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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're welcome to TPBN. Wow. Look at those flashes. Today is Wednesday, 02/04/2026. We are live from the TPBN Ultra Home, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both. Easy use corporate cards, go pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Rams doing a Super Bowl ad. We're doing a Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 1:Rams in our Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for the Super Bowl. Just a couple days away. This was a very fun project. Do you wanna take us through the the the thesis and sort of what what what we put together with this since I just got all the credit.
Speaker 1:But I had nothing to do with it, basically.
Speaker 2:There's a very nice post. Pull up the the Adweek Yeah. Our
Speaker 1:friend There was a very nice post from Blake Scholl over at Boom Supersonic, and he said, there's there's Clever, and then there's John Coogan and Jordy Hayes at TBPN Clever. Behold, a master class in marketing, and I had nothing to do with it, and I get the credit. Let's go
Speaker 2:Dylan on our team led the charge here. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time. We had done something similar back at Party Round. Yeah. We ran a billboard with a bunch of different friends, companies, customers, did really well.
Speaker 2:So doing this is the final stage Yeah.
Speaker 1:In terms of advertising. Fun fact. Dylan also spoke this week at the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Very happy to be partnered with them.
Speaker 2:But Kendra Barnett over at Adweek covered covered our ad. Yes. Of course. And she says, The fifteen second spot isn't selling anything. It's simply what co host Jordy Hayes calls a love letter to our community.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's really what it is. TBPN is nothing without the community, the people that join the show. Yeah. We made the fifteen second spot in house. Yep.
Speaker 2:We featured a bunch of our guests. And then if you've been on the show as a guest, whether it was for five minutes or five hours, your logo made it in here. So, yeah, this will be doing it a regional buy. We basically looked at where the majority of our audience was, and we bought bought segments around that. So very excited for Sunday.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I said in Adweek, it's completely unnecessary for a media company to buy advertising. The nature of media is that you're constantly putting out things that are promoting the business naturally just through the content. So why do it? And we basically did it.
Speaker 2:I said, we believe in doing things purely for fun.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:We're certainly having fun.
Speaker 1:Some people screenshotted that and texted me to that. I thought that was a good quote. Let me tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. There was another reason beyond fun.
Speaker 1:I do think it's an important opportunity to to introduce the football community to technology, to business, and and that's really that that's my goal with this ad. Hopefully, let people know if you're watching the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2:Technology, it exists. Awareness for technology and business. Let's play the
Speaker 1:ad. Let's play the ad. Let's see. You're watching TVP ad. If you're watching this podcast, you've already passed the test.
Speaker 1:It's a great question.
Speaker 3:I think it's super important and awesome.
Speaker 4:This is gonna be one of a 100 baguettes.
Speaker 1:You guys are the podcast in the world. The gong hit. This is great.
Speaker 2:Short, sweet, and, we look forward to seeing it live on Sunday.
Speaker 1:Yes. Eleven Labs, build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. We have some massive news from Eleven Labs coming up on the show at 11:30. Let's pull up the linear lineup.
Speaker 1:I will tell you that linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and we have a stacked show. Andrew Reid's back on the show. Matti from eleven Labs is coming on. We have Gurgae from the pragmatic engineer coming on.
Speaker 2:Super pumped for that one.
Speaker 1:Dara from Uber's coming on. Mitchell Green, one of our close friends is coming on to talk about all sorts of stuff going on in market. And then we have an awesome lightning round lined up. So is there anything else we should we should cover about the Super Bowl? Should we move on to other Super Bowl coverage?
Speaker 1:Because we're not the only ones. Running ads, lots of tech people Absolutely. Coming
Speaker 2:Wild, wild morning.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I was not expecting this out of Anthropic. They basically took the vibe war was like effectively relegated to X. It just felt like the same 100,000 people saying, It's so over, we're so back. It's over, we're so back. They're taking it to the main stage, right?
Speaker 2:It shouldn't be that surprising, right? Anytime Dario gets on a mic anywhere, he's taking shots at OpenAI.
Speaker 1:He but he's he's not taking direct shots.
Speaker 2:Not direct shots.
Speaker 1:He's always
Speaker 2:And this arguably is not a direct shot either. I guess he's They just never said been ads are coming Yeah. To AI. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And anyway But
Speaker 1:but truthfully, like, lot of the previous anthropic advertising has been very in their own lane. They've run a number of campaigns that have been We're just thinking. The crowd. We're thinking. We're your thought partner.
Speaker 1:This one does feel like it's a response to what's happening in the industry. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll get into why they took this approach. Clearly, think we're just excited to spike Sam's cortisol. And I think they probably
Speaker 1:Well, they've will definitely been watching some height Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's try just play all four apps.
Speaker 1:Let's play at least one of them. We gotta play the height maxing one. That one's particularly funny. But are they here in the timeline? While we pull those up, me tell you about app app loving, profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai.
Speaker 1:Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow
Speaker 2:And your you were saying earlier off the show you were starting to like Anthropic until they came out against ads.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. I see this as an attack on me. I see an attack on one advertiser as an attack on all advertisers. I'm pro ads and
Speaker 2:Wait. This is not this is not the right ad. We'll come back to this one. That's another Super Bowl ad that we'll add later
Speaker 1:in The the anthropic attack on advertising, it does cross the line for me. It goes too far. And I think that they should be supporting the advertising economy. Almost 10% of the American workers
Speaker 2:Alright. So let's pull up this one. The first ad is, can I get a six pack quickly?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And this one I thought, okay. This is hilarious. Not just watching clavicular. They're studying it.
Speaker 1:Apparently. Let's watch it.
Speaker 2:I was not expecting this to be the lux maxing Super Bowl. Yeah. But let's play it.
Speaker 1:Do we have it? No? Almost? While we're doing that, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Speaker 1:Without further ado
Speaker 2:Let's play it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is what does it say?
Speaker 2:Violation. Starts out by just saying violation.
Speaker 5:Perfect. That is a clear and achievable goal. Would you like me to tailor a personalized workout plan? Yes. Perfect.
Speaker 5:Let me personalize this for you.
Speaker 2:The lag This is like the lag.
Speaker 1:This is the whole meme on Instagram reels. Whenever you're do impressions of ChatGPT voice
Speaker 3:this. A hundred and forty pounds.
Speaker 5:Got it. I'll create a plan that focuses on aesthetic strength
Speaker 1:Alright.
Speaker 2:Pause for a second.
Speaker 5:With confident
Speaker 2:Like, the the the slight delay
Speaker 1:It's it it is iconic.
Speaker 2:So good. Yeah. And clearly, this was written with ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:No. No.
Speaker 2:No. I'm saying, like like
Speaker 1:What do mean?
Speaker 2:It's it's designed to sound like it was like, it's it sounds exactly like, got it. I'll create a personalized plan.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's actually how ChatGPT sounds. I I I think in fact, when I've watched the Instagram reels, they they do the Chattypuy impression, and it's it's a little more like, this is written for comedy. The the and so the fact that he says what what did he say? Alright. Absolutely twice in a row, like, that's
Speaker 5:something built in the gym. Tri Step BoostMAX, the insoles that add one vertical inch of height and help short king stand tall.
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 5:Use code height maxing 10 for big discounts.
Speaker 1:Ads are coming to AI. But not to collide as a great ad.
Speaker 3:What's the
Speaker 1:difference between me? The height maxing thing is so crazy.
Speaker 2:So crazy to run an ad like this and not even do a call to action. Yeah. That was probably intentional. Woah. Because if they're anti Call
Speaker 1:to action is like, you know, Cloud and you land on
Speaker 6:the ad.
Speaker 2:It's so funny. It's just truly the the the the irony of being anti ad and then just spending. How much do you think they're they're running? They have four individual ads. You can imagine them.
Speaker 2:This will probably be one of the biggest buys of the Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Someone ran the numbers, and if they did all if they aired all four, it would be something like $80,000,000 or something. I don't think that they're gonna run all four. That seems like a lot. Maybe there'll be some regional buys in there. I don't know.
Speaker 1:$80,000,000 seems like a lot to spend. I mean, it's a big company. They raise tens of billions, so, you know, it's possible. But that feels like that feels aggressive.
Speaker 6:There's also bulk
Speaker 2:discounting Sure. And there's Yeah. Again, they could do they could Yeah. Choose to do regional.
Speaker 1:And isn't there something where if you buy a massive ad campaign like this, you'll also have to buy in the Olympics as well? NBC sells both. So Yeah. We could see a rerun of these or or another buy later.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Super Bowl has an insane amount of demand. Yeah. Olympics has way less.
Speaker 1:But this is clearly like a a a particular moment in time and and
Speaker 2:insane. It's insane. I mean, it's it's incredibly clever. It's also incredibly dirty. Like, they're I think they're like trying to muddy the water around the ads rollout.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Like, as
Speaker 2:the ads the ads that are coming to ChatGPT are effectively display ads. Right? In the industry by now should know this.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yet this this campaign implies that the
Speaker 1:Influencing influence the response Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that you cannot trust it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's fair game Yeah. But it's it's like it's like dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's sort of fake newsy a little bit. It's a little bit it's it's a little spin on top of what will wind up happening. And, yeah, I mean, the the the the it wouldn't even make sense for the ads to really influence the content. They're probably just gonna wind up doing what Instagram does and just showing you things that you're actually likely to purchase no matter what you're looking at because that will just be what optimizes CAC and ROAS.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean I mean, at some point, I affect I I expect that the ads will be certainly targeted. Yeah. Like if you search, I don't know, Yerba Mate. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What Yerba Mate should I get? Yeah. It might show you, like, what it thinks you should get. Yeah. And then separately, it will have like, here's also another ad.
Speaker 2:Where Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Where you see a sponsored, you know, result and it's flagged and there's a little ad ad tag or slightly different background color, and people are used to that. So I don't think anyone really expects, you know, ads as they roll out in Chatuchupti to be some major violation of the social contract of what people understand ads to be. But what's interesting is that they don't actually say OpenAI. They don't say Chatuchupti.
Speaker 1:This is just what comes with the territory when you're the dominant player. Someone can just take a shot at the category
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it feels like it's a shot at you. And it's sort of a it's sort of a champagne problem. You know? If if ChatGPT wasn't in the position that it was in, they wouldn't everyone wouldn't be like, oh, this is a shot at ChatGPT. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They'd be like, oh, this is a shot at the category because there's seven players that are all equally used. It's like, no. It's a
Speaker 7:Let's pull up the
Speaker 1:next It's a dominant app. Yeah. Let's pull up the next one.
Speaker 8:How do I communicate better with my mom?
Speaker 1:They went off with this.
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Speaker 2:This feels so off brand. For Anthropic? Anthropic. Yeah. They haven't it's not it's not classy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, it's it's I'm not saying I'm not saying it wasn't a good
Speaker 1:it feels appropriate for the Super Bowl. This feels like the level of humor that you would see in Super Bowl ads. Like, if this was a Bud Light commercial, I'd be like, okay. But, yes, I agree with you. It feels like totally unexplored territory for them.
Speaker 1:It's yeah. It it is a little It's It's spicy. It's yeah. Alright.
Speaker 2:Pull up the next one.
Speaker 1:Pull up Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Pull up What's the next one?
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 2:What do got? Deception.
Speaker 8:So what do you think?
Speaker 10:Absolutely. That's such a fun and creative business idea. You've got something really special here. Getting started can feel daunting. I can make a step by step mini business plan.
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Speaker 10:400% APR rates may vary possibly doubling or tripling without notice. What? Would you like to make a quick credit check?
Speaker 2:Incredibly Yeah. Well played and incredibly dirty.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, did this I I outcome
Speaker 1:in in an ads world, but so easily avoidable and OpenAI has been messaging
Speaker 2:And I was trying I was trying to find
Speaker 1:ages, and they've stated this multiple times on podcasts and in blog posts and in essays. Like, they they've been beating the drum on this for a long time, That clearly, they will gate who is allowed to advertise, what the context is, how these ads will be displayed. Yeah. There's a there's a million
Speaker 2:I was trying to find examples of these type of Super Bowl attack ads from,
Speaker 1:like,
Speaker 2:the history of Pepsi and and Coca Cola, Apple Yeah. And IBM. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The I'm a Mac guy. Yeah. The I'm a Mac guy. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And and none of them were as direct or effectively as
Speaker 1:The 1984 ad was saying, like, IBM is authoritarian dictator. Right?
Speaker 2:It's like so aggressive. Still but still less it it it wasn't as as like, the timing here is a big factor Mhmm. Right right when the ads are rolling out. And just like really muddying the water. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Obviously, OpenAI is gonna do is gonna do fine. Yeah. But this really makes their life a lot harder.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That one was also funny because, like, there she's like, absolutely. And that's what, like, Claude usually says. Mhmm. When the you're absolutely right.
Speaker 6:That's like a Claudeism.
Speaker 1:That's a Claudeism.
Speaker 6:Yeah. That's not Chatuchipiti.
Speaker 1:What is what does Chatuchipiti usually say? Feel like there's
Speaker 6:specific phrases exactly like that.
Speaker 1:Well, the specific phrase that I think of is like, it's not this, it's that. And I didn't hear that coming through.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was interesting. But I don't know. Do do you think these are gonna be effective? Do you think
Speaker 6:that's the question.
Speaker 2:So so really bold campaign Yeah. For a company that hasn't been able to consistently top crack the top 25 of the In iPhone consumer.
Speaker 4:In consumer.
Speaker 2:And so my question is like, does this mean they're going into consumer or is this purely to piss off OpenAI and Yeah. Make their life harder?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I like, there's a world where there's where there's business leaders
Speaker 2:Like, is this, like, like Watching. Somebody's walking by and you just stick your foot out and try to, like, trip them? A little bit. That's kinda what it feels like.
Speaker 1:It does feel like vibe
Speaker 2:It feels like consumers so far gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see. Maybe at the end of the Super Bowl, we'll we'll check the App Store charts and Claude will be up at the top because so many people have seen this. They thought it's funny.
Speaker 1:But it does feel like such inside baseball. Like, I bet a lot of I bet a lot of average consumer AI consumers don't even know that
Speaker 2:ads But are they're they're not even they're not even pushing they're not actually trying to push downloads with this, or they would put a call to action.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or QR code, like download the app now. Yeah. Ad free ad free AI is here with Claude. Like, download this this thing.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I mean, maybe the thing is that I don't even
Speaker 2:know I know to saying all this to IPO first. I I can see it being beneficial in just terms of preparation for for the IPO. Right? There's a lot of people that are just retail investors that that aren't Yeah. Aware that that aren't really super aware of Quad.
Speaker 2:Right? They may have heard of Anthropic. Yeah. They actually aren't
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really aware of
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of of their different products.
Speaker 1:I just think, like, if you're if you're, you know, an an enterprise that's deploying AI, APIs, and LLMs, like, into your organization. And, like, you're not worried about the ads product in ChatGPT. You're like, oh, yeah. Like, OpenAI Codex is is this quality. Gemini three is good for this, and Claude 4.5 is good for this.
Speaker 1:And, like, my team will deploy and we'll look at costs and Pareto curves. It doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like any any CIO or CTO of a big company is gonna say, like, oh, like, I couldn't possibly, you know, use OpenAI in a business context.
Speaker 2:Gabe says, Ad Free AI is here with Claude. Ask three questions before hitting limits. Yeah. Yeah. Or use add gbt and be able to ask a bunch more.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:Here's a Super Bowl ad they should run. MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best in class embedding models and re rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so That would just be a clean
Speaker 1:ad read. Clean ad read for
Speaker 2:Does does this ever come back to bite them? Because the idea that you're gonna offer products to consumers and never monetize transactions, never monetize commerce, never run ads, like it hasn't really been done in the history of the internet. Even Spotify, right? Netflix. They always be over over Yeah.
Speaker 2:Look at look at Apple.
Speaker 1:Right? Apple the Claude app does go to the top of the App Store, if they do wind up eclipsing ChatGPT and become the most dominant force, like
Speaker 2:No. It is really funny
Speaker 3:if you drive a bunch
Speaker 2:of people to an app that has pretty low usage limits. Sure.
Speaker 1:And they
Speaker 2:try it for a little bit, and they're like, yeah, like, they're not gonna notice that the model might be better. Mhmm. They're just gonna be like, I'm going back to ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:That's funny. That's funny. I wanna see I wanna see what the battle between Mac, Apple, and Windows looked like. This is maybe back in 2006, 2009. The I'm a Mac, I'm a PC campaign.
Speaker 1:It's a it's a ten minute compilation video, but we can just watch like the first one. It's on it's on YouTube. Hello. Let's see
Speaker 5:this. I'm a Mac.
Speaker 2:And I'm a PC.
Speaker 1:Because they get viruses.
Speaker 5:Zuntai, are you okay?
Speaker 2:No. I'm not okay.
Speaker 1:Because PCs got viruses.
Speaker 11:Virus and
Speaker 1:Macs didn't. Around. Yeah. There it goes.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. In fact, you better you better stay back. This one's a doozy.
Speaker 5:That's okay. I'll be fine.
Speaker 2:No. No. Do not be a hero.
Speaker 3:Last year, there are a
Speaker 1:114,000 known viruses for PCs. PCs? Not Macs. So just grab this one.
Speaker 2:I I got a crash.
Speaker 1:Hey. If you feel like that'll help. Good. Is this that I'm
Speaker 5:a Mac.
Speaker 2:And I'm a PC. And I'm a PC too. And I What? Yeah. See, now you can run Mac OS 10 or Windows on a Mac.
Speaker 2:So in a way, I'm kinda like the only computer you'll ever need. Touche. No. I I don't think you're using that right. Touche.
Speaker 2:No. Listen. See, can only say touche if you make a point that I make a counterpoint. You see? So I said I run Windows, but you haven't made a point yet.
Speaker 2:Let's try it again. You can get a Mac and still run all your Windows stuff. Touche.
Speaker 5:Hello. I'm a Mac.
Speaker 1:Okay. What do you think? I mean, they're not taking a shot at Windows specifically or Microsoft or Dell. It's like all it's the whole category, but everyone knows it's really, you know, Apple versus Microsoft. Talking about viruses, talking about this other stuff.
Speaker 1:These are features. I don't know. It's not that far off. It's it's certainly not edgy. It's certainly not edgy.
Speaker 1:Like, it it it definitely fits
Speaker 2:the Yeah. So Anthropix edgy. Yeah. It's also it's also a timing thing where, again, they're actively trying to make their and and again, I'm not saying anything of this is Yeah. Is is Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not fair play Yeah. Technically, but the gloves are the gloves are off. Yeah. It does And and there is zero I will go out now
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And say I would say there's effectively a 0% chance that OpenAI can win the Super Bowl this year. They will be running an ad. It would be insane if they didn't run an ad. It'd be a huge way harder.
Speaker 1:Sam calling out Dario by name directly. It's like, Dario, you suck. Just a diss track.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe yeah. Yeah. Just a bunch of Sora slop. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just go and
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I I I think, like, the the other thing is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Opening, I I really doubt can react to this now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, the right like, if Yeah.
Speaker 2:This had dropped, like
Speaker 1:That's a flop.
Speaker 2:A couple weeks ago Yeah. They would have been able to say, hey, we need to respond to this. But they can't now. At least at least Yeah. Our experience buying an ad this year we were was locked last week.
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's a whole process. Right? There's subtitling all the stuff.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, they're not you can't just switch it up. Maybe OpenAI
Speaker 1:Well, maybe maybe they win in the sense that the the like, the vast majority of audiences have the reaction that you're having, which is like, actually, I don't mind ads. And actually, this is sort of a weird ad. And I still like Chattypeauty. And then Chattypeauty comes out with an ad that's just like very vanilla, like, hey, use it. We'll help you cook.
Speaker 1:We have health now. You know, we have a bunch of features. That seems helpful.
Speaker 2:Like No. Then they wind up Chattypeauty has the right word. What is it? He says it's propaganda IMO. It really it really is.
Speaker 2:It's it's not it's not
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're not being they're they're again, they're just kind of calling out the category Yeah. Being general about it. But they're implying that ads are gonna Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fear mongering. That that that the that the AI that you're used to being truthful and accurate and not trying to sell you some sloppy
Speaker 2:product will. They took, like, Mark Cuban's, like, main concern
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:The things that he had been, like, going on and on and on about. But everyone is like, hey, dude. You can calm down. Yeah. Like, that's not how it's gonna work.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And then they just, like, went with Yeah. His point of view.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which is a little out of date. I'm gonna tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Then I wanna go to Tyler.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I was gonna say, like, it feels like the the vibe war is, like, really heating up. Right? Like, over the summer, there's talent war. Yep.
