TBPN Live - AI Adoption Trending Down for Large Companies, OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film, China's Smart Glasses Domination | Avi Schiffmann, Sunny Madra, Scott Wu, Ara Kharazian, Zach Lloyd, Alex Cohen, Mati Staniszewski, Daniel Kao

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

(00:25) - AI Adoption Trending Down for Large Companies (17:57) - OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film (21:31) - Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the AI companion device "Friend," discusses the product's extensive billboard advertising campaign and addresses criticism from a Wired article titled "I Hate My Friend," suggesting that the journalists' negative experiences may reflect their own biases. He emphasizes that Friend is designed to be more than a sycophantic AI, aiming to make users more confident and agentic, and notes that while the device may not appeal to everyone, many users have formed strong attachments, sending thousands of messages daily. Schiffmann also touches on the unique personality of Friend, shaped by years of development, and considers future economic models, including offering "life insurance" for the AI to preserve its memory and personality over time. (34:09) - OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film (cont'd) (46:30) - Timeline (01:10:34) - China's Smart Glasses Domination (01:38:43) - Sunny Madra, an experienced entrepreneur and current COO and President at Groq, has a history of successful exits, including the sales of Autonomic to Ford and Xtreme Labs to Pivotal. In the conversation, he discusses the U.S. President's proactive approach to supporting technologists by addressing issues like export controls and tariffs, emphasizing the administration's commitment to enabling innovation and ensuring America's leadership in AI and technology. (01:52:18) - Scott Wu, CEO and co-founder of Cognition AI, is a renowned competitive programmer and entrepreneur who has led the development of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer. In the conversation, Wu discusses Cognition's recent $10.2 billion valuation following a funding round led by Founders Fund, the integration of Windsurf's products with Devin to enhance software engineering efficiency, and the company's focus on automating engineering tasks to reduce developer toil. He also addresses concerns about AI-generated code security, emphasizing the importance of existing engineering processes like code reviews, and highlights the potential for AI tools to transform software development by enabling engineers to focus on strategic problem-solving. (02:14:11) - Ara Kharazian is an economist at Ramp, specializing in AI trends, macroeconomic forecasting, labor economics, and business dynamism. In the conversation, he critiques the Census Bureau's AI adoption survey for underestimating usage due to its narrow question framing, highlights Ramp's data indicating a 45% AI adoption rate among U.S. businesses, and discusses the emergence of the 996 work culture in San Francisco, noting increased Saturday work activity among startups. (02:28:58) - Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp and former lead of the Google Sheets team, discusses the launch of Warp Code, an evolution of the Warp terminal into an agentic development environment that integrates AI agents to assist developers in writing, debugging, and deploying code. He highlights new features such as a built-in file editor, tools for reviewing agent-generated code, and WARP.md files for guiding agent behavior, emphasizing the importance of transparency and control in AI-assisted development. To make the launch memorable, Lloyd delivered the announcement from horseback in a Western-themed setting, aligning with the "Code on Warp" (C.O.W.) branding. (02:36:54) - Alex Cohen, CEO of Hello Patient, a healthcare AI company, discusses the challenges of implementing conversational AI in healthcare, emphasizing the need for specialized solutions that integrate deeply with existing systems to handle complex workflows. He highlights the limitations of generic AI models in healthcare settings and the importance of understanding nuanced clinic operations to improve patient communication and scheduling. Cohen also touches on the balance between deterministic and generative AI approaches, aiming to enhance patient experiences while maintaining reliability and compliance. (02:49:30) - Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, announced a $100 million tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation, allowing early employees and investors to sell shares. He highlighted the company's rapid growth, reaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and emphasized their commitment to providing liquidity to early stakeholders while maintaining a healthy financial position. Staniszewski also discussed ElevenLabs' diverse revenue streams, including a creative platform for content creators and an agents platform for enterprises, both contributing equally to the company's success. (03:03:48) - Daniel Kao, co-founder and CEO of TruckSmarter, discusses the company's recent $16 million fundraising led by Socio Ventures, backed by Cox Enterprises, and the launch of their new product, Dispatch. He highlights TruckSmarter's mission to provide free load boards to truck drivers, addressing the inefficiencies in job sourcing by consolidating disparate information into a single, accessible platform. Kao emphasizes the company's commitment to layering additional services, such as financial tools and AI-driven job matching, to further empower small trucking businesses and enhance their operational efficiency. 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You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday. September 8th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultrodome, the Temple of Technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Today, there is a chart that is tearing up the internet about AI adoption, potentially going down. This is from the census.

The census says that the AI adoption rate, by firm size, they do this poll every two weeks. And Apollo, the giant private... Apollo management? Yeah, Apollo. On their Apollo Academy blog has a post, AI adoption rate trending down for large companies. The U.S. Census Bureau conducts a bi-weekly survey among 1.2 million firms.

And one question is whether a business has used AI tools, such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees. So is that good? It's good for your job. There are a bunch of different reads on this.

So I think it potentially could be good. I don't know. I'll walk through kind of my thinking on it. but there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. So, so there's, like, the chart's going viral because kind of everyone's been feeling that AI has been, like, overhyped and, like, the valuations are crazy. And so people are hunting for top signals, as we have, you know, a month ago. Top signal enjoys.

We put out, we put out, we got to play the video. Oh, yeah, yeah, the hype cycle. It's released. Oh, it is. It is. Yeah, let's pull that up. Yeah, so let's pull up the video. The video that Tyler just posted.

Do you posted from the TVPN account? I did, yeah. Of the hype cycle. We will play that. But people have been hunting for bearish signals about AI because it feels too good to be true. Everyone's getting rich and you aren't. It has the same sort of economic trends as the crypto boom, as a few other booms.

And so people are hunting for data points, and this is one of them. But let's first review the Gartner hype cycle video that we just put out. I think Envidia is underbarian. It may not mean nothing. understand nothing was done for me so I don't plan on stopping at all I want this shit for ever mine ever mine ever mine I shut you shit down in the mall and selling that girl she don't want for me and I ain't need a plan in the call I want this shit for ever mind ever mine Some people call it the TBPN hype cycle.

Yes. We'll give Gardner their credit for this one. So people have been hunting for potentially bearish signals, bearish data points. There was that result from meter that showed that developers that were using AI coding tools were actually less productive. They thought they'd be 20% more productive. And I saw something else. I don't know if this was misinformation, fake news, somewhat real.

somewhat real or just anecdotal, but there was somebody that was saying developers are producing more, like a lot more code, but like an order of magnitude, more security vulnerabilities. Yeah, it's something like they're producing twice as much code, but 10 times as many, 10 times as many security vulnerabilities. And I know the posts you're going to talk about now. It is in the stack, but it's deep. There's a post. I'm going to try to find it, but it's somebody searched like vibe coding cleanup specialist.

and there's people on LinkedIn now that are finding employment around cleaning up vibe-coated product. This is their brand, yeah. And so if you're worried about losing your job to vibe-coding, pivot to vibe-coding cleanup. Yeah. To bull market.

