Julian Dorey Podcast - #30 - Anthony Fenu

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Anthony Fenu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Soar, a spatial technology company that specializes in AR/VR and compression innovation. The company’s mission is to make volumetric technology (like holograms) a central part of our everyday lives. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 4:49 - The shift to spatial technology; AR/VR; Google Glasses; Field-of-View 14:49 - The challenges of VR/AR & Hologram public adoption; Data privacy; World Economic Forum (WEC) Data Fears 25:57 - Are Monopolies good? ; Peter Thiel, “Zero to One,” & his 4 Pillars; The Paypal Mafia; Elon Musk 40:59 - How Anthony got into technology; The success of Anthony’s first company in AR/VR; The Lessons Anthony learned from his first company 59:47 - Anthony’s Core Venture Capital Principles; How Venture Capital works in Silicon Valley; What Anthony looks for his VC’s looking to invest in his company 1:11:23 - Anthony’s current company, Soar, and how they capture information to produce volumetric (hologram) experiences; Soar’s proprietary compression technology explained 1:20:41 - Relating Soar’s compression technology to common everyday technological needs; Silicon Valley (HBO)   1:27:31 - 3D vs 2D; Depth in imaging; The use cases for Soar’s platform; Licensing compression 1:36:25 - Anthony talks about some of his current clients; Anthony explains exactly how Soar’s hologram technology works (using the upcoming Logan Paul vs. Floyd Mayweather fight as an example) 1:46:24 - Artificial Intelligence and its integration with Soar; How Series Funding for Pre-IPO Startups works 1:54:15 - The question of when to IPO; Determining which VC’s to target out of the ones that make sense for a company 2:02:35 - How Anthony has networked in elite tech circles within Silicon Valley; Anthony’s thoughts on Bitcoin (BTC) 2:11:10 - The Winklevoss Twins story as told in the book, “Bitcoin Billionaires,” as an example of Groupthink problems in Silicon Valley; Peter Thiel & Gawker; Anthony explains the drawbacks of the Silicon Valley Groupthink 2:24:33 - The Covid 19 Tech Boom; How Covid affected Soar; The speed of technological innovation in the Covid 19 Era; Anthony explains the real story behind the famous 2Pac Shakur hologram from Coachella back in 2012 2:34:27 - Soar’s competition (or lack thereof); The Singularity; “Superintelligence,” by Nick Bostrom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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whatever, however the hell you're going to do this, I could have Floyd Mayweather right here and Logan Paul right here and I could stand right here and watch it from that angle or stand right here or move it around like this yep you could blow it up and make it the size of your you could make them life-size and walk in the middle of the boxing ring you have the compression power to do this right now yeah are you going mate no What's cooking everybody? We're going to do a little bit of a different intro today. Okay? So I want you to picture yourself watching a football game on TV.

Now there are a lot of games every weekend, but for the sake of this example, let's just say you're watching a game on I don't know February 4th 2018 and you're watching Super Bowl 52 that's when Super Bowl 52 was I almost forgot about that

if you don't remember what happened in the game that was Super Bowl 52 though that was when the Philadelphia Eagles handily handily defeated the New England Patriots by a score of 41 to 33. They're notoriously cheating New England Patriots by a score of 41 to 33. Now, if you're like most Americans, there's nothing more you love to see than the Patriots lose. And there's nothing more you love to see than the Patriots lose. And there's nothing more you love to see than whoever's playing them win.

So when the Philadelphia Eagles won the game you probably would have liked to go on the field with them and celebrate and enjoy as the confetti fell down and the Patriots wallowed in their sorrows. But the game's on TV. It's in 2D. It's on a screen. It's something you turn on and you turn off.

You can pause it. It's not really, really there. So you can't really go on the field and enjoy the fruits of that victory. Now imagine your favorite TV show. Let's just say you're a fan of Sex and the City. I don't know, some people are. And let's say you're watching an episode where carrie's going on and on about how samantha's brought home her fifth guy this week it's only wednesday that's not even mathematically plausible this is the fourth week in a row it's happening you know what she's just trying to rebound off richard and get attention to herself and everyone else is pissed off so carrie's got this great rant going about it You're watching this And it's on TV It's 2D You can turn it off, you can pause it

She's not really there with you You feel like she is, you feel like you're friends with Carrie Bradshaw But again, she's behind the screen Imagine if she wasn't I'm joined in the bunker today By Anthony Fenu And Anthony Fenu. And Anthony Fenu is the guy who's going to help make it a reality for those situations to be right there in your living room with you.

No, they're not going to be in there physically with you officially. But Anthony Fenu is the CEO of a company called Soar, which you probably haven't heard of but you're going to know about pretty soon because soar among other things produces holograms unbelievable holograms and when i tell you these things have incredible capabilities anthony fend you and his company want to put your football games and your tv shows on your table or sitting on your couch, depending on which is which. And let me tell you something. It's some wild, wild shit. I really enjoyed talking with this guy. He's an absolute genius.

It's like watching an artist paint their view of the world. And in this case, he's a tech guy. So it was pretty cool. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on YouTube where we got clips coming every day. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. And to everyone who's been leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts, I really, really appreciate you. That's amazing.

It's incredible to see that feedback from you guys is awesome. So thank you. Thank you very much. And enjoy this episode so that said you know what it is i'm julian dory and this is this is one of the great questions in our culture where is the news you're giving opinions and calling them facts everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions when we talked on the phone last week i guess yeah You mentioned to me that the 2010s, we've obviously come away

with this concept that it was all about mobile. And I mean, it's the iPhone at the center of all of it. And then the whole ecosystem that's come out of that. And that's, we've accepted that probably for the last five, six, seven years. But you also said that that's not stopping, meaning this next decade, 2020 into 2030, is still going to be defined by the mobile movement. However, you see a second component coming into that as its own new space that's really going to reset, no pun intended here, our reality. What is that? Yeah, I think that's spatial. So it's actually something Steve Case touches on this in, I forget the name of his book, but his most recent book, he talks about this kind of shift from personal computing to mobile. And then a lot of those

signs that you see that he talks about are the same kinds of things that we're seeing on spatial, like the access to data being ubiquitous. When you say spatial, by the way, just to fully define that, are you talking about VR, AR, like all the above? Yeah. Yeah. So to me, spatial is like the combination of all so augmented uh virtual and mixed reality wow um and and like i think the biggest innovation from like a spatial computing perspective is the augmented or mixed reality glasses like the way to view 3d content in our natural environment i think that is the next uh generation of computing is that the stuff that like google's talking about giving you

literally like the glasses we wear and it'll be i think i saw this they're saying it'll replace the phone is that yeah the same thing yeah i think I think it's going to be quite a bit before it replaces the phone, but I think it will. And we're ultimately putting the compute device out of our hands, and it's something that I can use throughout my daily life. Kind of like how a heads-up display in a car takes some of the controls away from a device in front of you or a center console or something like that, even a steering wheel, and puts them in front of you. And you can use some sort of voice tech to control it. I think that's a lot of what we'll see in a pair of glasses.

I know Facebook's doing a lot there, too. I think they just partnered with rayban i want to say um that's scary sadika one of the i think luxottica owns rayban um but yeah the the idea that a pair of glasses that look as good as your raybans can be like your main compute device i think it's pretty crazy and a lot of it'll be where you understand what's going on but other people can't see it it's not like the the computer screen's flashing in front of your face that everyone's like, oh, he's using it right now. It's more or less like it's literally on the inside and you're integrated with it. Yep.

Yeah, and I think there's – so you can go two ways with this too. I think there's also content that lives – and there are a lot of companies, one in particular called Niantic, is doing a lot of work in mapping the world in 3D, so to speak. But the idea at a high level is that if we all have access to the same 3D map in real time, we can interact with content in the same location at the same time, the same way. So it would essentially be like, if I'm looking through my pair of glasses, and you are looking through your pair of glasses at the street in front of both of us, at the same time, you can see the same piece of content interact with both of us the same way. Does that make sense? I want to know if I understood that correctly here. You're already blowing my mind a little

bit. So if I'm in California, and you're in New Jersey, and I'm staring at the street in front of me, so street X, and you're staring at the street in front of you in New Jersey, street Y, you're saying that even though those are separate streets, whatever experience you would put on there, we would both see the same thing in front of us. So you can do that, or you can also do same exact location. Like it can be mapped to a map, right? So think about just something as simple as advertising. Like right now, I need to put a billboard physically in one location. I can now make that billboard digital, get the same result from an advertiser's engagement perspective, but not require any of the physical infrastructure. Wow.

There was a company. I cannot remember the name. I was just trying to think of it and i can't remember it so i'm not going to try but a couple years ago when pokemon go was really going they seized on it and i think they were like a little bit of a shot in the pan i'm not sure but they were talking about literally that and they're saying imagine you're just wherever you are you're sitting at your desk you're out in the hallway you're in your bed and you're like all right i want to go to the mall and it's not just like you go on the phone go to your mall nope like you literally have the glasses

and you would see you use the billboard examples they're like we'll literally have stores that you walk into yeah so now you think about the speed that this can happen at, meaning right now when people are doing placed advertisements online, that all happens inside of nanoseconds based on data. Now they're actually doing it, but instead of dropping a banner ad, they're dropping a location and you just have a pop-up store in front of you. That is fucking wild. Yeah. It also lets me super target if I'm an advertiser, which I know people have varying opinions on. But all in all, I won't be served with an ad even in my actual environment that I don't want to see. It'll all be tailored. And therefore, the advertisers getting more value, they're only going to put what they think you're going to buy in front of you. If they know you are not in the market for a car, why would I put 10 car advertisements in front of you, right? Yeah. So you can use that same billboard for 10 different advertisements of 10 different customer segments. And every time somebody looks at that billboard, they could be seeing a different thing that is like valuable to them

and a higher conversion rate to the advertiser. All right, actually, I want to make sure I understand this then. Are you saying, is that example you're using where you're talking about there is literally a physical billboard outside from driving my car but because i'm wearing my glasses in my car and and i want to buy a lexus i see a lexus when i pass it and the car behind me wearing their glasses when they pass it they

want to buy a nissan they see a nissan yep got it so you're even talking about wow it's not even just integrating spatial objects right there that aren't actually physically there but we just see them when we interact but you're talking about taking physical objects and suddenly saying like all right we're gonna put that on it down to you know someone posts a poster of like missing cat if someone else wants to put their missing dog on there they could yeah exactly it's and and like based on the area that the person lives in now this is a little bit scary but like if the people driving by live nowhere near where that dog was lost the odds of them successfully finding that dog are much lower so i would want to show the missing dog ad to the

people that live closest to where that dog was lost. So I can do that in real time. It is the full convergence of physical and digital worlds. How close are we to this? Within the next five to 10 years. Now, when you say within the next five to 10 years, because that can mean two different things, I'm not saying it does, but it can mean A, yes, it's going to take that long to bring it public and also mean B, we have it right now. We're just figuring out how to message this to people.

So there are still some science and technology challenges in doing some things like this. Even down to the field of view of an AR headset right now. Like a pair of augmented reality or mixed reality glasses has a pretty narrow field of view. And that is a technical challenge. Will we overcome that in the next five years? Yeah, definitely.

When you say field of view again, I'm blanking. I should know what that is. Basically, like the... So when you look through a pair of AR or XR glasses – Pull that mic in just a bit. Yeah. It's almost like there's kind of like a window within the glasses that you can see things. And it's similar to like a – the field of view of like a camera lens.

Like I can only see so wide. I can only see so tall. So digital content in the AR glasses today only exists in like a narrower portion of the – of your eye's total field of view. So something like 40% or something like that right 40 to 60 it's the same concept as like on my actual camcorders the size of the image i can get compared to my iphone significantly bigger yeah yeah that's all field of view yeah okay yeah so so like there are i guess to circle back like there are a lot of challenges. I think we can overcome them pretty quickly. And then it's the messaging and adoption.

The biggest challenge to the whole picture is the adoption. I think there's, especially when you look at the convergence of physical and digital, there's a certain level of comfortability required from the general public. And I think data privacy and some things like that are going to be the forefront. Let me ask about that, actually. Because in a lot of ways,

we don't have data privacy right now. And it's something I think about a lot, and I hope more people are starting to think about it because it's – we basically through the social apps, through Google, through all these major companies, we give them everything we do down to where we go and what the course of our day is. different would it even need to be though to do something like this from a data perspective because we already have location tracking we already have all these things like you literally have companies that use beacons to track how close your car is so their app can send you a push notification i mean it seems like the from my perspective it seems like the big hurdle here would be to figuring out okay the adoption of like people wearing a physical thing versus like, all right, we're asking them to give more data. But it seems like there is more to it. I think there's not a hard line on what data is private and should be owned by the individual and what is not.

So, like, a good thing to think about is, like, Snapchat, right? Like, when you open the camera and you're using Snapchat, they're collecting, like, a 3D map of the space around you, right? So, like, if I'm using an AR, like the dancing hot dog, when I go to place that dancing hot dog on the table in front of me, like, they're creating a 3D map of the room, right? So, like, there is a 3D map of the inside of my house that is now stored by Snapchat.