Speaker 6:It's kind of a cold war. Right? It's kind of, okay. We got your guy, but on Twitter
Speaker 1:And it was all leaked behind the scenes. Like, Mark Zuckerberg didn't even really give an interview during that whole time. Yeah. And and there was, like, that leaked memo from Mark Chen saying, like, I feel like something has been stolen from us.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And I was seeing at
Speaker 1:Davos coming out and saying.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Davos, like, Dario is, like, basically Yeah. I mean, he's still not saying OpenAI, the words, I
Speaker 1:think. Yep.
Speaker 6:But he's saying, like, companies
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:Are doing ads. There's only one company that's doing ads.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like the anti there's these Ben Thompson has a great formulation of, like, the anti YouTube alliance between, like, Spotify and Netflix.
Speaker 1:So, like, once one company starts pulling away in a category, all the other companies sort of have a incentive to team up. And right now, it does feel like we're getting a little bit of an anti OpenAI alliance because everyone's like, well, they pulled away, and so, like, let's gang up on them. And they they, you know, they they they did so much stuff on the supply side. They locked up all these different all of these different supply chain partners. Like, we gotta push back.
Speaker 1:We actually gotta team up, and that's where you see a Davos with the the buddy cop movie Yep.
Speaker 5:That's what
Speaker 1:talking about. Between Daria and Demis. We will see.
Speaker 2:And Katie, the CMO of OpenAI, fired She says ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than Pod has globally.
Speaker 1:Boom. Nothing like some stats. They should run that in the Super Bowl potentially. Let's watch some of these other Super Bowl ads because I wanna see this General Motors robot. What happened here?
Speaker 1:What did this This was How'd
Speaker 2:you find this? Fourteen years I was digging around.
Speaker 1:Is this for the worst Super Bowl ads or the best?
Speaker 2:I would say this is the worst ad I've ever seen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's play let's play General Motors robot.
Speaker 2:And they they they've tried to scrub this from the web, but we're bringing it back.
Speaker 1:Let's play it. Let's see.
Speaker 2:Robot makes a mistake.
Speaker 1:General Motors. Make cars. We make Cadillacs. Okay. Robot makes a mistake, leaves the factory.
Speaker 1:Gets fired. Whoever produces that is not not gonna do well in singularity. You did not consider Rocco's Basculas. Oh, sign holding?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Cadillac going by? Well, now it now the robot's trying to get a new job.
Speaker 1:Okay. Robot's working at McDonald's or something. Robot goes to the This
Speaker 2:is like, who approved this?
Speaker 1:Robot watches the Chevys drive by the General Motors cars and jumps into the water and then wakes up.
Speaker 5:The GM 100,000 mile warranty. It's got everyone a GM obsessed
Speaker 2:Like, how do you run this at?
Speaker 1:Woah. So it's saying like like we care so much about the 100,000 mile warranty that like we will end it all if it doesn't if we don't stand by it. I think so. Still confused. Crazy ad.
Speaker 2:And obviously, they got an insane amount of pushback from people saying like, you're advertising, like, the darkest thing ever.
Speaker 1:No. Really sad. Like, ridiculous. Well, the bar has been lowered. So don't worry.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. One more
Speaker 2:app will play for you. This is a Bud Light commercial.
Speaker 1:Okay. I like Bud Light commercial. Super Bowl. They usually deliver perfectly, flawlessly. I feel like Bud Light is very, very steady.
Speaker 1:You can always count on them for pretty solid Super Bowl entertainment.
Speaker 2:That's how you brew it.
Speaker 9:My king, this corn syrup was just delivered.
Speaker 2:That's not ours. We don't brew Bud Light with corn syrup.
Speaker 9:Miller Lite uses corn syrup.
Speaker 1:Let us
Speaker 2:take it to them.
Speaker 4:By name. By name. Okay.
Speaker 2:Because that's in the ingredients. Yeah. So they can say it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Did happen to me.
Speaker 2:Pause pause for a second. Yeah. So so if Claude had named Chatchi BT Yeah. And done this, ChatGPT could have said like, we are suing you for Defamation. Defamation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And potentially Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, you just gotta go with the category, brother. Anyway, let's let's keep playing this.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 2:bro. Corn syrup's coming.
Speaker 1:We received your corn syrup by mistake. That's not our corn syrup. We received our shipment this morning. You're joking. Try the Coors Light Castle.
Speaker 1:They also use corn
Speaker 4:syrup. Oh.
Speaker 1:See, this is still like a little bit more playful and and like classy. It doesn't go to like an edgy place.
Speaker 2:It's also not misleading because you can see on the ingredient list
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That you can just look up and see they have corn syrup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean Like my my my Yeah. It'd be very different if it was
Speaker 1:like Extremely. We're delivering your ads to the ChatGPT castle. And it's like, oh, we already got our shipment of ads. Like, take that over to Google. AI search overviews.
Speaker 1:You know? Like
Speaker 2:Take it over to Groth.
Speaker 1:They should have just done they should have done a direct rip of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. I mean, incredibly incredibly well played by Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you think it'll be effective?
Speaker 2:No. I mean, I'm To what
Speaker 1:degree will it be effective? That's my question.
Speaker 7:Well, that's I'm
Speaker 2:not even sure they care about it being effective.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. It'll be this is effective. Like, the fact that people are talking about people that right now on the timeline, people are dunking and being like, oh, good point from Anthropic.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like like
Speaker 2:like They're scoring what? Today. In Teapot Yep. Max.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're able to score some points in the real world and just make like, senators are gonna see this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And be like
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole, like, senator, we sell ads thing in in Facebook. Yeah. Like, they stealing your data.
Speaker 1:That whole thing is, very, like it's still it's still a meme. It's still it's still a thing in the general populace which is unfortunate because advertising is the greatest business model ever, and companies don't want your data. They want conversions. They want you to purchase. They want a black box where they can put money and then get Get
Speaker 2:money out.
Speaker 1:Get money out. That's it. Like, I've run businesses that advertise many times, and I don't wanna know anything about these customers. I just wanna know they're ready to buy and they're down and and send them the link.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The difference the difference went between like, a Bud, you know, Bud Light going after some of their competitors is that they're actual competitors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. It's a very, very pure oligopoly. But maybe I mean, doesn't that doesn't that lend itself to, like, Anthropic is punching up because they're coming from behind?
Speaker 1:Because they're a smaller company, they have less market share in this particular market. It would be like I don't know. It'd be like if the athletic brewing guys ran an ad that was defaming all of the beer companies for all the bad things that beer can do to you. Right? Something?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyway. Maybe.
Speaker 1:Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 2:Yeah. According to AppFigures
Speaker 12:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Claude got around a million downloads in February
Speaker 12:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Which was actually down from the month prior.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:So not a real player in consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll see what happens. I'm I am going to be watching the app charts like a hawk. I wanna know. I wanna
Speaker 2:the entire game, while we're at the game, we're just gonna be glued. We're just gonna be in the back. Probably. Anyways, I'm so excited for all the other all the other tech ads in the Super Bowl. We got MrBeast Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Salesforce. We got it. We'll have a bunch more.
Speaker 1:That'll be good.
Speaker 2:And I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we gotta do we are are guests here yet? We have we have guests joining in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, we gotta bring down the mallet from the heavens because we gotta ring the gong for Walmart. They reached $1,000,000,000,000 in market cap as e commerce booms. Let's bring it down from the Lambda Cloud.
Speaker 2:You. Hit it.
Speaker 1:First game. Let's let's understand what's going on with you. What what's going on with Walmart? They've been written off Amazon was gonna kill them, but seems like the retail behemoth is growing faster than ever. Let's see.
Speaker 1:The achievement places Walmart among a small but growing club of companies that have a 13 figure valuation, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft. In trading, Walmart stock passed a $125 a share. Shares closed up 2.9%, giving the company a market cap of 1,018,000,000,000.000. The stock has surged in recent months, fueled in part by Wall Street's enthusiasm for the growth of the company's online business, as well as in investments in automation and AI technology aimed at improving efficiency. Sales have also ballooned as more shoppers have turned to Walmart for low prices, fast delivery and broad selection.
Speaker 1:The change at Walmart over the past decade culminating with its trillion dollar valuation, quote, has been seen as a profound shift at a retail company that we've ever seen, said a retail analyst at Morgan Stanley who studied Walmart since 2001. Wow. Simeon Gutman. Overnight success here. Twenty five years studying Walmart.
Speaker 1:Walmart's growth along with Amazon's creates challenges for competitors, he said. Meanwhile, Bentonville, Arkansas based company, will have to navigate the ascension of a new chief as longtime executive John Furner took the helm this month. Most of the 11 companies that at any point reached 1,000,000,000,000 are technology focused, even though Berkshire Hathaway is in there and Eli Lilly is in there as well. A decade ago, some Walmart investors didn't see the company's success as a sure thing. Rival Amazon was growing fast, and the then new Walmart CEO, Doug McMillan, was was investing billions to raise worker pay, clean up stores, and grow online.
Speaker 1:Investors wanted to see whether the investments would pay off. Walmart's market value was $212,000,000,000 at the 2016. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway famously sold a large portion of its longtime stake that year and fully exited the position by 2018. Retail is changing so much. I don't think I understand it as well as I need to, Buffett said during a call with the CEO about the Berkshire stock sale.
Speaker 1:He said, I don't I don't understand the the change. What will e commerce do to your business? Buffett offered Buffett offered kind words about Walmart's potential to succeed, but the snub was motivating for company executives at the time. Walmart sales have since soared propelled by ecommerce, then the pandemic, followed shop followed by shoppers' more recent hunt for lower prices amid inflation. Companies companies' investments played a big part.
Speaker 1:Walmart made an effort to offer more items that appeal to higher income shoppers, such as trendy small appliances and store brand foods. The company accelerated home delivery capabilities and can now deliver orders the same day to 95% of US households. So they've, like, fully responded to Amazon Prime, which was the main differentiator for a long
Speaker 8:time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Youssef in the LinkedIn chat says Walmart is just super secretive about its capabilities. He previously was over at Walmart.
Speaker 1:Thanks for leaking it to us.
Speaker 2:Socks on x says nobody talks about Walmart much in the age of tech giants. But if Sam Walton's fortune hadn't been split up, it would still be a fair bit greater than even Elon's. And they're still the largest.
Speaker 1:That was true back then. He posted this six months ago. Think Elon's way above this now. But it is interesting how successful it is.
Speaker 2:But yeah, Jim Walton, Rob, and Alice all over in the $100,000,000,000
Speaker 1:I mean, lot of this growth has to be because of the rebrand. We've to talk about the Walmart rebrand. You've seen this? Okay. Let's pull up the graphic and see.
Speaker 2:Woah. That's probably driving Stunning. Stunning and brave.
Speaker 1:That probably adds 600,000,000,000 to the market cap. Right? I mean
Speaker 2:Easily. Easily.
Speaker 1:Really just did a a slightly bluer slightly bluer background, and they called it a day.
Speaker 2:Well, without further ado.
Speaker 1:Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma to help us look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create, code back prototypes, and apps fast. And that's right. We have Matty from The man of the man of the hour.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 4:John, Jordy, great to see you again.
Speaker 2:You look fantastic.
Speaker 1:This this cover is iconic. It's I mean, props to you, but also the photographer on this, like, perfect lighting. I've always been a fan of Forbes photography.
Speaker 2:It's so nice to see somebody just beaming to you. Just having a good time. Usually, people are people are on the cover acting all serious, mysterious. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 2:I like to see I like to see
Speaker 1:We are we
Speaker 4:are having a good time at 11 laps. It's a good good good good and heavy moment building at the current stage, and everything is changing with AI. We have a chance of building at the frontier of that change, but a little bit surreal to see the cover in the zoomed in pictures.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. It's always a tip
Speaker 4:of the iceberg and reflection of the entire team. So Yep. Great great to see it.
Speaker 2:It's very Yeah. Amazing. How did the negotiation go with this current round? I'm sure you had a sort of your interest was, you know, coming in at eleven. I'm sure that gave you gave gave some leverage.
Speaker 1:Couldn't be 10.9?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:This was in in this round, the the valuation was known far before the round even started with with our aspirations from the early days to get that. And, of course, just surreal to be able to announce today that we've raised 500,000,000 series d at eleven billion dollars
Speaker 1:valuation. Congrats.
Speaker 2:The next Thank you, guys. The next leg the next leg up will will be tough getting to 11,000,000,000,000, but we're We we
Speaker 12:have it all planned.
Speaker 4:It's going to be 11 squared next, 121,000,000,000 as the as the next proxy evaluation, but this funding is great. We we we think that this what we need to get and transform how we interact with technology. Sequoia is leading the round. Andrew is joining the board.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 4:A 60 z is quadrupling down. Iconic is tripling down. And alongside the round, as always, we are releasing incredible updates to our voice agents to make them more expressive, quicker, lower latency so people companies can build even better experiences and customer experience, internal enablement, and sales.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. We're just we're
Speaker 2:just laughing. We're just we were watching some of the new Super Bowl ads from Anthropic, and and they've intentionally put bit a of lag in there when
Speaker 13:Yeah. In in the model.
Speaker 1:And That's your opportunity.
Speaker 2:It's like just reducing that latency to Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's really
Speaker 2:fine. Human or or even superhuman.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What has the 100%.
Speaker 1:What's been the biggest driver of growth? Just just more growth on the core products, new products. What's walk me through sort of how I would visualize the growth chart that went in the in the lead slide of this deck.
Speaker 4:So we started in 2022. The first model was text to speech, and then we continued expanding with incredible researchers in the team still learning speech to text to have the best transcription model. Eleven Music, we have the highest quality music model. Productions with dubbing. But the real innovation that we brought in 2025 was agents and conversational models.
Speaker 4:So helping enterprises build that customer experience work, internal enablement. And in 2025, we got to 330,000,000 in ARR at the end of the year powered by So work with Deutsche Telekom. Amazing. Deutsche Telekom customer support, Square, Deliveroo with training riders, and onboarding them into the ecosystem better or calling restaurants to capture what's happening with the menu, what's happening with the opening hours, all the way through to Revolut working with us across 4,000,000 of their users in Europe to be able to to bring that level of customer care that frequently wasn't possible. And we are seeing that's I think something that was impossible just a year prior.
Speaker 4:You have a real time voice agent interactions. Jordi, you were mentioning OnTropic. We think all companies in the future will want to optimize the latency, will want to optimize the reliability so they can interact with the with the with the with their audience, with their customers. And whether that's in customer care, whether it's devices around us, some of the devices you have will be able to speak back to you and Yeah. Converse with you as the guys come in, all the way through to the to the future robots.
Speaker 4:And and that enterprise adoption over last year has been tremendous. We grew to 330,000,000, and it took us twenty months to get to first 100,000,000 in AR, ten months to get to 200, and five months to get to 330. So hopefully that continues
Speaker 8:So big.
Speaker 4:And it's a good proxy of the value that we can we can deliver.
Speaker 2:Incredible. Well, we have a special guest. Yeah. We should bring him in.
Speaker 1:Let's bring in Andrew Reed from Sequoia. New board member.
Speaker 2:New board member alert. How are doing? Going on?
Speaker 13:Hey, guys.
Speaker 1:Hey. Good to see you.
Speaker 13:Good seeing you. I was I was enjoying when you were when you were bringing on Mati. I've realized that's very important for a Polish entrepreneur to become a one name entrepreneur because no one wants to go for the last name. And we're not brave enough to do it either.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Much easier when
Speaker 4:you're That's true.
Speaker 1:So so so talk to us about, like, the surface area of the business now. There was someone in the chat saying that they were just using 11 reader last night. Is that more of, a demo and a showcase of the product, or do you see that as growing into its own sort of consumer AI application?
Speaker 4:Yeah. And first of all, great to see you here, Andrew. Welcome to the board. Welcome to eleven Lapse. After two and a half years knowing each other, it's going to be a great fun after serving on floor on the board together.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's alright.
Speaker 4:To have you with And it was the last time we saw you guys, which was great. So it's our our full circle full circle moment. But, you know, to your question, as we think about our business, we are the foundational research layer where we do everything across audio, whether it's text to speech, speech to text, whether that's the expressive narration, expressive voiceovers, the music work. And on top of that work, we have the agents work that we spoke about, but also the creative use cases. And, Reader, is a great example of that, of how we can let our community create the narrations, create audiobooks, and then serve them in an easier way.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. You know what's crazy Yeah. Is that today, Audible will block AI audiobooks.
Speaker 1:Oh, weird.
Speaker 4:The only platform that allows you to serve their content on Audible is is is only the Amazon created AI content. Mhmm. So we need to find an alternative for us of that community to serve that. And, similarly, happily, I have a partnership with Spotify to to allow our users to bring that. And we have a lot of users.
Speaker 4:It's 5,000,000 Some Europeans doing doing that work.
Speaker 1:There you go. Andrew, how are you how are you processing the the SaaS pocalypse, the turmoil in the markets? Is this like hey, you know, eleven Labs needs a war chest, batten down the hatches, RIP Good Times, or is this something else that's, you know, you don't really need to worry about who's who's getting beat up in the public markets because you're the reason why they're getting beat up?
Speaker 2:Well, I I go back to what Jason Jason Lemkin was saying. He was bringing up eleven Labs as an example last week because he said he has a lot of portfolio companies and they're like, we're AI native. We're AI native. And he's like, show me the numbers.
Speaker 1:Are you
Speaker 2:crying? Labs is AI native and they're adding a $100,000,000 in new ARR every few months. So, like, that's what it looks like. That's that's what real pull from the market. Sure.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, Andrew, what do what do you see in the market?
Speaker 13:Yeah. I think the, you know, it's like the scorpion and the frog. The voting machine will be a voting machine. And I think in the public markets with software, there is a lot of baby being being thrown out with the bathwater. And I think as far as I can tell, the only prerequisite for being an AI native company is being a private company, and I'll leave that there.
Speaker 13:I do think what really matters is our business is accelerating as these models are getting better. Yeah. And are they delivering value in a way that's, like, differentiated and unique? And we are seeing companies like Eleven that are growing faster with better economics, better customer references, and just faster deployment than anything else we've ever seen. Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Like, I've going back to when I first met Mati 2023, I remember what what like, when I first looked at eleven, it was not obvious, like, what kind of company this is. Is it a is it a consumer company? Is it an enterprise company? Is it a foundation model lab? Is it an application company?
Speaker 13:And it turns out it was all of those things. And I think for, like, these truly, like, the the true AI winners, it's a you know, like, the the phrase going from strength strength to strength. It's like everywhere Eleven has been competing, they have just been dominating. Mhmm. And, you know, like, on me for not investing a zillion dollars
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 13:Three years ago. Fortunately, we we were lucky to invest a little bit, and I've got to know Mahdi. But, yeah, these these, like the new wave of these AI companies are just incredible.
Speaker 1:Can you both talk about a little like like, take me through more of that focus? Because you're saying, you know, Eleven is a is a research lab and a and an enterprise company, and there's consumer product. And but there's still a focus on audio, still focus on voice. And we've seen, you know, the lot of the good vibes that are coming around. Anthropic is like they're focused on code.
Speaker 1:You know, we've seen this like mid journey focused on images and you get to this opinionated thing. Is that where you're narrowing, or or do you see yourself kind of expanding out on all surface areas over time?
Speaker 4:Right. And it it it is true. Like, as we as we started the company, the one connected issue from model through platform to application is audio and voice. We know that we can create the best models. We know we can serve them, build for the users, understand those use cases, and then bring them to production.
Speaker 4:But, of course, to get most of voice, frequently, we'll stretch from other sister fields to bring those integrations into default. With agents example, you need the knowledge base to really integrate. You need telephony systems to make sure the agents interact in WhatsApp or can call the phone numbers. You need the evaluation, testing, and monitoring to really be able to understand that. So as we think about this work, voice audio is our superpower.
Speaker 4:That's the one connective tissue across all those domains. But if we can bring from other fields and elevate the entire voice experience, whether it's in voice agents, whether it's in a voice creative space, I will happily do that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Where where are you frustrated with slow adoption? Like, where where is there a lot of potential that where companies are not kind of like, they haven't fully processed that that the models are advanced to the level that they have and you guys have the sort of feature set. I I On a personal level as a user, there's still a bunch of different like media subscriptions that I have that have just like really poor
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like audio functionality. It's like if you publish an article, should immediately have like a you know, a mini podcast equivalent that I can listen to in real time. It shouldn't be like it doesn't seem like a hard problem anymore. But I'm sure you're seeing that kind of in other categories too where you want industries to wake up and say, like, hey. Voice voice is here.
