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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
You're watching TVBN. Today is Wednesday, 02/11/2026. We are live from the
Speaker 2:t It's good to be back.
Speaker 1:The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:We have a great lineup for you today. We got Matt Schumer coming on the show to talk about something big is happening, his viral essay. 45,000,000 views completely broke containment. That has to be up there in the competition if it was posted during that $1,000,000 challenge. We also have Harley from Shopify coming back.
Speaker 1:Vlad from Robinhood's coming on. Jeff, founder of Twilio is coming on. Jeff Lawson. Sam Blond, who I worked with the Founders Fund, is launching a new company, Monaco.
Speaker 2:Sam's legend.
Speaker 1:And John Ferrara, who's been on the show, I believe, at YC Demo Day. And so we've only talked to him in person, and he's coming to the UltraDome again. So we will see him in person at two Well, is something big happening? This is the big question. I think it's a good essay.
Speaker 1:I don't love the COVID comparison for a few reasons. It's good it's good in the macro, but I think when you dig into, you know, how much is AI and fast takeoff and the advancement of these models really like COVID, I have trouble with that analogy in particular. So back in February 2020, everyone in tech was aware of how quickly a virus could compound because everyone in tech had had followed exponential curves. We all knew Moore's Law. There's that funny quote, the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.
Speaker 1:People in tech like to attribute that to Albert Einstein. There's actually no evidence that he ever said it, but it's still fun. But everyone in tech is obsessed with exponential growth, exponential charts. Everything is about exponential. So seeing an exponential curve and maybe studying math or something like that just made people much more aware that if COVID got out of control and wasn't contained, you would just see rapid, rapid explosion in the number of cases.
Speaker 1:And that, of course, held for most of COVID, but it wasn't a true exponential. And I've said this before. There are very few true exponentials in the real world because, of course, things cap out. They turn into logistic curves. So instead of going up and to the right indefinitely, they go up and to the right, and then they and they plateau.
Speaker 1:Now will AI plateau? We've there's been a series of plateaus. There's been a series of S curves. That's the story of technology. Really, as you zoom out, you see smooth exponential growth.
Speaker 1:But in the moment, you see a number of S curves. You see the desktop, the mainframe, then mobile, then the Internet and cloud. You see these different curves. AI is certainly one of those. You could put LLMs, reasoning, agents, a whole bunch of different technologies that have grown that have sort of if they didn't happen, there would have been plateau, but then we get the next thing.
Speaker 1:And so the math around the COVID exponential always bothered me because it was exponential growth for a while, but you can't keep growing indefinitely, exponentially, because there's only 8,000,000,000 people on Earth. Something like a billion people got reported COVID cases, but you just can't 100x from there. Like, it's impossible. There's not 100,000,000,000 people to infect. So eventually, the growth rate has to slow down.
Speaker 1:And of course, there's a whole bunch of other dynamics where if if a bunch of people have had COVID, they can't really infect each other anymore and all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2:There's a great Yeah. Just jumping in, Chad, we are aware of a number of audio issues, so we're working on fixing that. Thank you for flagging.
Speaker 1:So back to AI. If you model the power of artificial intelligence just purely as a function of energy, we have plenty of room for exponential growth. We're we're we're truly very far away. Humanity is around 13 orders of magnitude away from Kardashev type two, like full Dyson sphere capturing a 100% of the energy that's produced by the sun. Even just in terms of how much energy we're using on AI that we have, the power that we generate on Earth, we're less than 1%.
Speaker 1:So we can grow that significantly, and that's why it feels exponential now. But there will be a whole bunch of bottlenecks all over the place. It takes time to adjust. There are certain industries that are sticky. And so I like the framing of it's time to talk to your friends outside of the tech world about AI, but it doesn't feel exactly like COVID because COVID affected people, older people, people who were not online reading biology, Srinivasan's post about COVID, studying the exponentials, modeling the R naughts.
Speaker 1:So it was very advantageous to go to people who were not aware of what was coming and telling them like, Hey, like, you are going to need to stay inside for a little bit because it's gonna get rough out there. And people did, it happened it happened extremely fast. And a lot of people, when they think about AI, they have very antiquated views. They still think like, the images of six fingers. And they don't notice that they just watched five AI generated reels that they couldn't detect.
Speaker 1:Or they talk about hallucinated facts and LLM responses, something that's basically been solved by deep research and reasoning models. Knowledge cutoffs, Oh, it can't tell me what happened today. Like, No, it can actually tell you the weather today. It can go and look that up on the Internet. No problem.
Speaker 1:And so many people still use these reference points and maybe they dip their toe in, but it's definitely time for them to dip their toe in again. So this is good. I love that. At the same time, their the coding model is as remarkable as they are. They'll reshuffle the economics of tech.
Speaker 1:We're seeing this with the SaaSpocalypse. Certain companies will be stronger beneficiaries of AI. Others will be damaged because maybe their only moat was that they had a complex software system that was hard to migrate off of. All of a sudden an agent can just do it for you. And you don't want to be uninformed, especially if you're in that industry.
Speaker 1:Even if you're just a buyer of that industry and all of a sudden it's more competitive, hey, you should be getting a better deal. Go renegotiate your contract. But when I think about telling my friends outside of tech about the coming wave, I'm just not entirely sure how helpful an understanding of coding agents will be for them. I was thinking about, like, some of my real world friends. Like, I'm friends with a surgeon.
Speaker 1:Like, yes, he has a SaaS product that helps him book clients. He should probably renegotiate that. I don't I would not recommend him vibe coding his own payment system and his own, you know, customer relationship Compliance. Management system. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Compliance. But even even outside of that, just, like, that's just a headache. He should just maybe go to a start up that's cheaper. There will be more pricing pressure. So if he's actually getting squeezed and it's hurting his margin, then, yeah, he should go and and find a better tool, find a faster tool, find a newer tool.
Speaker 1:But, like, the humanoid robot that can operate on a patient in a surgical context and has the trust of the patient, like, it's coming, but it's a ways away. And he's up to speed on surgical tools and how surgery robots are developing. Then he compared that to month. So compare him Yeah.
Speaker 2:To Matt Schumer Yes. The guy who wrote this. Yes. And Matt has been building what appears to be, we can talk to him about it, but like Yeah. The thinnest possible wrapper
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Over Models. AI Okay. And other models. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:It is according to the definition, your AI personal assistant, writing and productivity tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Again,
Speaker 2:this is I don't know. I can see him using ChatGPT Yes. And Claude and Gemini Yeah. And thinking, what am I doing with my life?
Speaker 1:Well, if he used the tool to write this, it clearly worked because you got 45,000,000 views and 65,000 Like
Speaker 3:on the
Speaker 2:on the website, it's the AI writing assistant with web search and citations. Yep. Which you can just get the models Yep. To today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:When he started this, I'm I'm sure they didn't have great search. They probably couldn't do citations very well. Mhmm. And so he's been his business has been getting steamrolled
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:By the labs. Yeah. And a lot of the lab founders kind of warned about building this kind of
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sam Altman famously said Rapper. Don't build a startup that assumes the models will plateau in capability.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then he built Sora, and if you and that was a little bit of a violation for that, but sort of in line with what he was doing. Yeah. But at the same time, yeah, if you were just building a wrapper and saying, I'm going to do better citations, that was always messaged, just like, hey, you're going have a rough time. Yep. And so I would definitely talk to any software engineers in your world about what's happening, how the level of abstraction.
Speaker 1:Mean, just yesterday, Roon posted something where he was like, whatever level of abstraction you're giving to the AI agents, you should probably be delegating one level above that. And I think that's a good that's a good frame of mind. And so if there's someone out there that says, look, my company for some reason hasn't been really on the forefront of AI adoption. I don't really have access to the models or they're not approved. It's like, yeah, you should probably be using these in your free time a lot to get up to speed to know how to actually use the new tools as effectively as possible because that's clearly where the future role is going.
Speaker 1:But in many areas of the economy and many areas of society and many groups of people that are outside of tech, if I sit them down like I have a friend who's a teacher, and I say, hell, like, coding agents are here. You need to understand that this is gonna change everything. This is gonna be like COVID. It's like, well, for the teacher, like, COVID was important because they could go there, they could get sick, and then they could not work, and they could you know, and the school could close. But if the software gets better, it's like, yes, in the far future, like, you might go to you might be like, I want my kids to go to the school with the humanoid robots because it's cheaper or something like that, but we're not there yet.
Speaker 1:And so if the software gets better, then I'm talking about, like, grade school. Like, it's mostly, like, distracted kids. They'll be distracted by, like, better AI slob feeds, basically. Yeah. But the actual process of, like, you know, you want your kid to go be with other kids and have a a teacher there monitoring them and nurturing them, that's not immediately disrupted.
Speaker 1:Like, yes, it will change over the next decade. Like I'm not AI bear here. I'm just saying, like, I don't know that February 2026 will be the month that, like, surgeons change or or what do mean? Sorry.
Speaker 2:Gotta jump in. I know, everyone, I know we're still having audio issues. The team is working on it, but the chat is funny. Go to L terminal says, tax loss harvesting my audio right now. Is this the
Speaker 1:What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Someone else said, is this the Cdance, Clang, Soarer version of TBPN? I asked people if they had kind of closed the app and reopened it and Trey says, already sold all my devices. Anyways, thank you for bearing with us.
Speaker 1:Plunger says we're back. So let us know.
Speaker 2:Are we back?
Speaker 1:Let us know.
Speaker 2:Woah. The chat's saying we're back.
Speaker 1:Chat says we're back. Hopefully, a AGI, ASI is
Speaker 2:We're back.
Speaker 1:In the fast takeoff, but we can't get reliable audio.
Speaker 2:Wait. Cut to John's screen for a second. Oh, You're back. We're back.
Speaker 1:At least the at least the graphics package works.
Speaker 2:Ryan Surf says, TBPN, terrible buffering personal nightmare.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. We're getting cooked. Let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. But crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thank you for bearing with us back.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Back to you.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. We will talk more about this with Matt. There's a lot of interesting things. I just I you know,
Speaker 2:I'm Yeah. Don't think it's
Speaker 1:bullish on AI. I do think, like, there's the software only singularity super real. The singularity broadly, I still believe in the Kurzweil timelines. But it's just like, I don't know that February is the year is the month. February 2026 is the month where, like, everyone is changed, whether you're like a car mechanic or, like, I have a friend who operates a bunch of gas stations.
Speaker 1:Like, one of the things he had to do was, like, kick someone out who was trying to steal stuff. Like, there's a crazy video of him, like, jumping over the counter and, like it's just, like, the humanoids will change a lot. That's not quite here yet. We're we're we're still, like, in this, like, slow takeoff, in my opinion. It is remarkable, and it's a lot of fun to talk about.
Speaker 1:So I do think the recommendation of, like, talk to your friends about advances in AI is awesome because you can just say, hey, like, look at this personal website. Let's build you this. Oh, you have a wedding coming up? Like, here, vibe code your wedding website. Like, what do you wanna do?
Speaker 1:Like, there's a whole bunch of different things that you can do, and you can understand how that will affect the economy and different stocks and different businesses. But for most people, it won't be like COVID where one hundred percent of people were, like, somehow somehow affected by it, you know. Whether it was like, oh, the thing that I like is closed. The coffee shop I like is closed Or Yeah. I I don't I'm afraid to go outside.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I
Speaker 2:think I got that. Question I have is like even even five years ago Yeah. There was kind of a running joke where it felt like a lot of office jobs were just fake. Yeah. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:And even when people kind of like started, that became part of the zeitgeist and people were talking about it Yeah. It didn't mean all the jobs went away. Yeah. Some jobs have gone away, but again, head counts at, you know, even a lot of these companies have have stayed Yeah. Relatively stable.
Speaker 2:We had a good jobs report, surprisingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Economists expected 65,000 jobs. The number came in at more than double at 130,000 jobs. We'll see where it lands in terms of revenue.
Speaker 2:But yeah, question is like, okay, the jobs have always been some email jobs. A lot of email jobs have been pretty fake. Yeah. What happens if agents can do a lot of these jobs? Do the fake jobs remain?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and how fast
Speaker 2:overall, like, I didn't I was joking. I responded to the article and I said, TLDR, freak TF out and sell all your money immediately. People were asking, what do you sell your money for? That's I the was joking around. I thought Jeffrey said, It's suppressing how widely shared and read this is.
Speaker 2:It's AI generated word salad posted by someone with vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is big, I guess, but its effect will be much more complicated than this essay quote unquote essay implies. Really going hard. Yeah. But again, it it felt like something like, you know, send this to 10 friends or you will be in the permanent underclass forever.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Like kind of like
Speaker 1:high school. Yeah. It was a little bit of like a throwback to the the permanent underclass. Tyler, what was your interpretation of it?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think my main critique is like I think with COVID, it's like very destructive. Right? Yeah. You maybe you lose your job, but like at at at the very least, like, you should you might get sick.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Things everything is, like, bad. Yeah. With AI, it's like this article is, like, yeah, people are, like, gonna lose their jobs. That's, like, kind of what the gist, you should be aware that, like, your job might get automated.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But, like, AI is, like, fundamentally, like it's like a productive tool. Right? So I imagine, like, we're not it's not gonna cause a recession. Then like GDP is not gonna go down.
Speaker 6:It's gonna go up.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Makes sense. And so I think my base case is like jobs actually get like way more fake generally. Yep. Like now it's like I mean, there's probably like hundreds of people on x and their entire job, like, salary is just posting, like, basically fake AI news.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And they get paid by it's not even like sponsored deals. It's like Yeah. They're just getting paid by x directly. Like, that's like completely fake job.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But like, that's gonna go up. There's gonna be more of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the the jobs have been getting faker ever since we stopped tilling the fields. Correct?
Speaker 1:Isn't that the I mean, that was the original Sam Altman formulation was like, if you explained to someone two hundred years ago, bunch a of people will be sitting around talking about the news and and they'll be filmed. It'll go over the Internet. It's like it makes no sense. And yet here we are running a business, doing ads for Okta. Okta helps you assign every agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk.
Speaker 1:Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Should we keep touring the the the takes, the various takes on this article?
Speaker 2:Staysassy says, I'm exhausted by the OMG. This changes everything AI posts. For this godforsaken site that I'm planning to take my doom scrolling talents back to Instagram. I believe in AI. I use it every day for increasingly nontrivial tasks.
Speaker 2:My team spends a massive amount of money on it vendors, tokens, acquisition. And I have pitched AI products that we built on stage. I believe things are changing fast. I don't care to hear some sweaty, overly online dudes breathless panting over the latest model anymore. I don't need to know what's changed in the last forty five seconds in AI.
Speaker 2:I don't need some dork with a weird haircut writing condescending posts like he was the first person to get the last Harry Potter book and wants to drop edgy hints about how Dumbledore dies at the end. I'd rather miss the latest AI news and just be poor. Tell me when the singularity is done so I can pause Singles Inferno and I'll tune back into x then. Logging off apparently stays as he works at the NASDAQ.
Speaker 1:Apparently. You see Robert's go, well, I'm building an answer to exactly this problem. Come back in a couple weeks and says, you're building Ambien?
Speaker 2:Nelson says, okay. But this one really changes anything, everything. Please, I promise. Please.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People are having fun. Let me tell you about 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 1:Logan Bartlett was identifying the remarkable crazy times we are in. It says, feels like an Anand can just tweet. Just vibe coded Databricks with a screenshot, and the SaaS market will fall 5%.
Speaker 2:Cephalopod. Yeah. I mean, if your job is building a wrap around ChatGPT like this guy, then it's not surprising that AI can automate that. Iron It's tricky. What did Joe
Speaker 1:Wiesenthal have to say?
Speaker 2:Joe, with a funny post. He says, seeing a lot of posts from software engineers that are like AI is devouring my job and soon it will happen to everyone. And it's like, maybe, but just because you have an easy job doesn't mean everyone else.
Speaker 1:Such bait.
Speaker 2:Incredible master. Bait.
Speaker 1:Incredible. Solid bait job.
Speaker 2:If anyone falls for this, you really deserve it.
Speaker 1:Yes. Software And engineering isn't an easy job. And Joe says, how hard can it be if it's the first thing a computer can do? That's so good. That's funny.
Speaker 2:Bugo Capital Jose. Quoted it and said, great comment from a friend who's coding with these AI tools around the clock. For the hype you read online, it's just really difficult to tell the difference between a genuine breakthrough propaganda to justify valuations and LLM psychosis. Yeah, Matt Schumer's article must go incredibly hard if you have LLM psychosis.
Speaker 1:I was thinking more about Claude with Ads, the vibe coded drop we launched on the Super Bowl. That was an idea that we had Friday morning. And after the show on Friday, we sat down. We talked about it with Tyler and said, like, is this feasible? Can we get a functional website up?
Speaker 1:It's a clone of the chat of the of the Claude app interface, same color, style guides, fonts, all this stuff. Like, coding that by hand feels like a week long project. I don't know how long it would take normally, but like, it's it would be harder and it was clearly accelerated. And I was thinking about like, if we didn't have coding agents, what would we have done? Like, we could have paid a dev shop 10 k to build something like that, but we probably just wouldn't have
Speaker 2:done it at all. Disagree.
Speaker 1:Okay. What what do you think?
Speaker 2:How how would it play out? Was doing kind of drops Yeah. Stunts like that before coding agents Okay. Were a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you could just work hard and do that.
Speaker 1:Just grind.
Speaker 2:Dylan and I, you know, we we did we did one back in the day with Party Round called Helpful VCs. This was during, you know, kind of this was, I think, like, May or June Yeah. Of 2021. So it was before the crazy Yeah. NFT boom had really started, but CryptoPunks were popular.
Speaker 2:And we made a collection of, like, 400 NFTs Yep. Of various VCs. And we just put them on a website and said, you don't repost this site in the next four hours, we're gonna auction off your NFT. Yeah. And and so you had like 400 VCs reposted it very quickly.
Speaker 2:Yep. And that was an example of like a funny idea like Claude with Ads Yep. Where we just had the idea. We worked on it for a few days, shipped it Mhmm. And that was it.
Speaker 2:So this kind of thing was
Speaker 1:How how long was it? A couple days?
Speaker 2:It was definitely no more than than five business days.
Speaker 1:We got this done in like one day.
Speaker 2:Friday to Sunday. Tyler was still shipping.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. What do mean? Like, obviously, like, I'm extremely bullish on these tools and they're, like, incredible. But it's still, like, I was spent, like, most like, almost all my Saturday, like, building out.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's not like it's like you took one for the team.
Speaker 2:You you you sacrificed your weekend.
Speaker 6:No. Feel like like these tools are like month. Employee month. Get it. You deserve it.
Speaker 6:You know, they're they're not so incredible that it can't, like, literally one shot it in in five minutes. You can't just tell Cloud Code build
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Zach Replica. Yeah. And it it's not it can't actually, like, do that yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Without you, it would not have happened because I was busy on Saturday with a bunch of different I had a friend's birthday party and stuff, and I wasn't able to lock in even if I understood the tools as well as Tyler does. And so it just feels
Speaker 2:like And I just, like, it
Speaker 1:to example of, like, net new.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Comparing it to the helpful VCs drop, like, we had to create original artwork Yeah. 400 VCs. Yeah. That you would have actually that would have been much easier with with Gen AI.
Speaker 2:Gen AI. Totally. So that was a factor too. Mhmm. But you're talking about anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I'm just wondering, like, you know, there's the Jevons paradox. We go back to Jevons paradox here. It's like, is this an example of intelligence getting cheaper to meter and then more ideas flourishing, more projects being built, more things happening versus something that we would have done anyway and it's more just like a cost savings thing.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It goes back and forth. But people are debating and people are enjoying the AGI. Megan Fritz says, bro, you got to listen. AGI is here.
Speaker 1:It's smarter than me. It's smarter than Neil deGrasse Tyson, bro. There is literally no escaping it. They're putting AI in your shoes. They're going to put AI in your cereal, bro.
Speaker 1:Bro, listen, the only way to survive this is to buy a premium AI subscription. Bro, I swear That was hardly make a commission. Please, bro, buy it.
Speaker 2:That was a funny thing.
Speaker 1:He
Speaker 2:Call he to action? What was the
Speaker 1:What is the call to action? I I actually missed that part. It's like buy a subscription to OpenAI or to his app. Because if this is content marketing, like, genius. Like
Speaker 2:No. He just said sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, anyone who's saying that, like, this is, like, SpawnCon for the found for the AI labs, like, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not what's going on here. This all feels very genuine.
Speaker 1:It's just how nuanced is it? So, yeah, start using AI seriously. It's not just a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Clotter Chat GPT. Like, you don't post that if you're for economic gain.
Speaker 1:So I don't know. Anyway, Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams like GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Delicious Tacos.
Speaker 1:Favorite account. It says moratorium on AI CEOs using AI to write long winded articles on how scared they are of AI. Very true. There's a lot. But I wonder.
Speaker 1:This didn't trigger my this is AI slop, you know, vibes. Maybe there was AI involved somehow, but it felt like it was sort of just, I don't know, very readable. It didn't throw me off. Anything else you want to cover on this? Or should we move on to a different story?
Speaker 1:Because there's a lot going on in the news today. We can move on. Okay. I want to talk about Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez, the retail investor, retail rival retail revival, Vow, burned investors.
