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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN live from the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Today is Thursday, February 27, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're going over NVIDIA earnings.
Speaker 1:We're talking about the spy Sheik, a man out in The Middle East who's making waves in AI investing. And we're also breaking down Stripe's letter from the founders. Lots of interesting fintech data in there. We're gonna have two call ins today. We got Sean Frank from the Ridge Wallet and Delian Asparooja from Varda and Founders Fund.
Speaker 2:What are they gonna be talking about, John?
Speaker 1:Sean is actually gonna come on and talk about Applovin. A lot of turmoil in the stock. I think they're down a bunch recently. Right? I actually haven't been following that, but he's the expert.
Speaker 1:That's why we're having him on.
Speaker 2:And then definitely up the chart right now, but, Sean has been a big customer of AppLovin. There's been a lot of attacks against them recently. He's come out in defense of them saying that, you know, you can say that it's overvalued. That's fair, but it is a real platform. We've driven real results on it.
Speaker 2:And, so it it'll be interesting to get his perspective there. I I think he spent few million dollars there last quarter. Mhmm. And so we'll we'll get an update there. And then, very exciting day for Varda.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm excited to dive into it.
Speaker 1:Reentry successful. And so Delian will come on and break it down and hopefully give us some color on, what's going on in the space economy, and, you know, hopefully get political, explain what's going on with, DOD procurement. I said,
Speaker 2:hopefully, get political.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I we don't get political. We let our desk
Speaker 2:get political too.
Speaker 1:I don't know. He'll talk about whatever he wants to talk about. Anyway, let's kick it off with a report in The Wall Street Journal about NVIDIA's earnings. They beat earnings. They're down today.
Speaker 1:If you wanna pull that up on public, I'd love some extra context, but I'll start reading from this. The chip giant has stayed relevant even as DeepSeek and other reasoning AI models rise. NVIDIA faced a growing threat earlier last year. The artificial intelligence world was shifting in a way that invited competition as millions of people started using AI tools operating the underlying models to respond to their many queries became more important than the computing intensive work of training them. This is the training to inference shift that we saw happen, and which was expected.
Speaker 1:You train the model and then you wanna actually serve it, and so you gotta do inference. This had propelled NVIDIA to the top of the AI boom. Many expected that shift could give competitors, including advanced micro devices, AMD, an opening to pry away market share. But Nvidia was already preparing to adapt and stay at the forefront of the AI race despite the shift away from creating models and toward operating them, a process known in the industry as inference. And I love this article because all the killers are here.
Speaker 1:They got Dylan Patel quoted. They got a bunch of other people that we'll get into shortly. Its latest AI chips, Blackwell, are larger in size, have more computer memory, and use less precise numbers in AI computations. They can also be linked together in large numbers with super fast networking, which Dylan Patel, the founder of industry research firm, Semiaanalysis, said led to breakthrough gains in inference. So bull case for NVIDIA laid out by Dylan Patel over at semi analysis.
Speaker 1:NVIDIA's performance gains for Blackwell are much are much larger in inference than they are in training, he said. NVIDIA's latest quarterly earnings report on Wednesday partly reflected its success in adapting to the industry shift. It included sales and profit that exceeded analysts' expectations coupled with an optimistic forecast for the company's current quarter. Inference has become a growing focus as AI evolves towards so called reasoning models where a digital brain thinks through answers to users' queries step by step. That process can require a hundred times more computing power, chief executive Jensen Wong said on a call with analyst Wednesday.
Speaker 1:The vast majority of our compute today is actually inference, and Blackwell takes all of that to a new level. We designed Blackwell with the idea of reasoning models in mind. So, yeah. Obviously, when you're reasoning, so many more tokens are being generated hundreds of hundreds times more, and so inference is becoming, much more important, and Blackwell has positioned NVIDIA well to take advantage of that. Got anything for me, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean, it's just it's only a company like Nvidia could have an earnings beat and a very optimistic forecast and the stock trade down 6% the next day, which is where it's at, sick almost six and a half percent. So it wasn't just priced to perfection. Price for It was per priced beyond perfection, in their, the the stock price is paying for it today. But let's get into the rest of it, and then I'm sure we'll have other thoughts.
Speaker 1:So, Collette Kress, NVIDIA's chief financial officer, added that many early developments of the company's Blackwell chips were earmarked for inference work. That pattern was a first for a new generation of the company's chips. Among the companies pursuing reasoning models are OpenAI, Google, and the upstart Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which we've covered on the show. The emergence in January of DeepSeek, which said it had built sophisticated AI models that required fewer of NVIDIA's chips touched off the significant scare for NVIDIA since, the AI boom began. So, of course, it sold off, then it gained back, and now it's back down.
Speaker 2:Speaking of deep seek, I don't know if this is in the stack for later, but somebody shared yesterday that they have off hours pricing. So the you can basically it's already extremely cheap. Yep. But then off hours, which are their sort of nonbusy hours, it's, like, off another 50%. And somebody was saying, great.
Speaker 2:We have Timoo AI now.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a ton of, load balancing that does happen in these AI inference models. So midjourney, when you're in America and you're using midjourney during your workday, you are likely running that inference in Asia Yeah. On an Asian server. Because of the time difference, they are not using it in the middle of the night, and then vice versa. And so that type of load balancing happens all the time.
Speaker 1:But it is funny how sometimes it seems like the models, if they're under stress, they still work, but they become, like, lower quality or the there's a bunch of knobs that people are tuning, and it's basically like, yeah, your your AI worker is getting Just
Speaker 2:won't try as hard.
Speaker 1:Just doesn't try as hard. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Eat some protein.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Wong brushed off the that threat on Wednesday describing DeepSeek's advances as a as an excellent innovation that AI developers everywhere were taking inspiration from. I think that's true. A lot of those gains will be baked in, but people still wanna run them on really big, really big server farms and using a lot of Blackwell chips. Why not stack all the gains together if you can?
Speaker 1:In the past, Wong has suggested that inference and training will eventually converge as AI more closely aligns with how humans operate. People don't absorb new information and reference it separately. He said at Stanford University last year, you're learning and inferencing all the time.
Speaker 2:Great point. And some
Speaker 1:of these models actually it's what's called online learning where, you you can continue to train the model even after it's been fully trained. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, there's a pre training, post training, but a lot of these models are are are now what's called online so they can be essentially updated. And and I think that that, the people that look at AI as, you know, we're we're kind of replicating the human brain think about it that way where there's, like Yep. Fast thinking, slow thinking, all these different models, and you need to replicate all of that.
Speaker 2:And humans are fixated on, you know, especially in our corner of the Internet, improving your thinking day over day, not in sort of quarterly installments or or, and, yeah. It's interesting because right now, people seem very comfortable with, the idea of, it would become a lot to process if, you know, Claude three point five. You know, there's some people today. I saw the cursor founder sharing. He still prefers Claude three point five over 3.7, and people are sort of oriented now around these sort of releases and having, like, fixed models.
Speaker 2:Yep. But there's a world in the future where they're just constantly morphing and evolving, and I think that that is what this point's getting at here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've seen some diagrams where people have said, like, oh, there's too many algorithms now and too many, like, hacks on top of, the the core LOM, to really call it AGI. Like, it it doesn't count. It needs to be, like, one simple algorithm. The the algorithm for AGI will be just some simple transformer, and then it'll just be massively scaled up, and that will give us everything we need, as opposed to what we have now, which is like, yes, like, it it has the ability to use a web browser, but that's adapted to it and has, like, ability to look up data and index things.
Speaker 1:And and it but another way to think about it is, like, in your mind, you have the access to go to the library and look up books, and you have the ability to use a calculator. And so maybe we don't need to create an LLM that can do every single calculation from its head. It can just use the toolbox.
Speaker 2:Superintelligence. Right? Yeah. Closer to the definition of something that doesn't need any
Speaker 1:Anything else. External references. Exactly. It's almost like a yeah. It's almost like an academic exercise of, like, can you just create some superintelligence with a single simple algorithm?
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't matter because really what people want are just agents that do their jobs. Yep. And so it doesn't matter if it's if it's, you know, just going and writing some Python and then coming back with the correct answer. I just want the correct answer.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So, NVIDIA still faces strong competition in inference, industry insiders say. While NVIDIA's advances in hardware and investments in its AI software have kept customers around, a variety of new chips from startups and more established chip makers mean it won't be easy for NVIDIA to maintain its position at the top. Robert Walken, the cofounder of AI chip startup Etched. I actually spent three hours interviewing him, last year. Great team.
Speaker 1:Fascinating team. Two Thiel Fellows on that team, and they are trying to build a, an inference based chip that's just a transformer baked down into silicon. Yeah. So those so those would run much faster. And they've done some cool demos where they've, been able to generate Minecraft essentially on the fly.
Speaker 1:And the only thing that it takes in is the input from the controller, and then it just generates the next frame that you would expect to see. And so you can just play this full game, and it's all being generated. There's no game
Speaker 2:in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So
Speaker 2:Level the guy on x, I think, levels I o, he's doing something with flight, like, an alter like, a flight simulator fully generated version.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about that later, but I'm pretty sure what that is is he had he had AI write game engine code.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:It's different than generating the video. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but but similar things, I mean, regardless of all the stuff, it's really
Speaker 2:Yeah. With the pace of development, some of these models, you can imagine a future where games are just perpetually generated Yeah. In every, you know, in every possible direction. Right? It'll be a totally new experience to play games versus historically, there's a map and there's sort of boundaries to the game.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then what happens when there's there's no more map? Like, the map is whatever you can imagine or whatever the game can imagine.
Speaker 1:There's no finite levels. Like, you can you can go to Chat GPC right now and just say, tell me a story about a knight fighting for a castle. And then just immediately be like, continue the story. Can where does it go next? Where does it go next?
Speaker 1:And you can do that for Or do that with Star Wars.
Speaker 2:Say, pretend, you know, you you just finished the the movie you know, this movie. Yeah. You know, continue the movie. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And right now, it might get boring. But, eventually, you could say, hey hey. Make another level for me. Make another level for me, essentially, and and do it all in real time. And so he said NVIDIA's chips were fundamentally limited by their origins as graphics processing units adapted for AI instead of custom made for the moment.
Speaker 1:Sharpening the Swiss army knife only gets you so far, Watkins said. You have to build specialized hardware if you want to get maximal performance. You're hitting a wall here. And we certainly saw that in Bitcoin mining. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Bitcoin was originally mined on the CPU, then eventually GPUs, then what are called FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, which are really kinda customizable silicon pieces. And then and then, after FPGAs, it went to ASICs, which are, the algorithm is baked into silicon. The chip can only run one algorithm. Yep. And the algorithm that the Bitcoin ASICs run is the Bitcoin algorithm that just mines, mines, mines.
Speaker 1:And, hugely risky because you're
Speaker 2:chips yearn for the mines, much like the children yearn for for Minecraft.
Speaker 1:True. True. Everything converges to mining in this in this world. Mining and tokens. Crypto tokens, AI, LLM tokens, you know, there's these weird crossovers all over the place.
Speaker 1:But, for the Bitcoin folks, it was very risky because you you have to spend all this money to make these chips. And then if the price of Bitcoin doesn't go up, well, you're not gonna reap your benefit. Now a lot of those
Speaker 2:Where the price of energy goes down.
Speaker 1:Energy. Exactly. And so this it's it's the same game that we're seeing playing out right now, and Etched is betting that, transformer architecture is here to stay and that AI inference is going to be here to stay. And I think that's a very safe bet. I I Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm very, excited for what these guys are building. Of course, it's a huge task to actually go and build a transformer based, chip and get it manufactured, but, the the the copatitude
Speaker 2:is completely useless. The comparison between humans thinking, just the process of thinking requires a bunch of calories, which is one form of energy. Right? Inference, on the other hand, the same, the same level of human thinking is gonna require some amount of inference to accomplish Yep. Sort of the same, generalized sort of reasoning process.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it also requires energy. So it'll be interesting to think, like, I I actually wanna see comparisons of, for a human to reason something out, what is the energy cost, what is the the the, comparable energy cost for a machine to do it. I would think that right now, it's very possible that it takes more sort of calories in almost energy in for the machine to do it. But eventually, that'll that could flip.
Speaker 2:But it might be closer than you'd actually think, but it's an interesting comparison.
Speaker 1:Right? How many take all the people put the pump protein bars
Speaker 2:do you need, to to have a good take? Right? Yeah. For you, it it's maybe, like, a quarter of one. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. We'll see you every time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It really, it it's, yeah. The matrix is is basically that story. So, he goes on to say a number of startups have begun making inroads among large AI customers. Cerebras, which is a company we've talked about before, they designed the largest chips ever produced, wafer scale chips.
Speaker 2:By the way, I love this because everybody's like, we need to make the best, smallest, most performant chip. They're like, no. We're just gonna make the biggest one.
Speaker 3:We're gonna try
Speaker 2:to make the biggest and best chip very American out of a French, French firm.
Speaker 1:I don't know if the French they're working with Mistral now.
Speaker 2:They're working with Mistral.
Speaker 1:And and and it was interesting because, Cerberus, I think they might have gone public or they or they became a pretty big company, and they they had one deal, that wasn't with a company that people had actually, like, used the product of. It was kind of a more of like a hypothetical
Speaker 2:is in is in Sunnyvale. So not French, but working with Mistral.
Speaker 1:And so, and so they're working with Mistral now, to build the world's fastest AI chatbot. So because it's all on one chip, you you can inference it very quickly. There's no memory bandwidth to deal with. And so Yep. There's advantages to that.
Speaker 1:Of course, there's a bunch of drawbacks. We talked about this when you're manufacturing at wafer scale. One tiny defect throws out the entire chip as opposed to if you have a wafer and you're getting 50 chips off of that. If you, you know, your your your yield is, you know, 49 out of 50 instead of zero out of one. And so there have been a lot of risks to that approach, but, I love to see that they're trying a different approach and trying to create just a new product that optimizes around a different vector of, of progress.
Speaker 1:And so Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco is working closely with AI chip startup, Grok, which is with a q. It's a different Grok.
Speaker 2:That's a tough one.
Speaker 1:It's very tough. And SambaNova Systems to set up large computing facilities for inference. And now the grok g r o q, they, went viral with a demo because they, ran LAMA on, their chip, which I I I'm not exactly sure. They they did something where they optimized for, like, super fast memory bandwidth, but low bet low total memory allocation or something like that. They made some trade off, and the result was that you could inference llama and generate tokens, like, extremely, extremely quickly.
Speaker 1:And it would just you know how, like, you're kinda waiting for chat g p d to load Yep. With the GROQ quote, chip. It would just, like, spit out a full page, like, immediately. And that was, like, kinda magical.
Speaker 2:When you're so used to LLMs taking a little bit to think
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, when it happens instantly, it's it's really shocking.
Speaker 1:It's magical. And it also future. Yeah. Exactly. And and I'm sure there's that that that thing about, like, Amazon, you know, every five milliseconds of optimization really matters.
Speaker 1:And so you you could see that really driving adoption. It's unclear if that's if GROQ is, like, scaling up and and successful in all the new models because some of the new models, they might need, oh, this one needs more memory, and it just doesn't work on their chip. So there's always a
Speaker 2:difference between when you're when you're looking at a reasoning model, sort of think something out. Right now, it's paced out in a way that that it sort of you can see the sort of chain the the logic chains, And it and it's more or less as fast as as, you know, you you might think through it if you were knowledgeable on the subject. Yet when it happens instantly, you start feeling a little paper clippy, and it's certainly nerve wracking.
Speaker 1:It is so funny that the the the first AI thing was clippy and then everyone's worried about getting paperclips and, like, it's, like, it all comes back to the paperclips. I wonder if that's where the paperclips the paper clipper, like, AI doom scenario came from. Is it at all tied to Microsoft's clippy? I don't know. What's, like, the etymology of, like, the paper clipping thing?
Speaker 1:I understand the the, like, the thought experiment that, like, hey. You know, you tell it to it's a good example. You tell it to go make a paperclip, and then it just turns everything into paperclips.
Speaker 2:Kinda see the the I I think the original the origin of this was that philosophers have speculated that an AI task with, with a task such as creating paper clips
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Might cause an apocalypse. By learning to divert ever increasing resources to the task and then learning how to resist our attempts to turn it off. So I think that that that's sort of the
Speaker 1:But why did they choose paperclips? Is it because of Microsoft's Clippy? I mean, that's what happened.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, like, they could've said staples. They could've said staples, or they could've said hats, So they could have
Speaker 2:said Yeah. So it's a 2014 thought experiment by this guy Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so Clippy would have predated that.
Speaker 1:So he's already
Speaker 2:It's very possible.
Speaker 1:We we gotta ask Bostrom. He he does, he does shows every once in a while. We should get him on. Ask him where he came up with paper clips specifically. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1:I have to imagine that NVIDIA is going to drop some kind of inference powerhouse sooner rather than later because I think they will get eclipsed in that market. He said it may take many years, but I think that's the direction things are heading. And this was Jim Piazza, an executive at IT management company, and Sono, who formerly worked on computing infrastructure at Meta. He said that NVIDIA might need to take further steps to directly address the competition in inference by developing chips specifically for it. So if you can think about this, like, you know, what what is Apple doing in in inference?