Speaker 2:You should be implementing it immediately.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I can go quick quick one first on on things that we believe in, and and Andrew is helping us push us to think about that space. The one, audio will be default in all the content, stories, knowledge that's available. It will be global. You will have all the languages, all the voices represented, and voice will be the interface to technology around us.
Speaker 4:The big opportunity to to a great majority will be in the media entertainment space that we haven't seen. On the agent side, today, a lot of the use cases are reactive supportive, but we'll see that proactive side where they have an AI concierge, AI assistant that can help you for the entirety of that journey. And and as we work with Andrew, we frequently think of, like, what's that connective tissue between research and product? How we can combine that experience together to deliver that? Andrew, I'm curious what you think.
Speaker 4:We we spoke a little bit about this, but what's top of all your mind for the next year?
Speaker 13:Yeah. Well, I I think at a high level, it's very hard to find, like, markets where voice is not taking off. And I think I'm old enough to have lived through the initial wave of, like, chatbot voice agent companies in the kind of 2015 to 2019 era. And for those companies, it was, you know, enterprise vendors foisting, foisting audio upon consumers and consumers, you know, asking for a real agent over and over and over again. Like, that was sort of think Talk
Speaker 2:to a human. Talk to
Speaker 13:a human. Talk to to
Speaker 12:a human.
Speaker 13:Use that, like, the, you know, like, customer research that, like, created, you know, like, voice agents with people asking for agents over and over and over again. I think the difference now is if you look across, like, basically every sector, people like interfacing with technology through voice and audio. Like, it's a it's there's a lot of end customer pull. I do think there's a big gap between, you know, what people expect the voice agents to be able to do and how they communicate with them versus what they're actually capable of. Like, I think humans are very adaptable, and I think once everyone used ChatGPT and realized, you know, what the chatbots can do, people started, you know, start interacting with text boxes on the Internet very differently.
Speaker 13:I think with voice agents, still, like, people think they're in a phone tree and are trying to talk to it like a phone tree. When reality, it's this magical interface that overlaps all of the the company's capabilities, and it allows you to express yourself and receive information back in a brand new communication style and a brand new interface. I think once people realize what these agents are capable of, my guess is the way people interact with their institutions, with their governments, with their, you know, the the companies that they buy services and goods from is gonna change very quickly. And I do think it's gonna take, like, the leading, the leading companies in this space to show people what's possible, and the whole thing's gonna flip.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 4:And, you know, on the on the last one, just to add a quick example, we've seen that we work with the government of Ukraine on exactly that. And one incredible case was they are creating an effective voice agent for the citizen support where you can call and ask about the services. And what's just transpiring is that the moment you can call in and you frequently just don't know where to find information, if you can just speak through and let the agent navigate through to the right help, it it just open up so many more programs that were just not available, whether that was in the how do I travel, what's happening around the country, how do I apply for certain certain help, Just opens up completely new ways of you exploring that information altogether.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I'm excited about seeing some new UI patterns. Like, I feel like the walkie talkie is potentially, like, a better even comp than, like, the phone call. Because if I'm, like, using a product and I have a question, I don't really wanna like place a phone call necessarily even if it's instant and quick and I know like an agent, you know, an AI agent will like pick effectively pick up the call immediately. You can imagine like, hey, how like where what's the best document for like this part to understand this part of the organization?
Speaker 2:It can like pull it up. And it's like having having these kind of new UI patterns, think, will be very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and chat with us. Great to see you guys soon.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to the next one.
Speaker 1:Have a
Speaker 4:good for having us. Congrats on the new Super Bowl ad.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Incredible. Very exciting.
Speaker 2:Congrats to you to you both.
Speaker 1:Thank you for supporting us. We appreciate it. Thank you guys. Soon.
Speaker 13:Just make sure that make sure the ad's available in Polish too.
Speaker 1:We will. We'll do translation.
Speaker 6:Help us out. Help us out. Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Great to you. By. Century. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.
Speaker 1:Let's go over to Gastown, what I wrote about in today's newsletter. And I want to pull up this very simple to understand graphic. As soon as you see this, Jordy, you will understand how Gastown works.
Speaker 2:I get it.
Speaker 1:Robert says, Gastown is the modern day temple OS. You have to be on the spectrum to design something that's insane. And it does have a lot of layers of abstraction. I'll try and take you through it a little bit. Basically, my theory is, like, there's a lot of excitement about this project.
Speaker 1:You might already be familiar with Gastown. But the the broader category is called orchestration, how you orcas how you orchestrate a whole bunch of different agents. And Steve Yegi wrote a great breakdown of his new Mad Max themed orchestrator. It's he says it's a new take on the IDE. It's called Gastown.
Speaker 1:He dropped it on January 1 on New Year's Day, so he has been locked in. He says that he's, like, having trouble sleeping because he's so obsessed with this thing. He's he's really pushing a ton of code. And now he's getting one call per day from VCs asking to invest, apparently. And so it's basically a continuation of the developer experience, and he maps out how this evolved.
Speaker 1:So, you know, you used to write code in a in a text file, save it, execute it in a terminal, then we got basic IDEs with some code completion, links to file systems, REPLs, etcetera. LLM chat windows work their way into the IDE eventually with a coding agent asking you for permission to run tools, run code. Once models got better, developers trusted them more. And the IDE sort of melts away, you're basically just interacting with the agent. So Carpathi has put it he says, your code writing skill atrophies, but your code reading skill improves because you're prompting and then you're just reading the review and you're saying, okay, yeah, this is going to do what I think it's going to do, we'll test it.
Speaker 1:And so the most popular workflow currently is probably a single agent CLI, so Clog Code, Codex, Gemini CLI are the most popular. They all have web and desktop front ends now, but it's sort of too soon to tell how fast those will get adopted. And we we we can move on from this slide. So Gastown is like way way more aggressive going fall into vibe coding. So Steve in his post just all caps says, you will die if you don't know what you're doing.
Speaker 1:It's like very risky. Woah. The code base is only weeks old. Maybe it's over a month now. It's a 100% vibe coded.
Speaker 1:He's never seen the code, and it's 225,000 lines of Go. Like, not a very simple it's
Speaker 6:Yeah. He said you should only be using it if you're already at the stage where you're using 10 plus agents.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:That's and otherwise, like, you will not be
Speaker 1:able to use it. Yeah. Yeah. So but so so there there's tens of thousands of people using this. Some folks have dozens of accounts with the big labs because they're maxing out their subscriptions.
Speaker 1:They're like, I got the two hundred month plan over here. I ran out of rate limits, I got another one. I got another one. Some of them get flagged for fraud. Like, it is boom time in Gas Town.
Speaker 1:And bills run into thousands of dollars per month, and you're getting close to having basically a full time software engineer salary on the line. Despite all the warnings, Steve has created a delightful little little metaphorical taxonomy for how to explain how things work. The town is your HQ. This allows you to work on multiple projects. The projects are called rigs.
Speaker 1:And then you sort of play, I guess that's the word, as the overseer. You're the boss. But you also have a mayor who reports to you, like a chief of staff. That's an agent that you talk to. And the mayor kicks off work convoys to different agents.
Speaker 1:They're called, like, pull cats. These are ephemeral agents that go and do, like, one little thing, and then they write code. That code lands in a merge queue. But then you have another role, another agent called a witness that oversees all the pole cats to help them get unstuck. And then there's a deacon that goes around, patrols the town, finds stuff that's, like, needs to be taken out or or or deleted.
Speaker 1:There's dogs that do maintenance, like cleaning up code branches that have gone stale. There's a crew that are specific to a to a particular project, and those are longer lived than pole cats. So if you have, like, back into back and forth design work, you'll create a member of the crew who he says you'll love and you'll, like, develop a relationship with. And you'll be updating their agent workflow and their their skills so that they can so that, you know, days later, you can go back to the same agent about how you're architecting the app, and it has all the context. Whereas the poll cats are just off doing one little implementation at a time.
Speaker 1:And so there's a bunch of different roles. It's all it's it's a lot. It's very cool, and it feels like a glimpse of what's coming this year. You still have to have an idea of what to build. So, you know, we talked to a I've searched around for, like, what are people actually building with this?
Speaker 1:And a lot of people are, like, like, reimplemented this open source library in Rust. It's, like, probably valuable, but that's not exactly, like, the breakthrough $1,000,000,000 individual solo developer project just yet. Like, you still gotta have a genius idea, but then you can build it. And and you still have to have a really good ability to manage agents and understand when things are going off the rails. But the rough edges are getting sanded down, like, as we speak.
Speaker 1:Orchestrators, it feels like these are the next it's the next easy unhobbling that will cause another doubling in the meter software engineering time horizon benchmark. If you remember that benchmark for how long a software engineering task can run without going crazy, it used to be a couple minutes, then it became a couple hours. Like, if you set up your gas town appropriately, you could potentially do weeks of software engineering work autonomously. Do you do you have more context on the meter eval? Mean, meter Well, it's literally is LLMs.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's not the actual model running for, like, four hours.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 6:It can It's do a task that takes people four hours.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. So so now I think you won't just be able to slot Gastown into the meter eval because meter has, like, Opus four five, Codex five two, Gemini three Pro, and so you can't really just slot it in. They might need a new category or something for orchestrators, but you could imagine getting a week's worth of software engineering work done with sort of a single prompt or a single setup.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It feels very similar to you you see people talk about, like, their custom VIM configurations. Totally. Spend, like, hours working on these things. Totally.
Speaker 3:I've seen a ton
Speaker 6:of people on Twitter, like, build their own, like, orchestrator. I mean, this is, like, very complex and
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cool. Totally. Yeah. No.
Speaker 1:No. A lot of people are already building these these these orchestrators themselves. Gastown is just one that's open source, but a lot of people are building these, like, various harnesses. And so orchestration and delegation, they make sense even in a world where models are improving in capability and declining in cost. Like, a stock LLM just cannot spin up multiple instances of itself if you give it a huge task.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. Imagine you're just, like, categorize every receipt in my company has ever processed. An LLM can do it, but it's just gonna take a long time. You should use 50 instances of LLMs, and you have to write some code for that. An agent should be able to do that.
Speaker 1:That's what you're sort of getting with this. And so but there's obviously still a bunch of kinks to work out in 2020 It's a very interesting paradigm to me. It's also sort of, in hindsight, obvious that we'd get here. And I think we'll see all the major AI labs do something in this space. I don't know if that means launching new products, but they need to deliver on this experience in a more polished package soon.
Speaker 1:I also expect a number of start ups to try and own the category or carve out sub niches. Gas Town for legal or something like that will probably be something we hear pitched for at some point. And in the end, the multi agent experience might be completely abstracted to certain end users. Like, most people using chat apps don't care about the details of a mixture of experts' model. Just want a good answer, and they want the model to be good at math and poetry and writing and research and history and all these things, and MOE models succeed at that, but it's buried below the fold.
Speaker 1:And so even auto routing between different models, I don't think a lot of people care about that if they're just in the consumer world, And I think that this will be more and more abstracted. So all of this will make 2026 more exciting than ever. You have Anthropic and OpenAI fighting over the buy wars at the Super Bowl. Yeah. You got Elon and Sam under oath in an Oakland courthouse, and another thousand startups just got funded to make something people want.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:So, basically, you're working on AI agents and you just pivoted to building a harness, pivot to Orchestration. Orchestration.
Speaker 1:It it does feel like it might be, like, the next hot keyword that we're seeing. Orchestration market map, orchestration, you know, all sorts of stuff. Anyway, Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, people are having fun with with Gastown. Will Brown got nerd sniped into finally reading the original Gastown post. And wow, it's beautiful and terrifying and hilarious and probably a glimpse of the future that will feel normal in six months. I couldn't agree more. Steve Yeghi is a great writer.
Speaker 1:Just very, very, very interesting to read all of what he writes, and he talks about his his neighbor's squirrel in a very fun way and how chubby the
Speaker 2:His squirrel neighbor's squirrel?
Speaker 1:It's He's 80 he has an 82 year old neighbor who feeds his local squirrel against those city ordinance, but but he's 82, so he's like, what are you gonna do to me? And and then he uses this, like, fat squirrel as an analogy for the gas town that he's building. It's fascinating. And then, people are having fun with this. Tetsuo.ccp says, last month, I was generating 15,000 lines of codes per day with Cloud Code.
Speaker 1:Once I discovered the the Ralph Wiggum loop, my productivity shot up to 10 x. This week, I finally set up Gastown, and I'm generating 1,000,000 lines of code per day. At this rate, I'm mere days away from completing my Minesweeper clone. And, like, there is there is something here where people you know, you gotta have you gotta know what to build. You gotta have a good idea.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:gotta There's gonna be a lot of people spending
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:$15 to recreate a game that's $60.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. But if it has me in the game, maybe I'll play it. Who knows? Anyway, Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet.
Speaker 1:State of the art reasoning, next level of ad coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado Further ado. Our first in person guest of the day, Gurday. Correct? Did I say that correctly?
Speaker 1:The pragmatic engineer, welcome to the show. How you doing? Grab a seat. Please sit down. And first time on the show, please give us introduction.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Good good to see you in person. In person, this place is even even better than us on Yeah. The Yeah. So just flew in from Amsterdam and I got you guys some some special stuff.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:What is This is stuff that they don't know about in The Netherlands. It's called Kraudnothen and it's best kept secret in The Netherlands. I love it.
Speaker 2:Little mini cookies.
Speaker 3:Mini cinnamon cookies. Before Christmas, the whole city sells this all the time. But as per as per the Dutch, you can only have it before Christmas. So there's this one shop that sells it year round. Locals hate it.
Speaker 3:Oh. It's kind of unknown, but I I I think it'll all be alright. And yeah, just some pragmatic engineer stickers for I love it. You
Speaker 1:you. And how how do you how do you introduce the pragmatic engineer these days? I Purely substack writer, a media company? What do you like?
Speaker 3:I I like to say that I'm I'm a software engineer who who has been a software engineer for like fifteen or so years. I was a manager as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Overnight
Speaker 3:I just started writing for software engineers. Yeah. I didn't think there would be any demand for this. I don't think anyone thought there would be any demand for this. And and turns out there
Speaker 7:is A
Speaker 1:lot of demand.
Speaker 3:There was a ton of demand for for people writing about just like for for me writing about in-depth topics that I don't write for beginners, I write for experienced folks talking I about started talking about stuff like how did Uber create platform teams
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Like, know, tech dev, how do you deal with that stuff. Mhmm. And people were paying attention, subscribing, paying. So it surprised me the most.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, and I feel like timing timing wise, what better time to be writing about software engineering than right now?
Speaker 3:It's a crazy time. Like, I
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I've been in the industry for about, you know, like twenty ish years, depending on how you count it. And I'm now luckily been able to talk with people who've been who are still alive, like Grady Booch who
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is a legend who had been around since closer to the beginning of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I don't think there's ever been a time, like, I I remember when I I was working, you know, was a software engineer, like, we were we loved our jobs and I think we still do, but what we were doing is kind of automating other people's jobs. Sure. Like like customer support, we were saying how many savings we had, but we we and we kind of took this for granted. Yeah. There's a bit of existential crisis now with with devs because this is the first time in history where the stuff that we build could potentially automate our work and and their
Speaker 2:software engineers used to have the luxury of like, oh, I'm not gonna I'm just gonna do my work. I don't need to really pay attention to what's going on and and the big changes that are happening. And now it's like, oh, I should really pay attention just so I stay stay on the edge and and because if you're not getting efficiency gains right now, think you will be left behind. Yeah. That feel that feels obvious.
Speaker 1:How wide is the spread of of experiences that folks in your audience share with you? Because I imagine that there are some folks out there saying like, I'm I'm using Gastown and agents and I'm vibe coding. I'm doing everything and I'm my job is completely changed. And I imagine that there's some people that are like, it's kind of business as usual at my company.
Speaker 3:So interesting enough. You you would think that so first of all, the the people who are are using the agents and doing all this cool stuff and being on the cutting edge Yeah. You guys shut off a gas out on CBI. I was just hanging out with him yesterday.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we were together at at this place called the Future of Software Engineering Summit. So twenty five years ago, there was the Agile Manifesto that back in 2001, it kind of shook the industry because it said, like, talk to customers Yeah. Iterate fast. It was like four simple waterfall.
Speaker 3:Anti waterfall. Yeah. And there were a bunch of people who gathered at this resort in Utah Mhmm. And, you know, they came up with it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And twenty five years later, Martin Fowler, one of the Agimana Fossa founders, who organized a retreat with, like, a bunch of thinkers of of today. And we went there and we gathered and a lot of about half the people were, like, more traditional companies. Think about, like, John Deere, 200 year old companies Sure. Enterprises, Cisco, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then some of them for startups. And the crazy thing was that, like, I was thinking, you know, they're a business as usual. No. Like, is the first time I'm seeing a technology where even in the kind of most old school companies, they're using it, they're trying it, they know that they need to catch up. And funny enough, some of those old school companies are a little bit ahead of like, don't know, some mid level tech companies because they kind of have processes to like approve vendors and all that used to this stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So like, I don't see anyone who's who's not
Speaker 1:Everyone's changed.
Speaker 3:Impacted by it. But there are some people who are on the cutting edge and, you know, using Gastown and Yeah. And playing with Claude, etcetera. I think they're still the minority, but the gap used to be massive. It used to be like years or something's been a decade behind.
Speaker 2:Steve Steve, you put him in the same kind of camp as Peter from Open Claw and that, like, just loves the craft and just loves experimenting and is, like, noncommercial because it's just, we have this interesting dynamic right now where you have these, like, hyper hyper hyper commercial labs like Anthropix, which is like idealistic but like very focused on like, let's make as much money as we possibly can from generating code. Then you have the the Peters of the world and and maybe the Steve's of the world that are just in it for the love of the game.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I I was hanging out with with Peter two weeks ago. Yeah. Right when Claude was starting to blow up and then my podcast went out when it was at peak popularity. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And people thought I was talking with him that same day, but I would say Peter is way more obsessed than Steve. Like, when met him for two weeks, I was the first human that he met. Woah. That guy is pulling it at but he's very clear that he's obsessive. But the thing that both him and Steve share so first of all, both of them are I think they're a little bit like on on the kind of like f f you category in terms of like they're doing what they want to do Yep.
Speaker 3:And they want to build mode. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. However, one thing that they both share, and Steve was telling me this, I was asking, how how are you, man?
Speaker 3:Because like I saw him like about a year ago last time and he looked a little bit more pale and he said, like, dude, like, we need to talk about something that is is really getting to us like early adopters. This thing is like a vampire. It drains you out. You have trouble sleeping. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like a lot of people who are in this, like, multiple agents mode, they're napping during the day. You know, there there's an email list, the kind of secret AI email list with these folks, they share this stuff. And so both of them are seeing it, and Peter was telling me the same thing. It just really is draining. This this so this might be maybe this this will pass.
Speaker 3:But back to your question, like, yeah, I I think they're both they're just building for the the fun of it. Both of them are being chased by crazy investors, like crazy amounts, and they're, at least for now, saying no same same same with Steve, and I love it. I I feel we're finally back.
Speaker 2:It's so refreshing.
Speaker 3:This the last time I remember, was like nineties or 2000 when there was a hacker culture, and this Yeah. Is
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, yeah, you go back to like the Linux folks, and like there's so many open source folks who did say no to the business community and wound up building great yeah. Please. This one's empty,
Speaker 11:but we can have that one.
Speaker 1:So so yeah. But but it it does feel like a return because while the mobile platforms were so closed down, there was less opportunity. Now we're sort of migrating back to desktop and and, you know, open source and
Speaker 3:And I think both what Peter and and Steve are doing, the reason it resonates so much, they're doing the stuff that the big guys will not do because it's too risky. You know, Peter
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Like, Claude took off because he he himself connected to all these things, and, of course, there's risk and security risk. He knows that. But, like and I think one of his Read the disclosures. Read the disclosure, but no one would do this because it's not ready.
Speaker 2:Totally. Steve Also, other labs would build it, but they wouldn't make it you wouldn't be able to use multiple models. They would they would be, like it would be pretty kind of clamped down.
Speaker 3:Yep. And Steve was telling me that what he did with Gastown, like so both both Steve and Peter are amazing software engineers. They have built incredible systems. Steve's had built a lot of Google's internal systems. He's been at Greg, at Amazon.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Peter, you know, built if if you see a PDF on the web or online, it's probably his business that that seriously,
Speaker 2:it's it's
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 3:It's it's so big. And Steve said that the reason he built Gastown is not because he believes that Gastown will work. It's crazy. You guys have deployed the mayor the mayor Yeah. The Polkats, all that.
