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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.
Watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 07/14/2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have an amazing show for you today, folks. One of the best shows.
Speaker 1:I I it's the it's the best day to be a journalist. It's the best day to be a live streamer.
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 1:It's the best day to be a commentator.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not a slur.
Speaker 3:Commentary business.
Speaker 1:Commentary commentator. Yeah. That's not a slur.
Speaker 3:A lot of people ask us to not yell in the microphones. We we cannot help it. We just get a little too excited sometimes.
Speaker 1:But massive weekend. As soon as we got off the stream on Friday, the news broke that Windsurf was being sort of pseudo It was a
Speaker 3:trade deal.
Speaker 1:By it was a trade deal.
Speaker 3:Really was a trade deal,
Speaker 1:not a meme. I believe this broke at 3PM Pacific, which is just after market close.
Speaker 3:Just after we went off air.
Speaker 1:Just after yeah. Which one were they targeting?
Speaker 3:That's a
Speaker 1:big question. I think they were more worried about the TBP and coverage than whatever the market had to say about the deal. But the deal was that Demis Hassabis here has a post. He says, very excited to welcome Windsurf AI founders, Mohan and Douglas Chen, and some some of the brilliant Windsurf engineering team to Google DeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini effort on coding agents, tool use, and much more.
Speaker 1:Great to have you on board. And so this was received sort of as like, oh, okay.
Speaker 3:So here's here's kind of the timeline Yeah. As far as I'm concerned. So immediately, our initial reaction, we're here at the studio. Yeah. We were off air.
Speaker 3:Our initial reaction was, okay, another one of these quasi Yep. Acquisitions.
Speaker 1:People call them shell closers.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Everybody's gonna Yeah. Get care It's fine. And immediately, a lot of people started kind of freaking out on the timeline Yep. Saying that the employees had been screwed.
Speaker 3:Yep. Our immediate reaction was, this doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Why so would very stupid.
Speaker 3:Why would all the parties from the the founders to the investors Yeah. To Google tolerate something like this?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then, call it 24 later, I was still getting messages from employees that thought they were getting total zeros.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And at that point in time, I started kind of reevaluating Yeah. Reevaluating what may have happened Yeah. And their
Speaker 1:And I think I I think to be clear, like, the the current employees, they they saw the news and they didn't get a check. They didn't get a wire transfer. And they also didn't even get an email saying, hey. We did all the calculation. And based on the share price, like, you'll be expecting this much money.
Speaker 1:It might take a month for it to clear, a couple weeks to clear, but, like, here's your expected payout. There's nothing like that.
Speaker 3:People apparently were crying Crying? Reaction to the news. Here's the thing. This was a unique company. Right?
Speaker 3:So so Yeah. Windsurf launched in November of twenty fourteen. The product. Oh, sorry. 2024.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The product. Yep. But if you had joined a few months prior to launch Yeah. Worked on the lead up to the launch Yep. Launched it, seen this, you know, incredible growth Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And then scaled to what you originally thought was a $3,000,000,000 exit Yeah. To OpenAI. And then you find out that you're actually
Speaker 4:So rough.
Speaker 3:You're getting to to to you're you're actually gonna continue working at the company while dozens of your best engineers and your founders go and leave Yeah. Effectively to then go and compete against against you, right, in Yeah. Cogen.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that that that roller coaster is just absolutely insane. And so really unique dynamic that was different than a lot of these other, know, the the character AIs, the scales, etcetera. Where in those situations, many of the employees had been there long enough that they had vested a meaningful They amount of had certainly reached their cliff. Yeah. In this situation, you could have joined in, you know, in August of last year and not hit your cliff.
Speaker 1:Not hit your one year cliff, but been there for the entire run of Windsurf as a product. Yeah. Like from zero to what? 40,000,000 ARR
Speaker 3:was the rumor? Mean,
Speaker 1:you you watched the launch, you're like, cool. I got it right. I picked the correct I I picked the correct startup. I picked the correct rocket ship. I'm on board.
Speaker 1:In Silicon Valley, you know, these option these stock option contracts, they're kind of like lottery tickets, but my number came up. And then you go to the gas station or something to cash it in, and you're like, wait, we don't know how much it's actually worth, and it's not just like a tax issue. And so, a lot of people very upset. And we'll get into kind of some of the of the debate around this. So what's interesting is that I have Varun Mohan, who is the CEO of Windsurf.
Speaker 1:He has not posted at all, still. The last post he posted was on June 20. So I think, maybe it was a little bit more recently.
Speaker 3:Yeah. To be clear, he's been completely muzzled.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. I mean, that that that's what we believe to be true. But it but it was weird.
Speaker 3:Because he's not muzzled and he's just chosen silence. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. The last time he really engaged with anything on on acts at least was when
Speaker 3:Wait, John. I have to interrupt Okay. Because it's now live. Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 3:The acquisition includes Windsurf's IP, product, trademark and brand and strong business. And above all, it includes Windsurf's world class people.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:We've privileged to welcome Really? Our team.
Speaker 1:They they don't hold hands to me.
Speaker 3:We are also honoring their talent and hard work in in building Windsorf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured that 100% of Windsorf employees will participate financially. Yes. They will also have all their vesting cliffs waived. What?
Speaker 3:And will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work Let's go. At Cognition, we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents while Windsorf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devon and Windsorf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side will soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devon's code base understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devon's in parallel, complete the highest leverage parts yourself with the help of auto complete and stitch it all back together in the same IDE. Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision
Speaker 1:It makes so much sense.
Speaker 3:For the future of software engineering. And we've never and there's never been a better time to build. So, there's a video up between, Scott Wu and Steve over at Windsurf. And we're hoping to have them on the show later today if we can coordinate
Speaker 1:Well, that'd be awesome. Yeah. That'd be great.
Speaker 3:Cool. So anyways, this apparently Scott got to work
Speaker 1:like Pacific Friday.
Speaker 3:And not only negotiated, I mean, to to do this kind of deal during all of the chaos this other deal that's happening. Yeah. And then put together a deal that delivers a a win for every member of the team. That's amazing.
Speaker 4:And the
Speaker 3:other thing that's interesting here is, you know, historically Cognition had I wouldn't say over invested in engineering, but they were heavily heavily skewed towards technical talent. Sure. The people that got left behind at Windsurf were
Speaker 1:We're less
Speaker 3:technical sometimes. Enterprise account management GTM, right? That's crazy. Over the weekend, I'd heard other teams that were kind of circling Yeah, yeah. Wanting to hoover up their GTM team.
Speaker 3:But the fact that they were able to get this deal done in just a couple days is fantastic.
Speaker 1:This is incredible. So Wow. What a a fantastic end of the story.
Speaker 3:Or a beginning. New beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah. New beginning. New beginning for sure. I don't even know if we should go through the full the full history here. We can kind of go through whatever.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, you kind of know the end of the story, but I think we should take you through some of the debate that rose up. And there's still the question of, like, even though it feels like everyone got the good ending, there still is this question about, like, we're in this weird zombie structure structure era where you can be left in limbo. What is the cost of that? What is the risk to that? Do we need new employee contracts?
Speaker 1:Do we need new understanding of how of expectations? Yeah. Because it's one thing for a CEO to say, Hey, I'm building, I'm trying to build something really cool in Silicon Valley. I'm going to build a tech product. And I want you to join me as a salesperson, operations person, an engineer, whatever.
Speaker 1:And we're going to go on this journey where you can go really hard. And we're, we want you, we all want to be aligned with like thinking long term. So we're doing a four year VAST with a one year clef, pretty standard. And the expectation, at least the history has been you will have clarity throughout that process. And now that we're in this weird, weird regime, like you're getting like, okay, the last chapter of the book could be really dramatic.
Speaker 1:But we got the good ending, and the question is like, has there ever been, if this deal kind of exposed the risk of like the bad ending, and that it is possible that that could happen. It didn't in this case. But, the big question I think people are debating is like, how much of this is is due to the chaos? How much of the chaos is a function of FTC and the antitrust regime? And Ben Thompson talked about that a lot.
Speaker 1:Versus just the differences in communication styles of different Mag-seven companies. That's interesting. The experience of CEOs, like, you look at the way Scale AI handled it. Alex Wang is he's a generational communicator. Been on Theo Vaughan.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Different dynamic too.
Speaker 1:Know, it's new.
Speaker 3:Suck lead in acquisition Totally. Having having that sort of founder mode confidence fully in control of the And, you know, it it it, you know, everything, you know, we've heard from various parties says that Varun was muzzled. But again, you like everybody involved should have been saying, how do we avoid making it so that hundreds of people don't feel like they've been Yeah. Completely screwed. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Even for twenty four hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the evidence Hundreds that was
Speaker 3:people feeling overwhelming.
Speaker 1:The Yeah. People people
Speaker 3:were people were messaging me Friday and Saturday morning saying the windsurf employees got screwed. Yep. And I was messaging them back and being like, you're misreading this. This is the standard deal that they've always done. And then the overwhelming amount of more information from high quality sources saying, no, they're screwed.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It it just flipped and I said, okay, maybe maybe they are. Right?
Speaker 1:You know, you know
Speaker 3:And and the key so so now we don't we had this whole other kind of tangent that we were gonna go down, which is like what happens to the ghost ship. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's could potentially be this like Lord of the Flies dynamic where there's now hundreds of people that are still working on Windsurf, but the competitive pressure is insane. You're losing a lot of your top talent and your founders is are you gonna be able to keep momentum or is churn gonna be crazy? Totally. And, and then do people try to stay a long time so they can get like a distribution or do some people leave because they wanna pursue other opportunities? And now we don't have to debate that because Windsurf is home with Cognition and Scott Wu.
Speaker 1:And you know the best part about that?
Speaker 3:What's that?
Speaker 1:Everyone, all those employees who are now onboarding to Cognition I
Speaker 3:know exactly what you're gonna
Speaker 1:They're getting ramp cards baby because Scott
Speaker 3:Time is money save both.
Speaker 1:Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. And you know Cognition has a huge lineage with the ramp team. And so we're very we're very excited for Cognition, we're very excited for Ramp and we're excited for all of the Windsurf employees who landed.
Speaker 1:Well, this is funny because there's so much that we should that we could go through. I think we should go through a little bit of the timeline of like what actually happened, how people how the debate evolved because it is very interesting. So the the the context of like why is Windsurf selling at all? And I think this big question, the first one is, let's just say hypothetically, you owned 100% of Windsurf last week. And let's say a completely financial investor comes to you, not if there's no even like big tech dynamics, it's like Warren Buffett.
Speaker 1:He calls you up and says, I want to buy 100%
Speaker 3:of your stake in He's like, these agentic IDEs. I need it.
Speaker 1:I need it. I have to have one. I have to have one. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I wanna buy I wanna buy a great business at a fair price. Let's do a deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So that's the question. Is is like, if you were if you owned a 100% of Windsurf, Jordy, would you sell at $2,400,000,000 last week? And I think for most people, the answer has increasingly become yes.
Speaker 1:And there's a few reasons. So the last the last big post that Varun, the CEO of of Windsurf had interacted with on X was this post by Technium who says, Windsurf wrecked. And it's a quote of Nick saying, breaking. Anthropic just pulled the rug on Windsurf. Windsurf will be cut off direct will be cut off from direct API access to Claude in less than five days, 3.5 SONNET, 3.7 SONNET, 3.7 SONNET thinking.
Speaker 1:Windsurf never even got direct access to Claude four anyways. And so this has been the question of, you know, how much like, if you are in this, like, wrapper business, I think it's I think it's a great product. I think it's I think it's great. I think I'm actually very excited about about wrappers, but there is this there is this anti there is this competitive dynamic with the underlying Foundation Lab, and Anthropic does seem to be more aggressive about Yeah. Where the value accrual will happen.
Speaker 1:So, you know, if it's if it's fifty fifty by default, all of a sudden, Cursor and Windsurf start pulling 80% of the gross margin dollars from what they're adding on top. Well, then the underlying foundation model is gonna say like, hey, like, let's pull this back. Let's make sure some of those credit cards live in our Stripe account. Yeah. And you're not just paying us big API fees.
Speaker 1:And so there's a big debate about this. Cursor had to go through it. Windsurf had to go through it. And Varun responded to this and had a good analysis and was basically making the case that, like, we can get through this. And I think that's true.
Speaker 1:I think there's totally a world where it gets true. But to your you were saying earlier, like, it is an extremely competitive market. They were not the number one product in the market. That's Cursor and by most accounts. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so and so they were in a, you know, not a super tough spot. It's a great growing market. It's it's, you know, it's developer tooling. How many how many, you know, database softwares, enterprise SaaS products are on the public market? Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's like there's like like the seventh one is probably worth 10,000,000,000. Right? So it's not like they couldn't have gone higher than 2.4, but Mhmm. 2,400,000,000.0 feels like a great deal for a company, for a product that's one years old one year old, for a company that's four years old and a hyper competitive space with
Speaker 3:Product that launched
Speaker 1:And less than a year your direct suppliers are trying to come for you getting aggressive. And so this went on Hacker News. Not sure how much you should read into it, but they said, Web Serve is absolutely dead in the water. And while Cursor hangs on for now, all value is going go back to the models, says Jake. In my opinion, other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded.
Speaker 1:Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort considering the number of freeopen source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things. Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less money to develop than forking an entire IDE. Clog code is dead simple to onboard. Use whatever IDE you're using now with a simple extension for some UX improvements.
Speaker 1:Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins middlemen like Cursor in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue and training data access.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so so the the other context here is this year, Anthropic, you know, Windsurf went from zero to somewhere around a $40,000,000 run rate. Yep. Anthropic this year has gone from the beginning of the year to 1 to $4,000,000,000. And so they, you know Yeah.
Speaker 3:However you you wanna say, they've been running running away with the market. Yeah. And Cursor's, you know, revenue is is equally incredible although from Yeah. Starting from a smaller base.
Speaker 1:And so this was some of the like, okay, things might be getting tougher from here on out. Yeah. I don't know that I fully agree with that but but people were saying this. And then we covered this last week but the meter team did these evaluations where they ran a randomized control trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up open source developers. And what they found was that developers said that they expected products like Cursor and Windsurf to improve them by 20% but they were actually 19% slower.
Speaker 1:And so you have this weird dynamic where, okay, maybe the future is like so I I don't know how real this is. I think that we could totally be in a world where Curse is incredibly valuable for less experienced developers working on more vibe coding projects than like pushing the pushing the frontier of really advanced projects. And then also, just the next the next version of these tools could be really cool and and solve this problem. But there was some worry that maybe developers were gonna take a hard look at their AI coding IDE stack and say, wait a minute, like, I'm kind of using this too much. I'm leaning on it too much, and maybe I should just like go back to the old way.
Speaker 1:So there were some reasonable points around like, maybe now is a good time to exit.
Speaker 3:Right? Then,
Speaker 1:so so after so after that, the question becomes, when you sell, you have the board has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Yep. And the big question that I think everyone was actually debating was this concept of was the Windsurf deal with Google a Pareto improvement for all stakeholders? Which means, in a Pareto improvement, basically, you can think of like the baseline is how everyone's doing. In a Pareto improvement, some people might go up a lot.
Speaker 1:Other people might go up a little in in value, but no one is going down. Not a single person is going down. This is the goal of like all political legislation. You wanna create things that are not just positive sum in the sense that like, you know, I tripled my net worth and you only lost half. Like that sucks.
Speaker 1:Right? You don't want that. Pareto improvement is like, I tripled, you doubled. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I won
Speaker 1:but we both won and we're both happy. Right? And so, in a good acquisition deal, everyone is per it's Pareto improvement. Everyone gets more than they than they, you know, had before. Everyone gets paid out.
Speaker 1:Then the flip side is something called Caldor Hicks improvement. And a Caldor Hicks improvement is where some people go up, other people go down, but when you sum them, it's still a net improvement. Mhmm. So very few people were saying like, you know, the VCs, even when you add up the VCs and the employees and the founders, it's a net loss for everyone. Very few people were
Speaker 3:making the argument. And to be clear,
Speaker 1:the employees got hosed.
Speaker 3:It seems like everybody would have done better Yeah. On an open AI everybody would have done better on an OpenAI acquisition. Probably. And so when the 2,400,000,000.0 number came out the evening of of Friday Mhmm. It seemed like, okay, not as great.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But still everybody's gonna do well. Yep. And then twenty four hour twenty four hours later, it was, oh, wow. Like this might have been structured in a very funky way that Yep.
Speaker 3:You know, people were I won't I won't report the number but people were messaging me information on how much Varun Yeah. Personally made and that was still in the
Speaker 1:context You of can just do the rough math. Found her stake. Couple rounds of dilution. How much do you think he made? Right?
Speaker 1:Like it's not rocket science to figure this or to at least ballpark it to the right order of magnitude. Right? But you build a great product that gets some traction, that solves some problems and you build a great team and big tech wants you like you you know, I I'm not upset about it. Yeah. But the question was like, what's fair for the employees?
Speaker 1:What's fair for, you know, all the different stakeholders? And so, a lot of people kept coming out with really interesting stories. So William Allen here has one, about Scott Belsky and Behance going to Adobe we should read through. Yep. So William Allen says, I don't think he's ever told the story, but it's worth telling.
Speaker 1:When we were selling Behance to Adobe many years ago, Scott Belsky made a spreadsheet of every employee, 32 of us at the time, and personally negotiated each person's title, salary, and incentive structure and made that part of the overall deal terms. I'm going to choke up. It's so virtuous. I heard the phone calls where he went to bat for each individual. He he not only didn't have to do this, but it actually complicated some of the other factors in the deal, of course.
Speaker 1:It changed the trajectory of so many people's lives, including my own. Two years later, 100% of that original team was still at Adobe. Even today, a dozen years later, many of the core members are still there building. I was inspired by it then, and I'm inspired by it now. And so I think that was a good case study in, like, the founders do have a lot of hard power in the sense of board control and actual voting shares.
Speaker 1:Almost every founder can veto a deal which gives them leverage to build that spreadsheet and actually decide who gets what. And then on the flip side, they have a ton of soft power because you can't really do a hostile takeover of a private VC backed company where the founder has board seats and stuff. Just doesn't work. And so it's incumbent upon the CEO to actually take that step, And that was the fear that Varun didn't do that, that he didn't go far enough.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There was another there was another example from Parsh, Ilya Sukar's So one of his former employees says, we got news our startup was being acquired five days before my one year cliff. I thought I'd get nothing. Our shares were accelerated to a 100%. It was a life changing event and I'll always appreciate that our founders did the right thing for us at Parse.
Speaker 3:And said, Ilya Ilya quoted it and said a 100% acceleration for everyone but the active founders. We went backwards and reinvested our vested. Glad someone remembers. Very heartwarming.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, people were people were debating, you know, did like was the core team taken care of? It feel it felt very rough. But then pretty quickly, it came out that So we were going back and forth on this on Saturday. And and and the core the core debate, like your post went pretty viral, like you got 2,000,000 views, 4,000 likes, and it and it definitely struck a chord.
Speaker 1:Folks were debating this one line Yeah. From what I've heard, the employees are getting screwed regardless of their vesting status. And it's like
Speaker 3:And that was because people had people were on a four year vest Yes. But they hadn't hit their cliff Yes. Even if they had joined eleven months ago Yes. And had again, they had worked on the product up until launch Yep. Launched the products Yep.
Speaker 3:Scaled it
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Thought that they were getting this three bit, you know Yep. Massive outcome in which again, they've some people would have not been able I'm I'm sure OpenAI wouldn't have kept everyone. Yeah. Right? Totally.
Speaker 3:I'm sure that they would have made a bunch of people effectively reinvest in
Speaker 1:post merger acquisitions like that happens all the time. That's not that's not a crazy thing. So certainly reasonable. I mean the other question is just like you know, if you worked at this company and you were like, I like working at this company. I I really would love to work at Google and you don't get carried along like that is getting screwed.
Speaker 1:Like not getting a job at Google in some ways is getting screwed. Even just the ambiguity over the weekend is a little bit of like a screwing. And so, I still will defend your initial characterization, But I thought that there were things that could potentially shift the narrative and so I quote tweeted your yours with the steel man argument which is one
Speaker 3:And we tried to get a a a knight in shining armor suit. We we were getting the steel man suit ready but then we knew we didn't have to.