Speaker 1:Well, they have, you know, the the the m one, m two, m three, m four chips. Those are Apple silicon. They aren't really wired together in a way where you can do a large language model training run. I I'm sure you could get it to work if you worked hard enough. You got enough of them.
Speaker 1:And we've seen some previews of this where, like, maybe they just, you know, networked a bunch of Mac studios together to do some sort of small training run. But it's not really designed to be, like, Blackwell competitive Yep. Or a 100, h 100 competitive. But, you know, Google has their TPU, and I think Amazon has a custom silicon chip as well. And so there's a few different hyperscalers that have chips that are specifically they they're like, hey.
Speaker 1:We're gonna do all our inference ourselves. We're not we don't wanna pay Nvidia their margins. And so NVIDIA needs to keep up with that, cut it off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The competition for NVIDIA is is the GROCs of the world, the GRO queues. Yep. Right? These sort of upstart chip chip, design design companies.
Speaker 2:But then it's also the hyperscalers. Yep. And that is honestly, in many ways, more risky because it's very difficult for, you know, startups can can kinda pick a, you know, a certain edge. But the issue with the the hyperscalers is they're the big buyers of these chips as well. So if they start developing their own, that's a huge risk factor.
Speaker 2:The other thing is in in the news this morning, well, we are the news, but in some other news this morning, Andy Jassy was on I think it was Bloomberg talking about Amazon's new quantum computing chip. And so every hyperscaler, cares a lot about this category, is innovating themselves here and, you know, in hopes to one day be, you know, running, a lot of their data centers on their own chips, right, would be the goal.
Speaker 1:Cut out the middleman. Well, regardless of what you think about NVIDIA, the best place to invest in NVIDIA is probably public.com.
Speaker 2:I would say so.
Speaker 1:Investing for those who take it seriously, they have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com for stocks, bonds, treasuries, options, and more.
Speaker 2:And treasuries are a great option in this market when everything they they rolled that out when interest rates first popped, in 2022 and, have just continued to ship, improvements on it. So, get a good time to have exposure to historically, much more stable assets.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So go do do some research and, move some assets over to public. Let's move on to the spy chic taking the AI world by storm. This is a fascinating profile on Abu Dhabi's Tanoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He has more than $1,500,000,000,000 to spend, and he's in a hurry.
Speaker 1:He's grappling with Mark Zuckerberg. The Abu Dhabi Royal
Speaker 2:is kind size is not size. You remember that line? I think this was, when Luna was crashing. Yep. The the people were sort of poking fun at the founders.
Speaker 2:He had this you know, his his company did collapse, but he had a good line in there, which was your size is not size.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:People were saying they were shorting. But, nobody's size is size when you compare, this royal thrown around one point four trillion.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Move over Masa. There's a new
Speaker 2:There's a new big dog.
Speaker 1:Big dog.
Speaker 3:Masa when you need I mean, it's funny it's funny when when Masa
Speaker 2:is talking about raising $500,000,000,000. You know, this is a guy that could do it, but he's certainly not gonna put 30% of his entire portfolio into one, you know, sort of potentially high risk project. So
Speaker 1:so let's kick it off. The Abu Dhabi Royal, sometimes called the spy chic, is accustomed to using his vast wealth to master his many obsessions, which have ranged over the years from martial arts to chess to video games. Now, Sheikh Tanoon, the United Arab Emirates national security adviser and brother of the president, is deploying a similar playbook at a much grander scale. He wants to muscle his tiny emirate to the front of the race to develop and control AI systems that could transform the global economy. The world is taking notice.
Speaker 1:The CEOs of Apple, Microsoft, and BlackRock have all paid homage to his elaborate Persian Gulf Royal compound in recent months. You know, we love royal compounds.
Speaker 2:Love compounds. I've been I I told you before we joined the show, I've been on an absolutely iconic, Persian Gulf Royal Compound in The UAE. I don't think it was this one. There are many. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's plenty of space in the desert to put these compounds, but, they really are, an oasis. The one that I went to had over a hundred Ferraris stored on the property. It's too many. There was actually it was actually to the point where he would have, like, one f 40 in each color. Wow.
Speaker 2:And so and he'd have, like, he'd be like, oh, yeah. I I like vintage Range Rovers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he would have the entire rainbow of just one Yeah. One car. Same spec, just changing the paint color.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 3:mean, it's like the sultan of Brunei.
Speaker 2:Kind of. Yeah.
Speaker 1:At one point, the sultan of Brunei was buying more than three cars per day for years, and he wound up with a collection
Speaker 2:in the tens of thousands. My my foot he was a client of my father-in-law, actually.
Speaker 1:Insane. He was making custom cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He would go in there.
Speaker 1:Dominator, the precursor to the Bentayga, never sold to the public.
Speaker 3:I mean, a lot of three and
Speaker 1:I just asked just asked Bentley, I want an SUV. And they said No.
Speaker 2:There's so many
Speaker 1:We'll make 10.
Speaker 2:So there's a bunch of incredible cars
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That originated because somebody in The Gulf said, make me this car. Yep. And we can thank them for that. The g Wagon was actually so the g class was developed as a military vehicle from suggestion from the Shah of Iran Interesting. Back in 1972.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. I didn't know that. As an Iranian, and is still loved by Persians Yeah. Specifically here in LA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Whatever Iran deal happens next, we gotta make sure there's some cool cars involved. Yeah. Let's let's deescalate and and shift from, you know, the geopolitical jockeying to just Yep. Who can design a cooler car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the world peace that I wanna see Exactly. In the world.
Speaker 2:Exactly. We're working towards that.
Speaker 1:But this guy seems like an absolute boss. He, on a fall trip to The United States, he grappled with fellow Brazilian jiu jitsu devotee, Mark Zuckerberg, and donned a sweatshirt and jeans for a visit with Elon Musk at Tesla's test Texas factory. All of this is possible in part because of the because the 56 year old, Tannoon, controls more money than almost anyone on the planet as the chairman of two Abu Dhabi wealth funds with an estimated 1,400,000,000,000.0 in assets and the steward of an enormous personal personal fortune. A new artificial intelligence fund he leads, MGX, is set to be infused with more than 50,000,000,000 from his wealth and other Abu Dhabi sources. And that's like a drop in the bucket compared to the 1,400,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. These numbers are so big now. According to people familiar with the fund, billions of dollars more are sent are set to be spent on AI by group forty two, a company he controls. This is all part of more than 70,000,000,000 the UAE has pledged to invest in France and Italy earlier this month. Last month, MGX was one of the few names mentioned backing Stargate, a hundred billion dollar data center project announced by
Speaker 2:The US. Calling this a hundred billion dollar data center project when the headline number just a month ago was 500? Are they dialing it back?
Speaker 1:I have no
Speaker 2:idea. Possible that they started the road they basically started the roadshow Yeah. And said, you know, shoot for 500. Even if you miss and landed a hundred, you're still in a good spot. Right?
Speaker 2:You're starting to be more competitive with some of the hyperscalers, but, definitely dialing it back, a full 80% if, I'm assuming that I'm assuming that the Wall Street Journal sort of, like, fact check this and and sort of confirm because for them to just call this if it was still a $500,000,000,000 project and then they're going and calling it a hundred billion dollar project, it doesn't look good on the journal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the the numbers just go up and down every other day. Yeah. Like, add a hundred billion, take 400,000,000,000 off. Who knows?
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter. And then is it over what period of time? And, oh, then Zuck's doing 200,000,000,000 over here and,
Speaker 2:and Big numbers.
Speaker 1:Satya at Microsoft is good for his 80,000,000,000, but then maybe pulling that separately, and no one really knows how you're counting this stuff up. But, a lot of money's going out. Yep. Data centers are being built. Yep.
Speaker 1:And the products are getting better. So they're, you know, the hype is over. Here,
Speaker 2:Saudi Aramco is working on, their own project with, with Grok.
Speaker 3:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So it also, it has also written big checks to OpenAI and Musk's AI, XAI, and and Amazon backed Anthropic. So he's in all three foundation companies.
Speaker 2:Good. Why not?
Speaker 1:And at that point, I think people are just like, I don't like that you're in my competitor, but I who else am I gonna go to for a hundred billion?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You're the only person. So, yeah, I'll take you can have a slice of everything. You can create an index.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's super smart.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even in a world awash with AI in funds, even in an AI world awash in funds, Tanoon stands out. While many are plunging tens of billions of dollars into concentrated areas, SoftBank is making a huge bet on OpenAI, and the tech giants are heaving money at data centers. Tanoon is planning to spend more money broadly around the fledgling sector than almost anyone else. It's a risky time to be splashing so much cash on AI.
Speaker 1:Citation needed. Who knows? It might be the best time ever. You know?
Speaker 2:Well, so the next so
Speaker 1:is this
Speaker 4:not bad
Speaker 2:or by saying the low cost AI model from China's DeepSeek has abruptly shaken assumptions on the need for heavy investment. Gotta put them in the true zone here. It's already come out that they spent way more than the headline number that they had. And so, at this point, if they they came out with a super low number, single digit millions, and then sort of revised it. And then since then, they've probably revised it again, but the whole sort of world moved on.
Speaker 2:Right? So we still don't know exactly how much it costs, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near the original number that they threw out. I'll keep reading here. Valuations, across tech have skyrocketed, and even optimistic venture capitalists often acknowledge the market is in a searing frenzy. Leading AI companies expect to lose billions of dollars for years to come while pledges of future profitability rest on hazy assumptions of a tidal wave of demand.
Speaker 2:Many see parallels to the latestage.com bubble when cash splashers of the era
Speaker 3:that's a great
Speaker 1:That's a great one.
Speaker 2:Gunslinger, cash flasher.
Speaker 1:Cash flasher is great.
Speaker 3:You gotta be a cash flasher.
Speaker 2:Are you gonna
Speaker 1:be dead? Splashing cash, what are you splashing?
Speaker 3:What are you doing?
Speaker 2:So when the cash flashers of the era plunged tens of billions of dollars into public into building out fiber optic cable networks based on projections that Internet growth would be even more rapid than it was, a glut of fiber and enormous losses followed. We've pushed back on this before. It seems obvious that we're in an AI bubble. But at the same time, our leading AI companies have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in revenue, which the .com era companies did not have. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and the actual adoption of AI seems like it's taken place much faster than the Internet.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And the reason for that is because the Internet is Already exists. Is the greatest distribution channel for software ever in history. Right? You can launch a new model, and get, you know, hundreds of thousands of users in the same day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wanna give some more color on who this guy is because there's a bunch of fascinating anecdotes in here. So it's from his ornate palace in Abu Dhabi, Tanoon personally tracks the progress of global large language models on a dashboard his researchers built for him on his phone and computer. He urges subordinates at the giant network of companies he owns to rapidly incorporate AI. So he's probably, like, pulling up, like, chatbot arena and, like, MMLU, like, every day, basically, and seeing how Oh,
Speaker 3:it's great.
Speaker 2:It's so much better when you're invested in every single company because chatbot arena is just your personal sort of dashboard. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder I wonder what else is he's tracking on the progress because it could be, like, DAUs, right, if you can get that data.
Speaker 2:I have this I have this situation right now where I have these two I have these two, companies in the exact same category that I'm a shareholder in. They're both growing very quickly.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They both raised a lot of money. And and I just happen to be friends with with both CEOs. That's how I ended up there. But it's sort of funny because every other week, they sort of alternate between sharing, you know, one person's like, oh, I did this. The other person's like, I did this.
Speaker 2:I'm like, I'm happy for all of you. It's it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:It's great. I like this one. So Tannoon was meeting with, Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Satya mentions a book by George Washington University professor Jeffrey Ding that suggests AI could be the base of a coming global economic boom. And this is clearly what informed this book, clearly informed Satya's idea about, hey, let's get to 10% global GDP growth, 5% growth in the developed world.
Speaker 1:This is what we should be thinking about AI, not reading like the AI doomer books. Right? But, the sheikh scribbled it down on his notepad, and soon after, Ding was eating lunch at his in his Washington DC office when a representative from the UAE embassy knocked on his door and said, I can't find your book in any bookstore. Can I get two copies? Amazing.
Speaker 1:Just like send my guy to just, like, go get the book directly from the source.
Speaker 2:We've talked about this before. Billionaires have guys.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:The middle class has apps. You know?
Speaker 1:Well, everyone has apps.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but when you get to a certain level of, like, the super billionaire, the trillion class yeah. I mean, he controls a trillion dollars. He I don't think he made it to the super billionaire list we looked at yesterday.
Speaker 2:I think crazy. In his category pay to not end up on this list.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or it's just, like, they have control over capital, but they don't personally own it. Yeah. And so it's all
Speaker 3:It's much When you look
Speaker 2:at the list, all the people are people that you can basically clock their net worth
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:By publicly available
Speaker 1:data rates. So you can
Speaker 2:see, we know how much of Tesla Elon owns.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So when the stock fluctuates by $20,000,000,000, you just look his share pro rata and you calculate, you know, how what his net worth did that day.
Speaker 1:I think you I think I think they said there were 26 super billionaires ranging from 450,000,000,000 for Elon roughly to down to 50,000,000,000 for some other folks. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, not on the list. Yeah. It's like, how do you not include those guys when they clearly control 50,000,000,000 worth of, you know, economic power? No doubt.
Speaker 1:And they're and they're not just, oh, they're around for a couple years doing the job of president. Like, they this is their life. Anyway, that is the nature of these things.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 1:love this guy because
Speaker 2:we're having a a Zoom difficulty, so I'm gonna just keep reading through this Okay.
Speaker 3:And it
Speaker 2:and you can help Connor Cool. Get the stream back up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Read this story about the Age of Empires thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm catching up here. Sorry, folks. So I'm gonna backtrack here for a second, but Tunoon grew up in the shadow of his brother, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the longtime crown prince who was named president of The UAE in 2022, while his brother rubbed shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake Abu Dhabi's economy. Till noon honed extracurricular activities.
Speaker 2:His he became so hooked on competing with his brothers in age of empires, a video game where players develop hunter gatherers into powerful civilizations that he hired an employee from the company that be that makes the game to coach him on tactics, former employees said. He turned a palace when within his royal compound into a gym. He funds one of the world's top cycling teams, The U The UAE Team Emirates, and he rides on an island near the Presidential Palace. He ringed with cycling pass. He likes super light Colnago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes him, incredible.
Speaker 2:Tanoon has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe. A black belt, he started a well funded championship tournament that has become the Olympics of our sport, says Bobby Rasek, a filmmaker who is making a documentary on Tunuu and the event. He's definitely one of the founding fathers of mixed martial arts, he said, a sport that, quote, would not be where it was today without Tunuu. The interest in AI has roots. His interest in AI has roots in the early two thousands when he was so intrigued by computer aided chess that he hired a sizable team of engineers to make him a program called Hydra that could compete with the world's best players.
Speaker 2:Erdogan, Goons, a computer chess specialist for opening moves, said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the Sheik as they monitored Hydra's games. That's incredible. So in late twenty seventeen, Tunoon's interest increased after he learned that Google's AI program, AlphaZero, had beaten the world's best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules. It was far more powerful than Hydra ever was, opening his eyes to the power of AI, he told associates. For the following year, he tapped Peng Zhao, the former chief technology officer at software turned bit Bitcoin firm MicroStrategy to start g forty two, a company devoted to applications in AI.
Speaker 2:So it's very cool. He's been he's been very obsessed with this for a very long time. And so at the time, Abu Dhabi's wealth and economic strategy was largely under the control of to to Noon's brother, Mohammed. As de facto leader of the country, Emirates oil wealth and put it into investments and economic development, building the wealth fund bounty to Hun would later inherit. So the thing that I think people don't fully understand about, you know, a country like The UAE is it's almost more of a kingdom that is forced to define itself in certain settings as a country.
Speaker 2:Right? So when you think about the wealth of the country of The UAE, you're you should be thinking about it as the wealth of a kingdom, which is controlled by the royal family. Right? And there's the these families are massive. Right?
Speaker 2:And so you can, you know, visualize sort of family tree. And the closer that you get to the top, the more of the wealth that you control. If you're farther down, you might control some small aspect of the kingdom's operations. You're gonna have, like, a team that works under you, but you're the ultimate decision maker. And so what's interesting is if you want to get big deals done in these in these sort of kingdoms, you actually have to you know, if it's a big enough deal, you have to get the sign off of, you know, more or less the king.
Speaker 2:Right? Yep. So you can see these sort of decision trees that trace up, and that's why, you know, the venture world has had this idea that you can just sort of of show up in Abu Dhabi and expect to raise, you know, billions of dollars. Like, it's some easy task. But, if you talk to any large allocator, they'll tell you that these relationships are developed over years, sometimes decades.
Speaker 2:And, you have to you you're gonna have to genuinely be, you know, invest time into those relationships and, ultimately get the sign off of, you know, the most powerful members of the family.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think, is it isn't it like every Emirati gets just, like, a payment?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's there's effectively a UBI. So so education is funded. There's enough, you know, sort of a monthly sort of payment to cover a lot of living expenses. This is part of the reason why cars are actually so popular there.
Speaker 2:One is because it's an oil producing nation. So gas has always been super cheap. There's like an incredible car culture there. Yep. But two, if your education and your, you know, house or your apartment are covered and you're working, what do you and you don't and you have a perpetual income by being a citizen of the kingdom, you're gonna spend it on cars.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And it's actually interesting. There's a dynamic. You know, speaking of cars, cars are actually you would think they would be more expensive in The UAE. They actually end up being cheaper because they're they they, one, these cars can't sell back in The States.