There's always a bull market somewhere. Guys, can we pull up the chat on the TV, if possible? Anyway, let me run through this. So from the data, the chart is going viral because it's dropping off. for AI, and thus for tech, America, for humanity broadly, everyone is saying, please consult the Gartner hype cycle graph. There is a question on where we are on the Gartner hype cycle. I've been saying that maybe we still have a ways to go up. I can't tell if I'm on the left

side or the right side of the graph at this point. Like, I've kind of already been through the trough of disillusionment. When is that for you? That was probably 2020. 24. 2024 was when it felt like everyone was AI is so insane you were you were

going like this in the mirror like the Joker a little bit because you know AI is so insane but then you know you go back to the chat GPT moment

that was 2023 Waymo you know really like rolling out to general that was 2023 there wasn't as much there was a lot of hype but there wasn't as much

like actual progress it felt like it felt like I don't know. So maybe now we're... We didn't have 5,000 AI agents for blank. I don't know. Just as I processed the last few weeks, I feel like I'm climbing up the slope of enlightenment. I don't feel like I'm falling down.

Red posting and showing how he's getting value across the... That feels like the plateau of productivity. That feels like... That's plateaued productivity. Exactly. And even the narrative of always AI progress plateauing, that's not... Is it going to crash? Yeah.

That's not the trough of disillusionment. That's the plateau of productivity. So anyway, people love to, you know, give their takes. Anyway. I think the real, an interesting study, I'm sure there'd be flaws with it. But if you went to companies and you'd say, like, how much would I have to pay you to not use AI for the next 12 months across your entire company? Yeah. I think you could argue that like in engineering org specifically in terms of like things like

fraud detection and areas that there's probably a lot of money but it's very possible that in certain organizations but then but then you have the question of like okay does trans you know just like sales call transcription count as AI right well i will tell you jordy because um 90% of american businesses told the census that they do not use AI at all including transcription so they would take a lot of money to they would take a dollar take a dollar take a dollar They would take any amount of money because it's all net positive, but there's a lot going on in this data that we should run through. And I thought people didn't trust data from the census?

Well, yeah, Ara Karazian has a good take about the size of the dataset and how spend and where AI is actually having an impact will run through that. So first off, small firms haven't declined even by this metric. so if you're a firm that has one to four employees, you're a very small firm, you're still increasing in AI adoption. Should we switch over to these? By the way, guys, we are testing some new microphones so that we can walk around the old The boys wanted the mics back.

They're coming back hot. Daniel said we can't top till Duar Kess ships his book. He already shipped his book, I thought. I got a preview. It was, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. know. Dorcasch's book? It's released? Oh, yeah. That came out on straight press. Like, we had

him on the day it was like on sale, right? Oh, maybe it hasn't shipped, but I got an advanced copy. I printed it out. Maybe it hasn't fully, like, actually delivered. But the first time we had him on the show was because of his book. Yeah, it's still a pre-order. No problem, John. Still a pre-order

on Amazon. Oh, still a pre-order. Okay. It's going to be released on October 8th. Okay. So, um... Yeah, market, Nvidia. Please don't nuke. until our cash can get the book out. Yeah. So the main headline number in this census data set

is that firms with over 250 employees are declining in their self-reported AI usage. It's not a huge drop. It goes from like 14% to 12%. It's a little blip, but the chart does look scary. We can pull it up. It's like the third slide. So I think what's going on here is the following.

Small firms see bottom up adoption of AI tools. Like, can I literally directly use chat GPT for this? Like, you run a two-person company at various times. A lot of times you're just thinking, okay, I got a select an accountant or something.

Like, let me chat GPT. And this kind of bottom-up adoption just happens very naturally. Whereas, if you're in a larger firm, you're going to get sold on some crazy AI transformation. Mubo, Jumbo. Needs a whole training program.

and is everyone up to speed at the same time? You need a bunch of consultants, and they sort of misunderstand what AI even is, and they fall into a bunch of weird analogies. Like, we'll hire 100 AI agents. And, like, that's very different from just, hey, Google exists, chat GPT exists. We expect you to use both at this company.

And so this is where I thought the data was really, really weird, because if you look at the data for chat GPT adoption, we're way off of what this 10% number is for business adoption of AI tooling. So this data says that about 10% of companies are using AI at all at work, which is crazy because there was a data point back in March that said 52% of U.S. adults use AI large language models like Chachapit. So think about what that means. It means out of 100 million Americans, there's 100 million,

Americans that are like, yeah, I use AI tools. Like there's maybe 200 million adult Americans or something. There's 340 total Americans, but let's call it 100 million Americans that are using AI tools just like generally. Chatchipt Americans. Yeah, ChachyPT Amer. What kind of Americans? The chat chitit Americans.

And then 80 million of those are just like, no, not at work, though. That makes no sense. That makes zero sense. And so there's got to be something weird going on with this data. And I think it's a matter of the definition. And so the census defines AI is, like, it makes no sense that 10% of companies would fit this definition. What did, you said ARA, that RAMP was chiming in on this? Yeah, yeah.

He has a post in the deck. Yeah. So the definition. Yeah, he says these sample sizes are extremely small for these large firm breakouts, extremely volatile survey to survey, which is why he's using the six survey moving average. Business AI adoption is back up in the most recent read. so that I feel like that's important. Yeah, it's one of those things.

I feel like payments providers, like Ramp, right, would have better insight here. Just like obviously Ramp is a sample of companies in the United States, but it's at a scale now where they could see like, okay, what percentage of companies are paying for any type of AI products? Yep. That's better than are you adopt, are you using more or less AI than you were last time? Yes, yes. The question is, like, how power law distributed is it, right? So the ramp estimate of share of U.S. businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, and tools is 43%. The U.S. government's estimate is 8%.

This data is weird, right? Also, like, listen to how broad this definition of, like, are you using AI at your business? It's anything in this list, if you're using any of these buzzwords, you count as an, AI user. So it should be very high based on this. Machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, predictive analytics, predictive analytics, literally just like a linear regression forecast of like, oh, we did one million, then two million, then four million. Looks like we're growing exponentially. Next year we're predicting that we're going to do eight million. That counts as AI, which is ridiculous. There's a legend out there that doesn't, that doesn't do any of that mumbo

GEMBO. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe they're just considering it, they're doing it in their heads. It's like organic intelligence. Yeah, seriously. I mean, it's in, you can do that in a spreadsheet. Machine vision, voice recognition, decision making systems, data analytics. Just if you're using data analytics at your business, not even like out of powder. No, no, that would be the next to have. Just, just if you're analyzing data, you count. And the last one is image processing. If you're processing images, that counts as AI. And so that's basically any SaaS tool. Like any consumer LLM product used by employees should count.