Like, that, I think, is a gray area. I don't think a lot of people understand it either, but that's a challenge. You also need those maps from a public perspective to be able to do a lot of these location-based things. So if I want true convergence of physical and digital, I need a map, a 3D map of the world. And how much of that should be owned by the individual? Yeah. I mean, and that's a little bit of a hot button topic just because of the fact that everyone's at home right now with this whole pandemic going on and there is probably the biggest spike in conspiracy theorism of all time just you know people got time on their hands there's crazy shit going on and they're trying to come to conclusions and one of the things that a lot of people have been looking at and passing around on every – I've seen it on every single platform is some of the stuff from the World Economic Forum.

And there's the famous title that says like the year is 2030. You live in this city. You have no privacy. You own nothing, and you'll be happy. And when you first see that, you're like, okay, this is probably taking it out of context. But then you go and you read that article. Have you read that? I have not.

Okay. You're not missing much. It's written by some chick from Denmark or something. I don't know what the fuck she does. But she describes that in a – and she's associated with the world economic forum she describes it in a frighteningly nonchalant way and she talks about how the government has all of our data they know everywhere we are we don't need cars because we live in this utopia city in fact we don't even need to leave the city because no one has it like us and we just use

public transportation. Everything's free. And then there is literally a line in there where she says, you don't own any of your data and you hope that it never gets used against you. Like it's not, oh, it's never going to get used against you because that's the trade-off here. It's like, you hope it never gets used against you. So people read that because i don't know how many people actually want to read that article no one does that i mean they just look at the meme and call it a day but i'm reading that and i'm like okay this one's a little less conspiratorial this this is a little crazy because this is someone in power saying this stuff and she's openly telling you that like yeah it's a shot you know it could be used against you and so we're looking at this trade-off now to

go to this space where yes do you want the utility and convenience you get from it and of course like i look at it i'm like hell yeah sign me up like when i first hear about the technology but the adoption battle is probably going to be tougher because people are going to be more on the lookout like well what's the what's the bigger picture from the powers that be here? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a challenge. And there's like a, I think one of the core issues is that it's very difficult for the average person to understand exactly how that's working, what data somebody has on you. like the biggest question that i would have is like what do you actually have i think there's this like common misconception too that

like the the only thing that somebody has on me is like the video that that i liked on tiktok or something like that i think that's uh it's it's a challenge, uh, especially with, um, young people. Um, the, the gap from like what is actually being collected, um, and what I can learn from what I'm collecting to, uh, what the average person thinks is being collected or, or what the average person believes, uh, whether it's one of the large tech companies or the government actually has. I think that gap's probably pretty big. Yeah. And I think the fear would be when you see it get, what's the word? When you see the data get attacked. Like if you see hacks or you see big companies or the government who's supposed

to be protecting data to use it for whatever it is they give us. And then suddenly it gets into the wrong hands or it's used for the wrong reasons. That's always the worst fear that people have. And then I guess Google just recently had a hack and some people were screaming like that was going to be horrible. It doesn't seem that way. But it's in the back of people's minds. But you make a great point. People don't understand point people don't

understand i don't even pretend to understand beyond what i told you like i know it tracks my location i let it you know i know it tracks what i like i don't really get how deep that can go i i even think about it with tiktok because tiktok scares the shit out of me just because it's not it's owned by a chinese company and their government can take whatever they want from those companies and like my mind goes straight to okay we're taking videos around us of everything and uploading billions of videos a day as users and that data has to be usable for some sort of like what's the word literal database to be able to figure out things like geographic location and and any types of things and surroundings that could make a country like

ours vulnerable you know on some type of conflict and the example i always give because again like i'm not like you i i don't know you've forgotten more in the last five minutes than i know about this in my whole life but i do know that in 2001 or 2002 when we were going after osama bin laden we were he was taking videos in caves like it was just his face and a cave behind him and i remember that the cia and the nsa whoever was all working on it they were measuring the elements based on that video they were measuring the potential elements within the rock and the NSA, whoever was all working on it, they were measuring the elements based on that video. They were measuring the potential elements within the rock in the cave behind him, and then using latitudes and longitudes to determine where that rock might be. And we almost got them as a result of that. And when you think about the power of computing back

then, what they were working with, we now have significant more power in the palm of our hands today 18 19 years later and so now i look at tiktok or any example but tiktok's the one i'm pointing at and i'm like i wonder what they could get out of that yeah the the other thing is that what is public from a technology standpoint is at least a couple of years behind what is in research projects at any of the big companies or government. So the capabilities are much stronger than you look at and publicly can understand. So, yeah, I think it's a big challenge. One thing in particular, especially with spatial, I think one thing that's going to be very helpful is startups attacking the kind of like the 3D mapping of the world and some of these areas that are going to be a little bit more gray

because a startup with good core principles and very transparent culture can navigate some of those gray areas much easier than a big tech company. And I think that's what will ultimately help Spatial. What happens if they get bought by a big tech company when the product's in Series A? Yeah, same thing. Then you need another startup or, yeah, you better be pretty comfortable with the company that acquired you. I think there's actually a conversation that's happening now

just around ethics in acquisitions. Just like I know just from some friends that have been looking at the M&A space or have been involved in the space recently, there are questions even around like a company like Facebook. Do you actually want to be acquired by Facebook? What is the goal? Where would you like your technology to live? They're going to give you the power to build it inside of Facebook if you're still early, or

maybe it's something that integrates perfectly, or maybe they'll just crush you if you don't. But there's the ethical question that comes into it too. Yeah. And that's the ethical question that comes into it too. Yeah. That's a tough question. You're barking up the tree of like monopolies and what they have the power to do once they get the economy of scale. And it's an interesting argument to have because when you look at a Facebook, when you look at an Amazon, a Google, there's a reason these companies are who they are. And there's a reason why they're so convenient for us and we get so much value from them. And it's natural to get pissed at them because they're big and powerful. It's what we do in society.

But it's because they're monopolies. They have a monopoly on our attention or our use for something and they had to get there they had to start as a startup one day and have nothing and then eventually get to that but once they do these companies are no longer content to continue to play in their sandbox google starts as a search company by 06 they're the first companies to have a self-driving car a lot of people don't know i know you know that but like so i talked to so many people that are like they might have a self-driving car i'm now i'm like oh no bitch they had that in 2006 you know and amazon starts as a book company and then he scaled it very

carefully for a long time and then just hit the red button and you know turn it into a cloud company turned it into data repository turned it into buying everything now they're doing pharmacies they're doing space all this stuff and it's like all these monopolies when they get to that size they now have the ability to say we want to go into this space so instead of just investing the r&d into it to your point they go in and say all right who's doing something really cool there who we can give a big payday and bring them in here and just let them do their thing and do it under our logo now yeah which which i think is a double-sided sword because you you have on one end um the ability to innovate at a pace that is much faster than if you

were not a monopoly and and I know Teal this is like his kind of bread and butter it was zero to one to a T the entire book yeah which is a fantastic book by the way you're a fan yeah huge is a great book. Yeah, and I think it's this – well, a couple of things, but one of them being monopolies are actually better is kind of the core premise. And companies in an area of great competition will in turn compete away all of the profit, therefore stifling innovation and causing this kind of like tumbling effect. So I think the analogy that he uses is like a restaurant is a horrible business. It's the idea that like you don't want to be the eighth – I forget how he tells this, so this is going to be off, but like the eighth Chinese food restaurant in one niche area of San Francisco.

Yes. Yeah. You are in a highly competitive space and the way to compete is usually price, and therefore you're diminishing the potential scale. You're diminishing the profits. So the way to break the cycle is to build a true monopoly. And I know he talks about this is actually something that we carried over into how we built um my current business but it usually starts we're gonna talk about that yeah we're gonna get there it usually starts with with like this uh core innovation like something that is orders of magnitude greater than what exists and then then it has the couple of key components,

one of them being network effects. Can you describe network effects for people, just so that we know? Network effects is tough to describe. It's kind of like describing viral growth. Like how do you describe what makes something viral? Eyeballs. Yeah. Yeah. So like the network effects is like, I guess a good way to explain it might be the power of one turns into two, the exponential growth that you get through network or through

word of mouth. If I had been the only guy to go onto Facebook, Facebook would have never been Facebook. There needed to be all my friends going on there too. Yeah. And that's, I know I'm really dumbing it down and there's more to it, but at the highest level, just for people to understand what you're trying to get at here, that's the easiest way to look at the top level of it I think. Fair? Clubhouse.

Clubhouse is a great one. Network effects were super strong because it was invite only. Yep. So what was the first thing that I wanted to do knowing that I only had one invite? It was tell all of my friends about it on twitter yep um and then dish out my one invite um yeah yeah it creates this uh just kind of like mushroom cloud yeah so teal his argument was you need that but you also need a space where you can either vanquish all the competition because you're better or there is not too much competition where it's commoditized and you're competing on price. That was the full takeaway, if I remember, right?

Yeah, and I think when it comes to price too, it's – you need to be able to achieve economies of scale. Yeah. Yeah, which is something that like if you look at AWS, yeah, that's like two of T, economies of scale. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's – I forget the four pillars, but it's something along those lines. It's a great innovation starting with something that is like orders of magnitude greater than what currently exists to solve said problem.

Then it's network effects, economies of scale, and these are kind of like the pillars to building a monopoly. I think there was – I don't know if it was one of the pillars, but it was like you have to be a little bit crazy or something like that which also makes sense right yeah yeah you got to think different or like he was literally using the steve jobs or something yeah yeah which which again it it makes a lot of sense um yeah i think i i forget who it was it might have been jason calacanis that interviewed him. I think it was like Recode or TechCrunch or one of them. And he interviewed Teal. This was – I think this was like pretty early in Jason Calacanis' days. But one of the questions was who do you – of all the – because Teal was PayPal mafia.

So for anybody that doesn't know, PayPal mafia is like the... Who's who, man. Yeah. It's the group of Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk. Reid Hoffman. Yeah. Reid Hoffman, Roloff Bata, I believe Chad Hurley. We can check that. That sounds familiar. Yeah. But anyway, there's this group of – it was early PayPal employees and PayPal founders that went on to build ridiculous companies. And so that was back in like 1999 or 2000, right? David Sachs.

Yeah. Oh, this is big. Keith Rapos. Wait, Keith Rapos was in there? Yeah. I didn't even know that. Yeah. Keith Rapos. Wait, Keith Rapos was in there? Yeah. I didn't even know that. Yeah, and he's... Yeah, he's huge. He's huge in the VC world.

Yeah, he's making a lot of noise on Twitter right now. Yeah, he just moved to Miami, I think, right? Jeremy Stoppelman was Yelp. This was a who's who. Yeah. I'll put this link in the show notes so people can see, but you're not kidding. I mean,

this was like, yeah. Yeah. And in, in kind of like Silicon Valley history, there have only been a couple of like the, uh, mafias,

so to speak. Yeah. Um, yeah. What was the other one? The other big one? Um, I'm blanking out on that.

There's, I, I, I think blanking out on that. There's... I think we'll see more, too. Oh, definitely. I think Airbnb is probably a good one. We'll probably see something come there. I'm not too sure. I know there are a few. Technically, in a weird way,

you're going to see that. You're seeing that with facebook just because uh not that they agreed or had a had a good parting but zuckerberg and the winklevoss twins yeah you know it took them a while but they're doing some shit right now man yeah that is that's pretty nuts it's a good comeback. I think – what was – damn, this one is going to kill me. Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz. Crap, what was the name of that company? Netscape maybe?

That sounds familiar. I'll check that. Keep going. Yeah, I feel like I should know that one. But yeah, there have been a couple of like quote-unquote mafias that still run um a bunch of major companies today a lot of the paypal guys like it was nutscape yeah yeah so so like think about the companies that came out of paypal like paypal early employees or founders it was yelp youtube um tesla yeah tesla x linkedin um a firm is max

left chin um square maybe i can't remember i don't know if square was in it might have been there's a lot i mean it's basically like it's crazy it's like yeah we we created silicon valley we just left here that was it and they were like they were the precursor at paypal and paypal is obviously still huge but they were the precursor to perhaps in a way digital currency they just didn't take it all the way they didn't go to decentralized or anything like that they integrated with institutions but the idea behind it and quick settlement and quick payment which now we see in stuff like venmo as well but they were the early like all right that's a little bit of a model for that it's very cool yeah it's um it's it's pretty crazy to see too because PayPal was – for most of them, that was not their first business.

But I think it was the quickest because from the X.com, Elon, Teal, all of them kind of joining. And they hated each other before. Yeah. There was a little bit of warfare there was a little bit of uh warfare there for a little bit yeah yeah because that was a x.com i just want to have the context x.com was competing was the company called paypal already and then x.com joined paypal or was it i don't think it was i think it was something else got it so they were competing paypal yeah got it got it okay yeah yeah and that so so from when they did that to when they um uh sold and then ipo was like a very quick period of time

you can't remember exactly they basically did it all they basically did it all like mid-tech bubble yeah yeah and it was like that's a that's one hell of a whirlwind there um yeah yeah and then following most of them dove right into other things um i think that was there was a brief period there and then teal started palantir yeah among other things i guess right what's the name of his – Teal. Is it literally like Teal Capital or something like that? Yeah.