Speaker 2:But, two, there are people that use cars to export wealth from sanctioned countries. Let's say you're an oligarch in Russia and you wanna get wealth out of the country. It can oftentimes be easier to move a LaFerrari than it is to move $5,000,000
Speaker 1:out of
Speaker 2:the country. So there's a bunch of cars there that sell below retail and below their sort of market value in The US because people just wanna get them into The UAE, move them, and then they have, you know, real dollars that are sort of protected within the kingdom.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think they were also struggling to set up, like, top tier universities. And so that's where they came up with this with the idea of, like, we'll just pay, if you go to a school in The US. If you get into Harvard, we'll pay full tuition for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, like yeah. Then it's just Yeah. There's a lot of There's a lot of investment as trying to build the next Harvard in The UAE. Yep. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, did you get to the to the section where they had to rip out the Huawei routers? Did you see that?
Speaker 2:No. We didn't
Speaker 1:get that far. The UAE has long seen itself as something of a Switzerland, a trusted point for trade for the East and West, and choosing sides on AI would risk damaging relations with China. But the allure of The US lead on AI was too much to ignore. Tanoon picked The United States. Let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:And he says Huawei routers were ripped out of g forty two's offices and Western equipment put in its place. No more spying. Do not do not look at our Internet traffic, China. While Tanun and his aids continued negotiating with the administration on details to enable the deal, the administration paired Tanoon's company with Microsoft. G forty two agreed to use Microsoft's cloud for AI work and also to comply with, US export restrictions as part of the deal, and Microsoft invested 1,500,000,000.0 in g forty two, joining its board of point five billion in g forty two, joining its board of directors.
Speaker 1:Still, China hawks in Congress remain concerned that The UAE's overall ties to China remain strong, fearing the country could allow powerful US tech tools to make their way to China. Those lawmakers could be an obstacle if Tanun comes back, for similar deals.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the challenge of being, Switzerland of The Middle East in many ways is that, you know, The UAE does have a lot of economic ties with, from what I know, Iran. Right? There's there's a lot of Iranian money there, Russian, etcetera. But the cool thing about being in The UAE is if you go there, you'll sit down at dinner and you're at a table with, with the it it's the most diverse group of people I've ever been a part of.
Speaker 2:I got a chance to go, a couple times in, what was it? Late, early and then late 2023. Mhmm. And you'll sit down at a table with, somebody from Iran, somebody from, Israel, somebody from Russia, somebody from The UK, an American, and everybody's getting along because everybody's just generally there to, you know, in that setting, enjoy f one. And, you know, everybody's, you know, generally pro business there.
Speaker 2:So it's a great environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, like, capitalism in business has been, like, the one thing kinda holding the Middle East Universal language. With with, you know, UAE and and Saudi Arabia kinda playing nice with both sides and kinda keeping everything together, and a lot of pressure to not let, anything fall into just absolute chaos Yep. Which is obviously risky. So speaking on a podcast in December, they're talking about Josh Kushner or Jared Kushner, recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region.
Speaker 1:Tanoon told him, Jared, I'm not meeting with you unless you spend two hours, after with me to talk about AI. Wow. And so he's, he's trying to build his He's
Speaker 2:going podcast mode. Like, you gotta talk to me for at least two hours, the shortest Joe Rogan episode. Yeah. Yeah. And, we'll get into the details.
Speaker 1:That's great. And so, yeah, he's he's been, investing in a lot of stuff. And, I'm sure he'll be someone,
Speaker 2:who's
Speaker 1:presence only grows over the next few years as he continues to make big investments. Anyway, if you're looking to take a trip and stay in a nice place, maybe impress a chic while you're on the fundraising tour, we recommend going to Wander.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. And we have some big news from Kyle over at Wander. They just crossed 600 total locations, and you were in the chat asking, weren't you at 500 a month ago? Said, yes.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's pretty pretty great growth.
Speaker 2:20%.
Speaker 1:Month over month.
Speaker 2:It is, incredible. It's amazing. And it it what's cool is Wander's a platform where every incremental property makes a platform more valuable. Right? You know, I think that, you know, we we dealt dealt with this before I was trying to stay to wander in, when the fires were happening, they were all booked.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, you know, they've added multiple properties within Southern California, and the pace that they're operating at is just incredible. So, go check it out. They actually are running a spring sale for the last day today that you can get $400 off, plus a wander hoodie with code spring four hundred. So go check it out, and you won't regret it. It is, unbeatable.
Speaker 2:And we are gonna be staying, in at least one wander in early March. Mhmm. And, very
Speaker 1:excited to record it. Pods.
Speaker 2:We'll be we'll have to do the show from the wander because their Wi Fi is so fast. For sure.
Speaker 1:It makes
Speaker 2:it all possible. Live stream it.
Speaker 1:That's great. Well, let's move on to, an analysis by Shiel Monat, breaking down Adyen and Stripe's twenty twenty four annual reports. They both are out, and so now you can benchmark these two companies against each other. Adyen processed 1,340,000,000,000.00 and was up 33% year over year. Stripe's growing faster at 38% year over year and is now at 1,400,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Adyen's value valued at 56,000,000,000, public company. Stripe is valued at 91,500,000,000.0. And in terms of employee count, Adyen has 4,300 employees. Stripe has 8,200. They're both profitable.
Speaker 1:Adyen EBITDA of 1,000,000,000. Note, Stripe has higher margins. And so, this comes to us from this, wonderful Stripe community letter, that we will read some of this stuff, but it highlights a lot of, interesting applications for the company, and we'll go through some of the highlights here.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. The big I mean, the big thing that stood out to me from Scheele's analysis, everything, you know, the two the two numbers that jump out, one is Stripe is almost double, valued more than double. Yep. And, Stripe has almost double the number of employees. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And and, so anyways, there there's the the the big story here is, how, you know, how is Stripe worth, twice Adyen despite having, less EBITDA Yep. And twice the employees and and all these things. But, yeah, the the letter here is fantastic and and just shows the level of and the and the leadership that, Stripe has, with the Collison Brothers.
Speaker 1:So their, Stripe's mission, of course, is to grow the GDP of the Internet. Right? Yeah. Fantastic. And payment volume represents 1.3% of global GDP now.
Speaker 2:That's insane.
Speaker 1:Absolutely insane.
Speaker 3:It's one of those
Speaker 2:things, like, they could have said, hey. Over time, we think the Internet's gonna grow a lot. We think Internet payments are gonna be big. We think we can actually get 1% of the global GDP running through, and and it's the most ridiculous number because every founder, has thought about a world, oh, if we just get 1% of this market, you know, we're a multibillion dollar company. Stripe actually did it.
Speaker 2:And, and, you know, an example of a of one of the most hyped companies of the last twenty years living up to the hype. Right? With the the way that they're growing, they will there's a world where there is a scenario where they have double digit percentage of global GDP running through their rails, which is just obscene.
Speaker 1:Yep. Straight billy straight billing alone is on a $500,000,000 revenue run rate. Yeah. We use Stripe Billing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over 300,000 companies are on Stripe Billing. And Stripe is profitable in 2024 and is expected to remain so in 2025 and beyond. And, of course, they were one of the companies to kind of move quickly during the last downturn and kind of I do I don't know if they had to lay a lot of people off. I think they actually mostly just froze hiring and kind of grew into their valuation. And, it set them up for profitability and then kind of scaling from there.
Speaker 1:So they kinda know what the base, you know, how the business operates, how it runs. Obviously, they're very big, and they can kind of grow into their valuation. Nearly 200,000,000 active subscriptions are managed via Stripe Billing. Stripe is trusted by half of the Fortune 100, 80 percent of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 80 and 78% of Forbes AI 50 companies. One in six new Delaware corporations in incorporates via Stripe Atlas.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That's crazy because I I I always thought of that. I mean, there was Clerky years ago.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And those products, they're very easy to get, you know, popping in, like, small Silicon Valley cruise. Yep. But you don't get to one out of six without being a mainstream product.
Speaker 2:The dynamic with Stripe Atlas is is fascinating because it doesn't seem like they do a lot of independent marketing. It it seems like a product that Stripe built truly for the community. Yep. It was a pain you know, it makes sense. It's a perfect wedge product for payments.
Speaker 2:Right? What do you need to do before you can accept payments online? You need to have an entity. They built what I think is the best way to create an entity online. You know, we used it for TVPN.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's a fantastic product. It, it's it's still super simple despite it being relatively complicated process to create an entity. Yep. The the product is fantastically simple, and it's turned out, you know, it's turned out to be an amazing wedge product for them, just given the the scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's gotta be a hard product to advertise. Right? Because, like, you only incorporate once. Once.
Speaker 1:And not everyone's incorporating it all the time, and it's not like there's so yeah. I mean, I'm sure they're all over Google Ads and stuff for when people are thinking about incorporating. But outside of that, it's hard to do a lot of awareness for that product, but they've done a very good job in getting penetration there. Hertz and and they give some, case studies here. Hertz increased 4%, of online payment authorization rates after switching to Stripe.
Speaker 1:Turo saw a 4.7 boost in recaptured revenue, translating to an extra hundred and 14,000,000 per year. I had no idea Turo was that big.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:That's huge. Intercom improved conversion rates by 2.1%. Forbes saw a 23% revenue uplift within six months after switching to Stripe. There's a ton of examples of this. Major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, Eleven Labs are Stripe partners.
Speaker 1:Stripe's agent toolkit and virtual card tools enable programmatic spending and control. More than 14,000 vertical SaaS platforms utilize Stripe's payment services. I mean, it's just like the default in Silicon Valley at least. Stripe Capital provides fast funding with funds arriving in under forty eight hours. So they've really, like, just built every possible fintech product on top.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you look at the actual
Speaker 1:Three lines of code.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Seven lines of code. I have to try to pull this up. But if you look at their product timeline, there is a pretty amazing, you can actually see I wish we could pull this graphic up, but it's gonna be difficult. But, they basically come out in 2010 with payments.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Two years later, they launched Connect. Yep. Four years after that, they launched Radar and Atlas. So this entire time, they're just focused on making this perfect payments product. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And and, to show that level of patience even when they, they had sort of exploding growth and traction and many many operators would have said, hey, we should go multi product. We have all this traction. They waited. And then since then, starting in 2016, they really ramped up the pace.
Speaker 2:They launched Atlas, Radar. Twenty seventeen, they launched Sigma. Twenty eighteen, they launched, terminal issuing billing, 2019 capital as well as corporate cards, and the infrastructure to issue corporate cards. And then in 2020, they launched treasury as well as climate, and then they launched a tax product, in late twenty twenty as well. So the velocity went from, hey, let's just, you know, have this sort of narrow focus and really own payments.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I think that Stripe is one of the best examples in history of focusing early on really, really directly on startups as a category. Yep. And they sort of ignored the enterprise pretty broadly, but they benefited from between when they started in 2010 and where they are today. Many of their early startup customers became public companies that are now massive, and those were, you know, customers that were able to prove out these use cases that would, you know, go on to allow them to, you know, sign companies like Hertz, right, which is this legacy company or Forbes, things like that.
Speaker 1:I remember Shopify. When Shopify started, like, the default payment integration for a long time was Stripe. Yeah. And you kinda bring your own Stripe account, and then they were doing Shopify payments, which is kind of a white label Stripe account. But it was all Stripe under the hood.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, they've just they've just really, really benefited from just letting the Internet grow and being, like, the index on the Internet economy. Interesting
Speaker 2:good example where the the mission of the company grow the GDP of the Internet Yeah. Was truly, truly aligned to the, potential of the business itself. Right?
Speaker 1:I thought this was interesting. They mentioned the bridge acquisition. Transaction volumes in stablecoins doubled from q four twenty twenty three to q four twenty twenty four, and Stripe now supports 40,000,000 monthly active stablecoin wallets.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, that that that's something that, like, they've been talking about crypto for a long time. They've integrated crypto products in the past, but, like, the the stablecoin thing feels like the first time that stuff's, like, really taking
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Taking hold. And I know I I saw that
Speaker 2:made the Bridge acquisition. They they spent, you know, over a billion dollars on it specifically because of the developer activity that Bridge had. Yeah. So they, I think, saw a younger you know, they saw the stable coin version of Stripe
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which had early developer traction. It was a product that developers loved.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then all of a sudden, you know, public companies are using the product.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so, they write stablecoins, room temperature superconductors for financial services. Top stablecoin uses today involve tangible real world activity. CFOs use stablecoins to manage corporate treasury. Immigrants use them for remittances.
Speaker 1:Citizens of countries with unstable currencies use them for dependable savings, and payment teams use them to enable customers from countries with low card penetration. Some of our favorite examples, SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets. Dollar app and neobank in Mexico uses Bridge to in to help individuals receive USD payments from payroll providers like Deal. And AirTM uses Bridge to disperse payments to workers all over Latin America. So as as we start paying more people all over the world, the stablecoins make a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:I've I've actually paid people in stablecoins before, because they've been in countries where getting them US dollars, was very, very volatile and delayed and high super high
Speaker 2:fees. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and to be clear, there was a lot of analysis of the bridge acquisition at the time where people said, how could they pay hundred you know, it's like more than a hundred times revenue. It's a really big number, and the obvious answer is that Stripe has over trillion dollars of volume. They're big believers in stable coins. They had had their own internal efforts.
Speaker 2:Why not spend a billion dollars to acquire a leader in the space and then focus on integrating it with all of your existing customers? So I think we're gonna see over time that that could very well be the an Instagram style acquisition for Stripe in the sense that you can imagine the bridge product, you know, ten years from now having, you know, hundreds of billions or potentially even trillions of dollars, in volume. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, I I like this. We've been seeing this, AI growth chart all over the Internet and Ramp or or or Stripe Ramp's done some analysis on this showing, adoption of AI tools on the corporate card side. Stripe's seeing something similar. They say we are seeing an AI boom on Stripe. We're partnered with a large number of companies with rapidly growing businesses including OpenAI, Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, Cognition, Eleven Labs, Langchain, Pinecone, Mistral, Cohere, Sierra, so many of these.
Speaker 1:And the median time to annualized revenue milestone, for the top 100 AI companies on Stripe in 2024 was twenty four months. They they compare that to back in 2018. It took SaaS companies, the top 100 SaaS companies by revenue, thirty seven months. And so they're providing extra data to show that the AI boom is real, and companies really are accelerating their revenue growth
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Faster than in previous, I don't know, in previous waves. Yep. And so Cursor, the AI powered coding assistant, raced to over a hundred million recurring revenue in just three years. We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which hit 17,000,000 ARR in just three months.
Speaker 2:This is wild. So Lovable, for those that don't know, is a Swedish company. Harry Stebbings, fellow podcaster, was was one of their early investors. And, it you know, Lovable doing that in three months just puts so much pressure onto every other company because that's now the bar. Yep.
Speaker 2:I remember in 2021, the narrative was you should be able to hit 1,000,000 of ARR in nine months post launch. That's now it seems childish in comparison.
Speaker 1:Try to
Speaker 2:In the cage, we're trying to hit a million in in three months. And, but anyways, the the demand for these AI products is is insane. And, I believe Lovable has more ARR, or or is that a much greater run rate than, Booking.com was when they went public.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think we dug into that during the Dara Khosrowshahi and Yeah. That, Mary Meeker article when she took them public. Yeah. I remember that. There's an interesting, point in here.
Speaker 1:Some people have called these startups LLM rappers. Those people are missing the point. The O ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just in terms of cost, but in the success of the entire system. In a similar vein, we see these new industry specific AI tools as ensuring that individual industries can properly realize the economic impact of LLMs and that the contextual data and workflow integration will prove enduringly valuable. So they're bullish on these quote unquote wrapper companies, which I thought was interesting.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to tell you about another fintech company that we love here on the show, Ramp. Go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go get to know Ramp on Ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Ramp, we have a major Ramp customer, Sean Frank. Oh, yeah. He's gonna be joining the show in two minutes. Fantastic. So I'm gonna text him right now, and we'll get him on here.
Speaker 1:Well, we can do this one, DM that we got in the meantime. It says, uhoy, John. Hope you're doing well. Apologies apologizing for hitting you with a bunch of questions, but I posted 50 blogs, and I have four subscribers. I'm not gaining not not that gaining subs is the goal, but still, I've talked to family members who's collectively hired thousands of people and they're out of ideas too.
Speaker 1:The whole add value and it will come approach just hasn't worked. I want to work with smart people before going out and building something on my own, but I'm not sure what the move is. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:So I think that, one of the things that seems very obvious with content is that you need extreme levels of patience. Yep. That's not an excuse to not refine the product every single day.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, you know, we we take this approach. We're we're lucky to be in a position where we have a daily show. We're trying to improve the show in every sing every single day. There's some days where, you know, maybe we weren't we're underprepared, some days where, you know, we we sort of miss a segment that we wanted to do. But Yep.
Speaker 2:In general, trying to improve the product every single day and then improve how you're distributing that product.
Speaker 1:I placed the distribution. So I posted 50 YouTube videos before a single one went viral. I and and for me
Speaker 2:over a year. Right?
Speaker 1:It was it was a full year. I posted them once a week for for for a full year, and it was like, oh, I got a hundred views. Awesome. Oh, I got a thousand views on this. That's great.