Speaker 1:Production team will get the steel A steel man suit. Knight of suit of armor eventually. We we we need to order from a prop shop. We take Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the way. We're working on it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:We're going and just make And sure it's great when it so, I had three points. One was that employees who haven't reached a one year vesting cliff don't have that strong of a claim around I built this with sweat and need a liquidity event and we don't know the ten years of all the left behind employees. So there is an argument that like, if you joined three months before, it was already like really big like, should you really get accelerated four years and like
Speaker 3:And I I never would have made that argument Totally. But it was a fact that you could have worked there eleven months 100%. And gotten zero. Yes. It's like, no, you're getting a ride on the go ship Yes.
Speaker 3:Ride the go ship
Speaker 1:in the sunset. And
Speaker 3:that was in the context of the founders and this is why people in Yeah. Group chats and DMs were were getting so angry because it was in the context of, you know, somebody that worked for you for eleven months was potentially gonna get zero. Yep. Now, that's not not the case now. And then and then you're walking away effectively Yep.
Speaker 3:Defecting Yeah. And and taking a multi $100,000,000 payday.
Speaker 1:It it is a weird dynamic with these start ups because clearly, I I don't know exactly what Windsurf's headcount was. I think everyone was saying it was around 500 at the time of this deal. And a year ago, pre pivot, what do you think their headcount was? Couldn't have been more than 50. Right?
Speaker 3:Definitely not.
Speaker 1:So you're looking at a 10 x increase in in employees who haven't really been like they've been on this rocket ship, so I think I I personally think they totally deserve liquidity and accelerated investing, which it sounds like they're getting and and it sounds like they're gonna do great. But but it but it is like not the nature of the initial contract, which is like one year cliff, four year vest. Like, if it came out that it was like, okay, they're getting paid out to the tune of, you know, how long they've been there, I don't think anyone would be like that upset, but then somebody was making a good argument that basically, like, you When you sign up with like a four year vest, you're saying, I'm going to keep working for four years. If you sell the company and put me on some zombie ghost ship, like, I didn't bail, you bailed.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you so you shouldn't you should accelerate me. And I I I actually think that that
Speaker 3:argument The the other dynamic here was so when Character AI
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:When when the Character AI founders and and part of the core team went back to Google. Mhmm. The Character AI became a ghost ship. Mhmm. But it was cool in the fact that they had 20 plus million users.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They also had a 100,000,000 on the balance sheet. Yeah. And it wasn't this like insanely gnarly enterprise market where and and I know and I know people on the character team. Yeah. And they were like, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3:We have a $100,000,000. We have tens of millions of users. Yeah. And we're just kind of gonna experiment Yeah. To try to find, you know, figure out how to monetize Yeah.
Speaker 3:This. And I just don't think that that was I I don't see that the code generation market in the same way where
Speaker 1:I trying to think about that like is there a world where you know, if the ghost ship had planned had had like stayed a ghost ship and they pivoted, is there some world where they you know, niche down like there was this rumor that they were gonna niche down into b two b like could they have niched down Windsurf into some like niche category and actually had like a pretty durable business? We were talking about like could Jeremy Kaffan make it work if he acquires it and like turns it into some cash flowing business. I just wonder like is there is there a niche where like, I mean we've heard we The example I would give is like, we've heard that like these code gen tools are like particularly bad at like rewriting old programming languages like Fortran for example. And so Yeah. If you created like cursor just for like rewriting Fortran, it's like that's not sexy at all.
Speaker 1:That's not gonna be hot on on Twitter or X. But it could be really valuable in like, you know, the bowels of like legacy banking and like Yeah. You could pay, you could charge a bunch and you wouldn't like the TAM wouldn't be very big but the business could be quite good. And and that that that might be a weird outcome, but it could be a silver lining. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Well, anyway, the second point that I made was that, you know, I said the second the real culprit might be FTC antitrust. This is a hyper competitive market, and Google still feels like they can't just do a normal acquisition. And I thought that was crazy because it's like, this is textbook, they should be able to acquire this company, right? Like, cursor's out there. They're not acquiring a market leader.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:OpenAI is clearly going after this market. And to the tune of what's what what's their valuation? Like 350,000,000,000 or something like that? Like
Speaker 3:like We haven't we we should try to get an update there.
Speaker 1:But like
Speaker 3:I not think the Masa, I'm I'm not sure the the full MASA
Speaker 1:It's not even one tenth of it's it's greater than one tenth of Google's market cap. Right? Yeah. And so you're looking at like and then is Microsoft gonna compete in this? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:They have They
Speaker 3:already do.
Speaker 1:They already do. And so
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It it it it's like you're you're basically like, I don't know, second, third, fourth in this market. There are four very serious players. Like, this should be textbook rubber stamped, good, good to go, do the deal, no problem.
Speaker 3:There's also a there's also a very long list of founder led companies that were that are may that were maybe less hyped than Windsurf, but have incredibly talented teams. There's like poolside.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Poolside.
Speaker 3:That's There's there was that one that Nat Freeman and Daniel Gross did that was Magic? Yeah. That was The magic
Speaker 1:dot dev.
Speaker 3:I haven't
Speaker 1:They were found apparently, they were training their own foundation model for a while, and that was kind of like, you know, very CapEx intensive and and and maybe slowed down some things in the product side. But still like, clearly it's competitive market. Everyone's working on it. They're also, we're we're missing out like there's probably a ton of YC teams they're working. There was actually one YC team that got in trouble for forking like cursor too hard or something.
Speaker 1:Forcing a little too hard. They crossed some line there. I think they did fine and I think that they wound up like cleaning it up. But people were upset about like when you fork something, you have to abide by the MIT license or whatever the underlying license is. And so, you can't just like steal open source code and not abide by the open source rules.
Speaker 1:And then, and then I said three new facts might come out, which they did. And the FTC thing was interesting because there was a little bit of pushback on that. People were saying like, Oh, like Lena Khan ate my lunch. Lena Khan's like like like responsible for everything. And I wasn't I wasn't necessarily saying like Lena Khan was 100% responsible for how this was was was structured, or like how this played out.
Speaker 1:But she did kind of like warp the road a little bit that made it a little bit wonky to drive on.
Speaker 3:Basically, made hardcore capitalism illegal. So we nerfed capitalism. And then and then capitalism ended up coming in and saving the day.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 3:With Scott Wu.
Speaker 1:Seriously. Seriously.
Speaker 3:So the solution
Speaker 1:to Anti capitalism is more capitalism. This is the Brad Gershuner point. Yeah. Totally. And so so I still don't I I still think that there's a there is a way that even with the weird new FTC antitrust regime, Google and the Windsurf founding team could have probably been a little bit more aggressive, taking a little bit more FTC risk and avoided this whole PR dust up.
Speaker 1:But that would have been more risk for Google. And I think that the way they did this here where they
Speaker 3:I mean, it's a great outcome for Google. It's like, we didn't buy the company.
Speaker 1:Look. Exactly.
Speaker 3:They bought the company.
Speaker 1:They bought the company. Exactly. So it really it really is a great outcome for Google. Even though I'm sure that they their comps team was up all weekend calling people. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like I I have to imagine that this was like I
Speaker 3:mean it it was War room for them. It was like serving, you know, it was it was the best possible story that the New York Times could have ever asked for.
Speaker 1:Yo, totally.
Speaker 3:It was like big tech
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Buys hot company that was competing, you know, not not necessarily Yes. Like the whole point of of Lena Khan's thing Yeah. Was that, you know, big tech is like squashing competition Yeah. By by you know, buying these companies early. And so you had the story that that was served up to them which was, you know, exciting company in cogen, lot of traction.
Speaker 3:Yep. OpenAI almost buys them. Google says, okay, we're gonna buy them. That's Google. Google and OpenAI are arguably, you know, the the two competitors that actually like matter Yep.
Speaker 3:In search right now. And so it was just the perfect story. And then and then the, you know, I I think Scott Scott over at Andreessen had a good post that I that let me pull up here for a second. He was basically saying, there is an irony that Lena Khan's activism has resulted in deals that are far worse for everyone except the people she was targeting.
Speaker 1:Wait. Who's who
Speaker 3:tweeted this? Sorry. Martin Casado.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. From Andreessen. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And yeah. It's like the the people with the lowest, you know It's crazy. Seemed at the time that the people with the lowest leverage, the employees that had joined recently Yep. Were getting the worst outcome
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Out of out of a deal that that should have benefited everyone.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking for code review for the age of AI, head over to graphite.dev. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev. So my question is, Google, it feels like PR nightmare, accidental PR nightmare because they had done what? Character?
Speaker 1:Just fine. It it was not that big of a deal for them. Not a and bit then scale it up.
Speaker 3:Well, and it was very clear that that that situation was interesting too because it it Google has delved into social in the past. Hasn't had the best
Speaker 1:the ChatGPT script
Speaker 3:to me. No. That that was intentional, of course. No. But they've they've they've they've messed around in Yeah.
Speaker 3:Social. Yep. You could tell that Google doesn't wanna own the AI chatbot. Totally. Totally.
Speaker 3:They just don't want the association
Speaker 1:And there was a rumor that Gnome didn't wanna be
Speaker 3:in that.
Speaker 1:They they kind of like, was just like, I wanna train a great model. I wanna train a great model. I wanna do AI research. And then that became the use case. They found product management.
Speaker 1:Then he was like, I don't really like And even
Speaker 3:today, Elon's see launching today with the I don't even I won't even say it on on the show, but his new launch today basically signals that that that is a very important
Speaker 1:And he's interested in that market.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He's interested in that market.
Speaker 1:Yes. Anyway, my my question for you is is, so feels like a PR nightmare for Google, feels like a couple stressful days, feel like
Speaker 3:Great timing over the weekend.
Speaker 1:Then that's my question. Do you think that they are that they were intentional and happy about releasing the news after market close because the the the all of the facts had come out over the weekend? And it was such a hairy deal that more deals needed to be done even after the story came out and it couldn't be super clean. So you have to do it on on late on a Friday. So then Saturday, Sunday, people can talk, deals can get done, and then announcements can go out Monday.
Speaker 1:And then it resets the whole news cycle. So you kinda skip the the the crazy news cycle. I think
Speaker 3:I think the world's too online. So I think I think it helps that that that it wasn't a weekday. But I mean, to to me, this this whole thing, you know, from from everything that we've kind of triangulated this Yeah. This could have been avoided by managers taking it upon themselves to basically call Yeah. Each individual person at the company Yeah.
Speaker 3:And say, before before you have a negative Yeah. Reaction, I I need you to be patient. Yes. I know you've been patient through this this Yes. Deal with OpenAI.
Speaker 3:Yes. It's not the deal that we wanted. Yeah. But we are working to make this a a positive outcome for anyone and and don't cry yet. Yes.
Speaker 3:Don't just don't cry.
Speaker 1:And it's really hard. Particularly hard because if you if you're in the scale situation, a lot of those people had been there for four years. And with Windsurf, most of those people had been there for less than a year, almost certainly. And so the strength of those connections socially outside of work is weaker. So there aren't as many, oh yeah, like my boss, like we we're already on signal with disappearing messages, so we just talk back channel all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like I mean, the crazy thing too is the argument was the new company has a strong balance sheet
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And they're gonna be able to just do a distribution or pivot or that was effectively the suggestion.
Speaker 1:It was intentionally ambiguous.
Speaker 3:And at the same time the the employees left behind on the ghost ship Yeah. Were already talking with other companies. Other companies were coming to them trying to recruit
Speaker 1:coining ghost ship because everyone involved with the deal would prefer you to use the term remain co. Remain co. But that's not as sticky as ghost ship. I think ghost ship
Speaker 3:Ship without a founder. I don't think that's
Speaker 1:gonna be the last ghost ship we see. I think like a new pattern and we're just gonna see this No. More and
Speaker 3:But but so so then you have this dynamic where the these talented people specifically, I talked to a founder who was talking with a lot of people on the go to market team Yeah. Being like, these are very talented people. Right. They took a company from zero to tens of millions of dollars in ARR and a bunch of enterprise contracts Yep. In a very short period of time.
Speaker 3:Yep. I wanna scoop them up. And those people were entertaining conversations
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because it was just totally unclear to them what what was gonna happen. Yep. So
Speaker 1:So, yeah. I mean, I still I I I think some of our friends hold the FTC like 100% accountable. I'm probably under a 100 but maybe over 50. But my key point is that never lose faith if the FTC is giving you trouble. Dylan Field didn't lose faith when he was dealing with a messy situation with the FTC at Figma.
Speaker 1:And also you should use Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com.
Speaker 1:Anyway, there there was another side of the stakeholders that was interesting that the this that this guy Publius said in your in your in your response to your post, which I don't think anyone was talking about at all the entire weekend. This is cool. And and this is something people don't really think about. I think we're in a good spot with these folks now, and think they'll actually probably be in a better spot now.
Speaker 3:Much better spot.
Speaker 1:But let's read through it.
Speaker 3:Is your getting more work
Speaker 1:Puglias says, there are more stakeholders here that have not been discussed. There is a whole network of software resellers that invested millions into building partnerships with Windsurf. I was leading the team at one of those partners. We have customers that we have been selling to for years who we vouched for Windsurf to. I am sending out a note to our 300 customers on Monday that we are stopping all partnership activity with Windsurf and be effective immediately.
Speaker 1:I hope you didn't send that because it's gotta recall that email. Don't send the email. Cursor has no channel partners and this will cost our firms millions. Oh, interesting. I didn't realize that Windsurf had a channel strategy and Cursor does not.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. So Windsurf actually has resellers who go and sell it into their partners because they're doing something on, you know, we do software development consultancy. We come in and help your team run more efficiently. We help you pick the right tools. You can imagine like McKinsey, I don't know where this guy works, but like, you can imagine a consulting firm coming in and giving advice on what tools to use.
Speaker 1:They
Speaker 3:get
Speaker 1:a kickback from Windsurf. They don't get a kickback from Cursor. So he's gonna lose millions of dollars, hypothetically, hopefully But my reputation and good name is worth more. With Google taking the best engineers from Windsurf, our large enterprise clients are screwed. When they purchased Windsurf enterprise licenses, they were also purchasing an ecosystem that they assumed would continue to improve.
Speaker 1:This is disastrous for any startup tech company with goals of building an enterprise channel. It's interesting. I don't think people have any idea how much this just killed channel sales for any AI company. So the rest of the AI companies out there who are like, oh, channel channel sales is really interesting.
Speaker 3:Basically, if you're if you're if you're a top company in your category growing super quickly
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You might turn into a go ship.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so, if if if I'm trying to resell that type of stuff, then I I have to go to the CEO They're good
Speaker 3:but they're not so good to get these maxed out. They're not getting a trade deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You can count
Speaker 3:on them to not get trades.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You're having you're having dinner with the with the CEO of some AI companies talking to you about like, yeah we have the best software and you're like, but you don't have any like actually great AI researchers. Right? Like, you you mostly just have We
Speaker 3:like to partner with companies with Medium to see.
Speaker 1:Tier researchers. Yeah. Product. It works but not too well because we don't wanna lose you.
Speaker 3:You wanna keep working with them for a
Speaker 1:long They're gonna keep working with you. And so, yeah, there were a bunch of other reactions. Shellqua hires. Let's see. I'm not an M and A guy, but something feels really broken in tech M and A.
Speaker 1:Confidentiality is out of the window. Deals get done and called off on a whim. Lack of rigor and discipline on both sides. Curious to hear what practitioners think. People are going back and forth on this.
Speaker 1:But really quickly, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And so, Will Menidas was particularly black pilled over the week, friend of the show.
Speaker 3:Incredibly black pilled.
Speaker 1:But he it's we're so back, Will. You're good. Will Menidas said, reason that tech has been able to grow so quickly and create so much wealth that it is rich that it that it is that it ritualized a set of norms around corporate governance that are very distinct from what the law actually requires. The second someone defects, the whole ship goes down. He's so upset.
Speaker 1:But basically, he's talking about like hand the handshake deal protocol is not a legally binding contract. Even term sheets. You get a term sheet from a VC, that's not a legally binding that's not a legally binding contract. Like VC can write your term sheet, Everyone can sign it and then you can just
Speaker 3:Literally says.
Speaker 1:Yep. Literally says it says this is not binding and then you can just wake up on the wrong side of the bed and be like, actually I don't wanna do the deal. And or or it could be like you found something in due diligence or you met a different competitor but the like, you know, the game isn't over until the money's in the bank. The experienced entrepreneurs know this, but we run on this like, basically, you know, these society, these like social constructs and these like social contracts that say, hey, if you're the type of VC that constantly rugs on term sheets, on signed term sheets, like, you will there will be a bad vibe around
Speaker 3:you. I can think of two Yes. That that are widely known
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And are still in business. Yes. But they they they it becomes very hard to be an effective VC Yeah. If your brand is you just pull term sheets.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. And some of the some of those folks have been banned from YC Demo Day. Other people have had, like, viral Twitter posts throughout them every once in a while. Like, they they do that to a founder and then the founder becomes very successful at post economic and is like, yeah, I I still have a grudge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm gonna tell the truth about x y or And and so the the thing is is that now where we are now is I don't think I don't think the whole ship goes down. I don't think this is a true defection. I don't think this reflects poorly. And I think that the the question of like, the the big question here was was, will this cause more new startup employees to want to just go straight to Google?
Speaker 1:Let's say let's say that you have the option of working at Google or Big Tech broadly, where you know the paychecks are coming on time. You know the RSUs are liquid and you can just cash out as soon as you get them or whatever their lockup is. And you know your managers because they're gonna be there and the company's gonna be around,
Speaker 3:blah blah Somewhat accurately predict what your comp will be in five years Exactly. And really work hard.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And then and then on the flip side, you have startups which are in some ways lottery tickets, but also you get to work on game changing technology with really cool people. You get to move a lot faster. There's a lot less overhead. It's lot more edifying
Speaker 3:You get
Speaker 1:to work for your people.
Speaker 3:Potentially the next Sundar
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Instead of Sundar.
Speaker 1:And and the economic upside can be a thousand x. It could be huge. And the question is, if that if that deal was broken, if that if that deal was okay, yeah, you can go work on the cool thing, but you might wind up penniless and not cash out like you were promised. That changes the equation and that could pull people away from startups. But I don't think that's gonna happen based on this.
Speaker 1:Because I think the lesson from this is that everyone got taken care of and the social contract still still holds. Although it was very messy and I think going forward every company that's doing a deal like this needs to think how do I get the Scale AI outcome and not the Windsurf outcome. Because just two days of pain is not worth it.
Speaker 3:I think I think one potential solution to these deals Yeah. Is exactly what we just saw happen Yes. Which is big tech company does basically an aqua hire Yep. Of the of the team that they want. And then you simultaneously sell off the underlying asset immediately.
Speaker 3:Yep. And you generate a liquidity event for everybody, so everybody's happy. Yep. It doesn't have to be like life changing. Yep.
Speaker 3:Right? But it has to be something. Right? So that it's
Speaker 1:And, mean, the very key thing is that they left enough money on the balance sheet. Because the money on the balance sheet, and this was this was Hari Raghavan's analysis. He clearly, I mean, the guy's, he's a good friend. He's obsessed with cap table math.
Speaker 3:I know. He was Yeah. I mean, this was capital J journalism.
Speaker 1:Yes. Thank you.
Speaker 3:This was investigative journalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, I mean his post is so long that I need to just go to the TLDR. But the TLDR is that he says, I spent hours last night breaking down the cap table and deal dynamics from public info. I realized that the unvested equity is around 80 to a $100,000,000, awfully close to the $100,000,000 the founders and board negotiated to leave behind in the bank. Why shouldn't management just And that was unvested.
Speaker 1:Is a
Speaker 3:key detail.