So he's got Teal Capital. He is a partner at Founders Fund with Simon Bannister and a bunch of them. Yeah. And then Musk is a – Yeah, he's – Musk is a machine. He's done quite a few things. Yeah. He's amazing, man. Yeah. And then Musk is a machine. He's done quite a few things. Yeah.

He's amazing, man. Yeah. He just – I like how he says with a straight face, when I started this and put $50 million of my own – I think he originally expected to put $50 million into SpaceX or something like that. Ended up doubling it.

And his original gut reaction was we probably have like a 10 or less chance of success you're gonna have some some balls to put up 50 million bucks he told a story one time like christmas eve 2008 mid world crashing off a cliff yeah he had i don't remember the amount of money left but he had basically gone through the whole war chest that he had gotten from paypal and whatever the little company was he had before that where he got an eight figure deal out of it and he said with his two companies tesla and spacex if he would just make a decision and let one fail the other had a 90% chance of

living based on the amount of money he could put into it. But if he put money into both, the chances that they were both going to die was maybe it was like 70 or 80% or something. And he said, I just believed in it so much that I said, I'm either going down with both of them or oh, well, that's an amazing, amazing set of balls and an amazing vision to be able to do that. It is. And he was, if I remember correctly, he was borrowing money for rent. Yes. To pay rent because he had sunk every penny into both of those companies.

Yep. And on like the last possible day, pulled out a financing round, I think, for both of them, if I'm correct? Literally both of them. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, so I've experienced raising money for one and in a crunch, that is very difficult to do it for two businesses of that scale at the same time, both on their deathbed, so to speak.

Very, very difficult. That takes a a lot it also says a lot about the team that he put together um which i think is something that he he focuses on pretty heavy but like he can acquire some world-class talent yeah that might be like the single hardest part about building a high growthgrowth technology company. It's building high-performance teams and acquiring like just world-class people. How do you do that to – actually, you know what? Let's – before I even ask you this because people are listening to you talk right now and they're like, all right, what is this guy up to? This is nuts.

Yeah. Let's cover some of that first so we have some context here on your background because one of the things that really struck me is your path is it was fast and it was extremely unorthodox you weren't you didn't grow up in palo alto you didn't you didn't grow up hacking into the government system at age eight and getting caught you caught in your living room. You weren't one of those guys. You just kind of were interested and fell into this and then just ate it up. So take me into when you really first started looking at tech and how it happened, and we'll get to what you're doing right now.

Yeah. So when I was in – we'll go back to college days a little bit. When I was in college, I was working a sales job and was intrigued. But I think in general, I saw a series of world problems. Like as I would go throughout my day-to-day, I would say like, wow, that is just a horrible process. Or why does it take me 35 minutes to do something that I could probably do in 30 seconds if I could automate it? There were just a series of things that I looked at and said, this is like fundamentally broken. So I think that was the point where I realized like I'm going to do something. Didn't quite know what it was. And then I think the, so I started, um, kind of dove into tech as a business, um, somewhat

by accident. I was intrigued by, um, the idea that you could take a series of pictures and create a 3D environment out of it much cheaper and much easier than some $60,000, $80,000 camera that did it. So I wanted to try and see if there was a way to do that. I had a buddy that I went to high school with that was much more technical than me. So I reached out to him. Were you a coder at all? A little bit.

Not much. Yeah. I had design and media background, which I think was very helpful. You were creative. Yeah. So even today, I still do a lot of the user interface and user experience design wow to be honest mostly because it gives me like a it's like a happy place so like if um if i'm just like drained and legal stuff or whatever it is i can i can nosy away and do

some design work but um yeah, so that's kind of where it started. I asked him if, if it was something that was possible, um, which by the way, I also learned is like the wrong question because it's always possible. It's like, how can we do it? And how can we do it cheap and quick? Yeah. Um, and are those two things possible together um but yeah so so he he put something together that was like i guess what you would call a a proof of concept and we said oh shit it actually works and what did you what did you have in mind what you wanted to use it for or you're just like high level hey i really just want to turn pictures into a video yeah i mean to be fair it was like the the um the place that I was living at the time.

It was like this could be pretty cool if we like made this a 3D space. So let me do a little replay here. You were what, 19, 20 years old? Yeah, somewhere around there. So you're sitting on your couch. Are you smoking a bong or a bowl? I actually did not smoke much in college which is like surprising um and the exact opposite of yeah most of the people around me because i can just tell you

that's how i come like yeah can we yo could this be 3d what if we just like took a picture and then oh shit yeah it's usually how it goes yeah i was probably drinking at the time hanging out in the living room. That works. Yeah. I think it was kind of strange, but I said like, damn, this would be pretty cool. Yeah. And like maybe somebody will pay for it later. Like if it's something that's like intriguing to me, maybe there's somebody else that it's also intriguing to. What were you studying in school? Was this related at all to what you were doing? I was a finance major at William Patterson.

Yeah. So no? No, completely unrelated. Yeah. Wow. So I was, well, I was finance and comm dual, but I don't think I ever took a comm class. And I also, I don't think I ever took,

I might've taken one gen ed. I was very frustrated in school in general just because like I didn't want to take like an English one class. I wanted to take like corporate finance and like things that were useful. Yeah. So I ended up not graduating from college. But we'll get there in a minute. Yeah. It turned out okay.

Yeah. Keep going. Yeah. So I guess we ended up building what would be like a base proof of life, right? So it was like, oh, shit. Okay. This is possible. We threw it together we used the the

house that i was living in as like a uh a test looks pretty cool and we had a friend that worked in new york real estate and he was over drinking one weekend and he's like oh shit guys like i would pay for this i think like i could sell condos like this so we went we did it and he sold a condo and uh we got paid pretty good on it and it was like son of a bitch so how did you do that did you take the concept and put it on a website so that people could watch like go to the website and watch it or and that's how it was sold no so it was it was really clunky at the time it was like the early um vr on mobile days where like you either needed a google cardboard um that was like not great experience um or a samsung phone and a gear vr It was like this black and white plastic device. You would pop

a Samsung phone in there and like you could view it. And we were like putting the experience directly onto the phone, like storing it on the phone physically. So like that was the only place it was living. And then none of, well, first first off none of us had samsung phones so like so you had to go buy one yeah so we were like buying phones putting the experience on there and then shipping out like this uh this device this headset with a phone and the phones were like pretty expensive we were making a good amount of money but but part of it was like on sale, like if they sold it. So most of the time we were like, shit, we just paid like 800 bucks for that phone. I really hope I get that phone back.

And it's going like across the world too. Oh, you're sending it to other countries. Yeah. I'm like, that's gone. That one's gone. That's getting lost somewhere in customs in Dubai or whatever. It's a tax write-off at least. Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, as clunky as it was, we built some good IP there, which was nice and learned a lot of really good lessons there. One, that there is a very smart time to raise money. And the concept of raising money was a little bit foreign. Knew like relatively how it worked and what you should do and what you should look for if you're a founder that's trying to decide whether or not you're like a venture – whether you are building a business that fits the venture model um but a lot of like the execution on like how do i raise financing was just like a little bit foreign so yeah you're also kids basically in a in a college dorm yeah bumping into something you're not sitting out in palo alto like all right i'll get a meeting with this vc yeah yeah like not not

attainable in any way so like um yeah yeah so so we um we saw there was a potential competitor at the time that ended up being like a oh yeah they're a competitor um it was one of the early google employees uh had the same kind of concept build it into hardware and also just as software. They're still operating and not for nothing, they're a billion dollar plus business. So I think we were on to something, which is nice. It's a company called Matterport. Wow. And they do like, it's VR and virtual tours for real estate.

So like most of, like if you have any friends in commercial or residential real estate, they probably work with them. You want to talk about economy of scale too. I mean, early employee at Google. Yeah, yeah. How do you even compete with that? You know what I mean? Yeah. And like access to capital too.

Like right out of the gate. I forget how much it was he raised, but I remember looking at it saying, Jesus Christ, how do you – I think it was like $10 million or something like that, $20 million. What were you guys even – because again, who are you thinking of calling? And where do you even know where to start? It's, they don't teach you in college. Here's how you do a seed round. Here's how you do a series A. They really, in business school, they don't teach you that.

Yeah, no. So what was your, did you even have a plan? Or are you calling up like Uncle Bob who's got like a Porsche in the backyard and might have a, you know, $10,000 lying around? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what we did first. Like our, like our first money in was like friends and family. It's like, Hey, I think I'm onto something.

There's a chance that it dies and we all lose our money, but like feel pretty good about it. The one thing that you do know is like me and the team, you know, like we're not going to just peel over. We're going to like stick it through no matter what. So if it's not this, it's something else. And I later learned that that's a lot of what early stage investors look for in general. I've had quite a few people say, hey, I don't even understand what you're doing, but I'll give you a quarter million or a half a million dollars just because I'd like to be a part of anything that you do. I like you.

I know that you will build something incredible. To be fair, I am not in any way able to judge what you're doing right now from a technical perspective. But I'd give you – if you need the cash, like if you're raising financing, I'll participate because I like you and I like the team and like, I know you're going to do something. So a lot of early stage investors, that's kind of what they're looking for. Is it a rockstar team? And even if this isn't the one, I want to get involved as early as possible. Yeah. Because if that first business dies, I want to be their first phone call when they've learned as much as there is to learn about how to build a company and how not to build a company that the next time when they're spot on, I get to write the first check and I get the crazy returns. So you're young. This is when you, I assume, decided to leave college it was actually before before that so um i think the aha for me was the first person that wanted to pay for software it was like holy shit there might

be something here and uh i'm frustrated as hell with with college did you have debt um like student loan debt yeah a little bit yeah yeah so so like that was the um i think that was the tipping point it's like i'm already frustrated i've been kind of like coasting through and trying to pick up as much knowledge as i can and like finance and i was also hitting the point where um i couldn't keep going without doing gen eds yeah like there were requirements that i had to hit on the gen ed side to be able to take those like late finance classes i think this was like sophomore into junior year so i knew i wasn't going to get much further and the stuff that i actually cared about without doing a bunch of nonsense. So that coupled with there might be something here was like, shit, all right, I'll take a leave.

And then I took a leave of absence, just never, I don't even know if I technically dropped out. They're still waiting. I think, yeah. It's like, he'll be back in the fall. But yeah, I took a leave and that was it. Wow. Yeah. But you were a finance major. it's like he'll be back in the fall but yeah i i took a leave and that was it um yeah and but you

were a finance major so did you did you go into college saying oh well i want to have this kind of job or do that kind of thing or was it totally you had no idea what you wanted to do i i had i had high level ideas um like like i knew general things that excited me um like i liked media at one point there was this like maybe i'll do like media law um and then there was another big stint where i was like i want to be an investment banker that's where the action is there's a lot of money there it would be super fun um and i'll hate myself for three, four years, but I'll absolutely love it after that. You watched The Wolf of Wall Street right before college. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe a couple too many times. And I was like, yep, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there was actually like this. There was a specific class that I took. I think I'm pretty sure this was freshman year, maybe first or second semester of freshman year. And it was like the first econ class that you like are required to take if you're a finance major.

And the professor – I learned later that she was an adjunct teaching one econ class. And during the day, she was a partner at Goldman in investment banking. But I kind of like – not that I half-assed her class because I was doing very well, but like I would show up when I needed to show up. When I didn't, I wouldn't. And I was frustrated at like the lack of like of, um, like depth to, to the, I guess coursework. Um, and she could tell, she was like, what the hell is this kid doing? So, uh, she grabbed me at the end of class one day and said like, Hey, um, what are you

doing? I get you're getting good grades, but like, there will be a point where you hit a brick wall and you won't be able to coast through anymore um and this is like i'm sure my dad said this to me like 10 000 times through high school um in high school like i did okay but like i didn't put a lot of effort into it i think because i like wasn't i wasn't engaged enough um there wasn't like that that challenge to keep me engaged um so like i did just what i needed to um yeah strike me as a guy who's very you're hands-on you like experience you like actually jumping in to do things you're not really you're not the kind of guy that i think really gets himself up for

and correct me if i'm wrong here for going in and hearing a lecture on something see i think it depends on what it is right like so so if it's somebody that has like extreme domain experience and has just a wealth of knowledge that they can share, I'm engaged 100% if it's something that's like relevant. But I think it's like anything. Like, I wouldn't be 100% tuned in on a medical lecture about the best way to remove a spleen, right? Like, that's just not, it's not something that's relevant to me. And especially if it's somebody who's never practiced medicine telling me that, it doesn't carry the same weight. So I think that was one of the things that I struggled with. Later learned that now I will take a call with anybody.

It doesn't matter who they are because I've had like the strangest connections and best conversations with people that like, it's seemingly random. Yeah. So like I'll take a call with anybody and like test the water and like see how it goes kind of thing. But I think that goes back to like the,

if it's something that like is relevant or super engaging or like deeply intellectual conversation, things like that, like now I'm engaged. You're in. Yeah. Yeah. And like I'll sit – I could sit through. Like Peter Thiel, a lot of people when they watch some of his – like he did a really good Stanford lecture. Like I was engaged for two plus hours. I mean I could sit all night and watch Peter talk because it's like a topic that's relevant. I like his – I like a lot of what he stands for and what he talks about.