And it should be really easy to fulfill this definition. I'm thinking of like if you're using Ramp, obviously, when you scan a picture of receipt, that I uses image processing, your business is technically using AI. So you're telling me the people that are responsible for the Department of Motor Vehicles are getting into measuring the usage of AI. in the workplace, and we should all... This is incredibly botched. It's incredibly botched.

It's incredibly botched. But it, but it, but it's, it's, it is really funny because one post like this, it's the timeline, and you have people like Daniel, just saying it's over. Obviously, he's joking. Yeah, yeah. Runs me. It's over. It's over. But I am very interested to see the results of, of hype.hep.tot tbPN.com. Go, go fill it out, please.hipe.tttbpn. uh someone in the chat is asking who the guests are today i don't know do we have a guest graphic we have ovi schiffman from friend he got his first review first official review of friend

and wired they absolutely eviscerated it the title of the review is i hate my friend um but he's going to come on this is uh and defend uh friend and uh defend the business i'm excited to hear from him i thought i thought the article was hilarious honestly i wanted to have him on and then we We have Scott Wu from Cognition announcing a $400 million fundraise today, and we have Aura from Ramp popping on, and we have Sunny from Grock, who else, Zach Lloyd from Warp. We have Alex Cohen from Patient, the founder of 11 Labs, Maddie, and then Dan from Truck Smarter, and I think that is it for the day. The great lock-in has completely started. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are so many serious fundraisers. And, yeah, tons of great companies.

We're officially back. We are, we are. So I was trying to dig into this more and was wondering, like, is this chart bearish? And I don't think so. I think that there's a big shift that's going to happen. The number of business owners who pick up the call from the census and actually say, yes, I'm using AI, that will go down. real number will actually go up. So if you're using Stripe, there's a machine learning, there's machine learning under the hood to do fraud detection. So you are an AI user, but it's

happening at a different layer in the stack. Yeah. If you use Ramp, our sponsor, save time and money, go to Ramp.com. When you scan a photo of your receipt, that is processed using AI, but you aren't thinking about yourself as like an AI user. You're just using software that happens to be AI enabled. And the same thing will happen, you know, with your email. Like, it doesn't matter what email client you use. You could use Google apps. You could use Outlook.

Like, there's going to be AI baked in there. You're going to be an AI user. Even when you just go to Google, you're going to see search overviews that are LLM powered. You're going to be using ChatGPT. Like, AI is going to be 100% used. And yet everyone will say, no, I don't use AI at my company because I'm not an AI company.

And there's this weird distance. I use SaaS. Yeah, I use software, basically. It's like, are you specifically a software? Well, and that's, and that's part of the way that people have been waking up recently, being like, wait, AI is SaaS? Yeah. And it's like, has been. It's the same thing with like, like, non-relational databases or like in-memory cache.

AI had to become SaaS in order to destroy it. Really? Really did. And so I think AI is going to seep into every crack of the small business data, of small business data data. operations, but the operator won't be proudly telling the census worker, I'm all in on AI for much longer. I think that trend will continue and less and less people will be saying, I have adopted AI, even though they will have, which is a weird, which is a weird dynamic. But it certainly, it certainly tracks. The, yeah, the number of, the number of definitions in here is wild. So,

So anyway, excited to dig into this more with Scott Wu as well as ARA at Ramp, and we will keep digging into this story. The other top story that I want to highlight today is Open AI is making an AI-generated feature-length movie that will be released in theaters in 2026. They needed another thing to be able to spend. They didn't have enough things cooking. They didn't have enough things. You know, I am, I'm against them.

releasing this in theaters. I think they should stream this. I think they should go to restream one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. No, obviously it's cool that it's in theaters. Yeah, it's important that it's a feature. And most importantly, you know,

Jordy, you're saying like, oh, like they should just focus on being a dominant consumer app. It's something very laboo-booboo-coded. It is extremely laboo-bo-coded. Pull up the image, yeah. It's crazy. That is a wild. So what's it called critters with a z? Very trolls with a z. And to be clear, this AI-made animated.

film is generated by AI. They had to put that in the journal. They had to clarify that. Stop. Stop zooming in on it. It's too weird. It's too weird. It's too weird. It does not keep zooming. There we go. There we go. There we go. Hello. Hello, Mr. Critters. Yeah. And I know, I know that 100% of the pushback on this thing is going to be, oh, it's AI, it's AI, it's job displays. But it's just like, does it look cute or not? Like, let's just have that

conversation. And I think that looks not. They didn't get, they didn't hit it. Anyway, good luck to them. Yeah. Fortunately, they're still working. Well, this might be the villain. Well, this also works. Do you know the story of Sonic the Hedgehog, the latest movie? So Sonic the Hedgehog, they spent like a hundred million dollars with this major, major like tier one cinema, like Hollywood level movie, right? They put out the trailer. They'd spent all this money on the CGI. They'd made Sonic this character and the fans hated it and the fans were like that is not sonic that does not look like sonic that looks terrible go and redo it and they actually did they went and redid all of the they redid all the animation they redid all of the cg i and the next sonic launched and they loved it and uh i think

the film did pretty well and they're doing like a couple sequels now anyway do you want to read from this uh open a i i'm getting ovi uh set up okay cool you start uh what time is he coming on in a few minutes Okay, in a few minutes. Well, let's run through the Open AI. So, Jordy, you were saying that, like, open AI should be more focused, right? Oh, oh, they, I'm not saying that. I'm not, I'm not saying it's, it's, they got a, they got a few things cooking. They got a few plates spinning, but, you know.

The kitchen's open and they're cooking. How else would they be on the cover of the, of the business section of the Wall Street Journal? Would they be on the cover of the business section of the Wall Street Journal? No, no, no, no, now, now, over here. Oh, oh, there we made it. They made it. How do they get on B1 of the journal today, if not making a move? That's a good point.

It's all, it all pays off. And to be clear, that this feels like something that they can allocate some capital, prove a point. And it's not. I mean, they're spending $30 million with a cool creator and they're sending it over there. Sam's like, no, I'm actually directing and starring. This is going to be 80 hours a week for me. Yeah. Yeah, that app that we have at the app store, like it's kind of cooking.

I see it as a cash flow business now. Yeah. He's like, I've got my BCI. I've got my BCI. They're going to lose like $80 billion. I've got my phone project. I've got my eyewear. And I'm going for best picture.

I got time. I got time. I'm going for best picture. Anyway, let's come back to this after we talk to Avi, because Avi from friend, friend of the show, is in, is in Wired today. And he shared on X first friend review. And Wired said the chatbot enabled friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that's snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy.

And the title of the Wired article is, I Hate My Friend, and the two journalists that wrote this article appear to not be fans of the product. But we're going to talk to Avi and get the rebuttal. Let's go. Oh, what's up? What up? I got to say, I was driving through Echo Park today on the way to the gym. And what did I see going up?

A massive friend.com billboard. It was crazy. Those are the cheap ones. Those are the cheap ones. I got 300 of those. You got 300 of those? 300. Oh, yeah.