Speaker 1:And then finally, one got picked up about SpaceX and the algorithm that went to 70 k views. And I remember seeing the chart go up, and I was like, wow. This is amazing. Yep. But it's really hard for blogs to go viral Yep.
Speaker 1:Because there's no algorithm No discovery. There's no discovery. And so what you should probably do is figure out, can you repackage this in terms of just a long post on x Yep. Or a thread? Or because a thread can go by or short form content.
Speaker 1:If you if your natural voice is on short form video, make one minute videos. Break your blog post up into a series of one minute videos. Try a bunch of things, and then very quickly, the algorithm will start sending you the signal of, like, this got 10 times as many views as that. What did you do differently? And you can introspect.
Speaker 1:But it's very hard when you're just hanging out on a dead substack with no traffic coming to it. Yep. That I I think that's very hard. And I think the people that have been successful on substack have built audiences elsewhere. Like, Ben Thompson talks about Tra Techery would not exist if not for sharing on sharing links on on Twitter and LinkedIn at the time.
Speaker 2:Yep. And
Speaker 1:now he's got it cornered, and people share it, and his stuff goes viral even if he doesn't post it because people will say, oh, there was a great interview. We gotta stop.
Speaker 2:We'll
Speaker 1:cover it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think the main thing is YouTube specifically as well as some of these other platforms can be very demoralizing. Yep. But that doesn't necessarily you know, the the x factor now is that the algorithms need time to learn your content before they figure out the right people to distribute it to. So,
Speaker 1:anyway Sean on the line?
Speaker 2:We have Sean on the line in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. We're gonna talk with Sean about Applovin, and Sean is one of the sharpest minds that I know on ecommerce. Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and say
Speaker 1:Hey, Sean.
Speaker 2:There he is. Mister Ridge himself, mister Wallet.
Speaker 4:You guys are in person. I I was expecting you guys to be, doing Zoom yourselves, but damn, IRL. Love to see
Speaker 1:it. IRL.
Speaker 2:Always. Always. Always. Unless, you're dealing with this traffic in LA these days, Sean. It, if you wanna leave your house now in LA, it's about an hour to go anywhere.
Speaker 2:Are you still going into the office in Santa Monica every day?
Speaker 4:No. I went yesterday. Yeah. It's, like, an hour and a half, bro. PCH is still closed.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, LA traffic, bud. Can't can't can't beat it. Well, tell
Speaker 1:us about AppLovin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so AppLovin, for some backstory for the audience, founded in 2012, really started to, it wasn't even necessarily a company I feel like that was on the map for a lot of people, until, last year. I think last year was the first time you guys started spending money on the platform. Is that correct? Or had you tested it, at at earlier points in Ridge's history?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So here's I think AppLovin has three discussion points. Mhmm. We'll go from what I'm least qualified to speak on to what I'm most qualified to speak on. So least qualified.
Speaker 4:Short reports are coming out that they are violating, you know, App Store terms of service, their ads target children, all these type of stuff. What AppLovin is is there's two that's the business. They run a bunch of mobile ad space. So games mostly games. But but you whatever is you old people are playing on their phones, they have that sort of ad space, and they have an ad engine.
Speaker 4:Right? So, like, they're the ad exchange. Think of, like, a trade desk or Google Google Display Network. So they run both sides of those. They've never done ecommerce.
Speaker 4:Their ecommerce push was, like, August or September 2024. So we're, like,
Speaker 2:six months out. Of their and and the just question. So the majority of their customers, until they push into ecommerce were other mobile games, I'm gonna guess, and other sort of digital apps services that they were pushing people to. What was do you do you have any idea of what their customer base looked like, until last year?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I think it was all mobile games. So, you know, they're they've been called, like, a pyramid scheme, all these type of things. So you're a a mobile ad engine where other mobile games can run on top of. Right?
Speaker 4:I think they also do, like, display and branding, like, trying to get you to go to the movies or just, like, real top of funnel campaigns. No nothing conversion optimized. Right? Now a lot of people spend a lot of time on mobile games, so there are a lot of ad units available. But it's something Ridge has never touched at all.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, we're mostly a Facebook advertiser. They get some years 75% of my budget. We do influencer, that type of stuff. We've never really done that much in the world to display and especially nothing in mobile display.
Speaker 4:Right? There are the industry does have a bad reputation. Mobile display ads are just like, that's where click fraud exists. Yep. Well, in my
Speaker 2:and and from my understanding with Ridge, you know, having, you know, worked out of your guys' office, and and worked on the Ridge business myself back in the day, you you guys have a had a policy where you'll you'll test any channel once, but you're very, very ruthless with pulling back that spend if it's if it's not working. So I I remember, you know, Connor, being, you know, who's the CMO of Ridge, being willing to test some obscure ad network and being like, yep. Doesn't work, you know, almost like the same day oftentimes. So when you guys decided to test Applovin and then actually start to really spend on the platform, I think that sent, you know, a real signal.
Speaker 4:Right. Well, I'll say that we're a very sophisticated advertiser. Right? For people unfamiliar with Ridge Wallet as a business, I mean, we'll spend over a hundred million dollars this year on digital advertising. Right?
Speaker 4:So that's everything from LinkedIn ads to TV ads to influencer to Reddit to Snapchat. Like, Meta is the biggest best game in town. They might get 70% of my budget some year. Sometimes they get 30% of my budget. But, like, outside of them, we're spending money on every single possible channel we can.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 1:what
Speaker 4:are the accusations against AppLovin? I'm gonna put the unverifiable claims that I cannot speak to in one box, and that is their short report saying that, like, you know, they're doing one click force downloads. They're tracking users, whatever. Cannot speak to that at all. Like, if that's true, you know, let's hope there's an investigation that we don't want them targeting children with inappropriate content.
Speaker 4:So no I don't know know anything about that. The second thing is the stock price has gone parabolic in the past, like, two years or whatever. I think the IPO of maybe 2021. I think it's up four x in the past year. At one point, it was worth more than Uber.
Speaker 4:So as soon as a company is trading at a hundred x revenue and is worth more than Uber and no one's ever heard about them, people just get immediately freaked out. Right? It's like, you know, they had the same, you know, revenue multiple as Palantir. Right? Palantir has been around a lot longer.
Speaker 4:People know about Palantir.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Just for some for some extra context, so they were worth 3,800,000,000.0 at the at the end of twenty twenty two. At their peak, just a little bit ago, they were worth a hundred and 60,000,000,000. So
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's generational run.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. And anytime that happens, I mean, a lot of people start speculating. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Revenue's growing really, really fast. I can't I'm not a stock trader. I fucking buy ads. So is the is the company overvalued? It's about as overvalued as Palantir is.
Speaker 4:So depending on where you land on that side of the conversation, that's that's why there's so much interest right now. Right? The thing that I'm qualified to speak to is as an advertiser, they shoot us an email in August, and they're like, hey. We're rolling out ecommerce. We'll give you a lot of ad credit to test it.
Speaker 4:Right? And we get ad credit from Snapchat to test stuff, from Reddit to test stuff, from Meta to test stuff, and free ad credit even if it's the shittiest ad space on Earth. I mean, okay. Yeah. I'll get some I'll get some bunk ass impressions, whatever.
Speaker 4:Right? They end up, you know, it ends up working really well. I probably spent $4,000,000 of my own money on AppLovin ads in q four, and I was spending $250 a day. It was it was matching Facebook ad spend. Right?
Speaker 4:So one of the short reports is seem that, like, oh, they're stealing Facebook's data to be able to target these people so good. Once again, I don't I don't know how the fuck that would work, but what I will tell you is that as a sophisticated advertiser who tracks everything via NorthBeam, via incrementality holdouts, via post purchase surveys, coupon codes, people were playing app loving games, seeing Ridge Wallet ads, buying those products, and then telling us they saw it on the ads. So it's a real ad channel. It really worked in q four. I I have an invoice right now.
Speaker 4:I owe them $1,500,000 that I have to pay by the end of the month. So, like, it's a business. I don't know what to tell everybody about the shorts. Now do I think the company is overvalued? Yeah.
Speaker 4:I don't own any of the stock. That's fucking insane. It's like it's a company. It's a mobile app platform. What do you mean they're worth more than Uber?
Speaker 4:Like, I fucking call an Uber every day. Right? I don't play any mobile games. So that's, like, the stock price question. Then it's like, oh, all of this nefarious, whatever, inside dealing subsidiaries.
Speaker 4:I don't know anything about fucking that. What I'll tell everybody listen in. And what's so weird is I'm public. I'm on Twitter. Like, I post my ad spend on these channels.
Speaker 4:No one's reached out to me. Like, none of the shorts. I'm like, guys, I'm around. Like, I'll show you the fucking app left left.
Speaker 2:Get on, make them pay for it. You know? Don't don't give that don't give up the sauce for free. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta go on Tigris, become an expert, expert consultant. You can make a thousand dollars an hour. 10 thousand dollars
Speaker 4:an hour. Like, I I have no dog in this race. I'm like, yeah, dude. Whatever. It was an ad channel.
Speaker 4:If they wanna wait tomorrow, I would spend money on Snapchat or TikTok or anywhere else. Right? But, like, the verifiable proof is that I gave them real money. It was a good ad channel. And I think the reason why people like, their revenue is growing super fucking fast.
Speaker 4:Right? Their revenue is up 80% year over year. And they're like, yeah. We have a billion dollar run rate for ecommerce advertisers in December. And I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 4:No shit. I spent fucking a million dollars. It's like, yeah. I spent a ton of money with you guys. Like, it doesn't take too many people like me spending that to get really, really high revenue.
Speaker 4:Dude, ads are the best business on earth. I don't know why this is so surprising for people. Now are they compliant? Do they owe Apple money? Are they stealing data from Facebook?
Speaker 4:I don't fucking know, but pretty good ads. You got any questions about that?
Speaker 2:Pretty good ads. Pretty good ads. What's the can you talk about the relationship between Applovin and Flip? Are you has Ridge had any success on Flip? I remember Flip blowing up out of nowhere.
Speaker 2:They were giving a bunch of credits to basically give away products for retailers. I know they have an ad partnership. Have you found any success on on the Flip platform?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I've never used Flip. As far as I know, Ridge has never worked with or advertised on Flip. It would be a surprise to me to hear that my ads were on Flip via Applovin. I've had friends who've had very bad relationships with Flip, so I've always avoided it.
Speaker 4:And our products don't work for live shopping anyway. Like, TikTok shops did doesn't really work for us either, and it's because of, like, we have a very male focused demo. We're more of a premium product. You know, those typically, live shopping works for, like, you know, leggings that make your butt bigger and that type of shit. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, it's not it's not our core product that's crushing it on there. That whole affiliate GMV world is very, very dark and shady. I know a lot of people who are doing weird stuff there. You can check out the affiliate top charts, like, what goalie's doing. They're giving people fucking mansions if they, you know, hit GMB targets of a million dollars.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, I don't know anything about Flip. I've never used Flip. They've emailed me all the time. Yeah. That I mean, even an idiot like myself, I'm like, that looks like a pyramid scheme.
Speaker 4:I'm not I'm not gonna hang out there. But, dude, you know, I have the data on AppLovin. Right? Like, 85 of our traffic from AppLovin came from iOS devices. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, one of the concerns is that, like, oh, this is just bot traffic on Android devices, like, click farms in Bangladesh or whatever. Right? It doesn't look like it's that. So I don't know how they have good quality iOS traffic coming through. It all seems to be games called, like, Toon Blast or some shit.
Speaker 4:But, like, anyway,
Speaker 1:old people watch it out. It
Speaker 4:was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The reason I wanted to have you on is is, you know, there are major brands out there that will run on an ad platform that's just sending them bot traffic, and they won't even necessarily turn it off because to them, they're just optimizing for, you know, impressions and clicks. And Ridge has always been a company focused on, you know, the end actually, you know, conversion. Right? And and sort of building your guys' engine around that.
Speaker 2:What what happens, you know, shifting the conversation a little bit? What what's your outlook on ecommerce in, our year 2025? We covered, maybe a couple weeks ago, we talked about how the whole Amazon you know, it's a it's a terrible time to be an Amazon seller. It's been a tough time to be a Shopify, brand as well with all this sort of tariff action and things like that. Historically, Ridge has made a bunch of products in China.
Speaker 2:It's, shaping up to be a rocky year for ecommerce broadly. It helps to have a fantastic brand like Ridge, but what's your outlook, going into the rest of the year?
Speaker 4:Dude, just take it day by day. I mean, there's more tariffs announced today. There's more supply chain disruption. You know, and it's not just the US government. Like, every government on Earth is becoming more productionary.
Speaker 4:Like, you're
Speaker 2:sexually 21. Sorry to interrupt, but we had, Ryan Peterson from Flexport on yesterday that said that was talking about the the the actions that Mexico had taken around, what what's not the same as the de minimis loophole, but I'm forgetting the the right name for it, but, to sort of protect American, Mexican, textile workers. So, yeah, a lot of lot of action.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, like, we like to think of this wonder like, very one dimensional. Like, Americans importing things from China cheaply, but, like, that fucks over other manufacturing economies like in Mexico. They don't want fucking cheap auto parts or cheap apparel coming from China sitting in their warehouses going to America duty free. Like, it everybody gets pissed off in that.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, that happened yesterday. The the quick summary is just take a day by day and try to survive. Don't have any debt if if you can afford it. Keep a lean team. I think d two c three point o is, like, incredibly lean teams.
Speaker 4:Like, ridges down to 60 US full time employees. We're doing more revenue than ever with less people than ever, and I think that's gonna be more of the trend. And, yeah, I mean, if you can bring stuff to America, you should. I mean, we're probably eight months away from 60% of the while it's being made here. So I'll keep you guys updated when they start getting made here.
Speaker 2:Where's where's your new factory gonna be? Or where you you you onshored some manufacturing that's been a a long term process, but, you know, what does that look like?
Speaker 4:I mean, yeah, it's all component part manufacturing. So, like, we have inner plates that are gonna be made in Missouri, and then they get shipped up to Philadelphia to be finished, and they get shipped to Arizona to be assembled. And then they go to fucking Kentucky to sit in the warehouse. So this is one of the challenges. You know, China very strategically has everything within, like, a one hour radius when they do, like, you know, these these industries.
Speaker 4:But with tariffs today, I mean, it's 85% on aluminum goods coming out of China. So it gets very close to the same price now. So I think that's why he's doing it.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, thanks for stopping by. Appreciate the update.
Speaker 2:Love the take, Sean. You will be, a regular a regular. Welcome to the show, and, thank you for for posting your heart out every single day.
Speaker 4:Yeah, dude. I'm I'm I'm the number three. The best guest you guys had so far. Yeah.
Speaker 3:We'll give you an n we'll get you an NFT just
Speaker 2:for you. Bye. Thanks. Bye. Thanks, Sean.
Speaker 2:Talk soon.
Speaker 1:Cool. Well, Delian should be joining any minute. I don't know if he's in the queue yet.
Speaker 2:But quick backstory. So Ridge sent, or sorry. Ramp sent Ridge a plaque for spending a hundred million dollars on ramp. So putting up some huge numbers. And, yeah.
Speaker 2:Sean is an absolute animal.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, let's see. Is, Delian in the queue? Not yet. Okay.
Speaker 1:I'll text him, and let's move on to, Michael Mignano. He says, are people and people are still wondering why every single podcast is pivoting to video, and it's a result here that says that a billion people are watching podcasts on YouTube every month.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, if you think about it, Rogan really led the charge here. I feel like he had such a massive audience on YouTube and so much of the attention that he would capture was YouTube oriented. And you remember there was a period where Rogan's influence and, attention felt like it fell off a cliff after the initial Shopify deal, and you could feel it almost ramp back up again as you went back on YouTube.
Speaker 2:So massive platform. You know, one of the biggest reasons for this is obviously that podcasts have replaced a lot of television consumption.
Speaker 3:Totally.
Speaker 2:And what people don't always realize about YouTube is that a mass amount of YouTube viewership happens on TV. So this is people in their house. Instead of turning on CNBC, they turn on TVPN.
Speaker 1:I get crazy screenshots all the time. People text me photos, and they're watching it on the TV. Yep. And it blows my mind. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was same thing with my YouTube videos. I was like, you watch this on TV. That's, like, insane. But I guess, like, you know, when you put a lot of production value into it, it looks like TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. And that was our thesis that was our thesis around, if you actually want to compete with television Yep. Around news, you have to record every single day. Otherwise, you know, nobody
Speaker 1:high quality like this. And it's also, just so much more snackable because we can take that clip. We can take some of those, some of those great clips that we just had, put those out on x, put them out on shorts, make vertical shorts out of it. And Yep. If you just have pure audio, you just can't really, really hard.
Speaker 1:Sometimes there's transcripts that can go viral every once in a while, but it's rare.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Delian should be joining in one minute. Let's see if we have another post we can go through. Bullish on one person. Teams card is at 2,000,000. ARR chat base is at 3,000,000 ARR.
Speaker 1:Levels IO products are at 3,000,000 ARR. Testimonial IO is at 1,500,000. TDIN.me or _ me products at 1,200,000. Ben Lang says he's bullish on one person teams. Pretty crazy.
Speaker 1:What what was the decision between PMF or Die to go two person team?