Speaker 3:It's a it's a mess. The reason he did it is he wants to push the boundaries and kind of like wake people up that something will be coming. It's not gonna be Gastown. This is just a start. And he said to me that he feels that he succeeded because so the it's like, Steve is I think Steve is a lot more provocative.
Speaker 3:Yes. Peter is a lot more like, I'm just gonna build whatever I
Speaker 2:wanna build.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how how have you been reacting to Steve's position on, like, the death of the junior programmer, the revenge of the junior programmer? Like, what advice do you have for young people that are joining the software engineering community today?
Speaker 3:I my position changes on changes so fast.
Speaker 1:Week to week.
Speaker 3:I used to be really, really worried about junior folks. Like, you know, because you look at it, like, it's just it's just been, like, such a bad, like, five years. COVID started. Sure. No one started like, I was at Uber when COVID started.
Speaker 3:We just stopped hiring. Well, we we still hired. We were paying people a lot more after we rebounded. But we didn't hire junior people because you didn't want to onboard them remote, and it's difficult, and we didn't know how to. Sure.
Speaker 3:And then when remote was returning, AI started, of course, now there's this thing, like, why would you hire a junior when a senior can, like, pair with an AI? Yep. Now, on the other hand, what I'm seeing so it's just really hard to get a job. But when I think of back when I started, like, my first job was around the financial crisis. It was just really hard to get a job.
Speaker 3:And Yeah. I didn't realize at the time, but
Speaker 1:And there's so much else there's so many other things going on. Like, there's Ukraine and, like, there's there's all this geopolitical stuff and the economy. What's the dollar and the gold doing? And business leaders are not we think of them as only focused on AI in terms of hiring, but there's a million other things going on in the economy.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But when I started out, like, I remember, like, a lot of people in my in my class, university class, they just dropped out, they never became software engineers. But I never thought of it that Yeah. I would be given a job. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I knew I needed to earn it. So what I did is I did a bunch of projects on the side Mhmm. I entered competitions, I built a bunch of things, and honestly, I was probably like a more impressive I think
Speaker 7:Totally.
Speaker 3:Like, first of all, like, we don't need to I'm not gonna like, when I remember this, I'm not gonna feel sorry for this generation because I did a study with like Gen Z, like, talked with a bunch of like Gen Z or young folks, and some of them are friggin' amazing. You know, the Andrew So so the kids are gonna be fine, that's one.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:The other thing is the turns there's this I'm gonna spill it, I guess, to all all everyone who's watching TBPN.
Speaker 1:Please.
Speaker 3:There is a massive advantage of hiring young people, and Shopify is the first one to figure it out. Farhan Tavar, head of engineering at Shopify, told me that he saw something interesting years back. Shopify was sorely to AI. You know, they they got Copilot licenses, everyone, but and no cost limit and all that, but they didn't see many teams using it. But there was this one team that was using it a lot more, you know, they're tracking tokens.
Speaker 3:And Farhan looked what happened. Oh, there was an intern on the team. And so I was like, oh, what happened? So they on boarded the intern and gave gave the intern his two week task, and the intern was done in a day. And and, you know, the and he goes like, okay, what what what next?
Speaker 3:Right? And they're like, how did you do that? He's like, oh, well, you know, like, I just like used this AI and did this, what next? Know, they're they're worried. They want get a return offer.
Speaker 3:And suddenly, the people on the team felt stupid. Right? And so they started to, like, learn from the intern and use AI. Yeah. But the intern was not threatening them, you know.
Speaker 3:The intern was never going to take a position.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:So next thing Farhan did, hire an intern in every single Shopify team. So this is why Shopify had a thousand interns.
Speaker 13:Oh, no.
Speaker 3:Wow. He's in some CTO groups, so why do you think Cloudflare is hiring one thousand eleven hundred one one one one one interns? Why is GitHub hiring more interns? Farhan told them, is the biggest hack in in actually getting your team more productive. Get an intern Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like a good intern, like, know, from one of
Speaker 12:the things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other the other thing is I I've heard I've heard stories of people saying like, I've submitted a thousand resumes or thousand applications. I'm like, if you want a job as a software engineer Yeah. Build a piece of software Yes. Without asking.
Speaker 2:Yes. Just you don't need to be
Speaker 1:one One job a week. One job a week, you should be applying to. Not a 150 a day.
Speaker 2:Well, not even that or one job a day. Yeah. Like, we hired somebody last summer. We hired somebody last summer that built us a guest directory that like in real time would take Yeah. We'd had an episode, it would scrape it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It would put it into a Shopify built there's
Speaker 1:so many different ways to plug in.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you can every single company out there if you're want an internship or or a junior job Yeah. Just go build a product for the company. Make it look make it match the brand kit exactly. Yeah. Make it look like something that you could ship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even if it's just built rebuilding something Yeah. That's existing, that's how you're gonna get some attention.
Speaker 1:For sure. Yeah. You just completely agree. Totally agree.
Speaker 3:And and also, like, you know, one thing that I think will will happen with software engineering, which has happened, like, for twenty or something years, software engineering is is not too different to, like, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. When I graduated, a lot my friends were in that domain. And those domains, to get a job, mechanical engineer, you need to go to university and you go to one where you get a placement.
Speaker 12:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I think, honestly, this will probably return, that that the most straightforward way to get a job is go to a reputable university that has placement programs and has industry connections Yeah. And get in there. If you go to a lower rank one, you can still get it, but it'll be hard. And if you're self studied, you can also do it, but now you need to do amazing work, you know, like like build something like OpenClot and that or some something like that.
Speaker 1:But Yeah.
Speaker 3:The the the lower, like, prestige, it or not, tech was this really special place where pedigree did not matter for years Yeah. Or decades. Yeah. This might be ending, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Are you interested
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the other thing is you don't need to I I think, you know, telling somebody they need to if somebody can go out and create something like OpenClaw and go viral, like amazing, but you can also just look at a company, look at a feature find a feature that their competitor has and just build the feature and say, here. You don't need to, like, create something totally novel. Just build the thing, share it, and that's how you get attention. I guarantee if you cold email four people in the org with, a link to the product, you will get an interview.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And don't forget, I think, the interim disclosure and like all of these, like, how to get things, you know, a lot of people when when you do the thing that most people do, you no longer stand out. So there's a lot of advice. There used to be how to get into fang of like, alright, do lead coding. And what happened is everyone is really good at lead code, the algorithm problems, and those companies don't really look at that signal anymore because everyone is so good.
Speaker 3:So I think every any point in time, you want to do stuff that others don't do and it'll be a lot more effort, it will be more risky, but that's the way you're going to stand out. So, like, you know, if if if you're young, just just do crazy stuff, especially with AI.
Speaker 1:Help me understand more about standing out. I remember there used to be job titles for Django developer. It's like not just back end, not just Python, the Django framework. Right? Rails developer.
Speaker 1:Yep. Right? Front end in a specific framework. Now it feels like every developer can use every tool front end, back end because of of vibe coding and and models. Do you would you recommend someone say, okay.
Speaker 1:Yes. You're a great developer. You can use all the tools. You can write any language whenever you want. But in order to differentiate yourself, why don't you add design or add finance or understand a little bit of legal?
Speaker 1:So, you know, is there is there something else that you should pull in so you can be a dual threat?
Speaker 3:Yes. And this is so this is what's happening when I looked at, for example, the job listing Workhorse. Workhorse employs what they call product engineers. They don't have a product they have one product manager for, like, 80 engineers. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And when I looked at the job description, like, I remember this evolution where it started, you know, in the February, like, a specific language, then a specific framework, then a back end or something. And the job description actually had things like, you know, like soft skills, like emotional intelligence
Speaker 12:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Like good communication. So first of all, hiring is starting to like, the stereotype of the Guilfoil Mhmm. Developer, it's just not gonna get hired in a lot of companies these days. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:We're most places are expecting business sense, product sense, and the thing that almost every modern company from Linear to WorkOS to all of the other similar ones are saying is taste. Taste. For software engineers. Yeah. Now, this is pretty pretty difficult.
Speaker 3:Interesting enough, inside Microsoft, there's an internal course that they're trying to teach taste to
Speaker 1:people. No way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Crazy. Scott Hanselman was telling me this. But it's kind of hard to hard to define, but it's a mix of, I guess, do your own projects, try to do real work that actually, like, either, like, you know, makes money or helps people or or or does things. Keep trying and and, you know, use use the latest tools.
Speaker 3:It's it's hard to give universal advice because the thing has changed so much, and one other thing that's happening, some companies like, the big change we've had over the winter is everyone has realized who is paying attention and paying side projects that us software engineers will no longer write the code. Mhmm. The agent will write the code, we will prompt it, which as some people are grieving or grieving, I'm kind of over that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But a lot of companies have paused hiring for now because they need to figure out who are we going to hire. Yeah. Because there's no point in coding interviews or much less point when the agent is is doing it. So there might be like a cool of of like like six months to twelve months where there's a lot less hiring as companies figure out what is this new person. So in the meantime, you know, people looking for the job is like, first of all, like, you get a job offer, appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Probably just take it. Get your door in the industry. It doesn't matter where.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:And then, yeah, keep pushing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder if
Speaker 2:I feel like a big opportunity right now is software engineers finding the companies. Of course, the companies that are really beat up in the public markets right now, the software. There's tons of companies that people are just saying, it's over. Of course, many of them will recover and and, you know, a few years from now be worth multiples of what they are today. But, like, doing the work to figure out, which one of those companies have durable customer relationships aren't just gonna be fully ripped out.
Speaker 2:And then you could have a situation, you know, not not that dissimilar from people that ended up joining companies in, like, 2022, '20 late twenty twenty two, 2023 when things were really corrected, where then the stock just trades up three x over the next two years, and you look like an absolute genius.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And one thing that companies are starting to hire for but they're struggling, I talked with a startup in Amsterdam, they were looking for an AI native junior engineer. So, like, let's hire junior engineers and their expectation was, like, knows how to use all these modern tools, has built some doesn't have to be worked with some projects with LLMs, you know, like built a a bot or something. They couldn't find find anyone. So, like like, go and use these tools, build some stuff, put it on GitHub, launch it on the App Store, etcetera.
Speaker 3:Because the reason they want to bring it in, again, they want like, some of these folks will use it a lot better. So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, you know, we're we might be overthinking this a little bit. It's a massive tech tech change. A lot a lot of existing folks inside the industry with, five plus years of their peers are paralyzed because that skill coding, it takes it takes freaking hard effort to like get good at coding. It took me, you know, like three years to like get okay and then ten years to get really good.
Speaker 3:And that's kind of down the drain on one end. So a lot of people are grieving that. So there's an opportunity for people who are kind of like stepping over this and like, alright, how am going to be effective with these?
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is great. Last question for me. How do you think about the like, it used to be that software engineers would join a company because they were obsessed with the technology. They joined thirty seven signals because they wanted to work on rails or, you know, Shopify.
Speaker 1:And and there were a whole bunch of, like, rail shops. And if you enjoyed rails, you would go there. Now it feels like there's more opportunity than ever to find a an industry or a category. Like, if you're obsessed with travel or you're obsessed with gaming or music, you can the tools are maybe less important, but the willingness to be excited about the product that you're making is going to be the differentiator as opposed to just, yeah, I work at this company, but I don't really listen to music, so why am I at Spotify? It's like, you know, you should if you love music and you love advancing that industry, you should go there more than anywhere else.
Speaker 1:Does that resonate with you?
Speaker 3:It resonates 100%. At my brother's company, he's building a startup Craft Docs. Yeah. Over the the winter, he realized like these agents are really good and he just mandated his team, everyone using Cloud Code, everyone needs to do prompting and you need to generate your code.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:He said about 50% of his team got really demotivated and one engineer quit because he told him, I do not want to be a prompter. I love the craft. That engineer was really in code was was was his kind of like Language. Identity. Yeah.
Speaker 3:He was the go to guy. He understood the code base better than anyone. And what happened in his first week is people used to go up to this person asking for like, hey, how does this work, etcetera. Yeah. No one walked up to him because the AI could answer it.
Speaker 3:And on this retreat in in Utah, I talked with a bunch of people who've been on larger enterprises, like big companies, and they were telling me the same thing, that the people who are struggling whose identity is the code and the craft. And the people who are thriving, their identity is less of the code, it's the impact. Yeah. Let's build cool stuff. Let's help the business.
Speaker 3:Or let's I love this industry and I I wanna advance it. Yeah. So I think that that's gonna happen. Like, the builders who don't care about the tools that much or going to thrive, people who grab at the craft, there there might be niches for them and it's not gonna go away but it'll be harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You always see that in the
Speaker 2:video Or game or I'm thinking of the Dwight Dwight Schruder.
Speaker 1:Like every programmer loves video games and so I mean, not everyone but a lot of them. So they go there and they'll be like, oh, yeah. Pay me half as much as if I was doing ads because I I wanna work on League of Legends or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm reminded of the scene Dwight Schrute trying to out outsell selling against the computer. Right? Like, immediately, he's like doing fine and the website just steamrolls it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's wild times. Well, we really appreciate you coming by
Speaker 6:the show.
Speaker 2:On anytime.
Speaker 1:Anytime. Is very very good. To have you more. We'll do so. It was great.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the thank you for the cookies. I'm
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And I'm also gonna tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance, and support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, I believe we have Dara Khosharshari from Uber in the Restream waiting room.
Speaker 4:So let's bring him
Speaker 1:into TV Panaltrum. Dara, good to
Speaker 2:meet How are you doing?
Speaker 5:Nice to meet you. I'm doing great. Thank you. We just had earnings
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:They were really strong, although the market is going crazy as we speak. So who knows?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's let's start there. Break it down Yeah. Yeah. What anybody that that wasn't paying attention to your guys' fantastic quarter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What happened? Maybe why did you have this particular quarter?
Speaker 5:So the quarter ended a great year for us. In the quarter, we announced trip growth of twenty two percent. We're now at a run rate of 15,000,000,000 trips. Well, there you go. Billion So many trips.
Speaker 5:For the year. That's 40,000,000 per day. So the business is really scaling. Gross bookings growth actually accelerated. Usually as companies get bigger, they slow down.
Speaker 5:We're actually accelerating. Profits is defined by EBITDA. We're up 35% on a year on year basis. And then we threw off almost $10,000,000,000 of free cash flow, 9,800,000,000.0, up 40% So year on the business is really scaling. At the same time, you've got the mobility business that's growing at really healthy rates 19%.
Speaker 5:And then Uber Eats
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:That really we built like entirely organically now is over a $100,000,000,000 run rate, solidly profitable and that grew 26% in the last quarter, really accelerating nicely since the beginning of the year. So the business actually looks really, really great. And then obviously we've got the onset of autonomous and autonomous vehicles and we kind of in our investor presentation, we had a lot a lot to say about autonomous Mhmm. Which we could definitely get into if you guys want to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Be before we get into that, like, what what are the key drivers outside of, obviously, the businesses, you know, maturing? You've been in the driver's seat for long enough now to really start having clearly a tremendous impact. But like what's really what's driving this acceleration?
Speaker 5:Yes. So I'd say one in terms of the businesses, our business is really supply led. So the more cars we get on the road, the more restaurants we have on the platform, our product gets better, there's the conversion of the product. When you open up your app, your ETA is lower, you have more restaurants available.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 5:basically, we are a supply led business and we continue to add supply onto the platform. We've got almost 10,000,000 drivers and couriers on the platform, well over a million merchants. And first, it starts with supply. And our selection and supply just keeps getting better and better and better. I'd say that's number one.
Speaker 5:Second is, we're the only platform out there that has both rides and eats and it's global as well. And that allows us to more deeply embed with our customers. About 30% of our Eats first trips come from Rider so to speak. And we can promote cross promote from the Rides platform to the Eats platform. If you open up your Uber Uber app now, you see Eats being offered.
Speaker 3:You'll see
Speaker 5:grocery being offered. If you're looking to go to a restaurant for dinner, we'll also offer that restaurant for delivery as a reminder that it's available for delivery as well. So this cross platform kind of promo that we can do, it's just no one else is doing it. Mhmm. It's taken us years to perfect it because any pixel that is promoting, let's say Uber Eats on the Uber app, it can get in the way of your experience on Uber.
Speaker 5:So you have to be very careful to have an optimal experience for your base business while at the same time nudging you over to the other products, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was there a period where it just felt like you were running two very distinct businesses and now it feels like they're actually coming together and it's working?
Speaker 5:Totally. And and and you know, my philosophy is that when you're building businesses that are younger, you want kind of full stack teams. So for example, our technology team, we had to dedicate the technology team for Eats. As that business got more mature and larger, we combined our tech teams, we combined our product teams so that you can build one core infrastructure, one matching stack, for example, bring the customer data together and kind of create more commonality between the businesses. Now, for example, my I promoted our head of global mobility, Andrew McDonald.
Speaker 5:He's been here for twelve years. He's now president and COO. So he's running one P and L and essentially we can trade off between benefits on one business for the other business to kind of grow the whole. And there's no one else who again has the breadth and depth offerings that we have. And then on top of that, we've got the Uber One membership program.
Speaker 5:We got 46,000,000 members, close to 50% of our gross bookings come from members. Yeah. And that membership provides a real lock in. Members spend three times more than non members. Customers who shop on both Eats and Rides spend three times than the ones who don't.
Speaker 5:And so it's that combination of the whole platform coming together that lets us grow fast, lets us accelerate, it lets us gain category position versus the others while at the same time having a lot of profitability.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest lesson from Expedia that you've been able to apply to Uber?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's a great question. I I would say, and it was a mistake at Expedia, was not recognizing that the business is supply led. So with Expedia, we were very much focused on the customer and bringing in more audience so to speak and then following with supply. And I think one of the regrets and you have to kind of learn your lessons as a CEO.
Speaker 5:It's like we're humans too, we make mistakes too, we learn as well. Is that booking.com was really focused on more supply in Europe for example. And because they had more supply, they are able to build a more compelling platform in Europe than Expedia was. And so I took some of those learnings and then of course some tips from the OG Uber folk including Travis as well that this is a real supply led business. And so it was to some extent learning from my past mistakes and then making sure I don't make those mistakes again in the new job so to speak.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I remember when Uber came to LA, the push for supply on the platform was so aggressive that I was getting directly targeted. Right? Do you wanna drive for Uber? I was employed at the time.
Speaker 1:I wasn't signing up, but I haven't seen those ads. Is that a function of better targeting, or do you just have a more natural driver acquisition flywheel? Like, what's working on the supply side in in increasing the supply of drivers these days?
Speaker 5:I think supply is definitely cyclical. So in the early days obviously Yeah. It was kind of a new thing. No one knew what gig work was. So Travis and team had to introduce it to drivers, had to pull them off of driving for a carry limousines or some of the traditional players Yeah.
Speaker 5:Onto the Uber platform.
Speaker 1:It was
Speaker 5:very broad.
Speaker 1:She had everywhere.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Then we had to kinda grow the the overall marketplace as well because Yeah. There are way more Ubers on the road now than taxis Yeah.
Speaker 5:Etcetera. Etcetera. But Mhmm. We have had kind of supply shocks in the past. So for example, COVID, one of the great things about COVID as it related to Uber was terrible event obviously was that we were able to move our drivers who are driving for Uber to make money on Uber Eats.
Speaker 5:But then after COVID, we thought when the world would open up, everyone would get back to driving because why the heck not? It turned out that a lot of our drivers, rightly so, they're worried about their health. They didn't wanna catch COVID. I remember I was talking to a driver and I'll never forget this line. I'm like, well, why don't you go back to driving people because you can make more money that way?
Speaker 5:And she said, well, big a big Mac isn't gonna give me COVID. You know? It's it's so safety was a big issue. So we had to reinvest in supply Okay. Very aggressively post COVID.
Speaker 5:We did so faster than our competitors, which helped us. Now we have a pretty finely tuned machine. And that the retention of drivers is really high. On average drivers are driving more supply hours. They're spending more time on our platform because they can drive, they can deliver, they can shop, they can even do they can judge AI algorithms now.
Speaker 5:We have a group called Uber AI Solutions where they can look at algorithmic answers and decide which is better, etcetera. There's much more to do on the platform. So the position that we have in supply is pretty strong. But believe me, we're investing. I guess we figured out that you guys are more consumer customers than drivers and good for algorithms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good work on the marketing side. Everyone's been able to make the bear case for traditional enterprise software over the last year as models have gotten better. There's been some chatter about kind of risk to marketplaces with agents. I'm not necessarily bought in to some of those theories yet.
Speaker 2:You know, you're operating this, you know, massive network of drivers and and supply and it's just a lot more difficult to sort of no no no model is gonna one shot that anytime soon.