Speaker 1:The Wall Street Journal has a deep dive on Tai Lopez. He pitched RadioShack Pier one turnarounds. Now the SEC alleges a Ponzi scheme. Tai Lopez was living proof of the American the American dream was still attainable for young men willing to bet on themselves. The entrepreneur hosted parties at a mansion in Beverly Hills and boasted about the black Lamborghini in his garage.
Speaker 1:The college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He also had a book subscription company. You would pay $30 a month and he would send you just a box of books, which was like not that scammy, like kind of a funny cool thing. I mean, books were like very like
Speaker 2:He was automating book buying.
Speaker 1:Basically.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are Yeah. Popping on to Amazon Yeah. To buy books they don't read. Yeah. He's like, why don't I why don't we just set this up on a subscription and save you the time?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He had this whole he had this whole thing about knowledge and how like the the original pitch for Here in My Garage was like, look at all my supercars. That grabs your attention. He's like, but you know what's more important? Turning around.
Speaker 1:A bunch of airport nonfiction. And it was like, you know, a bunch of these, like, books behind him, and he was like, this book wall is more important than anything. Where where is the actual article in the timeline? Here it is. The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:So the college dropout had made a name for himself on social media by offering get rich quick advice and self help courses. He was one of the first people to really understand the economics of YouTube ads. That when he went live with his YouTube ad campaign, he had the LTV to CAC so dialed that he was able to spin it up and just spend millions and millions of dollars on YouTube ads. And I don't know if he owned the Ferraris or rented them, but, like, it clearly worked. It was, the first real breakout, not influencer campaign, but direct YouTube ad network campaign.
Speaker 1:Very broad, not didn't need to be super hyper targeted or anything like that, but it clearly worked. So he urged his followers to invest in a new company he had started that was scooping up distressed retailers on the cheap RadioShack, Pier one Imports, Dress Barn, Model Sporting Goods, and Linens and Things with a promise to turn them into e commerce winners. That was always a weird It's a crazy weird pitch. It was a crazy pitch.
Speaker 2:And it's crazy how quickly the brand recognition drops off. Yeah. Radio Shack. Alright. I know that one.
Speaker 2:Pier one Imports. I know that one. Yeah. Dress Barn. Do not know that one.
Speaker 2:Models Sporting Goods. Do not know that one. Linens and Things. Do not know that one.
Speaker 1:At least Linens and Things, I can guess what they sell. I don't know what Pier one sells. I I Pier one imports?
Speaker 2:And it's crazy because almost every single every single item that that these retailers sell sells on Amazon and walmart.com Yep. At extremely thin margins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's really like a referendum on the on aggregation theory. And if you're not aggregating customers,
Speaker 2:you are just getting Maybe that was a deeper level of the pitch.
Speaker 1:What was that?
Speaker 2:One customer database. Yeah. The leading retailer brand.
Speaker 1:That was sort of it. Yeah. We had one unified e commerce front end, but a little late to be going after. I mean, there was there were some successful come from behind stories. What was the company that sold to Walmart for $1,000,000,000 or a couple of billion dollars?
Speaker 1:That one did pretty well. I forget what that was called. But Walmart made an acquisition of an e commerce infrastructure provider that did have an e commerce front end, but it never reached escape velocity. But it was like the perfect plug in add on to Walmart's infrastructure. And now Walmart's a trillion dollar company, I think.
Speaker 1:It might be a little bit off today, but we'll see. So Sean Murphy is an example of someone here. He saw Lopez's posts on his Facebook and Instagram feeds and was drawn in by the brand names and the promise of 20% returns. Always odd to pitch a promised return. But I think Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is called, know, first kind of major error. Yes. Having a bad business idea, like buying old retailers and trying to revive them Yes. Is not illegal. Yes.
Speaker 2:But general solicitation
Speaker 1:Yes. Very, very
Speaker 2:is a no no.
Speaker 1:And and and we'll get into specifically what he was promising and then what he was delivered in the gap
Speaker 2:between that the some startup founders try to get around this by like generally signaling on x that they're raising. Yeah. I feel like the industry does a pretty good job of not doing this.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Really quickly, phantom cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the phantom card. So he invested Sean Murphy invested a $175,000 into the company called Retail Commerce Ventures, e commerce ventures, R E V, and related Lopez Ventures. All told, Lopez raised more than $230,000,000 from hundreds of mostly small investors.
Speaker 1:You know, we we we talk about these big funding rounds, We're like, oh, like, how did this person get this much money? And we hear about the SPVs and the layered SPVs and all the all the bringing retail into the private markets, but, like, he really did it. Like, the the power you know, we a lot of people have seen the Tai Lopez takedowns and sort of don't don't have a ton of respect for him in in the business community. But he really does have a serious audience of people that have, you know, money that they need to invest. So one way or another, and if they get caught in the wrong place, might write a check that they wind up going on to regret.
Speaker 1:So Murphy is another example. He's an Illinois grandfather. He got a $10,000 Pier one gift card and monthly checks of about $1,000 for two years. What he didn't know was that his payouts allegedly were funded mostly by other investors.
Speaker 2:Second mistake.
Speaker 1:Second mistake. These guys lied. He said they conspired. They led people on. Poor Murphy here, Sean Murphy.
Speaker 1:The payments stopped abruptly in late twenty twenty two, the struggling retailers were then taken over by some of the company's creditors.
Speaker 2:So he had the $230,000,000 of equity and then he also levered Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the creditors got, you know, control of of the assets. Last September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Lopez and his partners accusing them of running a Ponzi scheme, misleading investors and misappropriating $16,100,000. The FBI has been contacting investors as part of a criminal investigation into what happened. According to people familiar, no charges have been filed yet, so innocent until proven guilty here, but The Wall Street Journal has some good data here. Lopez and his lawyer, Marty Reddy, didn't respond to request for comment.
Speaker 1:Court filings indicate that lawyers for Lopez and other defendants are in settlement talks. So on his podcast, The Ty Lopez Show and in his social media posts, Lopez, who's 48 years old now, hasn't addressed the company's collapse and the heavy losses incurred by his investors. The day the SEC filed suit, he posted on X, never doom. No matter how horrible the situation, don't ever think you're doomed unless you are dead. All defeat is psychological.
Speaker 1:Was he talking to himself there? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess staying staying in character.
Speaker 1:So I just can't believe how
Speaker 2:much like the the check sizes for some of the people that he was bringing in. Yeah. Apparently, Nelson Rowe says Lopez seemed credible, an 82 year old retired real estate broker who invested $300,000. The story sounded so good. They had all these brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Matt, like, can imagine somebody like this, like Yeah. Goes offline
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:For ten years and then just, like, logs onto the Internet and is, wait, this guy has RadioShack, ear one imports, linens and goods.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Linens and things.
Speaker 2:Linens linens and things. I mean, this seems like a winner. So, yeah. Yeah. Quick quick Google search could have could have helped to avoid this.
Speaker 2:I mean, it it it's I I feel like under discussed how Tai Lopez effectively drove an entire seemingly a generation of young men to inspire to aspire to build like a personal brand.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And and he Tai Lopez's greatest contribution, which I would say is not very great, is he inspired tens of thousands of young people to try to make their money in in info products, which is like still perpetuating itself because it's sort of like a it's kind of like a virus because somebody starts doing it. They get people down their funnel. The people get down their funnel. They realize like, hey, this guy's actually making money with courses. I should learn from him how to do courses.
Speaker 2:And it just kind of creates this web of people selling info products and flaunting a bunch of their lifestyles.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. There's so many layers. The, you know, the course that teaches you ecommerce or drop shipping, and then the course that teaches you to sell courses on ecommerce, and we need to do the final boss.
Speaker 1:The course that teaches you how to sell courses, about how to sell courses, about how to sell courses, about how to sell ecommerce or something like that. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. So in podcast, Lopez has described growing up with his mother in a mobile home in California while his father was imprisoned for selling cocaine. After high school, he said he spent several years working on farms, including with the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1:He had about $47 in his bank account and was living in a mobile home in Raleigh, North Carolina. He said, when on the advice of his uncle, he started looking for a sales job. He'd landed an insurance company where he cold called clients. Lopez has said that his breakthrough came out when he figured out how to write snappy copy for Google Ads, which generated quality leads that produced substantial sales commissions for for an insurance company and later at a financial services company he founded. He went viral in 2015 with a series of YouTube videos titled here in my garage.
Speaker 1:In the first
Speaker 2:So crazy that that was 2015 in my head. This was like 2005.
Speaker 1:Completely agree. I completely agree. I can't believe it's 2015. It feels much older. It feels like the first ad I ever saw on YouTube.
Speaker 2:I know.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah. It is it is retro. In the first Lopez wearing a crewneck shirt, glasses, a scruffy beard stands in his garage in front of a black Lamborghini. What he, what he likes a lot more than material things, he tells viewers is knowledge.
Speaker 1:That was the famous line, knowledge. The camera swings to the other side of the garage. In fact, he says, I'm a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold the 2,000 new books that I bought. That video has spawned a slew of parodies. Around the same time wait.
Speaker 1:Around the same time, 2015, Tai Lopez launches 67 steps. Six seven Steps?
Speaker 5:Did this
Speaker 1:in He '20 created the six seven meme, apparently. It's crazy. He's pulling all the strings. Online course designed to help people find what he calls the good life by focusing on health, wealth, love, and happiness. Lopez ran conferences where he shared what he said were the secrets for getting rich.
Speaker 1:67 steps is fascinating because it's this odd number. We were talking to Brandon about this, how, you know, 19 details you missed in the Super Bowl halftime show, like, the odd numbers. Oh, okay. That's, like, feasible. There's also a little bit of sticker thing if I say, you know, 99¢.
Speaker 1:That's different than a dollar. Right?
Speaker 6:I was gonna say so so in that video, when he when he pans to the bookshelf Yeah. One of the books is called a thousand and one books. So it really has he has 3,001 books.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Too There
Speaker 2:we go.
Speaker 1:Books inside of books layered.
Speaker 2:I guess where Mosi took this to the next level where his new info product isn't he selling like tens of thousands of books at the same time?
Speaker 1:There I I believe there was a a checkout purchase that I saw a screenshot of was that was that you could buy like a box of copies of the book or something. I think that's very good for ranking on the New York Times bestseller list. And I believe he didn't he set a world record for most books sold or something like that? Wild. So so so, you know, all all sorts of different book marketing strategies out there.
Speaker 1:Our biggest mistake is almost always thinking too small, he said in a social media post. He hosted influencer fueled parties at a Beverly Hills mansion he rented with a pool and basketball court. In 01/2015 video, billionaire Mark Cuban visited Lopez at the house to the two shot hoops and talked life lessons. For those who want to be an entrepreneur, what's the best advice? Lopez asked.
Speaker 1:Find something you love to do. Be great at it and sell it. Cuban responded. Honestly, good advice. Icky guy.
Speaker 1:There's been a bunch of different ways to say that from very high
Speaker 2:brow should have turned that sentence into a course. He should have put that sentence behind a pay because he's like, this is such good advice. I can't I can't just I gotta charge you.
Speaker 1:Well, that's
Speaker 2:the yeah. That's behind the table.
Speaker 1:A lot of the courses, it is just, like, it's already been distilled into a sixty second reel. You pay for the course, and you're just getting that sixty seconds repeated 25 times. Right? It's rough. So let's go into the shopping spree.
Speaker 2:Did you ever buy a course Yes. That actually changed your life?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I did. I bought a course on Houdini, on Houdini, which is a motion graphics tool used in Hollywood.
Speaker 1:If you've watched Game of Thrones and you see all the courses galloping thing.
Speaker 2:What was the course title? Was it like How to Get Rich Quick with No.
Speaker 1:Like it was like it was like, you know, like like using Houdini in advanced VFX pipelines.
Speaker 2:So you weren't deep you didn't you didn't just the course creator was not driving a Lamborghini.
Speaker 1:No. No. The course creator was like, worked on Westworld. You want to learn how they did Westworld graphics? And I'm like, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I would love to pay you $1,000 to teach me how to do that. That's really cool, and I want to learn that tool. I paid for a number of courses related to content creation, Cinema four d, After Effects, like, any, like, skip even you see me, like, edit something, you
Speaker 2:know Yeah.
Speaker 1:All of that is is I did I did I needed to learn it. I watched a lot of YouTube videos for free. I was also paying for stuff. But none of them were about getting their quest.
Speaker 2:You paid to learn how to fish. Yes. And now you're feeding yourself for a lifetime.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Because I mean, too many courses good if it's a narrow scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely bought at least one workout course when I was probably like 18 or 19.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I doubt even though it was like effectively advertising a bro split. Yeah. Yeah. You could just learn from any Arnold Yeah. Video, any quick Google search certainly can get it from ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:It was opinionated and I just followed it. Yeah. And it it was well worth the money Yeah. Even though the information was like, there there's something about if you pay for something, you're much more likely to take it seriously and actually try to follow it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I won't say even though we're kind of poking fun here, I don't think all all information products are bad.
Speaker 1:No. I completely agree. P 90 x. That was the workout course that was that was going viral when I was in college.
Speaker 2:I do think are the ones I do think are are like really, really, really bad Mhmm. Are when they advertise, like, trading courses Sure. To, like, young younger audiences. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it's like, okay. You have $300 in your bank account. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like, you're not you're not gonna change you're you're not not gonna gonna change your life.
Speaker 2:You should learn anything And
Speaker 1:the crazy thing is that there is a reasonable trading course, which would be like like buy ETFs. Right? Like, like, there good financial advice that you could give someone to trade. Right? And it would be basically, like, don't trade, like buy and hold.
Speaker 1:Right? Dollar cost average in. Yeah. A little bit every investment firm. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or or go pro and go work at Jane Street or Citadel if you have the job.
Speaker 2:At a wealth management firm.
Speaker 1:Sure. The flip side is, like, a lot of the courses, they weren't even they weren't even teaching you how to okay. Well, there's this big AI trend. Maybe you wanna increase exposure to NVIDIA, Google, Apple, you know, the big companies. Like, that would be maybe a little financially advice y, but totally reasonable.
Speaker 1:They were like foreign exchange, like, like, Forex courses. So you were trading, but it was, like, essentially on top of a random number generator. Like, it's, like, the most complex like, understanding the trade flows for for proper forex trading is not something you can just, like, pick up on a weekend. Like, that that is a life's work as opposed to just being like, oh, well, like, I'm a kid. I'm I'm I'm using Uber all the time.
Speaker 1:Maybe I should buy some Uber shares. Like, that's a much more reasonable philosophy around financial investing in my opinion than, okay. Well, the candlestick went up, it's a camel pattern, so it's gotta go up like
Speaker 2:chart strategy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Chart chartology or something. What's that called? Anyway, 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.
Speaker 2:Lopez teamed up with Alex Mehr, a mechanical engineer who had cofounded an online dating app that sold for $255,000,000 Not bad. In 2019, they formed Miami based retail e commerce ventures to snap up distressed retail brands. Lopez was CEO, and Mehr was president. Lopez's younger cousin was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio station promoter, and as an assistant to the online educational company that Lopez had started.
Speaker 2:The spokesperson for Mer said he believed in Rev's business models, put over $5,000,000 of his own money into the company, and suffered substantial losses when the business was hit with the so called severe post pandemic macroeconomic headwinds. Birken Road is represented by blah blah blah. Rev's first notable notable acquisition came in 2019 when it paid 5,000,000 for the e commerce rights to the Dress Barn name. Has anyone in this room heard of Dress Barn?
Speaker 1:It's crickets. Where's the crickets?
Speaker 2:We we need it.
Speaker 1:Where's the crickets?
Speaker 2:That's a good one. Team crickets, crickets sound effects. We gotta add it. After the COVID pandemic hit, Rev went on a shopping spree in July 2020. It purchased home furnishing retailer Pier one Imports out of bankruptcy for about $31,000,000 followed later that year by two more bankrupt chains, sporting goods retailer, Models, Models for 3,600,000.0.
Speaker 2:Has anyone heard of Models?
Speaker 1:Yes?
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 1:No? No.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. And discounters Stein Mart. Has anyone heard of Stein Mart for 6,000,000? And we got another no. I feel like this is is hack.
Speaker 2:We got people from all over the country, so I think I think this is somewhat representative of the average American. And of course, Radio Radio Shack undisclosed. I wonder how much they got Radio Shack for.
Speaker 1:No idea. Okay. There's an interesting tidbit here about Alex Meyer. I had to hunt it down. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I was distracted. First, I'm going to tell everyone about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team.
Speaker 2:Tell me.
Speaker 1:So Alex Mayer is, you know, controversially included in this Wall Street Journal article about this, you know, potentially disastrous deal. Jessica Livingston, founder of Y Combinator, is the author of Founders at Stories of Startups Early Days. It's a fascinating book with interviews. It's basically a whole bunch of podcast type interviews combined. So thirty seven signals, Hotmail, Lotus, PayPal.
Speaker 1:There's the the interviews in here are are remarkable. Steve Wozniak, Katrina Fake from Flickr, Max Levchin at PayPal. This Founders at Work template, if you see, it has this, like we should pull it up, but it's, like, this very iconic book with just a bunch of names on it, and then in orange, Founders at Work, and then Jessica Livingston wrote it. It turned into a series. There's coders at work about software engineers, and there's venture capitalists at work.
Speaker 1:And venture capitalists at work is a different book, not written by Jessica Livingston, but Alex Meyer's in it because he founded Zeus, which was a dating site. And and it's just like a funny, like, fun fact that he's in this, like like, book that is sort of tangentially, like, extremely legit. Anyway, we can move on. Sorry.
Speaker 2:It's just During weekly Zoom calls investors, Lopez and Mayor pitched new investment opportunities by touting the success of earlier REV deals according to former employees. At his self help conferences, Lopez would tell audiences they could share in his success by investing in REV brands. Joseph Bertow, a 44 year old who works in construction sales, went to an investor meeting at a Los Angeles hotel. Bertow recalled the message, give us as much money as you can. These deals are popping off, and we can't get them fast enough.
Speaker 2:He invested about $350,000.
Speaker 1:Much money. I I I don't know. I mean, maybe people are
Speaker 2:At the same time, when I when I look back at, like, my first angel investments, which granted, I was, like, 22
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I would I I thought that I was seeing good enough opportunities
Speaker 7:Sure.
Speaker 2:That I would happily invest half of my, like, liquid network.
Speaker 1:Half. You were gonna say 10%.
Speaker 2:Which is weird. I mean, it wasn't that
Speaker 6:much at the time. No.
Speaker 1:No. I
Speaker 2:know. I know. My first company. Yeah. I was, like, very young.
Speaker 2:I was down to take a lot of risk. Yeah. Yeah. Because I was, hey, this
Speaker 1:is Yeah. But it's gotta be different for these folks because this is clearly like retirement.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but part of it is like when you start seeing Yeah. When you start seeing private deals for the first time Totally.
Speaker 1:Feels special.
Speaker 2:It feels special. You look at the chart
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, you know, and in hindsight, I'm like, most of the worst like, there's certainly some people that have come on the show. Justin Mares is a good example. Like, you look at the first, like, three Oh, yeah. Deals Justin did and they were all like, at least two were unicorns. Like, he's he's insane.
Speaker 2:But for me, I look at the worst investments I've ever made were, like, probably in the first five. Yeah. And so People just
Speaker 1:don't realize how many companies are out there, how many private companies are out there. Like, you see this one deal, you talk to this one founder, and you're like, this is everything. And some of the early angel investments that I made that didn't go well were like, okay, great team coming out of a great university on a super interesting category. And what I just didn't realize was that there was like they were coming out of Waterloo, but there was a team at MIT that was six months ahead, and there was a team at Stanford that was nine months ahead. And Sequoia had already backed this one, but they hadn't announced.
Speaker 1:And then Andreessen had backed that one. And so I was in the one that didn't have any of the backing and was just going be third in the category, which was just going to create this, like, power law difference. Yeah. And if you don't have full coverage, you don't even know that those deals are happening. And so you wind up even if you get, like, the idea correct and, like, the team is good, you can still wind up in really rough
Speaker 2:And the other thing here is in one peer one pitch deck, investors were told they would receive 200,000 after their first year if they invested 1,000,000 Yeah. Which again is Odd. 20% return, which is insane if somebody tells you they're
Speaker 1:Any sort of guaranteed return is usually a huge red flag. Huge
Speaker 2:red flag. Anyways Before we move on, let me
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 2:Anyways, I think we can move on. Sure. This story is still unfolding. It is very sad, and I hope that the investors that were duped can recoup as much of their investment as possible.
Speaker 1:Indeed.
Speaker 2:Getting into the jobs report.
Speaker 1:Jobs report. Big beat. 130,000 jobs. Economists expected 65,000 jobs and a 4.4% unemployment rate. Bloomberg has a live blog here breaking it all down.
Speaker 1:There's some interesting things. So traders pushed Fed rate cut expectations to July, and revisions trimmed The US twenty twenty five payroll gain to one eighty one thousand. From Blue
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bird It's interesting. I think everyone there were kind of delays with the report. Right? Everyone was expecting this to be absolutely abysmal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And now I think the reaction is, can we trust can we trust the data? Right? Yeah. There's just been so much kind of like, FUD thrown around the data and and the job market in general that
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's hard to believe your own eyes.
Speaker 1:I debating with a friend about he was he was sending me some economic data, he was saying like like, AI is the only thing holding up the economy. And I was like, I don't know that that's the right phrase. I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but health care is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains. And and that's where, like, the real economy like, there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets that's very forward looking. You're valuing things based on, 2,050 cash flow and being like, yeah, I'll pay for that right now because this company is gonna be around.