Speaker 2:The whole thing was that PMF or Die was, like, how do you apply these sort of extreme constraints? Ninety days, twenty five k to it a million dollars fair are sort of the simple concept. But then outside of that, you have to stay in the house, but there's no real rules.
Speaker 1:You can kind
Speaker 2:of do anything you want. That's that's business. Right? The business has sort of there's laws that govern business, but there's no actual, like, rules in the same way that when two teams go on an NBA, you know, court, they have to follow, you know, specific guidelines. And so, we wanted it to to, as close as possible, match sort of, like, free market competition.
Speaker 2:The one thing with this Ben Lang post that's interesting is this to me proves that if you are really ambitious and you wanna have extreme scale and impact, you actually have to build the team. Right? Because this this list would be more impressive if, every single, you know, company on here had 20 to a hundred million of ARR. So
Speaker 1:anyways ready. Delian, are you there? Can you hear us? Let's bring in. I think he's close.
Speaker 1:We're figuring it out. Let's see. Three, two, one. Hopefully, he's live. Going in.
Speaker 1:He says he's waiting to be let in. He's in the room. Let's get him on the show. Two call ins one day. It's a big, big push, but we're ramping up.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be doing 10 call ins a day pretty soon as long as people won't come and chat. We we gotta make this this easy for folks. Hey, Deli. How you doing? Can you
Speaker 2:hear us? There he is.
Speaker 3:Yo. What's up, sir?
Speaker 1:No. All good.
Speaker 3:A while.
Speaker 1:Give me the update. What what's the latest with Varda?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You brought in a capsule from, you know, sort of Mach 25, down onto the, you know, sort of Australian desert floor.
Speaker 2:Nice.
Speaker 3:Teams out there, you know, going to, to retrieve the capsule over the course of the the, next couple hours. It's currently nighttime in Australia. Cool. Yeah. All things, you guys, are looking pretty good.
Speaker 3:So we're two for two, baby.
Speaker 1:Nice. What was in the capsule?
Speaker 3:This time around, it was at Air Force Research Laboratory, spectrometer. They're basically, staring out of the window of the reentry capsule, to, basically characterize the plume of the reentry vehicle and compare that to some of the materials that are on board. I'll leave it to the viewer to speculate as to why the air force might wanna do that, in relation to, potentially trying to figure out what other vehicles are made of, perhaps ones that they themselves did not make. And we'll we'll leave that, you know, exercise up for the viewer. But, we're super excited to, you know, sort of help out with the maturation of that type of technology and what it means for, you know, our country's national security.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. We gotta call Jesse Michaels to get him to speculate. What, what does the Exactly. Exactly. What what does the cadence look like going forward?
Speaker 1:Are you just doing what would do you know when the next one is already? Are there gonna be just dozens of these? Give me the the kind of next couple yeah.
Speaker 3:Next week. You know, hopping right back up and, getting back to it. So, you know, quick turnaround time, turning this from a, you know, one off r and d mission to, this year. We're planning to have four vehicles, total. Three of those will be more, DOD focused missions.
Speaker 3:It's not to say that there won't be some farm on board, but it just won't be, like, the primary, you know, sort of focus of the mission. And then one of our missions this year will be a primarily pharmaceutical, you know, sort of focused mission. And, you know, we kinda expect that, you know, sort of blind on a go forward basis and, yeah, looking to basically just continue to increase the cadence, you know, sort of year over year. Definitely some, you know, sort of vehicle improvements that'll happen, you know, from one mission to the next. And, generally, for the time being, continue to, you know, sort of land in Australia, just given, the regulatory regime and the, emptiness, out there, making it a bit easier.
Speaker 3:But at some point, looking forward to, returning back to the, United States once that becomes available.
Speaker 1:Are you expecting that to get easier in The US with the new administration?
Speaker 3:For sure. I think it's something that the, you know, sort of new administration is, you know, so clearly, aligned with, but it is just one of these, you know, sort of operational things that just takes some time to flow through, designating which of the military ranges is, you know, best as a landing range in The United States. We're basically just taking the, you know, sort of same, you know, sort of legal and regulatory framework that exists at, you know, sort of Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, both of which were government run ranges that now obviously prioritize commercial activity. There isn't the equivalent of that for reentry. Right now, there is no sort of dedicated government run, you know, sort of reentry range.
Speaker 3:We're exploring a variety of other use of options, potentially use of private use of ranges as well as we continue to narrow in, the user size of our landing radius. And so over time, may not need to be reliant on a, you know, sort of government plot of land, but instead, perhaps there's some private, plots of land that are large enough. And so, yeah, what is the ideal excited to have a say again?
Speaker 2:Sorry to interrupt. What is the ideal range size in your view, this year? How how how much smaller can it be over the long term? And is that even the right question to ask?
Speaker 3:You I think that information is ITAR restricted. So, you know, what I can say is, you know, on the order of, you know, around a hundred kilometer circle, or so, and that's pretty you know, so pretty big, to have that be fully empty and owned by one person. But that circle will, you know, sort of get smaller And, you know, maybe sometimes we won't open the parachute, and it'll be a very small circle.
Speaker 1:Fine. Great. Are you, tuning into the next Starship launch? What what are you hoping for there? What are you watching for that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, look, you know, we built this business predicated on Falcon nine, you know, sort of reusability and the cadence of that, and it's been really exciting to see that mature over the course of the company's life. Right? You know, sort of Falcon nines at this point are launching every twenty four hours. We're super enthused by, you know, sort of SpaceX's progress and the, you know, sort of potential of Starship.
Speaker 3:You know, there's definitely, you know, obviously, you know, sort of lots of kinks that need to be, you know, sort of worked out, but, you know, not so dissimilar to, you know, sort of Falcon nine. It definitely took it a decade from, you know, sort of the first landing to, you know, sort of becoming a, you know, sort of true workhorse that was, you know, sort of launching every day. But SpaceX is much larger, but also so Starship in terms of complexity, and so, yeah, I hope that they, you know, sort of get, you know, sort of through that, you know, sort of faster than a decade. But also they've got a lot of programs and payloads that are more important than us. You know, they've got everything from the, you know, sort of lunar activities that they they've got, the Martian activities.
Speaker 3:They've got Starlink satellites to launch. And so, you know, at least, you know, sort of my internal underwriting is, like, I'm not quite sure that, you know, Starship is gonna be launching people like Varda, you know, before the end of the decade. So it's, like, super exciting, but, like, I also have to run a business, you know, month by month, year by year. And so I can't focus on things that, you know, sort of relevant to 2030. I have to focus on the things that are taking me up to, you know, sort of space today.
Speaker 3:And Falcon nine is a pretty damn good ride to orbit every 24 hours and, you know, reusable, at least for the first stage. Pretty, you know, sort of pretty good offering. And, you know, perhaps there are other people that are starting to, you know, sort of, you know, try to, you know, elbow into that, you know, sort of world. You know, God bless papa Bezos and, you
Speaker 2:know, hope it works for him.
Speaker 3:And, you know, we're we're we're happy to get up to space, you know, which way or how, you know, or, you know, rocket, rail gun, space plane, you know, just whatever works. I don't care. I just need, my sweet, sweet microgravity.
Speaker 1:Amazing. How how big is the company? What roles are you hiring for? What's kinda, like, the biggest challenge over the next couple years?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're about a 15 people, basically, entirely in the Los Angeles, you know, area. You know, of course, the next year, I think there's, you know, sort of two, you know, sort of, you know, sort of core core areas. One, you know, sort of pharmaceutical, you know, sort of teams definitely, you know, growing. We're we're sort of starting to, you know, work on a broader, you know, sort of set of assets.
Speaker 3:We are, you know, about to open up a new, you know, sort of lab space for the team. And so anybody with a, you know, sort of, yeah, formulation, crystal engineering, you know, sort of background, process engineering, you know, the types of things that we do up there, We'd be super thrilled to have. And then, yeah, generally, on the aerospace side of things going from a, you know, sort of, you know, one r and d mission to now four flights next year, even more, hopefully, you know, sort of year after, just means, obviously, we need, you know, a lot more talent on that side of the house, and that's everything from, you know, you know, firmware software engineers, flight software to, you know, sort of avionics, structures, thermal, you know, mechanisms. And then we're starting to think about, you know, sort of more manufacturing engineering since, you know, we're starting to you know, I see we're early in that transition from, you know, sort of vehicles manually assembled by high end engineers to starting to introduce, you know, sort of more technicians into the mix and, you know, sort of more automation. It's not to say that we're, you know, gonna be looking like a Tesla style, you know, sort of assembly line anytime soon.
Speaker 3:But, you know, you know, one day need to it should start to it should look more like that over time. And so, some manufacturing engineering as well.
Speaker 1:Are there any proposals, that you're excited about in the new administration around, like, the space economy? Any, like, oh, there's if there's one law you could change, what would it be? That type of question.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, sort of the new administration, hasn't talked a lot about the space economy, but it has talked a lot about, you know, sort of space being a potential, zone, for deterrence, for our against our adversaries. And so that's definitely something that we think, you know, has a lot of potential. We think we can field something pretty near term there. And as you start to think about, you know, sort of space based activities that, you know, perhaps wanna, you know, sort of go down to the ground, all I'll say is, you know, sort of the, you know, company that just bombarded Australia from space, is probably, you know, sort of well suited to help out with that. You know, this time around, we pulled the parachute, but, you know, so next time if you want us to not do that, we're happy to, leave the parachute.
Speaker 2:Own, space arms dealer. Taking a quick
Speaker 3:I've always been consistent. I'm a space drugs and arms dealer. No no no surprises here. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. It's amazing. You you were putting the secret master plan in your bio years ago, so it's amazing to to see it play out. You recently, ratioed Chamath after he tried to, you know, make a may reply to one of your posts.
Speaker 2:You said you had made, you know, more investments, I think, in the in, in the last few months than you had in in potentially the last couple years. Where have you been investing? You know, you don't have to speak to specific companies because I'm sure a lot of those rounds haven't been announced. But where are you investing? Obviously, just chasing generational founders, but what's most exciting to you in the early stage market today?
Speaker 3:It's it's all AI slop. I just want everybody to have their own anime girlfriend, and she just, you know, sort of jerks you off every night, and that's how we either should maintain world peace. And as much as possible, that's what we're
Speaker 1:gonna do with the past.
Speaker 2:Bread and circuses. Right?
Speaker 3:That's what, you know, really changes the world and, you know, is really for the best. I mean, it's kinda what you probably you just should expect. I I just, like, I love stuff that is making stuff in the real world, And it turns out with this admin, they want us to do more of that in United States, and I wanna fund people that wanna do that. And I wanna do it with people that are, like, serious, and it's their life's work, and they're not just doing it because, like, you know, dynamism is the new meme, and they wanna be a part of the meme. You know?
Speaker 3:I wanna, you know, sort of fund the people where, you know, their family has been the manufacturing family for three generations, and they think they can do it better because they're gonna integrate some robots, some AI, etcetera. But, you know, I still have that, you know, sort of, you know, lifelong tie to that, you know, sort of particular industry. And so, I've been really, you know, sort of excited over the past couple of months where it just feels like, you know, a lot more people are thinking about that being the type of company that they can build. And I think you're really just starting to see, you know, sort of the clear, you know, the the difficulty in, you know, sort of being somebody that is screaming, you know, sort of atoms, not bits. You know, in years of 02/2019 was my, you know, sort of former, you know, sort of colleague, Everett, you know, sort of RIP, you know, would always, you know, sort of critique me for, you know, sort of saying that, you know, Dylan just likes investing in low margin, you know, sort of CapEx intensive businesses.
Speaker 3:And, you know, sort of five years later, you know, my sort of, you know, spin back to Everett would be, you know, you know, which one do we think is gonna be more valuable? The, like, you know, sort of TikTok captioning app, or, you know, sort of the company that's, you know, sort of cutting, you know, sort of metal, for all the, you know, sort of nations, you know, sort of, you know, future war fighting capabilities. I I like the cutting metal one, but, you know, Everett, you're welcome to, you know, sort of go, you know, invest in your, you know, sort of captions, use your products, and
Speaker 2:sort of will be great, brother.
Speaker 1:Shots fired. Shots fired.
Speaker 3:Love it.
Speaker 2:A little friendly competition. You guys can test our notes on a decade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great. Well, it's 01:30. We'll we'll let you get out of here. This is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for stopping by.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Three equitably. Bye.
Speaker 2:Thanks for coming on. Talk soon.
Speaker 1:This is great. Never a dull moment with Deli and
Speaker 2:We got we got two of the top the top poster in ecom and the top poster in hard time.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Same
Speaker 2:day. Same day. It's, fantastic putting on a show. Yeah. For for, those those listening, you know, our our strategy here is to develop regulars on the show, people that call in.
Speaker 2:You know, we wanna have if there's big news in ecommerce and big m and a, we'll have Sean Frank call in. Yep. You know, get, really sort of, like, boots on the ground takes on that. If there's stuff happening in space, we'll get Delian to call in, and both of them really delivered today. Totally.
Speaker 2:And I wish those you know, it'd be it'd be fun. It's actually we wanna leave the conversation wishing that it could just keep going, and we'll bring them back on the next week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. That's fantastic. Well, let's go back to the timeline.
Speaker 1:We got plenty more to talk about today. AJ Mehta says, couldn't be more excited to share what I've been building over the past year. A cute AI alien friend that is fun, helpful, friendly, and won't try to fall in love with you. Tollens remember things about you. They're really good at voice chatting, and they can peer into your world through photos.
Speaker 1:It has been so inspiring to see how people use their toll on. Help with school, relationship advice, fit checks, and just hanging out. It's been such a treat building this with his cofounders. An incredibly talented team of engineers and artists can promise that Tollan is unlike any alien you've met so far. We're live in the App Store.
Speaker 1:Go check it out.
Speaker 2:Okay. So I know AJ. He's LA based entrepreneur. Yep. He actually was partnered with John Feo on birthday candles.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if you've ever met him. So I
Speaker 1:I have. So He he worked at, a crowdfunding platform that I used back in, like, 2013.
Speaker 2:Crazy. So so I had seen Tolan. I had been, somebody had sent me them probably, I I don't know, maybe six months ago at this point. I didn't know even though AJ is a buddy. I didn't know that he was involved with it because he they didn't really come out, very publicly.
Speaker 2:So this is this is really cool. This is a thesis. You know? People have been thinking about this sort of, like, AI, Tamagotchi or
Speaker 1:this AI sort
Speaker 2:of Pokemon. Been a lot of conversation about it, but very cool to see they have over half a million, you know, downloads, developing, you know, some some meaningful ARR and a number one spot in the App Store. So I think there's gonna be a lot of stuff here. You know, there's another company. I'm forgetting the name of it right now, but but making, like, embodied AI.
Speaker 2:So kids' toys that have LLMs built into them, which is cool. So I'm just, you know, expecting to see a lot more of these.
Speaker 1:And they they seem to be That was always my take with the Rabbit r one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, it
Speaker 1:was this hardware device, really cute teenage engineering developed it, but MKBHD got a hold of it and was like, this isn't replacing my iPhone. And it's like, that's totally fair. But I always thought I didn't buy one, but I thought that it would be a great device for kids because it's something that they can just ask questions to, interact, take a photo, what flower is this, what animal is this, like and and it just feels like the the bar for hallucination as long as you gate it so it's not saying crazy, crazy stuff. If it tells you that, like, this squirrel is a mouse or something, like, that's not that big of a deal. It's not the high stakes.
Speaker 1:And some of those companies
Speaker 2:calling an Uber and it sends it to the wrong place.
Speaker 1:Exactly. So the frustration of a kid dealing with, like, you know, some sort of rough edge around an AI that's still friendly and fun. It's like Yeah. It it it it's like the Genmoji thing, but applied to an audience that is totally receptive of it.
Speaker 2:What do what do five year olds do? They ask questions. Exactly. So it's just this constant stream of questions. Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's great when a parent's around, but it's funny when, you know, my son, my oldest is not really at this point yet, but I imagine he's about a year or two away from starting to ask questions that I don't know the answer to. Yeah. And so having this thing that's, you know, not necessarily a cell phone that that they can have independently or when we're together to sort of generate those answers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The five whys stage. You you know that whole question of, like, in in management, you need to be able to ask five whys deep to understand the root cause analysis. Toddlers, amazing at that. They just keep asking, you know, why does the fire truck come?
Speaker 1:Where does the fire truck come from? Who makes them? Okay. Who makes that part? I'm like, I actually don't know the supply chain that deeply, man.
Speaker 1:Good luck. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'll have to have somebody on the show.
Speaker 1:Deep research. Yeah. I'm sure we can pull it up. But speaking of AI products that have gone off the rails and not been, you know, as focused as what is happening over at Tollan, NotebookLM from Signal, NotebookLM has had insane potential, one of the best products Google's ever put out in years. We talked about this on the show very early on.
Speaker 1:You could have it generate a podcast of two people talking about a topic to educate yourself about it. But in classic Google fashion
Speaker 2:for a show once. You did? Because we were I was driving in one morning. We were doing a deep dive on something. I had zero context on the entire story.
Speaker 2:I generated, you know, a podcast Yeah. About it, and it helped me, like, really quickly get up to speed. So it's cool. But I actually have some backstory here. I I, was at a dinner in Venice, that that, two of my buddies, Ben and Adam, who have a venture fund, hosted.