So like, yeah, I could sit and watch it. But in other situations, yeah, not as much. It comes down to interest. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's pretty normal too. Yeah, yeah. And so maybe you were just – you were really one of those guys, and there's a lot of guys like this, where you were more doing what you thought you were supposed to do rather than what you wanted to do. And then you fell into something.

You're like, oh, I want to do this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and like it's – like if you – I remember one class specifically. Like in college I took an astronomy class or whatever because I was forced to take it, right? I took that too. Yeah. Yeah, like I generally like astronomy. Like I think it's fun. But like that's not what I wanted to spend my time doing, especially when I was taking like three other finance classes.

I was taking like financial accounting or managerial accounting or something, corporate finance, and then astronomy. Like there's a – yeah. So that was like a challenge and not because the subject matter wasn't interesting. It was just like this isn't relevant to me today right now. I could be doing something better with my time. Yeah. This isn't relevant to me today right now. I could be doing something better with my time. So, yeah. I could go down a rabbit hole on education for hours. I think there are a lot of challenges there.

It's a wide open topic right now too, though, just because higher education, the cost that we're looking at and what's, what we're doing to society as a result. I mean, you're indirectly painting the picture because there's a lot of people who go and just do either like they do something wide open because they're told you can do anything you want here. And then it has no utility after college or they do what they think they're supposed to do. And then they go to do it after college and they're like, shit that ain't it you know but they're left with 100k in debt or 150k in debt and they didn't know what an what an interest rate was at age 17 and well now they do yeah i was talking to so my brother my younger brother is a finance major at ruckers and i was talking to him about like what he wanted to do when he graduates or even before graduation, like an internship.

I think this was last year. I was like, so what about like an investment banking internship? Because he was interested in kind of the same things. So investment banking or VC or something, something different. He's like, well, I have zero knowledge to be able to go into an, even an internship, be able to like hold my own weight. And it's not because like I didn't kill my classes.

It's because like nobody even taught like core principles. Like if I go into a VC internship, I don't, if it weren't for you, I would not know what VC is or how funds are structured or like what an LP was in the VC world. Just foreign concepts that are super relevant today that you would never know. They are all – and I'm going to generalize here.

But when you look at successful VCs, you want to talk about guys who are just about getting to the core of issues that's that's what they do and we think of them as this complex world and you've now obviously had a chance to see a lot of them up close and personal and deal with them so you know a lot better than i do and i'll let you describe it but at a high level these guys come in and and they have their three main boxes that they need checked to decide yay or nay or not even yay or nay, just like are we going to consider this one or is this trashed? And those involve – you talked about earlier looking at the team, the people. What do we feel from them? How do these guys talk?

What is their vision? What is their vision beyond what they're bringing in the room right now? You look at how organized are they? What's their burn rate? How much do these guys understand what they can do with the capital they're given because we're going to give them our money? There's all these things. And even in like a general accounting course where you're going through balance sheets and stuff to relate it to the burn rate one, they don't really teach you like, okay, well, this this company that's in compu sci comes in and says they're going to build this software and they're going to spend 7500 a month there's none of that they don't evaluate that yeah it's it's um

i think it's crazy how like none of that is taught but um to me what what they're so like this is how i would approach it and this is so the the good vcs this is what i've seen um it's it's a lot of like team story um and like being well thought through each of those components right like like there's this common misconception around early stage financing too specifically that like uh i feel like i see especially on like the vc section of twitter right i see all the time like um i'm early stage i pitched a bunch of vcs i didn't raise any money nobody wanted to deal with me like the they're really looking for like early growth like if you add the word growth, everything that they say makes

so much more sense, right? Like you need to have like the early signs of growth and you need to have like a killer team that you can point to, whether it's like things that you've built or like why that team works well together. Or like there has to be something that says like these guys can build a billion dollar plus company, $10 billion plus. Because ultimately like every investment that they make, they're looking to return the fund to like 3X or 5X. They're not looking for like $100 million exit. Maybe some of the smaller funds, but if you're talking about like tier one tier two silicon valley funds like andreessen uh sequoia kleiner perkins they're looking for like huge returns that can return 10 times their 100 million or 500 million dollar fund and if they get to you and and i know some

of these guys they only do series a series b and stuff but the companies that are coming in maybe on the angel investing side or just straight up on on the seed side i mean sometimes they can be looking at like hey maybe this one will be a thousand x i mean it can get that crazy oh yeah yeah it's like usually in those funds there's like one or two per fund that make the entire fund yep that's it they could lose the rest of the money and it doesn't matter because there is one ridiculous company in there with the crazy outside returns yeah yeah yeah um and they'll they'll follow on for rounds to go to especially the big funds they have like there's now these blurred lines between like uh growth and like late stage and there are

funds that can write a hundred thousand dollar check or or like a million is like somewhere in the small range quarter million um all the way up to like a $100 million check. They can like support you through many stages of life. How often do you see, let's say you're, because I think the one thing we didn't say is that obviously you have to have a good idea. That's important. You can't walk in there and be like, oh, I created a document. That's not going to work. But that's Captain Obvious statement. Sorry. But how often do you see some of these bigger places come across an idea that they love, something that they look at and say it's, oh, this – I think this is a unicorn, a unicorn meaning pre-IPO valuation of a billion dollars eventually.

How often do you see a company though come in and say, you know what? You guys are looking to raise $20. We want to do the whole thing. We don't want anyone else on it. I actually don't see that that frequently. Usually, like, I think it depends on the size of the round and, like, the people. But good investors will want additional help, right? Like, so when you're picking, especially early stage, when you're picking, like, a fund, you're not just taking a check from them, right? Like, they're going to help you with a lot of the key problems that you have, or at least you hope that they will, right? Like if I have trouble recruiting, like I want to be able to ask them, hey, can you help me recruit world-class engineers? And naturally somebody with a

brand name will help you do that. But there's still maybe additional challenges or like, like one of the things that we look at, we're on a very high growth path, exponential growth quickly. And that brings a new set of challenges. There might be a ton of operational stuff that I'm handling today that like I just can't handle all in six months or a year. Right. So I want to be able to go to them and say, I want the best operator that you know, to come and help. And, and like, they will help you do that. Um, these are people that will be like somewhat active, like your first phone call when something goes horrible and your first phone call when something goes amazing and like you're both popping a bottle of champagne.

Yeah. So it's a lot more than cash. And I think that's like important, especially for people that are like thinking about raising venture financing. You're basically getting married to somebody. So circling back, those investors typically want a group of other investors that can also reduce some financial burden in the future.

If you go to raise more money, it year, I want some help to help me bring in that kind of money or have see – I don't know if this was an exact example, but you might see Andreessen Horowitz along with Thiel. They led the deal, and then there's three other huge companies right there, and the amount – and I say only here just because we're talking about the big dogs. The amount might be a $30 million deal. I mean that's a bad day for Peter Teal right so if he wanted to do the full 30 he could do it and that's that's why I'm asking that just because I'm surprised sometimes that especially when they're then talking about it publicly and they have they seem to have such a high conviction about it could be an act but yeah you're putting your money behind something when these guys have it I I just wonder if they're like, all right, we're going to do the whole thing. But that makes sense.

It's basically adding more resources and more allocation of time for also more resources with a bunch of power players who all want the same thing. They want the success of Company X. Yeah, and I think a lot of this is driven by the founders too too, because in really hot deals that everybody's talking about, so to speak, you have kind of like your pick of who I want to fill it out with a bunch of strategics, people that can provide a bunch of different strategic help along the way. Like, example, NVIDIA Ventures, right? Like, if you have something that's like innovation using GPU or AI or something that's like NVIDIA bread and butter, you might want them for strategic reasons. So they would happily follow along if Sequoia and Teal led the round or something like that.

It's pretty easy to kind of fill out the follow-on once you have that lead. And that's typically how that works. So you go out and you pick your lead investor or you pitch a bunch of lead investors. Once you've found a lead, then you kind of fill it out. And usually the lead will help you fill it out. If like that's not in your network, you can say, hey, would you, who else do you want involved in the deal? So it's pretty clear, you know a lot about this and you know a lot

from experience yeah so i want to go back to how you then took selling the ip of company one and moving it into what you're doing now because what you're doing now is what we spoke about before the podcast and i think at the beginning of the podcast too which is moving strictly into spatial technology and basically going far beyond what you did with your proof of concept in that first project so the name of this company you have now is soar yep and tell us what you do yeah so we build what's essentially uh holograms so we capture we capture people in 3d are you here right now we stream them yeah you're here yes i am hold on reach out your hand yeah all right he's here he's here just making sure i can feel the table and everything yeah okay one day all right relax yeah yeah so so we build

um it's essentially um a platform for real-time streaming holograms or true captured 3D content, really. So I'll give you a little bit of a walkthrough. You use a series of cameras. You can capture and stream somebody in real time to any device, phone, tablet, headset, pair of glasses, when we have them in the future, holographic displays, they're starting to come out now. So it is the, at its core, like our IP, our core IP now is a real-time pipeline for compression and distribution of 3d content okay yeah let's define some of this so a lot of unpack there there's a lot to unpack here and i know you haven't even gotten like the licensing and some of the work you're doing with it but let's say you had your special cameras all up right here, and you wanted to create a hologram of you to put into some room in California.

Yeah. You would capture that here, and your technology in real time would allow you speaking and moving around and whatever to be 3d as if you are literally sitting there with people in california yeah it's telepresence it's true telepresence the cameras are off the shelf cameras produced by like intel and microsoft too so they're a couple hundred bucks a piece and they're come on about the size of your hand come on so it's not like this crazy complex setup. Like Intel, Microsoft have done some crazy research in this. Nobody's been able to achieve real time. But some of the on-demand stuff, they've built these super complex, like I think Intel's was like 10,000 square foot of just like hundreds of cameras and like all kinds of crazy shit. I think there was like five or eight miles of fiber lines in there just to move the data.

Meanwhile, we're compressing and streaming it in real time. So what did you guys – because you're using their cameras. What part did you guys invent? Like the software that actually compresses this and streams it yeah so so we and we're we're camera agnostic so you can use an intel um camera or you can use microsoft camera and really like the special kind of camera that you need is a depth camera so you need it picks up rgb the, just like a regular camera would. And then it also picks up depth using infrared.

So it'll be able to pick up depth of a person or an environment, and then it maps the color to it just like a regular camera would. You guys started working on this right after you sold the last IP, however you want to say it. Yep. At the beginning, did you already have the concept of this designed? Did you know or did this happen over time? Did you fall into it? When we started the second business, we knew that this is something that we wanted to do, but knew that the compression problem was a very, very hard problem. Can you define compression for people?

I know what you're talking about, but I just want to make sure everyone understands. So, like, highest level possible, you're taking a tremendous amount of data and making it smaller. So a good way to think of this is like water through a pipe. We're taking a lot of water. If you were to put leaves in that water, we're basically the extra water um and sending just enough water to carry the leaves so that it can fit through a smaller pipe got it okay that might have been a bad analogy that was the first time i've ever used that one no that's i it was it was pretty good yeah i'll take it a step farther with an example to let you go off on to see if this might make sense.

But if I upload a two gigabyte video, maybe it's a nine minute clip or something like that to YouTube. YouTube takes that and then they use their system to compress the file and then put it within their full server so that now it's its own link and you or me or anyone comes in and clicks it if it's public and we can go experience the video in this case full HD video on YouTube when they do that my understanding I could be wrong is that they're basically taking those two gigabytes during that upload process and they are compressing and they're getting it down to whatever size they get it for their servers. So what you're saying is that you do that with being able to stream a hologram somewhere else in real time with volume and all that, and your major value add is that you have invented a software that allows you to take an enormous file size, shrink it down to the minimal amount so that you can do this and then not lose any quality, meaning you don't see the hologram pausing or lagging.

You just see a literal person as if he's sitting there until you try to punch him in the face and your hand goes through it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's – that is like pretty spot on. Okay. That is pretty spot on. I think an important note to add is that it's general purpose. So it works for anything 3D. So it doesn't necessarily have to be holograms. It can be 3D content that's currently being streamed.