Speaker 1:You're buying a Google bond that doesn't mature for one hundred years. Right? And then there's like the on the ground, like, do people have jobs or not? And the question of, like, do people have jobs or not is much more in the health care and services sector. And so Bloomberg has been breaking it down.
Speaker 1:U. Payrolls rose in January by the most in more than a year, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly fell, suggesting the labor market continued to stabilize at the start of 2026. And now there's going to be some debate over, you know, how real is this? Will it be revised down? But there are other economic statistics that we can look at.
Speaker 1:We're having Harley from Shopify on the show, and we'll ask him about the health of the consumer because he sees a lot of a lot of commerce data. And if people are even just worried about losing their jobs, usually they're pulling back on spending,
Speaker 2:discretionary Revisions came out today as well, showed job growth was almost 900,000 lower in the twelve months through March 2025 than initially reported. So again, like, announced these big numbers. Yeah. And then we kind of move on and then revise them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is pretty big, though. You'd be surprised if this if if this flipped negative. Like, maybe it goes back to 65 or half as much, but it still seems like like there is job growth broadly. This seems at least directionally correct.
Speaker 1:Employers added 130,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate declined to 4.3% according to the BLS. That followed revisions to the prior year, which showed market slowdown in hiring. Jobs gains averaged 15,000 a month last year, down from the initially reported 49,000
Speaker 2:pace. Just a bit off.
Speaker 1:The report suggests the labor market is finding its footing after a year marked by rising unemployment and minimal hiring, while economists expected hiring to remain generally sluggish in 2026, more clarity around the impact of president Donald Trump's economic policies and lower borrowing costs could encourage some employers to boost headcount. The January data reinforces Federal Reserve's official inclination to keep interest rates on hold now. Yeah. I mean, there there is this interesting tension, right, between even if the job numbers are inflated, that puts pressure on the Fed to not cut rates, which is another stated objective of the administration. So you have these, like, two things.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're pushing for, hey, let's count every possible job that could potentially fit in this category, that will then it's gonna be harder to make the case that you should cut rates. In leaving rates unchanged last last month, chair Jerome Powell cited signs of steadying in the job market. So Jerome Powell saw this as well. Coming off a hiring recession in 2026, this is welcome news, said Heather Long, chief economist of the Navy Federal Credit Union. I think Fed chair Powell was right.
Speaker 1:The labor market appears to be stabilizing. So Trump praised the numbers in a social media post Wednesday, said that The US should have the lowest interest rates globally, adding to previous calls for for rate reductions. Great job numbers far greater than expected, he wrote, in all caps. With the release of each January employment report, BLS benchmarked payrolls to a more accurate but slightly less timely series called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. That data is based on state unemployment insurance tax records and covers most US jobs.
Speaker 1:That adjustment showed job growth was nearly 900,000 lower in the twelve months through March than initially reported. Yep. The figure roughly aligned with that of the BLA.
Speaker 2:Overall, I think I think, you know, the team that had to revise last year down by almost a million now coming out and saying, like, you know, everything's great and we crushed it. Yeah. It doesn't give you I don't have any comp. Like, a smart person might might think like, okay, a year from now, we're gonna figure out that this none of this was real.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Yeah. Mean, market's not moving on it. The Dow Jones is down 0.1%. The S and P five hundred is up 0.1.
Speaker 1:The NASDAQ's completely flat. I guess, technically up 0.01%.
Speaker 2:Comments on Joe's post says, and you take these numbers at face value, question mark. Joe, I know you don't believe these numbers. LOL. Almost every single person responding. Just like, oh boy.
Speaker 2:Anyways.
Speaker 1:Oh, well. What what did Khalshi have to say? Jobs number
Speaker 2:is This is not for February.
Speaker 1:This is for
Speaker 2:February. Most people are expecting, you know, more than 60 k.
Speaker 1:The current forecast is 68,000, and it and it jumped in the last couple days on this.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what is real? What? ByteDance, C Dance
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Two point o. The model's very good.
Speaker 1:According to Ethan Moloch.
Speaker 2:I wish we could have asked Chris from Runway about C Dance yesterday Yeah. And how he's thinking about competition from Bite Dance, but we can next time. Let's play this video. This is a nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane, which if you ask me is worth the 2,000,000,000,000 of CapEx. Is photo real?
Speaker 8:In world of marvels, some creatures defy all expectations. This is the incredible story of the pilot otter.
Speaker 1:That's cute. I like that. Twelve seconds, longer than most eight seconds. And someone in the in the replies shared a Grok version of this that it just has a little bit more I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit more blurry, maybe, this video.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can see it up close, but it it it it What? Close, but it's not
Speaker 2:What model made this? Real. This is Grok. Okay.
Speaker 6:The audio is also much worse. Think I I
Speaker 1:watched this. Yeah.
Speaker 5:In the skies above Alaska, a river otter pilots its plane. Yeah. Its paws expertly handle the controls. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You instantly clock the audio.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't on a C Dance. On C Dance, it sounds it sounds for sure real.
Speaker 2:Automaxing. Lucas is firing shots at actors. Okay. But we can pull this up.
Speaker 1:Let's see.
Speaker 2:Let's get some audio.
Speaker 5:You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal. He was a good man.
Speaker 8:He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die, and now you die too.
Speaker 2:Insane, insane audio, but but the the video the video look, I mean, I can't. You you you've watched a handful of movies
Speaker 1:I have.
Speaker 2:More than me. Does this look like it could be in a film?
Speaker 1:It's close. It's pretty close.
Speaker 2:What are you missing?
Speaker 1:I mean, just the length of the shot, it's not fully modern in the sense of the way Hollywood shoots an action scene like this. It's either like way more cuts and just way more like detail shots like cutting in and out, or they'll try and turn it into more of like a cinematic set piece and have like a drone shot or a sweeping shot. Like, it's very rare that you're just sort of sitting there watching that in most of like the most movies.
Speaker 2:But it's But in terms of sitting there prompting Yeah. And splicing it For together from different angles sure. You could
Speaker 1:For sure. What do you think?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I I think I I do wonder if there's, an interesting comparison to the the kind of Cloudbot stuff where, like, I think one of my main takeaways from the Cloudbot thing was that it's gonna be hard for for BigLabs to kind of replicate that just because of, like, you can't get the the WhatsApp integration, like stuff like this. Where I think with the Chinese models, the image models, the video models, they're very clearly, like, training on stuff they're not supposed to be training on. Yeah. Like, the the the otter flying, like, that's David Attenborough's voice.
Speaker 6:Right? Like, you're not supposed to be able to to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Where, like, can Sora can can the opening eye really sore with with that exact voice? Like, probably not. Yep. Like, maybe they can try to do it, but, like, they're clearly gonna face some legal repercussions
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Where like China can actually just kind of do it because they don't really have those
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of the American labs, it feels like they've been launching very aggressively and sort of making a fair use claim and probably engaging with lawyers from the big IP holders immediately and just sort of saying like, look, yes, like, we know you can prompt Disney characters. We're happy to pull that out. But also, can you wanna talk to our business development team?
Speaker 6:And Yeah. Like, with OpenEye, you saw them actually do, like, a Disney deal where
Speaker 1:Very quickly.
Speaker 6:China is not like, I'm pretty sure that you can go and see see dance
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:See dance and just two prompt, point like, Mickey Mouse, you know, doing a little dance or whatever.
Speaker 1:Let's this look other Sea Dance two point o post. Will Smith fighting a spaghetti monster. Epic action film scene. Different cuts.
Speaker 2:There you go, John. You wanted All you had to do was ask. This is pretty real.
Speaker 1:I like that Will Smith is just the benchmark forever.
Speaker 2:And I have the old Will Smith Spaghetti AI ready to go after this.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Alright. So this is February 2026.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is Let's go
Speaker 2:back in time.
Speaker 1:That is a great shot. That's something you need to do in Houdini. No longer. Yeah. This is good.
Speaker 1:This is very good.
Speaker 2:Alright. Pull up this next one we got going back to 2023. We can see the progress.
Speaker 1:China can one shot AI crime. Wow. This is the progression or there was this supposed to
Speaker 2:this exact same thing and be like, this is gonna change everything.
Speaker 1:And it did.
Speaker 2:And they were right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They were right.
Speaker 2:But it's still funny.
Speaker 1:And now, it's just sitting there enjoying spaghetti, I suppose. Yeah. Wow. That looks cinematic. This is good for Will Smith.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, he'll license his likeness and it's just more more attention. I mean, is like Jake Paul's strategy. He really wanted to be all over Sora. Got a billion impressions or something like that.
Speaker 2:Daniel in the chat says China can one shot AI crime.
Speaker 1:Who do you think launches the next turn of the video model? Do you think we get VO four, Sora three, or the next meta model first? And while you're
Speaker 6:thinking about
Speaker 1:11 labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. What do you think, Tyler?
Speaker 6:I'm hoping it's meta. I really wanna see their model. Yeah. It should I'm expecting it to be like super, super good.
Speaker 1:I think it'll be this this quality. It it has to be. This is, the standard. You can't launch something that's behind the frontier.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Also, shortage content. Alright.
Speaker 1:No shortage of content, for
Speaker 2:sure.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I I'm I'm curious what they'll do with Sora, if they'll actually, like, keep working on the app or or if they're just gonna kinda try to just keep, like, making the model better and then, yeah, they put it in the app, but they're it's not a bit as big of a push this
Speaker 1:time. I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Another news.
Speaker 1:Which one?
Speaker 2:We gotta talk about Mistral. Mistral's cooking.
Speaker 1:They're cooking.
Speaker 2:And they're investing 1,400,000,000.0 to build out AI infrastructure in Sweden.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Bloomberg. French AI startup Mistral is investing 1,400,000,000.0 US dollars to build AI infrastructure Sweden as it pushes to become the go to AI supplier for governments and enterprises in Europe. The data center will be located in a place that I cannot pronounce, Bourlaunge, Bourlaunge, in partnership with Echo Data Center AB, Mistral said in a statement. The facility will house the advanced computing power to train and run Mistral's AI models and is scheduled to be operational from 2027. So at least a year out.
Speaker 2:This is Mistral's first data center investment outside of France, and the company is billing the build out as a move to strengthen European tech sovereignty. As political ties with Washington fray, governments in the region are increasingly wary of relying on Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, which dominate infrastructure, data storage and cloud computing. Mistral, which develops AI models and hopes to be Europe's answer to OpenAI, says it can offer customers a fully European AI stack with data processed and stored locally. This investment is a concrete step toward building independent capabilities in Europe dedicated to AI, says Arthur Mensch. Mensch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Their last round was led by ASML. Dollars 1,300,000,000.0 from the Dutch chipmaker. That's a good deal.
Speaker 2:They're cooking. They're cooking. This is the kind of thing that Macron should be highlighting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. I mean, I guess it's old news.
Speaker 2:You
Speaker 1:need to launch a new project and Yeah. You can't just fully focus on
Speaker 2:And they're announcing in the Financial Times that their revenue is now similar to Grok. Mr. Alt's revenue soars Really? Over 400,000,000. Interesting.
Speaker 1:That's pretty high. 400,000,000 as Europe seeks AI independence. Well, they've certainly carved out a nice niche. Let's go over to the Grok team and GROK and the x AI departures. First, I'll tell you about fin dot ai, the number one AI agent for customer service.
Speaker 1:If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.
Speaker 2:Chat says Jordi discusses dissing Macron caused domino effects. Missed all of that swampy You manifested it. I did it. I inspired them to grind harder. No, of course.
Speaker 2:Was one of many Yeah. Who was having a little bit of fun Yeah. Last Friday. So Jimmy Bah said, bye bye.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yesterday, he said last day at x AI. Mhmm. And Tanish says with Jimmy Bhatt's departure, half of the x AI founding team has left. Mhmm. I my a lot of people have been fig trying to figure out, like, why is this happening.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I'm one
Speaker 2:of them. My current belief is that and this is based on some news that last week Mhmm. XAI executives were given the option to take cash Yep. As part of the SpaceX merger. Take cash today, and you can just move on.
Speaker 2:Yep. Or you can take equity in SpaceX and stay with us for the next leg. Yep. And so I think a lot of the executives, which are just the founding teams Sure. And the co founders, are just saying, like, hey, I'm gonna go work on something else.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:so we saw some other posts. Some of these people are teaming up to work on something new together. Sure. I'm sure some of them, you know, will just join other labs. But, yeah, the big question is, like, what is XAI's strategy going to change at all with the merger, or is it going to be more of the same?
Speaker 2:I keep kind of wondering, will they get into actually get into the Neo Cloud business? I could see it happening. But for now, I think this is maybe like, people want it to be more dramatic than it actually is Mhmm. I think. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is it isn't odd. I mean, when when the when the SpaceX merger happened with XAI, lot people were like, like, you got pre IPO shares in SpaceX. Like, you're you should ride it out and then sell post post IPO because the stock will probably pop, etcetera. And, yeah, this feels like a quick exodus of people, which is aggressive.
Speaker 1:And it feels like, sure, you're behind the frontier on a few different vectors, but it is a place where you're sort of GPU rich. Very intense environment, though. So if you want something that's a little bit more exploratory, a little bit more research oriented, having the CEO say, we're not doing research, we're doing engineering, that's not exactly a rallying cry. You're like, but I want to do research. I don't want to do engineering.
Speaker 2:But I'm a researcher, sir.
Speaker 1:But I'm a researcher. You're engineer now. And so, yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see where people land. Tyler, what's your take on all of departures from x AI?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, it it probably just seems like more evidence that that x is gonna be some sort of, like, GPU reseller or
Speaker 1:You think so?
Speaker 6:Neocloud market. Yeah. Like, maybe it's, like, okay. Elon is extremely bullish on space data centers because it can just allow you to put, like, so much, like, you know, terra terawatts of of compute in space. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:It's like, okay. That if if you're engineering versus research, maybe he's just, like, so scaling pill that you don't you don't actually need to do that much research.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You can just build up massive data center and then you just use the same paradigm of models.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:You just train the biggest model. It's 10 x bigger than everyone else. You just have the best models. You don't actually need like the insane like moonshot research projects. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Maybe there's something like that going on. Yeah. A lot of the researchers, they said they're leaving.
Speaker 1:The the the
Speaker 6:they said they're leaving because they're so excited about this kind of recursive self improvement Yeah. Learning that's That's still like a very
Speaker 1:much hype cycle.
Speaker 6:It's like a very moonshot research project.
Speaker 1:Feels something you wouldn't want to leave. That seems fun. That seems interesting.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But if XAI's whole path is now just we're going to scale up the data center so much that we don't actually need to work on these things.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Maybe it's something like directionally kind of in that lane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was the what was the original Elon Musk prediction about XAI's progress around, like, solving something fundamental in physics or or or one of those, like, one of those, like, major math challenges?
Speaker 6:Yeah. He I think he said that at the Grok four
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was that Nadia Strokes?
Speaker 6:Yeah. It was something like that. Was it's gonna develop some novel novel physics theory.
Speaker 2:The most impressive product that I've seen from x AI is their voice mode integrated into Tesla.
Speaker 1:Comedy mode.
Speaker 2:It seems to be wildly entertaining to a lot of people. To a
Speaker 4:lot of people.
Speaker 2:And I've been seeing posts this week that have, like, 200,000 likes, meaning that it's incredibly mainstream Yeah. On Instagram. And testing out the product, it's it's like very quick, very low latency. Yep. It it says it feels like pretty much as close to talking to somebody like in a Google Hangout or Zoom as you can get.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so I think maybe maybe their voice mode is underrated.
Speaker 1:I think so. I have a friend who has a Tesla with
Speaker 2:a long commute. And The question is, is there value beyond comedy? Not saying there needs to be right So But if Grok can actually get good at doing things for you Yeah. Genetically, and you're driving in your Tesla, and you can say, hey, book me a haircut Yeah. You know, for next week.
Speaker 2:And you can, like, do that. Or, hey, I need to get some groceries. Can you order some groceries to the house? And you're actually just getting that kind of, like, ambient Yep. Assistant experience
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I think that they could get some traction there. They do have a same amount of cars on the road. That's a big user base.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have a friend who has a Tesla with long commute, and he talks to grok voice mode. Not the crazy mode, just the normal mode about, you know, putting together to do lists, planning out the day, researching things, answering questions, getting up to speed while he's commuting. I've done that a few times where I've just kind of sort of opened up not the voice mode specifically, but the record my voice and transcribe And I'll sort of talk about what's on the agenda for today and then try and put it into just a sort of, you know, annotated note format that I can work on.
Speaker 2:We breaking news from Elon.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:He shared XAI was reorganized a few days ago to improve speed of execution. As the company grows, especially as quickly as XAI, the structure must evolve just like any living organism.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This unfortunately required parting ways with some people and we wish them well in future endeavors. We are hiring aggressively. Join x AI if the idea of mass drivers on the moon appeals to you.
Speaker 1:That's funny. I like that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. But like, yeah, like, mass drivers is like not an AI thing. Right? So it's very clear that like, if if you wanna work on these crazy, like, moonshot AI, like this weird Yeah. Machine learning concept, like, maybe it's it's not actually that aligned with with XAI anymore.
Speaker 1:Sure. Well, I mean, yeah. It's like, what type of moonshot do you wanna work on? ASI that lives in a data center or the infrastructure that will power humanoids and the mass driver on the moon that's making endless satellites that, you know, build the Dyson sphere? It's like it's a different direction, maybe even longer term moonshot, but it is different.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, they they still have, the MacroHard project, right, which is, like, still I'm I'm very excited to see Yeah. What comes out of that.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do they do they have a CLI tool yet for Grok?
Speaker 6:I I wanna say there's there is a Grok's code.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, XAI posted a forty five minute all hands Mhmm. Outlining their accomplishments and a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 1:So Today.
Speaker 2:We will watch that right now in silence.
Speaker 1:Yes. No.
Speaker 2:No, we're not going to watch it.
Speaker 1:No, we'll tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Speaker 2:So Let's see. A lot of people like, a number of researchers have just been doom posting Yeah. The timeline. Hugh Pham says, today, I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing. When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's when, not if. So this is somebody who's actively at OpenAI. Yeah. And so it's significant, but it's also great marketing for
Speaker 1:I investing in think people are more skeptical when it comes from the CEOs who are actually out on the fundraising trail than from staff engineers who have less of an incentive.
Speaker 8:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But this post has been up for nineteen hours, and it has 384,000 views. So you can assure you can can I would say OpenAI comms has seen this post Mhmm. And has not asked them to take it down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, they probably genuinely feel that way. The question is just like, how real is it? And how how diffuse will this be? How fast will it be?
Speaker 1:Is it February 2020? Or is it, I don't know, some other time, 1995? There's someone on X who has figured out a massive viral hack to go viral with AI slop constantly. I thought it was very funny because I looked up the account and I already had them mute I already had them muted. But the formula is as such, Trunk Fan laid it out, find a viral post.
Speaker 1:AI generates a take of 400 to 800 words as a quote. You do 10 plus quotes in quick in a row and hope a few hit. Between 10:30 and eight and ten p. M. Yesterday, cranked out 13 of them, 10,000 words total, all AI slop every day, unreal.
Speaker 1:And the and so Trung fact checked or spot checked them with Pangram, and you'd see that it's fully AI generated. But apparently, he blocked Pangram Labs. I was laughing because the there's this interesting divergence in the performance. Some of the posts have tens of thousands of likes, and some of them will just sit there with, like, one like, two likes, no likes. And so it's it's this odd case of 300,000 followers on LinkedIn and something like almost 200,000 followers on X.
Speaker 1:Like, it's working, but there's no real audience. Because if you post something that's just that only gets one like, it feels like there's no, like, real audience there, real fans. So I'm wondering, like, how this monetizes. Is this a real business? Where is this going?
Speaker 1:But certainly, frustrating some people at the trough.
Speaker 2:Ackman makes $2,000,000,000 bet on Meta. Oh. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square revealed a major new stake in Meta, making up up 10% of its portfolio or about 2,000,000,000. The firm sees Meta as a top beneficiary of AI, boosting ads content in future products like wearables and digital assistance. I saw somebody had wired up.
Speaker 2:I don't think we got to it in the show, but they wired up OpenClaw with their Meta headset.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And Which one? VR, AR, or The the
Speaker 1:AR one. The display.
Speaker 2:Effectively saying like, hey, buy this product. It would Oh. It would go to Amazon and buy the product. Wow. And that is that is the vision we've been talking.
Speaker 2:That is the opportunity. Zach wants you to be able to just be in the world Yep. Shopping.
Speaker 1:Yep. And for a lot of people that don't wanna wire up an open source project, he will slowly do all the biz dev deals to, drive traffic. Although Meta has tried to get into commerce so many times, and we can talk to Harley about this as well. There's been a lot of back and forth about should you be able to just click and check out directly on Meta properties. It's never fully developed, and you have to imagine that they have all the biz dev horsepower in the world to try and go and do that.
Speaker 1:But for some reason, that has continued to live in the domain of brands in Amazon, on Shopify sites, etcetera. Quickly, Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And Scott Wu is sharing some news from Cognition. Your PR should fix themselves.
Speaker 1:With auto fix, Devin now closes the loop on its own PRs. If Devin review or GitHub bot flags bugs, Devin automatically fixes the PR. Devin also tackles CI lint issues until all checks pass. And so there's auto fix, and Scott just says one step closer to the recursive, ever improving AI coding system.
Speaker 2:JayBull on
Speaker 3:X What's JayBull?