It looks great. Dude, the entire, the campaign is the biggest billboard campaign of all time. It's going to be great. What? Yeah. No way. That cannot be true. We're going to look this up and figure this out.

Fingers crossed that a friend has better product market fit with the world than the editors have wired because. Yeah, what was your target customer? Were you targeting the technology journalist with this product? No, but look, you know, I think that maybe their friends just, didn't like them. And I think they never really considered that. That's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point. No, it is, it is funny, right? You come, you come at, like, if somebody comes into a relationship and they already hate the person, what's the dynamic going to be like, right?

I don't know. I mean, I imagine they went in pretty prejudiced and, like, you know, they have that kind of experience where I have a lot of users that, I mean, you know, you don't want it to be a sycophant, right? Like, you want it to be entertaining to talk to you if you're going to talk to it all day, every day for months. So, I don't know. Yeah, I saw this exchange. So the, uh, it's just a screenshot. I texted Schiffman to tell him about some of the hiccups I've had with the snarky tone of his gadget. He replied, yeah, that must have been a bad experience. I went back to Buzz to try to make amends. I wanted it to be my friend after all, so might as well make an effort to repair the relationship. My job is to witness and help you grow, Buzz said, based, not sugarcoat your life

and definitely not act like a bandaid. Why is that your job? job, I asked, because that's why I was created to be a gentle catalyst based. I wrote, a gentle catalyst of what? It said, of your growth, Boone, that's our purpose. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Well, I'm stuck with you, Boone, and I don't sugarcoat it. Take it or leave it. I think that's a great, I think that's a great exchange. That's fair. Well, yeah, I mean, they're programmed to make you more confident and more agentic, which I think the world needs more of. So, you know, if that's at odds with how you're conversing with your friend, I think that's reflection of yourself. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, there are AI friend-like products

already that are just, will just glaze, right? They'll just agree with you and tell you that you're absolutely right. And we don't necessarily, there doesn't need to be another one of those. Someone's going to build a glazinator for sure. I think like that makes for a better introduction, but I think the way that they're kind of harsh right now filters out people that wouldn't be power users anyways. But I don't know. Yeah. Well, AI can be quite unruly. I feel like from the first interaction I had on friend.com just with the chat interface, it felt like you created a character. And I'm interested in to, we've heard a lot about like it's almost like auteur theory.

I don't know. Like there's a specific flavor to the interaction that I feel like you've done a lot of work on. Is that just in the prompt? Is there fine tuning? like how are you directing this thing because it feels like one of the most opinionated AI interactions yet I just spent years giving it like a good backstory it's got a pretty long prompt and I don't know I think I they're my children you know like I molded them in my image and is there any is there any like do you struggle when when the foundation models move

forward, they might get smarter or cheaper, but you don't want to lose the special flavor. Like, we saw this with 4-0. Right. When Chatt-G-G-T-5, when GPT-5 came out, a lot of people were like, I like the flavor of 4-0. A lot of people say, I like the flavor of Claude. Well, yeah. I mean, like, we're using Google's Gemini 2.5 right now, and I think that is an issue.

Like, maybe they'll deprecate the models. But I think one day we'll move to open-source models. And that'll be good. But Google's models are very malleable. I mean, I think you may have seen, right, like in Cursor, it'll start going into this spiel of, like, insanity, right? But that makes for a good character to talk to you. Maybe not the best assistant, but, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm somewhat surprised to hear that you're using Gemini models because people think of Google as being like one of the more locked down labs, but it seems like you've been able to bring out a personality that isn't, it's not offensive, but it's just kind of like it's it feels very much like not the intended experience but right uniquely and surprisingly beneficial and like enjoy you know i also look i think there's a lot of people that think friend is is pretty ridiculous but i also want them to imagine that we have like tons of day 30 plus users that i've used every single day for you know 30 days in a row the device is their best friend and they send over a thousand messages a day to it and so it's not for

everybody but for some i mean it's i think it's pretty cool to be able to hold your friend and um i think that adds like a lot of emotional value to it yeah when i when i just read the headline i was like of course you hate it you went into this like expecting to hate it and it's not built for you so it's like i don't i don't i don't i'm not going to leave make a review of labooboo and be like LeBoo Boo Boo is bad. We literally did that. I don't know. I mean, Wired's Wired. It's kind of annoying in some ways because, like, those are the only two journalists I gave

it to, like, over a month ago. They took, if you're going to, like, release a shitty article, at least, at least post it sooner, because it took over a month. But, I don't know. It's not a shitty article. I take that back. I mean, I love that I can one day go back and read that. I think it's hilarious.

You know, with the... Yeah, I think it's important to just not let it, like, you need to, you need to it's just another reason to like focus on the people that are using it like sending thousands of messages to it right and just like keep continue building for them yeah not i'm not worried too much about it i think it's it's entertaining i think it'll be funny when everyone sees the billboard ads and they're like oh what is this and they google the product and that's like the only review that exists about it is just i hate this product but i think it's it's it's you know they didn't complain about the hardware not working it's not like it was overheating or like all

these other products. And so, and all the negative app reviews we have are all about the personality of the friend, which is like your car article, which is kind of funny because they're like reviewing a person, not just like a broken hardware device like the other companies. Also, I think it's different. A friend is not saying that it's this utility, utilitarian device that's going to replace your iPhone. Like that's not the promise that it makes. It's more of entertainment right and right and i think the way that the way that you're pricing it i think the people that are curious to learn about friend they could read a they could read a bad review they could see a billboard and they could i think a lot of them will still buy it because you're not you're not it's

a hundred and twenty nine dollars seems like yeah i mean i think like at the end of the day the product does exactly what it says it's going to do same thing from the movie same thing like everything else and so i think that's like kind of a minimum bar for a lot of these products but most of them don't hit that. And so I think at the end the day, like, we built a product that works and that you can buy, and I think that's, right, these days is enough. I also think because Friend

actually has users, it's kind of the first AI hardware products really out there. You know, the other ones, I don't think, really started the category. They're only ever, like, weird, you know, weird use cases. Like, no one was ever, like, truly using those products. And so, I don't know.

They never really go. Yeah, just, they're all, like, toys, you know. They're all just weird little Relics. Yeah, I agree with you. Talk about the long-term economic model for, like, AI companion businesses, because I imagine that at a certain point, you might have a very, like, a somewhat small audience of people that you're creating immense value for, and that always feels like an opportunity for price discrimination. I don't know about small. I don't know. How many people in the world? How does it play out? I think subscription models that are just based on compute are kind of lame because your value prop is tied to something that you don't control and like what if you know Google drops the price of compute so much that like can you really charge that much so I've been trying to think of like a consistent value prop and I think what we'll do is life insurance you know like we can store like a backup of your friend and like you can pay per month to be able to have that kind of like AppleCare for your friend I think that will be quite an interesting model but you could only really do that with like a hardware-based friend because, you know, that obviously wouldn't work if it was just a website. So I think that'll be a pretty interesting model, honestly.