Speaker 1:Right? So they So
Speaker 3:they're basically saying we're leaving enough as though you vested your full Yes. Four years.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so and so, if you if it like, it's it's it's still a leap of faith because I don't believe that Google and Cognition were in communication at all. And I think if they were, that would be more like antitrust chaos and stuff. But, just economically, you know that if you if you leave a company there with that much money on the balance sheet and those many and that many like that invested options, somebody is just gonna be like, wait, so I can get that for basically free if and I can make all the employees whole, and I get all the employees, and I don't have to pay really like anything to get that thing. Like it's just gonna happen immediately.
Speaker 1:And because it's just like, you've create you've this you've left this like, you know, a $100 on the floor and someone's gonna pick it up. Like the free market will just work.
Speaker 3:I think the I think the question that I had and that I think a lot of people probably had is, what is the governance structure of the ghost ship? Oh, Right?
Speaker 2:So Jeff
Speaker 1:Crazy question.
Speaker 3:Jeff Wang who's coming on the show at 1PM.
Speaker 1:Oh, he is? Let's go.
Speaker 3:Jeff and Scott will both be coming on at 1PM
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:For fifteen minutes. Okay.
Speaker 1:Can we can we communicate that to the other guests?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so the question is like, okay Jeff, you now run a company with hundreds of employees that are angry about what just happened that that probably like maybe they wanna keep building windsurf but maybe they wanna go and do something else. And what happens like Jeff is basically, would imagine like has to make a bunch of calls. Yeah. It's like, do you just keep running the business? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is there pressure to keep running the business?
Speaker 1:First question Jeff. Did you ever feel like, Is it Frodo Baggins throwing the ring into the fire? It's like, pay out the $100,000,000 in bonuses. After all, why shouldn't I keep it? Throw the ring in throw the ring into the Mount Doom.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The question was
Speaker 1:like
Speaker 3:could
Speaker 1:Were you ever tempted?
Speaker 3:Could could the the new leader the leadership Yeah. Like was it ever Was that an could could the leadership have decided, you know what? We can run this business super late. Exactly. We could actually run this business with like 10 people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and, you know,
Speaker 3:we're gonna run it for a few years And we're to use the advantages that we get from our own products to run a super lean team. And then you would have employees effectively burned again, potentially. But that didn't happen. I'm very happy about it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And the question
Speaker 1:If question is you're big tech and you're gonna do one of these like zombie acquisitions, you gotta leave enough for the unvested shares. And if you're founder and you're gonna do one of these zombie acquisitions, the ghost ship's gotta be full of plunder.
Speaker 3:Full of plunder. It's gotta be
Speaker 1:stacked with treasure because then
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:Then the rescue divers will go and lift the ghost ship off the
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sea floor. If big tech comms are telling you, you can't tell anybody that they're getting taken care of.
Speaker 1:You have to risk it.
Speaker 3:Tell little birdie little birdie to go fly around and let people know.
Speaker 1:You gotta be you gotta be having like quick calls, not not saying anything too specific
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But saying what you said, I think you worded it perfectly. Where it's Yeah. Like it And it don't cry yet. Varun.
Speaker 3:Just poor Varun. Because because he was getting dragged because because By us. He he apparently he apparently People were messaging me, like, he joined like the the all hands for like a minutes. Yeah. You know.
Speaker 3:And it just seemed like he was being like ultra, like kind of like a psychopath being like, see you guys. Yeah. It was a good run.
Speaker 1:And it's like.
Speaker 3:Go go have fun building, you
Speaker 1:know, continuing the not have happened if he had said, no. I need an hour. I need to explain everything. Would that have killed the deal? Almost certainly.
Speaker 1:If that killed the deal, what's the outcome for the employees? Probably worse than what they got.
Speaker 3:You think it would a 100% have killed the deal?
Speaker 1:Almost certainly. If I think one of the key deal points in the negotiation with Google was we do it via Google's comms and legal strategy. Because Google does not want to get hit with some crazy FTC lawsuit that's gonna not just be some multi billion dollar settlement, but also a huge headache for years and bad press and stuff like that. So Google says, hey, we we want to do this our way. It's gonna be awkward, but we're gonna take care of everyone.
Speaker 1:And and yes, we will yes, we will leave enough money on the balance sheet to pay out all the invested options. And but in exchange, you got to do the comms our way which was rough.
Speaker 3:You have to create
Speaker 1:a terrible scapegoated by the entire You have to. You're gonna haze. You're gonna be
Speaker 3:haze for forty eight hours.
Speaker 1:You're getting haze. But then
Speaker 3:And it's gonna blow back on us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Google didn't look hard. Weekend. It was rough. It was rough.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Start building at linear dot app.
Speaker 3:And if you are launching a TBPN derivative product, derivative work, get on linear. Tool we use.
Speaker 1:So what you would do is you'd put all the glasses of tap water that you need to drink and then you would just check those off at a time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Every time you tear
Speaker 1:it back. Like we only have one rule about copying us. It's the derivative works clause in our terms of conditions.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:And in there, if you create a derivative work of TVPN, you are legally required to drink a glass of tap water
Speaker 3:on Every time you go live.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Every time you go live.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, again,
Speaker 1:we don't have to
Speaker 3:We make
Speaker 1:did invent TV. We invented news. Yep. But we we will open source it. It's an MIT license type of situation, modified MIT license.
Speaker 1:Yep. The only modification is that you have to drink tap water.
Speaker 3:Yep. Anyway. Is a small price to pay.
Speaker 1:Anyway, other Question. News
Speaker 3:What do you think why do you think Google did this?
Speaker 1:Why? Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:That is the that is the real question is is we've talked about the role of the VCs. I think based on what happened, never talk down on first ballot hall of famer Neil Mehta. Never talk down on the future for first ballot hall of famer. Everyone was saying, oh Neil Mehta, Green Oaks, they they did this sloppy deal. They're screwing over the employees.
Speaker 1:Employees are great. Neil Mehta potentially goaded. I don't know.
Speaker 3:I agree. I agree. That was well played. I think you'd work. I think No.
Speaker 3:No. But the question is,
Speaker 1:what is why did Google
Speaker 3:why did Google feel like they needed to do a meta style trade deal in
Speaker 1:Yes. It's good So so, Windsurf in my I I don't know everything about all the employees they brought over. So they brought over 50 engineers. I don't know if any of those are like insane AI researchers with like crazy citations on like foundational papers. I don't know that it's the same I don't know that they're trying to build a super intelligence team to really bring their models to the frontier because they already have that.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. Gemini is is at the same, like, level of, like, AI research quality as OpenAI Anthropic by most benchmarks, by most people that use them. Like, it doesn't feel like they're way behind there. Llama four, on the other hand, was a little bit behind. And so and and it felt like Llama four was specifically behind, not on the product side, but on the research side.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. They just weren't figuring out what works in RL. And so they had to bring over a ton of people to just be like, how do we actually train this next model? Like Behemoth couldn't they couldn't tame the Behemoth. Like, they gotta get some Behemoth tamers in the building.
Speaker 1:And it seems like that's why they acquired all the different researchers who know, okay, like, training on a 100 k g h 100 GPUs gives you this, and then you need to use this data, and you need to hold back this data, and you have this this reward function and this reinforcement learning technique, and you need to do all these different things. And so you need AI researchers for that, but Meta has great product people. So, like, they're gonna be able to take what they build and then vend it into Instagram and vend it into all sorts of different places and use it to optimize the ads 1% and make a trillion dollars. Like, they're gonna be fine on that side. Google is great at AI research.
Speaker 1:DeepMind is amazing. They have so many they invented the transformer. They're not behind on the quality of the foundation model. Yeah. They are they are behind on product, and they are they are behind on, like, user experience, everyone complains, oh, they have this amazing v o three model, but, I had to log in seven times to get access to it and then go through an upgrade thing and it was on wrong Google account and then I have to trigger it.
Speaker 1:Then I get some great
Speaker 3:win there. Here's the here's the the
Speaker 1:The steel man for the short sellers?
Speaker 3:No. No. No. Short sellers. Here's what's what's kind of interesting about the way this is developed.
Speaker 3:So at at Google's last developer event
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They've launched Joules which is an async development agent Okay. For for for code cogen.
Speaker 1:It's a clogged code competitor and open AI so
Speaker 3:is like a dev yeah, dev and AI competitor.
Speaker 1:Devon competitor.
Speaker 3:And so now you have you imagine Google has more ambitions around cogen Totally. Right? They've seen Anthropix. Very few businesses actually like will work at Google. Right?
Speaker 3:You need a billion dollars of revenue or you're gonna get shut down most likely. And so cogen is an area that I'm I'm sure they're taking very seriously. I haven't heard a lot about Joules since the event. I haven't heard about people that are that are using it. I'm sure it's I'm sure it's powerful.
Speaker 3:Yep. But you now have a dynamic where some you have cognition and Devon who got knock I can't say cloned by Google, but again, like they were the Yeah. First like serious like enterprise coding Yeah. Agent. And so And and the the Windsurf GTM, you know, sales marketing team versus the former Windsurf founders and top researchers who are now at Google.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so I'm just incredibly excited to watch this play out. Pavel was posting earlier. He said, I hope these guys smoke Google at AI coding. Imagine the chip on your shoulder after this you're a Windsurf employee.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, everybody's gotta be very fired up.
Speaker 1:Okay. Really quickly, we gotta I wanna I wanna track some poly markets around Google. Google forced to sell Chrome. Remember, we were tracking that a while back. There was a question of whether they need to split it up because the FTC we've been talking about the FTC a lot.
Speaker 1:I will pull up this this Google forced to sell Chrome. It is down at 1% now. No one thinks that they're gonna have to sell Chrome. And of course, the the browser war is heating up completely. And I was checking the the the they're not tracking this Sundar Pichai thing.
Speaker 3:Sundar Pitch AI?
Speaker 1:Pitch AI. He has been pitching AI very successfully. But the question of like competition is like it's heating up a ton in browsers and then now it's heating up in this and like the FTC should totally be sitting back and just watching the gladiatorial games play out. And yet, like even though In
Speaker 3:so many I mean, look at look at the vibe look at the vibe coding market right now. Is competition not thriving?
Speaker 1:It's insane. It's insane. Yeah. No. I completely agree.
Speaker 1:And so like I think I think there's a lot of people that are making the argument that like, oh, you can't keep blaming Lena Khan, she's not even there anymore. And it's like, she was there for long enough
Speaker 3:The legacy.
Speaker 1:To really like lay out a new pattern and just instill a bunch of behavior in the big tech companies that results in these in these crazy deals. Anyway, let me tell you about numeralnumeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. It's it's like an AGI for sales tax.
Speaker 3:That's right. Should we talk about Yeah. Zuck's new super cluster?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Let's go through it. Okay.
Speaker 3:So And there's some new reporting from the Times as well around their strategy, we'll cover next. But why don't we start with Zuck hit threads this morning. He hit threads hard. With a thread.
Speaker 1:With a thread. It was very cool. He had a great visualization. I hope we can pull this up. I'll put it in the tab.
Speaker 1:But basically, send bangers.
Speaker 3:There we go. Jarvis. Send link to bangers.
Speaker 1:Send link to Ben. So basically, he has this cool visualization of how big the Hyperion data center is and it's just the full size of Manhattan. Somebody was replying to this being like, he's building the cube. Oh, Sam D'Amico from he's been on the show a bunch from Impulse. He's building the cube because there's this old visualization of like, if you put a billion people in one building in Manhattan, it would just be this cube.
Speaker 1:And so everyone who's like extremely pro building housing is like, let's build a cube. Let's build a cube. Anyway, the news is that Mark Zuckerberg is is giving more details. He he's announcing that like, the super intelligence team is real. It's been only rumored, reported.
Speaker 1:He hadn't he hasn't actually said, hey, we're doing all this. That was all like leaked reporting. He came out and posted on threads, and he posted on Facebook too, saying like, this is real, and here are the details. He said he's gonna invest hundreds of billions of dollars in in CapEx, which is which is what? They're doing, like, 60 to 80 a year now.
Speaker 1:And so I guess, like, it's more just, like, he's gonna continue that for the couple years. He's not giving specific guidance on where the ramp
Speaker 3:four EBITDA was 84 What was CapEx? 85,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, CapEx or EBITDA?
Speaker 3:That was EBITDA.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. Look up the CapEx.
Speaker 3:CapEx was between 38 and 37,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Okay. And then some of that goes towards like reels and then some of that's used for AI and then the AI stuff kind of slips over into Reels and and just other other data center uses. But in general, you know, he's going all in. He's continuing to invest billions. What's interesting is that he claims that Meta will be the first lab to finish a one gigawatt super cluster.
Speaker 1:So he's basically racing against Stargate and thinks that he can bring Meta's next data center online before Stargate. And he's calling his one gigawatt super cluster Prometheus, which is a hilarious name. The guy loves the Roman Empire, apparently loves Greek mythology too. But Prometheus is a very very edgy name to pick in my opinion. Because Prometheus is the guy is the Titan who stole the fire from the gods.
Speaker 1:And, it's like I I get that it's like the seed of
Speaker 3:As Lord.
Speaker 1:Of like the new It's the like seed of humanity. It's the seed of this new thing. It's a great name in many ways. But also, it's like, if God's real, like, he might not like that. And that could be a problem.
Speaker 1:It
Speaker 3:could be bad.
Speaker 1:But, you know, Zuck seems to like, like, Icarusian names. Yeah. Because Orion
Speaker 3:He likes fly I mean, he objectively likes flying close to the sun. He does. That's where he feels at home.
Speaker 1:He does.
Speaker 3:Like the warmth of the sun. The warmth
Speaker 1:of the sun. And you know, the hot take on Icarus is that, you know, everyone talks about, oh, like, you know, don't fly too close to the sun, you don't wanna be Icarus. But you know who, you know the person who was like telling Icarus to do that? No. Surprise surprise.
Speaker 1:No one remembers his name. His name was Daedalus and Daedalus was like, oh, don't fly close to the sun. Who do we remember? We remember Icarus.
Speaker 5:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's And so maybe, hot take, it's better to be Icarus than Daedalus. If you want history to remember your name. Even if you fly too close to the sun, even if you have a great fall, you will be remembered.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:So, maybe it's a, you know, Icarus gets rich, Daedalus sounds smart situation. Daedalus sounds smart, Icarus gets rich.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:I think that might be the what's going
Speaker 3:Your mental model.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I mean we was also On one of the first shows we ever did, was talking about how how how the name of the new VR headset Orion is kind of odd because Orion is like this hunter but was notoriously like over his skis with the hunting, and was killing all the animals, and like was smited by the gods, and you know, and basically like It was it was like a textbook case of like hubris and over aggression. Like like, the moral of the story of of Orion, who is the hunter in in the stars. The reason he's in the stars is because of hubris. And so, it's very funny to name your product like a like a tale of hubris. Maybe it's a reminder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I seriously wanna talk to Zac about this because like I'm very interested like how many layers deep does he go? Because I mean the guy is like clearly like studies this stuff. Like he's like a student of Romanian. I just Google it when a new name comes out and like look at the summary.
Speaker 1:I imagine that he reads it much deeper and I imagine that he gets the joke and and he's doing this almost ironically, which I think is cool. Anyway, the other news is that they're aiming to to scale up Hyperion. So Prometheus will come online in 2026. So that's probably one year away, maybe a little bit more than one year if it it's toward the end of twenty twenty six. And then they're building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to five gigawatts over several years.
Speaker 1:And that feels like simultaneously, like, crazy, insane, ambitious, amazing. I love it. I'm super excited for the capability coming out of And also, like, the biggest glass of cold water poured on the AI 2027 folks, like, of all time. Because, like, I feel like everyone in the AI, like, is gonna be self reinforcing and just ripping. It's like, well, yeah, like, the data center capacity will 10 x every year for the next twenty years.
Speaker 1:And it's like and and Zuck's like, we're gonna five x over the next three years. I don't know how many several years is. I imagine, like, three or four or something. But it's just funny to be like like, it's it's incredibly ambitious. It's the biggest data setter ever, I I believe.
Speaker 1:It's like this massive project. So cool. It's amazing. And it still doesn't match the rhetoric of like the really crazy AI people at all. Totally.
Speaker 1:But you know, it's fun. Anyway, that's the story of Zucks. Any any any other takeaways from the Zuck super cluster?
Speaker 3:Congrats. No. The others We should ring the gong.
Speaker 1:We should ring the gong for Zuck and Let's
Speaker 3:hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Hundreds of billion So
Speaker 3:there was some new reporting from Eli Tan over at the New York Times around Meta's new superintelligence lab is discussing major AI strategy changes. And so there is a picture
Speaker 1:Does that mean like like going close source or
Speaker 3:Yes. I'll read through it. So Meta's newly formed super intelligence lab has discussed making a series of changes to the company's artificial intelligence strategy and what would amount to a major shakeup. Last week, a small group of top members of the lab including Alexander Wang, Meta's new chief AI officer discussed abandoning the company's most powerful open source AI model called Behemoth in favor of developing a closed model. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Two people with knowledge of the matter said Yep. For years Meta has chosen to open source its AI models which means it makes the I'm gonna not I'm not gonna read this. Any move towards a closed AI model would
Speaker 1:be What is what is software?
Speaker 3:Can you talk They to they the New York Times wrote What what they're about to make the computer code public.
Speaker 1:What what what is a computer? What what is code? Can we can we can we explain this for our audience?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We should we should really break it down. We're about to go deep dive. Anyway, so Eli writes, any move towards a closed AI model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won over developers for open sourcing its AI models and one of its top AI executives, Jan Lecun, has said that the platform that will win will be the open one.
Speaker 3:So so, yeah. I think this is obviously still still very much in flux.
Speaker 1:Build Mecca Churchill.
Speaker 3:Mecca Churchill.
Speaker 1:If he builds Mecca Churchill, instant win. Instant Instant win. Over Elon. Totally. They're clearly battling it out.
Speaker 1:They're trying to fight in MMA wars and and and they never they never got that fight down. Now they're fighting it out in AI. Build Mecha Churchill. It'll be such a good meme. It'd be great.
Speaker 3:Something Whenever
Speaker 1:you build Zuck, you gotta sell it to people. You gotta use Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Tailwinds of the last decade are the are now headwinds, says Buco Capital Bloke.
Speaker 1:He says, higher rates, AI labor compression and available role salaries, business model maturity, managing margins versus growth, crowded knife fights versus greenfield, less less liquidity because companies stay private longer slash forever, Worse m and a environment due to regulation, PBD, technology enabled outsourcing. So little bit bearish from the Bucco Capital bloke. Sheil says feels like a good time for everyone to learn about single trigger versus double trigger acceleration of shares. So single trigger is if there is an acquisition, all of your shares vest. I don't know if this would the the the question is like, how do you define trigger?
Speaker 1:Because these zombie acquisitions, you're on the go ship, who knows if you trigger the trigger? But double trigger means you have to be acquired, change of control, and then fired. And so double trigger is
Speaker 3:gonna stay hard to negotiate that if you're just the 300 through the 100
Speaker 1:Almost never happens. People who negotiate are the CFOs who come in.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. CFO comes in, doesn't matter if CFO's employee number 700 or number three, like CFO's gonna get single trigger. Always. Always. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Maybe always, but like the people who know, know, but you should know about it. You should know about single trigger and double trigger. The other interesting thing that I was digging into that we didn't really ever get to the point of like understanding was for a long time people were saying like, hey, you can debate all of the stuff about the windsurf, but the the employees on the go ship, the ones who are in the remain co, the ones who were left behind, they would have vetoed this deal if they could have. I think if you go to them today and say, hey, you're working at Cognition, you're using Ramp now. They're gonna be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm happy.
Speaker 3:I'm
Speaker 1:happy. And it's not like it's not even like they landed at a boring company. I was saying like they could land at like, you know, some old line company that just picks them up. Like, well, what was that company that that Humane like landed at, like, HP or, like, print they're, like, doing, like, smart printers now? Like, that's not exactly like a like a like a upgrade in terms of status and silicon value.
Speaker 3:A paraphorn moment. Exactly. You gotta put your you gotta put these on so can experience the audio.
Speaker 1:Audio. But but but going to Cognition seems like a great upgrade in terms of just like like, you know, being at another cool company. You're still on the start up roller coaster. You're on the ride. You're you you have a lot of unbounded upside.