The way that we compress 3D data difference 3d data well so it wouldn't need to be true captured 3d content right like like we could we could aid in the streaming of game content that's not captured using a series of cameras like it could be generated content um immediately applicable with captured content but but think think about game like if you're playing Call of Duty online you 3d data is being streamed right but it's still impress that make it faster and you can make it more realistic because you would use you could yeah meaning when we're looking at Call of Duty right now it's much more realistic than it was five ten years ago

but you can still tell the guy you're using is, I mean, he's a video game. It's not, it's a graphic. It's not an actual rendering of a person. It's not perfect. You're saying that you can do that, but you can maybe take me and literally put me in the video game. And you may be able to tell him a hologram but it looks exactly like me yeah yeah so so that's like um you can you can start to see the rabbit hole opening yeah yeah oh we're going down it yep we're going down yeah and the um the other good note is that um a lot of people don't realize that like content is streamed whether it is live or on demand right so so if you have on-demand content that you can stream the smaller the

file and the less data you're streaming the faster it can be because of internet speeds and bandwidth limitations and the cheaper it is for that person delivering the content to you. Because the person delivering the content gets a bill from AWS or Google Cloud, and it's per gig or per byte is a good way to look at it. So any time that you can compress it better without losing quality, you're going to take it, especially because economies of scale, a small amount more compressed per file across millions or tens of millions of files is a significant amount of money. Does this work in both directions though? And let me define that because that makes no sense i saw this article it was going around at the end of the summer and it was we were talking

about it on a couple podcasts in a different context but this guy james al tucher wrote an article about new york city and the state of everything there is a lifelong new yorker and how bad it was but he was going through why he thinks it's in danger of never being the same, which obviously caused a huge reaction. But he broke it down into all these different segments. And one segment he broke it down into, I was just interested outside of the article itself. But he was explaining that it has to do with bit rate capacity on Wi-Fi.

And I think it was a little more technical and exact of a term. But what he was saying is that if we wanted to Zoom or Skype in 2010, 2011, here is the speed per second we could do it over Skype or Zoom or whatever it was, versus here's the speed we can do it now. And by the way, that means we can render this many pixels, and it's this much faster, and there's no delay, and the voice comes in this much clearer. So his point was, all of our general Wi-Fi, whether it be at home or in the office, can now support much more. And what you're saying is, you guys take down the amount it has to

support. So it's almost like in one way we have our capacity increasing and while the capacity is increasing you're also decreasing the need the capacity has which i guess the lower you go just makes it faster and faster it doesn't have a crossover point where it doesn't matter anymore well so so a good way to think of it is is like a pipe when the pipe gets bigger right so the the right when you go from 3g to 4g they made the pipe bigger when you go from 4g to 5g you're making you're making the pipe bigger if if we can reduce what's being sent to um from half of the pipe to a quarter of the pipe now you have three quarters of the pipe open that we can buy um residentially in the country would not be enough bandwidth so okay like we're pretty crazy and and then we get it down to roughly audio file

size so that's nuts so if i on on our lowest quality setting i'm trying to picture the size here when i record this podcast i record it in waveform which is you know the highest audio form you can't upload waveform to your podcast provider who's going to put it out on spotify and apple podcast and all that because the files are huge no one's going to stream a two gigabyte audio file. I mean that's crazy to download on your phone. But I end up exporting this at 192 kilobits a second, which is based on the research I did. That's pretty much the highest anyone goes. There's like a couple shows in the universe that do 256, but 192 is about as high as it goes and the size of those

files comes out to maybe for a two and a half hour podcast it'll be 220 millibytes or something like that what is the size of say not that you're going to stream something for that long though you could but what is the size of, streaming something in hologram form for 10 minutes right now? Related to that. So I'd have to do some math. So on our highest quality setting, we'd be at like 25 megabit per second.

Raw, I think that's okay it's it's a lot I don't know I'm five minute clip might be like 40 gigs or something like that oh wow okay so it's still huge oh yeah enormous yeah well no not post Oh, that's pre-compression. Yeah, yeah. And you can compress in real time? Yeah, yeah. We're compressing and streaming in real time. I watch Silicon Valley.

Can you tell? Yeah, yeah. That is – I watch all of that. It's a great show. It is a great show. You'd be surprised how many – like even people that – so I think I've been thrown into the fire enough that like I'm no longer quote unquote starstruck by somebody. Like every once in a while, like I'll be talking to somebody that has like a recognizable name and they'll make a comment.

And I'm just like, no way. Like he watched that too. I think it was somebody recognizable in Silicon Valley. And I'm just like, no way. Like, he watched that too. Like, I think it was somebody recognizable in Silicon Valley, like one of the big tech founders. And he said, like, you guys have essentially built, like, what they were talking about in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Yeah. I keep on thinking about that because that is that is literally what they did yep i don't think if i remember the show correctly it's been a while i don't think they had the full concept you do with literal holograms and like creating

new space but their that their value add was literally to take files and whatever you gave them they could compress it to this crazy small size so all these companies software companies could come down and say all right we need this down to this and they could do it yeah and if you remember when they um i think they were on this stage of tech crunch and they weren't sure whether a 3d file was going to work yeah this is why they weren't sure if a 3d file was going to work yeah this is why they weren't sure if a 3d file was going to work because like some of it some of the compression uh will cross over but like to get really good 3d compression you have to build a really good 3d compression right like like something that works standard for 2d will not work standard for 3d so you'll you'll chop down

some of it because inside 3d you're still like compressing rgb like there's still color information there right so like you can compress color information the same way you gotta like split it yeah so it's like way more complex but um at a high level like that that was it was kind of like one of the things that was hit on a couple times in the show, which is pretty funny to look back. You're talking about that 2D and 3D difference, though, in that answer you just gave. And I'm a little confused there because in my head, I concept 3D as this or anything around me like it's literally like you can see the full volume of it yeah 2d i've always thought of it as it's like what i draw on a paper or something like that yeah how are you talking about it what do you mean when you say that yeah so so i think uh well the way that we look at it is like pixel versus voxel right so

you have it's it's 2d information or or 3d information so like if i'm actually capturing i think that's one of the biggest things like if you look at like a 2d camera like i'm picking up 2d information i'm picking up um color um and and it kind of stops there. If I'm capturing something with a depth camera, which is the kind of camera that we use, I'm also picking up 3D data or that third dimension, which is depth. So if you're looking at what's coming out of a depth camera versus a 2D video camera, you would see like one of these cameras would pick up my side.

And you could actually see like the depth from here to here. I'm just looking on here while you're talking, like looking at you describe it yeah so like if the camera is straight on 2d you can kind of get a sense of depth because of the color because of the light and shadows and things like that as to where like a depth camera is actually picking up the depth here so so like it's it's a series of infrared um like an ir blaster an infrared blaster that's like actually picking up depth so if if you look at that in a little bit sorry yeah the mic if you pull if you look at like a raw depth map um or like just what the the depth sensor is picking up um you'll see like that third third dimension of content so you guys everything you produce is 3d yeah you are using all depth cameras so when you say rgb you're talking about the red

green blue color spectrum yeah it's for people because that's like a little bit of a buzzword and then you are actually getting that i mean just, just to describe it, like that 3D, like I feel like you're there watching it. So you capture it, somebody in the room, and what is every outlet through which you then provide a service? And in English, what I mean by that is, sorry, what I mean by that is, are you going to clients and saying, okay, we're going to put you in another room somewhere else? That's one thing you've talked about. Are you also going to people and saying, we're going to create simulated experiences, meaning we're going to pre-record something and then let you play it, like hit a play button and it's 3d right there and then are you also going to people with straight ar augmented reality and saying we're going to put stuff we're going to create experiences where you have to use your phone and that's the only way you're going to see it like where do you guys fall here yeah so so i like to the way that i explain this um because we get this question a lot right i'll bet um i i explain it like this we're we're trying to build a a true platform technology right so the best way to do that is to build the tools that

people need to create this type of content so i i think like volumetric is is a new type of medium, right? It's like true 3D content. So just like how 2D is a medium as a whole, volumetric video or true 3D video is a new medium. Oh, that's the term for 3D. Yeah, so that's what we call it, volumetric video. That's like the 3D or some people call it 4d video it's a good thing you guys name this stuff because like if it were me i'd be like three fucking d yeah that's what it's called yeah you give a nice name to it it's volumetric yeah kind of rolls off the tongue that

comes out of the out of the science side and and and happens to sound nice there are some terms that don't sound so nice but this is what we call it um like we in in part of our compression pipeline uh there's there's a like the first component that it goes through like the first step that it goes through is um we were calling it volumization which in the volume family. I don't know that that's a word, but it is now step one of our compression process. Right. So, um, it kind of sounds nice, but, um, yeah, so, so we, um, I look at this as, as like a platform technology and, and the easiest way to build a repeatable scalable business, this kind of ties back in with what we were talking about. Some companies don't fit the venture model.

The venture model is exponential growth. It's high growth, high return, not taking 20 years to build it and not something that you're looking to hold on to. You're looking at an exit point or a potential exit point um so the uh the repeatable scalable nature of like a platform technology means that i can provide the tools to anybody that wants to create volumetric content open source kind of like of like open source. Okay. Except we're not distributing the code. So, so like, um, think Adobe, right? Like Adobe is a, a platform or a series of tools for creators to use, create content, um, where you distribute that content is up to you, but Adobe makes it as, as easy as possible to distribute wherever you want. So that's kind of like what we do. We work with a company called 8th Wall in Los Angeles, and 8th Wall built a really cool way to distribute augmented reality through a through a web link right so one of the biggest challenges with ar was like i have to download uh an app to be able to to view it and that was the pokemon go

thing yeah literally yeah yeah exactly and and not everybody wants to download a purpose-built app for each experience that they want to view so So like 8th wall built a, um, a, a way to distribute AR via a web link. So you can click the web link and it opens the camera view on your phone. And now you can view an AR experience in the, in the environment around you. So like that is a, a method of distribution for volumetric content. So when you use the platform, if you want to distribute via web link, you can distribute via web link. If you want to distribute via your own app,

we have an SDK. I think the goal there is to be as flexible as possible and keep working on making it as accessible as possible. Wow. So your full line of business seems to also be looking down the hole of licenseability maybe too. Like are you, with your patented code, are you looking to then be able to partner with companies and provide that for a fee and still maintain full ownership of what you're providing yeah yeah so so like we can we can license compression um and it is uh orders of magnitude greater than the industry standard for 3D compression in real time. So the benefit there is tremendous.

And there are a lot of people that would see tremendous value in, in licensing, just compression. Um, I think the ultimate goal is to, to make it a true platform where I don't really care what, what you need to do with it. Um, you have access to it and we control kind of like the end to end process there, um, to make it as easy as possible. Um, so, so that's the, that's the ultimate goal, But yeah, we can license pure compression too. And do you have a client base right now that you're working with actively? And if so, what are you providing specifically? Are you literally already going full product and providing 3D experiences based on whatever they need? Yeah, so we're working on some some pretty

exciting stuff right now we'll we'll release some stuff in the in the near future but i can talk about like one of the one of the use cases that i see being um very big in the near future uh is live live sports and specifically smaller scale live sports um i think something like boxing um and we're uh toying around with with how to do this now there are still some science challenges but are you gonna put logan paul and floyd mayweather in the middle of this table we are you doing it sure gonna try yeah oh to try. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And I think, so when you think about that as a whole, right?

Like now I have full six degrees of freedom. I can move around and have it happen right on my coffee table. I can dive in and feel like i am stepping between the two as they throw punches at each other is it colored in like like do we see color or is it oh yeah yeah no like it'll feel like it's happening in front of you so i could be and if people are listening right now my mind's blown but if you're watching you can actually see me looking down at this blank table in front of me i can be looking down right now in this finger. Could I adjust the size too, by the way? Yeah.

Oh my God. You can manipulate it. You can spin it. You can zoom. You can put yourself in it. With my app or my remote control, however the hell you're going to do this, I could have Floyd Mayweather right here and Logan Paul right here, and I could stand right here and watch it from that angle or stand right here or move it around like this.

Yep, you could blow it up and make it the size of your, you could make them life size and walk in the middle of the boxing ring. You have the compression power to do this right now. Yeah. Are you fucking with me? No. So the challenge with something of that scale is that when there's fast motion, and this is kind of like some of the stuff that we're working on now, but with a limited number of cameras, there's going to be information that you're not capturing. So the obvious answer is add more cameras and what's nice about

the base that we built from like a compression pipeline standpoint is that the the scalability is there so we could add like we use a series of four cameras about the size of the palm of your hand but like if we wanted to pick up color information from a red camera because the quality coming from a red camera is much better, then we could do that and just use the depth out of a depth sensor and swap the color for the color out of a red camera. So if you have four cameras though, and I'm just going to do math here, like even take it simpler than that. And you say, all right, to get the full data and picture that we want we're gonna need eight how much does that affect the size of the file now not exponentially really and as as we test that we'll see but the the goal from the beginning was to build something that would be scalable to what could be the size of an NBA court, right?

And still be able to stream it over modern Wi-Fi networks. Obviously, the stronger, the better, especially when it comes to doing something like this. But yeah. So that is the – that's one of the big impact things that I see happening in sports. I think it's true six degrees of freedom. It's – even from a training perspective and not just a viewing perspective, that provides a tremendous amount of value to like what would have been the traditional way of watching film or something like that by the way six degrees of freedom just first first hear through on that one that's a nice little tagline yeah i don't know if you thought about that it did not soar six degrees of freedom

yeah yeah that's pretty fucking good yeah that sounds good yeah you're gonna use that next oh yeah just give me a little TM on the bottom. All right. Yeah. That's going in an email. Yeah. So I'm trying to wrap my head around this cause that's far beyond what I actually thought. And when I was talking to a couple people before this podcast who were asking me who

was coming in and I'm like, this fucking master of the universe is coming in here and here's what he's doing I told them that your vision was to put a football game on my coffee table with no bit rate problems full compression and and basically as if you're watching it on tv but instead it's 3d right here and you can watch it where you want I didn't realize that a you pretty much can do this right now already and b it's far beyond that from a customization standpoint. It's not like, all right, I'm buying a 12-inch by 18-inch board to be able to watch this. It's like, no, if I want it 12 inches, it's 12. If I want it 12 feet, it's 12 feet.