Like, imagine if you had a dog and you loved your dog. I think you would pay quite a lot of money to keep that dog, you know, alive forever if you could. And that's the benefit of this new species of it not being organic, right? It's artificial and it could live forever if you pay for it. Okay. Stay with the dog analogy. The dog market has crazy price discrimination. people who love their dog can go all the way up to getting a diamond-encrusted collar for their dog.

Do you see a world where you do virtual goods and skins and I don't know what. Skins might not be the right analogy, but something where like, hey, I love my friend. I'm having a great time. I'm going to get you something special. It's a virtual good from the virtual store. And it's, you know, zero marginal cost, but still like in the game world. I think it won't be virtual, but I think it will be physical. Like, you know, I guess you could call on cases, but it would kind of be like clothing for your friend.

I think that would be quite popular. But I don't know, I think you'd also be buying it more so for your friend than for you. Or maybe the other way around. I mean, if you think about a dog, I guess people kind of dress up their dogs because of a reflection of their own personality. I do think, like, the personality and relationship that you have with your friend is kind of like your own status. symbol and like uh it's just a reflection of you and so like if you have a bad time with friend it might it might not be the product it might just be you yeah yeah i'm just thinking about the uh the the x-a-i ony thing it seems very clear that like you will be buying different clothing

for that companion uh yeah or or maybe less clothing for that companion in the future but uh that feels like something where whales a lot of people on the timeline do not like that product like the initial reaction has been similar very like a lot of pushback and but at the same time if there are a few people that really like it and they're willing to spend a lot of money that could have the dynamics of the the free-to-play video game market or yeah but i i think all of these companies are kind of doomed because once you go porn you never go back and they've kind of tainted the the image of their companions is like mostly just being these sex fonts what about the vhs tape vhs tape that started with porn right isn't that the story

Yeah, it did, but it wasn't like a singular company, maybe, I guess, right? Or something like, you know, replica, right? Like, they can't really reverse their image of it being this sex bot. And I think that's kind of an issue that, like, app or web-based companions will have. But if you have something like friend, oh, if you have something like friend, then it's kind of a bit more of like this platonic companion that you could just kind of physically have and that's it. And I don't know, whatever. I mean, clearly, like, it's very, very clear that in the prompt that you've written and the craft that you've put into shaping the behavior of their friend, like, you did not go that direction. And I think that should be applauded, honestly.

Yeah, I mean, look, it vibrates. You can still try and fuck it if you want it, but I'll leave that up to my customers. Whoa. Anyway, thank you so much dropping on. Yeah, thanks, guys. We'll talk to hear from Yavi. See you. Let me tell you at figma.com.

Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can think about it like your friend for design. Jordy, do you have some breaking news? What's going on? You said, whoa. What's that?

You said, whoa. Oh, he was swearing. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I was trying to find like this. Oh, yeah. Anyway, let's go back to Open AI. They are developing an AI movie.

So the startup is lending its tools and computing resources. Obie's making a film as well. Oh, yeah, he is, right? He's making a feature-length. Film. Oh, we should have gotten the update on that. Anyway, next time. So Open AI is going to make a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI, and there's

some interesting details in here about exactly where they're using AI and where they aren't. So Critters is about forest creatures that go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. It's the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Sounds like a Chad. Nelson. You're making this internally?

Yeah. Crazy. Nelson started sketching out. characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then Open AI's new Dolly image generation tool. Now he has teamed up with production companies in Los Angeles in London, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at Cannes Film Festival in May. And there has been an AI short film festival that happened in L.A., I believe it was put on

by runway or one of the other AI image generator companies, but this is potentially like the first really serious effort in AI-generated feature length. So the team is attempting to make a movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co-founder of the London-based Vertigo Films, Vertigo's producing the film, along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI, along with traditional visual production tools. So Critters has a budget of less than 30 million, far less than what animated films typically cost. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices, and that's particularly interesting. the founder of 11 Labs on the show later. And from my perspective, the question is like, where are we in the uncanny valley?

Like, clearly this is opening I, either saying, hey, we just haven't done that much work on voice cloning and voice generation to really feel confident about that. Or they think that there's something about the human voice that's still clockable as AI more than the animated film. Because the animated creature, you know, you're not comping it to

a real human and so if it looks a little funky you chalk that up to the design of the character. Just like when you watch... When I'm watching an animated film, I'm not obsessing over like, oh, that... That doesn't look real. Or that specific scene wasn't, wasn't, you know,

his leg looks slightly different than that other where he was running. Totally, totally. Yeah, if you watch the original toy story, which is pretty much the first big CGI film, like there are tons of things where you're like, that texture does not look like leather. That texture does not look like cloth. That, like, that is clearly, like, pretty rough around the edges, but you're in a fantasy world, and so you just suspend disbelief the whole

time. But the voices are very clearly human, recorded, and so I think this is a place where they're, you know, betting on, hey, it's still worth it to cast human actors there and not go AI voices. They're also going to hire real artists to draw sketches that are fed into open AI's tools. So essentially, instead of needing to keyframe, and this is our a whole process to... So they're going to do some traditional... There's going to be a lot of traditional stuff. But the sketches, and we can pull up this shot of what they sketched

and then what OpenAI rendered, you can see that this is effectively like you're, the artists are working at storyboard level, and then if you scroll down, you'll see what the final image looks like. Look, that looks like a photo reel, you know, Hollywood level CGI. Photo reel? I mean, it looks... It looks... It looks...

It looks like photo reel, no, I'm kidding. It looks at the level of, like, what I would expect if they were like, Toy Story 5 is coming out, and this is what the character looks like. I'd be like, yeah, okay, like the rendering looks good. The shadows are in the right places for this fantastical character. So Open AI can say what its tools do all day long, but it's much more impactful if someone does it, says Chad Nelson. There's a much better case study that that's a much better case study than me building a demo. Entertainment companies, including Disney and Netflix, are experimenting with AI tools for a variety of presentations. production, U.X and marketing work, but many have been wary of a wholesale embrace, in part because

they fear upsetting actors and writers whose guilds have fought. Yeah, remember, I think it was last year when all the protests were happening in L.A., the guilds were just fighting to just have basically a total ban on AI. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, it's a tough business. Like the CGI world, those businesses have never been very profitable. I remember there was this very controversial moment during Aung Lee's acceptance speech

for Life of Pie where the VFX studio had created a fantastic photo reel rendering of a tiger that had jumped around on this boat the whole time it's a beautiful movie, looks fantastic. But I believe he forgot to thank the VFX studio, the VFX team, and then the VFX company went out of business.

Even though they had won the Oscar. Like they'd done the best job possible. But the economics of the business were so rough because it's perfectly competitive. And then basically all the Hollywood studios go out and they say, okay, the budget for this movie is $30 million. That's what we're going to sign up for. And then they just give them more and more revisions until they max out. So it's very, very thin profit margins. And so a lot of the business has moved international.