Speaker 1:I I'm expecting to go to my terminal and it will call people randomly in my neighborhood and ask them if they wanna give me a ride. That's the future I wanna live in.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so so we're we're not really quite seeing that yet. But how are you thinking about kind of risks and opportunities with with a more agentic kind of Internet and consumer products?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think that if you have unique fragmented supply and the global scope that we have,
Speaker 3:then
Speaker 5:you are safer than let's say others who might not have unique supply or they don't have the fragmentation of supply that we do. Like we've got over 9,000,000 couriers and drivers on our platform. That's very difficult for anyone whether human or agent to replicate as well. So we are working with AgenTic platforms. We've got a great relationship for example with OpenAI.
Speaker 5:And so you will be able to call an Uber using ChatGPT. One of the things that we want to do is we want to get our brand in front of you as well. So once you call it, for example, it's an Uber map so you can track your car, do all that good stuff. So I think like companies like ours who do have, we're in over 70 countries, we set everything up. The membership program is very, very deep and embedded.
Speaker 5:We have a fragmented supply base that's going to be very difficult for anyone to recreate. I think we can rest easier. And for me, I wanna make sure that my brand gets out to the customer. And at the same time, I'm building those experiences within the Uber
Speaker 1:app. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So a driver can interact with the app using voice. They can they have an agent who can help them out if they don't know why they're not making more money. We've got agents for ordering. We've got agents for ordering your rides, etcetera. So I think as long as the experience on app doesn't trade trail the experience off app, I think off app actually can ultimately for players like us expand the the marketplace, and that's definitely something that we're looking at.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about the next iteration of Apple intelligence rolling out? We were talking to Mark Gurman, and he was saying that we've been able to call Ubers from Siri for, I think he said, a decade or something like that. It's been there. Obviously, I'm sure you have the numbers, and there's probably a lot of people in nominal terms that are using that functionality. But it feels like it hasn't broken through.
Speaker 1:But it feels like it's about to with the next iteration of Siri and Apple intelligence. Is that that's lower friction. That feels good for you. At the same time, if I don't open the app, maybe I don't go and do other things and I lose a little bit of connection. What how are you seeing that trade off?
Speaker 5:You know, my my view is don't think too hard and build great consumer products. I love that. So if someone wants to if someone wants to get us through Apple Intelligence, chat GBT or they want to come to the app, I don't care. Yeah. You know, as long as as long as we're we're we're getting used and we're getting used used often.
Speaker 5:Now, yes, there are considerations. We have a $2,000,000,000 advertising business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:If that is subsumed underneath an Apple intelligence Mhmm. That could hurt our advertising business. Mhmm. But for me, like, if if the North Star is build out consumer experiences that are absolutely first rate, And then we have this, the multi product category and the membership underneath. I think the economics can kind of take them take care of themselves over the long term.
Speaker 5:And if we make a great app, like people will keep coming to that app. And I remember when Google Maps was at some point amalgamating Lyft and Uber content. People were worried about that. She talked about Apple intelligence. Our app is pretty damn good.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And my job is to make sure that it remains leading and keeps attracting audience because ultimately that is the most engaged audience that you can have, that direct audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a lot
Speaker 2:of sense. Yeah. Mean with food with the the benefit with with with the Uber Eats business is like, don't really want plain text experience ordering food and chat. And then, you know, chat No. Can generate images and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:But it's several jumps in UI.
Speaker 2:Eventually, you're like, well, I can just pop over to the app. Yep. We got to talk about autonomy. I'm sure you spent a bunch of the earnings call on that note. But what were the highlights?
Speaker 2:What should people be paying attention to?
Speaker 5:I think the biggest highlight, and we have a big section in our supplemental materials that I encourage folks to look at is that what we're seeing with autonomy is that it's a net positive in terms of demand into the ecosystem. So there's one view of looking at it, hey, autonomous is just going to replace humans and, you know, robot cars don't get tired, they don't get distracted, they can work twenty hours a day, they do need to get recharged and clean, etcetera. So they will replace the workforce, so to speak, that I think a lot of people are talking about in other markets as well. What we're seeing in markets in which we have launched autonomous is that actually those markets are growing faster. There's a new audience segment that comes in.
Speaker 5:Our new customer acquisition, know, overall now we have 200,000,000 consumers coming to our front door every single month, growing 18%, growing pretty quickly. But in the markets in which we have AV, our audience growth is actually accelerated and we're gaining new customers because it's a really freaking cool product. So one is that we've always had the hypothesis, hey, mobility is a trillion dollar marketplace, but autonomous can add more to that market. It can be trillion dollar plus or another trillion dollars. And the early signal is that, yeah, it is actually additive.
Speaker 5:It's not replacement only. The second, I I would say big finding if you wanna call that for us is, we've always had the hypothesis that autonomous on our platform is going to take advantage of the platform to be much more much more utilized than off platform. You know, like, to some extent, a car is a box with wheels. Mhmm. The autonomous car is super expensive.
Speaker 5:So you wanna keep it running and you wanna keep it earning money for as long as possible. And we're finding that the utilization of those cars on our platform is 30 plus percent higher than cars that are not that kind of are building their own platforms. That utilization bonus is hugely important as it relates to the value of our platform. And so we're seeing that come through too. So one is it's additive, is great.
Speaker 5:And the platform is doing what it's designed to do, which is bring more business to a driver, where that driver happens to be human or happens to be a robot.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you're saying so the unit economics of AV provider can actually be better if they're if they're adding it to the Uber platform.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, that that's how we have to earn our take rate, right? It's it's if we're not driving higher utilization, we won't earn our take rate. And right now, the utilization premium that we're seeing suggests that our take rate is, you could argue, too low, but we have a very strong case to be made for the take rate of the platform.
Speaker 1:Is there any role for Uber in the rest of the self driving car stack from cleaning to service to storage? There's a lot of these things that could be handled, and they're currently handled by the sort of OEMs and the big autonomy companies.
Speaker 2:But other
Speaker 1:You could imagine smaller vendors. In the future, it being much more distributed, but does it go full individual maintenance and whatnot?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So if you think about the AV stack
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:There's the distribution. Yeah. That could be Uber. It could be Waymo. Could be Tesla.
Speaker 5:Sure. Right? And there's a driver and the driver we're partnering up with the driver. Mhmm. Then there's the operator.
Speaker 5:And the operator has depots, is cleaning the cars, recharging the cars. We have a network of fleet partners now on a global basis because about 15% of our supply is provided by fleets today. And they rent out cars to drivers. We're taking those fleet operators and we're saying, hey, we want you now to operate AVs. So those fleet operators in partnership with us, we have investments in a bunch of them.
Speaker 5:They are the ones who operate the fleet and they can do it in a really low cost manner. They're doing it with hundreds of thousands of cars. And so AV is different, but not that different. So you got the operator, then you have someone who owns the car, that could be us, It could be Waymo. But ultimately, think it's gonna be third parties like private equity players and all this stuff who are gonna want to own these big assets.
Speaker 5:Just like they kinda do rental car fleets. And then you will have kinda debt out there. So there will be the financialization of the marketplace as well. But we are definitely playing in the demand side. We're partnering on the driving side.
Speaker 5:And then we can and are providing through our fleet partners all of the operations in a city including depots, cleaning, etcetera.
Speaker 2:What kind of conversations have you had or what should people expect from other OEMs outside of Tesla on the autonomy side? It's an interesting dynamic now where Teslas are getting FSD is getting really, really good. It's a meaningful differentiator if you're a consumer and you, you either want to, you know, drive less on your way to work or one day be able to add your car to a platform like Uber? What's kind of coming down the pipeline in terms of just overall competitiveness from other OEMs?
Speaker 5:So what's interesting is that when I was having discussions regarding autonomous with OEMs, it was more they were more interested in L2, which is where FSD is now than they were L4. The prospect of every single car being sold with a $5,000 priced piece of software that has a cost of goods of zero. It's like OEM's eyes, know, went like this. They were super super interested.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:As it turns out, I think that l two is proving to be less interesting than people thought. Because you still kinda have to watch a road etcetera. You can't really turn off. I think the great great customer product is just I can relax, I can do whatever I want and I can get my time back the way that you get your time back in an Uber. So in the back seat, do whatever you want, make a call, etcetera.
Speaker 5:So the conversations with OEMs actually are getting a lot more constructive for us because they see L3 and L4 and we want L4 obviously as the big prize now. And that was not true three years ago. So we're having actually really great conversations with OEMs. We have a deal for example with Lucid who builds awesome EVs and one of our other partners, Neuro and Lucid coming together. And there are many other discussions that we're having with OEM partners.
Speaker 5:And then of course now NVIDIA is in the game, They were building the reference computer architecture. Now they're bringing the sensor stack and now they are building self driving as well, the model as well. So NVIDIA will provide a full stack software and hardware solution to any OEM provider. And as you can imagine, NVIDIA brings a lot of heft, a lot of know how, and then a lot of credibility to the ecosystem as well. So the direction of
Speaker 2:sitting there as like a supply driven business just being like, let's go. I want every every car outfitted with this when when it's when it's ready. Yeah. And you can imagine a world where, you know, the Uber wait time is twenty seconds every time. It's just like Yeah.
Speaker 5:Mean, dream is ten years from now, every single new car sold is L4 capable because that is obviously very strong prospect for a supply, what I started with. And hopefully, you'll get that twenty second ETA or you'll be pissed off if you have to wait for more than a minute.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you step back from maybe the specifics of of Uber and just think about how autonomy might change the American landscape. Like, how are do you do you agree with the thesis of, like, the suburbs will become more popular? People will be commuting longer? Like, what what knock on effects do you think are potentially underrated or under discussed of of moving in a more autonomous direction?
Speaker 5:Yes, it's a great question. I'd say generally in The U. S, suburbs are growing faster than cities. So this is a trend that started with COVID, it continues. And our growth in the suburbs and less dense areas is about twice our growth rate in the cities.
Speaker 5:So it's been a really attractive growth driver for us. I do think that it's going to create a lot of space in cities. I think 30% of space in cities is for parking. A huge amount
Speaker 1:of it
Speaker 5:goes unutilized. Some of that will be taken up by depots, etcetera. But I do think that it is going to increase the breadth of where people get to live. And I think it's going to make transportation available for many, many more people as the cost. It's going to take a while and it's probably going to take two or three generation of cars.
Speaker 5:But the hardware costs for these sensors for the computer is absolutely coming down. And this will result in lower cost mobility being available to many more people in the world, whether they live in the city or they live outside of the city. And I think it's going to have a great impact on society. Having more transportation available more affordably to a higher percentage of the population. Yes, it's good for a business, but it will undoubtedly be great for society.
Speaker 1:Last question. What advice do you give to someone who wants to be a public company CEO?
Speaker 5:One is I would tell you like, don't hunt for it. Pick I I I'd I'd say that the advice that that I give folks is people get way too hung up on what their title is Mhmm. Or how much they're gonna get paid, etcetera. I have always you know, what's worked for me is I have been very very specific about who I wanna work for. And when you pick the right people to work for, one, you learn a lot from them.
Speaker 5:But the one thing that I've seen in in every environment, environments are unpredictable, but people usually stay successful. Like you look at Elon. Right? Yeah. Like he succeeded in so many different areas and that's true for really exceptional people.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So, exceptional people stay exceptional regardless of the environment. You know, if you pick a company or you pick a position, that can change. That that can go the wrong way. Yeah. If you pick the right person, you pick the right person, not only do you get to learn from them, but they usually move up in the
Speaker 1:world. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And so as they get promoted, as they build a bigger company, you kind of get to free ride off of them. So you get double the benefit, which is you learn from someone who's awesome Yeah. And you get to move kind of in their wake until you're ready to strike out on your own. I'd say that's number one. And then the second thing I'd say is like, you know, advice for young young people in terms of learning, just learn how to work hard.
Speaker 5:Like, it's again, your skill sets may change, your profession may change, people are like discussing is coding the right thing or or, you know, learning the the liberal arts. The most important skill in life is a skill of working freaking hard. And if you work for the right person and you learn how to work hard, you're gonna do just fine.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love both those answers.
Speaker 1:That's a fantastic answer. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2:So great to finally have you on the show. Congrats to the whole team on a fantastic quarter and we'll hope to have you back on very soon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk
Speaker 12:to you soon.
Speaker 5:By the way, I don't know if our IT people have been watching you guys, but we have ramp coming on to Uber.
Speaker 1:No way. There's
Speaker 5:something happening
Speaker 1:Okay. With your
Speaker 5:commercials that that are working. My IT people are watching way too much of the VPN.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Love That's great. Well, congratulations and we'll talk to See you you, Dar. Thanks so much.
Speaker 5:Take care, guys.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multi stream, go to restream.com. And let me also tell you about Plaid.
Speaker 1:Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. Next, we have public company CEO.
Speaker 2:We have our dear friend, Mitchell Mitchell Green. Lead Edge. Lead Edge Capital. Coming into the show. Let's bring him in.
Speaker 1:Oh, he's here. Mitchell, how are you doing?
Speaker 12:Ron, you should have had Darren and I on together. We're buddies.
Speaker 1:Oh, you are? That's awesome. Yeah. Damn. That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should if we we planned better This is surprising. Add you both next time.
Speaker 12:Yeah. How's life?
Speaker 1:It's good. It's good. Yeah. So it's we're we're going all over the place today. We're talking about the market collapse, the end of SaaS, but the birth of agentic coding and all these crazy things the developers doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's
Speaker 12:up? I got a question for you. If everybody my partner actually came up with this idea. He's like, so if all the if all the saascom if all the software companies are all gonna disappear
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Because you can just, like, vibe code your way to build in one of these companies, well, then can't the next AI company vibe code that AI company?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. And, I mean, there is seriously a a push in the open source software community now to loosely vibe code everything you need. Like, you build all your own tools.
Speaker 1:You build your own all your own software. This used to be the domain of programmers that would stay up all night for months on end to build a little to do list app, and now it's much more robust. But we haven't really seen where all of this goes. It's still pretty early, and most people are just building, like, tools that build more tools at this point. But We're Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the iron law of the universe, I don't know if you agree, is like, if it goes up quickly, it comes down quickly. There's always you know, you see these amazing growth charts and you get a little nervous because if it easy come, easy go.
Speaker 12:Yes. It's funny. I think people are people are gonna be in for a a rude awakening. I think some people I are mean, you were calling this you
Speaker 2:were calling this the last time Yeah. The last time you were on the show, you were kind of more just kinda skeptical a lot of these valuations. So
Speaker 12:Yeah. What no. What's funny is it's like public market software is not cheap. We're buying it. But we think companies like Workday are incredible businesses.
Speaker 5:Wow.
Speaker 12:A company like TransferWise in the payment space Yeah. Remitly. Toast has been crushed. Yeah. We're not in a company called AppLovin, but I huge gaming company.
Speaker 12:Have a good buddy who's made billions on it and is now rebuying it. Like, these things are just like Yeah. They create I was like The things are like all sent out at the same time.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. And you know, I was looking at looking at PayPal. You have a it's trading at seven times earnings now when I look this morning. They have half a billion users. It's pay it's it's a global payments network.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It doesn't seem like anything you can just vibe. You're not gonna vibe Can't vibe your way
Speaker 1:to money transfer license.
Speaker 12:We're gonna vibe code it. We're gonna build it. We're we're just gonna make by the way, same with Workday as well. We're just gonna vibe code our way, you know. Only took Workday twenty years to get companies like Nike and Procter and Gabble to give them all their ERP data.
Speaker 12:Of course, you know, Mitchell and Jamie John and Jamie, and we're gonna like we're gonna vibe code our way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I think people Forget. People are undervaluing trust right now. Totally.
Speaker 12:People forget how software companies like, building code has never been the actual, like, hard thing about a software company. Yeah. This is not like building semiconductor chips.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:It is like distribution. People forget you build a piece of software.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:Then you have to sell the software. Then you have to maintain the software. Then you have to add features to the software. Then you have to, you know, you connect it with other systems. Those systems change.
Speaker 12:You have to have user permissioning. This stuff is really complex. And, oh, I'm sorry. The dude sitting in, you know, in in Silicon Valley in in a in a shed on, you know, Sand Hill or in San Francisco who's gonna vibe code their way. Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 12:How about the other 10,000 software engineers that Salesforce has?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:Or the 3,000 software engineers that work they have? I mean, are they just like sitting around, you know, on their thumb? No. Of course. They're gonna try to innovate, and what's gonna happen is no different than what happened in ninety nine and two thousand.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:If you look at the top 50 sellers on the Internet today of, like, the largest ecommerce companies, like, yes, Amazon is one, but Walmart, Home Depot, you know
Speaker 1:They made it through?
Speaker 12:Macy's Yeah. It's a good ecommerce businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, one really quickly.
Speaker 1:You can actually test the thesis empirically by looking at r and d spend of tech companies and how much they actually spend of the money they raise before they IPO on software development specifically, and it's shockingly low, way lower than you'd think. You feel like
Speaker 12:software company literally at all these, like, pod shops and all these hedge funds, all these hedge fund guys. And by the way, the trade there's a great chart. I could I wish I could pull it
Speaker 1:up. Okay.
Speaker 12:Which is like, you know, it's like software exposure for hedge funds has gone like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Semiconductor exposure has gone like this.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 12:And, you know, usually if you do the opposite of what everybody's doing, you'll make a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Okay. There you go.
Speaker 12:But So, I I agree.
Speaker 2:One one, you know, one one kind of test you could run is like, if you're thinking about a company like Workday, is if you went to all of Workday's customers right now and you said, hey, I can I can I can build this for and I'll sell it to you at 20% of the price? Mhmm. Would anybody actually change switch over? Because it would be like, okay, it's gonna be cheaper but what if it's like way less reliable? What what if I get what if it's so unreliable or has so many issues that I get fired over it?
Speaker 2:Yep. Does somebody
Speaker 12:You know there are like multi billion dollar revenue businesses that are literally built to sit on top of companies like Salesforce and Workday to help them manage the companies, to manage the software. It's it's it's it's now again, so then you think about, like, I think companies that are, like, selling to big enterprises Mhmm. Are are actually gonna end up great. Now again, you might have the Sears and Kmarts of the world
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:That, you know, didn't innovate Yeah. Or were over levered. So I do worry about some of these private equity software companies. They get way over levered, and if they try to drive too high EBITDA margins and and sacrifice r and d. Now there are other terms like Avista, like what Robert Smith does, and he's actively, they're trying to be like, no.
Speaker 12:We need to, like, double down on AI and, like, double down in r and d and these things. But I think there will be some people that are just trying to maximize EBITDA margins that'll be hurt. And guess what? Somebody will go build the next competitor of that. So then you're like, look.
Speaker 12:We think about, like, an area that's probably more right for AI disruption is companies selling into, like, SMBs Mhmm. Because the software isn't nearly as complex.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:But again, there are company it's not like companies like HubSpot, which is a great business
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:That sells into SMB. They're they have probably a thousand software engineers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah. They're sitting there trying to disrupt themselves constantly. So it's not I don't know. I think it's
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's definitely market by market, sector by sector.
Speaker 12:Cycle for sure. Like, I think it I think people just don't truly understand how, like, software companies actually sell Yeah. That just say that people are gonna buy code in a way. Now, what is incredible is how fast some of these AI businesses are growing Yeah. That are built off the tailwinds of some of these companies.
Speaker 12:Even like a company like a ClickHouse, which just raised at a big round. We were one of the early in it luckily, Totally by dumb luck. Nobody you know, but we got, like, you know, we have four companies, we're investors in Grafana Labs which Yeah. You know, the software company but embracing AI and it's got an incredible quarter and Yeah. Plan.
Speaker 12:And so, like, you are you are seeing there are there are gonna be a bunch of companies in software that that continue to innovate.
Speaker 2:Could you vibe could you vibe code equipment share? That was one of your
Speaker 12:they just great. That's I am vibe code. I was gonna vibe code car collection software, but then I decided since I actually have a job for a living, I'm gonna hire somebody else to vibe code it for me. Job creator.
Speaker 2:Totally. Software engineer victory. Yeah. Still in the still Yeah.
Speaker 1:Makes it another job.
Speaker 12:Actually, some 18 year old senior at Santa Barbara High School is benefiting from this.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 12:fantastic. To build me software. Yeah. But now they're
Speaker 2:gonna have a job forever. For sure. They're be maintaining this thing
Speaker 12:for you. I'm gonna get you guys in on it as well. So Oh, I like that.
Speaker 1:I'm down.
Speaker 12:No. But on on equipment share. Equipment share, look. I mean, it's it's up almost 30% from the IPO. It's, with my partners, Tim and Zach.