Speaker 1:It's Potentially,
Speaker 3:I mean, I I I don't I don't wanna be take too strong of a position here. But but Scott and the team at Cognition are are some of the best. And, you know, if you just lost all your engineering talent and you're confident in your own abilities you want to work with world class Yep. Engineering talent really great, really great place to end up.
Speaker 1:Yep. Really quickly, let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on a two on G2, go to fin.ai. Customers,
Speaker 3:well thank you.
Speaker 1:But the question that I was running through, and I was getting to was single trigger, double trigger on, like, that does matter. That is important in acquisitions. But another thing that potentially could be relevant in a future acquisition, if we get sort of like the windsurf situation, one of these zombie acqui hires with the bad ending, where even years later, you're like, I would have loved to have vetoed that. Like, I really didn't, I never would, I wasn't happy with the ending at all, and I haven't changed my position for years. Not just, it wasn't just a few days of chaos, It was like forever.
Speaker 1:I was like, I wish that hadn't happened. I picked the wrong company. The question is, if you exercise your stock options, would you have a different outcome? And so, essentially, when you get a job offer from a start up, they give you a stock option contract that allows you to exercise and pay to buy stock, actual stock in the company, for a lower price. And the question is, your legal rights as a option holder are different than as a stockholder.
Speaker 1:So an unexercised stock option makes you technically a contract creditor, not a stockholder. And so you do not have the bundle of statutory and fiduciary law rights that attach to stockholders. So if there was going to be like a class action for the ghost ship employees, and and they really did want to block it, or they wanted to sue Google, or they wanted to sue the founders or something like that, they would say, this is a breach of fiduciary duty, and I'm a shareholder. You had a duty to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they didn't in this case because if they hadn't if they hadn't exercised. I'm sure some of those employees had early exercise. It's a thing. But it's just an interesting piece of the the of the puzzle that we fortunately didn't even have to go down this road, but I do think that people might want to re have this conversation because I mean, the chat GBT summary says, to preserve more robust remedies that stock law makes available, inspection rights, fiduciary duty claims, derivative suits, appraisal, exercise first, complain later. Exercise first, complain later.
Speaker 1:And so you can do a partial exercise, but if you don't own a single share of the company, then you don't have the right to actually sue the or you you might have less of a claim to sue in in a scenario like this. So it's a it's a potentially rough scenario. Should we go through Elon? Let's switch gears. Elon
Speaker 3:is leading a massive investment from SpaceX into his other company, x AI.
Speaker 1:Yes. We've talked about this. Yeah. Nothing better than one hand washing the other.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:This is what we like to see. Yep. It's so efficient.
Speaker 3:It really is.
Speaker 1:How else do you wash your hands if not with one and the other?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Try wash
Speaker 1:It's impossible.
Speaker 3:Don't yeah. Don't try to
Speaker 1:wash your hands with your 2,000,000,000 from the SpaceX balance sheet, which is what? At 400,000,000,000 now? And they're raising billions pretty regularly and doing tenders and stuff. So SpaceX is, I think, the the largest the kind of neck and neck with OpenAI in terms of private market companies. It's a twenty year old company, very stable business.
Speaker 1:Starlink's print throwing off cash. There's like so much that's been that is mature about that business, obviously. Still gotta get Starship to work. Still gotta get to Mars. Still gotta go to the moon regularly, but, you know, exciting road ahead, but still very solid business.
Speaker 1:And he's taking 2,000,000,000 off the balance sheet of SpaceX and putting it into XAI. And so the the the map of of Elon companies Oh, correct. Is just getting yeah. A correct. It's a correct.
Speaker 1:It's It's a correct. Everything everything owns everything else.
Speaker 3:So The question the question that when when I saw this news come out
Speaker 1:Yeah. What'd say?
Speaker 3:My my first reaction was that Mecca is gonna love Mars. He's gonna love it up there. It's gonna be the first potentially, the first AI to get to Mars. My second reaction was I actually think that if you add up the valuations of every Elon company. Tesla Yep.
Speaker 3:Taking it number seven on the mag seven Yep. 900 ish billion dollar company. Yep. SpaceX 400 ish billion dollar company. XAI which is maybe getting valued at 200.
Speaker 1:It's a 200. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Something around 200 now.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 3:great. And then Neuralink which is what at like 12 somewhere somewhere between like 7. Yeah. Somewhere around roughly around like double.
Speaker 1:Almost a almost a $10,000,000,000 company might as well
Speaker 3:lead. So somewhere in that range.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:It's actually interesting to think of of if if you rolled all these assets up together
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:What do you do you think it would trade at a premium to all of their standalone valuations?
Speaker 1:I don't know enough about Wait. In the public markets or private markets?
Speaker 3:Yeah. In the public markets.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know enough about like because I've I've heard a lot of a lot of public markets investors say stuff like, the market just really wants a pure play in this.
Speaker 3:Want a pure pure play than Elon Inc. Just Elon Inc. Because a lot of these companies still Yeah. Even at various points end up being founder bets. Totally.
Speaker 3:Like Tesla is still a founder bet. Totally. Elon figure out autonomous vehicles.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I I do think that there's this underrated narrative of like
Speaker 3:And XAI too at $200,000,000,000. It's like, I don't think investors are underwriting the the the the new AI companion today. There's there's still
Speaker 1:like, the profit stream or even revenue stream from the API business. Yep. No way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They're, you know, they announced a $200,000,000 government contract today. They were underwriting Elon being able to get deals like that done. Yep. Right?
Speaker 1:So so
Speaker 3:And even even remember, Ben Thompson, we we asked him about this. Yep. And he he basically said, I can't do analysis on Elon companies Yep. Because they are detached from traditional business reality. Yep.
Speaker 3:And so my question is like, if you roll these things up, is this a $3,000,000,000,000 company?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, the the interesting thing is like, like, it does give you as a retail investor, like, you can pull so many different narratives. Yeah. So like right now, just within just just within Tesla stock, if you're a Tesla investor, you can look at what's happening with Tesla deliveries because of the political backlash, or what's happening with the tariff war, the EV tax credit. And you can be like, that's bearish. But then you can simultaneously tell yourself a story about, well, Robotaxi is gonna be so big that it'll make up for everything.
Speaker 1:And then if that doesn't sit with you, you can be like, Optimus is gonna be so big that it justifies a multi trillion dollar valuation. So I'm still a buyer, Right? Because you have, like, these these call options And really,
Speaker 3:it's all about the rare earths on Mars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So imagine imagine that. So right now with Tesla, I see, like, four stories, and they're kind of, like, too bearish, too bullish, potentially. Like, the bearish ones are are EV tax credit and, you know, not being able to sell as many vehicles. The bullish ones are like, maybe he figures out Robotaxi.
Speaker 1:Maybe he figures out Optimus. Right? And that's why you might choose to buy or sell Tesla.
Speaker 3:Or Neuralink chip in your brain with When the XAI
Speaker 1:you put all of them together, it's like on any given day, it's so much easier not to be a panicking. Right? You don't need to be panicking because you're like, well, yeah, like Neuralink got pushed back by the FDA today, but SpaceX landed Starship. So, I'm behind. Or like, oh, the Starship blew up, but, you know, Neuralink, you know, made a monkey play Counter Strike.
Speaker 1:So, like, I'm I'm going long. Right? There's like always some good news to latch onto when you see the the Elon portfolio as a whole. But there's this fascinating chart here. I don't know if we can pull this up, but it's the links between all the different Elon companies.
Speaker 1:So so SpaceX buys SpaceX buys 5,000,000 annually in in vehicle parts, energy systems, and in the Model X Astrovan. So that's money flowing from SpaceX to Tesla. Stainless steel alloy technology, Starship materials for Cybertruck, go from SpaceX to Tesla. And then The Boring Company purchased $300,000 annually in energy systems and uses the Model three for the Las Vegas loop. And so they're buying from Tesla.
Speaker 1:Starlink has a T Mobile partnership, connectivity for vehicle Internet and superchargers in Teslas. And then you have all these other things where, like, Neuralink might link into XAI. XAI did the all stock acquisition of X Corp. And then there's a study to for robotic arm control and future mind controlled limbs that links Neuralink to Optimus. SolarCity was acquired by Tesla.
Speaker 1:FSD is a separate product. So, like, all these companies are overlapping. And the interesting question is, like, should they just be that, Karetsu? Like, and what is stopping that? Should they all just be under one Musk Holdings, Musk Inc?
Speaker 1:And if it was, I think it's that that would actually be extremely uncomfortable in the public markets because there would be all these crazy shareholder lawsuits where So like, you know, if you were if you were an if you were a shareholder in in in like Musk Inc. And Musk Inc. Is public and owns Neuralink, you can
Speaker 3:There's also there's this beautiful cottage industry industry of people that are effectively resellers of Elon shares Yeah. That own a lot of these companies and wouldn't necessarily want this to happen
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Because it that that kind of stops the
Speaker 1:No. Totally.
Speaker 3:Gravy train. I had somebody message me yesterday and said, it's funny how investing in Elon Co's is not too dissimilar for from buying watches from ADs. Yeah. Because like It's true. If you have a great relationship Yeah.
Speaker 3:With your AD Yeah. In this case which is Elon, you can get direct access to the companies. Yeah. Yeah. But if you don't, you're on the secondary market just buying SPVs.
Speaker 1:You're going to get bezel.com, but don't worry because your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
Speaker 3:Great transition.
Speaker 1:So stop worrying about your ADs. Head over to getbezel.com. Anyway, if you're looking to buy Tesla shares, the one Elon Musk company in the public markets, head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions.
Speaker 1:Anyway, in other news, is there anything else that we should talk about with Elon ripping 2,000,000,000 into XAI? Think we're good there. Let's move on to Casey Neistat. Some personnel news, baby. He's joining Mod Retro as chief storyteller.
Speaker 1:That's not a real title and it's not a real job, but I'm excited to be a part of the team. I love the Kandor. Kandor? I don't know. I mispronounced that.
Speaker 1:But he put out an eleven minute video talking all breaking down the Mod Retro thesis all about how planned obsolescence is destroying great consumer electronics devices. You buy something and it's in the trash in a couple years. It's collecting dust and he goes through some of the products that he's had when he was young that still work as intended. They didn't need some crazy software update. It was an IOT toaster.
Speaker 1:It was, you know, the things that he loves, the Walkman, the original Game Boy. And he breaks down how Palmer's thinking about building and and the Mod Retro team is thinking about building a quote unquote like Game Boy that's different from the other companies that are also creating similar, like, emulator products. He's like Yeah. I got this $50 one, and it works. Like, you can actually play it.
Speaker 1:Now, you can't play it at a high level. Like, the frame rate is not like, the the quality of the product is not at a level where it's, like, truly competitive. But also, it's it's kind of designed it just like as, like, you know, TIMU level junk, basically. And it's just like, how can we just, like, slop it up for a little bit? Whereas,
Speaker 3:public It is wild. The I'm so crazy. Just getting to the quality level of the original like Game Boy Color. I have a Game Boy Color from my childhood. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And a while back, I just put in it had been a two decades. I just put in a batteries just turned it on and just immediately booted up and worked.
Speaker 1:And that just doesn't happen anymore with with modern electronics because After Tyler updated the glass.
Speaker 3:Made we made we made.
Speaker 1:How is it? Give us a thumbs up. We're missing a microphone for Tyler today. So, just give us a thumbs up. Still good.
Speaker 3:We got a thumbs up.
Speaker 1:We got a thumbs up. Okay. We will be back on the stream shortly. We will we will buy another camera. We will buy another camera.
Speaker 1:And and we will also buy another mattress from Eight Sleep. Mattress cover. Go to 8sleep.com. Get a pod five ultra. They have a five year warranty.
Speaker 1:Thirty night risk free trial. Free returns. Free shipping. Shane Copeland over at Polymarket says, one day, there may be more AIs than humans creating pricing, trading millions of Polymarkets on everything. A unique benefit of on chain prediction markets is the ability for AI agents to plug in multiple groups quietly print on Polymarket with agentic workflows.
Speaker 1:As AI ushers in super intelligence, Polymarket ushers in collective intelligence. It's happening. I'm using the best AI models. Oh, interesting. Didi's doing something over there.
Speaker 1:I asked it to use modern portfolio theory, bet sizing, make calculated bet. Yeah. Very interesting to see the the interaction of AI and and and like web three or like, you know, just crypto generally, crypto powered protocols because it's like
Speaker 3:This is one that actually
Speaker 1:makes sense because there was
Speaker 3:there was an era of of basically meme coins that were just like, I'm not a normal meme coin. Yep. I'm an AI meme coin. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 3:But this is actually bringing together and and them bringing them together in an interesting way. Josh Kushner, friend of the show had an absolute banger. He said the goal of life is to be excited to go to work and excited to go home.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 3:And I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Put that on a billboard. Josh, go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising make easier and built easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.
Speaker 1:We should add quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Josh, I wanna see that, you know, every VC fund has some, you know, occasionally trite catchphrase saying on their homepage. This is actually a great message. You should take out a billboard in New York City. Thrive Capital or Thrive Holdings or Thrive.
Speaker 3:Our goal for life is to be excited to go to work and excited to go home.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
Speaker 3:This is this is
Speaker 1:I think it should be
Speaker 4:on the billboard.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This You
Speaker 1:think pronatal so? We just made a transition.
Speaker 3:This sustainable pronatalism in tech. Right?
Speaker 1:It is. It is.
Speaker 3:Being excited to go to work and also excited to go home and be with family.
Speaker 1:It is. Should we do Mark Andreessen talking about o three pro? This is fun. So
Speaker 3:One of our buddies got one shotted by this. Yes. So Matt Schumer said ask o three pro based on everything you know about me. Reason and predict what the next fifty years of my life will look like. And Mark said, do not under any circumstances do this.
Speaker 1:I would have told Mark. He's like, you will take your fund public. You will run a massive firm, but it will be a ton of headaches.
Speaker 3:It'll be like, you know that little knee pain you have? Well, you're gonna have to probably get surgery eventually. And, you know, I I think the issue is like Chad GBT
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Knows an incredible amount Yes. About about the the the things that you're working through in life depending on how how you use it. But the things that you're working through in life and
Speaker 1:I still I still think it knows. It does know a lot certainly more than many other AI or many other software systems that I use. Like it probably even knows more about me than Gmail. But, it's still only getting a slice of the picture. And I think that I need to do this because I imagine it will be like, you will you will continue to succeed as a train conductor.
Speaker 1:Because months ago, I was trying to, you know, prompt engineer it into giving me stronger, like, more in-depth data about trains. And so I was like, I am an expert in trains. I own many trains. Tell me all the different brands of trains and the prices. Don't dumb it down for me.
Speaker 1:I am a train expert. And then and then I noticed that once they rolled out ChatGPT memory, it kept being like, know, someone who knows everything. Train expert. And I was like, no I was just prompt engineering. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 3:do this you do this and be like, yeah and yes John. You'll finally get that height reduction surgery. I know you're always complaining about people saying, oh, I didn't know you were so tall. I didn't know you're so tall.
Speaker 1:The funny thing about that is that I that's that's just something that I would never go to ChatGPT with. Right? Like discussion over whether or not being six eight is like good or bad or like I I just I wouldn't have that conversation with ChatGPT. So I I don't know. I I should run this prompt.
Speaker 1:I think everyone should run this prompt. It's kind of it's kind of interesting just to see like the state of AI. Right? And the state of these models. Like, how clear is it?
Speaker 1:But I I actually quote tweeted this and said the line from Terminator, No fate but what we make. Which I know you haven't seen. God. Terminator two. You got to see this movie.
Speaker 1:James Cameron. Come on. It's one of the best ever.
Speaker 3:Someday.
Speaker 1:Someday. But in that, the whole the whole theme of Terminator is the idea that they are able that they invent killer AI, then they invent time travel, they go back in time, they're trying to prevent the AI from taking over in the second run through. And there's this debate about Marry board. And the refrain of the main character is no fate but what we make. No fate but what we make.
Speaker 1:Like like we are we are we have power over our future. And I believe that. I believe that to be true. And so I think no matter what o three tells you, go do what you want, carve your own path, make your own kind of music.
Speaker 3:So should we pull up this video of Yes. Palmer Lucky
Speaker 1:on Impulsive podcast. I absolutely love this. This is from Kyle Harrison.
Speaker 3:And I'll be right back. But we should play this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I will try and pull it up. So Kyle Harrison is I'm putting this in the tab. Let's see. Hang on.
Speaker 1:Let's see. So Kyle Harrison is clipping the impulsive podcast with Palmer Lucky, talking about Kyle says, a strong aficionado of conspiracy theories myself, Palmer Lucky has given a perfect direct answer to anyone who believes the moon landings were faked. And I thought this was very very fun because as as it's become more more open to just talk about conspiracy theories generally, There's been a weird meme where people have gone from like, I believe in one conspiracy theory to I believe in all the conspiracy theories. And if you believe in all of them, you're not really thinking critically. You're not actually thinking independently.
Speaker 1:And independent thinking is what's the most important. So how are we doing on the video? Can we pull that video up? I would love to watch this and react to Palmer Luckey on the impulsive podcast full screen if we can. It'd be great.
Speaker 1:Let's see. It is loading, But he gives a direct answer to It's a very funny reaction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One sec. We're working
Speaker 1:on it. It's not This is quote tweet of Mike saying, topic at lunch today. What is one what is the one conspiracy theory that you have the most conviction in being true? Moon Landing being fake was the consensus of the group. Mike, who you hanging out with?
Speaker 1:Canvas Outdoors. You got some wild men in there. It's crazy. I like the conspiracy theory that that John Wilkes Booth was a British agent and killed Lincoln. This is a very interesting one.
Speaker 1:Have you guys heard this? No? You've never heard this conspiracy theory? Yeah. There's a conspiracy theory Like everyone knows about the JFK conspiracy.
Speaker 1:You gotta go deep to get into Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories. But there's there's very little information about this. And I don't know
Speaker 4:if we'll ever
Speaker 1:get to the bottom of
Speaker 3:the There was no Reddit.
Speaker 1:There was no yeah. No no 4chan at the time. But but if you look at, like, some of the incentives at play at the time, like, it's it's completely possible that, like, someone was pushing John Wilkes Booth to do this, and potentially, it wasn't this reaction to the war or something. I don't know. This is an interesting theory that, like, I don't think many people have gone down.
Speaker 1:Anyway, do we have a chance to pit pull this up? Yes? No?
Speaker 2:It's not working. Sorry.
Speaker 1:We'll skip it. We'll skip it.
Speaker 3:Let's move over Anyway, to just just to give people kind of the takeaway. Yeah. Totally. The Palmer was basically Logan said, I don't believe the moon landing was real. Palmer says, the reason that I think it's real is the astronauts left these effectively reflectors on the surface of the moon Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you can build your own Laser. Laser system to beam them up wait for the light to travel Yeah. And then come back to you.
Speaker 1:And it will not bounce. It like, the laser won't bounce back if you just shoot it at any part of the random moon. You have to hit the mirror, and they put a mirror up there so that you could do this. The real question, the real conspiracy theories, the real real conspiracy theories ask how deep does this go? Who put the the mirror there?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe it was aliens.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it could have been aliens and
Speaker 3:Or it never could have been a rover, you know, or or A rover? Like like a non human landing.
Speaker 1:Oh, rover. I've never heard this term.
Speaker 3:Like an alien rover? No. Like the Mars rover?
Speaker 1:Oh. Oh. Oh. Okay. So humans never went, but NASA still put the mirror there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, that's funny. That's a
Speaker 3:high But of the real But the real
Speaker 1:we can't get humans there.
Speaker 3:The real
Speaker 1:can But we can get a mirror there. So let's do that and let's So it's like the moon landing was like 90%
Speaker 3:Or let's just land a mirror on the moon. That's hilarious. No. But the
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 3:But the but
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 3:good the theory that Palmer very clearly did not deny Yes. Is that the moon He didn't say the moon wasn't made of cheese.
Speaker 1:Cheese. I knew you were gonna go to cheese. Well, hopefully we'll have Palmer on the show soon. We'll be able to press him on on the moon landing further. Get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1:See how deep the rabbit hole really goes. But, we have our first guests coming in the stream. Welcome to the stream. Jeff, how you doing?