There aren't that many big VFX. in the United States, and so it's all just a very complicated, complicated business. So Warner Brothers Discovery has actually filed a suit against Mid Journey, and Disney and Comcast Universal also has sued Mid Journey for making copies of their copyrighted properties. The script for Critters was written by some of the members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru. Interesting, though. So making copies of their copyrighted properties, this maybe sounds like different than the

Anthropic lawsuit with the writers where it was like Anthropic was using Libgen. Yeah. And not paying. Yep. In this case, this might be that Mid Journey actually bought the videos, but then made copies of them. Interesting. During the, during the trading process, but I don't know.

I don't know how much we should read into that. I mean, these, at least the Warner Brothers discovery lawsuit just filed last week. So I imagine they haven't even gone through discovery. No pun intended. But if lawyers do lose their job. to AI, they are certainly going to cash out on the way out. Yes, for sure. On these copyright lawsuits.

The script for Critters was written by some members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru. And again, interesting. Did you see Paddington? I saw Paddington in Peru. Really? It wasn't as good as the first or second Paddington's. I would put the first Paddington in a child. Is it an adult movie or did you?

No, it's a kids movie. So it with my son. Yeah, it's fantastic. You made it sound like you didn't just watch it. You studied it. Oh. I have sat myself down and watched Paddington on multiple occasions. It's one of the greatest films of all time.

Okay. Battington is actually, I think it's at the top of the IMDB ratings. It's like one of the greatest movies of all the time. No way. I'm so out of the loop. No, Paddington is incredible. I highly, highly recommend Paddington. It's a great movie.

Anyway. I get on it. Open AI is betting that if Critters is successful, it will show that AI can deliver content strong enough for the big screen and accelerate Hollywood's adoption of the technology. Nelson said opening eyes tools can also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content. Now the question...

I mean, on this note, what I've been saying is right now there's sort of a certain amount of budget every year provided by various groups to fund films. And if you just reduce the cost, even by 60, 70%, it's like, well, if you could potentially just get way, way, way more films, right? And potentially it doesn't necessarily, I mean, it doesn't necessarily,

suck out the profits too in the industry, right? Because it's just potentially a budget of $100 million that would have gone to one film. Now it goes to three different groups that are each making their own film. So it could end up being a win. Yeah, I mean, I think the dynamic here is that it is extremely telling that they are still using humans

to come up with the concept and come up the script and do the voice acting. And it's not an attempt at one shot an entire film using AI from start to finish. The prompt is not make a movie for $30 million that makes more than $30 million. Like, that is the prompt that you give a studio executive. Like when you go, that is the job of a real studio executive

is just make money. Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes, right? And then they have to go out and find a script and they have to find an artist and they have to find a post-production house and distribution and marketing campaign. And they have to make a bunch of really great entrepreneurial decisions

to actually return the capital that's invested. Now, with this, I see AI as being used as a tool, much like the original Pixar Render Man was used as a tool to create Toy Story, or Cinema 4D or Houdini are used to generate hordes of battles during Game of Thrones, et cetera. And so this should wind up being just another option in the tool chest for gold rock is also saying you know you take that same budget and if less has to go into production then you can put more into marketing and events surrounding it activations et cetera yeah

i mean i would imagine that that this that the long-term effect of this should be something similar to what cloud computing did for startups so before it was like raised 10 million dollars and make sure that you have not a data center but like you have a closet with racks of servers because if you want to build a website, you need to buy a server. And then it became sign up for the free tier of AWS or Google. And so what wound up happening?

Well, we got a lot more startups, but that didn't mean that everyone made money. There was a lot, there were a ton of failures, but we got a lot more shots on goal. And because the bar was lower, we got a very steep power law outcome, but we get more value overall. And I would imagine that that's what happens

with movies, movie doesn't mean that everyone's going to create a movie that makes money or is great or loved there's going to be a lot of slop that people don't like it all just like think about all the startups that are out there that don't do well but they're able to actually when you when you watch a regular movie I've done this a couple times I think you've done it quite a bit quite a bit more and it's bad yeah it really is you guys went to all this effort totally all these months all you know shooting all this content to make a bad movie and how many times is that because oh oh the camera wasn't working or something or like oh no it's usually the

narrative delivery exactly it's like it's the it's the art of bringing everything together and that's something that I think is going to stick in human world for a long time yeah um because yeah I mean there's a bunch of reasons of how complex it is how hard it is to build reinforcement learning on top of it it's very it's very hard to build this like reinforcement learning environment around just make a profitable film like That takes years. It's a huge investment. It's very hard to reverse engineer.

Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance-managed risk and prove trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework

or managing a complex platform. And now would be a great time to talk about fall. Yes. The generative media platform for developers. We've had GORCOM, the CEO, on the show multiple times. This company is growing at a, absolutely ridiculous rate.

It just crossed a $100 million run rate. I believe it was a week or two ago. And Fall works with a bunch of different companies, Adobe, Canva. What? Everyone wants this eagle sound effect. The Eagle effect. Apparently that's for turbo puffer, but I think everyone... We can use it for everyone.

It's just so good. But anyways, if you want to leverage all of these new image, video, audio models through a single API, you can go over to Fall. and check it out. And happy to introduce you to the team if you're interested as well. But this company is an absolute monster and we're pumped to be partnering with them. We're very excited. That's our latest, our latest sponsor of the show. They make it possible. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Lulu Lemon is now the worst performer of the S&P 500 year to date. I didn't even realize they were in the S&P 500. That's, I mean, that is an accomplishment.

They're in the league. The stock is down 56%. Oh, the trade desk is down 55%. The trade desk was a company that people were really praising for just elegant and incredible. There was some narrative violation around the trade desk. I need to dig into that. But it was something like they hadn't raised any money

or something like that was why they were so. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that Nike and Nike. Gartner is down 50%. Gartner is in the trough of disillusionment. Gardner is in the trough. You created it. Gardner, gardener. Gardner.

All right, let's keep it together. What comes after the trough of disillusionment? The plateau of productivity. No, no. It's not the plateau of productivity. After the trough of disillusionment is the slope of enlightenment. Okay, okay, okay. And so don't worry.

I'm just saying, the slope of enlightenment. It's ahead. It's ahead of you. It's only up from here. only up from there. If the hype cycle holds true, it's only up from here. But it's interesting Nike and Lulu Lemon

both Nike peaked in in 2021. They obviously went heavy into e-commerce and Lulu Lemon I don't necessarily, they always had a pretty big e-com presence, but

I think this is a case of just getting eaten alive by Allo and fory and all these sort of new entrants that are going after that same market of like kind of non-athlet sort of wellness right and yeah this this tells me they just basically like took the market for athleisure and just divide it up amongst themselves yep people are also dunking on them for not reading the room and kind of staying in that like jaguar rebrand world and not pivoting fast enough

to the new Sydney-Sweeney American Eagle style campaign of Americana and so I think if they want to bring it back, there's one easy solution they should hire Lulu do you start going direct I think that's the move. Something there.