Speaker 12:My my partners, Tim and Zach, led that deal. I take no credit for it. They did a phenomenal job. It look. It's benefiting from, you know, the ongoing there's a massive if you were to isolate, you know, CapEx and infrastructure spend outside of, like, GDP, you know, driving GDP growth right now, think I it's, like, a very meaningful part.
Speaker 12:Mhmm. Highways, energy products, data centers. I think another big thing that's gonna drive a lot of CapEx is this this, you know, accumulated depreciate this accelerated depreciation Yeah. In the big beautiful bill. That will benefit people like equipment share.
Speaker 12:And to put it in perspective, I think companies like equipment share, you know, in the s one, because they haven't filed results yet. I think last quarter, you know, in the s one result. In the last quarter, the s one and the s one was, like, growing nearly 30% a year. Yet you have companies like United, Hertz, and Sunbelt that grow, like, single digits, and yet these things trade at almost similar EBITDA margins. Now the reality is it's people that tend to buy companies like equipment share or Hertz equipment are not used to businesses that grow 30%.
Speaker 12:So they need to just, like, continue to put up results, and I think they'll they'll get the they'll get the multiple expansion over time. But they are it is like a great second derivative play on AI.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. Totally. In
Speaker 1:the public markets, when you look at a software company, it feels like a lot of people are looking at, you know, is top line accelerating? That should be happening if you're a true AI company. You're also looking at stuff like, are you over leveraged? Then you can also just talk to the management team. And if that doesn't sound like they know anything about AI, you could be very, you know, skeptical of the company.
Speaker 1:How do you think about when you find a new company, what what research what's your process for understanding how they'll be positioned over the next couple of years?
Speaker 12:Yeah. That's a great question. Think what we should do is just count the number of interns they have, frankly. Because, you know, 24 year olds and 22 year olds are gonna know more about this than 50 and 60 year olds and 40 year olds like myself. No, all kidding aside.
Speaker 12:We the way we think about it is we just think of how is this, like, squarely in an area that could be, like, very easily disrupted by AI? We we we just sit in, like, how deeply is this product integrated? How many people are using the product? Is it is it a result of stuff coming out of do they own their own data? Mhmm.
Speaker 12:You know, and I think we just we think about how complex the product is to build. You know, like, we talk to a company that's growing like a rocket ship and that makes, like, software to help, like, voices in call centers. Mhmm. And and for us, it's growing like a rocket ship, but we're just like but they sell into call centers. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:But the call center software companies just build this themselves. Mhmm. And they're like and then it's like a function of, okay, well, what valuation then do they want? And then you dig in deep and it's like and I'm not saying this one way or another. We have, do they have like one or two customers that are 40% of sales?
Speaker 1:Concentration.
Speaker 12:You know, we were we were looking at a company recently where like 40% of their sales is to a company that, you know, we're pretty skeptical on whether it should exist in ten years. It's like, you know, 40% of your sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. It's kind of like a dying gasp from that bigger company, and they're sort of sneaking the money out the back through this new startup. Talk about the IPO window. Feels like it's been open.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of rumors about the big companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. But what does it mean? I mean, you saw an equipment share. Like, what what what's your take on the IPO market and where it might evolve over the next year?
Speaker 12:Good companies can go public at any time.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 12:Except like, you know, equipment share was up 30%.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like, boy, it was a great it was a good deal. Yeah. I I think I think what's gonna be very interesting about some of these giant A clip of shows like a billion dollar deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean, even It is sucking liquidity out of the markets like Correct. Going out and raising $200,000,000,000.
Speaker 6:Yeah. A lot of people seem
Speaker 2:super confident that that the the market will fully support a SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Speaker 1:David Goggins market.
Speaker 12:We shall see. By the way, the money has to come from somewhere. Yeah. So you have to say, was it gonna come out of cash? Mhmm.
Speaker 12:Is it gonna come out of treasuries? Mhmm. Is it gonna come out of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft? Yeah. Probably, it'll look the reality is is a company like a SpaceX or an OpenAR or Anthropic or a Strike or let's see.
Speaker 12:Let's use, like, ByteDance. So Byte and by the way, ByteDance trades as massive amounts of earnings. You know, the negative is it's China. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But the positive is it has massive amount of earnings, and, know, you can get to a giant number, like, valued like SpaceX, a big fundamental earnings number.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:So you're like, where is a $150,000,000,000 gonna come from? And so in that one, you probably say, well, it would probably attract new money back into China.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:But then might people pull out some pull some money out of Tencent and pull some money out of Alibaba or Google or Microsoft to get exposure to this thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:I'm sure in the case of a SpaceX, it would take money out of a, you know, it would take money out of Tesla because it's like Elon, you know, it's like die hard and forgivers. But who knows? Maybe he's just gonna merge, you know, SpaceX and Tesla together. They don't have to and change it to the Elon Musk company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think Tesla shareholders would have been, very frustrated to get XAI merged in. Getting SpaceX merged in Not bad. And maybe you got a little x
Speaker 12:I would not. I knew nothing. Yeah. Would it shock me if it happened?
Speaker 2:No. What do you Someone in the chat just said that act the ticker x just got reserved at NICEE. Mhmm. So we'll see what that means.
Speaker 1:That's exciting. What do you think of the secondary market? When when I when I moved to Silicon Valley, it was like seen as a total bear signal if a founder CEO was selling stock at the early stage. Now companies stay private for so long. There's massive secondary sales.
Speaker 1:Elon's been a master of, you know, liquidity keeping SpaceX private for twenty years. How is the secondary market evolving? What are you seeing?
Speaker 12:It's definitely evolved a lot. When I started working at Vesiver in 2004, 2005
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:You know, it was a very, you know, it was very, you know, world class venture funds were like, oh my god. Absolutely not. You should
Speaker 4:call it.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 12:The exactuaries. Yeah. And I got into my first investment ever in 2009 by in a company called Bizarre Voice doing a secondary. Now, I will tell you most deals have a secondary component. It feels a little bit frenzy ish right now, like the Facebook, Twitter, back then.
Speaker 12:It it is I was just in an investor conference yesterday speaking in Arizona, and it shocked I had multiple people come up to me. Now, like, institutional investors, like like random companies' pension funds that were like, oh, what do you think of Anthropic? We're like buying into it here.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I got even a better one. K. One of my big institutional investors, fantastic guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Name name will be, about said, but he's like, we you need to start a microsecondary fund that will buy secondary interests in these tender 30 act funds. You know, you have, like, you have, like, the code the new code to fund and the district fund and all these and it's a huge wave coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And and it basically offer, like, quarterly redemptions. You can take out, like, five or 10% a year. It's what, like, BREIT was. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 12:And then but occasionally, if there's too many people that want to, redeem, you have to gate them. But you never wanna gate. But when do you think everybody's gonna gate? Like, everybody's gonna all the dentists and doctors are all gonna pull out at the exact same time.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 12:And and my buddy was like, oh, you should start a sec a microsecondaries fund to buy out their interests in all these interval funds when they all when they put it when when the gate comes up and all of them want out at the same time, and they're like, wait a second. We can't get out? We're we're locked up? What do mean? I thought this is like liquid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 12:It's common. Don't worry. It's Don't worry.
Speaker 2:What do you what do you think Ferrari, the business is worth?
Speaker 12:Oh, boy. I thought you gonna ask me what I thought of the new car. Lewis was Hamilton was fast in Dustin. It's preseason It's an amazing business, but the stupidest thing I ever did was buy the cars and not the stock. Mhmm.
Speaker 12:I actually have several friends that I race Ferrari Challenge with
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:That bought the stock at the IPO, and now they slowly dribble the stock out to buy cars.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 12:It's an amazing brand. I don't know what it
Speaker 2:It only only IPO'd in 2015.
Speaker 12:Yeah. What what is the stock like? I mean, what's what's Ferrari stock price now?
Speaker 2:Stock's down 10% in the last month. It's a $63,000,000,000 build factory. Me a
Speaker 12:The nice thing is you can't yeah. Yeah. Yes. It's stock.
Speaker 1:You can't vibe code
Speaker 2:me. But it's up 500% since the IPO. Pretty good. So yeah. Right when you got into cars, you should have
Speaker 12:been getting into I should have bought the factory. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what advice would you give to someone just getting into venture, private equity, raising a fund, looking at opportunities? We're seeing this, like, k shape right now with the mega funds scaling up. Feels harder than ever to start sort of a mid sized fund. What what what are you seeing that's interesting that new managers are doing?
Speaker 12:That's a good question. I'm gonna steal a word. I'm gonna steal a line from Jeremy Levine, who's a senior partner of Bessemer Venture Partners and probably one of the best venture capitalists over the last twenty five years. You guys could never get him on. He's incredible.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Like, an amazing investor. Was like that very early investor in Pinterest and LinkedIn and Yelp and, like, Shopify with Alex Ferraro. Like, the total stunt. Like, he said to me, I would always complain about what they were paying me, at the time. And he's like, well, Mitchell, you're learning a lot.
Speaker 12:And so the most important thing is actually to go find if if you're trying to get into this industry, and I think there's too many people that are young starting funds, and they're gonna actually, like, or entrepreneurs that have actually never really professionally invested. I I would actually tell you, you're better off going to find the apprenticeship Yeah. And, like, look and literally go find an amazing venture capitalist or venture capital firm that you can go work for. Convince Sequoia or Benchmark or Mike Maples or Josh Kauffman at Verstrom. Like, guys that have been doing this, gals that have been doing this, Teresa Gal, who have been doing this for a long time, and go shadow him for two years.
Speaker 12:That's how you're gonna really that
Speaker 4:that is honestly the
Speaker 2:best Or 10. 10. 10. Yeah. Like like so so many
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of people get into these funds like two years later, I'm I'm raising my own fund. It's like Like You haven't seen a going
Speaker 2:like maybe you're a good investor, maybe you've made some good angel bets, maybe you did a couple years at a fund already, but going and saying I'm gonna do the the the path of doing the 30 to 50 to 100,000,000 to $200,000,000 fund, that is like a
Speaker 1:It's tricky especially where prices
Speaker 12:I are mean, I give Harry at 2020 b c a lot of credit. Like, he started off with podcast. He like hustles his way. Like, I'm sure you guys are gonna get to start to see, like, really interesting deals from doing this. And it doesn't mean in, eighteen months now, you're gonna go start a fund.
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Think it's people confuse angel investing and being successful with angel investing with all of a sudden, if you get a $100,000,000, you'll be really successful. It's really, really hard. And I think people need to find mentors and go work for people that have that have invested as you through cycles. 100%.
Speaker 2:What what does it take to actually be contrarian? Because it's it's a it's like, whenever, you know, it's such a popular word in this industry now. Everybody says they're contrarian and yet, of course, only
Speaker 12:That's consensus.
Speaker 2:Consensus. Yeah. Exactly. And so I feel I feel like it's something like humans have an innate sort of instinct to kind of go with the herd and and 100%. And and so you have to like fight that.
Speaker 2:But how do you mean, fight
Speaker 12:Steve Cohen has always told me if you wanna know where the stock market goes, but he's like, look. He's like, you got a lot of smart hedge fund guys in your fund, you know, himself included. Ask us all where we think the market's going. Like, eight of us tell you one thing and two say the other, please call me and say what the two said. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Where it's going. Like, market causes the greatest amount of pain to the, you know, greatest number of people.
Speaker 2:Well, And to be honest, right now, the re if you looked at at x, would say the the consensus view is that AI is in a bubble and then we're gonna have this massive correction.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the contrarians are saying, you know, are the runes, obviously, he's very incentivized. Dylan Patel is saying like people aren't prepared for Yeah. Not
Speaker 12:Look, my view is is my view on all that is good company and good investment can be two very fundamental things. Mhmm. Like, you may wake up in five years and Anthropic is worth 5 $303,100,000,000,000 dollars. Right. It's $350,000,000,000.
Speaker 12:I wanna go back to the contrarian thing in a second. Mhmm. People are underestimating over the next ten to fifteen years what AI is going to do, myself included, everybody, your guests included.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:In 2000, I could have said on your show if it was around, and nobody would have talked about the $3,000,000,000,000 of social media that's been created value. Yet, people always overestimate the near term. Yeah. The bubble will pop, whatever bubble we're in will be different than 02/2021. It'll be different than '99.
Speaker 12:There will be some correction. Nobody will be able to predict when it happens, and the correction will just happen. But then that is probably the best time to then buy a bunch of these names and and hold on to a blunt bird. How do you be a contrarian? I don't know.
Speaker 12:You'd be like Lindsey Vonn and Terry Reese Allen trying to now go win an Olympic medal. You you know, I I think people that have I think contrarians tend to be people that understand, like, how to take very calculated risks. And and are are not afraid of doing that. So, like, what we look for in our analysts that come and work here, you know, cold call companies all day long. You know, by the way, a good CEO doesn't call you back.
Speaker 12:It's a CEO you call every ten ten times and calls you back after 10 times. Like, that's it's a it's a grit Yeah. Persistence, not being afraid to be different. So, like, you look for, like, athletes. I'm sorry, but if you drop the ball at the Rose Bowl, like, you have faced adversity.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I'm sorry. Getting a d on a test is not adversity. Like, you know, but, like so I think, like, a lot we like a lot of, like, athletes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:Or, like, people, like, that were really big in, like, arts or music or just doing something different. Being a straight a student is not different, especially with grade inflation.
Speaker 1:Talk about the differences culturally between the hedge fund guys you know and the venture capitalists. I was reading Dan Wong was talking about how in the hedge fund world, you're wrong five times before breakfast because everyone has a different thesis, and then it's immediately proved right or wrong. So you get more used to being contrarian, and everyone wants to find that edge. Whereas in Silicon Valley, there's a little bit more incentive to go with the herd because you can just ride the wave. What else have you seen, and do you agree with that take?
Speaker 12:Yeah. Yeah. So hedge funds are it's like, I think, a very, very generalist view. Like, extremely generalist view. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Broad view. What I would say is I think if you were to take the best hedge fund managers I know Mhmm. And the best venture capitalists I know
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 12:We've been fortunate to, like, partner with a bunch of people, work with people, have people back us. I would tell you that in three month or six month increments, I think the smart the hedge fund guys are smarter and, like, have a better sense of where the world is going. But I think over, like, a a five to ten year period, the the venture capitalists have a better view. Just in general, like, on how they think.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Yeah. Kind of aligned with the business. Contrarian takes. I saw one here.
Speaker 1:The center of gravity is shifting. More innovation is happening outside of Silicon Valley with countries outside The US producing category leaders earlier in their life cycle. I read that. I felt like I disagreed with it. Defend it.
Speaker 12:I in a world if you believe AI is coming and it's easier to build software or build whatever, well, who says you have to be in Silicon Valley where it's really expensive to live? It's really expensive to get talent. Mhmm. You can be able to build it anywhere. Look, people have built now public companies that are completely, you know, Grafana, by the way, is a big business.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 12:And it's completely distributed. Like, there are other big companies. Like, if you talk to people like Dell and Microsoft, they will tell you that they've they've shut down a lot of, like, small small regional offices and just have people work remote. So I think and actually, the more you believe in AI, the more actually stuff could come out. So, like, application layer.
Speaker 12:I think at the models at the at the model level Mhmm. It becomes about recruiting the best, like, you know, PHP tech level talent and stuff like that. But just to build application companies, think you can build them anywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:This is great. What what's the update on on the racing side?
Speaker 1:The Rolex 24.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Any any reactions?
Speaker 12:Watched part of it.
Speaker 2:Why why weren't you why weren't you racing in this Rolex '24?
Speaker 12:Years. Years. I got more years. We need to see. I was so race season, we had our first race for Ferrari challenge kicks off in, like, the March
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 12:At the thermal club outside of Palm Springs where you guys have been.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 12:I'm actually gonna race the support race at Le Mans this year. Oh. Nice. I'm gonna I'm gonna race the Monaco vintage races in an old f one car. Nice.
Speaker 12:That's great. My goal is to run Le Mans in the next, like, five years. Okay. Like, twenty four hours
Speaker 4:at Le Mans.
Speaker 1:Wow. That'll be amazing. Well,
Speaker 4:we'll Oh,
Speaker 12:you know you guys you guys the guys you gotta have come on here though because you like cars. I don't really know him, but George Kurtz is like a sponsor. Oh, he's he's very good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. His his race at at Daytona was insane. I mean, from getting taken out that opening corner to, getting the win.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolute legend. Well, Mitch
Speaker 12:one's gonna be f one it was funny. George Russell was talking Yeah. That he thought f one I thought I saw, like, an interview with him where he thinks it might be a lot closer this year. There's a bunch more teams that could be in the mix. It's still obviously very early on, but, like, the car that Adrian Newey built at at for Aston Martin is totally wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So it'll be
Speaker 2:fun. We're putting we're putting together a market map of f one teams based on the tech companies that sponsoring them. So
Speaker 12:I'm like, that's amazing, by the way.
Speaker 2:Because there's I mean, I think
Speaker 1:It's the easiest way for tech people to understand before.
Speaker 2:Buttersports are definitely a beneficiary of the AI boom so far.
Speaker 12:You guys gotta come to you gotta come to an f one race.
Speaker 1:We're excited. Yeah. We we were in Vegas. Was fun. Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming we'll be at all three American races.
Speaker 1:I hope so. I hope so. Cool. Anyway Alright.
Speaker 12:A great
Speaker 1:rest your day.
Speaker 2:Out, Mitchell.
Speaker 12:We'll see you soon, Mitchell. Guys. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software. Inbound.
Speaker 1:And I'm also gonna tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And we have some breaking news. Sam Altman has responded to the Anthropic ads. He says, first, the good part about the Anthropic ads, they are funny and I laughed. I like it.
Speaker 1:But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads is that they is that we won't do exactly this. We would never obviously run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it's on brand for Anthropic Doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren't real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it.
Speaker 1:More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use cloud in The United States. So we have a differently shaped problem than they do. If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads. Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.
Speaker 1:We are glad they do that and we are doing that too. But also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can't pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly, Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI. They block companies they don't like from using their coding product including us. They want to write rules for themselves for what people can and can't use AI for and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be.
Speaker 1:We are committed to broad democratic decision making in addition to access. We also are committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad, it's about builders and how and how anyone can now build any builder mode.
Speaker 1:We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday and we think builders are really gonna love what's coming for them in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is gonna win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who wanna control them.
Speaker 1:So he fires buyers back
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was it More was responses. In general, like, again, I think Sam has to admit that the ads are like pretty entertaining and it's just such a wild move and unexpected from from Anthropic given that they've been, you know, try I mean, I I would say like from a brand standpoint Mhmm. Going with like the sort of edgy adult humor was was Risk. Unexpected.
Speaker 1:We'll see how
Speaker 2:But yeah, ultimately it's deceptive. Like they're trying to mislead people about OpenAI's ad product.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not corn syrup.
Speaker 2:Like the entire strategy of the campaign is clearly not to drive downloads. It's FUD. It's FUD. Yeah. And yeah, I think there will probably be
Speaker 12:a
Speaker 2:Harvard business case study on on this
Speaker 1:TBPN business case studies. Think that'd be fun. We should generate those. Also, it's just anti ad, which I don't like. I like ads.
Speaker 1:Here's another ad. Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And we have our next guest in the restream waiting
Speaker 2:room. Is it time to puff?
Speaker 1:It's time to puff. We got Simon from Turbo Puffer. Let's In the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in Ultravow. Simon, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:To see you.
Speaker 7:Good. Good to see you guys. Hey, John. Hey, Jordy.
Speaker 3:What's It's time
Speaker 2:to puff.
Speaker 1:It's time to puff. What's new in your world? Were you thinking about doing an over the top attack ad on a competitor or are you locked in focused for the Super Bowl? What's the strategy? How is the business growing?
Speaker 7:I mean, you were so generous to give us a front and send to the Super Bowl. As a new entrant As a new entrant to the new world, I can't I don't really understand American football. Okay. But it seems right up your alley because when I think of it from first principles, it seems like a sport that has been designed to show ads
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:Which I think that is a great American invention. So I have to respect that.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful.
Speaker 7:It's very beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:How has the, the agentic coding boom been processed to you? What what what's the effect? Are you seeing any slowdown? There's been hype waves and sell offs and all sorts of turmoil. Has the recent, sort of reacceleration, taking you surprise?
Speaker 1:Did it hit you like a flash bang?
Speaker 7:I I what whatever is going on right now is hitting us like something.
Speaker 1:Sounds good. What is going on? Bring it down for You've been waiting to use this effect
Speaker 3:Yes. All day.