Speaker 2:Says, cool. So now Meta is Enron Explain. Being being a little dramatic. But Meta's plat Meta Platform's auditor Ernst and Young raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27,000,000,000 data center project off its balance sheet. Meta moved the data center project into a new joint venture with BlueOut Capital and said it isn't the primary beneficiary of Vicinity, so it didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Four Democratic senators asked the Financial Stability Oversight Council to investigate the risks that AI related debt posed to the financial system, citing Meta's joint venture with BlueOwl as an example of a convoluted and opaque financing.
Speaker 1:This is this is sort of old news. We talked about the BlueOwl deal and how it was structured as as its own entity. It's its own business. It just has Meta as a as a tenant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think I think for me, I would probably need to see them doing like copy and pasting this like, you know, 10 more times
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To the point where I'd be like, you know, maybe Meta's not good for it. Right? But
Speaker 1:I mean, it still shows up in in the cash flow if they're paying for the data center. They need to monetize it properly.
Speaker 2:Nas on a roll. It says apparently Walter Bloomberg has no vocal cords left because of all the uppercase shouting on the axe.
Speaker 5:He's constantly
Speaker 1:Walter
Speaker 2:I bet a lot of people out there think he just works for Bloomberg.
Speaker 1:They probably do.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Walter Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg. Joe Wiesenthal's
Speaker 1:boss. Definitely.
Speaker 2:Well, we got Harley in the waiting room. Let's bring
Speaker 1:him in. To the TV panel, Jerome. Harley, how are you doing?
Speaker 5:Gentlemen, great to be here as always. Love being here on earnings day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Always good to have you.
Speaker 2:Great to have you back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Give us the update on earnings, and then I wanna dig into, you know, what you can tell us about the economy broadly, 2025, the jobs numbers, everything about what's happening in the world. Help us understand it.
Speaker 5:All right. Let's go. All right. Let's start with the headlines. Last time we were on together, I think it was Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
Speaker 5:I think I came to you live from the middle of the National Retail or maybe it's January, actually. January. National Retail Federation. Yeah. And I told you that you asked about how things were on Shopify, I said wait for the earnings.
Speaker 5:Here are the earnings we announced earlier this morning. GMV was up 29% to $378,000,000,000 which is incredible. Revenue was up 30% to $11,500,000,000 which is a decade of growth of over 20%. The number that actually has I've been at Shopify for almost half my life, and this number is I don't know, it hits hard, which is that we now power more than 14% of the entire US e commerce market, which is
Speaker 2:You guys did 1% of the TAM meme, and then you 14x ed it.
Speaker 5:That's exactly right. And actually, one of the cool parts is that we also did it with, I think, incredible discipline. Cash flow for the year was about $2,000,000,000 for 2025. Beyond that, one of the things that I think I'm certainly most proud of is that we really spent kind of 2025 building the rails for AI shopping, and we did things like announce the universal commerce protocol that we co developed with Google, which effectively means that every single brand will be able to sell on every major AI platform with our AgenTic storefronts. And we have partnerships with ChatGPT, Google Gemini, AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot.
Speaker 5:And so I think if you if you kinda think about 2025 as the year that we kind of laid the rails for AgenTic, I think 2026 is the year that we scale what runs on them. And and so that, I think, is is really incredible. Back to what we were talking about at NRF. We're talking about some of the brands and and how the velocity of growth. We can talk about consumer as well.
Speaker 5:But just in terms of the merchants entrepreneurs we see, I I'm beginning to think that 2026 is is really gonna be kinda year one for this next generation of these billion dollar brands. I think there's gonna be more billion dollar brands created in the next ten years than the last hundred years. And and in terms of, you know, if you're looking for kind of a proxy for how the consumer is doing, I mean, we we talked, you know, we talked during BFCM, of course. We did that, you know, I I sort of became a a couple of hours. Exactly.
Speaker 5:But look, GMV for the quarter was a 124,000,000,000. I mentioned, you know, for the year was almost $400,000,000,000. And so if you if you think about that as a as a proxy for, you know, how consumers are doing, Consumers are buying. They're buying from brands they love. They're being incredibly thoughtful about where they're spending their dollars.
Speaker 5:But for the brands that they care about, they're voting with their wallets to support them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Talk about agentic commerce. Is there any activity that's happening yet? Is the ads launch from ChatGPT going to be an important moment in driving that? What are you looking forward to this quarter in terms of agentic?
Speaker 5:So we do have some merchants live already. Merchants like Glossier, Spanx, Viore, Stanley, Steve Madden are already live. Actually, if you just look from Jan twenty twenty five to Jan twenty twenty six, we actually have seen approximately AI searches. So if you look at your Shopify admin in terms of sources, it's up, like, 15 x. Still very early, but it's certainly beginning to evolve.
Speaker 5:And one of the things that we're trying to do for the merchants on Shopify is that if you're with us, you can sell everywhere commerce is happening, whether that's online or offline or certainly on on AgenTic. And I I think, you know, you guys have discussed this many times, but I think there's gonna be a bunch of, like, there's gonna be a bunch of diff different permutations of exactly how agentic commerce evolves. What we're doing is we're preparing for whichever path wins. Shopify is going to be well set up there. In terms of ads, I mean, that's not you know, ads are not a new thing.
Speaker 5:I think ads have always been part of the commerce experience in some form, sort of natural evolution. I think consumers expect this. I think the key, though, is going to be there has to be a clear distinction between kind of ads and organic content. And so far, that's what we're seeing as well. But generally and and, you know, I I think, you know, we're in the early stage of 2026, but it does certainly feel like there is a massive I know you were talking a bit earlier about, you know, how a bunch of young people became kinda drop shippers Yeah.
Speaker 5:Based on some influence. In many ways, it does feel like there are more people starting businesses, but the velocity of those businesses is just insane right now. And and, like, because, like, they can access global markets, like, right away, they have incredible resources. It feels like a really, really important time to be an entrepreneur right now and a very exciting time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the moat for d to c entrepreneurs? Is it changing? Is it brand? Is it distribution?
Speaker 1:Marketing chops?
Speaker 5:I mean, look. I I think let me I'll give you a quick example. We launched Shopify Sidekick Mhmm. About a year ago or so, which is our we we sort of call it your your cofounder. It lives inside of Shopify.
Speaker 5:It knows everything about your business and everything about commerce and Shopify. We added to this thing called Shopify Pulse recently, which is this new feature that effectively it proactively helps merchants grow their business. It works in the background. It surfaces like these tailored recommendations for things you can do to grow your business. And then if you agree to them, it actually goes and executes.
Speaker 5:I heard the story last week of a of a jewelry merchant who was actually who got a recommendation from Pulse to rather than having four separate SKUs to actually bundle them into a stack and create a bundle. And immediately, that particular merchant, like, immediately saw more sales happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:If you are meeting these great merchants with great ambition and great products and adding this, like, personalized data analysis with great intelligence, I don't know. It it's it's it's bespoke. It's intuitive, but it it really will allow more of these direct to consumer brands to access, I think, more customers. And this idea of, you know, like, initially, it was, like, online only for DTC. Then it was, like, let's try offline as well.
Speaker 5:I have online and offline working simultaneously. It feels like we've evolved well past that that and and this is kinda what we're doing at Shopify, which is that regardless of where consumers are spending their time, make it really easy for merchants and entrepreneurs to access those markets. And simple something as simple as, like, the agentic storefronts where with a couple clicks, you can push products to ChatGBT and to Gemini. That's only gonna increase the velocity even further.
Speaker 2:SaaSpocalypse, how are you guys? I'm just gonna say the word that's been on everybody's mind the last, like, you know, ten days or so or ten months, if if for for kind of our corner of the Internet. I look at Shopify, it's a system of record, it's payments, it's a cons, you know, consumer buying network, it's battle tested infrastructure that that needs to be, you know, have, you know, insane uptime. Like, don't see the I don't see the vibe coding risk at all, but how are you guys answering that kind of question with analysts?
Speaker 5:Yeah. It it's look, I I we I did our call this morning at 08:30, and we've basically been with analysts and investors the entire day. The question does come up. I mean, first of let just say this. People have been underestimating Shopify pretty much since day one.
Speaker 5:We've sort of made it a habit of proving them wrong, which is which is kind of fun. I think a couple things. I think AI for on the AgenTex side, I think AI will change how people discover products and potentially even how they buy. Mhmm. That's what we're building for.
Speaker 5:We are building for these AgenTex storefront experiences and and making sure tools like Sidekick make it so that if you're on Shopify, you're just better positioned. Mhmm. But, you know, the the truth is, like, AI is going to rewrite interfaces. It's not it it will not rewrite the transaction contract. And and one of the things that we've been building on Shopify you know, everyone talks about the online store, like, you're you know, you the the ecommerce component of Shopify.
Speaker 5:The killer feature of Shopify for a very long time has actually been the back office, the retail operating system. That's where you go to do inventory, and and you do taxes, and you do analytics and reporting. You launch marketing campaigns, and you create loyalty, and you do payment authorizations and fraud prevention. Ultimately, I think the companies that are going to continue really well, notwithstanding some of this vibe coding, the ones that will do well will be the ones that are system of records, the ones that are actually operating like operating systems. And and, you know, that's that's Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I And I some other companies yeah. Yeah. Just jumping in. Like, I do think that there when when throughout my history, you know, being being a Shopify, you know, customer and and user over the years, I would be if I was operating like a tiny Shopify plug in that one engineer had built and they were charging $30 a month, I would be a little bit worried about vibe coding because I do remember in throughout history using a plug in where I was like, okay.
Speaker 2:This is a nice little feature that I can bolt on Yep. And I'm happy to pay for this because it doesn't make sense for me to go hire an engineer to build some custom
Speaker 1:Email case.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, whatever whatever that is. So I think I can just do it again. But again, that is a that is a that's a tailwind for Shopify as a platform because you have the system of record and it's like, hey, now we can allow you to add these kind of like Lego blocks on top of it. So Yeah.
Speaker 5:I I you know, one of the things we're we're noticing, actually, one of the questions I got on the earnings call this morning was the growth of the app ecosystem, that there's now more people building apps for us. So one of the things we're we're seeing app developers, but also merchants themselves who historically would hire, you know, a third party to build a tool, do it themselves. And part of the reason that we're putting out all these new APIs and SDKs and and these new tools to build on top of this because we actually think having more people build on on top of Shopify, you know, benefits benefits merchants. But back to that whole, like, if you were just a feature, I mean, you you know, you guys if I had to word cloud, you know, your show, the word rapper probably comes up as much as as as anything. Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think you actually have to create something of real value. And if all you're really doing is wrapping something, you're gonna struggle. But companies if you look at the apps on I mean, you know, take some of the larger apps on Shopify, like the Klavios of the world, you know, who are who built this incredible, in their own ways, their own rails around email marketing that is very, very difficult to disrupt. So I I think the idea of, like, we wanna invite more people to build incredible tools on top of Shopify, and also give merchant tools to build it themselves. But I think that, you know, AI will rewrite interfaces will never rewrite, like, real infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Playvio is a a great example because you could have a somebody could could build something that can send an email, but then if your delivery is just terrible, it's just gonna be you might, like, save a little but a little bit using the five coded solution, but then you're, like, losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because you're not actually getting through to your customers. So there's there's any, like, ecommerce operator, like, getting you guys know this too. Like, you've spent like, you guys have had a better solution in the market for how many years and you're still, you know how hard it is to convert a legacy brand to even trust a new platform because they're like, our current system is not great, but we know we know how critical this infrastructure is and and what a big step it is. So I
Speaker 5:It is interesting. Even on the enterprise side, one of the things that I've noticed coming out of NRF, which effectively is like all the largest retailers are all there, is that even the largest retailers who feel like they have something that's good enough, they're getting pushed by their exec team or their board to think about like unified commerce. This idea that, you know, think about the metaphor of, a browser with 12 tabs open, online, offline, agentic, cross sell on social media platforms, b to b. Even the most traditional of of retailers and businesses, we are finding now are coming to Shopify for simplicity, that they don't wanna run this, like, you know, this Rube Goldberg machine in commerce. They actually wanna create this centralized back office that runs all of it.
Speaker 5:And that's been amazing for us. In fact, one of the biggest areas of growth for us has been the enterprise. And companies that traditionally did not come to shop, like General Motors, for example, or Estee Lauder, for example, are now migrating to us as well. So I I think, you know, it's an exciting time to be a new entrepreneur getting started because the resources and the tools are insane. But even with some of the largest retailers, the next few years are gonna be incredible for them because they're gonna access these tools and be able to operate at a pace that, frankly, some of them have never been able to operate at.
Speaker 1:Yep. Do have a hard stop at 12:30?
Speaker 5:I can keep going for bit.
Speaker 1:Okay. I want to talk about evolution of UI, of tactical, like when I had an e commerce site that was not on Shopify regrettably, launching a new product was like Oh, god. How are we going to literally Django go in the back end? What's the database schema? Is it a boolean?
Speaker 1:Right? Like, all these different things. Right? Then you go to Shopify and it's very easy Is it
Speaker 5:now who stores or something? Like, what
Speaker 1:was No. Was literally Django, like like Python. Like like it was like hosted on Heroku, I think. And so, yeah, homegrown disaster. Huge, huge waste of resources.
Speaker 1:You go to Shopify, you get a an HTML page with a bunch of fields that you can fill in when you have a new product, and it fills into the templates. Right? Is the future I talk to Shopify in natural language? Is that actually better than defining my product variants in HTML UI? Like, do you think that, like, Shopify will have an agent that where I'm I'm I'm making changes within the Shopify ecosystem but in in natural language?
Speaker 1:Or is HTML dropdowns, are those sort of like more Lindy than we think?
Speaker 5:So I think the good news is you can do both. Right? Yeah. Like, the idea is can we make the important things really easy and everything else possible? There are merchants right now that we have a product we just announced in in December at our at our edition called SimGym.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:SimGym effectively simulates what any task might be. Mhmm. So you can say, if I change this particular design or I try this particular campaign, what does SimGym simulate will be the results of that. And we're seeing a lot of our merchants begin to adopt it now and try it out. I think the idea should be you can do both.
Speaker 5:If ultimately what you do best is you are an artisan, you make beautiful products, you make some sort of, like, children's toys, and they're amazing, and and you actually do not know anything about digital commerce, digital marketing, I think you can use Sidekick as really your your CMO and your your your your cofounder that helps you become a lot more, you know, Internet native when it comes to commerce and retail. Mhmm. In other cases, the idea that, you know, some of our our brands, like Skims, for example, or or Aloyoga, for example, I mean, they wanna do some really customizable stuff. They're very technical. They have an amazing engineering team.
Speaker 5:They wanna go into the code and really make it. So so their particular store is is exactly what they want. That ability where, you know, at some point, you had to either build your own stack if you wanted massive customization, Or if you didn't know how to use anything when it came to ecommerce, you had to go and hire, you know, some sort of, like, company to go build everything on your behalf. I think all that's gone. I think the net result of that's gonna be you're gonna have way more people starting businesses and way more companies getting larger at a much faster clip.
Speaker 5:A psychic is a really good example of that and so is Simjim. I think beyond that, the other thing is, like, this idea that you start with one particular channel, I think will will very quickly go away. We're already starting to see that where immediately, you know, you may start with your online store as your online hub, but very quickly, you're gonna activate an Instagram channel or TikTok channel, or you may decide, hey. I I wanna try this agentic thing. I think this idea that I am an x kind of merchant, I'm an online merchant, offline merchant, think I that's going to be something that, like it's going to be like talking about the color TV.
Speaker 5:It makes no sense in the future. But all that coming together is is what we've been building in Shopify for two decades, and the end result of it is that, you know, we're seeing way more entrepreneurship than ever before.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Jordy,
Speaker 2:anything else? How are you talking to last question. How are you talking to friends, family outside of the tech bubble about AI Yeah. On X? You were busy with earnings, but on X, there's a there's an essay with, like, 50,000,000 views basically telling everyone to freak out.
Speaker 2:I'm curious how you're
Speaker 5:I saw I saw the essay before I before I started my day. I actually sent the essay to my wife just because I wanted to substantiate that I'm not an insane person Yeah. Talking about this stuff every single day. Yeah. I think that essay I think you guys said, or someone said, like, that essay feels like it crossed the chasm.
Speaker 1:It did.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Like, it it like, what are Containment. You Exactly. It it went kind of well beyond Totally. Just like our kind of little, you know, world circle of the Internet.
Speaker 5:I think ultimately, the the idea of being reflexive with AI you know, Toby wrote this letter a couple months ago. You guys probably remember it. It got leaked. And it really know, the reason it got leaked was it talked about that if you wanna hire someone at Shopify for your team, first, you have to substantiate why AI AI can do it better. But if you actually looked at, like, the the meta message in the in in the Can't do it better.
Speaker 5:Email. Can't
Speaker 2:do it better. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Definitely. Cannot do better. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 5:That AI cannot that so if you can't do it better, then you, like, you can hire. But, like, if AI can do it better, you're you know, we're not we're not you know, the headcount doesn't get allocated. Yeah. Which what it really suggested was this idea of, like, AI reflex that rather than sort of use it as a tool, how do you kinda use it as part of your day to day life? You know, when I'm preparing for an earnings call with Jeff, our our CFO, we used to go around and meet a ton of different product leaders around the company to kinda glean and and figure out and summarize, like, what are the most exciting things happening at Shopify?
Speaker 5:It was an it like, it was part of the process for, I don't know, like, ten quarters. Now effectively, we go to Shopify's vault. We have, like, a dozen MCPs running. We're able to pull way more information we can. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So when we do meet with those product leaders, the conversations are way richer. They're not spending a bunch of time explaining to us on on a, you know, at at a very abstract level or or a, you know, at at a macro level what they're working on. We can ask specific questions. I think companies that become more reflective and individuals that become more reflective, especially entrepreneurs, there's no doubt it's gonna make you more, you know, it's gonna make you more effective and more efficient. But I think articles like this, it invites the non tech community into what we're seeing in a way that I think is is important.
Speaker 5:I think the reason it's getting so much traction is because it felt like it was it felt like it was written for my wife as opposed to for me. Yeah. And and not to say that she is a laggard, she's not, but but she needed someone who isn't me to say, hey, you should really take this stuff seriously. It's really cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:For sure. But that's different than I think a lot of people are sharing it, saying, you should take this seriously. It's really cool. I think a lot of people have been processing this as like Yeah. You should take this seriously, and it's like, get your financial house in order.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You know, this is like, you're gonna get steamrolled.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I no. Look. I I I'm not like, don't believe in the doom of them. I'm I'm an eternal optimist.
Speaker 5:Think I think what it's done for Shopify, for our merchants, for our business has been incredible. I think what it's doing for individual entrepreneurs is incredible. My daughter, you know, we we recently moved to we moved to Montreal, which is a French city. My my kids, we moved from an English city. My kids are learning French right now.
Speaker 5:There's homework that comes that I just cannot help them with. I I would have had to hire a tutor. I still may have to at some point, but the fact that I'm able to do so much more on my own, even in my own, like, dad role makes my life better. Totally. So what's so cool about that is for
Speaker 2:for for you, you can you you can go hire a tutor. You could hire 10 tutors, but there's a of family there's a lot families that just never would have been able to do that. They're they're the kids would have
Speaker 5:been struggling. And, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Like mean, sometimes, like, my my four year old will ask me just why, why, why, you know, the 10 whys of, like, why, like, why is the sky blue? And I'll be like, I think I know why, but I I even if I even with the money, I can't hire a tutor to come buy the house at 9PM on a Tuesday two seconds, but I can go and look it up and then relay a story, and I can tell that story however I want.
Speaker 5:Be optimistic when you have those tools available to you.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 5:Key, though, is looking at them as these incredible tools. Yes. Looking at them as a way for you to create, like, some sort of exoskeleton in for all of our lives. Yes. And and there's gonna be some laggards.
Speaker 5:I mean, it's gonna be, like
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think it's was Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm. Like, we will cross the chasm wherein the mainstream will use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:My mom's using AI right now mostly for, like, things like recipes. Sure. But that's sort of like a gateway drug, I think, for her using it for things like questions about, I don't know, banking or whatever my mom does daily. So I I it's tough not to be optimistic. And and certainly from a Shopify perspective, it's been incredibly valuable for us.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Agencik shopping hasn't even started yet, but, like, we're prepared for it. And I think I don't know. It sounds like
Speaker 2:an over Yeah. Even even for entrepreneurship, like I
Speaker 5:think we're still underselling the opportunity with AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. When when I look back in my early days of entrepreneurship, luckily, had people around that I could call and say, hey, how do you do this? Or what kind of contract do I need for this? How do I set this thing up? How do I what should I use a safe note?
Speaker 2:Should I use this or that? And now, entrepreneurs can build a network quickly, but you don't need a network to get customized advice on pretty much any situation. And yes, it could still be wrong sometimes, but it's usually directionally correct and helps you be more informed. And it's amazing.
Speaker 5:It feels also like we as humans, we don't often wanna ask someone else the question that we deem as being like a silly question or a stupid question. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's one of my favorite parts of AI. Right? Just like ask a dumb question.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Totally. Totally agree. I remember when we raised our first our series a,
Speaker 2:this is, I don't know Wow.
Speaker 5:Literally almost twenty years ago, I had to look up what a liquidation preference
Speaker 1:was nice.
Speaker 5:All around. Yeah. And I and I felt like, you know, I like we're raising a series a, and it was a $25,000,000 round, best number to let it. And and I remember thinking, like, I I I went to I was already a lawyer. Like, I wasn't a very good lawyer, I finished law school.