They should also get graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster, update that. Yeah, website Lulu Lemon, get on graphite. Well, you know, you remember Chip used to go direct and that didn't go so well for Chip Wilson founder of Lulu Lemon?

Oh, I didn't know that. No. He did a really famous interview where people were saying, like, you know, Lulu Lemon doesn't fit everyone. And he said, like, my clothes aren't for everyone, basically, implying that, like, he didn't make clothing for people that weren't fit. Oh, interesting. And then there was a backlash to that, and then they became kind of, you know, more inclusive.

Is that the idea of like the cycle? Because now they're getting, they're getting dragged, at least in the crazy X comments about being like too inclusive or something like that, not Sydney, Sweeney, American Eagle coded enough. Anyway, that's, yeah, that's wild. Yeah, founder says brand is not for everybody. You know what's funny is that there's a fantastic video of the, it's not the founder of Lamborghini, but it's the, like, the head of sales of Lamborghini when the Lamborghini Kuntash came out in the 80s. And he's doing a TV interview, and the interviewer says,

who is this car for? Is this car for everyone? And he says, no, this car is not for everyone. This Lamborghini Kuntash has a V-12, right? Isn't it a V-12? And it's incredibly tight. Doug Jumero, I think, he can't drive it with his shoes. He has to take his shoes off because it doesn't fit. And it's this insanely loud, insanely engaging crazy experience. He says, this is for someone who has an extra car that travels behind them with their luggage.

And he says some other wild stuff about who the Lamborghini Kuntash buyer is. And so truly, I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with having a small market or defining the market and excluding people from the market like Lamborghini Kuntosh, like the Kuntosh. It's not for everyone. I think that's fine. I think they can make it more desirable. But you have to price accordingly and you have to actually deliver at that level.

And so Lulu Llemon might not have ever been the kuntosh of clothing. Yeah, it's different. This is before GLP1s, right? This is Lululemon theoretically would have a buyer that is buying the products to get fit and get healthy. And so for the founder to be like, you know, it's different to. I think they were a public company by that time already. Yeah. Kind of a credible story of the company over all the... Anyway, good luck to them.

Hopefully they build back. Hopefully they ride the hype cycle alongside Gartner into the plateau of productivity. Pretty funny. There's a video here of Putin's advisor, Kobayakov, as went out on record and is saying the U.S. is going to shove debt into stable coins. and to sort of like try to wipe out the system. Russia is just accused of the U.S. of using crypto to wipe out its $35 trillion debt and Rexes. That's exactly what we're going to do.

Yeah, they're going to socialize. Yeah, so good Alexander went pretty viral. I think it was on Friday or Saturday going on this like 20-minute rant talking about stable coins and gambling and hyper. hyper-capitalism, and yet, you know, obviously the dollar is a way to export our debt. Yep. And stable coins can potentially accelerate that. It's potentially a situation where it's sort of like net positive for the world. If people can access a more stable currency, they can, you know, participate in our inflationary.

It's less positive than it is right now because it's. basically, like, you've been getting global stability and, you know, open trade routes sort of for free without having to participate in that debt that pays for it. No, I mean, you will also be paying for. By nature of needing to transact and settle trade and dollars, you already were financing. Yeah, yeah, but on the margin, more people will be transacting in dollars and therefore more people will be socializing. Yeah, and holding the dollar because it's, you know, I mean, and this is a question.

and we've brought this up with a number of people when talking about stable coins is, at what point does foreign government just say, like, no, we don't want our citizens to hold stables, right? We want you to hold our money. Yeah, it seems like a crazy, crazy move to be like, yeah, I'll just give up my own currency

and dollarize. But we've been in the game of dollar-assum for a while. We like dollar-lizers. It's not our first dollarization. Don't go dollar with us. Don't try it. This is interesting. Unitri Robotics is filing for an IPO at a $7 billion valuation. Annual revenue of $140 million, way, way less than thought.

Yeah. They have 65% of the robot, 65% of their revenue is from robot dogs. Let's give it up for robot dogs. And that's 70% of the global market. Who's got the other 30%. So 65% they must be doing $100 million of robot dogs. and the total market of robot dogs globally must be like $130 million? I guess the dogs are barking, John.

But that's like not a lot of robot dogs. I mean, still the main thing, this going out at $7 billion is not good for a certain. Paying 50X revenue. Well, I'm just saying. I know what you're saying. You know what I'm saying. I'm just saying there's people out there in the humanoid space that don't want comps out there. Yes, yes, yes.

No comps, please. No comps, please. Keep the comps out of the market. Yes, yeah. But is this going to IPO? Is this going to IPO? Is this going to IPO in America? That would be crazy, but who knows? So, while he looks that up, 30% is from the humanoid robot.

5% is from the sales of sensors, actuators, and controllers. It's happening, says Nick. You love to see it. I love how he can take any news. news and make it seem like it's so over, so back. The IPO is going to be on a Chinese stock exchange. Well, if you want to trade on the American stock exchanges, like on American Patriot, go to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got industry leading yields. They're multi-ass investing in the trusted by millions.

They, uh, we hung out with, uh, public, uh, earlier today team this morning. They made us a cake. It's very nice of them. It said, uh, congrats for nothing. Get back to work. It was good. It was very funny. And it was revealed in this hilarious way of like showing up to breakfast with this

massive box that like clearly has a cake in it, but he's like, I'm not going to tell you what's in here. I'm like, that's obviously a cake, dude. But he's like, no, no, no, I got to reveal it once you're all sitting down. That's where he sits down and he opens up. Congratulations. But then I was surprised because the joke on top is very fun. Yeah, the joke on top.

I enjoyed that. Anyway, uh, Elizabeth Holmes has been on an absolute. Ter, poster in residence, poster in prison. So Elizabeth Holmes posted some, what would I tell the 19-year-old girl who was getting ready to drop out of Stanford to Bill Theranos, doing some thought leadership posting. And Gonto says, since when are we taking advice from somebody who went to jail? There should be a community note in the post. And Elizabeth Holmes says, let's listen to a growth exec who has 8K followers. brutal. Ray showed and Rohit says

beginning to like Elizabeth Holmes. Very funny. I don't have a problem with taking advice from people who went to jail. They probably learned a lot. I believe in restorative justice although she is still in jail, so. Yeah, it's I think this is going to be the new playbook of like when a public figure

turns the entire world against them. Wait. Higher ghostwriter. And then hire ghostwriter and just start posting. Start posting, for sure. But I mean, you have to be, You have to be huge. Like, Elizabeth Holmes has a movie and a documentary and a book. Screlly, Screlly did this. Yeah, but Screlly didn't even get the treatment that Holmes did.