That's nuts. Yeah, so there are going to be some big challenges scaling it beyond like – so right now the optimal environment is like 20 foot by 20 foot, right? Like a 20 foot by 20 foot box, you can put musicians, you can put – you can do live events. You can't quite do a live boxing event. And I think where the challenges are in boxing, and these are some of the things that we're working on now. Oh, that's your max. Yeah, so right now we're at 20 foot by 24.

Okay. Could we, to be fair though, we haven't, we have not tested it bigger. I'm sure that we could. I think the answer is adding cameras. And we know that we can scale the number of cameras and still stream over modern networks because that's what we built for. Like that was the goal from the beginning. So I think like when you think about boxing, if they're fighting or UFC, great example, like they roll around a little bit.

They wrestle. They get on the ground. There's going to be times where like they're on top of each other and there's not much space between or a little bit of space. And capturing depth information in those tight areas is really tough with only four cameras, right? So you'll have to scale the number of cameras, play around with the placement, and figure out what works best. So that's the kind of stuff that we're doing. Now you got me thinking on that though. Is there technology available right now, maybe not even available, but in the thought process that you could integrate into what you're doing where, let's say in that scenario, you have two guys in a cage in the UFC rolling around on the ground. And with the cameras, with the example you gave, you see a lag because it doesn't pick up where one guy's foot is because you literally can't see it on the camera.

Have you thought about being able to integrate technology that has sensors, meaning you would have sensors on the mat that then feel for weight and physics well i'm i'm going outside my range right now so bear with me but have feel for like weight and physics distributions that could then say oh if the cam in real time the camera didn't pick up that there's a foot there but we feel that foot there so the camera knows that that foot had a rendering that it already captured and now it's just going to put it there that is that's interesting not something that i thought about you just got something you just got something from me i win for today yeah that's uh and and it's kind of like a it's it's a unique um it's a unique problem uh because it's not that weird for something to not be picked up by a 2D camera. Or it doesn't feel as weird.

Maybe it's the best way to say it. For 3D, it would be very strange to just cut off, like, a piece of somebody's shin, right? Like, just a piece of it, because you might still be able to see the back, but, like, the front of somebody's ankle, just, like, gone. It's like the video games when they lag and you see the funny one where the guy runs through the other guy. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And it kind of, when you have too many of those things, it starts to lose its like, because ultimately, like we're going towards what will be lifelike. So if you have too many of those things happen that you can't account for, then it loses its like lifelike feeling. Yeah. And I think, so one of the things that we're playing around with too, are like machine learning and AI components to like

fill in holes that like it might not be picked up by a camera at that point. And so we'll see it's it's going to evolve uh rapidly um i'm just going to ask this quickly yep just because you're saying a million things and i'm like oh let's go with that let's talk about that was two months from now i want you coming back in here you down yeah yeah okay good because there's a lot we're not going to get to today i'm not even going to touch some of the things you just said but in that vein yep with ai how much of you heading into this space like when you were first looking at this after you exit with the ip in the last company and coming to this and saying all right we want to go into vr ar because that's our sweet spot how much were you thinking about oh here's what's happening with artificial intelligence and here's what the world is going to look like as a result of that.

So here's how we're going to have to integrate it in whatever we end up doing here. Or did it just kind of organically come together where you're like, oh, okay, that's how it's going to fit in? Yeah, I think it was pretty organic. And we're not using much right now. There are clear areas where we say, like, okay, machine learning would really help this. But for the most part, we can't solve it the way that we would like to, then the next natural, I guess, try would be to kind of simulate what would be seen if there was a camera there. And that would be using some sort of machine learning, like training neural network with a series of 3D models and then kind of like knowing exactly what pair of jeans that person was wearing and like what color and what the 3D portion that's missing looks like and then filling it in.

But right now we're not using too much. Um, yeah, we have some like fun research projects that we're working on, but, um, yeah, other than that. And are you guys, like, where are you right now funding wise and in, in, in the stage of the company? Cause you have clients, you obviously have income. You've had this company now for three years you have a team you're you're where philly san francisco and australia yeah we have so we're doing the whole distributed teams thing right now which is it's different i think one thing i'll say about that i think it's – you kind of have to like either go all in or not because running – I can see it now and we're not huge. I can see it being a challenge growing and like keeping culture great and keeping people happy. And it's nice not having to have everybody in the office but i think there's probably a happy

medium there where you have like like um almost like cells so like we can we can have a small office in x location where a a group of people will go to and that is a cell of this greater picture um i think that's it probably looks something like that in the future, but for right now it's, it's kind of like a distributed, wherever anybody is from or where they grew up, if they were moving out of the Bay area or moving out of New York or people are kind of all over the place right now. But yeah. Yeah.. Yeah, so we have some people in Canada. We have some people from D.C. to Philly, New York, one in Miami, one in Australia. Yeah, one, soon to be two in Australia, one in London. So it's kind of, and the worst thing about it, because this is, it's relatively new, like the overseas people have been recent. And they've all, they all came from here too, which is kind of crazy like they were all in palo alto or new york city at one point and then

like pre-covid and now they're like back home overseas oh okay yeah like and the time zones are just holy crap yeah because australia where he is is he's in perth so that's 13 hours right now 13 hours ahead and then london's five hours yeah and then we got uh sam fran yeah it's three hours behind yeah and we have one guy in boulder he's two back uh one in austin it's just like it's a your email subject lines are long oh my god yeah 4 p.m central 3 p.m west whatever fucking time australia yeah like which one is mst again please get like you're gonna have to just color code them this one is this part of the country i'm about to put a map up in my office yeah it's uh it gets a little bit messy but uh the team is – they're all troopers. It's burgeoning, man.

But the first question in there, like the funding process, what stage is this company at? Yeah, so we're – we've raised some money. We just are in the process of closing an extension round on a, I guess what you could call a seed round. So we're doing a formal Series A in Q1. We've raised kind of off names, so to speak. I know there's kind of these blurred lines so to speak i know there's there's kind of like these blurred lines between

what is what but um nowadays you have like like pre-seed seed yeah there are seed extensions or seed a seed b um people are raising like a1s a2 it's like all over the place but um yeah so i i would say we are like just pre-a um but you guys have income and we're mature for a for a seed company yeah yeah because i mean if if you were just putting it in the regular box it's like seed is no income we have the idea and it's it's designed yeah a is okay we have revenue now b is we're fucking huge. C is we're a unicorn, right? A buddy of mine just raised a $10 million seed round. I think he called it a seed. At a $100 million pre-money. Nope, scratch that.

$100 million post, I think it was. And they were pre-product. So he had a $100 million valuation after the round, pre-product. Pre-product, yeah. Raised $10 million. What did he invent? New human bodies? No. It is – it's a – it's like they do some stuff with government.

Oh. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that. But like again, pre-product and he's a second time founder. But they called it a seed. In that situation, usually, that's a Series A. Yeah. Even though it's like pre-product, that is a very large round for like a seed company and a very high valuation for a seed.

Yeah. Yeah, the lines there are pretty they're pretty blurry and now there's like uh super growth rounds like series e yeah it's like g all kinds of stuff like trying to stay private as long as you can and yeah what's the and that's the question a lot of people have outside the game a lot of people wonder well how much do these companies want to go public because then they have to have a quarterly report and meet certain standards and innovation suffers in a way there but also if they know they're going to go public why do so many companies wait it's this common thing now on the public side and me coming from a background in finance, it's obvious. You get a ton of capital going public. You just can't.

The exponential value of the capital you get when you put out public shares cannot be replicated on the private side. We know that. But whether it be Uber, even Facebook back in the day, insert tech company here. We just saw a very good one with airbnb a lot of these companies say they're going public and they don't do it for like three years they don't do it for four years and sometimes they get fucked from that so how do you because i feel like you have a lot

of knowledge on this from when we talked on the phone and actually mapping out like hey here's the type around we would want to do here's the amount we'd look for here's we would want to do there. And here's when we would want to go public. How do you chart that out? Or is it just kind of like, you get hit with a lot of things and you go with the flow? So I think the question of like, to IPO or not to IPO is a question that like you you you kind of start to get a um an idea of this somewhere around like series b I want to say um and and keep in mind like I've never taken a company uh company public so so like I'm probably not the best person to ask there but I do have quite a few friends that have like been through that process um and it sounds like it starts to come up in board conversations somewhere between like the series b um series c area where you can start to like map that out and

say is this something that makes sense are there likely acquirers are we getting offers already like what what does that kind of stuff look like? Because once you start to get to that point to your burn is growing, because usually you'll still have a net burn. And define burn, you and I know, but define burn for people. Yeah. So, so like burn in early stage companies is quite literally the money that you're burning per month, right? Especially pre revenue. Like it's, it's just how much am're burning per month, especially pre-revenue. It's just how much am I spending per month? When you start to have revenue, your expenses will probably be higher than your revenue for a period of time. And the difference between the two is your net burn. So when you have revenue and a million dollars goes further than when you have zero

revenue so um the net burn is like the important one later um burn in general is important pre revenue but um yeah i i think like your burn is growing dramatically um to the point where you have to start to think about like um is there an exit in sight um are we going to hit profitability and push toward an ipo like what what does this look like in the next um because fundraising is cyclical it's usually like 12 to 18 months every 12 to 18 months you're raising money if not sooner than that yeah um so otherwise you'll just literally run out of money yeah it only lasts a certain amount of time yeah yeah so um i think at that at that point you're you're starting to chart it out anything earlier it's it's like extremely difficult like i i have an idea of like what i would want to do right um and i can see a clear

path to get there but i know it's going to take like twists and turns along the way so we'll see but yeah wild it's just i'm i'm nerding out right now because there's so many things that you get to see that you're like in the middle of that we in the rest of the world kind of have to look at from the outside and study what goes on. But being in the middle of a big round like you are, what is your thought process on this is the amount I'm going to need and here's who I'm going to get it from. How do you go to identify that? Like, how do you say, all right, this project, I think these venture capital firms would be interested in. And the obvious first level answer to that is that you're looking at

companies that have previous investments in spaces similar to yours, but there's a lot of them. So, how do you figure out like, I want to talk to this guy, but I don't want to talk to that guy. So, so this is like a difficult thing for founders and first time founders, I feel like get this. Um, they, they kind of just like get thrown to the wolves when they go to fundraise for the first time.'s like like how do i navigate this whole situation um so so first off it's driven on relationships like like almost 100 on relationships like if you just reach out you're probably not gonna um see results right so so you want to find like warm introductions and with that comes like somebody that knows that person right so if i'm asking for an introduction to i don't know we'll use peter teal as an example like the person making the introduction has to know him pretty well which means they either have worked with him or

have been on the other side of a deal or something. They're in that circle, and they should have a general understanding at minimum of how that person is to work with. So I think it's two-part. It's A, identifying who those people are, and then B, talking to as many founders and as many other venture partners as you possibly can to get an idea of what is this person going to look like? How much support am you possibly can to get an idea of like what is this person going to look like how much support am i really going to get especially with somebody like um like teal or

um mark andreessen or like these are the the big brand names and and like um we'll call them like the the like a lot of people see mark as like the LeBron of venture. Yeah. It's Team Illuminati. Yeah, yeah. So you may not – if you are going to need a lot of support at an early stage, like you might not want him to be the partner that you're working with. Yeah. get as much attention as if you're working with a different partner at the same firm, where in a year or two, when you're a $200 million business, now Mark's going to be more involved because the situations are going to be more complex. He's been through that circle a little

bit more, yada, yada. So I think that's just a couple of the high notes. But at least that's how I approach it. Going into this round, that's exactly what I'm doing. It's talk to as many founders as you possibly can, get an idea of who has worked with who and what they like, what they don't like about them. What are they like in board meetings? What are they like in horrible situations? To me, that says a lot.