Speaker 5:I didn't went to business school, and I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. I just sort of think back of now the, like, the amount of information. I could have taken I could have got all these case studies. I could have understood it in in in a much deeper way. That is where I think so it's not surprising
Speaker 2:that you could have dropped the term sheet into any LLM and instantly gotten, like, pretty
Speaker 5:Tell me what's wrong with
Speaker 2:pull out all the main terms. Here's what's marked. Here's what you can push back on.
Speaker 1:Anyway
Speaker 2:It's amazing. No more doom. Sorry. Thank you for not
Speaker 5:No more doom, guys.
Speaker 1:Come on. Let's taking the extra time.
Speaker 8:This is
Speaker 5:gonna be great.
Speaker 1:We kept you
Speaker 5:long. Great to meet
Speaker 1:great of your We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye, Harley. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small modern, small, and medium sized businesses. And I'm also gonna tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world?
Speaker 1:Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Nikita Beer has a prediction. I want your take on Nikita Beer's prediction. He says, in less than ninety days, all channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. IMessage, phone calls, Gmail, and we will have no way to stop it.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't yeah. I mean, he he must be seeing something. Yeah. I would assume he's seeing something at axe.
Speaker 1:He's been fighting this for a long time. He's the trenches, for sure.
Speaker 2:Fighting the bots. Yes. I got a I got a a pretty good AI phone call yesterday that was somebody leaving me a voicemail that was just like, just have a few questions. Give me a callback. Oh.
Speaker 2:That's that's why I was in yeah. It was a good
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. No. Sometimes, like, the the text message is
Speaker 2:like But I listened to the voicemail Yeah. And I could clock it as AI. But when I just got the, like, kind of, like, summary of it
Speaker 1:if But it's David Attenborough, you're gonna be like, David. I would love to do a documentary about a flying beaver with you. Sign me
Speaker 2:up. So
Speaker 1:hack that sort of solves this. On X, you go into the settings, and you turn off notifications from anyone that you're not mutuals with, that's not verified, that doesn't have a phone number. You just make it really you will miss some stuff, but you will see way less spam. On iMessage and and and the iPhone, I I just don't accept calls from unknown numbers. And so, like, you have to be in my contacts book.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so how do I actually meet people? Well, I get mutually introduced. I add their contact. We get into a group chat, and it's just it's just a game of chain linking one chain to the next.
Speaker 1:So if you Yeah.
Speaker 2:For me, for me, there's already there's already pretty finite. There's a small number of people who are free to call me out of the blue whenever, and I will pick up if I'm Totally. If I'm available. Totally. And then there's another big group of people that I'd be happy to have a phone call with Yes.
Speaker 2:But I'm not just gonna pick up out of nowhere because, you know Yeah. Whatever. So talked about it before.
Speaker 1:The typical spam functionality for a long time has been deny lists or black lists, where you have a list of spam accounts and you deny those, you block those numbers. Everything is shifting to allow lists or whitelists where you have an approved list of people that can get through through your messaging apps. And basically, messages, cold DMs are gonna be a lot harder to break through. So the era of the reply guy who gets retweeted and ratios and, you know, gets surfaced, maybe that's the maybe that's the alpha these days.
Speaker 2:Or you just have to grind harder. I have a post that I wanna read to
Speaker 1:Puffer first. Serverless vector and full text search. Build from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10 x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
Speaker 2:Shopify alumni. I have a post. I want your reaction.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 5:Hit me.
Speaker 2:It's from Delicious Tacos.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for ten years, and I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can.
Speaker 2:Buy stock in hot dog companies.
Speaker 1:I I I think it's a little different, but it is funny.
Speaker 2:It is very funny. I mean, who knows? Hot dogs might change everything.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, you got you got you got quote tweeted here. You said, Justin, horses say we may be in a car bubble, which is funny because that's a pro AI take. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was confused by this. AI not kill everyone is a meme responded kind of saying, horse says the real risk is what happens to the economy when the car bubble pops. So it's kind of it's it's this is a techno optimist account now?
Speaker 1:No. I think it's a doomer account. Right?
Speaker 2:No. No. I don't think so.
Speaker 6:Wait. Really?
Speaker 2:They say techno optimist in their bio.
Speaker 1:Okay. I thought they were always like pause AIs, pause the progress, but maybe the maybe the bubble is a is a bigger issue as well. Well, we can continue to dig into that quickly. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and and invest securely connecting accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.
Speaker 2:What's The we got the we got a Bugatti Tourbillon
Speaker 1:The luche.
Speaker 2:Post here.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:The Bugatti's mogging.
Speaker 1:The post says the Ferrari Luche makes the interior of the Bugatti Bugatti Tourbillon look like an absolute master class Bravo Ferrari. It's pure genius to be this bad. People are still going back and forth on this. The Tourbillon, this is a this is a driving machine.
Speaker 2:My take takeaway from all the reactions this week in my personal view is I think the Johnny Ive Ferrari will be popular in specific bubbles Mhmm. On the West Coast Yeah. And generally not be very loved.
Speaker 1:The only yeah. The only thing that that really jumps out to me about the about the design is the is the rounded rectangle display in the center. It just is it does feel iPad ish. It feels like there's the tactile buttons, but the the just that block of, like, there's a screen.
Speaker 2:There's also, like, a leather kind of lunchbox looking thing that you can pull out. Cool. Which I think is weird.
Speaker 1:It is so odd.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't love it.
Speaker 1:Take it on the go, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Rat limit on x says, people who back into parking spots cannot be truly present. You envisualized your departure the moment you arrived. Invisualized?
Speaker 1:This isn't even a word. Is it envisioned? Envisioned. This is hilarious. Still decay.
Speaker 1:Like, I love it. You envisioned your departure the moment you arrived. You're not truly present. Do you back in ever? I back in every once in a while, but mostly I'm angling for the room for the doors.
Speaker 1:So if a pillar in the parking garage
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That will block the passenger door and have a passenger
Speaker 2:It's strategic. It's not
Speaker 1:default. Exactly. So I am extra I'm extra present. I'm extremely present. I'm locked in trying to give my passenger the best possible vehicle exiting experience there could possibly be.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Figma. FigmaMake isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps fast.
Speaker 2:Thoma Bravo executives fielded queries and held conversations with investors to discuss the impact of AI on their software portfolios. Vista Equity's chief executive sent an email to clients and plans to follow-up with a webinar. Don't worry, I'm following up with a webinar to discuss the state of the firm's portfolio, saying that we believe that AI will enhance software, not replace it. Leaders of several firms, including KKR, Blackstone, and Ares, reported that their exposure to the sector are limited and that the sell off is overblown, with some saying that AI will not significantly impact their well established portfolio companies. It's hard to say that it won't impact it at all.
Speaker 2:You kinda gotta kinda gotta pick a side in most cases. Mhmm. But, yeah, it's interesting. You've got, like, you know, like PE firms Yeah. That only own software.
Speaker 2:Yep. And they're like, no big deal. Yeah. We're excited about this. We're not worried at all.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. But they're having to do kind of like, you know
Speaker 1:It's the what kind of American and RU meme. It's what kind of software did you Did you
Speaker 2:own something then on the other side, have firms that have some exposure saying, well, we don't have very much exposure.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:And so these are the messaging
Speaker 1:is so not this is what we were talking about this morning. This I think there will need to be, in many ways, a reclassification of who the AI winners and who the AI losers are in the software world because there truly are platforms where, yes, you could vibe code it, but the value in the asset is the liquidity on that platform. Like, you can vibe code an Airbnb marketplace competitor, but if there's no houses on there and they're all AI generated and you can't actually go to the beach house, like, you don't actually compete with Airbnb. And so there's a lot of software companies that fit in that world where there's liquidity or some other network effect or some scale economy. But purely just having, okay, we spent a bunch of money on R and D, we have a bunch of lines of code written, and it would cost you $1,000,000,000 to write the same amount of code and compete with us.
Speaker 1:So you're not going to do that because you're going to take a billion dollars to raise all the money and then you're just going to be competing with us. Well, now that billion dollars is shrinking down. Maybe it's $100,000,000 Maybe it's $10,000,000 Maybe it's less and less and less. And so there will be need in many ways, it's a return to form of, like, where are the true moats? And then intellectual property, obviously, network effects, scale economies.
Speaker 2:There's a few Regulatory.
Speaker 1:Regulatory. So, yeah, there will be some software companies, some SaaS companies where you find out that it's like Duolingo with like, oh, it's actually a game and people love the brand. And so that's been much more resilient relative to a Chegg that was basically just data that was scraped and put into ChattyPT and the stock's down 90%.
Speaker 2:Pythia Cap responded to the comments from Tomo Bravo and Vista Equity saying, breaking. Six x levered long software investors who can't exit think software is okay, actually. Mhmm. So
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also Pat Grady from Sequoia Capital has quote tweeted my article, and he chimes in, sort of agrees. He says AI I the title of my article was AI is not COVID, and he says AI is not COVID in three key ways. And I wish I had put this in the article because it's pretty good analysis.
Speaker 1:He says it's bigger, much bigger, and I agree with that. COVID, you look at the numbers and it goes up. It was crazy, world changing, but then now we've moved on, and there's a whole different set of stories. It's durable. COVID was a wave.
Speaker 1:It came and went. AI will compound. And so you never go back to not using the Internet. You never go back to not using a mobile device. You never go back to not having AI in the world.
Speaker 1:You do go back to a world where you can walk around and not feel sick if you don't wear a mask. That happened. And then third, he says, we have a choice. This is important and the main reason to read the article. With COVID, everyone played defense.
Speaker 1:With AI, we can choose to play offense. Don't let AI wash over you. Put it to work. And this is what Harley was saying as well. There's an opportunity.
Speaker 1:And Pat Grady says, the best time to make that choice is right now. And I agree. It's an optimistic message.
Speaker 2:Alex Hsu Yes. Says, at this point, I can't tell if Harvey is in the business of selling technology to lawyers or equity to VCs. He, of course, is in
Speaker 1:What business is he in?
Speaker 2:He's in works for a company called Oh. Attitude. We specialize in providing high end flexible legal talent to corporate legal departments. So he's in a a legal a lawyer staffing firm.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:So hard to take this post.
Speaker 1:Guess what? News flash. If you're the CEO of a startup, you're in both businesses, buddy, always, no matter You gotta raise. You gotta out raise your competitors. If you're in a competitive space, if you're in a high growth industry, you have to be selling equity VCs, and you also got to be selling your product to customers.
Speaker 1:Get used to it. It's the game on the field, and you're going to be playing it. Let me tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1,000,000,000 daily active users and grow your business today.
Speaker 2:Jira ticket says, knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket and they blew his head. Smooth off. I can't believe how mainstream this this is. 5,000,000 views, 167,000 likes. Andre at console says, should I use console?
Speaker 2:Does does solve that exact issue. Sof over on x says, gonna name my son Garrett. Short short for cigarette. I never put that together.
Speaker 1:I used to have
Speaker 2:Garrett would be a beautiful name.
Speaker 1:I used to have this joke with Christian Garrett from one hundred thirty seven Ventures because the his first initial is c. So if it's c garrette, it's cigarette. And it's like he has the name. Anyway, BlackRock's getting into DeFi. Totally unimaginable five years ago, but they're doing it.
Speaker 1:We should
Speaker 2:They're talk a buying lot Uniswap tokens. Yes.
Speaker 1:They're buying Uniswap tokens. So Fortune has a story here. In the latest sign of the rapid convergence of Wall Street and crypto, the world's biggest asset manager is moving into decentralized finance or DeFi. BlackRock on Wednesday revealed it will be bringing its treasury backed digital token called Build with misspelled, that's very online for BlackRock, onto Uniswap, a leading DeFi platform, where it will be bought and sold by institutional traders. As part of the tie up, BlackRock is also purchasing an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's own token, Uni.
Speaker 1:The new arrangement, which is being undertaken with tokenization firm Securitize, is a significant milestone for the DeFi sector, which many view as one of the most useful applications in crypto unlike traditional trading, which relies on centralized intermediaries to record and settle trades. Platforms like Uniswap where clients where where rely on smart contracts to match buyers and sellers via liquidity pools and automated market makers. Currently, there are around $100,000,000,000 worth of capital sitting on DeFi platforms. I remember DeFi summer. Were you deep in the trenches during DeFi summer?
Speaker 1:It was a it was a big what was that? 2022? Right? 2021? It was before the crash.
Speaker 1:'20 It was the era of, like, Thor chain and, like, and, like, about
Speaker 2:2320 or '21.
Speaker 1:Something But
Speaker 2:I think that 2021 was the Solana summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. DeFi summer was was
Speaker 2:Must have been
Speaker 1:major FOMO, basically, for anyone who didn't participate and major heartache for many people that did. It was a it was a wild time. A lot of people having fun. And interesting from a you know, it it it had it had some of the same feelings as the as the OpenCLaw thing. It was like you you had to set out you had to know the terminal a little bit.
Speaker 1:You had to be comfortable sort of, you know, installing these tools, understanding, oh, don't send your money to the wrong address. The address itself looks like a hash, and so it's like a little bit, like, slightly technical. You didn't have to write any software, but you had to be able to use different wallets
Speaker 2:get or nerds very sniped.
Speaker 1:I it does feel like there was a little bit of nerd sniping. There was also a lot of real businesses built. And, you know, obviously, there's still a $100,000,000,000 sitting in DeFi, and DeFi survived the DeFi winter that followed DeFi summer, of course. Sort of bad nominative determinism. The DeFi summer sort of implied that a winter was around the corner, and it was.
Speaker 1:But BlackRock's now going into DeFi. So they're listing their BUILD token, launched in 2024 and boasts a total market value of around $1,800,000,000 and and it reflects a major vote of confidence in DeFi from one of the finance industry's most influential firms. The practical impact of UniFi of Uniswap adding build to its platform is likely to be minor at first, though, since the arrangement involves securitized creating a white list of eligible institutions that can participate in the DeFi trading. The firm is also white listing a handful of market makers, including longtime crypto liquidity provider, Wintermute, to facilitate trading. Meanwhile, access to build is restricted to qualified purchasers, a legal designation for those assets of more than 5,000,000 or more.
Speaker 1:So they're getting into DeFi, but they're just dipping their toes in the water. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken helps them fix it fast. That's why a 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So there are lots of essays that everyone it's like essay week in AI.
Speaker 1:People are writing essays about, is AI like COVID? Is you need to talk to your family? Zoe resigned for OpenAI on Monday, the same day they started testing ads and chat GBT. She quit in protest. Protest.
Speaker 1:She did?
Speaker 2:And she dropped an guest essay.
Speaker 1:Guest essay in the New York Times. In the New
Speaker 5:York Times.
Speaker 1:That is a crazy thing to do.
Speaker 2:So opening I feel like a company hasn't fully arrived until an employee quits and they have the opportunity just to go immediately write like an opinion essay on said business?
Speaker 1:Pretty soon, you're gonna quit and drop a whole Mr. Beast video. That's the future. You drop you drop a drop a ten part hour long mini series. Just just raise the stakes.
Speaker 1:Go with the the the biggest Yep. The biggest splash you can possibly make.
Speaker 2:So first, Zoe makes the bull case for
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 2:KatGPT as a business. Okay. OpenAI is the most detailed record of private human thought ever assembled. Can we trust them to resist the title forces pushing them to abuse it? Again, so far, the ads will effectively be display ads
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not not integrated into the content and not, yeah, not not influencing the content. And But again, she's arguing that, you know, you can sort of start by doing that, and then there there there's an incentive. There's a business incentive to, you know, up the ante a little bit. Hopes revenge Yes. Says, I don't mean to be rude, but I feel like this article says very little.
Speaker 2:I think everyone will agree data privacy is good. Two tech companies have a bad track record of resisting their incentives to misuse this data. You kind of vaguely gesture towards certain kinds of oversight, mostly niche and European. But I think we both suspect that that's probably not gonna happen in this case. That's really there really isn't a model here.
Speaker 2:I'm a lot more interested in why you joined OpenAI and stayed for two years and what you would slash wouldn't do in the AI space. I do think you're right to draw attention to what is special about the intersection of AI and advertising, is that the dataset being created and the product itself has a much higher potential for abuse than other familiar tech models of ad monetized platforms. This feels like fairly obvious point that I don't see enough of. You're also right to draw attention to the fact that people don't necessarily have a problem with the fact that ChatGPT is doing ads now like this, but that they likely don't think it will actually stop their slippery slope. Thanks.
Speaker 1:There's a very funny paragraph in Ben Thompson's Certecari piece on Google earnings that is basically the flip side of this that I thought was very funny. Now he says, This is probably the least important of the three benefits of LLMs for Google search business. He's covering Google earnings and what ads are doing for Google. Everything is going very well. And he says, What's notable about that ranking, however, is that this is basically OpenAI's entire proposed advertising business.
Speaker 1:Google has the luxury of not putting ads in Gemini, but that doesn't mean they aren't experimenting with ads in conversational AI. They're just doing it in AI mode, and their initial offering sounds a lot like what OpenAI is going to do in ChatGPT. Put ads put in ads based on the content of the current conversation. Meh. It's the meh that is scary.
Speaker 1:Google's upside revenue potential from LLMs is so large that its side project, which is OpenAI's entire proposed business, hardly merits a mention in terms of justifying CapEx. So Google is saying, hey. We're going to spend so much money on CapEx, but analysts, shareholders, don't worry because we have really great applications. And the great applications that, like, they put ads in LLM responses really, really low. And so Ben Thompson's like, it's this, like, side this thing is happening, and everyone's very focused on this ChatGPT ads thing.
Speaker 1:But Google's doing it, and it's like, meh, like, not a even big deal for them. They're like, of course, yeah, we just left some ads in the thing because we're doing AI search, and we'll keep them out of Gemini. But we're you know, display and and search ads and YouTube ads are gonna be way better, and we're making so much money over here that this this thing that's, like, causing so much drama and people are doing Super Bowl ads about, like, yeah, we just did it, and it's minor to the financials. And, you know, if you're an analyst or shareholder, like, don't even stress about it. And also, no one's paying attention.
Speaker 1:So it was just very funny that there are plenty of justifications elsewhere while everyone else is going to have to keep have to spend to keep up without nearly the obvious high margin benefit. So Google has a bunch of different places to put ads and so much surface area, so many users and so little pushback. I don't think anyone at Google is going to be quitting over ads in AI mode because they it's an advertising company and everyone's used to it. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike first.
Speaker 1:Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And without further ado, we have Matt Schumer in the Restream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Matt.
Speaker 1:The Schuminator. The man of the hour. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2:essay taking the time. Most ever, maybe? Has there ever been a more
Speaker 1:viral essay? Won the million dollars if you posted this a week ago?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 7:I don't know, but I do wish I posted this a week ago.
Speaker 1:Well, fantastic response. What has the response been like to the essay from non tech people? I imagine that you have friends, family friends that have been texting you screenshots or something. Like, walk me through the experience of this.
Speaker 7:It's been crazy. I I wrote this with that in mind, but still, I didn't expect it to actually happen. You know what I mean? Right? I I originally wrote this for my parents.
Speaker 7:I was trying to explain to them what was going on while I was actually home for Super Bowl Sunday with them, some family friends. And frankly, I couldn't find anything that was both clear and accurate, but also understandable for them. Right? I was looking at Dario Mode's essays. And when you read them, they're perfect.
Speaker 7:They're amazing. But you have to be in tech to understand them. And I just wanted to find a way to communicate this in a way that allowed them to actually understand it without having to know all the jargon, the industry dynamics, everything. Because I think it's important for people to know this, but there's just not much out there for the person that's not in tech. So, yeah, it did take off.
Speaker 7:It's been surprising and exciting. Frankly, I've been getting texts from friends who I haven't heard from in years, and they're like, my boss is sending this around the office. It's it's it's surreal. I thought it would go a little viral. I didn't think it would go mega viral and certainly not this level.
Speaker 7:So I'm kind of taking it all in. I've slept, like, two whole hours since I posted this. I'm exhausted, but it's been it's been crazy. And I'm glad that the message was received. I think that's the most important part.
Speaker 7:Right? People
Speaker 2:Yeah. What better
Speaker 7:than not happening the way I'm expecting, but it's good that people know that there's a chance.
Speaker 2:And the message is just something big is happening. You just want people to pay attention. Because I think people are gonna debate, like, how how you presented different things. Is the COVID comparison really that accurate? But is that is that specifically you're just trying to wake people up?
Speaker 7:Exactly. Right. I if I knew how viral this was gonna go, I think I would have spent more time thinking through some of the parts of how I presented them. But
Speaker 2:I said Is of why you're maybe sort of worried or you want people to pay attention is your experience as an entrepreneur here? Because it feels like, in many ways, hyper right, like, you know, probably made more sense as a product two years ago. And as all the different LMs have gotten better and the products have gotten better, I imagine it has been great. And it sounds like maybe you're moving on to focus on investing. But as part of this, it's been kind of very personal experience of just kind of waking up to the power of the base models and the labs in general?
Speaker 7:It has. And I'll share more on the company side soon. But I've been in this industry since 2019. I got in when I was in college working on a VR startup, and I realized that if I didn't drop everything to jump into AI, I'd regret it for the rest of my life. And I'm glad I did.