Speaker 4:Hey guys. Good to be back. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:It's great to have you.
Speaker 1:For some reason I'm missing it. Let me see. Think I lost
Speaker 3:John's not getting audio.
Speaker 4:Oh. Are we getting? Are we getting?
Speaker 1:I'm not getting anything right now.
Speaker 3:No. Can you can you George, got me? I got you loud and clear. Alright.
Speaker 5:How are
Speaker 3:you doing? You had a busy busy we haven't put up a traded graphic for you and the team yet. But, and I'm almost surprised. But
Speaker 4:I I really should publish an address, you know. I think they keep, sending to the wrong spot. So that's okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What's going on? What's going on? Give it just give us the update since the last time you've been on the show.
Speaker 4:I was checking the checking it, and three months ago, we chatted. And, actually, question of the day was, like, what's going on with Zuck? What's going on with Llama four? You know, where is this going? And, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 4:I'm not sure if Zuck is a follower of the show, but, like, you know, I did go back and I said I wouldn't bet against Zuck at a $100,000,000,000 of free cash flow per year. And, you know, I think that's panning out to be pretty true. So
Speaker 3:Yeah. That was a great prediction. Zuck. How how did you react? Did did you catch the news morning that first hit threads and then it was being shared over on x as well around the new data centers?
Speaker 4:Listen. I mean, you know, it's hard to ignore a giant blue box on top of Manhattan, you know? It's like a pretty freaking epic, you know? The the technology pros love to see it.
Speaker 1:It's a good graphic, right?
Speaker 4:It is. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very relatable.
Speaker 1:I thought it was a great visualization. I guess the other question is, yeah, just like what was your reaction to the windsurf news? We were chopping up on it. Did you go through the emotional roller coaster? Did you never lose faith?
Speaker 4:What's what's your to see what's yeah. I'm super excited to see what Scott has to share here in a few minutes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, obviously, all kinds of weird distortions in the market from, you know, kind of former FTC policy.
Speaker 4:Obviously, hope that gets, like, cleared up quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I think it's a big
Speaker 4:get for Cognition. I think it makes a ton of sense. They kinda needed, like, a horse in that race. And, you know, while, yes, the genetic coding is part of the long term play here. Like, you know, you wanna you can't go straight to streaming.
Speaker 4:You kinda wanna start with the DVDs. You know? Mhmm. And so with Cognition picking up Windsurf, I think they're kind of buying that DVD business and gonna allow them really leapfrog to the agent stuff in the future. So it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 4:Excited to see what they build.
Speaker 1:Okay. The like, where we left it as, like, the potential risk of these, like, sort of zombie ghost ship acquihire situations is that if a deal happens and we get kind of the bad ending where there's 80% of the workforce, 90% of the workforce, couple 100 start up employees who've been working hard for maybe a year, and they don't get a good outcome, and they're not happy about it, it could have a chilling effect on start up hiring, and those folks could wind up just saying, hey, I'd rather just a stable bet in big tech as opposed to a lottery ticket that even if the numbers hit, I might not be able to cash it in. And so my question for you, you have to you compete with hiring
Speaker 3:people from Meta. The question I have is, do do some of these later stage or even you know you know, big tech companies themselves start using that as a recruiting tactic to be like, look like, you know, it's very possible that this company gets acquired in the next year and it's unclear.
Speaker 1:I mean, they already do, like, these RSUs are liquid. Like, they'll just show up in your account. You can just cash them in. But but what is your take? Do you think it makes it harder for you to pull people over from big tech into the startup world?
Speaker 4:I think, you know, the the true believers in startups, you know, are oftentimes you know, yes, they're buying a lottery ticket. They sort of understand that. But ultimately, you know, the analogy I think of is, yeah, ships in harbor are safe, but that's not what ships are made for. And I think, like, you know, the best early stage founders and hires just, like, can't they have to live a certain way. You know, they kinda have to hit the high seas and see what they're made of.
Speaker 4:You know, that being said, like, I think, obviously, as startups start to scale and they're hiring the twentieth person, the fiftieth person, the hundredth person, the four hundredth person, like, that math really starts to make a lot of make a lot of of a difference. And, yeah, absolutely. I totally believe that the recruiters, you know, at the big tech companies are already weaponizing this to to bring people in the door. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the I wanna know more about how you're seeing the hyperscalers pick different parts of the stack to plug in as, like, as they build out, like, the AWS dashboard. Because it feels like with, like, I wouldn't have necessarily expected, like, IDEs to be one of the places where potentially like AWS needs a play. Have Microsoft Azure has Copilot. Now Google, what was the one that they launched that was like Jules.
Speaker 1:Jules, but now they also have the Windsurf team or some of And like, they might launch something that looks like, you know, like a piece of software that's not at the API level, above the API level. Yep. What other categories of like AI tooling, wrappers, that type of stuff do you think big tech is looking at? Or what do you think they will build internally? I feel like you have some experience here.
Speaker 4:Exactly where the value capture ends up landing is a big open question. Everybody's nervous. The SaaS companies in the middle are nervous. I think also the model labs are also pretty nervous about this. Nobody at this point wants to have any two principled of a stance.
Speaker 4:You know? They'd rather have sort of an egg in every basket and however it hatches, they'll come out on top. You know, I think that, like, obviously, yes, like, coding has emerged as sort of the main one of the largest use cases of AI today, and it makes a lot of sense. It's a highly deterministic, highly controlled environment. It sort of makes sense that people who are using these tools at the edge also are the ones applying them to more software.
Speaker 4:And so it's a great use case for AI. Retrospective, it's sort of obvious. Think that, like, it was gonna be a really big deal. You know, where the value capture really shakes out of the long term is anyone's to say. But I think, like, you know, you can in some sense, you'll never regret owning the top of the funnel and having a direct relationship with an end user and being the default in a given category.
Speaker 4:Like, that's Lindy. That goes back, you know, a millennia. Right? You wanna be the default. You wanna control the direct relationship with the end buyer, and you wanna own the top of the funnel.
Speaker 4:And so in that way, like, you know, you may be pretty bullish about your models, but does that mean you shouldn't have an IDE play? Probably not. You probably still want an IDE play because, you know, you're not gonna you're not gonna bet the bet the farm on the models of winning the value capture at the end of the day. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. How bright is the line between engineer, AI engineer, and AI researcher right now? Because it feels like we've the original narrative around a lot of the trade deals was like AI researchers can get a $500,000,000 training run unstuck, and that can immediately unlock billions of dollars of value, save you tons of money on inference. Like, the math just works out so so clearly. I feel like we've always had this divide between I mean, to some to some degree, we've had a divide between like DevOps and and product engineering.
Speaker 1:But the bigger brighter lines have always been between like engineering and sales or engineering and operations. Is there a new, like, dividing line between like who's an AI researcher versus who's an AI engineer? And are are companies, like, gaming that yet with, like I I I always see, the member of technical staff, and I don't really know what that means. I'd say, I I assume if you work at OpenAI, you're smart and can do a lot of stuff. But it like Yeah.
Speaker 1:How how niche is the skill set, and how much of a dividing line is that?
Speaker 4:I think the skill set's still quite different. Mhmm. You know, if you're working at a large lab on a research team, maybe you really are concerned about primarily training, whether pre, mid, or post training. You know, you're primarily looking at loss curves. You're primarily thinking about, you know, what benchmarks you're gonna be exceeding at.
Speaker 4:You're thinking about what data sources you can capture to continue to train and fine tune on. You're experimenting with new approaches to reinforcement learning or other to, like, try to, you know, sort of eke out incremental gains and beat out your competitors. If you're an AI engineer, you're really thinking about, like, how do I apply GPT four to legal? And it's really kind of a different shape of both like skills and also foci and obsession. So, you know, it's not to say that like in the limit, like those these things won't sort of converge or won't merge to some degree.
Speaker 4:But like in today, there's just a pretty bright line between the two.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about the I guess the question is, like, DeepMind seems very different from the LAMA organization in the sense that, like, the Gemini models are truly frontier and Mhmm. But the the the problem with Google's AI strategy feels like it's on the product side where not many people are downloading the Gemini app or a lot of people are. It's like millions and billions of hundreds of millions of people. But but like, you know, market share on on chat apps, and like who has it in their home row.
Speaker 1:Like ChatGPT is so successful, kids just call it chat, and Gemini is not really at that level yet. And so Gemini. Gemini. Yeah. The the the question is like is like the problem that Google is trying to solve feels like a different problem from the problem that Facebook is trying to solve.
Speaker 1:And the question is is, can you acquihire and and and acquire talent that actually solves that problem? Or is there some sort of like underlying structural problem of like how big Google is that is actually slowing down product development? My my fear is that like you get some you get some great product engineers in, but then you're still hamstrung by Google's scale, Google's
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:HR department, their legal department, how they think about, oh, well, like, we can't launch this unless it's internationalized on day one because we're Google. Right. And so all of a sudden, you have these great people who've been able to, go zero to one on a product, get it really viral, and, like, create a product that like people love Yeah. But they can't do that in within the confines of Google. So, yeah, what do you think
Speaker 3:about that? I mean, the the potentially more specific question is, are you betting on Google plus Windsurf or or, Cognition plus Windsurf if they're going after the same, you know, developer sort of engagement? Right? If if these if these you know, if the if the products effectively converge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's like Conway's law, the idea that you ship your org chart remains quite stable and true. And you can kinda take that even one step back, which is, like, you ship your culture as an organization. Obviously, the org chart is one manifestation of your culture. You know, I think that if if Google leadership does not give these this new windsurf or half windsurf team, like, a really long leash and a ton of autonomy Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, there's gonna be some level of, a, you know, immunoresponse, and they're gonna throw them back up again. I think you really have to give those folks a long leash, and that has to come through the has to come from the top. Right? It has to be, you know, either founder or c suite level where they're getting the green flag to, like, really run hard and ignore stuff like internationalization. Yep.
Speaker 4:And, you know, maybe you just have to get the legal sign off, but, like, you get a dedicated team of legal people, you know, at your beck and call to unblock you whenever you need to. Yeah. Yeah. I won't I won't it's too early to, you know, bat on the horses here, so I'm not
Speaker 3:sure if
Speaker 4:I can bet on the horses yet.
Speaker 1:But even even like the like the ADA rules, like accessibility rules. Like Mhmm. When you're a startup, you move pretty quickly, and you're still you still have to do a lot of the accessibility work. But if you're like 90% there, it's like if you mess up and the screen reader breaks on one page, you're like looking at like a $5,000 settlement to just say, hey, sorry, like we messed up, like one person couldn't use this and like, we feel bad and we paid you and we're good. But if you're Google, it's like, there's going to be an army of lawyers who are like, how can we how can we squeeze them on this, get them to settle, like, a little there's just more economic power against that.
Speaker 1:And that and that just naturally slows things down. Yep. Yeah. It's very interesting.
Speaker 3:How are you what are you expecting out of open source broadly open source models broadly in the next couple months? We saw OpenAI delayed Yeah. Their launch. Just basically saying like the the the takeaway was effectively not quite ready, need a bit more time, wanna ship something Yeah. That we're super proud of.
Speaker 3:At the same time today, there was some reporting that that and and unclear if it's true yet, but reporting that says maybe maybe Lama will shift away from from open source in general. So I'm curious, generally excited for OpenAI's open source model, but what what are you thinking?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, China obviously continues to bring the heat on open source. Mhmm. You know, regardless what we think of, the CCCP and their motivations, like, just yesterday over the weekend, model the came out.
Speaker 4:It's already doing incredibly well on benchmarks. A bunch of developers and founders that I know are pretty excited about that model. And so I think that, like, at the end of the day, like, you know, if there is some belief that, like, if you have a very good model that it could sort of run away and eat an entire market, you know, if the facto, you're fighting against everybody else who doesn't want you to be able to do that. And so I do think that, like, to some degree, the margins will be competed in new way. I think that more things will be open source in the future.
Speaker 4:And I think that also, you know, if you think about, like, the workloads. We don't use supercomputers to write our email. We just need basic at home stuff. It works just fine. And the same models can know, same idea can be extended here.
Speaker 4:You know, while the frontier models are gonna be developed you know, kind of developing and and figuring out new science and hopefully letting us don't die. Right? We'll see. I think that, you know, for a lot of, like, business use cases and consumer applications, honestly, the intelligence bar is just, not that high. And the capability overhang that's already in the models today continues to be quite large as well.
Speaker 4:I mean, there's a lot of you know, people joke there's a $100,000,000 inside your laptop just to figure out how to unlock it. Well, it's $1,000,000,000 inside of these model weights at least.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. That's true.
Speaker 4:You know, we gotta go unlock it.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's your, temperature check on just overall progress stagnation? Like, are we are you feeling the acceleration? Are you feeling a deceleration? Dorcache last week updated his timelines, kinda pushed them out.
Speaker 1:Still very aggressive timelines. But what what was your reaction to that? It feels like I'm seeing a few memes about like, no one knows how to scale RL or like Yeah. You know, yes, we're seeing impressive stuff on Arc AGI from Grok four. But keep in mind, we went from like 7% to 14%, and this is a test that kids can do.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah. It feels like everyone's saying like, we need new research. We need new breakthroughs. We need new paradigms. What's your overall temp check on timelines and just like Yeah.
Speaker 4:I mean, listen, I think that like AI continues to be really spiky, and it's really hard to intuit where it's strong and where it's weak. And it's you know, we want it to be strong in all the ways that human intelligence is strong. We also want it to be strong in all the ways that human intelligence is weak, you know, sort of project all of our hopes and fears and dreams, like, onto these things. And, you know, I think in many cases, they're still not there. Just today, Chroma released a technical report.
Speaker 4:The topic of context rot. And so the question is basically like, okay. This model's got a million tokens, but does it? Like, what can you actually do with those million tokens? Needle in a haystack is certainly one benchmark, but we demonstrate across a sweep of other approaches that actually these models, like, they can start to fall apart really early, like, way earlier than you might think.
Speaker 4:You might see reasoning performance drop off even around, like, 10,000 tokens or earlier.
Speaker 3:And that
Speaker 4:was, like, not that much. And so, you know, like, I don't what you know, at least what I want as a builder is I don't want a model that has the 10,000,000 token context window, but kind of maybe sort of work sometimes. Like, I want a model that has 60,000 tokens, but is a is per perfect at paying attention to that model
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:To that context and perfect at reasoning over that context. And so, you know, we hope that this report will both help developers understand what's possible to build today. It will also create, like, a new set of benchmarks to the model labs who care about because I think this is ultimately what people who are building care about.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, I mean, that seems like victory lap for you. Give me the update on Chroma, Rag. And, you know, because it's a Yeah. I mean, mean, that that, like, just to kinda set the the base case, like, there was a lot of, like, oh, like, oh, Rag's gonna get one shot if I just huge context windows.
Speaker 1:I saw the million tokens, and it was like, that's a lot of stuff. I feel like I could just stuff everything in there. And then Yeah. I was talking talking to Dorakesh about, can we go even larger? Can we get to a billion token context window?
Speaker 1:And and he was making some of those points, but he was also just saying, like, the, like Inefficiency. Yeah. The inefficiency, like, scales quadratically. And so just getting to a billion tokens is not a thousand x harder. It's like billion x harder or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but give me the update on like on like Rag as a as a research effort, what Chrome is doing in terms of a product and then some of the actual like use cases, when this works, where this breaks down, like, it fits in the overall puzzle?
Speaker 4:Yeah. The big question has been, is long context all you need or not? And, you know, maybe it will be someday. So I've not been I don't have a time machine. I've not been to the future, but I don't care about someday.
Speaker 4:I care about now, and I care about the community developers that we serve
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And giving them good information so they can really reason about what is this stuff, what is it useful for, how can I mix it together to create value? That's what we really care about. And so, I mean, the research was not really commercially motivated. Right? I think it's like no good research is commercially motivated.
Speaker 4:You have to go in with just like a question and, you know, a thesis, and you'll just see what happens. Like, you can't go into it with a bias. Yeah. And I think, really, you know, the bias from us came from intuition from us building stuff. We noticed that actually once models start crossing these certain, like, thresholds, stuff really starts falling apart.
Speaker 4:And this is what you talk to anybody building in the space. They'll tell you this firsthand. This is their intuition as well. Yeah. Like, million tokens maybe, but, like, it really starts to fall apart after a certain number of tokens.
Speaker 4:And so we wanted to, like, really just try to quantify that and reason about that and put numbers around that. And so you start to think about, like, what are the solutions there? Well, one solution certainly is to use retrieval. Obviously, you know, we are biased in that way. We think Chrome is a great tool for that.
Speaker 4:We're also seeing increasingly people use re ranking in the loop. We're also increasingly seeing people take, like, a large context window, say, like, 10,000 or a 100,000 tokens and breaking it into mini small LLM calls.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because the the the fewer the context, the better the model can reason. And so that sort of process of doing sort of a MapReduce, like, splitting it into mini pieces and then having these, like, huge army of parallel small piece small, fast, cheap LLMs that process that context is also, I think, emergingly a best pattern and best practice. But, you know, it's still early. I think that, like, we didn't really want to go into the technical report either with, like, here are all the answers. We don't know all the answers.
Speaker 4:Sure. But we wanna motivate, like, here's the problem as we see it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, speaking of other, like, research and technical reports, what was your interpretation of the meter report that suggested that code tools were, like, Cursor and Windsurf, were actually potentially slowing down a set of developers. It wasn't a huge study, but it seemed like a shocking result in the sense that it was people were expecting a 20% increase, and they got us 20% decrease roughly. And and and one of the developers who was actually in the study chimed in as well and was like, I I think I know what's going on. I'm, like, leaning on this tool too much.
Speaker 1:I'm doing a lot of waiting for stuff. And so maybe some of this just naturally cure is cured by speed, but would love your take on on that report if you read it.
Speaker 4:I mean, we as society are gonna figure this out the hard way, where we're gonna figure out, like, how much of our sort of reasoning should we externalize to AI and Totally. How much of that reasoning that we then have to integrate to process what it thinks. Right? Yep. And there's probably also there's also news over the weekend about, you know, OpenAI making you dumber or ChatGPT making you dumber Sure.
Speaker 4:And kind of headlines like this. And, of course, the exact claims, you always wanna dig under the hood and look at the actual study design and their actual claims versus the salacious headline. But
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 4:I think it just speaks to how early all this stuff is. Obviously, there's, like, a ton of excitement. People wanted to change the world. Mhmm. And, you know, think exactly how it gets integrated into our workflows over the medium and long term.
Speaker 4:Like, you know, it's the classic thing where, like, over the next year, it probably won't look like that that much. But over the next ten years, it's gonna look totally different. And so, yeah. We'll just wait ten years and see. But, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about just just condensing down information in the context of of rags specifically, but also just the other the other techniques for this. What what I'm interested in is like Andre Karpathy recently was kind of thinking through what the future of reinforcement learning could look like. And he draws on this very interesting story that I think most people will be familiar with, which was that for a long time, if you went to any LLM and said, how many how many incidences of the letter r are in the word strawberry? It would get confused, and it would give you the wrong number.
Speaker 1:And this was because of tokenization. Each piece of the word is broken down, so we can't really see the letters. And so Yeah. The solution was that they they kind of baked in some sort of like system prompt apparently that said Yeah. If a user asks you to count letters, split it into individual letters and iterate through it one at a time.
Speaker 1:And then you just kind of, like, figured out the cheat code for that particular type of problem. The problem, of course, then is that, like, humanity's job is unbounded, and there's a billion different versions of that that come up all the time in the context of work. And, like, that's where you have all these little edge case failure modes, and that's probably why, you know, I still have to book my own flights or something, or you need a human to book your flights because using all that stuff, there's just too many edge cases. So his his solution was like, we need to develop a reinforcement learning paradigm that goes and finds those hard won lessons and bakes them down and saves them. And that feels like something like compressing of information because you're not just gonna wanna stuff all that into the context window again.
Speaker 1:You're gonna run into that problem. So so just talk to me about your reaction to Karpathy's post and then just kind of how how how RAG might interface with the next models, whether on the training side or in on on the inference side.