Like did they pour gas on it when you were on fire? Or did they come help put out the fire with you? You don't look at these guys as dollar signs. You look at them the same way that they would look at you or other people coming in. You basically flip it on them. Yeah, and to be fair like there's there is cash anywhere like if it was just money that you needed um you you can get money from a million different places um there's alt financing there are um wealth funds overseas there's family offices there are venture funds there's family offices, there are venture funds, there's angel investors, there's,

there are 1000 places to find cash. It's, it's the the strategic money. That's like, what you should be looking for. Yeah. Now, an obvious question here. And we'll get to COVID. Because that's, that's some really important context, just with what's happened in the tech space. And I want to talk about that. But an obvious question about how you've gone about so effectively doing this and networking with other founders and getting yourself into the venture capital realms is you've always been an East Coast guy. You've always sat like this is where you are. You're sitting in Philly in New York. you're not you're not out in palo alto and one of the things we've always heard again pre-covid because that's a separate conversation is that you kind

of got to go into the bubble there you got to be in the middle of the shit and be in that cult environment that's what some people call it but you need to like you have to have boots on the ground. And you seem to have very effectively not had to do that, or you've been able to do that effectively, I should say, without having to be there. How? That's how. Yeah. Well, so two things. To be fair, I did spend a good amount of time out there. And for a while i was flying

back and forth i did not know that i'm sorry yeah no no not i i was never there for longer than a month at a time so like i it's not like i lived out there for a while um i've had like apartments in in san francisco and stuff like that but now I've never spent more than like a month, maybe two at any given time. So I did build a little bit of like a network out there. But to be honest, like most of that you can do online too. There are a lot of like physical or where a lot of like physical networking events that like you probably just wouldn't have been able

to get access to the same kind of people um like i can think of one so this was actually in in one of those like months that i was living in the city um One night I grabbed food and I think it was on Eventbrite or something like that. And there was an event at Yelp that popped up. And I had a friend that worked at Yelp at the time reached out and said, hey, do you know what this is? And he's like, oh, I don't know. We do that kind of stuff all the time. Just free food if you want, just go. I was like, okay, cool. I'll head over. So I think it was me and one of my co-founders went over to the Yelp office and like Jeremy Soppelman was just walking around. A couple cool conversations. Like it is the people that outside of the bubble are like the tech gods,

so to speak. They're just like the average person out there. They're everybody. And they want to like have a conversation. Like I could sit down and have this kind of conversation in a coffee shop with like almost any of them. So that's the one big benefit of being in Silicon Valley. It's like, it's such a close knit community that once you've met a couple of them

and can start to like build some of those relationships, it's just you're not more than one degree from anybody. Like Elon, great example. I have zero reason today to talk to Elon Musk. I am not more than one degree from Elon. I can think of five or six people that know him really well. You just have no purpose. And it's that kind of thing where it's like if I needed that contact, I have that.

I've never met him. I've never like spent time in that space like just trying to get to Elon Musk. But through that network i'm sure i could have a conversation with him besides besides stoppelman who's some of the coolest people you've sat with um there's uh there's quite a few uh tim draper is actually uh yeah draper's really cool um i'm trying to think uh met brian chesky that's airbnb guy yeah um yeah there there's uh there's quite a few of them i actually think ironically and tim draper is probably not like the biggest name definitely not the biggest name but um draper was like one of the cooler ones to just have a conversation with.

He was wearing his Bitcoin tie. I remember that. He was early to that. Yeah, yeah, he was. Early to that. Super bullish on Bitcoin. What do you think of that space? See, I haven't spent much time in like the crypto world.

Ironically, I was on Clubhouse the other day and there was this really cool conversation around like insurance of crypto on ethereum i'm not sure um i just know in general they were talking about kind of like how you have the fdic on like dollars like u.s notes um but we don't have much on the crypto side um and and how especially like the exchanges you're really trusting the exchange um and if you don't vet them you can end up in in quite the situation um because it does not work the same way that it does as a bank um and i don't know that a lot of people know that but they don't i mean if if you have if you have coinbase get hacked you're kind of screwed yeah because if if they come in and they take your bitcoin bitcoin is not controlled by any government ethereum not controlled by any government and that, not controlled by any government. And that's the upside of it.

But this is where there's a little bit of a downside too because they can't just come in and say, all right, FDIC has got you insured up to X amount of Bitcoin. It doesn't exist. And people – and then there's also like the private key side where people look at taking ownership themselves. Well, you do that. A, you better know how to protect your key yeah meaning how do you not put it on an electronic platform someone could hack into and get it and b you better not lose it because it's gone i mean they estimate what like five ten percent of the bitcoin in circulation will never be seen because it got lost i mean it's just pretty wild it's wild man so our director of engineering now um he was in in a past life um did some consulting security consulting on uh online and uh this was like early bitcoin days i was in high school

at the time he was in high school um and uh he was consulting. I was in high school at the time. He was in high school. He was consulting while he was in high school? I'm pretty sure it was high school. It was either high school or like freshman year of college. God, you people know some different people. And so he was doing some consulting with some online friends and they paid him in Bitcoin. This was like the really early days of Bitcoin. So he was on the Silk Road.

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. He was doing some what we'll call white hat hacking. Yeah, he's selling blow to somebody in like South Korea. Yeah. So in exchange for his, we'll call it security. Hacking is like a type of security or involves security in some way um he was paid in bitcoin and uh we did the math the other day i think it's like somewhere around 180 million would have been worth today he uh yeah at the time he was like, well, fuck this. I gotta get rid of this because I just need the cash.

Yeah. Oh, no. I'm pretty sure, he might kill me for this one if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he bought like a quarter of weed or something on Silk Road and then just took the rest in cash. We always joke with him like that was the most expensive weed you've ever bought. It better have been a $100 million high because – Oh, man.

I really hope your company goes all the way. Right. Yeah. Every time the price goes up and he looks at it because I'm pretty sure he owns a bunch of Bitcoin now that he did not get for like a dollar per Bitcoin. So he's doing all right but still yeah yeah wow that is a tough one to swallow it is a tough one to swallow and and the guys i think we said this earlier talking in a different context but some of the guys who were the earliest to the space were the winklevoss twins yeah they were buying it down ten dollars when they learned about it

and they were still buying it to the point that back during the height of 2017 it was revealed that they own more than one percent of the global bitcoin in circulation and you can bet your ass they own more than that now because they're buying every day and it's it actually though they're an interesting case study for the groupthink that can occur in these bubbles. And this is something I definitely want to ask you about because you're networking with and building relationships with serious people and also people that I've never heard of or people have never heard of who are doing crazy cool shit out there. And again, I didn't know you were out there so much, but it's obviously been very effective and it's gotten you to this point. And now you're going through these funding rounds with a tangible product and raising serious, serious money

and talking to serious people as a result of this. But the downside to Silicon Valley and the greater community around it is that these people exist in a world that they know and no one else sees. And that's the reality that they believe to be true. Meaning, they think that we know everything that's going on, so we have all the answers, and here's how things go.

And we're going to decide what happens next. And it's like everyone else is a little bit of a simulation. And that's the hatred they get online. That's the stereotype they get. There's a modicum of truth, though, in the fact that it's very culty and that it creates that environment title, but the book that became the social network, the movie. And he's written, he wrote the book that became the movie 21. Like he's a great writer, written a lot of things, but Bitcoin billionaires was an unplanned spinoff of the social network. And it focuses on the Winklevoss twins who he obviously built a relationship with while he wrote the first book. then once they got into bitcoin he goes

oh i want to tell this story and one of the things that they ran into that was so crazy to me is first of all these guys got really screwed they they got really really screwed and they still got a big payout and they also put their emotions aside and asked for their payout in facebook stock so they made a lot more money than their payout would have been yeah but they opened up a venture capital fund or basically something like that that operated out of the east coast and they were doing the whole bi-coastal thing i guess kind of like you and going out there all the time and one of the problems they ran into i guess this is like 2010 2011 was that they would get to the final part of a deal to invest in a new project and then suddenly the

guys they were investing in who knew who they were and were so excited to meet them and talk with them would come back and be like oh we're over subscribed sorry you know whatever and they're like what the fuck no one will take our money. So they finally get to the final stage with some guy who had some idea out there. And they fly out to Palo Alto to sign the deal. And he comes to the table with them and he goes, he was actually scary. He's like, guys, I can't. I'm sorry. I can't work with you.

And they're like, what the fuck? And this guy just straight up was honest. And he said, look around. They looked around and he said, what is the closest company to where this restaurant we're in right now is and they said facebook and he goes exactly they don't like you there and they're like oh so you can't take our money because we're the winklevoss and that might screw you and he said yep and the dude paid for the beers and said i'm sorry guys i wish you luck wouldn't even take the 20, and the dude paid for the beers and said, I'm sorry, guys. I wish you luck. Wouldn't even take the $20 beers. And the connotation was that anyone's watching and they're going to say, ooh, Jim there took money from the Winklevoss or was talking to the Winklevii or whatever.

And that's an extreme example. But this is the type of stuff that you see it from the outside. And part of these products that are coming out of silicon valley are things that we talked about they give they give us convenience they give us incredible value they move the human race forward it's all true but you also need for adoption and for the health of society you need people to trust what's happening there you need people to feel like their best interests like the general public's best interests are at heart in Silicon Valley. And yet when you have this groupthink that says there's us and here's the order of business and here's how things go and if you don't do that, you're fucked. You run the risk of creating two separate worlds.

And I think in a lot of ways, and I don't need to continue to go too far out, but we're seeing the downsides of that, especially during COVID and some of the public sentiments and around the election and all that stuff. And so you being a guy in the middle of that world, how much awareness do you have of that concept? And how much do you think of your product as, hey, yes, I'm in Silicon Valley, I work in that realm, but I am trying to bring something to the general public and I want to make sure at the end of the day, I have their trust more than anything. It's a loaded question. I'm sorry. No. Yeah. So, so I think it is, um, it's, they kind of operate in like a vacuum sometimes. It's like this is our world.

This is correct. And that can be detrimental even just to startups and founders. I've seen quite a few times things like that happen. And there's also like the thing with the Winklevoss twins, that story doesn't surprise me. There are like clear grudges and clear like – it's almost like Axelrod in Billions. Billions? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Billions. That's the show.

It's billionaires with like grudges, right? Just – Ego. Yeah, yeah. And like he's in his own world. Um, I think that happens a little bit in Silicon Valley. It's also why like, like Teal is a good example. Um, he saw this, I think this was 2018 or, or 19. Um, he, he like denounced silicon valley and and moved to la i think that was part of it um there was the whole gawker thing and and i was kind of surprised that like

the silicon valley culture didn't um accept teal a little bit more but but he is he challenges the the status quo gawker was the whole kogan thing yeah yeah so that was where it's peter teal's gay and he wasn't publicly yeah gay but gawker had outed him i think in like 07 or 08 with some article without his permission and then something happened with hulk hogan where he was on a sex tape or something so hulk was pissed and Teal behind the scenes came in and funded the lawsuit and then crashed Gawker, right? is really close with one of Peter's close friends in that whole situation, that he had help on the legal side of that. So he was pretty deeply involved in the whole Hulk Hogan situation

and in Gawker in general. And it was basically, he went to Peter and said, I have a way. I can take down Gawker. And it was just like, okay, sounds great. You go, bet. Yeah, done. I'm in. Here's the check. Yeah. So I think that's like, well, that's a good example of like – and a lot of people said at the time like this is just a billionaire throwing his weight around to destroy a media outlet because he didn't like something that they wrote about. I actually think that Gawker was like pretty detrimental. I agree. Yeah. So like I'm not too concerned about that,

but it does go to show you. And again, I'm, I'm a fan of Peter Thiel. I'm a fan of, uh, the person in the middle there that I know. Um, I, I like them. I think they're, um, they're great, but it does, uh, it does show you a little bit about like the power and the – if you look at Silicon Valley, there's a lot of that that's like not contrarian thought. That's not like contested as much. It just kind of happens and outside of Silicon Valley doesn't see it as much. And so you're saying that that was Peter Thiel's a guy who has been, as you put it, openly critical of that environment and has literally removed himself from it physically in some ways, but also still as someone who is a master of the universe there

with unlimited resources, there is a level to which even he was like, all right, I got wronged here and I'm going to go take care of it and maybe isn't thinking of the slippery slope. The one place where I will definitely defend him is that, I mean, Glocker did one of the scummiest things you could ever do to a human and i think maybe where peter could have done it differently is to just really go all in on going after them for that himself rather than waiting on the other thing to to fund it but that's a tough one just because yes there is a slippery slope there you're right and i don't know that he was thinking about that. But shit Like it wasn't that like he told nobody. It was that like he chose not to make it a public spectacle. Right. And they did.

So that was like the – I guess kind of the core there. But yeah, no. I probably would have made a big scene out of it. Again, understand why he did and it was probably like just subject matter that like did not need to be a big public event um although in some ways it kind of did anyway but yeah yeah well the entire concept and i'm i'm very i'll admit i'm very obsessed overall not just with silicon valley everything, with the concept of groupthink. I think it's a – I think it is a scourge on our society across almost every level of culture.

And I think the internet, which is supposed to be this open forum of freedom of communication, has actually pushed us in the opposite direction in a lot of ways with that because people are afraid to disagree with the loudest voices who get the most attention and look the worst example we see is in our politics because we see the most extreme views on either side of the aisle get all the noise and the Pareto principle they get 20% of the people make 80% of the noise and that's what we think the reality then is and that's how we start getting into these conversations like you got Russ Limbaugh coming out and saying oh we might have a civil war tomorrow it's not great right now but it's not there but the fact that we're even saying those things is because of that and then you see ideas get shut down and again ideas are they're the foundation of what makes us human but they are the literal foundation of innovation and moving forward and doing things and so i think

just sometimes with silicon valley it's counterintuitive to be like that because the entire community is built on they they say it, we want to push forward the human race. You heard me say that earlier. And you can't do that when it's like, no, no, no, no. This is how things are. We don't challenge that. Yep. It's problematic.