Speaker 7:But seeing the progression is of freaky. I mean, it couldn't write a sentence accurately in 2019, much less a line of code. Now we're looking at models that can build autonomously for many hours. I had early access to GPD 5.3 codecs, and that was a very eye opening experience getting used to that. At first, I was prompting and using it like I use any other model, little things at a time, iterating back and forth until I realized, wait.
Speaker 7:This isn't screwing up. I started pushing it forward and pushing it further and just saying, hey. Here's the big spec I want. Don't come back to me until it's perfect and get it deployed on a server. And it it did.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And I'm not saying every industry is gonna go just like that. I don't think it's gonna look like that in every industry. But if that's a sign of things to come, I think people should be paying attention.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the VR example is so interesting because, like, completely agree with you on just the power of the models. Like, it's it's so real. It's it's so legitimate, and it does and truly, a lot of people are like, oh, it still hallucinates.
Speaker 1:There's six fingers in the images. It's like that that that is antiquated. Like, you need to get up to speed. But at the same time, like, if if I was you know, we see Mark Zuckerberg, like, cutting back on on virtual reality spending and plans there, like and it doesn't and it feels like if AI is, like, gonna advance everything, you'd be like, great. Like, I I can invest 10 times less in Reality Labs and the headsets are gonna get 10 times better.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. There's a lot of these things in, like, the they're not even it's not even physical world. I'm not even talking about doctors. I'm talking about VR headsets. Even that doesn't feel like maybe, like, AI doesn't really pull that forward.
Speaker 1:And I'm just wondering, like, when I go to my friends and family, how many of them will actually be like, yes, this is going to change my life in whatever I do versus, like, yeah, software will get better, but software is a small piece of what I do. But how how are you thinking about about people that where software is, a more minor piece of their world?
Speaker 7:Yeah. This is something that, again, hindsight is twenty twenty. I wish I had spent more time on knowing what was to come. I try to address it a little bit in the article, and I'll hopefully provide more color here. My dad's a lawyer, as an example.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Like, it's not gonna stand in court anytime soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Right? It can help with writing. It can help with reviewing things that he's he's working on. It's essentially an associate, and it's getting better every year.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But it's not gonna stand in court. I think the ideal thing here is people read this, and they kind of take it in their own unique way for their own unique needs for what they're doing. Right? If you're somebody who's very, very exposed, and I think there are lot of people who are who kind of are denying it Yeah. I think it's worth paying attention and saying, okay.
Speaker 7:What is the world gonna look like in two, three years? How do I prepare myself? Because it's it's worth it just in case. There are industries where I think it will take longer, though, even in those industries. For example, let's say legal.
Speaker 7:Those that are just getting started today might have a bit of a rough time, whereas a partner might do quite well, actually. So I think it's very contextual for each person, and that's what I wish I got across a bit better. Sure. Maybe I'll do a follow-up or something like that. But Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think it's really tricky to give sort of like a silver bullet, one size fits all answer for everybody. Totally. The goal is to just say, hey. Look.
Speaker 7:This is happening. Can you try to think about about it a little bit for your industry? Because even if it's gonna change an industry Yeah. And there's, like like, ability for it to happen, it's not gonna happen overnight even if the technology is there. Though I do think for a lot of these industries, the technology will be there relatively soon.
Speaker 1:It's just
Speaker 7:a matter of how long it takes to proliferate proliferate through society.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lawyers don't tend to post as much as software engineers. It's true.
Speaker 2:But you can imagine lawyers out there thinking, don't even write contracts anymore. I just review, which is like kind of what you're seeing Yeah. Most engineers saying. Lawyers are But at the selling same time, so so part of the I I will I'll be interested to see what happens with like the general legal job market. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But we've just been hearing examples from companies being like, I need to hire hundreds of interns that are just gonna come at work Yeah. In a new way and and use the tools sort of natively. Yeah. And you can imagine that happening. But but again, there's just I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what advice or what what recommendation would you make to a new grad right now?
Speaker 7:It's really tough. And it's one of those areas in the article that I don't think I had a clear answer on, but that's because there is no clear answer. I have a lot of people in my life that have asked me this. And part of my thinking on this article was like, can I answer some of these questions? And there are parts of this that got clearer parts that didn't this is one of the parts I don't think I full clarity on.
Speaker 7:I think knowing the tools is better than not knowing the tools. Yeah. Focusing on industries that maybe will take a little bit longer to be disrupted so you can entrench yourself a bit first is valuable, And there are people better than I at knowing which ones those might be. But really, I think it's just getting used to using this.
Speaker 1:Because this
Speaker 7:is the new world. Like, you know, if a calculator is is available Yeah. You should probably be learning how to use it. This is this is that times a thousand. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So I think it's just learning to be adaptable. I think there probably is we'll look back in ten years, and there will be clearly, like, this is what you should have done. Totally.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 7:think anybody knows today. Yeah. But it's also been very contextual. It's gonna depend on what your goals are as a person.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, obviously, like, there's this post about, like, it's the last moment to join a lab before the takeoff, and, like, it'll be fun to join. And and that makes a ton of sense. At the same time, I I love the idea of being a young person, becoming a a hacker, like, lightly technical, but really fluid in the tools, then going and working at, an oil and gas company and just being, like, the most cracked, most productive person at this company that has, like, assets, and you're gonna be able to just do so much more across the organization and and be that, like, you know, a 100,000 x intern, basically. Jordy, where do wanna go?
Speaker 2:A lot of comments from people asking if AI wrote the essay.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:What's what's your what's your writing process actually like these days?
Speaker 1:It didn't stick out to me as AI, but we You definitely
Speaker 2:I didn't you probably if you did use AI, you pulled out a lot of the em dashes. Yeah. So
Speaker 7:It did help a lot. And I think that's kind of the point. A lot of people are, like, dunking on me for saying that. And I posted that I used it.
Speaker 2:It's not really a gotcha if if if it did insane numbers, like, whatever whatever the result was.
Speaker 1:Like, if you're upfront about it, it's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 7:It's like proving the point. It's like people are saying this this thing sucks at x y z, but, like, look, it's 50,000,000 views. Like, I Yeah. There's a reason that I'm talking about this stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And, you know, I think there's, like, little details I get wrong here because this has been a crazy couple of days. Sure. But the way that I approached it was, again, I wanted to write sort of like a Dario style essay, but for the average person. Mhmm. So what I started doing is I have like lists of like all the things that have like sort of made me think over the years that I agree with.
Speaker 7:And I have sort of points on what I agree with in each of those articles, what I disagree with, what I think has wrong, what hasn't.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:And I've kinda dumped this all in, and I used Claude for this. Even though I think Codex is way better for engineering, Claude is better for this sort of stuff. Yeah. I dumped all those articles in, and I said, okay. Here's what I agree with.
Speaker 7:Here's what I don't. And then I basically spoke to it for, like, an hour with my own thoughts and my own feelings and how I wanted to present it and what I think actually makes sense. Because a lot of these things in the past kind of are somewhat accurate, somewhat not. And I iterated with the AI for for many, many hours going back and forth until I finally felt like, okay, it's time to write. And I kind of had to put out a whole sheet on how to do this.
Speaker 7:And then I actually went and I took that and wrote the first draft myself. And then there were obviously parts I struggled with that had the AI come and help. I had it kind of like work on the wording with me. And then once I had a first draft, I brought it back and I had it critiqued. And that's kind of there's obviously more details that I've
Speaker 1:got Yeah. To mean, I think when people lob, like, this is AI, they think that you that your prompt was like write a essay that will get 50,000,000 views. And and it just like one shots. It's like, no, this is a collab I wish back that and forth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's that on X. A
Speaker 2:A lot of lot of hashtags.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It can be can be a little rough.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So yeah. Fascinating. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. What are you what are you what are you gonna do next?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I I've noticed from your portfolio that there's a lot of chip companies, hard tech investments. Like, what are you most excited about just in the economy broadly?
Speaker 7:I mean, in terms of what I'm investing in and I intentionally tried to leave this out of the article because I wanted the article to be just purely my message Yeah. Not sort of, like, kind of, like, have to deal with the the sort of interplay of that. But in terms of what I actually believe in, I think the chip companies are very interesting. I was you know, I don't know
Speaker 1:if you
Speaker 7:saw a couple years ago, kind of helped grow up and Yeah. That that's worked out quite well. I mean, Etched, a few others like that. I also think the rails are gonna be very important. I tend to invest in you know, I just started my fund around this thesis that there are gonna be sort of these things that AI needs to proliferate.
Speaker 7:Right? It's not just the the model itself and the weights itself, but it's the, the rails for them to communicate with each other. And I just invested in a new company, AgentRelay, that's about to come out that I think is going to be really exciting there. I also did AgentMail, so very, very similar. Daytona.
Speaker 7:SF Compute's a little different, but I think they're going to be, which Evan is, a killer. That's great. I'm sort of interested in that sort of stuff. Like, how do you take the models and then bring them out of their boxes? Because this is obviously happening, you just kinda wanna put your money where where it's gonna grow, obviously.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like there's whenever something crazy happens, there's a lot of, like, it's almost like nerve racking panic. But I I do think we're in this moment right now where there's gonna be a reevaluation of how value accrues in tech because tech has become everything. Like, you know, car companies are tech companies now. Everything's a tech company.
Speaker 1:And but the business models are wildly different. And, you know, you know, the the the software agents are gonna accelerate some companies. They're gonna damage some companies, and we're we're gonna be following it all right here. But we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get some sleep.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on the massive article. I mean, it it it it it I definitely agree with the point of like, we we're not talking about the the latest updates to AI broadly enough.
Speaker 2:I do think it's interesting. Some people will read this. Let's say they're a firefighter or a school teacher
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And be like, wait, I'm gonna have to do less paperwork?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's actually a lot of people that
Speaker 1:should and Totally. That's but that's be a good thing. There there are some there are some beautiful white pills. There's some there's obviously some quagmires and some quicksand you wanna avoid. But this is how technology is is rolled out and adopted.
Speaker 1:And so you wanna you wanna skate where the puck is. But we appreciate you coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Thanks so much, Matt.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. Talk soon. To
Speaker 1:Have a good one.
Speaker 2:Good to see you.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. And without further ado, we have Vlad Tenev from Robinhood in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring Vlad into the TV. Vlad, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Woah. Cactus.
Speaker 1:Cactus. How are you doing? I like the is the cactus symbolic of something?
Speaker 3:Well, I love succulents, and I think we're we live in a dangerous world, gentlemen. You know,
Speaker 1:you Yeah.
Speaker 3:You turn around, you you just gotta be careful. So it's a constant reminder that you just have to watch your back.
Speaker 1:With a physical cactus behind you, yes, you need to physically watch your back. Don't don't back up during this interview.
Speaker 6:I love it. To really
Speaker 1:be careful here.
Speaker 2:I love cactuses too. This is probably gonna inspire us to get Cacti. Cacti. Cacti. Right?
Speaker 2:Sorry to be pandemic. No. No. You're you're right. We'll get some cacti around around this.
Speaker 1:I'm more of a Christmas tree guy.
Speaker 2:I like big Christmas tree. No. But I've been missing having some
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Plants in
Speaker 1:The US. Anyway. Sorry. We're not here to talk about
Speaker 3:You know what's the thing about this cactus is? Yes. You think that it's very dangerous, but you can train yourself to actually like
Speaker 1:No way. Woah. Yeah. Yeah. Alpha right here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's all about seeing amazing. All that
Speaker 1:the I had I had no idea that you could do that.
Speaker 5:My hand CEO
Speaker 2:touches cactus.
Speaker 1:That's great. How's business? What's new in your world?
Speaker 3:Well, we've got a lot of things going going down. You know, I know I know it's the day after earnings, but we're always looking forward to the future. And what I did at earnings outlined our path for 2026. Mhmm. So couple interesting things.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Number one in active traders, we're pushing hard on prediction markets. We think that we're in the midst of a prediction market super cycle. And eventually this asset class is gonna go from tens of billions to trillions in annual volume. Mhmm. So we're in the fix of that.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. We're also pushing on a bunch of initiatives that I care about super personally. Private markets Mhmm. And family finance. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So through this year, if if you look at the end of the year, Robinhood should be better for you the more family members use it. We wanna get your partners on Robinhood, your children, your parents, grandparents, the whole family, and we're building tools accordingly with that. And then private markets. I think access to private markets is one of the biggest inequities in financial services today. So we're we're just working really hard to solve that for people, very, very
Speaker 2:clean and urgently. Yeah. More specifically, you guys have a fund set up. Like, I'm I imagine there's more going on. Like, where where where where's, like, private markets as a category going on the platform?
Speaker 2:Platform?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because like fundamentally fundamentally, the problem of like a lot of people have been excited about these billion dollar companies and watch them go from single digit billion to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and having to just sit on the sidelines and hold SaaS has been a rough rough for a lot of people over the last year.
Speaker 3:And I think it's really a continuation of a trend that's been going on for decades. Right? It's it's gotten harder and harder to go public, and at the same time, more and more attractive and easier to raise capital as a private company.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, our efforts in The US to stem the tide are Robinhood Ventures, which is currently on file with the SEC. We filed our n two, which you can think of as kind of a s one for funds. So we're in the strict quiet period for that, so I can't talk about about the funds specifically. But in The US, we're very focused on on solving this problem and we think we have a path. And internationally, we're gonna push forward on tokenization.
Speaker 3:Last year, we did our OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways, which showed us that there was just voracious demand for for access to these types of products. So this year, it'll be about hopefully getting from the giveaway stage to making that like a real making those products real and tradable for customers. And also getting the companies to like engage in it willingly. Right? I think we experimented a little bit, but we we realized where we'd like to be is making it clear to companies that this is something they should want and benefit from just as much as as it is to the retail shareholder.
Speaker 1:If you could rewind, how would you have have let retail traders invest in Robinhood? Would you have done it at seed round if you could have? Series a, series b? Would that have been a headache? Would it have been worth it?
Speaker 1:Walk me through if you could replay.
Speaker 3:We we absolutely would have done it at seed. All people know this about Robinhood, but Robinhood was actually we had kind of a hard time raising our seed round. Wow. And and so we talked to probably over a 100 investors. At one point, Robinhood was live on AngelList, if you remember that platform.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 3:And you could invest in Robinhood at seed at a 10,000,000 valuation cap. So effectively think of it as a 10,000,000 valuation. Yeah. And we would take all comers. I mean, we would pitch, you know, middle aged ex retirees Yeah.
Speaker 3:From Nebraska the same way that we would pitch like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. And, you know, they would ask us questions. And if they wanted to invest, we we typically would just let them invest. So we have we have tons of shareholders that were just Wow. Essentially retail.
Speaker 3:I mean, high Yeah. Net worth maybe, but but they were just normal people. And, you know, some of them even have messaged us. They held through IPO and over the years and and have done quite well. So I absolutely
Speaker 2:Understatement. Would
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I absolutely would I have wanna
Speaker 2:I wanna go back onboard. Yeah. I wanna go back to prediction markets. Prediction markets are bringing new people to the Robinhood platform.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That's exciting for the business. The pushback and concern that people have is like people coming on, maybe they wanna trade the Super Bowl. Are those people going to make great financial decisions on the Robinhood platform? Obviously, you guys are an open platform. People can do whatever they want.
Speaker 2:But what are you gonna be looking for to make sure that, you know, over time, there's you know, I I think the the general concern is, you know, I'm not gonna use the g word, but, know, bringing like trading, high risk trading to the platform, there's some very real kind of concerns around that. So how are you making sure this kind of rollout as prediction markets as a category grow still serve, you know, the overall user base?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think this is one of the things that we're actively working on. I think you you have some customers that really love prediction markets. And for them, they want it to be easier to get to and more intuitive. And they don't like they they would probably say that our experience right now buries them too much and we make them too hard to get to.
Speaker 3:And then you have customers that, you know, don't want anything to do with it. They don't wanna see it. And so we've been actively working on greater personalization so that we can let customers opt in or out if they'd like. And and also we can detect automatically when someone wants to see that content in different places. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So this is just I mean, prediction markets are kind of a test case. It's where it's most acute, but we see it across the entire spectrum of products as we expand the breadth of our super app offering. For example, we have a credit card, we have banking now. Banking is a separate app and you have some customers saying, well, I'm kind of annoyed having to go through two different apps to get access to banking. Can't we put it in the same one?
Speaker 3:Others others want it to be separate and prefer it. And so we're we're continuing to experiment with this stuff, but but where it ends is just a really, really tightly personalized experience depending on what each customer is looking for and and expecting. And I I don't think I think we're actually breaking new ground. I don't think financial services companies have done that. You see that a lot with with consumer products, but we're investing a lot on the machine learning infrastructure on the AI side into delivering that for customers across our entire product suite.
Speaker 3:And I'd say more generally, prediction markets, one of the unique things we we have is we're not a monoline prediction markets player. So we have the suite of products. We we can offer you a lot of things. And what we've been seeing increasingly is prediction markets have been great at attracting a new type of customer who previously may have not been as interested in Robinhood. You know, they hear about us, they download the app, they onboard for prediction markets, and we're making that process easier and simpler.
Speaker 3:And then we can onboard them to all sorts of other stuff. So be it retirement accounts Mhmm. Or credit card, or banking product. And I think that's just something that's generally good for these customers. I see nothing wrong with someone coming in for prediction markets, but then being, you know, discovering our retirement account
Speaker 2:with Yeah. I would. I I I certainly hope that people come in. Maybe they wanna trade something that's happening in the news or or a game or something like that, and they realize, hey, I actually just wanna save a good amount of my paycheck every month, invest in stable assets, and, you know, invest in my retirement.
Speaker 3:That's actually true because And I think I I think people talks about these as two different types of people. You have your prediction markets users and your people that are interested in stable retirement. But what we increasingly see is that actually it's the same people and, you know, I might be I'm obviously interested in a retirement account. I might have a small portfolio for my prediction markets or my options trading or my more speculative trades. But having both together in in one roof makes it a more valuable service for me.
Speaker 1:How do you think about the news generation from prediction markets? It's always been an interesting way. We we we we pull up prediction markets all the time to understand what markets think about how many SpaceX launches there will be this year. Do you want to do more in content driven by prediction markets?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And and we've been doing that quite a bit already. We have a whole slew of prediction markets that are non sports. And and actually, one of the interesting things that we saw was the week after the NFL season ended Yeah. We had the government shutdown.
Speaker 3:And the the prediction market contract on the government shutdown actually drove a ton of volume because it was on everyone's mind. Yeah. And people wanted to see what the current status was, how likely it is, and of course some portion of those customers traded. So we think that'll be a bigger and bigger thing. And and again, as we make it as we make it easier to surface things that are trending and things that we think you might be interested in, I think that'll strengthen the use case of looking at prediction markets as a source of news.
Speaker 2:How do you think the wealth management industry broadly will adapt to AI? I think there's a lot of conversation recently around, hey, do I need to pay somebody 1%? If I can ask an LLM, hey, what's a good strategy for somebody that makes x amount of money a year and wants to retire at this point and and wants to take a little risk but not too much. You can ask some questions about it. So feels like that model could be threatened or at least margins could could compress.
Speaker 2:But how are you thinking about it both as an opportunity from from Robinhood and then, you know, how the industry will have to evolve?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I think the there's gonna be a lot of disruption by AI. I mean, we're starting to see it already. And we have Robinhood Cortex, which really has done well, sort of like helping customers think through their their trading, their sort of self directed activity. But we've already begun conversations with regulators about how to bring Cortex to advice, making recommendations and and and doing ongoing portfolio management.
Speaker 3:So obviously, wanna roll that out safely and in a trustworthy way, but it's coming. And I actually think on the human advisor side, a lot of people prefer a human advisor. They prefer the relationship. They, you know, like to have someone that has the full picture and that they can talk to. So I don't think that's going away.
Speaker 3:And in fact, AI is gonna be a really integral part in streamlining the workflow of those people so that rather than serving, you know, 50 clients per adviser, you go to serving 500 or or possibly more. So I I think you're gonna see both models continue, but costs and efficiency and capabilities continue to grow for for each of them.
Speaker 1:What's the status of copy trading? I I there's a lot of people that are excited about situational awareness, what Leopold's doing over there. How many clicks is it to to to copy his strategy, and and how closely is it possible to copy these days the the big funds that have generated a lot of excitement?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, we we have a product coming out, Robinhood Social, which Okay. Should commence rolling out in in just, like, weeks to low single digit months. Okay. So we're kind of putting the finishing touches on internal We just integrated prediction markets, which actually makes the the feed much more dynamic.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 3:And when we announced it, one of the features that was like particularly popular was whale tracking. So following Nancy Pelosi's trades Yeah. It's this one. You know, other things like that. So Mhmm.
Speaker 3:We're we're gonna make a really all Nancy Pelosi's doing.
Speaker 1:It is such a funny world we live in. It's Nancy Pelosi's stock trick to ticker and yeah. Endlessly entertaining category. Always always new innovation. But congrats on the progress.
Speaker 1:That Robinhood social feature, how much of it was vibe coded? How much of a speed up are you getting internally? Like, what is the software engineering org look like these days in an era of coding agents?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, we we've certainly been continuing to hire software engineers.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Perhaps not at the definitely not at the rate we were hiring in 2021, but one of the reasons we've been able to deliver this high product velocity Mhmm. And keep costs relatively flat is because of the productivity improvements we've seen with AI. Mhmm. And there's there's two things that we sort of, like, talked about at earnings. When we when we look at internal operations, the two areas that move the needle are software engineering and customer support.