Speaker 4:Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think learnings from the system running can be integrated both into the data systems that underwrite that system. It can also be integrated into the weights. Now whether that's through RL or different, you know, means
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Is sort of gonna be dependent on the use case. One way that we've been thinking about it is we're calling this the the inner loop and the outer loop of context engineering. So if your context needs to be tuned to do a good job, context fraud is real and motivates the need for context engineering. And this is the job that many application developers are doing, have been doing now for years is, like, solving that problem of what should be in the context window right now.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That's the inner loop. The outer loop is how do you design a system that will get better at the job of the inner loop over time? So how do you capture signal from your users? How do you capture feedback from agents? How do you capture all of that data?
Speaker 4:How do you analyze all that data? And then how do you bring that big data into that inner loop problem? That could be, obviously, number one, massaging and changing the knowledge and data your model has access to as known as retrieve log data generation. Or it could also be, you know, applying it to weights in different many stages of the pipeline, including the LLM itself, the embedding model, re rankers, all of the above. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And so, I mean, this concept, we just sort of put out, like, a week ago. We gave a, you know, short a short kind of conference at Ramp's office in New York on context engineering NYC.
Speaker 1:Let's hear
Speaker 4:the Ramp. Listen. You gotta
Speaker 1:do it.
Speaker 4:You gotta
Speaker 1:do it.
Speaker 4:Selection. And and this is the first time I've really seen this positive in such a clear way. And so, you know, again, we don't have all the answers. But I think this is the question people will come to ask in the future is, like, not only how do we build a system which works today, but how do we build a system that gets better over time automatically? And that is, like, the outer loop of context engineering.
Speaker 1:Makes sense.
Speaker 3:I I wanna get your how you're thinking about Grok. Last week was an intense week from everything from the fiasco. I think it was on Tuesday with with Terrible timing. Grok bot just going wild. Maybe it brought more attention to the launch Wednesday, which was extremely Good.
Speaker 3:Impressive.
Speaker 1:Hot on.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But then later in the week, you know, people were realizing that like the reasoning model was or or like part of the kind of reasoning loop was like kind of making sure that it understood the boss man's views by by you know, what what is what is Elon's
Speaker 1:He was
Speaker 3:searching in that
Speaker 1:the coverage and then reinforcing that wrongly.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And not correct. So as I went into the weekend, I was thinking this will be interesting to see how Grok can do in the enterprise. And then this morning they announced like a $200,000,000 deal with the government. So I think that's a a good stamp of approval.
Speaker 3:But I'm curious like kinda what insights you have around, you know, some of the basically, like, larger potential customers and how they're even thinking about model selection for for, you know, different products and applications.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, I think you should probably wait. I think, actually, again, Ramp, Plug has, like, the graph of, like, you know, Anthropic and ChatGPT or Anthropic and OpenAI revenue growth. Yeah. You know, let's wait to see when Grohak makes a dent in that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's not to say they will or they won't. I don't know. You know, there are these headwinds that you're talking about, which is, you know, you can either see as a a feature or a a a bug depending on which way you look at it. I mean, you know, there's certain things to like, there's things to not like.
Speaker 4:Don't it's kinda hard to predict the future here.
Speaker 1:Guess what I wanna know is, like, what is the what is the flip side? Maybe we should just talk to Ara at Ramp about this. But what's the flip side of that chart? We know who the sellers are, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and then Grok, and there's like kind of a long tail. But who are the buyers?
Speaker 1:Because I see individual like prosumer knowledge retriever. I would pay $200 for a better Google types
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In one of them. Then there are the developers who are paying for developer tools. But then what is like the third bucket of like buyers for tokens right now? It seems like it's a lot of companies with like kind of point solutions, little I'm stuffing an LLM in my enterprise SaaS, speeding something up, cleaning up some data. But do you have any insight into like kind of what's the third wave that's coming that everyone listening to this should start investing in now?
Speaker 1:No. I'm just kidding. I
Speaker 4:think you're right that a lot of the spend well, a lot of the spend is consumers. Yep. You know, a lot of the spend is also businesses, enterprises. They're using it for really boring stuff. Business process automation broadly.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You know, those buyers, you should expect to be, like, way more conservative about, like, the tool they pick. Yeah. You know, the adage of you never got fired for hiring IBM definitely also applies here. And so sort of reasoning about who is the IBM of this space and why, I think will help you determine where that spend is going to go.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a great question. Because being on the frontier as a brand, I would say OpenAI. But then from a scalable infrastructure, I would say GCP and Gemini. But then from like a model agnosticism view, would say Microsoft.
Speaker 1:It's a tough question. I don't know if the IBM has emerged. Maybe you have a strong opinion. Maybe Jordy does. But overall, I mean, great great great catching up with you as always.
Speaker 1:Yep. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 3:No. Congratulations on the on the launch of the paper.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, very yeah. Very exciting results. So thanks for thanks thanks for funding it.
Speaker 4:To see you.
Speaker 1:A great rest day. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Good to you. Take care.
Speaker 1:We didn't tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks.
Speaker 1:And if you're looking to take a vacation to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, you might run into Dua Lipa. She says I love speed. I love it. She's really a driver. Like, this is not a larva.
Speaker 3:But she wasn't driving the car.
Speaker 1:But she's in
Speaker 3:the car.
Speaker 1:She's not just hanging out.
Speaker 3:And the delivery was absolutely fantastic. Fantastic delivery. To give everyone some context, so we have Scott Wu from Cognition and Jeff Wang from Windsurf joining any minute now. We're Exactly. The studio crew is getting We're ready for everybody.
Speaker 3:Let's bring them in. Are ready whenever.
Speaker 1:Bring them in. How you guys doing? Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Round of applause. Did you guys have a relaxing weekend?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Really chill weekend.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Easy. Easy. Easy. Nothing too much.
Speaker 6:We we both haven't really slept.
Speaker 1:Okay. So
Speaker 6:go easy on us. Okay?
Speaker 3:Well, you had a lot of you had a lot of people to take care of and and honestly, when we we heard the news of, you know, a few minutes before we went live and we were fist pumping here in the studio because it's such a such a fantastic outcome and I I'm I'm sure everybody involved is grateful for the work you guys put in to get this done.
Speaker 1:But give us Yeah. Kick us off with the the high level. What's actually the partnership look like? What do you like, how would you describe it in your own words of, like, what's actually happening?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, this is a this is a real acquisition.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:We are being acquired by Cognition.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:And,
Speaker 2:you know
Speaker 3:Must feel great to say
Speaker 1:that too. It's really you
Speaker 3:don't hear that much.
Speaker 7:It was a tough it was a tough, Friday, I would say. I don't think anybody would want to be in my shoes on Friday. Yeah. But we talked to a lot of teams out there. There's a lot of AI companies, foundational companies.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And after talking to Scott and the Cognition team, there it was done in my mind. There's a done deal. I don't know if you guys know this, but Cognition was probably the only other team that we thought was smarter than our our team, actually.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No.
Speaker 4:And that's what that's what
Speaker 3:we put we put that together just on the show, seeing the announcement. It's like you take this incredible, go to market sales machine that that you guys had built and you combine that with one of the best research and just hardcore engineering culture.
Speaker 1:Perfect overlap.
Speaker 3:And it's a perfect match. Perfect overlap.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Absolutely. And on the windsurf side, there were all these stories breaking out on Twitter and everything going on, and people were saying, well, you know, the the the thing that's left is just the shell. And we looked at it, we said, well, actually, I I don't know if that's right. You know?
Speaker 6:It's the there's there's the code, there's the product, there's the customers, and most importantly, there's the whole team, obviously. And and it's an amazing product, there's a lot to do and a lot to build together. And so I think as we started talking about it, we found that there were just so many natural ways to partner, you know, both in terms of, obviously, the customers and and customers would love you know, are super excited to have a solution that that basically combines both the IDE and the agent. And and and and then the technology itself, which is, you know, I I I think we, Devon at Devon you know, building Devon have always focused on this kind of remote background agent as the thing that we've kind of done. Whereas, you know, Windsurf is is really focused on the agentic IDE, and and I think there's a lot of kind of things that play in there all the way down again to to the kind of the the fit of the the the relative teams and the team strength and so on.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 1:It's almost like you predicted this because, like, the like, these types of mergers are really hard because you have two brands that are popular. But Scott, you've been managing Cognition and Devon, like you've had the the the corporate structure and the product structure for a while, and so like it doesn't seem nearly as complicated as like where does this go? Do you have to rebrand one another? I I don't know if you have thoughts on it yet. I'm sure you that this is down the road.
Speaker 1:But it seems like you're actually fairly set up to to integrate these two companies in a in a way that's like not so super chaotic to either, which is great.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I I wouldn't say it was intentional. I think on our
Speaker 1:end, for
Speaker 6:example, it's probably more just we we we we tend to over focus on on software engineers because it's just a lot of who we are and how we think about it. And in particular, of just like the these, like, product and capabilities things, whereas I think on the Windsurf tie side, I I think Jeff and the team, you know, the whole team have built out a really great kind suite of of of all of the different kind of functions. Right? You know, sales, deployed engineering, enterprise work, infrastructure Yeah. Marketing, operations, and so on, you know, finance, etcetera.
Speaker 6:And and and, yeah, just turned out to be a really, really great fit.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Jeff, Friday end of day, did you think you would be running a process so quickly? I I know, you know, part the the obvious move would just be, you know, continue to to run and scale the business. You guys had a lot of momentum. But what was going through your head Friday night?
Speaker 3:Because I I imagine at the time you're also balancing you you were all of a sudden managing a team of hundreds of people that I probably all, you know, wanted wanted your time and attention as well.
Speaker 7:My my immediate priority was just to get a lot of options on the table and to have a lot of paths forward. I had to tell the team, like, this is the path forward immediately because this is this is happening now. And then outside of the meeting, you know, I I I was thinking like, okay. Who do I need to talk to? What what is the best use of my time?
Speaker 7:I can tell you I was on the phone for pretty much twenty four hours nonstop on my phone after after the all hands. And me and Scott, we we worked really fast. We met at our office the next day. He even brought in everything on a piece of paper to sign. He even brought he's
Speaker 1:Woah. Taken
Speaker 5:you go. He obviously had to
Speaker 7:talk through a lot, but that was it was real it was pretty dramatic, Scott, but it was cool.
Speaker 1:It was cool.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was fun. And and naturally, you know, because it has to be this way, we got things signed, like, one or two hours before we were able to put out the announcement. But, like, look, as soon as we started talking about it together, I think it was kinda clear for both of us. Like, the the the way that we really make this a success is, you know, obviously, customers kinda wanna understand what's next.
Speaker 6:The team wants to understand what's next. You know, the whole world is talking about it. We wanna be able to come out together as soon as possible and say, we're gonna do this. We're gonna make this really amazing. We're gonna make sure we take care of all the users and all the customers.
Speaker 6:We're gonna make sure we take care of the team. And there's just a really great product here at its core, and and that's what we wanna focus on, and that's what we wanna build out together.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and you
Speaker 7:what's crazy? Yeah. What is crazy? Like, we talked pretty late on a Friday night as well. We were comparing notes, there was, like, almost no overlap.
Speaker 7:I mean, we talked about the team already, but even the product. The product is, like, missing exactly what the other product is offering. Yeah. It's And the ability to combine the products together is gonna so amazing for our users. It's gonna be really cool.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think there's gonna
Speaker 6:be a lot of fun stuff around, you know, you can have have an agent work and then review the code, you know, locally in your IDE. You could be planning tasks out and then kind of sending them off for work. You could be, you know, you can do a first pass with an agent and then come and look at the work and then kind of finish that up and do the finishing touches with, you know, with tab and all these other features and
Speaker 3:so on.
Speaker 6:Right? And and we're really excited to to to to build that out together.
Speaker 3:How is how is the team feeling right now? I imagine this is the craziest forty eight hours of of their career
Speaker 1:preview of the Slack emojis that are ripping right now.
Speaker 7:Actually, we we announced it at another all hands. Probably all hands, and we put another Monday all hands up. And very, very different
Speaker 3:They're like, it couldn't possibly get worse. So so it's only up. Yeah. Really excited.
Speaker 7:Oh, we made it dramatic too. We so me and Scott and the team, we we really went out of our way to to make this a very generous acquisition. I'll just say that. And I think, I I you know, the team probably felt like, you know, their, you know, their career was over or something. You know, like, they it was Totally.
Speaker 7:Very sad on Friday. But I think today I I don't know. How long did they clap, Scott? They they kinda cheer for, like
Speaker 3:Standing ovation.
Speaker 7:Or something. So I think the sentiment has shifted. The team is even more fired up to go. They the whole product is still there, all the all the things we had, and the GTM team is still there. And now they also have Devin to to sell as well.
Speaker 7:So everybody's fired up now.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Yeah. Every time I talk to Scott incredible. It's always because, like, he's done something really incredible and aggressive, like like and it's like, okay. Like, let's do let let's talk about this right now.
Speaker 1:And before, I was making, like, documentaries taking me a month to put out a single video. Now, fortunately, I have a daily TV show, so I can just have you on and we can chat about it. I do have some some random questions. Don't know if I'm it's interested to know about about that go to market team and and channel sales specifically. Specifically.
Speaker 1:There was somebody in the comments of one of Jordy's posts talking about how Windsurf was growing revenue and and and working with channel partners. Can you walk me through how, like, what would you give advice to somebody who's structuring a, like, a successful channel partnership strategy for a product like this? What incentives do you have to align? How big of a piece of business was that? Do you expect it to be a continual source of growth?
Speaker 1:I'd love to know about just that as a particular strategy as opposed to, say, you know, Google Ads or going viral.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We we made a decision to go a 100% partners back in February. The thing about a partner channel kind of, like, segment is, like, you have to, like, you have to, like, kinda feed them. Like, you kinda kinda build belief with them in the product, but also show that there's an economic extent incentive too.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 7:And it did take some time actually from q one to to q two to, like, get the top priority partners, make sure those partners can easily sell on your behalf as well. And it really took, like, about four to five months to really see this, like, kinda take off. So some of our partner partners have already started bringing in 7 figure deals even without even trying the product. They just go to their customers. They ask them, you know, what what they want, and they just say it's Windsurf.
Speaker 7:And, and now, they they can say Windsurf and Devon.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Yeah. I,
Speaker 3:I was getting multiple messages from people Mhmm. Friday and Saturday being like, I want this team. I want this team. And that was what and and and I think that it is it is just it's such a this whole deal and everything is is really a a testament to the caliber of the team which was the Yeah. Which was one of the major disappointments Friday is if you were on the team that that was staying behind at Windsurf.
Speaker 3:There's this sort of almost like signaling, right, of like I took this Let's say you joined last August and you brought the the product to market, you launched it, you grew it to tens of millions of dollars in revenue and then don't get to kind of continue the mission. It's I'm I'm just really happy for everyone involved.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm just And now Oh, sorry. Yeah.
Speaker 6:I was just saying now, you know, now we're all one big team and it's I I mean, we're we're kicking it into another gear. I I think we're all so amped up to to take this and just go, you know, we're we're gonna go full speed basically for for the next while. And and we get to play on offense now and and go for
Speaker 3:for it all.
Speaker 6:So
Speaker 3:Are you guys already making plans to get under one roof? What's what's the
Speaker 6:What's the have a lot to figure out. But but but, yeah, working
Speaker 3:to get some practice.
Speaker 6:Getting to the point that there's there's kind of the product collaboration, there's the go to market collaboration, and then there's the literal kind of like team situation. A lot a lot of work to do over the next couple months.
Speaker 3:Well, we wanna
Speaker 7:tell our customers like, we got there back now. And the product is is gonna get so much more cool.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well,
Speaker 3:you guys turned something which was in in many ways, you know, a disaster. One of crazy waiting stories I the New York Times piece on Monday and getting to see the New York Times push out this news and turning this whole thing into a win is is incredible and you guys have done a a service to, the team and the industry. So thank you.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Honestly, honored to get to be a part of it to to work with such a great group of people. And I just wanna see you guys. You guys have no idea how how things went with all the legal and everything last night in terms of figuring these things out. Are we gonna make it there in time?
Speaker 6:Are we not gonna be it was we we we've we've been through a lot, and I think it's it's it's it's just the sort of thing.
Speaker 7:So Just so you know, Scott was like, we are announcing Monday, hell or high water, and, we we just did not sleep, for the last, like, seventy four hours. Yeah. So it's been a crazy it's been crazy.
Speaker 1:I mean, we we yeah. We we we appreciate you hopping the stream. Do you have anything else, Jordy? No.
Speaker 3:You guys deserve probably probably too early to sleep, but you both deserve a power nap at the very least. Definitely. Thank you for coming on. Anything else that that makes sense to share now or should we let you go?
Speaker 1:We're all good.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Yeah. Stay tuned. We're gonna have a
Speaker 6:lot more announcements soon. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 3:Amazing, guys. Great work. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye. And next up, we have Carl Pay. No.
Speaker 1:Not yet. One second.
Speaker 3:That is amazing.
Speaker 1:That yeah. What what a great story.
Speaker 3:Absolute dogs.
Speaker 1:Absolute dogs.
Speaker 3:That is The perfect man. Cemented in SV lore.
Speaker 1:Tech lore for sure. For sure.
Speaker 3:Didn't know, I mean, I knew Scott could fundraise. Yeah. I didn't know he was this kind of this caliber of deals guy.
Speaker 1:Absolute dog. Absolute dog. Well, read through some timeline. What else Figma has such a homey feeling. I spend all day and I really enjoy it.
Speaker 1:Feels cozy, safe, good to come back to. Shout out Zach. Giving Figma a little shout out. Let's bring in our
Speaker 3:first There he is.
Speaker 1:First Patton.
Speaker 3:Studio walk in.
Speaker 1:First studio walk in.
Speaker 3:Let's go.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream, Carl. How you doing?
Speaker 3:Welcome. This is fucking Welcome.
Speaker 1:Thank you. How you doing? It's
Speaker 3:great to have you here.
Speaker 1:Good to you You
Speaker 3:haven't done this much before.
Speaker 1:No. We've had a few people in in studio. Done a few Usually when we're in person, we're on the road. But good to have you come here. Would you mind kicking us off with introduction of yourself, the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. My name is Carl. I have a company called Nothing. Yeah. We're the only new smartphone company to have emerged in the last ten years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I felt like tech got really boring. Yeah. I was a big big tech fan. I got the latest iPhones.
Speaker 2:Yep. All the time I sat up to watch the keynotes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was based in Europe, so the time zone wasn't always the best. But in the recent, like, five years, I haven't done that anymore. Like, every iteration is pretty much
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The same as the previous one. And I wanted to do something about it.
Speaker 1:So what'd you do to spice it up? What what was the first the first feature? And then walk me through all the other features. Please, Paul, wanna I
Speaker 2:wanna Show see us. So we're we're in a very big industry. Right? Like 1,200,000,000 smartphones are sold every year?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we're not trying to reimagine the category. We're trying to find our niche. So we started with industrial design. So if you look at our products
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They look pretty different.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Before actually starting to make products, we made a design book. We took inspiration from movies, from architecture, from furniture design, and we created this little mood board, and then we based all our designs on that. So if you look at our different products, these are headphones, this is a smartphone. Yeah. You can immediately tell even if you don't see the logo that it's from the same company.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah. Creative design is how we started. If you ask our users why they buy our products, design is number one reason. And then lately, we've been working more on the software side.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 3:It is funny a cell phone should be the ultimate personal accessory yet the that but yet they've all converged onto the same exact form factor. It's so funny because John and I have the same
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Exact same phone and we get we get mixed up all the time. I grab it. He grabs mine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, how much do you think we are at like the end of history for differentiating on like quantitative specs? Because for a long time it was like, okay, I need to go with this one because it has just a faster processor. But that kind of disappeared and then there was software lock in, you want the blue bubbles or whatever. But, if we truly get to the end, then we're going to get it like, every watch tells the time the same.
Speaker 1:People spend a lot of money on certain watches that say something about them. Right? Same thing with cars. But what's your view on like just staying on the frontier? How how stagnant is the frontier?