How do you build something that changes the world in a vacuum? Yeah. It's like taking one perspective and building something that's supposed to account for all four or whatever that's a great way of putting it it's like it's brutal that's a great way of putting it but they look they have had a very just looking on it on a short-term basis they have had a very good year in the broader tech community for new ideas and innovation. Ironically, what we just said, just because of what's happened in society and with the pandemic and how that just completely changed our reality. And look, you saw how quickly people adapted to this thing, getting used to Zoom within like two days and how much we learned that jobs we would have never

thought of that could be remote actually were which i think a lot of us knew they could be but it was like gen x and and the baby boomers still in charge in a lot of ways and even some millennials they weren't thinking like that stuff was possible and then they're forced to do it and now they're like, oh, yeah, duh, it was. But when this started, everyone felt like the world was ending. And everyone's thinking like the stock market is going to crash. All this shit is going to happen. Oh, my god. Are we going to get it if we touch anything? There's all this hysteria.

But what did we see? We saw immediately Amazon and Netflix go like this, right? That was when I got wrong because I'm thinking, people aren't going to be spending as much money. And that turned out to be false. And then we saw very quickly, even after some dips, all the tech companies, broadly speaking, just go through the roof yeah and that's the public side but the private side saw explosions too i was getting whispers by like march 25th even from like some of my guys in austin texas like yo there's some shit happening here and so the opportunities that came in early on have exploded and created some projects that are now unicorns. And they've also completely disrupted and ended some industries, which now are never coming back as a result of the whole thing. But I could imagine for you guys, and particularly, it's been good for everyone in tech, as I said,

this had to be really, really good for your opportunity, just because now you have a whole bunch of different industries and business that are coming to you and going, oh shit, we're not doing in-person stuff. And even when this thing ends, there's going to be new realities that people now expect things that aren't in-person. You guys are going to create those experiences. How much of that is true? And I mean, what's your year been like?

Yeah, so it was happening before COVID. We were seeing the shift and we were helping push the shift. But COVID sure as shit accelerated it. Yeah. And it helped a lot. It also put like kind of a spotlight on how we do some of the things that we do, right? Even live events. Or a good example is advertising.

Like the value of 2D advertising has been diminishing. The value of advertising in podcasts has been going up. Engagement is better there, but 2D is diminishing, right? So what are the advertisers looking for something that's more engaging um they're trying to mix uh something that's live with 2d content and with something else that can drive a deeper engagement in a lot of cases that's audio in some cases it's not i think in a lot of cases spatial that's audio. In some cases, it's not. I think in a lot of cases, spatial could do it or like immersive AR, VR. In some cases, it can't. But that is something that like now is at the forefront. It's like I can't do live events in person. 2D is good, but people can skip through ads people like there are overall the quality of engagement on an advertisement in 2d is going down so how can we find a new place to serve an ad

that might get a better engagement and and one of the things that we've been saying in 3D is like you can actually make the ad an experience. Like I can have a Coca-Cola bear running around in the background and like in my living room. And it's an ad. It is clearly the Coca-Cola bear. But like if I can like pet him and his ears wiggle or something. Like come on yeah that's a little bit more engaging than just like a coca-cola bottle spinning and showing you the logo and that would would that require you using as the end user receiving that would that require you using a phone to see the yeah you phone tablet headset whatever you're viewing, holographic display, like that little,

little Coca-Cola polar bear is there. You can, uh, I don't know, tap on his ears and make him, make him wiggle or something like that is as stupid as it sounds. That's pretty engaging. That's pretty cool. And some of your clients that were in like live events though, too, right? Yeah. So you're working, are you working with any music companies yeah we are um are you allowed to say uh i will i'm not i won't say the name but the the one company that we're working with pretty closely now um they build experiences for all of the major record labels so um a lot of the major record labels in the next two quarters will be customers.

And our... What do you mean build experiences? So they create AR experiences right now just with computer-generated content, not live content. So, yeah. Would, i'm thinking outside the box here because i'm also thinking that you're talking about someone different than i was thinking the one the because i don't want to say the name if this was it but you were working with some company that handles like concert tours yeah is that right is

that the one you're talking about no i was talking about somebody else but yeah right okay so well you know what i so i i will say the the name i don't know that it matters um one of them is filter yeah another one is genies um yeah those two companies are creating like avatars um that are pretty cool pretty engaging there was actually a genie is justin bieber avatar in times square the other day um so they're just they're doing some pretty cool stuff yeah like performing yeah but it's like a computer generated avatar of him instead of like actually him as 3d so um yeah that's in the street transition like standing in the street i think i think he was on a 2d screen so you're looking at a 3d piece of

content on a 2d screen a little bit less engaging but right so yeah we're we're kind of like across the board and again it goes back to the whole platform thing. The best thing for us to do is to make it as easy as possible, whether you are like a production company or a live event company or just a developer that wants to use the software, be able to go to a centralized location and play with the software and create an experience using Volumetric and then distribute that experience via WebLink, via Snapchat, via your own app with an SDK that we give you. Like anything you want to create, do it here. And then from an enterprise perspective we just license uh we'll license that platform and get out of kind of like the just pure compression licensing you said somewhere in there though you were talking about live versus like pre-recorded

or whatever in 2d versus 3d within that so i'm just thinking of examples i know but the first time i saw some crazy shit with a live event that i guess was a pre-produced pre-recorded actual thing that came out was back in coachella in like 2015 where they brought out tupac yeah to as a hologram to perform with snoop dogg and i think eminem might have been there too yeah was that what what's was that 3d or what's so that that was not actually 3d um that that was like a trick on the eye um served serve the purpose and i think it was really cool um i forget the name of the company that did that but um i think i actually uh talked to the guys that did it um the the production um the i guess the way that you view that is by like there's like a distance that you need to be away

from the from the thing and it's like projecting something and it makes it it gives off this feeling that it's 3d um even though it's it's actually 2d um but it's pre-recorded yeah it's pre-recorded yeah yeah no so so i think they just took like some sort of 2d video that already existed and then made a 2d but hologram looking uh experience out of it so snoop dog standing next to him could tell that it was not yeah yeah like he knew yeah interesting yeah but you as the viewer did not so so like it should work yeah yeah he came up i got the goosebumps so yeah so like we're getting to the point where that will be real and i think we're getting there quicker than uh than we think what about competition though competition for us yep so what are you facing so so right now there there are some offline companies doing capture.

One in particular is creating these large-scale captures. It's a company called 8i. It's similar to what Microsoft is doing. The problem there is just that the amount of data that comes out of it is is ridiculous um so there's no way to deliver that in real time um the quality is good i'll say that like it looks good but there is no way to deliver that uh in real time or or uh stream on demand cheap i'll say they don't have your compression no and and from how they approached it they would need to rethink the entire process um to be able to to kind of get

anywhere near where we are so um yeah there there are a couple of couple of companies trying it um microsoft for example is charging somewhere around like $30,000 per day to capture. So you go into a Microsoft Studio and you create a piece of volumetric video, cost you about 30 grand, somewhere in there. And you get like three minutes of content, which is just pretty crazy. And then you get this huge file mess that you got to do something with. Um, and you just paid 30 grand. So even for ad agencies or like live event companies, uh, or somebody trying to do a promo with something like that, it's super expensive. The files are huge. It's like kind of a non-starter.

So we looked to check all of those boxes. We've done so so far. So you are the man in the arena with this. It's really, you're on to something here. And I mean, it's obvious to tell that just based on some of the money coming in and funding and where it's coming from. It's pretty clear people believe in you, and it's also pretty clear through the clientele as well. But the reason I say I want to bring you in here again is because there's so many broad topics to go over with a guy like you and talk about what's happening in our world, not even with covid but how these things go i mean we started this conversation talking about the next period of disruption and you defining it as spatial and

and what that decade looks like but there are other things that that's like kind of the crown jewel in a lot of ways of things we're gonna have to get used to in the sense that we're gonna have to get used to the idea that people aren't physically here which we're kind of bootloading that with Zoom and being away from each other. But you're going to take that to the technological level. But there are a lot of Pandora's boxes we're facing as a result of things like this. And you've touched on today like artificial intelligence and people throw around these buzzwords. They don't know what the fuck they mean as far as like what the context is how deep it goes and maybe some people can think about

their data a little bit and oh i'm giving up a lot but they don't understand machine learning they don't understand how data is used to do that and what the repercussions of machines to get smarter and smarter are going to be so at least before I let you out of here today, one of the things I did want your opinion on is how much do you think about a world with the singularity? And how close do you think something ridiculous like that is? And before you answer it, just as a broad level, when I say singularity for people

listening i'm talking about where we are just and it's a generalization we are at equal with machines in the sense that we've crossed the chasm where machines have the ability to do pretty much everything a human does at a higher level without the ability to maybe sense and feel love and stuff like that but do you think about that a lot and and where are we on on the spectrum of that coming into the realm of possibility um that's a that is a very good question i think we are probably closer than a lot of people think um but but i'm actually not as concerned as a lot of people think but but I'm actually not as concerned as a lot of people either mmm I think I think there's there is a big focus on like responsible use of of AI and I know Elon's doing a lot here too. But I think in general, I think it's kind of like a Pandora's box.

And we have to understand what we're opening and be careful with how we use it. So you're talking specifically on AI, right? More than anything because that is the boot. Anything involving the quote-unquote singularity, let's be honest, that's the main bootloader to it. Yeah. So the idea that a machine can outlearn a human and perform human tasks and emotion and etc. Faster and better than a human.

I mean in a sense they already do that. Yeah. But I'm saying and I think you're on the same page. I just want to make sure. I'm saying where they're able to then combine that with their own, their ability to make their own decisions. Yeah. Well, I think it's like that interesting point where like you've taught it to make the right decision and it starts to learn that the right decision is either not a decision that you gave it the choice to make or yeah. And that's where it kind of gets out of control a

little. Yeah I think and I'm not as much in the AI machine learning world but I think in general less concerned I actually have a little bit of faith in humanity there. I actually think that we're going to use it responsibly for the most part. There are a lot of ways to weaponize it. And I think it's going to be a big threat. Will it be used like that? I'm not sure. That's why I keep that art right there to think of it

that way because yeah that's what it could be well people think of the first real test of humanity was the atomic bomb and the nuclear bomb and they're like oh we're gonna blow all of ourselves up and hypothetically that could happen anytime but we kind of got through that you know and i have hope that that's exactly what will happen with machines too the difference is the atomic bomb couldn't blow itself up a human had to hit the button that's the one big thing here that i'm like hmm you know if there are guys like you mentioned, like Elon, who are sounding the alarm here, but you get the wrong people who are just so stuck in their own mind and their own innovation to unlock some of these things because they're just forging ahead, you know, through no fault of their own. They're not trying to, but they hit the wrong area and boom, you let it out of the you let the cat out of the bag. We don't know what some of this stuff looks like um have you ever read super intelligence by bostrom i have not oh you would

love that from quite a few people that i needed to read it yeah read it's not even i mean you can definitely sift through things a lot faster than i can and appreciate it even way more than I could. But it's – I would still say for anybody, it's not the kind of book that you can kind of just sit down and read in one sitting and go through it. Because you really – this guy paints every possibility that you could possibly think of. This guy's – I mean, we're playing checkers. He's playing fucking something. I don't know. But he goes through all the potential outcomes, good and bad and a lot of bad, of machine learning.

And it's like, oh boy, the number of if this, then that's that we have to take into account here to not fuck it up. It's a lot. It is. I guess yeah i think in general um i have more faith in humanity in this area than i probably should um especially considering I generally do not. But at least from an engineering perspective and from like a – because we are still creating it. To what degree it's on its own already is debatable. So I'm not sure. But I have,

I have faith in the, at least on the engineering side, that like, we'll probably do what we can before it gets to that point. But I could be horribly wrong on that. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to accept that for now.

We'll, I'll cut it there. We've been in here a while and my head hurts, but we're going to come back to that. We're, a while and my head hurts. But we're going to come back to that. In a couple months, we're going to sit down. We're going to go through some of the high level stuff so I can let you put out all your opinions on simulation theory, the full singularity opinion, all that good old stuff. And I won't tell you the other stuff I'll throw out

there. But I'm very curious to hear you really expand upon some of these things and definitely if if you have time and i don't know that you do but if you have some time check that check that book out before before you come back it's all right i definitely will like i was saying that is like you're like i don't know probably the five or fifth or sixth person that said hey hey, you got to check this out. Dude, crazy. But listen, man, what you're doing is impressive is not the right word to even put on it. It's pretty incredible. And I really appreciate you coming in. I'm going to go take a look deeper on some of the documents that you shared with me right

before this and anything else as well. I'd love to just take a look. But you guys aren't seeing this on this. If you're watching it, you're not seeing the holograms in here. I've seen some of the videos of what this guy does and it's no bullshit. I mean, it is freaky.

So yeah, I'm curious to see how Q1 goes here. I think it's going to be pretty good for you. Yeah, I think it's going to be exciting. I think it's going to be good. It's going to be a whirl. And I know it has been the past few months have just been non-stop so um looking forward to it but uh it should be fun and i'll absolutely come back well february we'll we'll have you back in here and we'll shoot the shit and also see where you're at perfect for now anthony thanks for

coming in brother yeah i really appreciate it pleasure andasure. And everyone else, give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.