Speaker 3:And I think we are at or at the very least near best in class for both of those. So customer support side, 75 plus percent of all tickets are handled by AI, including licensed cases that would have previously required a licensed brokerage professional. And and we thought, I mean, frankly, thought that would be further away. We were able to to get there and deliver a great experience relatively quickly. And on the software engineering side, it it's been tremendous.
Speaker 3:I mean, with every new generation of models, you look at, you know, Opus 4.6, now you've got codecs. You can essentially have it running autonomously overnight, checking its own output, debugging itself, and have it do the work that probably would have taken an individual software engineer weeks to do while you sleep. And one year ago, that wasn't possible. So the acceleration from each new generation of models is is tremendous. And I I think there's gonna be lots and lots of disruption.
Speaker 3:You can kinda see the market starting to digest that. But Yeah. I think the firms that adopt AI and are actual technology companies, this is the opportunity to dramatically accelerate relative to incumbents. And financial services, you know, a lot of our competitors aren't really even on cloud infrastructure anymore. They're still on mainframes.
Speaker 3:So I think it's going to become increasingly tough.
Speaker 2:Yes. No, it's alright. Last question, then we'll let you go if you have another second. How are you thinking about M and A? You guys clearly have built the muscle to take new products from zero to one.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you have a lot of confidence around that. But what's interesting from an acquisition standpoint? What's your M and A team spending time on generally?
Speaker 3:I mean, we're certainly always looking. Last year, we were quite active with with a number of acquisitions and I think we've really built the muscle to integrate them well. In particular, you have Bitstamp, which since we closed that acquisition has basically doubled in revenue. And typically, when you go through an integration like this, it's tougher. Right?
Speaker 3:Because things tend to slow down, but we've been able to actually accelerate as we've integrated.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So that's good to see. And and we're on the lookout. You know, a lot of people are bearish on the crypto industry right now. We remain bullish on on crypto, and we think that, you know, now is the time for builders to build. And just just like in the past, the cycle goes up and down, but long run, we think crypto is gonna become the financial system, and they're gonna converge.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, I think we're we're still investing heavily there.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 1:cool. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Very, very interesting.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Jordy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hope hope you have
Speaker 2:good rest
Speaker 1:of your day.
Speaker 2:It's funny. So so many others other CEOs come on, and they're dealing, know, with the crazy volatility in the market. And you're just like you're like, first time?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great. Not so funny. Good good to see you. Grizzled. Congrats.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you later. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco.
Speaker 1:Unlock infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Jeff Lawson. And we
Speaker 2:are starting the lightning round.
Speaker 1:We are starting the the Lambda lightning round. Let's Let's go. Let's activate the Gong. Thank you, Ben. We have Jeff Lawson in the restream waiting room.
Speaker 1:Or actually, are we delayed here? Let's let's figure it out.
Speaker 2:You can go back.
Speaker 1:I will tell you about Lambda because it's actually the next one in the stack. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. We have Sam Blond coming on the show in just a few minutes.
Speaker 2:And Buko, this kinda gets at what I was asking Vlad about. Buko says unless you have 5,000,000, AI is already good enough to be your financial adviser. Mhmm. Then it's probably good enough. Try it.
Speaker 2:Share net worth, where, how you've allocated assets, what your goals are. Ask it to analyze and identify opportunities for improvement.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Stress test different scenarios. He gets basically everything right. So bullish on just out of the box LLMs for helping with stuff.
Speaker 1:Very good. So Well, let's bring Jeff Lawson in to the TPP and Ultradome. How are you doing? What's happening? Very good.
Speaker 1:Thanks, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. First time on the show, I mean, I feel like most people will be familiar with your career, but but please give us a brief introduction.
Speaker 8:Alright. So I'm Jeff. Yeah. You know, I've been a an entrepreneur my whole career. I've been a software developer and started a bunch of companies Yeah.
Speaker 8:On the Internet. So very first company during the .com era. Yeah. Was the first CTO of StubHub. Was one of the first product managers at AWS.
Speaker 8:But then founded the company that most people know me for, which is Twilio
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Back in 2008. So enabling software developers to build communications in all the apps that we use all day and Yeah. Grew that over sixteen years to about 4,000,000,000 in revenue and took it public in 2016. And and now I'm here in the fusion energy world with inertia.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I have to I have to say thank you because Twilio sponsored a lot of hackathons when I was in college, and it was like the go to, like, fun tool to pull off the shelf and build something that was a little bit more interactive than just a normal website. I built something that would text me every day with little updates and stuff. It was like so much fun to be tinkering in that era, so thank you for everything you did at Twilio. But It was a crowd pleaser.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's just like delightful product experience, so many interesting unlocks. And then obviously, like, huge partnerships you see at powering Uber and all the big companies that need to send a lot of text messages.
Speaker 1:So obviously, business. But get us up to speed on Inertia Enterprises.
Speaker 8:Absolutely. Well, so Inertia is the commercial fusion energy company.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And I know that sounds like, you know, saying, yeah, we were selling unicorns or something. But Yeah. That's because fusion energy has been the thing of of myth Yeah. For nearly a hundred years since it was first hypothesized because fusion energy is the perfect form of energy for humanity. It is clean.
Speaker 8:It is safe. It is low cost. It is abundant. The only question has ever been, will it work? Well, that changed in 2022 when the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab actually created the first experiment to create energy with fusion.
Speaker 8:Yeah. And this was a huge breakthrough. And so inertia is commercializing that experiment and taking it out of the lab Mhmm. And bringing it to the grid. And the way we do that is with few things.
Speaker 8:Well, the way that experiment works is they hit this tiny little peppercorn sized bit of fusion fuel
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 8:With the world's largest laser.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if
Speaker 8:you get it just right, you compress it, you create this reaction that releases a bunch of energy.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And so for us, commercialization means, number one, we're starting with proven science. This is pretty important. Right? You wanna have science, basic science that works before you start commercializing. So that's step one.
Speaker 8:Step two, we're gonna go build the world's most powerful laser. It is a million times more powerful than the laser they currently use. Course. Of a more national lab.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:It is Big number.
Speaker 8:20 times more efficient. It is one tenth the size. So it's a really modern, but the coolest laser that humanity will have ever built. The third thing we're gonna go do is build the world's first fusion fuel, factory. We are making these fuel targets in a automated scaled way.
Speaker 8:And then last, we bring all that together, and we build a grid scale, giga gigawatt scale power plant that has enough energy to be able to power a medium to large sized city. A million homes you can power with this facility. So that's our plan.
Speaker 1:That's actually that's so crazy. Talk to me about the capital intensity of this. This is hard tech. This is energy. This is a big deal.
Speaker 1:How much did you raise? And
Speaker 2:I love that you're doing the meme too, to like, you know, make build software, you know And go into hardware, yeah. Do And then do
Speaker 1:the The hardest thing possible.
Speaker 8:Well, you know, I I feel like that's one of the things that that is exciting to do. Like, having done the software thing for most of my career, taking what I've learned in terms of building a company and scaling a company and now bringing us to this new domain is is really exciting. So in terms of the capital intensity, you're right. Fusion is not a cheap endeavor. So today, we announced our first capital raise, $450,000,000.
Speaker 8:It's a milestone based approach.
Speaker 2:Nothing like nothing like like 450 to to kick things off.
Speaker 1:That's a fantastic round.
Speaker 2:It's a good way to get started.
Speaker 8:Thanks. Thanks. So we've got a milestone based approach. So we basically, we take this and we've got a great group of investors who've come around Mhmm. And said, hey, look, you know, fusion is something that we want to invest in, but we want to invest in a commercialization effort, not in basic science.
Speaker 8:And so that's what our investors have come to the table to do, and so we're really excited to be embarking on this. Now, we will raise more capital later as we get to that last stage, which is to go build the first fusion power plant that'll be capital intensive. But this funding is allowing us to take a lot of the design work that we're doing today and then start building these prototypes. So scaled down version of that laser, a scaled down version of that target assembly plant in order to prove that these technologies are ready for the scale up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With a business like this, it feels like, you know, obviously, the TAM is massive. It's no doubt that the world needs tons and tons of energy. We want as much of it as possible. How do you look at the risks to the business?
Speaker 2:You've got technical risks, execution risk, regulatory risk. What's your kind of personal framework? And how are you trying to, like, you know, chase each one of those down and to, you know, eliminate that risk?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting. It's the exact opposite of the world of software. The world of software, it was always, you know, you can build just about anything.
Speaker 8:The only question is, does the world want it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yep. Is anyone gonna pay you for it?
Speaker 8:Yeah. This is the opposite. Right? You know the world needs energy, especially if it is cheap, clean, abundant, and safe. The only question has always been, will it work?
Speaker 2:Can you do it?
Speaker 8:And so here we are with the know, physics of it now proven. It's a scale up. And so what does that scale up consist of? Well, it is essentially building supply chains, building vendor bases, and scaling up a number of fields to meet the demands that a first power plant would put on some new technologies. So for example, we're working with a lot of companies in the laser diode field to scale up production of the particular kinds of laser diodes that we need to go build our our plant.
Speaker 8:And in order to do that, we have to scale up production of these particular semiconductor diodes by about a thousand x what the global production is today. And so you look at something like that, and you're like, okay. That is doable. It's a lot of hard work. And so the milestones that we look at is like, okay.
Speaker 8:We're bringing the vendors along for the ride. We have to do some inventions, some automation. But, you know, this looks a lot like bringing a consumer product to the market. You know, I think about, here's what Apple does every year. They dream up a new iPhone, and then they figure out how we're gonna make a billion of them, and then they introduce it to the world.
Speaker 8:And every time they do that, well, there's a bunch of hard things they have to go figure out about how they're gonna, take a design and manufacture them at scale and with a certain yield and with a certain precision. And so those are the kinds of undertakings that we are going under for both the laser scale up as well as our target development scale up.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. How important is it to find a dance partner with one of the hyperscalers now? I I I've seen a number of news articles about not just fusion but also fission projects and just big energy projects. These things are measured in years, if not decades. And it feels like there's a lot of advantages to having at least an LOI that says, hey, if we can deliver this, you know, AWS wants it or something like that.
Speaker 1:How are you thinking about pull you know, spinning up the biz dev muscle of the business maybe before you break ground?
Speaker 8:Well, you know, I think that if anybody is able to deliver on cheap,
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Clean, safe energy, is there any question that you will have hires for it? You know, I don't think that's really the problem. I think really the problem is actually bringing those things to reality. Sure. But we are
Speaker 2:excited So would to say the people that are like, you know, still have all this risk, technical risk to their business, can they scale it up, regulatory risk, all that, and they're focused on, like, finding their dance partner? It's like, is that just for hype and do you think maybe that's the wrong focus or is creating some amount of hype necessary to attract capital? I mean, you have the luxury of a track record that allows you to raise half $1,000,000,000 out the gate. Yeah. Or someone else might need to find that dance partner
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To get any type of excitement around what they're doing.
Speaker 8:Well, I think, really, it's about focusing on the core progress that needs to be made. Because no matter what your approach is, there's a lot of things that have to get proven. There's a lot of things that have to be done. And so I don't think that necessarily the validation of a a buyer is the most important thing for the stage at which, you know, most fusion companies are at. That said, we were happy to have Google Ventures become a part of our our round.
Speaker 8:So they are an investor in Inertia. Yep. And, obviously, we we, you we think that if we are able to deliver on the promise of clean, safe, cheap, abundant energy, that they and many others will be interested buyers. But, really, our focus is heads down.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Let's make it work. Let's do the engineering and the scale up and the supply chain work that is needed in order to, go build that first plant.
Speaker 1:Why inertia? How'd you pick the name? Well,
Speaker 8:the there are two major, types of fusion, like, methods. Yeah. One of them, which I think you may have heard about before, is magnetic confinement fusion. Yep. The other one is called inertial confinement fusion, and we are doing the inertial confinement fusion using lasers.
Speaker 8:And so given that, I thought the word inertia was a super interesting word because it both can refer to the the lack of change of direction. Right?
Speaker 5:The Uh-huh.
Speaker 8:If you have inertia, you're like, well, you're not gonna move. And I thought that actually spoke to humanity's dependence on carbon based energy, interestingly enough. But inertia the flip side of inertia is once you have momentum, once you are moving, it's hard to stop you. And, of course, that's our goal with building the company. And so I thought there was a number of interesting things about the name.
Speaker 8:But it all stems from the the basic technology that we're pursuing, which is inertial confinement fusion.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 2:Prior to this, you've kind of lived and built through a number of cycles. How have you been processing kind of everything else happening in nature outside of outside of energy?
Speaker 8:Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We started, StubHub. It was during the the dot com meltdown in 2000. Started Twilio during 2008,
Speaker 2:the financial crisis. And so You were born in the darkness. Yeah.
Speaker 8:You know, I think the thing is you gotta start companies irrespective of the macro environment that you're operating in because the macro environment is gonna change. And so the business itself has to be built on the fundamentals of whatever is gonna make that business successful. So for the case of, say, StubHub or Twilio, the fundamental was focus on customers. If customers need what we're doing, great. We'll eventually, show the world and win and do all the things we need to do.
Speaker 8:If we're not serving customers, then we won't. It's as simple as that. For inertia, it's a little bit different because we're not going have customers in the short term, but I like to say our biggest customer is the laws
Speaker 1:of science. Right? So we always have to
Speaker 8:be serving the laws of physics. And if we focus on that, taking
Speaker 2:You gotta talk to the because you gotta talk to your you gotta focus your time talking to your customers. Physics. The laws of
Speaker 1:science. Our
Speaker 8:our customer is yeah.
Speaker 1:The universe. Yeah.
Speaker 8:The universe. But if we focus on that, of doing all the engineering, all the scale up work we have to go do to go take the proven result and now build it bigger and into a power plant, that's the thing. By the time we're done with that and proving that out, whatever the current economic story of the day is or or even the story of the year is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Will be long gone, we'll be talking about something else. And that's how I've always looked at my, at my startups.
Speaker 2:What What's the what's the hardest role to hire for right now?
Speaker 8:Well, you know what's interesting? We are one of the things I like, and I'm really, excited about with Inertia, is that we are not fighting the talent war for AI engineers. Now we have software engineers on staff, and we are hiring people versed in AI, But it's not the same kind of people that, you know, that Meta and Google and every startup down the street, and I'm here in San Francisco at the moment Yeah. Is fighting for. And you see some pretty bonkers things going on in the talent market right now for those, you know, foundational AI engineers.
Speaker 8:And I'm quite frankly just happy that we're not in the market for that talent. We're we're hiring for a lot of engineers, but Yeah. You know, not necessarily those. We're hiring for mechanical engineers and materials engineers and industrial engineers. We're hiring people from the likes of, you know, Apple.
Speaker 8:People who figured out how to take these products every year and take them from a designer's desktop into, you know, a factory where they're making billions of them. We are hiring people from the likes of Waymo, where they had to figure out over the last decade, hey, how are we gonna build this first of a kind autonomous car and scale up things like LIDAR and make them better and cheaper and faster and all these things in order to enable those amazing cars we see driving around autonomously in here in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it's like those are the types of people who've done those scale ups are the most you know, a lot of the interesting talent that we're going after right now. And I think that's just a little bit different than the, you know, than the AI let's just call it a hot mess right now in the industry.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come by and explain it all to us.
Speaker 2:This Great is to meet you and product. We're excited. Come back on anytime.
Speaker 1:Everyone's rooting for you in the chat.
Speaker 2:Big updates, small updates.
Speaker 1:You're gonna be legendary. Thank you for
Speaker 2:all the hard work.
Speaker 1:Gonna be probably decades, but hopefully we'll have you back a bunch along the journey. This is a lot of fun.
Speaker 8:Hopefully, a a decade and then and then the next There
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 8:Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And without further ado, we have Sam Blonde coming in to the TVP and UltraDome. Sam, good to see you. How are doing?
Speaker 1:I'm
Speaker 9:awesome. Thank you for having me, guys. Here, let's start off with a little bit of fun. I think the squad is ready for a big show, and we're gonna gong it right back at you.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Let's Let's go. Look at that team. Here we go. Whoo.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Hey, team.
Speaker 1:Wow. So coming out of Stealth today, it seems like you hired half of half of San Francisco already. How big is the team? How long have you actually been working on this? Because we worked together, what, two years ago, and then you called me and you were ready to launch.
Speaker 9:That's right. So we we really started working on this September '24.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:Kugen, awesome to see you again. Jordy, great to great to see you. Hopefully, the first of many. And started September '24. Squad's about going on 40.
Speaker 9:Wow. So Going on 40, a lot of EPD, and we're starting to build out go to market too. So we're having
Speaker 2:a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Introduce the full the full product, the company. Since no one's heard about it yet,
Speaker 2:but People have heard of Monaco.
Speaker 1:They've heard of Monaco.
Speaker 2:But now they've heard of the real Monaco. Real Monaco.
Speaker 9:There's a maybe fun story with Monaco. We've already been in a a bit of a lawsuit, so we can get it out. If entertaining for the viewers. Absolutely. Okay.
Speaker 9:So more importantly, we're an AI sales platform. Yes. And I I think, like, you know, two minute version or one minute version is on the tools side or replacement for legacy CRM. Mhmm. Most commonly, this is gonna be, like, your HubSpot, your Adio, your Salesforce.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 9:We also replace all of the point solutions that integrate to those tools. So this is gonna be data provider like an Apollo or a ZoomInfo. We provide all of your signals like a Clay. We do your call recording like a Otter or Fireflies. We do all your sequences like a number of different companies that do outbound in a deeply integrated platform.
Speaker 9:And for us, that's really a means to an end, which is we're replacing full sales workflows with agents. Yeah. And so we have agents who identify the right company to target, the right person to target, the right message to send. We leverage sing signals to incorporate into that message. When you get a response, we schedule a meeting.
Speaker 9:We record that meeting. We update your pipeline, we really architect it in a way that is not to be reactive to user input. If you've ever worked in a a sales tool, you sort of get a a database that's largely empty that you need to tell it what to do. Day one, when you log into Monaco, everything is already done for you. You're just sort of a beneficiary and recipient of things like meetings, feedback on things you can be doing better and more.
Speaker 2:Did you Yeah. Is launching with a platform like this only possible because of AI and and the advancements in coding agents and coding tools? Because it seems like you're you're sort of rebundling. Yeah. You listed off maybe like 10 different that are now coming together.
Speaker 2:And it's it's notable that that you guys didn't come out of stealth, like, maybe six months ago when you maybe had five of those things operational, but you you clearly decided to launch with a with a full suite.
Speaker 9:I I think a few things come to mind. One is we are able to build software faster because of the coding copilots that you just alluded to. And so I don't know that we would have been able to build a Monaco like platform in the amount of time that we've been able to pre AI. We're also building for a segment of the market. We're purpose built for earlier stage startups.
Speaker 9:So this is series a seed stage companies. Yeah. The needs of these businesses are relatively unsophisticated compared to much larger companies. And so because we're purpose built for a type of company that doesn't need super deep functionality, unlike the database side in fact, when you have super deep functionality, it makes it more difficult to interact with. And so you bundle all these tools together.
Speaker 9:If you're a series a startup, it actually works against you because the tools are so complicated to integrate, customize, work with. And, again, we're purpose built for that company. And then the last thing that comes to mind is wouldn't it possible to build Monaco without AI because we're AI native. So, like, everything that we do is sort of oriented, and the decisions that we make are around how can we program the platform to have an agent doing this rather than a user. And and so very different user experience than if you're used to logging into these sort of reactive databases.
Speaker 9:I listed a few of them. HubSpot, Adio, Salesforce, totally different user experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk about the domain. You got monaco.com. Talk about the lawsuit. Talk about how you picked Monaco to begin with.
Speaker 1:I want the full story.
Speaker 9:Okay. So naming was hard. It took us a couple months and, like, tried a bunch of different names. And you can't just, like, pick a name that you like. We couldn't have just called ourselves, like, sales.com because the the like, one, we wanted the .com to be available.
Speaker 9:And two, you, like, can't name it if something already has that name. Yeah. So I was trying to associate the brand with, like, luxury premium. Mhmm. Was thinking through, like, what what are some names that are typically associated with that?
Speaker 9:And I came up with Monaco. My older brother, who is a cofounder, when I told him I really like the name Monaco, his response was, that's the stupidest name ever. What are we gonna just call it? Like, New York? And so he wasn't a fan.
Speaker 9:But I think, like, over over time, started socializing it with some other people and started picking up some traction. There are a few things that we really like about it. It's a cool sounding word. Like, Monaco is just, like, a nice word itself. The place is associated with, I don't know, wealth and success.
Speaker 2:Yachts, Formula One.
Speaker 9:Yachts. But a big one is Formula One. A lot of really cool things that we can do there with the brand. Our logo is actually like a checkered flag that's going up into the right. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 9:And let's see. So the domain dispute, we we ended up calling it Monaco. Really liked the note the domain.
Speaker 1:Was the domain just available or did you have to go to a broker and get
Speaker 2:A domain like that doesn't just sit for $12 on GoDaddy.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 9:We we had monaco.co Okay. And that was a couple thousand dollars. I think all is said and done, both the domain cost and the broker's fees, we spent like, I don't know, another 800 or $900,000 dad dm. So we got monaco.co evolved to monaco.com. We did use a broker.
Speaker 9:Shout out to Loomis if they're watching.
Speaker 2:I love Loomis. Yeah. I've used I've I've worked with them on a bunch of domains. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Shout out Loomis.
Speaker 2:Cool. Wait.