Speaker 1:Yes. All day. And the chat demanded it. Anyway.
Speaker 7:Bobby says We we need a puff.
Speaker 1:Yes. We need a puff one.
Speaker 7:We need a puff They get puffer It's sort of just like, you know, when you want me to get off camera, you get a puffer fist
Speaker 2:that starts counting down. Is
Speaker 1:have a smoke grenade that kind of issues puffs of smoke. But maybe they need logos all over them. That would be good.
Speaker 7:I mean, look, the world the world's puffing. I think you asked about coding. I think coding was the first vertical that really started puffing really hard. Mhmm. And I mean, in general, the way that we look at the world is that we can certainly take all of the knowledge in the world and we can distill it into a few terabytes of weights.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. And those terabytes of weights are extremely useful at reasoning over data. Mhmm. But in some way, they have to reason with the data. And to reason with the data, you need a search engine, right, that has all the canonical data and is that tool to search through the data.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I mean, that's what Cursor and Cognition and other coding tools are doing with Turbo Puffer, is to search through the code. And so I think we're seeing that in other verticals now. We see it in legal. Right?
Speaker 7:And we see every vertical sort of starts by just pushing a bunch of things into context. But then really what they want is to allow the agent to search by itself, and that's where TurboBuffer comes in as that as the search engine, it can index petabytes and petabytes of data to allow these agents to search.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were I mean, we're talking about ads. Is do do you have a burgeoning ads business? Or not not ads in Turbo Puffer, but powering ad tech systems because I can imagine a lot of new platforms. They have a lot of content.
Speaker 1:They have a lot of ads. They need to match those. And so your system should be valuable there. Is that a stretch, or is that a good application?
Speaker 7:I think most of the ad businesses already have extremely sophisticated systems for this.
Speaker 4:I'm thinking new
Speaker 5:ad. So generally,
Speaker 1:But yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. No. We we haven't seen that vertical really come alive for us yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I imagine I imagine it it becomes important. And and what about other sort of applications or sectors that are growing in terms of this technology, adopting this technology, puffing broadly?
Speaker 7:Something that we're seeing puffing pretty hard right now is that people want to basically build their own Google. They wanna take the entire web and make it searchable and allow the agents to reason over either literally the entire public Internet or data sizes that are the internal data that's of that kind of volume. Right? Hundreds of billions of documents. And recently, we we we launched some product to support that where you can basically now build your own Internet index on top of TurboPuffer for an extremely reasonable cost.
Speaker 7:So what we showed is that we could take a 100,000,000,000 documents and make them available to you with a p 50, so that's immediate latency of less than fifty milliseconds. So this is pretty remarkable for an off the shelf SaaS product and something that we're seeing that some of the most sophisticated customers in the world need. And I don't think there's any other easy way to do it than to puff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We talked a little bit last time on on just compute bottlenecks, AI bottlenecks, anything that you're that's keeping you up at night in terms of data center build outs, semiconductor build outs? Even if it's not directly related to your business, is there anything that you see that could potentially put a damper on the growth of the booming AI industry?
Speaker 7:I mean, I think everyone is everyone is is struggling to get compute when you get when you get enough scale. Yeah. And I mean, that that's it's it's good news in CPU land. I'm I'm not contending for the GPUs yet. Yeah.
Speaker 7:But we are starting to see I mean, you have to do that at any scale. Right? You have to start requesting from the cloud providers, hey. I want hundreds and hundreds of this machine in this particular region for these customers. Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So I think that's something that everyone's facing. Obviously, we're watching the DRAM prices and things like that like everyone else. Yeah. But, hopefully hopefully, that gets that comes down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are there any any kind of, like, you have an interesting view into the usage of pretty much every popular AI product. Obviously, you can't talk about individual the the sort of usage of any individual product. But is there any sort of narrative violations that you're seeing broadly? Every single day, depending on new products getting announced, people are saying, you know, it's over for this company.
Speaker 2:It's over for that company. Or I just turned from this product. But, overall, what are you seeing?
Speaker 7:I think, I mean, what we see is that the companies that are building the most exciting product are trying to operationalize very, very large amounts of data. That's difficult difficult to copy. And so, I mean, we have some survivorship bias in the businesses that we see, but they come to us because they wanna connect more data to AI than anyone else. I I would say, yeah. If you're a thin layer and you're not trying to vacuum up a lot of data, then it's it starts to get really difficult.
Speaker 7:So I I mean, I I do see us with how powerful the models are now. You have to be investing in some pretty pretty deep tech to to make it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you doing anything on this on the on this on the front of, like, making Turbo Puffer intelligible to agents? So if someone goes to a vibe coding app or a CLI tool and they just say, solve this problem for me, the agent pulls TurboPuffer off the shelf?
Speaker 7:I mean, we try as much as we can to make the docs very easy to read.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I think, it's not completely clear how the LLMs make the decision of what the best database is, I think that we're trying to do what we can to make sure that the LLMs, like like Puffin as well. Yeah. I I we have made API decisions around what it would be easier for the for the LLMs to guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I heard a interesting anecdote about someone building a CLI tool. They wanted to make it easy for an l an LLM to grab or an agent to grab. And so, basically, they just rewrote the CLI to include every possible hallucination or mistake that could be made.
Speaker 1:And people often do this with with URLs, where they will say, well, you know, some people might type the wrong URL sometimes, but LLMs hallucinate in a slightly different way. They don't necessarily fat finger a single key, but they might, you know, drop the wrong token or use the wrong phrase or use the wrong term. And so they rewrote their CLI to include, like, every possible permutation that an LLM could think about in terms of, like, update, edit, quit, exit, you know, all the different keywords. They just created hooks and functionality for all of them. So even if the LLM shows up and is, like, kinda clumsy, it can still use it, and so it still likes it.
Speaker 1:But I don't know I don't know where all that goes on the on the commercial side. This is more for, like, open source.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think I think maybe it's a little overblown how much you have to design for this. I think it's the same with humans. We fat finger stuff, and the LLMs are a lot more resilient now than they were even just six months ago. So to me, it's it's just always good API design.
Speaker 7:If you're designing a good API or a good CLI or a good interface, you should sort of be able to predict like, oh, if I did this, it's probably gonna work this way, and I think the LLM treats it exactly the same way. So I I I I would maybe take back that we're doing anything super intentional for the LLMs because I think the same design that's good for humans is good for LLMs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:What, if anything, has changed since the funding round?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Not much has changed. We got logo rights to ramp, so that's exciting.
Speaker 1:No. Congratulations. Second ramp engine.
Speaker 2:They were like, finally you raise a bit more venture capital. We'll let you use our logo.
Speaker 11:There you go.
Speaker 7:I mean, you know, it's it's it's yeah. I think we're we're really, really happy to work with that team. Yeah. And I think there's lots more logos waiting beneath the surface Mhmm. To be unearthed.
Speaker 7:So the Murderer's Row will will continue to to evolve, as we earn the trust of more and more of the lovely companies that we that we work with.
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:What what was the what was early on when companies were discovering Turbo Puffer and realizing, hey, this is really good and this is gonna be sort of key to enabling all these different features and functionality that Was we it actually a challenge getting logo rights because they didn't want their competitors to be super aware of it. Right? You want, like, hey, if I can have an even an extra month before another company that I might have some overlap with, I'll take it.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, we have some verticals in I think there's a head front that doesn't really want us to talk about because they they see it as a competitive advantage. Right? And so, I mean, I we like that tension Mhmm. For sure.
Speaker 7:I think, honestly, in the beginning, it was just I'm sure that some of the companies that bet on us early were like, okay, this is like three or four people in Canada, and we're betting our whole business and search on on them being able to make it. And I have certainly heard from one of our early customers that that kept them awake at night. Mhmm. Now the company is 10 times that size, right, and of a of a different caliber, and we owed them everything to have bet on us that early on. But it was certainly a challenge in the beginning, not just because they saw it as a secret sauce, but also because they were afraid of what their customers would think.
Speaker 7:Right? Hey, here's this like little like dinky company in the woods of Canada. Like, what do they know about writing search
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:I think they were concerned with their customers' thought. And we've just tried to do everything that we can by keeping keeping our uptime as good as possible and walking everything carefully and building good software to earn that trust. But I think every startup that gets logos, I think the founders have to really fight for it. And then they have to build the relationships to make sure that people trust they're gonna use the logo in good hands. And they're not gonna plaster it all over contexts that they wouldn't feel okay with.
Speaker 2:How are you guys approaching vendor selection today? When are you running the calculus of should we build this ourselves or pull something off the rack?
Speaker 7:We were we were just discussing this recently where we've started our our data stack now is just using, like, Cloud Code or Cursor Agent in a repo and just giving as much information as possible what's going on. We've ditched we're we're starting to more and more ditch just the tools because it's so easy to compose the charts and things like that with agents.
Speaker 11:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:So the the shallow SaaS software, I think it's it's it's dire there because it's just so easy to replace it now. Mhmm. But I think there will also be a bit of a hangover from that. Right? There is real value here in, like, permissions and enterprise, like, all these enterprise features.
Speaker 7:So it will probably go very much in the in the direction of everyone's gonna build their own little shallow thing, and then some of them are gonna realize that this is a this is a bit of a nightmare to maintain and then pay for it again. Could be dire for a little bit, but I think that that I don't think it's gonna swing. I I I still think there's a lot of value in that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the what's the worst, like, logo crime that you've ever seen someone do? Is that just go in the customer database, search has any employee from a hyperscaler signed up for a trial account and then slap the logo on the landing page? What what would you tell a young founder not to do in terms of throwing a logo on a landing page?
Speaker 7:I think we we like I think logo crimes is actually great diction. I think we see this a lot where you see like just you go on a page and it's like Microsoft. Right? And it's all these, it's like, okay. Like, we were talking about this internally because so for example, there's a there's one small team inside of Vercel that uses TurboPuffer.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I think a lot of companies might then just put the Vercel logo on the website and say, Vercel's puffin.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But I don't think that's fair. Right? It's an auxiliary use case. It's one person who's using it for go to market and doing a phenomenal job over there. And so what we're trying to do is like, okay.
Speaker 7:That's that that logo might not make it to the front page because that would not be an honest association. And then on the use use case page, we're gonna be having to tag this as core and auxiliary. Sure. And then under auxiliary, right, it will say, okay. It's this particular team at this enterprise that's using it.
Speaker 7:Just to be completely honest about it. And I think that's and then I think just sending a note to the teams that you work with of like, hey, is this a cool place to use your logo? Yeah. Just ask respectful about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just ask for permission.
Speaker 12:But you can't
Speaker 7:Yeah. You can't speed run it. It takes time
Speaker 2:to drop. Chat's saying Vercell is puffing.
Speaker 1:Breaking news. Put up a TBDN trading card. We got the scoop here. Yeah. We love Guillermo.
Speaker 1:Case study.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Case study will come out but as I said, it's an exhilarate use case
Speaker 12:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and But that's
Speaker 1:still cool.
Speaker 7:And and we love the trust. But it's not like v zero is puffing or something like that.
Speaker 12:No. Don't know.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for hopping by. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And have a great While rest of your we were live, Google reported earnings. Oh, yeah. What happened? Revenue grew 18%, Search 17%, Gemini has 750 monthly users, and the stock is absolutely nuking.
Speaker 2:So Oh, no. Say just don't don't look at your portfolio. Stay in Slack.
Speaker 3:It's it's just barely over $4,000,000,000,000
Speaker 1:company though. That's so rough.
Speaker 2:When are coming to California next?
Speaker 1:After hours.
Speaker 2:Or just not in
Speaker 7:California, I'm I should going to California next week.
Speaker 2:Alright.
Speaker 7:But when are you are you when are you coming up to Canada? I keep like, every time we talk about this, and then you guys are like, oh, it's so cold.
Speaker 1:Country the is un American from my perspective. It's just it's so un American.
Speaker 7:Have you met American Simon? I'm right here.
Speaker 13:Okay. I'm ready for you.
Speaker 1:Okay. You got me. You got me. Well, we
Speaker 2:would love we would love to fishing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you do a weekend weekend trip, it's too hard to bring the show.
Speaker 2:Honestly We're done. Yeah, family trip. Yeah. That'd be
Speaker 3:great. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Realistically. It's great.
Speaker 3:Bring it Great. Bring it
Speaker 2:it everybody.
Speaker 1:Awesome. You dump them in the lake
Speaker 7:and you have a great time.
Speaker 1:Risky with some one year olds, but we'll give it a try. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping Great
Speaker 2:to you, Simon.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great update.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card.
Speaker 2:Chat says we need red suits.
Speaker 1:Red suits. Yeah. We were talking about that today because we've been wearing the white suits a lot and now, it's time for the red suits. We're gonna have to call the tailor.
Speaker 2:Got it here, please. Yeah. Says Alphabet sees twenty twenty six CapEx, a 175 to a 185,000,000,000 versus a 115,000,000,000 expected. There we go. There we For the past decade, Mag seven were free cash flow monsters who poured money into buybacks to support their stock prices.
Speaker 2:That era is over. Well,
Speaker 1:let me tell you about vibe.co, where d to c brands, b to b startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. Pavel says SaaS is dead is probably oversold, and sleepy companies get wrecked in technology shifts is probably undersold. I think that's a good take. There's a lot of people talking about the SaaS pocalypse.
Speaker 1:Patrick O'Shaughnessy shared a clip from Gavin on Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best saying, why it's a mistake for SaaS companies to resist AI because it has a lower margin structure. We can pull this video up. When there's a transformative new technology customers are demanding, it's always a mistake not to embrace it. Let's play this clip. I wanna see what
Speaker 3:he said.
Speaker 14:Applications ask companies for making the exact same mistake that brick and mortar retailers did with e commerce. So brick and mortar retailers, they looked at Amazon and they said, oh, it's losing money. You know, ecommerce is gonna be a low margin business. And so they did not invest in ecommerce. They they clearly saw customer demand for it, but they did not like the margin structure of ecommerce.
Speaker 14:That is the fundamental reason that essentially every brick brick and mortar retailer was really slow to invest in ecommerce. And now here we are and, you know, Amazon has higher margins, so margins can change. And if there's a fundamental transformative kind of new technology that customers are demanding, it's always a mistake not to embrace it. And that's exactly what the SaaS companies are doing. They have their seventy, eighty, 90% gross margins, and they are reluctant to accept AI gross margins.
Speaker 14:You know, the very nature of AI is, you know, software, you write it once, and it's written very efficiently, and then you can distribute it broadly at very low cost.
Speaker 1:Such underrated point that the like, the CFO just knows my company has 30% gross margins. So that's what I'm building my entire business around. My company has 90% gross margins, and that's how I'm informing every business decision when the whole structure and that you've built the foundation of your business on changes. That can be a little tricky. Quickly, yesterday, we went to the Cisco AI Summit.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you saw it. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We had a lot of fun talking to the team at Cisco. They were very hospitable.
Speaker 1:I had a great time. Absolutely enjoyed talking to everyone. We had a really wild, wide ranging conversation with Dylan Patel at the end. That's in the RSS feed. If you didn't get a chance to listen to the full thing, we go all over the place.
Speaker 1:Space data centers, what Google's doing, what Apple's doing, what Microsoft is doing. We we went everywhere. It was really, really great. Anyway, we can go through some more of the timeline. What is this?
Speaker 1:OMG Cap says, he died doing what he loved, aggressively buying the dip on SaaS like a guy averaging down on Blockbuster Video in 2010.
Speaker 2:I'm averaging in Averaging down. To zero.
Speaker 1:That is not good. There there there are a whole bunch of different takes on the SaaS pocalypse. Peer Rischelson has won. Why would I pay for SaaS if I can prompt the software and run it myself? My brother in Christ, have you heard of open source businesses?
Speaker 1:The last thing people wanna do is be in charge of development and maintenance of software. You gotta get an intern. It's a bull market in interns. The interns are back. The interns you heard from Mitchell Green, leader over at Lead Edge, he's hiring interns to build stuff for him.
Speaker 1:It's a bull market interns.
Speaker 2:Everybody wants to be the one person billion dollar company. Yes. No one wants to be the billion
Speaker 1:Billion company of America. America. Yeah. That's the business. I really I hadn't actually heard that about Cloudflare, over a thousand interns.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. I didn't even know that about Shopify. That's very cool. Clearly got mocked for having 50 interns. Maybe they were just early.
Speaker 1:We we we, at one point, it felt like we had a ton of interns. We don't actually have that many interns, but interns are underrated. It's a it's a it's a good time, and it's a particularly good time with the new tools to let someone loose with a with just a fresh start. Like, they don't have to they don't they they don't have to maintain the old system. They come in, and they're able to start completely fresh with fresh tools.
Speaker 1:They can pick anything off the shelf, whatever's the most cutting edge. That's what they bring into the organization as opposed to saying, hey, you have to maintain this particular workflow or this particular technology or you have to plug into those rest of this ecosystem. Change management takes a long time. Interns allow you to kind of pull that forward, which is a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Cognition.
Speaker 1:They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:Unemployed capital allocator says, wait, I'm confused. Is it the software engineers that are obsolete or software companies? Or is it the software users? Or the software users employers? Taekim says, all of the above?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bukos says, you're not confused. None of these things will exist in five years. Everything. Sell everything and and quit all the jobs.
Speaker 1:It is interesting.
Speaker 2:Bloomberg had an article yesterday that shared that Google is expanding their footprint in India, plan to
Speaker 1:headline, right?
Speaker 2:They they'll have the Yeah. Capacity to add something like 10 to 15,000 Yep. New employees and, you know, I don't, you know, I would say like the the probably the catalyst there is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sort of changes around predictability to US immigration law potentially, you know, being a factor in that. But it was kind of looking at it from a a Tyler Tyler point of view just being like, hey. How how AGI pilled is is Google broadly, you know, is DeepMind if if they're planning to scale headcount Yeah. Like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The headline was from Bloomberg. It's millions of square feet. So that can accommodate somewhere between 10,030 employees per million square feet according to Gemini here. The industry standard is 60 to 80 square feet per person.
Speaker 1:I wonder how we're doing here in the TBP And Ultradome. I feel like I have way more than 60 square feet to myself. Standard tech office is a 100 square feet per person.
Speaker 2:Technician And there's
Speaker 1:a lot
Speaker 2:is also going zero tax on data centers until 2047. What
Speaker 1:would the tax implications be of that?
Speaker 2:Property tax?
Speaker 1:You don't get yep. Maybe no property tax because you can't possibly not pay income tax on the revenue that's generated from a data center. That would be a
Speaker 2:crazy But
Speaker 1:we will see. But our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. We have KJ from Lotus AI. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Good to see you.
Speaker 11:I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Good to see you guys too.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on. It's First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.
Speaker 11:Yeah. My name is KJ Dollywal. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Lotus Health AI. Yeah. We are building an AI doctor powered by real doctors.
Speaker 1:What's the go to market? How how much do you like who do you want to sell to? Like the hospital network, the individual doctors, even the individual consumer?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. We're actually direct to consumer. Okay. So one of the big things that we believe in is going straight to the patient Mhmm.
Speaker 11:Because innovation in healthcare sort of has always lagged it. The hospital systems or the insurance companies, my background is in consumer. I built the largest South Asian dating app prior to this.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way.
Speaker 11:And so we just, you know, we thought what are the things that people actually need. Yeah. America's struggling with health care, so we decided to just go direct to consumer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Walk me through some of the I mean, the most basic could be, you know, diet plan, exercise plan, all the way to a doctor can refer you to a lab to go get an MRI and surgery and all sorts of stuff. Like, where what do you see as the the early go to market, the the landing zone? Like, what do you wanna be excellent at and then grow from?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We're really focused on primary care today. Mhmm. So when you think about America today, a 100,000,000 people don't have primary care doctors. Wow.
Speaker 11:So that's sort of this huge sort of opportunity to really give people, you know, basic care. So that means, you know, sometimes you need a prescription, sometimes you need a referral, or even a lab order if you're gonna go see a specialist like a cardiologist and you don't have lab ready that oftentimes that visit is a waste of time for the cardiologist and for the patient. Yeah. Right? So we can do a lot of that preliminary primary care virtually.
Speaker 11:Yeah. And it turns out eighty percent of all care in general is actually, you know, possible virtually within the primary care setting.