Speaker 2:And one of the guys that the product designers from the notebook l m team was there. Yep. And he was excited because when you're at Google and you're working on this super hot Yeah. Startup within Google or this product Yep. You become an instant sort of micro celebrity in the organization, and there's all this momentum and more resources coming your way.
Speaker 2:It's a similar sort of thing that, you know, a a founder goes through at an external company when they have a lot of hype. But I believe he ended his team or some members of the team just left to start a a basically, that product. So, I think that they lost potentially the sort of founder spirit that they had that were able to create that product.
Speaker 1:So he said in, signal says in, but in classic Google fashion, it seems like it lost all momentum and got left to die. No mobile apps, no meaningful iterations, just VPs choking it out. The vultures came and picked it apart. Google's playbook for smothering internal innovation is unmatched. And then Andrej Karpathy chimes in.
Speaker 1:They iterated on a bit, custom instructions and the ability to join the podcast, but overall, I agree. I think I actually used it again this morning after a while and felt a bit regressed even. The woman's voice especially sounds more slightly more dead slash less interested. And signal says, yeah. It got hijacked by terrorists, parentheses, AKA Google leadership.
Speaker 2:Not holding back.
Speaker 1:And yeah. Yeah. Signal. I mean, it makes sense. Like like, even even when it was announced and it was gaining traction, it was still hard to get into that pipeline.
Speaker 1:It was very unclear. It wasn't its own app. It was it was it it was it it wasn't the Gmail launch where Gmail became this, like, you know, phenomenon, and it was a separate website. It was a you know, first, it was this Easter egg, then you had to refer a friend, get storage, and stuff. And they, they they they ran a great playbook, not just promoting that as a separate product for Gmail, but also running all the growth strategy to make it more viral and make it work.
Speaker 1:And it just seems like that energy has kind of left, especially when there's such an incentive to spin out of Google and raise a bunch of money and Yep. Instantly be at a hundred million ARR and a billion dollar valuation, which is something we've seen again and again and again.
Speaker 2:Now the big thing here is that Google's leadership, deserves a lot of they're certainly under pressure
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:But they deserve the scrutiny, and they deserve to be called out by letting these sort of high potential products, you know, like Gemini in general. Right? A lot of people are saying Gemini is great when I can find where to use it or how to use it or it's not, you know, overpromising and under delivering. But there's this general, when you compare Sundar to Satya, they're just not even in the same league. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. And it sounds harsh, but, I think that we should hold our trillion dollar hyperscalers, leadership to a high standard. And I think it's very possible that Google needs new leadership at the top. People called for it when their, AI, image generation models were just, you know, generating, just just, you know, made up history, basically. And now it just seems, Google has the most the most potential in, you know, the they should be Google should be trading as a meme stock if it had good leadership.
Speaker 2:And, they're they're not getting, you know, any any credit for the position and the opportunity that they have in the market because they seem to just continue to, you know, squander these these opportunities.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, you know, that that that whole Gemini, generative AI image generation debacle, I think they fixed it. It's pretty easy to go in there. It seems like it was fine tuned after they built the model to inject a bunch of extra keywords to try and make it more diverse, and it had all these weird anomalies. Easy to fix.
Speaker 1:Easy to fix. There was clearly backlash. I I guarantee they fixed that product, but they didn't integrate it anywhere. I just went to Google, and I said, draw me a picture of a frog, and it just gives me, like, Google images results, and then Adobe Stock footage, and then Pinterest, and then Reddit. And it just gives me, like, the normal Google results.
Speaker 1:And it's like Yep. The Google search bar is my entry into the Google world, and it should know that that is a that that's an AI query. I asked it to do something, and it didn't do it. And so Yep. Like, whoever's on that team is probably like, oh, well, like, they're not letting me stick my product in the main thing.
Speaker 1:And so now, I'm off on this siloed thing. And how do I even get to that? I think they're just announcing that they're gonna do a separate Gemini app. Maybe that's a good decision. I don't even know at this point.
Speaker 1:It's all very confusing from a strategy perspective.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But, they gotta retain the talent. They kinda gotta stop these people from jumping ship and raising billions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I feel like if if, you know, we could probably talk to the guy who built the product. I'm blanking on his name now.
Speaker 3:You'll have to get on when he launches. He raised no.
Speaker 2:He he already raised money,
Speaker 1:I believe. Yeah. He should announce it here.
Speaker 2:And, anyways, so we'll see. But, I hate to see a good American technology company Yep. You know, squander an incredible
Speaker 1:opportunity. Was that whole narrative of, like, during the AI boom, Sergei and Larry got super interested, and they were coming back in and grinding and, like, picking up the momentum and the pace. And there was a moment where we're like, oh, wow. Like, Google's gonna go back into founder mode. They're gonna own a % of Waymo.
Speaker 1:They're gonna, like, you know, really double down on this stuff. The the mission of Google is to organize the world's information. Like, what could be a better distillation of that than building an LLM? Like, an LLM is just distilling the worlds and organizing the world's information into weights. And
Speaker 2:Lost in the sauce. And And
Speaker 1:they've done phenomenal products. They're actually LLMs perform very well on the benchmarks, but they're just not productizing it effectively.
Speaker 2:Well, they they allowed a bunch of external investment into Waymo. Right?
Speaker 1:That was weird.
Speaker 2:Which is weird. Right? Why why do you I mean, you you don't even have the con you you Yeah. You're running this massive balance sheet
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And you have a breakaway, you know, potentially world truly world changing product Yep. That's growing exponentially. Yep. And you need, you know, these big external
Speaker 1:I mean, that one I can kind of steal, man, because it's like Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and Waymo doesn't exactly do that. Sure. It doesn't exactly fit in the in the mission. And so I understand why that might be. And it's a very different capital intensive business.
Speaker 1:There's all these different layers of the stack, the routing, the partnership with Uber, who cleans them. It's just a very it's like getting into delivery. It's like Yep. It's more akin I would just expect, like, Amazon to really, like, want to be in that more than Google. But for the LLM stuff, like, they gotta figure out this product side.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to, designer Ben Hilack. He's been on the show before, known for his, Jaguar redesign. He, he says, I used to be really afraid of competitors, and then I realized they can't hire me.
Speaker 2:Iconic line. Ben, I actually threw this in because he rolled out a new website that he made himself, and I think it's one of the best new sites that I've seen. So if you're listening, go to don.s0 and check it out.
Speaker 1:D0n?
Speaker 2:D a w n S o. And, he cooked it up himself. It's been I'm navigating around it right now. It's it's fantastic. And, yeah.
Speaker 2:Check it out. But but, yeah, I think, his broader point with this post, which is somewhat of a of a s word post, really trying to John was, you know, upset that I said the s word yesterday, so I'm not gonna say it again today even in the context of an s post. But the the broader thing here is is, you know, having that confidence, in himself.
Speaker 1:Meme post, a joke post.
Speaker 2:A meme post. You know, he's joking around. Right.
Speaker 1:You know, it's a meme we we say meme coins, not s coins.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's in there. But, but, yeah, I think, founders that are overly focused on their competitors, it's just the biggest trap. You need to focus on what you're truly great at and, try to spend, as much time as possible doing what you're great at and augmenting your skill set.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, you should never be afraid of competitors. It it actually, yeah, it took me a while to realize that it you know, these markets that most people are playing in are so big, just focus on your customers and focus on yourself. King.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Become unhirable, become ungovernable.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's great.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to Nick Carter, who did a fantastic job censoring some foul language on the timeline. He says, holy f star star star, s star star. 35,000,000,000. I'm weak. Hold me.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the news here is that CoreWeave is, planning an IPO, within a week that that would allow them to raise 4,000,000,000, and would get priced at around $35,000,000,000 and pull out the size gong because Nick Carter is the Jason Calacanis of CoreWeave. He said it himself. He's there we go. Chris Pitt of the Gong, fantastic investment.
Speaker 2:Nick, I saw in the comments is, you know, friend of friend of the show, but he was one in the, first, first round of CoreWeave. And, you know, you can make a guess if he entered you know, assume that he entered it at 50,000,000 posts. The multiple on this one is is absolutely, egregious and, will probably dwarf his earnings in in from his, you know, day to day, job.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:Who knows? Right?
Speaker 1:He's made a lot of money in a lot of places. Yeah. He's very successful.
Speaker 2:But still, he says this is his best investment
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:By far.
Speaker 1:Close.
Speaker 2:It's not even close.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And,
Speaker 2:we're just happy for him. So I wanted to highlight this.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah. Coreweave, a lot of people are gonna be looking towards this to price other data center projects. They're an AI cloud computing provider. They build data centers and then and then lease to people like Satya Nadella at at Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Satya loves to lease.
Speaker 1:So, there's a number of players here, and there's a big question on how the public markets will receive companies like CoreWeave as they go out to the public market. And so everyone is waiting with baited breath to see where this trades. We talked about the timing is earlier.
Speaker 2:The timing is certainly shaky. Right? You can imagine Core is running the analysis on NVIDIA's down 6% today even as they beat earnings. Yep. The market is starting to, the animal spirits are
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a few things going on. I mean, DeepSeek people got they kinda coped through it with the Jevons paradox thing and, you know, they and then the x AI news, and they kind of bounced out. But it was definitely, like, it it it it made people just do a slight double take on, like, should we really spend the trillion on on, you know, a big data center or something like that? And then, also, you have a lot of questions about the public markets and how The US economy will do under the Trump administration as these prompt campaign promises actually get rolled out.
Speaker 1:And if there are really significant tariffs or something like that, like, there could be dislodging behavior in the market, and that could have a have an effect all over the place. And so we'll see, but good luck to them. And, you know, if you're losing sleep
Speaker 2:Over the market.
Speaker 1:Stressing over the markets, we recommend that you get an eight sleep. Go to eight sleep dot com. Nights that fuel 8sleep.com/tbpn.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You have a fantastic quote there.
Speaker 1:Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. How'd you do last night, Jordy? Let's check it out. Eight I
Speaker 2:am mogging you in the sleep department. I already know I have a better score than you. Just
Speaker 1:85.
Speaker 2:90 seven.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's go. Okay. I gotta get out of my game.
Speaker 2:That was that was rough. I think
Speaker 1:Six hours and fifty minutes last night. What'd you do?
Speaker 2:Seven hours and fifty nine minutes.
Speaker 1:Woah. There we go.
Speaker 2:I'm just really dialed into my game.
Speaker 1:Way up there.
Speaker 2:I I was texting somebody at at 08:20 last night Yep. And they they they were like they they listened to the show. They were like, isn't this your bedtime? I was like, yeah. It is.
Speaker 2:I'm about to put away my phone and and crash.
Speaker 1:Nobody outsleaps me.
Speaker 2:Nobody outsleaps me. It is, no. It it's one of those things. I do think that sleep, you know, from a from a fitness standpoint, once you identify as somebody that goes to the gym, I find it's very easy to just go to the gym every single day. Totally.
Speaker 2:So when I started working out, after I partied too partied too much my freshman year of college, I just started going to the gym, and I just, you know, identified as somebody that went every single day, so I would just go every day. Super easy. Sleep is very different. You're doing stuff in the evenings. You have varying levels of work.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you need to be out of the house earlier than other times, so it's hard to get consistent. But just been focusing on getting extremely, consistent, and it's paying off because, we need to put some real
Speaker 1:money on the line. For sure. And we also need to test the testosterone levels because I was scrolling through YouTube, see a great Chris Williamson quote or clip. He's interviewing doctor pia Peter Attia.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:You know, two steps to one secret hack to improve your testosterone. Open it up. I'm expecting some crazy supplement or something. He's just get some sleep. That's it.
Speaker 1:I'm like, okay.
Speaker 2:Wish it was more exciting.
Speaker 1:But it's easy It's easy. With an
Speaker 2:eight sleep. It's free
Speaker 1:to sleep. Let's go to Emily Sundberg, one of the greatest journalists in the game right now. If you don't subscribe to her Substack, we highly recommend that you do. She says she wrote about unwell and breaks down Alex Cooper's podcast career. So in 2018, Alex Cooper, now famous for Call Her Daddy, started alongside Sofia Franklin, debuted the Call Her Daddy podcast.
Speaker 1:So she's been in the game for seven years, eight years now. The show quickly gained traction with downloads soaring from 12,000 to 2,000,000 within two months. That's a historic run. Fantastic. Tensions arose between Cooper and Franklin over contract negotiations and creative direction, leading to Franklin's departure.
Speaker 1:Cooper continued as the sole host, steering the podcast through a transformative period. Cooper signed an exclusive three year deal with Spotify worth over $60,000,000.
Speaker 2:That was
Speaker 1:2021.
Speaker 2:A little bit of lore. Yeah. Back when this article when the when the feud was happening between, the caller daddy host, this is in 2020.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I spoke with Taylor Lorenz. Yep. Taylor was writing for the New York Times at that point. And, anyways, I I helped Taylor get some context on the story. This was before she was this was at a time when she really had the tech industry's attention.
Speaker 2:This was the booming creator economy. I said, we're entering this was a quote that ended up in the article. We're entering a period where creators are business owners and media brands of their own. They can't just be seen as employees. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The tools are available to them to become founders and CEOs of their brand and develop businesses with multiple powerful revenue streams like merch, ad sales, and subscription revenue.
Speaker 1:This is your quote.
Speaker 2:This is my quote. In the New
Speaker 1:York Times.
Speaker 2:In the New York Times. And, what I was speaking to was that, it was gonna be, miss Cooper was such a star that it was gonna be really, really difficult to keep her there Yep. Because she had so much attention herself. She could spin up a new RSS feed and, you know, have, you know, hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of subscribers in a week. Right?
Speaker 2:So the value, you know, historically, you'd have these sort of, creator types that were dependent on the distribution of a TV channel. Right? So they they could only be this big, you know, figure personality if they had their, you know, relationship with ESPN or CNN or CNBC. Now, you know, and this really proved out. She went on, her own entrepreneurial journey realizing that she had a lot more leverage in that situation even though she was making, you you know, millions of dollars a year at Barstool.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so she signed with Spotify for $60,000,000, which was one of the platform's most significant agreements for a female led podcast 2021. Then along with her husband, she launched the Unwell Network, a media company aimed at developing content with emerging creators. The network's initial signings including included influencers Alex Earl and Madeline Argye. In 2024, she secured a $125,000,000 3 year deal with SiriusXM setting to commence
Speaker 2:These are super max deals.
Speaker 1:These are massive deals.
Speaker 2:It's wild. NBA money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, for the super top power law podcast, they get up there. Similar Pat McAfee with ESPN. I think the deal is, yeah, in the the hundred million plus range. Joe Rogan, same thing.
Speaker 1:Transitioning caller daddy to a new platform. And then in 2025, Cooper introduced Unwell Hydration, an electrolyte infused beverage line developed in partnership with Nestle. Interesting that they're going with the big corporate, partner out of the gate targeting women's wellness. She also added several new shows to the unwell roster, including former former Barstool host, Grace O'Malley. And so she's really grown her empire, and we love to see Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the the what Emily gets into in her piece, which you can go subscribe to her sub sack and check it out, but, she just lost Alex Earl, which is this massive Yep. Figure right now, one of the biggest anchors. And so the same same the same issue that Dave Portnoy was experiencing with having the star and then losing set star is now the same issue that Alex Cooper, which is why people have had this, you know, idea for, the barstool for x, the barstool of business, the barstool of x y z. Right? And then and the challenges Completely
Speaker 1:the wrong because barstool is not the barstool of something. It's Yeah. Daypartner. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And when we set out to, start t VPN, you know, we there was a bunch of different networks that we could have worked with. Yep. But we were you know, our point of view was we can set out on our entire business. We can have one producer. We're gonna have to incur some costs to get to get the show running, but there are costs that are, you know, most adults can can cover.
Speaker 2:Right? It doesn't Yep. Doesn't cost millions of dollars to start a podcast when it would have started cost millions of dollars to start a TV Yeah. Network.
Speaker 1:And that talent retention problem is so real. You saw it with Vox Media. I think, eventually, Kara Swisher spun out after she sold Recode, started her own thing again. Johnny Harris spun out of there and started a YouTube channel. Yep.
Speaker 1:He he learned all the skills. And so, yeah, there were startup costs. He had to hire people to do the motion graphics, and he had to work really hard to get it off the ground. But very quickly, people recognized him. Oh, that's the guy from Vox who does the border show I love.
Speaker 1:I see it in my YouTube feed. And, Cleo Abram left Vox as well-to-do the same thing. She was at a million subscribers in, you know, a couple months, and it's because, Vice, the Try Guys did the same thing. BuzzFeed saw I I guess they were at BuzzFeed, but, Vice and BuzzFeed guys, teams have left over time. And, the easiest way to go viral on YouTube for a long time was just put up a video, say, why I quit BuzzFeed?
Speaker 1:Why I quit Vice? Why I quit Vox? And boom, it goes viral. And overnight, you have, you know, a hundred thousand followers or a million followers. This just happened with Donut Media.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you follow them at all, their car channel. A lot of people have been leaving that. They got bought by, I think, some private equity firm or some investment firm. And so the talent wasn't fully economically aligned. And, over time, more and more of the talent just realized, wait.
