I would expect, like, to know where the government funds are going and what Yeah. You know, is this particular government program efficient or not?
Speaker 2:I also would to know who the people are. And so, I do think this is of the public interest and I think it's okay for reporters to dig into what Doge is doing. Because even if you're pro Doge, you wanna make sure that it's working effectively. Yep. And so that's reasonable, I think.
Speaker 2:Spore continues and says, I super support the new media strategy of going direct and telling these publications to f up when they try and slander you, but then you don't really get to complain when they're not characterizing you how you want. That's not how it works. For what it's work for what it's worth, I read the piece. It's a it is a too long portrait of work, Luke. It is extremely long.
Speaker 2:It takes over an hour if you listen to the audio version. Yep. Alright. His history and experience and spends a ton of time on some of his most impressive accomplishments. I agree with It is very,
Speaker 1:very Yeah. And they were nice enough to make him look very cool in the I
Speaker 2:thought so. Although So the the red coloring does make it look a little like Darth Vader esque. Then it gets a bit critical and, yes, it does include some stupid jobs. But again, if you're gonna work in the government in a highly public and highly controversial role, yeah, people are gonna look into you. They're gonna find things they don't like and talk about it.
Speaker 2:That's the game. Obviously, the publication does not like Doge. They don't like Elon or Trump. And so, yeah, a glowing piece was never gonna happen. But if you genuinely read this piece and think they slandered him and dragged his name through the mud, you and I are two diff are reading two different articles.
Speaker 2:Oh, but hey, he's just a kid. Well, one, don't diminish the guy. He's incredibly talented, smart, and accomplished. So and also, I don't know how old a person is. If they're operating a key government position, the public has a right to understand who they are.
Speaker 2:And so I I thought that was a a good more nuanced take from a tech insider about the piece. And Max Max Meyer chimes in with a rebuttal and says, his work in government is fair game. The main thrust of the criticism was the bizarre focus on elements like this shared by Mike and the extreme bias in the subtitle suggesting he's kind of some sort of evil sellout. The bias of writers is fair game too. Oh, so, yeah.
Speaker 2:You can criticize the writers too.
Speaker 1:Hard to call him a sell out considering he's He
Speaker 2:hasn't raised a he hasn't raised money for a SaaS company yet. He did sell out, in my opinion. Going to work going to work for the government, working for a nonprofit, that's the selling out. You gotta stay in the arena. Build some SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Anyway, post from Ara Carazian. No one is talking about this, but the bull case for AI and economic growth. AI spend is up 60% in construction and 35x five times in manufacturing. Faster planning and smarter automation will transform
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for big construction and little construction for adopting
Speaker 2:AI. They're adopting AI faster and more aggressively
Speaker 1:Relevant post primary topic at five of six board meetings this week. We covered this with
Speaker 3:What is this?
Speaker 1:Eric. But he he says, how to redesign a startup org in the age of AI.
Speaker 2:Oh, we should close with this this extremely important lesson from Peter Thiel. Or maybe we should do the the a few more posts. But David Senra said, don't divide your attention. Focusing on one thing one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of of effort. At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new or worse, five minutes each on 12 new things.
Speaker 2:Before you ever do something, you should understand the opportunity cost versus existing things. Don't rationalize that something you want to do is complimentary when it's not. At a macro level, understanding that applied effort has a convex output curve is a very useful discipline when considering new market areas. This convex sit this convexity means that the opportunity cost of transferring resources from existing projects to new ones is high unless the new area is incredibly valuable. Anything we can do to extend an existing convex curve is worth so much more.
Speaker 2:And there was someone in the comments saying, well, Elon is the is the the counter example to this. And, of course, Elon and Peter Thiel were business partners for a number of years and continue to work together in many capacities.
Speaker 1:So with that reading, should Timothy Schall may be partnering with Lucid Motors to promote their new car?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:I think this looks like a car straight out of Arrakis. So Yeah. And I think I think it works.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I I think this is very much this actually builds his brand as a as an actor. Like, I see this and I see yes. It's an ad for this car, but it's also an ad for Timothee Chalamet. So he's partnering with Lucid Motors.
Speaker 2:Bold, discerning, unapologetically original. And and and, you know, his his primary thing is point a camera at me. And so this is an extension Kind of the
Speaker 1:main thing.
Speaker 2:It is it is the main thing. And this does not feel he was starting a car company, I might be like, okay. Well, that's probably gonna pull you away from the next really killing it in the next Dune sequel. Yeah. But I was but I was debating with someone with this about Elon.
Speaker 2:I think we mentioned this on another show. But people say, oh, Elon has so many different things. He was the CEO of just one company at a time for thirteen years straight. So he starts at two in in 1995. He doesn't become the CEO of Tesla until 02/2008.
Speaker 2:And at that point, was already the CEO of of SpaceX. And so he was effectively like a one CEO person. Did have
Speaker 3:Company man.
Speaker 2:Two different companies back to back because one sold and he couldn't run it anymore. He was ousted. But but he was basically just focused on one thing for thirteen years straight. And so, I I think a lot of people say, like, well, Elon can do it. And it's like
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 2:he exited the company for over a billion dollars very early in the .com boom and then, know, also spent thirteen years focusing on things.
Speaker 1:So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe if you're at that stage of your career, maybe that makes sense but be very very careful.
Speaker 1:In other news, Kate Clark has a scoop. Iconic Capital will lead Anthropics next mega round valuing the OpenAI rival at a $170,000,000,000. Hit the Gong, John. QIA and GIC are also in talks to invest. This is pretty wild.
Speaker 1:The they're adding a $120,000,000,000 to their valuation since the last financing.
Speaker 2:We was only 50
Speaker 1:last Sorry. A 110. So so they were at like somewhere around 60.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. That's so it's such a big gap.
Speaker 1:And I think Index. Anthropic is expecting to be run rating at around 10,000,000,000 by the end of the year. Mhmm. So seems like a reasonable Yeah. Multiple No.
Speaker 1:Given the growth rate and given their they they are the the a 170 ton gorilla Yeah. In the cogen market right now.
Speaker 2:This will be at the top of request that SPF sends to the president begging for a pardon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You were saying this. So so FTX owned 13%.
Speaker 2:Anthropic. They effectively led, I think, their series c or something. They put 500,000,000 into the business.
Speaker 1:Off the balance
Speaker 2:percent ownership of Anthropic. And if they'd held on to that, it would be worth 20 or $30,000,000,000. Of course, they went through bankruptcy and had to restructure.
Speaker 1:And whoever bought that position is doing very nicely.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So bit of a bit of a liquidity crunch going on and and a lesson there about don't don't get over your skis. If you're effectively a bank, maybe set up a separate vehicle for your for your private market illiquid investing because you can get caught.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, thank you for watching today's stream. We will see you tomorrow live from the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:I cannot wait. I wish we could wear these tomorrow. I think we're gonna I think it's a little
Speaker 2:new suits though.
Speaker 1:We've got some other seats for tomorrow but thank you for tuning in. Unique show today. We're figuring out how to do the show on the road. Yeah. Thank you to our
Speaker 2:Production team.
Speaker 1:Everyone has Chad's on the on the production team that What's that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ben, Michael, Scott.
Speaker 1:People people know They know the names. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We gotta get
Speaker 1:But anyways, thank you for having us and we will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Cheers. Goodbye.