Speaker 1:How important is image processing, you know? Oh, I got a mole, like, the way you look at this, like, that's like, I have a cloud, right? Alright. I I got a scab and it's not healing and I is it infected? Is is AI ready to handle that sort of use case?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Definitely. So, like, you know, we're seeing we're already seeing AI being implemented in, you know, obviously, the the imaging space and MRI space. Mhmm. But what we're focused more on is really getting the information from the patient, distilling it, and summarizing it for a clinician to look at and make the final call.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 11:So that's really where Lotus is able to give Americans free primary care essentially because we brought the cost of care down by a factor of 10. Yeah. So you can upload images, you can, you know, chat with Lotus for hours, but it will do the intake similar to how you would answer questions on that clipboard when you go see a doctor. Sure. And then the doctor can review all that quickly.
Speaker 11:And the big thing sort of that we did is we sort of created this what we call the personal health record, which is the richest longitudinal record on a patient. So when you sign up, the first thing we do is we ingest all your health data. So that's from all the EHR, every doctor you've ever seen, your wearables data, your insurance claims data. That allows us to build sort of the foundation of the patient, and then we can really unlock a lot of the sort of agentic workflows and the clinical workflows on top of that. That just make care delivery a lot more accurate at that scale.
Speaker 1:Years ago, I remember this company, Zocdoc, was sort of like help you find a doctor nearby, almost like a Yelp for doctors. I don't remember what their business model was, but is there any overlap in or learnings from that type of business where maybe there's a referral fee to a specific doctor? Is it does that make any sense or do you just want the customer to eventually pay or ads? Like, what how do you see monetization evolving?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Zocdoc did, I think, something interesting which they they would basically have doctors pay some sort of affiliate fee to be listed on their platform. But actually getting paid for referrals in healthcare is is a big no no and kind of illegal. That's why doctors, you know, shouldn't be paid actually for referrals because then you can be incentivized to refer to a particular, And you know, so what we really believe in is in terms of if you think about the largest tech companies in the world Mhmm. They're consumer companies, and they make money through sponsored content.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. So we actually think if we focus on premium content within fitness and wellness, which is a, you know, multi trillion dollar sort of industry already, That's sort of how we'll be able to monetize. But really, what we're focused on today is is bringing the cost of the care down.
Speaker 1:So Anthropics attacking you. I tell you, like, you're the they weren't they weren't talking about OpenAI. They were talking about you. Lotus. Respond.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. No. But but I mean, how you you you are going to have to have the talking point that responds to that ad.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that Super Bowl ad will blow over. Everyone will talk about it in the Chattyputee context, but you're gonna have to have a strategy for how you, you know, don't do the, hey, we're Lyfts or we're being weird or creepy with your ads. Like, how do you think about messaging and setting the tone, the mission, the values of the company now so that you never have a PR crisis in the future?
Speaker 11:Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's so important to do that. Right? Mhmm.
Speaker 11:You know, trust and safety and privacy is Yeah. Is very foundational to what we're building here at Lotus and and being, you know, we we wanna not only stand for the patient, but also for the doctor. Mhmm. Right? And so when you look at the industry today, doctors are burning out.
Speaker 11:Mhmm. But we don't have enough doctors. So we're really giving them the technology to supercharge their capabilities. And, yeah, in terms of, you know, advertising, it'll be optional and, you know, there'll be a premium subscription. If you don't want to see ads, you can sort of opt out.
Speaker 11:Yeah. Right. Or there's other avenues we're exploring like your employers, right, a lot of large employers that are self insured struggle to get their employees really good healthcare or at least primary care. So the employee has to take time off for work, you know, drive an hour, go see a doctor. Half of the times around seeing the doctor, they're seeing a nurse or a PA because we have such a shortage, and it ruins their day and and it, you know, reduces productivity for the company.
Speaker 11:So have companies reaching out to us saying, hey, like, we'll pay you $50 a month. Can you just give this to our employees for free? Mhmm. You know? So there's a lot of different revenue models we'll explore explore, but really what we're focused on is, you know, how do we get to a 10,000,000 patients and grow this company to scale because that's really how we think this sort of primary care crisis can be fixed.
Speaker 11:Essentially, fee for service doesn't work in primary Right? And even value based care doesn't work because we don't have enough doctors.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you reacting to the major LLM providers potentially going into this category? A lot of them have already made announcements. They've rolled out features. They have massive user bases.
Speaker 1:What's going to be the key differentiator that allows you to go the long haul?
Speaker 11:Yeah. No. We think that's actually net positive for the Mhmm. For the industry because, you know, people are starting to trust AI with their health data. Mhmm.
Speaker 11:The one thing they can't do is they can't actually treat patients. Right? So we can actually because we have real licensed clinicians Sure. Getting treatment, we can actually close that care loop. Right?
Speaker 11:We can give you that prescription, order the lab, refer you to a specialist, give you a diagnosis. Mhmm. And, you know, in fact, you know, one of our investors is an executive at OpenAI and so we've been sort of following that sort of project that they've been looking for a while. But I think it's net positive. I mean, I think there's, you know, there's you know, healthcare is a $5,000,000,000,000 market in terms of spend, and a lot of that is just waste.
Speaker 11:Right? That can be sort of cut out and and or taxed Are
Speaker 2:you do you think Lotus is is really a threat to urgent cares where, let's say, somebody has, a skin issue and they're used to the flow of like I want immediate care, I wanna get like if somebody gets, I don't know, like poison bad case of poison oak and they want they need to get some treatment for it, they'll go to an urgent care, be able to get like a prescription or a steroid or something like that. Whereas with Lotus, you could just get, you know, basically as long as you have your phone, you could immediately like get get treatment. Is is Lotus threatening to those kind of businesses that rely on people just needing like convenience?
Speaker 11:Yeah, no, actually it's the quite opposite because what those urgent care centers today and even emergency rooms or hospitals, their biggest problem is they're overwhelmed with patients coming in that don't need to come in for, you know, things that can be treated through telehealth, medicine or telehealth, right? We actually refer you to urgent care because we obviously recognize and our clinicians recognize that there are obviously certain things that can't be treated, you know, virtually and need to be done in person And that's where we refer you to inpatient or urgent care sort of, you know, care where the doctor needs to touch you or, you know, do a procedural thing. But it turns out, like I said earlier, you know, eighty to 90% of care can be done virtually and and that's sort of the big bottleneck. So what ends up happening is all these patients end up going to urgent care or, you know, hospital ER rooms, and then the patients that actually need that care end up not getting it because, know, these systems are overwhelmed today.
Speaker 1:Well, we are in the Lambda Lightning round. You raised some money. Tell us what happened. What's the deal?
Speaker 11:Yeah. We just raised, you know, a total of 41,000,000 in our seat and series a. Congratulations. Viner Perkins and CRB co led that round. That's great.
Speaker 11:And then we're yeah.
Speaker 2:He Some great names.
Speaker 11:Very proud to have you guys.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on the progress, and I'm sure we'll see you back here soon. Great to meet you.
Speaker 2:Cheers. We'll
Speaker 1:talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it.
Speaker 1:CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we will continue our Lambda Lightning round with Nick Sharp from Adio. He's the co founder and CEO.
Speaker 2:Welcome back.
Speaker 8:Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good
Speaker 2:to Give have you us the update on the last few months. I feel like the the timeline has been loving. Adio feels like there's a ton of momentum.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Well, that's good. We've had a it's the end of a busy day here in London, and it's been it's been a long one, but an exciting one. So I think it's about five months ago that I was on the show when we when we raised our series b.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:And since then, we've been busy deep in r and d land. And today, we are we're we're showing the world the the fruits of our labor and launching a product called Askatio.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Break it down.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So it is a entirely new way to interact with Ateo with your CRM and it is a new conversational AI interface, which essentially does does something which has been the holy grail for CRM for a really long time, which is making sense of all of the ton of data that you're generating all the time. So that's that's calls, that's emails, that's all of the interactions you're having with customers, product data, etcetera, and essentially makes it intelligible and allows you to take action on it. So good example might be I I now run a workflow at the end of every day, which essentially goes through all customer calls, all customer emails, and just flags things that are important for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's
Speaker 2:like customer feedback or a place that you need to step in and and have a conversation with a customer yourself, etcetera.
Speaker 8:Exactly. But imagine, you know, we have like thirty, forty people in our customer facing team now. So to do that previously when we have hundreds, thousands of customer interactions a day would be impossible. And so it's yeah. It's a very, very exciting step for us.
Speaker 2:What's been your reaction to it feels like even this year, a lot of people have been saying AGI is here, and yet there's a bunch of net new CRM companies being formed. Do you guys have the benefit of having been around long enough to have a very strong foundation yet not necessarily be fully kind of cemented in your ways and still a lot of functionality. And so it feels like you were already an AI native CRM and so it must be kind of funny to see other CRMs coming in that that are trying maybe trying to claim they're more AI native.
Speaker 8:Yeah. It's totally. And what's what's funny for us is that there seems to be a level of consensus now that something's gonna happen in this market, which has not been the case. Right? So the consensus seems to have been building more and more and more.
Speaker 8:And in the last few months, we've just seen a we've we've seen things fully flip in the other way where everyone now believes that that these kind of incumbents are gonna be disrupted. And so we're we're excited by the by the by the excitement to everyone else and the kind of belief in the market. And, you know, we we have the the job now of making sure that we continue to to be at the front of the pack, which is sort of, you know, lots of short term just being very paranoid in the short term, very optimistic in the long term, and just kind of keep building, keep going.
Speaker 2:What are you paying attention to on the sort of sales agent side just in general? This is, you know, a big opportunity for Adio, but I know you guys will wanna integrate with a bunch of players as well. So far, we've been hearing, you know, people are using a bunch of different agents on, on that front. But what are you seeing?
Speaker 8:Yeah. And and the way that we think about this is I think when the market is is when when there's as much innovation and and turmoil, etcetera, as as we're seeing right now, you kind of want to see you wanna see how play things play out a bit. So we're taking some pretty big bets, but equally, we're not building a closed platform, and we're letting we we really want people to integrate with our platform. And we we want our customers to go in whatever direction is right for them and make sure that we can we can support that. So we took a huge bet on ecosystem and, building a really strong SDK.
Speaker 8:We've we've kind of quietly put out an MCP server in beta. So mmcp.atio.com/mcp. But we're we're basically we're you know, CRM is always gonna be the center of of a GTM stack. And so as well as doing our own things, in agentic workflows and and that kind of stuff, we've also taken a huge bet on, on supporting all the other great companies that are doing stuff there as well.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Awesome. What can we expect from you guys this year? Is this are you calling it now? This is the last thing you're gonna ship for the year? No.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Exactly. Job done. Well, like, you know, for for us, this is this is day four of of f y twenty seven, so we're we're we're just at the beginning. And honestly, it's gonna be it's gonna be a bit of an onslaught.
Speaker 8:We have a huge, huge amount coming. We're gonna follow-up with this launch pretty quickly in in in sort of just over about a couple of months with another really, really big launch. And and then, of course, we we're in this interesting phase as as as founders or as company builders or whatever, where you now have to do two things. You've got to scale your company, and you've got to hit all of your really ambitious targets. But at the same time, your everything needs to be rebuilt every three months.
Speaker 8:Yeah. So the way that you do go to market, the way that we think about product, etcetera, we're in kind of deep r and d mode across the company. And so you're you're you're you're trying to be simultaneously be a extremely scrappy early stage company, but then also trying to kind of compound, you know, compound growth and and serve a growing number of customers. So we're we're up to about 7,000 customers now Wow. Which is triple triple this this time last year.
Speaker 8:And so, yeah, lots of lots of things going on at once.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about outbound actually sending emails, draft Yeah. Like like like going into more of like the AI agent for sales rep or place a sales rep? That's a that's a space that feels like people are trying stuff, but nothing's really caught. Like, how how far away are we from that?
Speaker 8:The the interesting thing is that that the the I mean, you might have seen this, the the ramp post that was making rounds. Yeah. And these channels are getting saturated, and it's it's a it's a constant game of cat and mouse. Right? Because the more emails that get sent, the better the the the the Gmail or or whoever else is that detecting them and stop shutting them down, etcetera.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:So we take an ecosystem bet on those things. Again, you know, especially when it comes to outbound, we really want to be we wanna be the place where the customer context live, where your your team live, etcetera. Mhmm. And we do we integrate with with a lot of these players. Now, over time, you you want to be able to provide your customers with a pretty out of the box solution to a lot of these problems.
Speaker 8:So never say never. But right now, we're we're mostly focused and when it comes to outbound, we're focused on just partnering with with the best people we can.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time
Speaker 2:to come Thanks for staying up.
Speaker 1:Thanks for staying up late. We appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Long day.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Exactly. And we will see you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll see you back
Speaker 8:Yeah. On
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Cheers. Bye.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. We have one last story that we should get through before we get out of here. Citadel's Ken Griffin says Trump White House has quote, enriched family members. The Wall Street figured Republican donor offers rare public criticism of perceived administration self dealings. They're calling him Ken doesn't like Griffin.
Speaker 1:Billionaire investor. Griffin. Sick of Griffin. This he said this is a direct quote from Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel. He says, this administration has definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration.
Speaker 1:He said at a conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday that was hosted by the Wall Street Journal, he added, quote, that calls into question, is the public interest being served? The in response to Griffin's comments, well, White House spokesman said, quote, the only special interest guiding the Trump administration's decision making is the best interest of the American people. The fact that major stock indexes have hit multiple all time highs, real wages have grown, and inflation has cooled since president Trump took office is proof that this administration is delivering for every American. Trump and his family members have profited since he took office last year. This is the Financial Times.
Speaker 1:An FTE investigation in October found the president's rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire had already reaped more than 1,000,000,000 in pretax profits over the prior year, partly attributed to a digital currency boom buoyed by the White House's own crypto friendly policies. Companies backed by Trump's sons have been awarded contracts with government agencies and benefit from administration policies and cryptocurrency and prediction markets. And a lot of this goes into the decision to sell NVIDIA chips to The UAE. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then meant to ask Dylan about that yesterday. Yeah. This idea of like, do you think any lab CEOs or or hyperscalers were looking at that the reporting that came out over the weekend that the the spy chic
Speaker 1:Yeah. In The UAE
Speaker 2:had bought half $1,000,000,000 of world or sorry. Half 1,000,000,000 invested half 1,000,000,000 into World Liberty Financial. Yeah. Bought 49% of the company right before the inauguration Yeah. And quickly we approved a a pretty massive sale to China.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wonder how many people were kind of reading that story and being deeply frustrated just given, hey, like, I would have
Speaker 1:I Oh, bought them. Was a happy buyer. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Trump, of course Trump, of course, said he didn't know anything about Yeah. Anything about the investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a big question. I mean, obviously, the the Wall Street Journal, I think, had a piece on, like, the timing being suspicious.
Speaker 1:The Trump administration's denied that that there's anything wrongdoing going on. Maybe there'll be an investigation at some point. But the the the the question that's in my mind aside from that one is just is is The UAE suitable for selling GPUs too? Because if it's something that's, like, really obviously a thumbs up and everyone's happy about, then it's a lot less controversial to do it, I would think. Because we're now at a point where many folks that I look to for guidance on, like, the geopolitical chip issue have come around to the idea that, hey, maybe we do want China to actually be buying NVIDIA chips, and there's maybe some good arguments there.
Speaker 1:Initially, was like cut everything off. Now, the ball has moved to don't Yeah. Sell them we want AML equipment. Don't sell them with other Yeah.
Speaker 2:Come around to we want people
Speaker 1:To stay in
Speaker 2:the AI to be on the American AI stack. Is it better for The UAE to Yeah. Be running on NVIDIA versus Huawei?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, yeah, Dylan's point was like, not this these things don't happen in isolation. So if you if you don't sell NVIDIA chips to China, it's not that they're going to, you know, retaliate specifically with with Huawei or SMIC or SME. It's that you could, like they could, like, you know, do something in a completely different part of the world. Like, Dylan's example was, be more aggressive about Africa or something like that.
Speaker 1:Like, the the or the the rare earth element. So so there's, like, a million different debate points going on, and all of those sort of come together. But with regard to The UAE, I I I mean, I guess that there is there is a risk that you you you send a bunch of NVIDIA chips, and they just stay on the they stay on the on the container ship, and then they just get forwarded straight along to someone who's maybe even less friendly. But I don't know that that's been a historical risk. There's been a lot of chip smuggling.
Speaker 1:A lot of it's gone through Malaysia. I don't exactly know how much of a risk The UAE poses. So I'd I'd love to talk to Bill Bishop about how that fits in. We'll have to keep we'll have to keep digging in. But, obviously, I I think we're fans of Jimmy Carter's approach to leading the American people.
Speaker 2:Divest.
Speaker 1:Divest. Stay focused. Lock in. It's the great lock in. It's the great lock in.
Speaker 1:You gotta stay focused on the on the job at hand. Anyways.
Speaker 2:Anyways, crazy day. Yeah. Mike Isaac over
Speaker 1:What's saying? At the
Speaker 2:time says, by the number of OpenAI employees I see tweeting about Anthropic Super Bowl ad, Anthropic should be paying OpenAI earned media fees. It's funny. They're like, thank you for
Speaker 1:Oh, also related to Ken Griffin, I like this post from High Yield Harry, where it's Mr. Beast with Kim Kardashian, and Ken Griffin's just way in the background. And High Yield Harry said, guy like me would have taken a photo with Ken Griffin instead. And I don't know who he's who he's imagining him being. Like, is he imagining that he's Mr.
Speaker 1:Beast or Kim Kardashian? But it's funny to imagine being at this party and saying, I gotta get I gotta get a photo with Ken. I gotta get a photo with Ken. Woah. Okay.
Speaker 1:We gotta close with this this G Wagon. Look at this G Wagon. Mentioned this.
Speaker 2:Pull it up.
Speaker 1:I did not
Speaker 2:Pull it up.
Speaker 1:I did not see this. It's it's right after yeah.
Speaker 2:Look at this. Okay. This is Mike Blake. I'm gonna pull up. I texted him to get some more context.
Speaker 2:So Blake runs an account called Found Objects on Instagram and he is selling a very special G Wagon that's effectively it's like a it's one of 10 ever made.
Speaker 1:Why is Vladimir Putin seen next to it?
Speaker 2:Because he was he was rolling in the He was rolling in the This was this was part of the presidential
Speaker 1:fleet. Vehicle.
Speaker 2:So it's basically like a Maybach converted with with into a G Wagon. Yeah. In order to you would have to do an insane conversion to get this into The US. But but for the right person, it could be could be really great.
Speaker 1:This has Mark Zuckerberg written all over it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He likes the
Speaker 1:high end. He likes extend. Send it to West Coast Customs. This this extended shoe rack is
Speaker 2:so cool. Go to the go to the picture at the very end.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The picture at the very end.
Speaker 2:Goes incredibly hard.
Speaker 1:Sitting standing in front of it. It's like why is he not getting into it or getting out of it? He's just like walking next to it. It's very, very
Speaker 2:So this this can be yours for the low price
Speaker 1:seen this. This is not AI. This is is real. This is real. Because there was there was an AI car caught on bring a trailer that's that caused a firestorm in the car auction community.
Speaker 1:The pictures were absolutely hilarious. It it you'd look in the car, and the car was was generated, I guess, on cobblestones. And inside the car, the AI had hallucinated more cobblestones. So it looked like you had cobblestones floor cobblestone floor mats, and you could
Speaker 2:and you can come back
Speaker 1:to getting into
Speaker 2:the before you pay, you know, 225 k
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For a brand new g wagon, first consider this 2010 g 55 x l. I think it's a fantastic example. And we'll end on a white pill. Yes. I guess we didn't need the red suits for Google today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The stock has recovered. It's now up one one and a half percent after
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's hear it for Google. Everyone wants They're investing in AI, and the market loves it.
Speaker 6:Logan Logan also just tweeted they they just crossed 10,000,000,000 tokens per minute on Gemini Wow. And 750,000,000 MAUs. I've seen
Speaker 2:it Give them a $100,000,000,000,000 It's
Speaker 1:a 100,000,000,000,000. They're 4% of the way there. They just need a 10 x and then 10 x again, and they'll do it. Well, I'm rooting for them. I'm rooting for the entire financial market.
Speaker 1:I'm rooting for companies because I love business technology.
Speaker 2:Because we love you. We love you. And we'll be back tomorrow. We have a fantastic show planned.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars. Plant the bomb. I'll tell them about where to leave us a review. Leave us a review on Spotify, podcast, five stars. Please sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:Follow us on all social media platforms. And and and go to go to Yahoo. Why not?
Speaker 2:Why not?
Speaker 1:This is the Yahoo team, the marketing team, they were like, we need a jingle. We need someone to go sing it. This guy gets in the booth and starts singing, and they're like, go harder. Yahoo. They're like, that's not hard enough.
Speaker 1:Goodbye. This
Speaker 12:is weird.
Speaker 6:Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.