Speaker 6:Put them
Speaker 1:in the dispute.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The dispute. What actually happened?
Speaker 9:So shortly after we acquired the domain, I think it had sort of been parked for a little while. Yeah. And we get this, like, hate mail from the escrow company that was holding the domain that the government of Monaco had filed what's called a UDRP dispute against us. We'd never heard that this was a thing. I didn't know there was, like, a regulatory body for domains.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. Anyway, they made, like, you know, all sorts of what turned out to be unsubstantiated, like, trademark claims. We we I'd I'd to get legal representation. This was, a couple month long process that required all sorts of evidence and more, and we ended up, winning the case. So, all's well that ends well.
Speaker 9:We are Monaco. It's official monaco.com.
Speaker 2:Just coming went to war with a country before it even launched. Not not many Wartime CEO. There we go. What are you learn we we've been covering the SaaSpocalypse. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You guys have the benefit of kind of understanding the world in its current form and building from the ground up. But but a lot of questions around seat based pricing. Do companies need to evolve to more value based pricing? What are you learning about kind of the broader concerns around enterprise software? And how are you kind of applying it?
Speaker 9:Well, I can tell you what we're doing right now. We're we're in public beta. So yesterday, we were in private beta. Today, we're in public beta. We'll eventually get to general availability.
Speaker 9:Right now, we're pricing around simplicity. So we charge a platform fee that includes all of the compute that you need relative to these other companies that I've referenced. We have very high compute cost because of all of the agents that are doing the work. We also have really high servicing costs. We pair what we call forward deployed AEs with every customer that signs up.
Speaker 9:So we charge a platform fee. Those things are included. Right now, we're charging annual platform fee of $25,000. That's discounted to what it will be as we go into GA. And we will I I suspect when somebody who is in the company that is much smarter than me on the finance side, I think we will be in this sort of, like, you pay a minimum minimum amount for the initial compute, and then it's pay as you go.
Speaker 9:It just makes far more sense with the value that we're adding to do this usage based sort of compute predicated pricing. But right now, we're solving for simplicity and eliminating friction from onboarding customers, And this has been a price point that has been met with very little resistance.
Speaker 2:How do you think sales is evolving? If you compare to a code any any software engineer says, oh, I don't write any code. I just review code now. What what's the equivalent experience in sales? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where do you think it goes?
Speaker 9:Yeah. It's it's a thoughtful question. You know, look, my answer may change six to twelve months ago from now. So let me give you the, like, today answer. It it doesn't seem that the the sort of customer facing relationship building aspect of sales is going anywhere.
Speaker 9:In fact, that that seems today to be the highest ROI activity that salespeople, in in some of our customers' cases, founders are doing, trying to replace the founder for many of the startups that are selling our product with, you know, some sort of, like, agent that is pretending to be a salesperson or or whatever it might be. People want to talk to someone in sales oftentimes. And so what we're doing is we're actually optimizing around that. Mhmm. It's the sort of noncustomer facing activities that we believe agents are far better at.
Speaker 9:So I'll give some example. Building and scoring your addressable market. So what we're effectively doing is we are telling you, without being customer facing, who are the best companies for you to target and why? Here's your prioritized list. We've added buyers to that prioritized list.
Speaker 9:We've added sequences based off of signals to that prioritized list. We are going to automate those sequences with no human involvement. And you, as the beneficiary, whether you're a sales rep or a founder, you will spend your time customer facing the way that I'm speaking with you guys right now. And we're gonna optimize everything in the platform around that experience, including the post follow-up. So you get off the call.
Speaker 9:We have the call transcript. We've written an email for you to follow-up with that person. It's very opinionated and trained on the way that we think about sales and go to market. You can review that email and click send. It's time for the next call.
Speaker 9:Mhmm. And so that's the sort of optimization that we believe AI is influencing the function of sales right now around. It's getting more qualified demos, helping you close more of those customers, and actually emphasizing the relationship building that happens that that is sort of customer facing.
Speaker 1:What's the best way to get a job as a salesperson in 2026? Advice for young people, maybe mid career people, somebody who wants to sort of be on I mean, you you worked in sales, had a great career. What does it take to be the next Sam Blonde?
Speaker 9:Oh, that's the my my answer might come off as too arrogant. Why don't I just come why don't I come up with, like, what what what would I do if I wanted a job in Monaco? I I think I I think there are a couple things that stand out right now. We we've come out of this, like and I think we're long out of the the sort of, like, COVID time period. Mhmm.
Speaker 9:We are five days a week at least in San Francisco. Mhmm. And so anybody that is sort of looking for this, like, I I expect to be able to, you know, potentially work from home one or two days, that that, like, sort of COVID hangover, that's a a a thing of the past. Mhmm. So I think from a quality standpoint, people that are just looking to win understand that it's like hard work to work and win at a company like Monaco.
Speaker 9:I do think that, like, track record of performance is an important thing. And so if you are, you know, a little bit later in your career or have several years of experience leveraging the relationships and the network that you've developed through that process. I think for us, it's gonna be hard to hire someone that sort of comes to the website and fills out a, like, I wanna be a senior AE at this company, like, job application without a close connection and
Speaker 1:a job a bottle of champagne. Right? That's the secret?
Speaker 9:Look. I won't say I can't be bought.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you're looking for a job, send a case of champagne. You'll get the interview for maybe. Who knows? You gotta have the resume too and the skills to back it up.
Speaker 1:Jordan, anything else?
Speaker 2:No. This is great.
Speaker 1:Congratulations to the whole
Speaker 6:team on all the progress.
Speaker 2:I'm yeah. I'm excited to watch more companies pick this up and
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And start to grow their revenue faster, hopefully. So
Speaker 1:This is awesome.
Speaker 9:Thanks so much, guys. I'll be back soon.
Speaker 8:Thank you for having Talk to you soon.
Speaker 9:Congrats on the success. We'll talk soon.
Speaker 8:Take care.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway takes automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Speaker 1:And without further ado, we have someone in person. Who is it? It's John. How are you doing, John? What's happening?
Speaker 1:Welcome. You. Grab a seat. Even better in person. Yes.
Speaker 1:Even better in person. What brings you to LA?
Speaker 4:Well, a couple of other meetings, but I figured I had to stop by. Yeah. And you know, little known fact, I was actually in journalism school Okay. Before along with data science. I was also majoring in journalism in Northwestern.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And if this had been an option when I was still in school, I
Speaker 5:might have not
Speaker 4:dropped out and just tried to get a job here.
Speaker 8:Who are
Speaker 1:your heroes? Who who's the who's the GOAT journalist in your opinion?
Speaker 4:Oh, man. Well, I dropped out for a reason. So
Speaker 1:You didn't learn anyone's name? That's funny. Well, reintroduce yourself. Tell everyone what you're working on, what you're building.
Speaker 4:For sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of Juxa, which is a GPS alternative that can track anywhere on earth, outdoors, indoors, underground
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Without relying on hardware like satellites, beacons, or cameras. Yeah. So that's a bunch of buzzwords to say
Speaker 1:Without external.
Speaker 4:Without external hardware. Right?
Speaker 1:We still need your hardware.
Speaker 4:We use IMUs that are already installed on devices like phones
Speaker 1:k.
Speaker 4:Robots, embedded devices, medical devices
Speaker 1:magnetic fields involved?
Speaker 4:No. That's kind of a
Speaker 1:Different tech.
Speaker 4:Right? It's a it's different tech, and and the key differentiator in what we've built is something called synthetic fingerprinting Mhmm. Which is this idea of being able to simulate IMU measurements at scale for different people and objects. And the value behind that is essentially from this desk here, we could map out and simulate an environment anywhere in the world. Amazon warehouse in Boston, and then have that up and running like in an hour.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:If you wanted to typically use like a magnetic approach, you it's hard to simulate magnetic movement because it's usually dependent on objects that are hard to predict being in the environment. Sure. You actually have to go to that warehouse, collect that data manually, and then train models on that. Mhmm. And so our idea is that the ultimate scalability with any positioning system is one that can be deployed fully remotely because I can't possibly go to, you know, every corner of the earth and install beacons, cameras Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Or, you know, collect fingerprint data.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. So what's the what's the textbook device? Android phone? IPhone?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, every every mobile phone today has an IMU
Speaker 1:inside So of
Speaker 4:like the same thing that's powering your compass app. Mhmm. Right? Accelerometers, gyroscopes are what we rely on.
Speaker 1:Are they getting better? Because I feel like the compass app came out Yeah. I don't know, a decade ago and it works as well as I I can
Speaker 4:mean, they've gotten better. So the traditional problem you'll see in the, like, inertial measurement unit space, if that's one a space that you find yourself in, is that drift is pretty prominent. So, you know, in theory, if we can do something that's faster, better, cheaper, and more accurate, everyone's like, why haven't this been done before? Right? So the idea is typically because I'm used Drift a
Speaker 2:lot. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So if you want to actually, you know, track someone over or an object over a long period of time, typically they veer off course, then you end up losing
Speaker 1:the phone's here. You know the phone's here to start. Then you raise it one foot. The IMU knows you went up a foot. You put it down a foot.
Speaker 1:The IMU knows you went down foot so you know where
Speaker 4:you Yeah. That'd be probably like an accelerometer, like an altitude sensor. But we're talking about usually speed and orientation vectors. Oh, So the simplest way to think about it is, right, if you know your starting position and your stacking vectors related to speed and direction Mhmm. That's called dead reckoning.
Speaker 4:That's the approach where you're not act that's just like very drift prone.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? So then what our what we do with our simulation and then our kind of the models that we've built is what mitigates drift by, like, 90 plus percent Yeah. And is able to track people and things over long periods of time. So the value adds are places like in defense and military Mhmm. Right?
Speaker 4:Because GPS gets jammed, like, instantly in any war zone. Yep. In indoor environments like warehouses Mhmm. Hospitals, any sort of, like, logistics centers. So those are kind of where we target first.
Speaker 4:Obviously, our long term goal is to sort of be, like a like I said, a pretty wide scale GPS replacement. You can imagine, like, that way down the road, eventually, someone like FEMA being able to use this to find survivors of natural disasters under piles of rubble where a GPS signal might not be able to penetrate through. Sure. But in the near term, those commercial opportunities are pretty
Speaker 1:Do you have any customers yet or do you have pilots running and how big are these firms that you're working with?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we work with, like I said, kind of those three industries mostly right now, logistics, healthcare, and defense. Mhmm. We have three customers. Our ACVs are in like the mid to low 6 figures.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So those deployments the first deployments are actually going on in March
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Which is exciting
Speaker 1:for And do they have to change anything on the hardware side?
Speaker 4:No. So we're we work kind of out of the box by design. Again, the whole goal is we want to eliminate as much especially compared to, like, RTLS solutions like beacons or cameras, we want to eliminate as much friction as possible. So we integrate directly onto device, and they don't require any setup.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How did you get into this? Were you just annoyed by messy, noisy data and you're like, I gotta fix this.
Speaker 2:Kept going into GPS denied zone. Yeah.
Speaker 4:You find yourself there all the time. Well, that's the same reason why if you're ever like driving in a city and it tells you you're going the wrong way on your maps app and it's really annoying. That's why, for reference. Those buildings even outdoors, those tall buildings get in the way of the signals. But I got into it largely because both of my parents were in the US military and the Navy.
Speaker 4:And so for a cumulative set of years, they were deployed between Afghanistan, Asia, all over. And so I think I kind of was exposed early on to the idea of like wanting to know where your parents were when you were a kid.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And it's funny how you develop these like random hyper fixations Mhmm. Maybe at that age that feel random and then over time Mhmm. You know, an elementary explanation from my mom or dad kind of converted into like a prolonged interest.
Speaker 1:That's cool. What's the status of the company? How much have you raised?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we raised we out of YC, which we were in the summer twenty five batch, we raised a little over $5,000,000. Let's hit the gong. Nice.
Speaker 1:You never hit the gong for this race.
Speaker 4:Congratulations. It hits different in person too.
Speaker 1:It is. Wow. No. It's better in But
Speaker 4:raised 5,000,000 led by CRV Cool. Out of YC. Charles River Ventures. Correct? Exact well, I yeah.
Speaker 4:Did not I should have probably known what that stood before I took the money. I learned that after the fact.
Speaker 2:You locked in.
Speaker 1:You looked it up. Yeah. So how big is the team?
Speaker 4:Right now, it's seven. Okay. It's a pretty technically dense problem and so Yeah. Essentially all of our talent are like the top there's a very small community of hyper talented engineers and researchers, mostly in academia, who focus on like no hardware tracking, submitted data, all that stuff. We've been fortunate enough to probably have what I feel comfortable in saying is probably the highest concentration of those people at a single company today.
Speaker 4:Maybe maybe Waymo or maybe maybe Tesla who does a lot of LIDAR and SLAM stuff. But, yeah, seven people, pretty much all engineers.
Speaker 1:And and the IMU manufacturers, they don't want to get into this side of the software problem for their clients, provide an API that is less noisy?
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's like a probably a business opportunity for them, but it's it's a pretty drastically different space than like manufacturing sensors that are like the size of your pinky nail into Okay. Into sort of building like simulations and and all these like drift loss functions that are like again pretty concentrated in the know how among the 10 or so people that can actually build that across the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. What was the biggest thing you learned in YC?
Speaker 4:Well, YC was interesting for us because we are I think like 95% of our batch was b to b SaaS or like agents, I think even, maybe. So which was remember. Which was yeah. You were there.
Speaker 2:You got agents for your agents.
Speaker 1:I know. Yeah. It was a lot of agent infrastructure companies. I think you were You know, actually
Speaker 4:in brow our office at Union Square is browser based old office.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way.
Speaker 4:So hopefully we're summoning some of the good juju from them.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:No. YC was good for us because they basically shove all of the non agent companies into one group office hour. So like our our our like eight companies, our weekly meetings was like like a missile company Oh, yeah. Like purse I think Perseus Defense. Knox Metals, if you're familiar I with love them.
Speaker 4:Us, robotics, like a robotics company. There are another couple of guys building, like, magnesium alternatives. So it was a pretty eclectic group. Mhmm. Nobody was really focused on the same thing, but they were really good conversations.
Speaker 4:So my favorite part about that was probably the group office hours. Mhmm. If you can like finagle your way into the eight or nine deep tech companies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What are you what are you trying to prove out before the a?
Speaker 4:Before well, I mean, realistically, like, think for us, it's like a technical question more than there's like a market question. Right? Because, again, if we're coming to right now, 90% of all human and object movement globally is in GPS denied areas Mhmm. Which makes sense if you think about it. Like, right now, we're in one.
Speaker 4:Anytime you're indoors, underground, in a combat zone, there's no location data being tracked. So you're missing tons of analytics. So I think the appeal is pretty strong in terms of the need, and we can do it if if our technology works as we say it does at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time with the same accuracy and reliability. So essentially, it just comes down to proving out the tech. And we have a lot of we also have a lot of preorders aside from the customer we already have that I think will propel us to all the revenue benchmarks that are important.
Speaker 4:For us at this point, it's essentially proving out that we're able to, again, mainly reduce drift meaningfully so which so that we can track people for hours or eventually days on end without it being a without it being a significant problem.
Speaker 2:How I gotta ask how you're thinking about privacy, security, all those things. I'm sure the Internet, if you're successful, you'll be one of the most hated people on the internet. I'm like Just from the from the schizo
Speaker 4:Well, I've been seeing all the hearings online of all the yeah. The hearings get pretty tensed out
Speaker 1:on whether modification is
Speaker 4:They're not gonna Exactly. So I'm like maybe next up. But but no. I mean, privacy is essentially something that, like, we're usually selling to vendors or companies who have end users on their side. Sure.
Speaker 4:So, by and large, like, our direct interface is not with the people who are being tracked with their location. That doesn't mean it's not important for us. Obviously, we have our methods about it being encrypted. Yep. Working a lot with defense, and those environments has to be very secure.
Speaker 4:But generally, like, we work with health care, for instance, you know, tracking staff is usually a matter of, well, does it fall off in the union rights? Like, it something that it's on a hospital issued device, usually they're allowed to track them without it being a problem. Mhmm. If it's on a, you know, personal device, then it's obviously it comes down to the direct discretion of the the employee.
Speaker 1:And even the personal devices, like, you know, Apple can track you, but Apple has spent probably billions of dollars talking about how they treat privacy seriously. You sort of know that if you open up the Maps app, you're paying the GPS
Speaker 4:Yeah. Light. And and and for what it's worth, like, we're using also the standard infrastructure that Apple is also using in their devices. So, like, our the actual things that we're going off of in terms of hardware Yeah. Have already been greenlit and approved by, hopefully, institutions that people trust.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Again, it'll ultimately probably come down mostly to the interactions and the relationships between the customers that we sell to and their customers. Yeah. You know, my long term vision though is right now we're selling commercial. It'd be great over the course of, you know, five, ten years, you can see a use case where, you know, there's a consumer facing version of of Juxo.
Speaker 4:Instead of Google Maps or Apple Maps, you get the added benefit of, again, a navigation tool that will never lose your direction when you're in a big city. You can route it from your house to your exact appointment room at a hospital. It'll give you routing on the road to the parking. Once you're in the hospital, it'll navigate you to the room. So there's those easy, you know, added benefits.
Speaker 4:But more than that, like, when I think about FEMA tracking you. Right? Are people is are people gonna download a FEMA app to be tracked by FEMA in the event they're a natural disaster? Probably not. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So I think about, like, in terms of how we can ultimately eventually interface with people directly is we might partner with companies or agencies like FEMA or whoever else who want to track location in sparing moments moments. And they basically, as a user on, like, with juxta maps, you can opt in
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:To FEMA tracking you if you live in a natural disaster area and one strikes. Yeah. And then that's sort of the consent process that we would deal with directly with the customer. But for now, that's probably much too ambitious and way down the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Also, the phone OEMs would probably want something like Like, you know, Apple just, like, randomly rolled out. Like, hey, if you're if you don't have cell service, like, you can send one text message via a very slow satellite. Yeah. And everyone's like, awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. If I'm ever lost hiking, I'll probably text someone. What does the data side of the business look like? Is this a big data problem where you need to actually source a ton of data to run a model on top?
Speaker 4:So so the big again, the big breakthrough with us has been the the synthetic fingerprinting process. We're the first company publicly that I know of that's built an IMU simulator Okay. At scale that's as reliable as ours is. So essentially, we can give be given an input of an of an we do a lot of asset tracking too. So we do a lot of like like warehouses and and different like shipments.
Speaker 4:Given the dimensions, weight, height, whatever of a object or person, we can then simulate it in our physics based engine, have them moving around a three d space. We because we render we basically take in a map or a satellite image of whatever the space is. Mhmm. We use computer vision to render it into this three d model. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Then we simulate all these people or things moving around the space and create these basically anchor points, benchmarks of what IMU measurements are going be at certain spots given how that person is moving and where they started and all that other stuff. That allows us to to benchmark that data. So we're able to that ability to synthetically generate it is what makes it so scalable. Mhmm. In terms of, like, again, long term really long term visions, like, my anticipation is we'll be one of the largest holders of all labeled map and floor plan data in the world by a good margin.
Speaker 4:Right? There's actually It's a pretty untapped but important space to have labeled data Broadly. Yeah. And and and because the input The only input that we get from users is the floor plan or the Mhmm. Saddle image of the space they want to track.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So if we were to partner with, let's say, a major grocery store chain across The United States, you know, we'll probably be the only company at the moment that has that much labeled data about aisles, shelves, checkout lines, everything like that. So that's maybe not a that's more of like a monetization route down the road. Yeah. In terms of data that we need as our input, the synthetic process kind of allows us to circumvent a lot of that.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Cool. Yeah. That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 2:Well, great to get the update. Congratulations. The olive branch. Hang out hang out a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll hang out after.
Speaker 2:Will do.
Speaker 1:Thanks. We gotta plant the bomb. We gotta tell everyone thank you for watching the show.
Speaker 2:What There's one more video. There's one more video I want you to I don't think you've seen
Speaker 1:it yet. Video.
Speaker 2:This one is for you.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:Let's I am. Pull it up. Sharing it with What else
Speaker 1:going on? We got through a lot of stuff today. Oh, I think I know what you're pulling up. I think I know.
Speaker 2:You guys got it?
Speaker 1:Let's see. Blue Water Autonomy had a announcement. Okay. Let's watch this. POV nightly reel scroll but you're performatively into physical media.
Speaker 1:So they print them out. Could
Speaker 2:get Commenting? Into
Speaker 1:Commenting. Okay. Double tap a like. Okay.
Speaker 2:This is this is this is how you're gonna start consuming short form.
Speaker 1:Yeah. People people always lament the fact that we don't print out the tweets anymore. But a lot of the tweets are videos and you can't print those out. But maybe you can. Maybe you actually can print out the videos.
Speaker 1:Any anything else you wanna talk about before we get out of here?
Speaker 2:No. Fun show today.
Speaker 1:No. Thank you, guys. Don't wanna talk about the Hermes We should. Leather pool table in emerald green? Plant that bomb, and we'll tell everyone about the leather pool table.
Speaker 1:It's emerald green. This would look great in the UltraDome. It's only $264,000. What a steal for an Hermes pool table. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:They put the h on the cue ball. I like that.
Speaker 7:Little detail. Let everyone know.
Speaker 2:You got the Hermes version. For generations.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow at 11AM
Speaker 6:in the
Speaker 1:Pacific Shark And Fox.
Speaker 2:Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.