Speaker 2:We're pretty much at the end. In terms of hardware innovation? Like we all have the same suppliers
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:By the same screen screen, same processor, same battery.
Speaker 1:And and you don't think that there's gonna be any sort of like crazy breakthrough where like this happened with the with the Apple Vision Pro where, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was was certainly like doing everything to stay on the frontier VR headsets. And then Apple allegedly does this crazy thing with their supplier where they're like, you know that thing that you're making in the benchtop that costs like thousands of dollars for this screen with this pixel density? Let's just pull this forward and just like eat that cost to just leapfrog everyone and have the best screen. Now they now they made a bunch of other mistakes, so the product didn't take off. But they at least nailed it on the screen front, everyone agrees that the Apple Vision Pro has like the best Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Resolution at least in the of the modern VR headsets. So you don't think that there'll be like a, oh, wow. The next iPhone has twice the battery life. They figured out something crazy.
Speaker 2:Not any anytime soon. And I would probably say that the first phase of the smartphone wars are over. Yeah. And Apple and Google One
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have the biggest platforms. IOS has like a billion users. Yep. Android has 3,000,000,000. But I believe that the next war is start is just beginning to happen.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that's gonna be be all about reimagining the operating system. Yeah. So the previous generation operating systems are very mature already.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But now with AI technology, I think we can build something really different.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. How are you how are you thinking about partnerships? I mean, John John's probably said this 200 times on the show, but all he wants is better transcription Oh, Siri. Like, it's
Speaker 2:like
Speaker 3:Oh,
Speaker 2:you know what we did. I don't know if the people there can see it, but No.
Speaker 1:You can hold it up.
Speaker 3:Hold it up.
Speaker 2:If you hold this
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Now we're actually recording this meeting.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Oh, you see the waveform there?
Speaker 2:You see the waveform. You see the little red light blinking. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's a nice test.
Speaker 2:And after the meeting, you can just have AI summarize the
Speaker 1:And and and my question is, is that using a transformer based transcription AI, or is it using the old thing that gets every other word wrong?
Speaker 2:We're using a model. Think I think we're using Whisper plus Gemini.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, yeah. It's gonna be fantastic. Amazing. And for some reason, no one's thought to implement that in the old stuff.
Speaker 1:And it's getting to a point where I'm like deeply frustrated with it. Because my standard workflow for I need to send someone a text message this long, is I open up the ChatGPT app, I click the Whisper button, I talk to it, then I copy it, then I then I paste it into my into my Wow. Text message box because I don't trust the standard transcription in iOS by default. It's very, very frustrating. Anyway, I want to talk about the second smartphone war that's coming.
Speaker 1:Who's going to be in that war? It feels like Apple and Google are going to continue to compete. You're going to be there. It feels like Johnny Ive and Sam Altman and the OpenAI team want to play in there. There's probably gonna be other Yeah, folks
Speaker 3:I feel like they, in a lot of the kind of teaser content, it's really around saying like, this is an additional device in your stack. They're not going as far as to say, we're gonna fully replace the phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess why not just do try and do like an add on or like a fourth device, third device? I mean, most Apple people have like Apple Watches, phones, the iPad, the computer, you know.
Speaker 2:For me, like the smartphone is one of the best devices, especially for applied AI. Yeah. Because it's got all the distribution. 1,200,000,000 are sold every year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have it in our pockets every day. We charge it every day. We use it for four to six hours every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's got the distribution, but it also has has the data. Right? We do so much on our phones. So if if we're gonna build a really intelligent operating system, we need the distribution scale, but also the depth of data to create a really personalized experience for for each consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I do believe that in the next ten years, we will all be carrying another sensor as well because sometimes the phone is in our pockets
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we need another sensor to capture data for us. I don't believe it's gonna happen that quickly though.
Speaker 3:Other sensors, glasses, something we've been debating on the show.
Speaker 2:Could be glasses.
Speaker 3:One of one of the one of the challenges though is like, you're walking around a lot of these, you know, the Metairie bands are like actual
Speaker 1:glasses.
Speaker 3:Sunglasses. People gonna be carrying multiple glasses that they're using differently throughout the day? There's I don't
Speaker 2:know what the form factor is gonna be. It might be glasses. It might be a pin. It might be a necklace. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'm not super bullish that it's gonna come in the next two three years.
Speaker 1:What do you think of the idea of
Speaker 3:Which is a which is a challenge to be clear Yeah. If you're a seed stage company
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you need to generate traction Yeah. Yeah. Sales now. So to pick a new form factor, you guys can almost from your position be like, well, we have the supply chain. Sure.
Speaker 3:We know we can build hardware. We can, in some ways, kind of see what how this this next device
Speaker 2:We built this machine. Right? Because making hardware is very tough, especially smartphones. Like, from having an idea to actually shipping the products Yep. Across, like, 40 countries, servicing the consumer Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's a machine. We're building the brand Yep. Building the fan base.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So I think whenever a new form factor comes out, it's quite easy for us to quickly follow and have distribution worldwide.
Speaker 1:Well, what what do you think about putting a camera on headphones?
Speaker 2:We've seen, like, patents of other companies doing it. Yeah. I'm just not sure what we would use it for.
Speaker 1:It seems like the it seems like meta Ray Bans are like, we want a camera on your face, and we will give you headphones for free via speakers that you can kinda listen on someone's call. But for the most part, it's so it's so close and so localized that if someone's taking a call and the Metairie band's back there, we won't really hear what the other person's saying. And then Apple, I think is the company you're referring you're like alluding to, potentially has a patent, and people have been kind of rumoring that that the next version of AirPods Pro might have a camera on there.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And so then you could ask Siri, take a picture of that, tell me what it is. Are you bullish on like the idea of visual intelligence? Because when I've walked around with the Meta Ray Bans, I like I like having an LLM at my fingertips.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:But I'm very rarely actually saying, what is this can? Because I can look at it, and it says Yerba Mate. It says Mataina. It says Mango Kiguela. I don't need to do that.
Speaker 1:What I do need Nei to do on my glasses is tell me what's the history of Yerba Mate? Mhmm. And I could just ask that without taking a picture. I can give it the I like, I'll be walking around and some some idea will pop into my head, and I'll be like, need to know the history of the state of California. Tell me when it was founded.
Speaker 1:Just give me the data. And it's nice to have an LLM at my fingertips, but I don't actually need the visual intelligence. I I see it on my phone. I have the new I have the new button where I can pull out visual intelligence. I'm not a daily active user of any visual intelligence project, but what are you are you bullish on it generally?
Speaker 2:Long term, I'm bullish. Don't know exactly how it's gonna play out, but for your use case today, we already have a ChattypuT voice integration in our earbuds. Yeah. So if you connect your this the these headphones to our phone, you can just click a button Yeah.
Speaker 3:To Ask ask make
Speaker 2:a phone call with ChattypuT voice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's And that's good enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good enough for now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Is it is
Speaker 3:it is it Do do you think that the technology industry broadly just so badly wants there to be a major platform Don't. That that in some ways. And and it makes sense in the context of like Zac. Right? Zac has spent the last decades like basically being like, you know, very, know, the platform layer just kind of messing with it.
Speaker 1:It's been
Speaker 3:a hassle. It's been a hassle. So like it makes sense to to invest tens of billions of dollars to try to make sure that you have a a real Yeah. You know, horse in the next platform race. But at the same time, it's it's I think if if you love technology and you grew up the way that Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think the three of us did, you have this desire for there to be like, because it would just be fun and even even if you look at the phone and you're like, okay, this this might be this might be the dominant Yeah. Platform for the next thirty years still.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm super excited to see what the industry builds. Like, we need people to try new things. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For us, we're still gonna be focused on the phone because I believe there's so much cool software we can just build on on the phone. Yeah. Of course, we're thinking about what comes next and we're prototyping, but that's not where our main focus is.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Was was the changes to iMessage a a a catalyst for you guys? They they they allowed, like, red receipts and and delivery.
Speaker 2:Oh, the RCS? RCS. I I see it as a positive for us.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It has to be a positive. I'm I'm curious if it was did it did it make a material difference or No.
Speaker 2:Because I think it's not just about the color of the text message or it's not just about the read receipts. Actually about the color.
Speaker 1:It's about the color. The color is more important than the tag.
Speaker 2:Way more important.
Speaker 3:That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:Really. And that hasn't been solved so
Speaker 1:Yeah. They need to add that to the protocol. What what color message do you want this to show up? And then all the Android users
Speaker 2:can There's send so much social pressure of having a blue bubble. Like my friend told me that at school his daughter's teacher is like handing out homework through airdrop. Yeah. And his daughter was the only one who had to raise their hand and say, I don't have an iPhone. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's rough. Yeah. The social pressure is big. On the on the the blue bubbles and the idea of like tech is almost a status symbol and a personal expression. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I I was joking earlier that, you know, if if OpenAI wants to build a phone, they're gonna have to contend with the blue bubble issue. They should do like gold bubbles or like, you know, the Trump phone. I think Trump was launching a phone. I'd love your take on that at some point. You know, is there is there a hierarchy of colors that you should be thinking of?
Speaker 1:Is is blue intrinsically more welcoming than green?
Speaker 2:I think because of how the ecosystem has played out, you just have to go blue if you want a chance. Sure. Yeah. So we're on our phone business, we're not targeting The US Sure. Very strongly just because of this reason.
Speaker 2:Like, we can't see a way past the the blue Okay. Bubble
Speaker 1:So, yeah. Walk me through the landscape of your non US competitors then. Who who who's actually in in the market? What are the different markets that are interesting? Like, where's the biggest opportunity?
Speaker 2:If we're talking about building the next generation operating system, I think we gotta put China aside Yeah. Because China will have its own ecosystem with its own players Sure. And the rest of the world will have its ecosystem. Okay. I believe you need you need data and distribution to be able to build the next OS.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So, of course, the smartphone companies will be contenders like Apple, Google, Samsung, and Us. There's only four smartphone players outside of China today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then there's other companies with a lot of data as well, like Meta, for instance, or OpenAI. Yeah. So it could be any one of them.
Speaker 1:Have you ever done like a post mortem deep dive on the on the Facebook phone?
Speaker 2:I had it.
Speaker 1:Had it?
Speaker 2:Back in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What? I I didn't even know it existed. Yeah. Wait.
Speaker 1:It was actually a real thing?
Speaker 2:It was real. It was built by HTC, I think.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I I think Chamath worked on that project.
Speaker 1:An interesting like bit of Silicon Valley lore. But I wonder I wonder what the Like, is the lesson there differentiate more on design? Is that what you learned from that? Or is it more like price for performance? How like Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What are the different levers that you think you need to pull to pull something
Speaker 2:It's probably like PMF. Yeah. Like, people have certain expectations from a smartphone, like Yeah. Great cameras, great battery. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, you can't underperform any of those things. You gotta be competitive with the latest iPhone, the latest Samsung. And then you can add your flare on top of it. Yeah. But your flare cannot be significantly different from what people are used to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Like, I believe that in the future, for instance, that apps are gonna go away. There's only one app on the phone. It's the operating system.
Speaker 2:Interesting. But we can't ship a phone without any apps. Like, people love their apps. So you can have a future vision, but it's gonna be like a step by step process to to getting there. And you gotta bring the consumers along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about
Speaker 3:How do you think I I can imagine where a world in which more and more of the app apps on that you use day to day are are just eaten by the operating system. Something like weather, for example. I don't love my weather app Mhmm. But I will open it up from time to time. Yep.
Speaker 3:And there's a different scenario where I just, you know, transcribe what what's, you know, how's the weather gonna be this afternoon? And it just knows where I am and it just pops it up and says, you know, it's gonna be 72 and sunny. But then for other things, like, don't you think there'll be some networks that endure like, for example, like, something like a Strava. Somebody's really into running. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:It's hard to imagine that that just merging with the operating system. Mhmm. So
Speaker 2:I see it slightly differently. I think, broadly, there's two categories of apps, like waste time apps and save time apps. Yeah. Waste time apps are more like entertainment apps. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the the the save time apps are just utilities. I think the utilities are gonna be really easy Yeah. To replace in the beginning. But when it comes to Netflix and Spotify and those, like, entertainment apps, it's gonna take some more time. But eventually, the OS will partner with apps and apps can still exist in a in a container, just not as a separate thing you launch.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:What have you learned from the the history of, like, bloatware on smartphones? I worked at a startup years ago, fifteen years ago or something that was it was running a Siri competitor. And part of their business model was getting like Blackberry to pay them to pre install their app. And it was like a pretty good deal for Blackberry. And this was in this case, it was a pretty good piece of software.
Speaker 1:And so it just it just obviated the need for the customer to go and click pay for $20 for this app. At the same time, customers have notoriously been like, why do I have 75 Verizon apps on my phone? And they get kind of they get kind of frustrated with that. What's the good condition for that? What's the bad case?
Speaker 1:And then where does it go?
Speaker 2:The smartphone market is very big. Mhmm. So on the lower end, everybody has a ton of bloatware. Mhmm. And I think that's okay ish for the consumer because they get a better priced product that they shouldn't afford otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you're operating on the high end and you have a ton of bloatware, then it's kinda weird because people are already paying a lot of money for your product
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then have ads inside of product. Yeah. So that's kinda how I think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what is the what are, like, the key break points for for phone pricing, like, internationally even?
Speaker 2:Internationally, probably around $300. Like, that's the main main category. Yeah. Here in The US, it's very different. It's like a barbell shaped market where the ultra premium takes a lot of share and the low low end, like burner phones, take a lot of share.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. How much are burner phones in The US?
Speaker 2:I don't have the numbers, but probably like 20% of the market.
Speaker 1:Okay. Wow. Yeah. I I meant in terms of price. Like, are we talking like a $100?
Speaker 2:A 150.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, so really, really
Speaker 3:cheap. Interesting. Think that's
Speaker 1:a big thing.
Speaker 3:How much capital would you need to deploy to be able to make a cheap phone, high quality phone in The United States? Are we talking like
Speaker 2:Like, know, manufacture locally?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, would you need like a $50,000,000,000 to
Speaker 1:set And up it's all the a CapEx or OpEx problem.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. The question is like if you have to basically like re not just do the assembly but like recreate all the sub suppliers, it it's you start adding that up and and it gets
Speaker 2:I don't really know because we partner with a bunch of factories all over the world. Yeah. So if we wanted to manufacture in The US, we wouldn't know who to go to to partner with. Not even We do a lot of our manufacturing in India. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there we've seen that the government has been pretty successful. Think, you know, India is now the second site in terms of volume after China.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they have incentives to like, if you manufacture locally and export locally, you get some cash back. And I think that model really works. So if The US is serious about this, it's more of like the structural incentives that need to be set up for this to run.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. What would it take to to is there anyone trying to build like a Tata Nano of phones? Like something that's like smartphone level, not burner phone, but at like $75 a pop?
Speaker 2:They're they already exist.
Speaker 1:They do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like for Africa.
Speaker 1:Okay. Are they are they delivering on the promise at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They're doing a great job in Africa and other markets where people need cheap phones. Yeah. You can get a smartphone for like $50 now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Interesting. What about how do you guys think about have have you integrated wallets for stable coins? Is that something that should happen at the operating system layer for a phone? I'm sure you've been through that since.
Speaker 2:I haven't thought too much about it. For me, like there's no real use case for crypto yet.
Speaker 1:No real use case for crypto. What about store of value, bro?
Speaker 2:We just haven't seen anything with real PMF yet.
Speaker 1:What about Bitcoin? It was PMF.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's like one of the only things.
Speaker 1:I I I get you.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You're you're probably not trying to sell that many phones into sanctioned countries where the citizens really wanna get dollars Yeah. On chain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can you walk me through the relationship between manufacturers and telecommunications companies? I remember like
Speaker 3:years And this ago this is the absolute last question because I know you got a heart out. Oh, yeah. Sorry. We gotta make time for Okay. Cool.
Speaker 3:Hit the gong.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every market is different. Yeah. But in The US, there's basically very little relationship between brands and carriers because there's only three carriers. Mhmm. And they're playing a user acquisition game against each other.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So their main way of acquiring users is not through selling unique hardware. Mhmm. It's mainly the bundle. Right?
Speaker 2:How much data do you get? Do you get free Spotify? Do you get Netflix? So for a small brand like us, there's basically no play
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:With a carrier unless we build a groundswell of support with our community or have, like, really, really innovative products. Mhmm. I think our products are becoming more and more innovative and and and fresh. Mhmm. But we probably need a couple more years before we have a product that's really different for The US.
Speaker 4:Very cool.
Speaker 3:Very cool. We all Hit the Gong and then we'll let you go.
Speaker 1:Well, dude, do we need a number? Can you give us anything? How how big is the company? How many employees you got? How many phones have you sold?
Speaker 2:We're about 750 employees. Wow. We're 0.2% market share globally.
Speaker 1:That's actually huge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The way down
Speaker 1:there. Market is. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:Thanks. We've done more than a billion in revenue and we're doing a billion this year.
Speaker 1:What? Okay. Okay. Okay. Please.
Speaker 1:Please. Hit the head.
Speaker 3:Right behind you. That is very well deserved. Give it give it a self.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. And thank you so much for coming by. Really appreciate having you in person. This is progress. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:Great stuff.
Speaker 1:Really buried the lead there for sure. Are we hopping straight on with with Garrett or we got fifteen minutes? I guess we got ten minutes.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's
Speaker 3:Ten minutes.
Speaker 1:I wanna go through Is there anything else you wanna go through? No. I I like this in the in the how to spend it section of the Financial Times. We have a review of something we've been hunting for which is the best hotel gyms in the world.
Speaker 3:There we go. All good. There we go. So, if you've been to a hotel gym on chest day
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:You've probably been disappointed because many It's hard to find a hotel with what is it? Bigger than 50 pound dumbbells. And
Speaker 1:we believe, haven't fully verified this, but we believe this is due to a market failure in the hotel gym insurance market.
Speaker 3:Insurance market. Yes.
Speaker 1:And so, I think that there are two tiers of insurance. One for like a CrossFit gym or power lifting gym that has free weights and also barbells and you can do hang clean and clean and jerk and all that stuff. And then there's a different level of insurance underwriting for things like treadmills and bicycles and free weights that go up to 50 pounds. And so that's why when you're traveling, see a lot of gyms that don't have they won't you can't do squats. There's a leg press machine.
Speaker 1:And so they lean on the machines because the risk of injury is lower, but the risk of gains is also lower. So we are gonna understand where you should travel because to get access to the world's best gyms. Hotel gyms are a mixed bag. Even in top flight spots, working out can be jar can be a jarringly subpar experience.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 1:Could not agree more. Machinery might be decades old. The water cooler might might be might date to the eighties office era. Should get Rora. For years, hospitality didn't invest in gyms as unlike with restaurants and spas, the gym usually doesn't bring in any extra revenue.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting dynamic I hadn't thought of. So, yeah. Mean, you put in like a Nobu in your hotel, that's gonna drive a ton of extra revenue, whereas your gym will not. So, increasingly Just
Speaker 3:charge me per set with the 75.
Speaker 1:Per
Speaker 3:pound. Yeah. Charge me per Per pound.
Speaker 1:And then you've got to put the bigger weights in because like, I'm gonna wanna lift heavy.
Speaker 3:Profit maximizing strategy.
Speaker 1:So, but increasingly, top hotels are pivoting. It's important I keep the same fitness routines as when I'm at home, says Emily Oberg, founder of clothing label Sporty and Rich, who works out six times a week. Her favorite hotel gyms include the Ritz Club in Paris for the pool and the Il Saint Pietro in Positano. It has it has alfresco cardio equipment, outside cardio equipment, tennis courts and views. It's motivating if the space is also beautiful.
Speaker 1:Gym lighting needs to make you look and feel good while working out, says interior designer Kelly Weirsler. Acoustics should amplify without distracting. Materials should perform functionally while still feeling refined. I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 3:Have you been to any of the proper hotels, the Santa Monica proper gym?
Speaker 1:I haven't.