Speaker 1:I should just be running my own show. And so there's always this it's talent retention is very, very tricky. It's very, very tricky to align the economic incentives when you have these these small teams. But the future seems to be, like, the networks are not, to me, the the donut media or the barstool or the Vox or the Vice. The networks are x Yep.
Speaker 1:Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and you can be on all of them, but they have the power, and they have something real that they are going to get a cut of our business and and Alex Cooper's business and everyone's business. And then and then the shows are the individual people. And so aggregating people together, it just doesn't work unless there's something really crazy going on. It's really perfect. And so I I I think that the future is definitely something like what we're doing
Speaker 2:right now. And if you're more operating a a scale network or media business, you have the option to grow homegrown talent, which takes a long time and it's really hard. Yep. And then you might actually get a hit and then they'll leave. Yep.
Speaker 2:Or you have to pay a ton of money, which is what SiriusXM is doing, spending a hundred and 25,000,000 for for a
Speaker 1:three year deal. And that's just distribution rates.
Speaker 2:That's just
Speaker 1:distribution rates. Exclusive or maybe it's some some piece of it's actually
Speaker 2:fully exclusive. No. And, But
Speaker 1:it makes sense because they'll be able to sell $200,000,000 of ads against all of that on the radio, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or get, you know, subscribers that that offset that cost, you know, user acquisition, basically. But but, yeah, overall, gonna be, only, you know, SiriusXM is cable at this point. Right? It will, just sort of fade away over time.
Speaker 2:It will probably, you know, have have some enduring value, but, won't be the giant, you know, that it that it once was.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking to advertise a podcast, get on AdQuik. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Get an AdQuik billboard, folks.
Speaker 2:We got our own podcast billboards coming up.
Speaker 1:We're working on it.
Speaker 2:I can't wait.
Speaker 1:And I imagine a lot of people listen to us. We need to do the SiriusXM deal too. So you can be listening in your car to TVPN, and then you drive by our billboard, and it's just $24.07. We're in your
Speaker 2:SiriusXM is so funny. I I you know me. I cycle through cars a lot. So anytime you get a new car, they're just sort of, like, aggressively marketing to you, and they'll send you, you know, mail that says, open this right now. You open it up, and it's like, we'd like to offer you a free month of SiriusXM, and you're saying, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You stop opening them. But, anyways Cool.
Speaker 1:Well, we got some news Best
Speaker 2:of luck is that.
Speaker 1:Cognition Labs. Devon just got faster. They've heard your feedback that Devon is too slow. Devon is an end to end agent that makes hundreds of decisions for each task. So that test time inference stuff that we've talked about, essentially, the reasoning models, that's what Devon's been doing for a long time.
Speaker 1:So there was and is still a long way to go. But they've made Devon two point one x faster over the past five months, and the trend continues. And so congratulations to the team at Cognition Labs. If you're running a startup with a big GitHub repo, get Devin in there. Get it in your slime.
Speaker 1:Get him
Speaker 2:in there.
Speaker 1:Get him in there.
Speaker 2:Could be your next
Speaker 1:Put him
Speaker 3:to work.
Speaker 2:Top engineer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, he, Devin is it's weird saying he by anthropomorphizing it. But, Devin is like the top engineer at, at, Gumroad. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anti work.
Speaker 3:Which is Yale's company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, there's so much, like, junk little tickets here and there code that needs to be fixed and, like, no one wants to hop on those.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Put Devin to work over the weekend. Put him to work. Put him to work. Let's go to Paul Graham.
Speaker 2:Put him in Workspace 17, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That would be good.
Speaker 2:Historically underperforming workspace.
Speaker 1:Historically underperforming. Famously underperforming.
Speaker 2:Let's go to Paul Graham.
Speaker 1:Paul Graham says, there are a lot of people attributing crazy beliefs to Elon lately, but to me, the clearest sign that he is not entirely rational is the continued deprioritization of tweets with links in them. Everyone can see that this makes Twitter worse.
Speaker 2:And hits him with the t word.
Speaker 1:Tweets. Yeah. Oh, that's that's disrespectful to the x culture.
Speaker 2:I mean, Paul Paul follows it up by saying the suggestion that one should put links in replies is such an obviously broken workaround who starting from scratch would design Twitter to work like that. I totally agree with with Paul here. It's it's totally possible to simultaneously see exactly why Elon is doing this.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It it may make it may make x, you know, lack of links makes x worse for users. Yep. But it makes x better for Elon. Right? He wants to keep people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:On the platform, and I bet you that it is working exactly as intended. Yep. Twitter used to be a place you'd go on and you discover articles Yep. Blogs, videos, music. You know, it was just it was just sending you across.
Speaker 2:It was, like, the most amazing discovery engine Yep. For the Internet. It was it was effectively, like, a stumble upon, like, product where you just go on. You didn't know what you're gonna find, but you were gonna find interesting, you know, topics. It was a great place for writers to distribute their work.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's still a distribution platform. Right? With PMF or Die, we saw this. We Yeah. You know, launched a post, got a million plus views on the post.
Speaker 1:Include a link, made the post native for x. What works on x? Vibrils. What works on x threads. So whatever you wanna do elsewhere that would be on a link, you can upload a two hour movie if you want.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can't link to Netflix.
Speaker 2:I would argue that x is now, an a platform for attention and not distribution.
Speaker 3:So you
Speaker 2:can get people's attention on x, but it's it's, it's not the sort of linear distribution of I wrote a blog post. I'm gonna post it on here. A bunch of people were are gonna click over.
Speaker 1:Distribution's never going to.
Speaker 2:You know, I I still get a lot of links out to my personal website, but there's a very clear line. There's every single month, millions of people see my posts. Yep. Some percentage of those click to my profile Yep. And then a smaller percentage click to Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, my personal website, and I see all the traffic. Right? So, anyways
Speaker 1:But it's a skill issue. Some people post links and still go viral. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the tough thing with Paul, he's an incredible writer. He condenses his his thoughts down. He writes in a very straightforward way. He should be able to just post his post directly
Speaker 1:on He can, but I think he likes the aesthetics of his website. Totally.
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 1:that's the main thing is he doesn't wanna conform to the axe thing. But he should just take copy the just literally just copy the text and put it in a long post. Yeah. It'd be fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But No. And there's there's a huge edge that people like Paul and Ben Thompson, they built up these newsletter, these these newsletter lists.
Speaker 1:Even mail? I don't even think he has anything. I think people just literally just go and check. Oh, there's a new BG post. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah. I mean, it it you either gotta build your list, you know, offline and have that as a channel and and and grow it and have different growth strategies for that Or repurpose all your content to be x native, whether that's through threads or long posts. You know, Lulu's been able to do it. I see tons of people that can do it with threads. Tons of people that can do it with videos.
Speaker 1:All sorts of people have have found ways to break through with the algorithm. But it is frustrating. Yeah. Because it's high standard deviation, and when you have a post flop, it's hurtful to your, you know, ego.
Speaker 2:We've talked about it before. I've had a lot of people, reach out to, you know, me or you and say, oh, I think I'm shadow banned,
Speaker 1:all this stuff.
Speaker 2:I I go, brother, you haven't posted you haven't had a had a banger in in weeks. It's not it's not the platform. It's you.
Speaker 1:It's you.
Speaker 2:You gotta take responsibility for the flops.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of an absolute master of algorithms, let's go to mister Beast. He's raising, he's raising money at a $5,000,000,000 valuation. The YouTube star aims to raise a couple hundred million dollars, and he, quote, lost tens of millions of dollars on the Amazon reality show. I don't even know how that's possible because isn't Amazon paying for it? But I guess he may might have
Speaker 2:I think he has a history of, betting on himself to such an extreme degree that he will go out of pocket Sure. Yeah. Consistently. Like, you know, ultimately, the the Amazon show is as much, distribution and sort of marketing for the rest of his business empire as it is. It it's, you know, I I'm guessing he looked at it and said, I don't need this to be a profit center.
Speaker 2:Yep. I'm fine if it's a cost center. I have lunch. What is it?
Speaker 1:Because it's going Beastables. So so in the Mr. Beast deal, if you invest in a $5,000,000,000 valuation, you get shares in a company that's making, 400,000,000 in sales, and that's across Lunchly, the Lunchable, product, Beastables, the candy company, Mr. Beast Burger, the, Ghost Kitchen's driven, burger delivery company, and then Mr. Beast LLC, which is the production company.
Speaker 1:And so you get assets in all of those. But, yeah, he's always been reinvest everything. He wants to be aggressive. He's running his business more like a Silicon Valley startup, trying to burn money, really go for growth, and then capture the value later. And so far, it's been working.
Speaker 2:Yep. Big numbers. We gotta hear the update on mister Beast Burger. I think the other from what I know, the other you know, the the sales of of, Lunchly and, Feastables have have been pretty phenomenal. Yep.
Speaker 2:Mr. Beast Burger had a bunch of issues early on. I've never seen it anywhere out in the world. It's a delivery only product, but I I haven't even seen it online. Once, the last time I saw it was around the controversy around the quality issues that they were having.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 1:the quality control on a product like Feastables is way, way easier because it's just if it leaves the factory in a good condition, it's probably going to get to the customer in a good condition, especially when your chain is Walmart delivery as opposed to it's being made in all sorts of different kitchens and then delivered by all sorts of different people. There's a million places where that can go wrong, and there's way more people taking a slice of the profit in these ghost kitchen companies than in consumer packaged goods, which are already not super, super high margin. Yep. But the the the MrBeast Burger, I think the financials were it was always a harder lift than something like lunch later or feastables, which can Totally. You know, just be, hey.
Speaker 1:We make a million chocolate bars. We drop it off at Walmart, and it flies off the shelf because I'm a celebrity.
Speaker 2:So Now the whole concept of airdropping food to people is is, it sounds incredible in theory Yep. That you can just sort of instantly create a brand and produce it all over the country. Yep. The actual, reality is that these sort of fast food companies that you're competing with, right, Raising Cane's, things like that, They have year you know, spent decades developing these super super, you know, Chick fil A has developed these super sophisticated supply chains to deliver the perfect meal every time. And mister Beast has a great, you know, brand with his demo, but, the idea that he's gonna he's it's competing with Chick fil A is really tough.
Speaker 1:Right? Did you see mister Beast on, flagrant two? Do you know that podcast?
Speaker 2:What is
Speaker 1:that? Andrew, why am I blanking on his name? He was on this comedy podcast, and they play this prank on him where they're like, hey. We got some Mr. Beast Burgers here.
Speaker 1:Let's all have them. And they open it up, and they'd replace them with Big Macs from McDonald's. And they're just like, oh, this looks exactly like a Big Mac. Like, yeah. Like, like and they say that there's, like, some song that was popular with with Big Macs back in the days, like, sesame seed bun and, like, the, you know, cheese and spread or whatever.
Speaker 1:And they're like, this looks a lot like a Big Mac, Mr. Beast. Like, what's going on?
Speaker 2:They really put him on
Speaker 1:the spot. And he, like, kinda didn't get it for a while.
Speaker 2:He was like,
Speaker 1:you're you're, like, pranking me. Right? And it was very funny. It
Speaker 2:was very funny. Anyway To be honest, I wouldn't know I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. It's been I've
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I think the Big Mac has an extra slice of bread in the middle, so it should be pretty obvious. But, and and, of course, like, he should know if it's his product. But, anyway, people are having fun with it. But overall, you know, I think he's I think he's kinda pivoted through that, spent less time with things that are underperforming, spent more time with the things that are performing.
Speaker 1:And, obviously, the Amazon show, even if he lost money on it, it probably raised his profile
Speaker 2:because he couldn't His audience on YouTube was basically maxed out. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean It's hard to You say that, and yet it's, like, every couple months he's celebrating, like, now I'm at 400,000,000 subscribers. Now I'm at half a billion subscribe. It's like, he really does seem to be able to see
Speaker 2:is probably but his TAM is probably less than Yeah. Facebook. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's From a user perspective. With, like, CNBC, where CNBC just does not have a younger audience. And so Yeah. If he wants to expand the audience going into more reality TV style older crowd that's just tuning in on
Speaker 2:Just being on America's home screen. America Amazon Prime is the dominant, you know, TV screen in America.
Speaker 1:A generational game show host, and there's no reason why you wouldn't see him develop reality TV shows, cohost them, host them, or develop game shows. And the next, you know, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I remember that being, like, a really, really popular Jeopardy is a game show that's, you know, it's a little bit less gimmicky, but, that that show has a really enduring value. He's had a number of hosts, and you could see him developing something like that that captures both the online audience, which is future and growing, obviously, but still goes after the old audience that's just tuning in every night.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The question is, at a $5,000,000,000 valuation
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is that a company that, you know, the the the idea behind mister Beast raising for this HoldCo is that he will take the company public at some day. Yep. None of these investors would be plowing, you know, potentially a billion dollars into the business if there wasn't a path to liquidity. And I just don't see there being a a an acquirer that's not the public markets. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And the question is, that stock has very real meme potential of, like, you have this younger generation of fans that just wanna be a part and and feel like they're an owner of the Mr. Beast world. At the same time, though, looking down into these, he's got CBG companies that are prop that that we don't even know if they're profitable. So they they they account for 400,000,000. He you know, there's $400,000,000 of revenue across the portfolio.
Speaker 2:We don't know if they're actually producing any sort of actual, earnings. And then the production side of the business, unclear what the margin looks like on that. And over time, he's gonna have to launch many, many, many more businesses. So investors that are investing at 5,000,000,000 are probably thinking this company you know, this group's gonna go public.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna have to launch a lot of other companies to sort of even grow into that $5,000,000,000 valuation.
Speaker 1:Very different corporate structure because you could totally see Mr. Beast LLC, the production company, going and getting acquired by Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, Disney even. Yeah. Any of those could pick that up. Do those companies want also a CPG company?
Speaker 1:And Feastables, natural home at Nestle, natural home at Unilever. Right? But does Unilever also want Mr. Beast LLC? So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't be surprised if you see him launch a company, scale it, use his platform, his production company as the go to market strategy, the initial marketing. And then at a certain point, it's like, hey, look. Feastables has really saturated our core market of Mr. Beast fans. Now it's Super Bowl ad time.
Speaker 1:Let's just hand it over to Nestle, take that cash back into the business, and then do an even bigger stunt, more content, and then a new product. Yep. And then just keep doing that. He's been talking about getting into mobile games, and, you know, we've talked about him getting into a VPN or something, something software high margin. We'll see where it goes, but it's a fascinating story.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to, an interesting question from Yunyu Lee. Says, what happened to all of those companies that raised $500,000,000 to train a foundation model for coding? Did they all just get mogged by Claude? Mogged by Claude is a funny funny phrase. I'm genuinely curious for what it's worth.
Speaker 1:I don't see Cognition Labs, Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt dot new using anything other than Claude or GPT, maybe with the rare r one sighting. And so yeah.
Speaker 3:So to debate companies there.
Speaker 1:Yourself right now.
Speaker 2:There's Magic AI. Yep. And then there's Poolside AI. Poolside was started by I think it was
Speaker 1:it's one of the Isn't Poolside a reference to the Poolside PMs?
Speaker 2:I don't know. What's the poolside?
Speaker 1:Oh, you don't remember that viral video of the of the product managers saying they're remote working during COVID, and it's these two girls, and they're at the pool. And they're like, day in the life of a product manager. Here's what I do at my job. Well, I check-in with the engineers and make sure that they're doing the the tickets, and everyone it's super viral. I think that's the reference for poolside.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Maybe not. But I think the idea is, like, you use this poolside AI thing, and then you can be at the pool hanging out, which is just hilarious to me. And I love the brand.
Speaker 2:But, you
Speaker 1:know, who knows if it makes sense to train a model for $500,000,000.
Speaker 2:We've we've talked about this in the past. You know, so so a little backstory on poolside. Yep. So Jason Warner is this cofounder and CEO of poolside.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:He was previously had a, illustrious career, was the CTO of GitHub.
Speaker 1:GitHub. Yep.
Speaker 2:And he was the VP of engineering at Heroku, and he was also managing director at Redpoint Ventures. So it makes sense to hit you know, when he starts a new company that raises, you know, obscene amount of money. There's two strategies in in AI that we've seen to date. There's the ultra public sort of compete for attention on the timeline, which many of the foundation models have taken. And then there's the strategy of SSI, which is we're gonna raise a bunch of money, but that's when you'll hear about us.
Speaker 2:And otherwise, we're just sort of shooting for ASI. Yep. It's totally possible that, you know, these companies like Poolside and Magical, which is backed by, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Speaker 1:Another GitHub guy.
Speaker 2:Another GitHub guy.
Speaker 1:They're both in the two different companies.
Speaker 2:Yes. Absolute dogs. Yeah. It's totally possible that they decided, hey, you know, there's there's this bloodbath on the timeline for attention. Let's, you know, focus on just core traction.
Speaker 1:And, you
Speaker 2:know, there's other approaches. If you have $500,000,000, you could spend tens of millions of dollars a year on direct sales, and it could be a lot, you know, more under the radar. But it is it is a very interesting call out that, when you think about, all these, AI coding tools are using Claude. Right?