Speaker 3:Designed the Santa Monica proper.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 3:really? Kelly Worsler. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There Okay. You So, the best concept, these are awards from HTSI and the Financial Times, how to spend it. The best concept goes to Power in Ireland, a great gym chain in the lobby of the hotel. Power, Ireland's leading boutique workout provider, has partnerships with the Dean Hotels in Cork, Dublin in Galloway, and The Mason, also in Dublin. In the gyms, there's a functional fitness area with a custom athletic rig and AstroTurf track, a lifting area, free weights and a cardio equipment cardio area area equipped with technology techno gym skill run treadmills, rowers, ski ergs, Watt Bike Pros and more.
Speaker 1:There are several forty five minute classes, including run and Metcon. Guests can recover afterwards in the Hyperice Suite, which is stocked with massage guns and foam rollers. Rooms from 200 Euros. Not bad. The most scenic is at the Amon Zou in Greece.
Speaker 1:It's an Amon property, of course.
Speaker 3:There we go.
Speaker 1:Summer escapes are all about picturesque locations, seafront settings, a quaint and quiet locale, and often ancient European history. This Amman property gym offers all of the above, and then some. The resort has its own UNESCO protected ruins but it's but it's the outdoor shaded weights area
Speaker 3:overlook Let's give it up for hotels that have ruins.
Speaker 1:That is the real sell according to Tim Blakey, a personal trainer and founder of the workout at Primebody. We go on holiday to be outside, he observes. There's a slight breeze, the sun is usually out, and you can get your nature fix while you lift weights. Rooms from 1,500 Euros. Also not bad.
Speaker 1:Oh hey, they have a proper hotel. Did you know that? That this was gonna be here. The proper hotel in Santa Monica, best for recovery. It has an amortal chamber where tech infused lounge chairs pulse with electromagnetic fields to deliver red light therapy to reduce inflammation and combat jet lag.
Speaker 1:It's funny because when I walk wax testing? Let's go.
Speaker 3:Okay. That's cool. Yeah. It's funny though when you walk into a, I mean, you're going into a hotel gym, what do you really care about at the end of the day, John? The pump.
Speaker 3:How much
Speaker 1:you around. Can So, and they say at the proper hotel in Santa Monica, don't be surprised if you see Brian Johnson on your way out.
Speaker 3:Personal favorite hotel, Jim, Sensei Sensei Porcupine Creek. Mhmm. This is Larry Ellison's basically Four Seasons Yeah. Competitor and they've done a a really nice job with it.
Speaker 1:Okay. We gotta go through. There there there's a few others, the most exotic, the best for classes. But the the most exclusive. This is this is what I want to
Speaker 2:know about.
Speaker 1:There we The most exclusive hotel gym in the world according to Financial Times, Soren at the Emory in Knightsbridge. Guests of the all suite Emory have full access to Soren, a comprehensive wellness club with only a 140 vetted members. It costs £15,000 per year to join.
Speaker 3:I thought you were gonna say per month.
Speaker 1:The gym is small, but it has 300 and degree mirrors, so it feels bigger. LA celebrity trainer, Tracy Anderson has licensed her name to Saron. It's the only place where you can book her dance cardio workouts in The UK. Alternatively, guests can request Isn't
Speaker 3:that kind of disappointing though that the
Speaker 1:Dude, this
Speaker 3:is the nicest so that like the most exclusive gym in the world is is £15,000 a year? Like, shouldn't somebody make should somebody make like a like a $100,000 a month gym?
Speaker 1:I think you just designed home gyms in mega mansions.
Speaker 3:I maybe I did.
Speaker 1:But but but
Speaker 3:I With with an entire team of specialists.
Speaker 1:But so so so you can pay the £15,000 a year for a membership or you can book a suite for £1,600 per night. So maybe, I don't know what is that? It's it's in pounds so that's like $15 US
Speaker 3:or something. It's pretty funny that the dynamic of this is the most exclusive club in the world. But if you just book a hotel room you can go Yeah. To That's a bit silly
Speaker 1:don't But this is where it gets good. So if you book the hotel room it's suites only. You book the hotel room it's gonna cost you £1,600 a night. They have a weights trolley that you can request and it brings the weights to your suite. It includes dumbbells, kettlebells, skipping ropes, yoga balls, resistance bands, and a leather gym ball.
Speaker 1:A Peloton bike can also be installed at a whim. So you can be in your room and be like, I don't want to go to the gym. Bring the weights to me, and they will bring them to you on a trolley. That is luxury. I love it.
Speaker 1:Anyway. Lots of fun in the how to spend it section of the the Financial Times. Any any other any other news?
Speaker 3:Let's do some timeline.
Speaker 1:The other yeah. Some time I
Speaker 3:like this post from Dylan Patel. He said AI bros when I tell them Boeing outperformed NVIDIA, Meta, Broadcom, AMD and Microsoft this year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I gotta pull up the Boeing chart.
Speaker 1:On public.com?
Speaker 3:I certainly do. So, year to date up 34%. Wow. Let's give it up for a great
Speaker 1:With only 34%? How does that outperform Google, Nvidia, Meta? I guess they all round trip because of the
Speaker 3:tariff Yeah. And Nvidia's only up 18% year to date because a lot of the election stuff started getting priced in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well well, we have our we have our last guest of the show joining now. I'm gonna let you take the intro. I will be right back.
Speaker 3:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Can we bring in Garrett? I will say how I will say what up. How
Speaker 3:you doing? What's going on? Good boy.
Speaker 7:How's it going?
Speaker 3:It's great to have you here. This is the first time. Correct? Do I have First an time. I'm surprised it took this long.
Speaker 3:It's great to see you. You've got some exciting Hit news us with a quick intro on yourself and the company and then we'll get into the news.
Speaker 5:Sweet. Yeah. My name is Garrett, CEO of PipeDream Labs. At PipeDream Labs, we build the infrastructure to make autonomous logistics, scale.
Speaker 3:Amazing. Give us the quick catch us up to speed on the history of the company. I know we first met back, I think it was in 2021. You've been very busy since then. And then I wanna get into what you're announcing today.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, likewise, man. Congrats on the show. Thanks. Dude, you look sick.
Speaker 3:Yep. Incredible. Have to come in person next time you're next Yeah. Time you're
Speaker 5:I got you guys. So, yeah, the the announcement is something we've been working on for a long time. You know, the kind of first product we were working on at Pipedream is, you know, what we see as, the fiber optic cable for autonomous logistics, how you can move a lot of things really quickly and really cheaply. So we put underground pipes, in cities, and then we have these robots that go through the underground pipes and deploy orders to what we call portals, but they're like ATM sized kiosks. It's a modular system.
Speaker 5:It may be able to be retrofit, you know, whether that's into a building, an apartment building, underneath a road, and uses just standard construction methods that cities are used to using for noninvasive construction going into buildings and through public right of way. So we got you know, that's something we were working on. We we got that to a really good place. And something that we kind of thought about a lot when we were starting was, you know, if we're working on the fiber optic cable, we wonder if there's also gonna need to be kind of like the cloud architecture for autonomous logistics. Because as you start to move things really quickly and you we've seen this with drones already.
Speaker 5:Like drones are like this magical they're magic. It's incredible and they're so quick. And yet it's still taking like fifteen, thirty minutes sometimes. Like I had one that took forty minutes because it's so it's so hard to pick out of those stores that they're picking from. And they're picking out of the stores because those are the closest storage areas to where the customers are.
Speaker 5:So it's kind of like an inefficient system. You have this really fast delivery method and a really slow processor to get that thing out of storage and into the drone. So that's something we thought about a lot. So me and my co founder, Cannon, we're a huge retail nerd. So we're always diving into Costco and Walmart and Amazon and the history of just logistics and retail as a whole.
Speaker 5:And what we realized is like, man, it is time. It is time for Autonomous Logistics to scale and no one stepping up and building these fulfillment centers that are made to rapidly dispense. So we had learned a lot, worked with lot of partners who taught us a lot about how to run those facilities and decided, you know what, it's time to go. So we just acquired our first Rapid Fulfillment Center here in Austin. It's going to be what feeds the network, here in Austin.
Speaker 5:And, yeah, that that was the other announcement So is
Speaker 3:so is this, just so I'm getting it correctly, so is this set up in order to serve the, like, you know, original Pipedream infrastructure and then also traditional drone delivery as well?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So the way that we see it is if you have something at at a rapid fulfillment center, the goal is how do we get it into the customer's hands as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And a lot of the times that's, you know, you you may wanna move it through the pipe dream network to a closer location. You might just wanna put it into a drone directly. It may be a heavier item.
Speaker 5:It may be a bundle of items. You wanna put it into a self driving car. I think for the foreseeable future, I think it's gonna be even, like, really load dependent as well. I think autonomous vehicles and drones are gonna be kinda like the GPUs of the autonomous logistics scale up. We're gonna be constantly constrained by their availability.
Speaker 5:So our goal is to be really good one at dispensing really quickly and dispensing into the right modality and, you know, constantly figuring out what is that right modality for that address, what is the right modality for that time, and making sure that that order is getting into that right modality and getting into the person as cheaply and as quickly as possible. So
Speaker 3:what is the over the next year specifically, what what delivery form factor are you most excited about?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think the two that we're most excited about is autonomous delivery right now is still pretty cost constrained. The cost per delivery is still really high. So you're either passing it out along to the customer or you you see a lot of the times it's heavily subsidized. I think, especially on the drone side, that's gonna come down a lot over the next year.
Speaker 5:And so that's the one that we really wanna be the best at doing. We we have an internal goal here at the team that we wanna by the end of next year, we wanna have done the most drone deliveries of any company, which is crazy. It's not like a super high bar right now. But I think that is a a resource that's really underutilized. And then what
Speaker 3:is the regulatory framework that drone deliveries are are needing to happen within right now, specifically in Austin? Like I imagine peer to peer, I could just put something, you know, attach something to a drone, take it up, fly it over to a buddy's house and drop it. But then if you're trying to do this at scale, I imagine, like, you you have to keep keep a lot of other things in mind.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It it's right now, it's not such a straight pathway to being able to it city by city. So each company who is doing the drone deliveries has to get their own regulatory clearance. And so it is, like, pretty pretty big hassle. That that's changing pretty rapidly.
Speaker 5:We just had the executive order to make that pathway clear up. I I really think especially as you start to get more consumer demand for it. I mean, it's just if you go and look at the reviews from people who have experienced a a drone delivery, it's borderline a religious experience. It really changes how you think about commerce as a whole. So I think that's gonna change over the next couple of years.
Speaker 5:I think there's a lot of companies that have died saying drone delivery is gonna, you know, scale in the next two years. You know, they've been saying that for the last, like, fifteen years. So it's a tough thing to time. That's why, you know, we wanna get really good at drone deliveries and be really careful and then just kinda learn right now, be ready for that scale, and really focus on pickup as well. Pickups is a huge, industry.
Speaker 5:It it's one that doesn't have a lot of infrastructure to it, so it's still such a bad experience, but it's still one of the fastest growing ways that people experience retail is ordering ahead and picking up, especially in grocery. So that's when we saw the ability for us to go into grocery, make it a really, really great pickup experience. That's something that you can do right now, make really good margins on, learn. And then as there's autonomous methods decreasing costs, specifically due to better regulation, then we'll start to add that on as we go along.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Anything else?
Speaker 3:I think that's it.
Speaker 1:Good to see you again. The last time we Yeah. Talked or I mean, we've talked a few times, but I interviewed Garrett like two, three years ago or something Yeah. All about how Amazon had been talking a big game about drone delivery. And I was like, let me talk to everyone else who's been been working in this space and it's it's a fantastically massive market that is incredibly difficult to actually get things to work and once they start working it's great.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Think the key thing is staying in the game Yeah. Finding finding a sustainable business model that's not dependent on, you know, dependent on adoption over a fifteen year period versus a fifteen month
Speaker 1:I remember when we were when we were talking, we were we were new like, it's just such a it's it's one of those business that you just, like, naturally noodle on, like, okay. Should you go to, like, people that are building new prefab home communities and install a bunch of pipes in the ground when they build the buildings? Or should you do some sort of boring company thing where you get really good at drilling into old old, you know, neighborhoods? Or should you do flying or driving? Like, there's so many different modalities.
Speaker 1:So very exciting that you're that you're kind of exploring all of them now. So congrats and good luck.
Speaker 5:Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Great stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll talk to
Speaker 2:you soon. Talk soon. Bye.
Speaker 4:Alright. See you guys.
Speaker 1:In other AI acquisition news, we almost missed it because, you know, Sundar did everything he could to drown this out, but we surfaced the post and it's about Mark Zuckerberg acquiring Play AI poaching the entire team, and they are joining the Meta Super Intelligence Lab next week. Zuck cannot be stopped. He has the Thanos gauntlet there. They completed
Speaker 3:his Who's on the who's on the the who's on
Speaker 1:The cap table? Or No. No. It's the researchers. Guess it's the I I feel like I feel like we were played a very big role in this meme bigger, but a lot of people have run with it in different directions.
Speaker 1:It's been amazing watching it watching it grow like this. The PlayAI group will report to Johan Shalkwick. Cool name. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Who recently joined Meta from a separate voice AI startup called Sesame AI.
Speaker 1:I remember this. That was a controversial one because Sesame is a new new company, and then, you know, shouldn't be losing people to Zuck already. But, the entire Play AI team is coming over, and I believe, it's a YC company because I saw one of the YC partners posting about, hey, this is this
Speaker 2:this I'm not is there a
Speaker 3:100,000,000 for Gary Voges.
Speaker 1:The dark knight, the dork knight rides again. Never go up against him.
Speaker 3:Well, in other news over the weekend, Janek Sinner made history as the first Italian man to win a singles title at Wimbledon. Naturally, is according to Bezel. He celebrated with a rose gold Rolex Daytona Oysterflex on the wrist. So thank you for doing the most important work. It looks absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yes. Cover of the Wall Street Journal for this, by the way. In Bloom, Italy's Janik Sinner celebrates Sunday in London after his men's singles championship win over Spain's Carlos Al caraz. I don't know if I follow tennis enough to know how to pronounce that. Poland's Igo Swatek defeated blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, more coverage. He's I looking happy love the trophy.
Speaker 3:I love how how
Speaker 1:I know sports.
Speaker 3:Little attention you play
Speaker 1:to tennis, You you know what I do follow, though? I follow hitters. I follow watches. And Jensen absolutely mocked the rest of the tech world
Speaker 3:He really did.
Speaker 1:With one of the most insane You don't see Mills
Speaker 3:in the see him in a short sleeve t shirt much.
Speaker 1:No. He took off the leather jacket for this.
Speaker 3:Look at this thing.
Speaker 1:A come from behind moment because we were the about his lack of wrist game. And we've been doing wrist checks on Jensen for for months now.
Speaker 3:Carp who was was early and right.
Speaker 1:Carp's yeah. Oh, for sure. He With the Aquanaut. Aquanaut. The orange strap.
Speaker 1:Zuck's been ramping up, putting up insane FPJorns.
Speaker 3:Really, anytime he steps out of the house.
Speaker 1:He has a cubitus. He's got he's got a stack collection. And everyone was saying, even even Jensen's family relative, Lisa Su over at AMD was mocking him with a a Rolex we saw. But now,
Speaker 3:Jess Jess steps steps out. Never top And the market loves this, John. The stock's up.
Speaker 1:Oh, stock's
Speaker 3:up? 3% over the last five days. Obviously. Obviously because of this.
Speaker 1:Obviously because of this. But this watch is is really, really special. I mean, what I what I love about it is that it's just so thin. Like, when I think Richard Mel, I think of the silhouette, the outline, this kind of like, well, it's almost like a bowed rectangle, which I think is a very cool unique I think of skeletonized. It's checking those boxes, but then it's just so thin.
Speaker 1:And it looks fantastic. And Jensen is wearing it very well.
Speaker 3:Need to do a deep dive on RM because the story is Yes, we do. It's basically this longtime executive who decided he was going to make a luxury watch brand.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And to actually just decide it's easy to say I'm gonna start a watch company. Yeah. Very very much harder to like actually crack the code and be able to sell
Speaker 1:watches
Speaker 3:watches
Speaker 1:in the I'm surprised some of our friends haven't started watch companies given how many companies they're spinning up every two seconds.
Speaker 3:Yeah. A certain one in particular. It'll happen eventually. It'll happen eventually.
Speaker 1:The last
Speaker 3:Another post, somebody posted, RIP McKinsey, you don't need a 300 k consultant anymore. You can run now run full competitive market analysis using Grok four. And our friend, Buko Capital Bloke says, I'd like to see an LLM provide regular consulting to turbocharge opioid sales, be a trusted partner for autocratic regimes and help young people get hooked on e cigarettes.
Speaker 1:Very negative on the consulting firms. Who speaks for them?
Speaker 3:But we gotta we gotta we gotta They do
Speaker 1:a lot of good work.
Speaker 3:McKinsey McKinsey,
Speaker 1:Bain, BCG. The white shoe firms, they do great work. Yes. Some mistakes were made. But overall, good farm team for future PMs and big tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, in other news, Monumental Labs, the has raised some money over $8,000,000, most recently in a $7,000,000 seed round led by Alexis Ohanian seven seven six. This is the company.
Speaker 3:Stone carving alert.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're carving stones. They're carving stones.
Speaker 3:You heard Monumental Labs, you thought new new New foundation model.
Speaker 1:No. AI robots can already carve stone statues. Entire buildings are next. The stone carving startup Monumental Labs has raised money. They have a new HQ, almost 40,000 square feet in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Speaker 3:Great. So so the the cool thing here, so so they they are opening this new facility Yeah. In Greenpoint which is makes total sense Yep. To be the home of what will become the largest fine art stone fabricator in North America Yep. And possibly in the world when it opens in the fall.
Speaker 3:Makes so much sense in in this, you know, a lot of people would, you know, this company was non obvious.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:But then if you think about what we would pay for stone statues here in the studio, and I think what a lot of people will pay
Speaker 1:all the mag seven CEOs, potentially, just hypothetically, I don't have like a mood board for that or anything. Yeah. It's not like saved on my phone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We wanna make the amount rush rush more of the manosphere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's mag seven watching over the manosphere.
Speaker 3:No. But I I think I think you know if they can really crack
Speaker 1:Congratulations to the Monumental Labs team. That's a very exciting company.
Speaker 3:Led by Alexus Ohanian, a friend of the show.
Speaker 1:And also
Speaker 3:He says, looks like the secret is out. Can't wait for y'all to watch because he is gonna be a guest shark.
Speaker 1:He's going Shark Tank.
Speaker 3:The upcoming season of Shark Tank which will be Wednesdays this fall on ABC and stream on Hulu. He's gonna really have to really go shark mode because Alexis is known to just be a really
Speaker 1:nice Not
Speaker 3:not I mean, sharp elbows I'm sure getting into deals. Sure. You know? Sure. But but yeah, he's gonna I mean, but there's always room for Yeah.
Speaker 3:Just offering an entrepreneur on Shark Tank a nice fair deal. Yeah. You wouldn't Yeah. You know, he he's not gonna be offering, you know, like Yeah. Can just give me 20% of top line forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mean, as a personality, think you'll fit in great. I think you'll really add something to the show. So very excited for him. Go check it out.
Speaker 3:And final post from Adam Singer.
Speaker 1:I was gonna end on this The
Speaker 3:CMO of Adquick out of home made easy and measurable. Says love seeing out of home from the new gen of tech media brands, great brands do things online and in the real world. Our software makes this really easy for all. And I just wanna give a quick shout out to Adam for betting on us early.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Bet on us when we just were two guys, two suits and a stack of posts. We will never forget that and Really was. Go do yourself a favor and sign up for AdQuick. Yep. After you're done with that.
Speaker 1:Easy and measurable. Come on people. I don't even need
Speaker 3:a It's really not complicated. After that, leave us a five star review Spotify Spotify. Apple Podcast wherever you listen and I can't wait for tomorrow. Yeah. There there was a couple weeks of news since last Friday.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And I'm sure there will be quite a bit more tomorrow.
Speaker 1:The other piece of news, the information launched a competitor to us and they had some technical issues. So, if you know things about computers, please contact them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Tell them tell them the technology brother sent you.
Speaker 1:And that's our show. See you tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Cheers. Goodbye. Have a great Monday.