Speaker 1:That is,
Speaker 2:like, the preferred, you know, LLM, under the hood. So, credit to Claude for staying so competitive despite it not even necessarily being their core focus. They just
Speaker 1:I need to do a deep dive on GitHub Copilot. Like, was GitHub Copilot a custom trained LLM or was it built on top of g p t three? I think it might have been built on g p t three, but you could imagine that that would color like, the GitHub experience could color how you think the the market will evolve. Because if they're if they're building Copilot and these two guys both have real deep insights into what's going on GitHub, and they're seeing this and they're saying, hey. It makes sense to train a custom model just for code, then Yeah.
Speaker 1:Makes sense to to double down on that. At the same time, there's a lot of people in AI who believe that, I I talked to one guy. Actually, the guy from Etched, he was saying that I was like, how how do you think, like, the humanoid thing plays out? Like, like, is it important to just include all human knowledge in in those training in those foundation models as well? And he was like, literally, yes.
Speaker 1:Like, I think that adding the corpus of every book ever written will help a a humanoid walk. And I was like, that's an that's an interesting take. But, like, there's this idea that, like, yes, Claude, like, like, in order to be a good programmer should also understand every single language and every single philosophy textbook and every single history textbook, even though it doesn't feel like it applies all.
Speaker 2:It's it's the same exact thing, for any, you know, career path. If you have a bunch of knowledge from totally unrelated subjects Yep. Can oftentimes allow you to be better at that one specific thing.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so I think there's a real, case for that. But, all that being said, in the same way that there's, you know, 20 different consumer LLMs and sort of, like, chat apps, there's 20 plus heavily funded, you know, AI coding products, and they won't all make it. Yep. There will be multiple winners. Yep.
Speaker 2:These aren't It's not obvious yet that, you know, it's not obvious yet that they're these are sort of winner take all markets. Right? But
Speaker 1:I say let them cook. I say good luck to them. Hopefully, it works out. Hopefully, we have some cool products. I'd love to see it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to levels.io. He says, I've spent probably hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, and every time I load it, I'm stuck downloading new 10 gig updates, and it takes me fifteen minutes before I can even fly with my game. At least I can just fly immediately without updates. And so he Levels IO is a indie hacker. He's been on, Lex Fridman show, very popular on x.
Speaker 1:He built it.
Speaker 2:About his wins, but also his failures. Yeah. He's launched, I think, a hundred plus products, many of which have flopped, but many of which have done very well. Very cool. His his general ethos is just take tons and tons of shots on a goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, he's he's bucked the venture train. He's he's very outspoken in that he thinks venture is silly, and at times it is. But he's managed to create a bunch of really cool products, especially, you know, more recently. He I think, a few years ago, he was focused on remote work. So we had a bunch of products related to to that.
Speaker 1:What was it called? Like
Speaker 2:Nomad list.
Speaker 1:Nomad list. That's it. Nomad list.
Speaker 2:Which is cool. He was sort of living that sort of digital nomad lifestyle that was, I was never big in that world, but, became very popular. And then, now he's pivoted into AI. He does some stuff in image generation, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then I'm excited to see, what he's doing in in flight. He's created this sort of flight simulator that almost feels Minecraft esque. Yep. And did you ever do flight simulators growing up?
Speaker 1:Not really. A little bit.
Speaker 2:I used to do, flight lessons, and, and it was fun way. I had the full rig, you know, everything, strapped up to my desk and, you know, the the yoke and everything.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I was
Speaker 2:I was big into that world.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:so this is funny. This guy, Gabriel, is pissed off that, Levels is monetizing his game that he released for free. So he releases his game. He says you can play it. And then he adds these upsells where if you wanna buy, like, a f 15 in this game, you gotta pay $30.
Speaker 2:And Gabriel says, I make games for a living. Personally, I wasn't bothered until he added a $20.30 dollar microtransaction.
Speaker 1:Not really a microtransaction. That's a That's
Speaker 2:more of a macro.
Speaker 1:Macrotransaction.
Speaker 3:But yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it's fun. It's a good demo of of him being able to build a a basically, a game, you know, with, a bunch of AI coding tools. And he's building in public, but then still driving a bunch of attention. I think Elon quote tweeted his announcement, video, and he did a great job of taking the the product he produced. And instead of just saying, hey.
Speaker 1:Hey. Go check this out. Here's a link. He posted a video to really give you full context. Yep.
Speaker 1:Went viral. Elon quote tweeted it. I'm sure a lot of people found it. A lot of people downloaded it or or just opened the web browser, started playing around. If they liked it, they pay $30.
Speaker 1:He gets to make a little money. It's great. And that shows
Speaker 2:him at his best.
Speaker 1:With all that money he's making, he should, of course, buy a Vacheron Constantin, watch. I was in, West Hollywood Beverly Hills going to a business meeting this morning. I should have been wearing this watch because, everyone at breakfast was in absolute hitters. But I love that Vacheron's, advert running this ad campaign called The Quest, and they are on the back of the, The Economist this week.
Speaker 2:Full court press.
Speaker 1:Say, two hundred and seventy years of doing better if possible, and that is always possible. In 1755 in Geneva, a quest begins. A quest for excellence in high watchmaking, a quest of passion, perseverance, and mastery, a quest to do better if possible. And that is always possible. The quest that never ends.
Speaker 1:Vacheron Constantin celebrates seeking excellence for two hundred and seventy years. They're celebrating their two hundred and seventieth anniversary with a big ad campaign.
Speaker 2:So just to give people some context, Vacheron was started roughly twenty years before America Yeah. Which is pretty difficult to fathom.
Speaker 1:It's wild.
Speaker 2:So this single watch brand predates America by twenty years, and, it's important for people to know that they can go on bezel today and, you know, see almost the entire catalog.
Speaker 3:They got it. They got
Speaker 2:a bunch of stuff on there. There's a ton of other things. We should put it on the record. We have a thesis that Vacheron, you know, it's it's the least well known holy trinity watch brand. When people even if, you know, you just said holy trinity to somebody, that wasn't super familiar with watches, they would think Rolex, AP, Patek.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it's actually Vacheron AP, Patek or
Speaker 1:Patek. That's correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, I think that this brand is about to go on a generational run. You just picked one up. Yep. I've been looking at a few myself.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it's a sort of undiscovered, holy trinity brand. Yeah. And the world is, you know, seem seems to be responding now. They have the new two two two, which, I have my eye on Yep. If I can get my hands on it.
Speaker 1:And they yeah. They haven't really overextended in the way the other holy trinity companies have.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Less techs. Coming out with a cubitist, terrible press run, terrible
Speaker 1:Very controversial watch.
Speaker 2:Probably gonna get discontinued. Who knows?
Speaker 1:I think potentially underrated, but continue. For sure. ATG is going crazy too.
Speaker 2:Just massively overextended, kind of pissing off a lot of core watch enthusiasts by these crazy sort of DJ partnerships, which may end up being smart, but, you know, following more of a LVMH style playbook.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Jonathan Wasserstrom. He says, I need some liquidity so I can take all of that liquidity and put it back into a different equally, if not more illiquid new deal. I love it.
Speaker 2:Trevor. Jonathan's a buddy. He started a commercial real estate, marketplace back in the day. So he's a founder. Now he does a bunch of, venture stuff, has a pretty active syndicate on AngelList.
Speaker 2:We did a deal together last year, but, this resonated with me. My entire life has been, you know, working in illiquid Yep. Getting some liquidity tripling down into the next thing and, you know, just, doing that. And I'm sure I will be doing that for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1:That's the game.
Speaker 2:And I love it. So, you may as well just say it how it is, which Jonathan says, very eloquently. But if
Speaker 1:you got a bunch of illiquid assets, you gotta lever up. You gotta take out some debt against them and then roll that into something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Leverage, baby.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to, Sam Parr with an absolute banger. It's at 16 k likes. I I saw this and was like, this is so good.
Speaker 2:Wait. We don't have the ability to play it
Speaker 1:right now. We can't play the video. What we We
Speaker 2:gotta get
Speaker 1:videos. Yeah. We will figure that out. We had a brief Friday.
Speaker 2:Videos working.
Speaker 1:But it's a it's a fantastic meeting of Sam Soulek, photoshopped into a board meeting, talking about his leg day in, granular detail. Sam says it's the best meme he saw in the last seven days, hands down.
Speaker 2:And I agree.
Speaker 1:I saved it to my phone because it's so funny. I think I could actually maybe just play the audio for everyone here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do that. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Here.
Speaker 3:Holy shit. Veiny as well. I mean, pumped veiny, fatigued. What other descriptors are there of a good lift? But I'll make this quick because I gotta get some I gotta get some rest ASAP.
Speaker 3:The last thing I wanna do is wreck my sleep schedule. But you tell me, man. I mean, that's a a fucking pump for
Speaker 2:sure.
Speaker 3:I kinda lost a little bit of the striations. Get them on this side. Un pumped, there's a ton of fancy pants lines in here, but this is way more swollen than I need to be happy with.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's so good. Amazing. I love Sam Soo. Like, I really hope he, becomes a Terminator.
Speaker 2:Fish tank.
Speaker 1:Maybe. I don't know. He just, like, has his own little, like, tone of voice, but, what a fantastic influencer. He's been on a historic run, and good luck to him in the Arnold Classic coming up. He's going for his IFBB pro card.
Speaker 2:You gotta stream that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, I I think it could set off a a a huge wave of IFBB attempts in the Silicon Valley world.
Speaker 3:Lot of
Speaker 4:a lot of capital
Speaker 1:allocators getting into bodybuilding. Keith Raboy was early with the berries thing popularizing working out. The next logical step, become a mass monster, go for the IFBB pro card.
Speaker 2:We've been working on it. Speaking of optimization Mhmm. It's official.
Speaker 1:Go to
Speaker 2:the next post. You can now track, Blake and Patty. They're in the cage. You can track their productivity, live. So somebody was inspired by Optify, the the the YC sort of sweatshop SaaS company that went viral, or was it Monday or Yeah.
Speaker 3:I I think it was Monday or weekend or something.
Speaker 2:And they basically rebuilt the exact product. So leveraging the stream, this it takes footage live footage from the stream Yeah. And then tracks when they're seated at their desk actually working versus off doing other things. So Yeah. You can pull this up.
Speaker 2:It's pmfdot, pmf or dye.xyz. They got their own domain
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Hosted it, and you can live see you can see exactly when they're sleeping, like, not in their desk. You can see how much sleep they're getting.
Speaker 1:They built this so fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I need to find you need to find the guy that that did this and hire them.
Speaker 1:I guess, by at my real dev. So go give them a follow because they're gonna build something fantastic soon. This is this is great. I love this, like, meme website one off, you know, just simple demos. We've seen a bunch of people build stuff like this for the show, ad networks and automatic clipping for us and stuff.
Speaker 1:There's so many cool things that people are doing. So, you'll love to see this. And it's funny. This is the thing that, like, it could just be photoshopped a years a few years ago. You go back thirty years, Photoshop didn't even exist.
Speaker 1:Right? You couldn't even make a meme. Now you can actually make the full website, make the full product, thanks to artificial intelligence for sure. It's great. I love it.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Lewis Hamilton. He says now's the time. He's on the cover of Time Magazine. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton. What?
Speaker 1:Force power. Now at Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton races to claim his place as f one's greatest. Certainly hope it happens. He is, he's a phenomenal, phenomenal driver to watch. Now it's
Speaker 2:gonna be very tough. Right? For our Ferraris are known for their, lack of reliability. Yep. And if there's one thing that that helps in f one, it's a reliable, you know, racing
Speaker 1:car. I don't know how real that meme is, but I got into f one for a couple seasons. And I was like, okay. Yeah. I know Ferraris are unreliable.
Speaker 1:And then I saw, Charlotte Claire, like, like, breaking down all the time. And I was like, how did that translate to the f one team? You'd think it'd be like maybe it it would apply to one, but not the other. But it really does seem like it's a it's a thing across the board, and it's gotta be extremely frustrating if you're a driver. But good luck to them.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, Ferrari irons it out. Has a great car
Speaker 3:this year.
Speaker 2:They're doing, testing right now Fantastic. In, Sakhir. Yeah. And, yeah. I'm excited to see the season.
Speaker 1:It could be the downfall of this show. You know, people complain about other podcasts, pivoting into pure politics, staying away from technology and business and markets. We like to stay focused on technology and business. We slip into some other categories every once in a while. But if the show really goes down the hill, I think it's gonna become an f one podcast.
Speaker 1:We'll only be talking about racing and cars the whole time. So hold us accountable if we do that. Get us back on the topic. Keep it tech and business, guys. Anyway, should we close out with Balaji?
Speaker 1:Balaji has an announcement around about BioGraph, the world's most advanced preventative health and diagnostics clinic designed to drive meaningful advances in health span and lifespan. Balaji says, what's wrong with you? You don't know. You don't know if you're quietly sick. You don't know if there's a creeping time bomb in your body, one that might be detected and prevented by a simple test.
Speaker 1:But you're busy. You can't spend time worrying about the stuff. Ideally, you just want to get periodically scanned by a set of machines, have them determine what's wrong, if anything, and then dispatch treatment accordingly. That's why Peter Attia and his friend, John Herring, founded BioGraph, and it's why, Bologie became one of their first investors. The product packages just about every useful biomedical test into a single battery, from blood work to EKGs, from CT scanning to whole body MRI.
Speaker 1:It integrates all these measurements in an app that and tracks them across time, giving a comprehensive overview of known risks for cancer, heart disease, metabolic disease, neurological issues, sleep disorders, and more. It schedules you for a recurring checkup every six months and uses both basic baselining and advanced AI to determine whether your results are normal. I'm sure that Elizabeth Holmes is crying in prison thinking that she should have built this instead. Use off the shelf hardware.
Speaker 2:We don't know if she's using, you know, cutlery from the kitchen to assemble her own chips and, you know, develop her own machine.
Speaker 1:She's like, give me all the shivs. I'm building a new MRI. She's collecting why does she have so many illegal cell phones in Cell Block 17? Oh, well, it's because she's developing an EKG and a CT scanner.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's why.
Speaker 2:This is, this is cool. It makes it makes sense to combine all these technologies. And if there's one thing people value, it's their life. So I can imagine that people would pay a lot, to get access to this. And there's so many school things you can, you know, do with this data.
Speaker 2:You can imagine that life insurance companies would, you know, one day ask their clients. Like, if you've ever gotten life insurance, they'll send somebody out to, you know, do tests on you. And, yeah, you can imagine, you know, life insurance being like, cool. We're happy to insure you, but get this test first so that we can set your rate. Right?
Speaker 2:And, yeah. So so very cool application of the tech. And it's already seen, you know, people catch, early onset, you know, cancer and things like that through blood testing, biomarkers all the time. So I'm excited about, I hate when a company like this goes live, and I didn't hear about it
Speaker 1:until it
Speaker 2:went live because it means I'm not invested in it. But, you know, very cool to see Peter Attia launch this. And it's cool because, you know, Peter Attia is historically you could email him Yeah. And sign up to be a client, or a patient of his, but it was something in the range of 200 k a year. So it's completely unattainable for most people.
Speaker 2:And, even with that kind of pricing, there'd be a really long waiting list. You'd see him a couple times a year, and he'd give you advice. And so he's gonna be able to offer a lot of the value of his service for a fraction of the cost, I imagine. You can imagine something like this costing $5,000 a year and and getting a lot of the value of what Peter provides in terms of longevity from that.
Speaker 1:Let's get Sam Soulek in there. I wanna know his biomarkers because I want the same biomarkers.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:And that's our show. Thanks for watching.
Speaker 2:Real quick. What's up? Some some live breaking news. OpenAI. Oh.
Speaker 2:Launched a new, product 4.5.
Speaker 1:K.
Speaker 2:Today, we're releasing a research preview of GPT four five, our largest and best model for chat yet. So, again, we've talked about the roller coaster Yep. The LLM roller coaster. We're all on it. We're all riding it whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2:And, you know, clawed out its moment earlier this week. Next AI had its moment last week. Deep sea kept
Speaker 1:three over the weekend.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. This is why Lulu's advice of just launch because you're not you know, the best case scenario is you kinda own the spotlight for a a few days.
Speaker 1:Did OpenAI even do, like, a video for this?
Speaker 3:They did
Speaker 2:a livestream Okay. Not on x. Okay. And then they've posted a handful of videos. Okay.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting because I wonder how much Elon is nerfing their their reach. He might actually be he might actually be a little wary to do that given how many
Speaker 1:Might be amplifying it with the crying emoji. Yeah. Who knows? He gets in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saying scam.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, attention is attention.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. It says rolling out now to all chat GBT Pro users. And so we should go, and try it out and get our reactions tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll break it down tomorrow. I'm sure there'll be a bunch of good analysis, and we can test drive it. Oh, I got 4.5 right here.
Speaker 2:Ask it to tell you how many r's are in strawberry.
Speaker 1:It's just, like, 10.
Speaker 2:40 thousand
Speaker 1:four hundred and 50 It's, like, 45. Actually.
Speaker 2:I don't
Speaker 1:wanna hear any of your joke prompts anymore. I'm sick of you human.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Love all touch base. Levels of intelligence that that you couldn't even Yeah. You know, experience.
Speaker 3:Get out of here.
Speaker 1:Get out of here. Anyway, we're getting out of here. Thank you. Thank you. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Speaker 1:Leave us a review. Put an ad for a company you work for, company you started, company you just love in the review. We'll read it on the show. And that's our show for today. We'll be back tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We'll see you then. Have a good day, everyone.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Bye.