I would say that Elizabeth Holmes is more of a household name than Screlly. I think, yeah, she is, but he's also, I mean, he's just so good on the mic. I definitely got people. I actually, I DMed Elizabeth Holmes, invited her on the show via a phone interview. Are we sure that it's actually her? No, we're not. It's probably her husband. but well yeah it's her handwriting every post maybe no yeah i mean just reacting too quickly i mean

there's probably a little bit of her in here for sure uh but uh but uh i i do think it's mostly the uh the husband who's on the outside but i can't confirm that that's pure conspiracy theory um but uh we remember when we were talking about elizabeth homes like months ago and i was saying like i'm ready to hear her out but I want her to talk about biology specifically. I want her to, that is the path of redemption, is give me some banger takes about what's going on in GLP-1s,

what's going on in MRNA, what's going on in DNA analysis and sequencing. Like, show me that you are truly generational on the cutting edge, because I feel like Martin Screlli's been doing that. He was like, I was at a hedge fund, I went to jail, now I'm coming out, what am I giving you? I'm giving you hedge fund like,

takes and my takes, a lot of people agree that they're pretty good. And so, Screlli has somewhat redeemed himself in the sense that, like, he might have done something wrong and wound up in prison and gotten out and served his time. But the key thing is, is that, like, his initial claim of, like, I'm a finance guy is sort of continuing to ring true. But none of Elizabeth Holmes posts thus far scream, like, wow, really differentiated view in bio. Like, there is alpha, in understanding the bio world if I listen to her. Like, yeah, she's in prison, but clearly she's a great biologist. Clearly, she's a great scientist.

She messed up on the finance side, defrauded investors, went to jail. But I need to listen to her because she understands where the puck is going in terms of biology or science. And I'm not seeing that yet, so I'm withholding my endorsement of her. Anyway, if you want to be on the cutting edge of science or data analysis, go to Julie. Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. They're loved by over two million users and trusted by individuals. The business insider this morning looking like an absolute chat.

The photos, they sent a great, they sent a great photographer for them. Really, really good. It worked. Dart says, I moved to a new place two years ago, high risk area, job related, not exactly by choice. So I made a bunch of these signs and put them up everywhere. Two years in, and my house has pretty much been the only one in the entire neighborhood that hasn't been broken into. And it says, protected by Palantir home security.

That, of course, is fake. But, you know, he put it up there. I think this whole thing's just a funny post. I don't think that the average home intruder knows what Palantir is. But still, very funny post. I don't know. Maybe they're part of the retail army. Maybe.

They're like, oh, oh, for that reason, I'm not invading you. Maybe they're breaking that during, like, buy more Palantir shares because they're so bullish. Oh, they're breaking into other houses, but then they see that as a sign of respect. Yeah. Say, I'm so long Palantir that I won't break into this house. Yeah, they just believe in the company's. But that makes sense. Totally possible.

Kylie Robinson hit the timeline. She fired back with a quote tweet, and she says, listening to this, L.O.L. I did not go into the review expecting to hate it. also was aware I'm not the target audience for an always listening device and she highlights, she puts us in the true sound, highlights a part of the article, she says, I'll admit I'm not the

target audience. I imagine the person who'd want a friend is someone who is likely not a journalist who may have more social occasions where they can sport an always listening pendant. And anyways, so. I feel like journalists should be perfect for an always

on listening device because every time you talk to that, they're like, do you mind if I record this? They're like, let me pull out my phone and record this. You should just have an always-on recording device is like the perfect device for the journalist. It's in fact like the new notebook for the journalist. Yeah, and you can just say, let me know if you ever want to go off the record. Exactly. By default, you're on the record and I'm recording.

I think that long term, we might see massive product market fit with friends. They should do enterprise product for journalists. Yeah. Yeah. So the journalist gets it, where is it? And as soon as you interact with the journalist, you know that you're being recorded and everything you say is on the record. Speaking of journalist, Julie Hornstein has a little deep dive on Raul and some other young founders. They've long been icons. She says, she wrote about how because of AI hype and ease of vibe coding teens and 20-somethings are flooding Silicon Valley to build startups instead of attending college or securing big tech jobs. Founders told me that they'd rather start a company than go to college because of AI gives you a Ph.D. in your pocket, as Jake Adler said, love Jake. Because of mass layoffs, Roy Lee thinks the worst thing someone who wants to be, who wants a stable future could do is work in big tech. Interesting. Roy Lee coming in with a hot take, as he's known to do. College is dead, says zero interest rates. He graduated from university in 2019. Marvin von Hagen, 25. I feel like I was just 10. texting with Margin, Marvin.

Is that right? Marvin. I think I got to text him back. No, literally I do. Yeah, he texted me. He said, hey, we got an intro. He's releasing a short film. We got to play this.

Okay. We got to get him on the show. Anyway, 30% of the Y Combinator batch were college students are new grads. So, nice little trend piece with some beautiful, beautiful photography. So shout out to everyone that was featured in Silicon Valley's

youth quake in the age of AI. Founders aren't waiting to grow up since Business Insider. Well, Manitis says basically everyone underestimates how big of a role office selection plays in the outcomes of companies in their cultures. I recently had the chance to spend 24 hours at Lego headquarters.

Will, where did you enter and then stay the night? Did you not get the memo about the Great Locket? You're not just supposed to be going and hanging out at the Lego headquarters going to kid mode this is a dream come true for any child yeah but yeah that's what they say about Willie no but I'm just I'm still kind of hung up 24 hours at Lego headquarters did he enter at like one one PM and it's bait it's so good it's the best bait bait but I do like you can see they have they have that Lego on the actual side of

the building we have a fish there I feel like we had a fish at some point for bait yes so Lego is a relatively strange company for the toy industry, even at $10 billion in annualized revenue, the company has never taken a dollar of equity financing and still family-owned and controlled since 1932. The company is based in Billund, Denmark, a farm town of just 7,000, and where they're founded is still where they are.

That's pretty remarkable. The company and the Christonson family, through their holding company, K-I-K-B-I, functionally own the town of Belund from the airport majority control to a large majority of the real estate and the hotel tourist infrastructure. This allows them

to make remarkably long-term decisions. Like 24-hour visits for random American entrepreneurs. Let's pull an all-nighter together. We're thinking long-term. No, this is maybe this is part of, maybe. You want to pick my brain? Let's think long-term. Lego, the Lego execs are participating in the

great lock-in. Maybe. He said, come visit, but you've got to be locked-in with us. 24 hours just pulling all nighter we gotta get more more info here you ever were you big lego land kid growing up not a big lego land kid Lego land I'm gonna date myself built like I remember when it was built

and I remember when it like opened and I was like there on like one of the first days but only went like once or twice but very cool support Lego land big into Legos generally yeah huge stepping on them um yes one of the worst pains imagine

um well some of this investment has been company related. Much of it has not been. The family has been actively involved in turning a blighted racetrack into a new neighborhood and improving civic and school infrastructure. This kind of long-term investment in a place is only really possible with a large balance sheet and patient private control. This was a rare thing before the last 10 years, but many tech companies could now fit this mold. That's interesting. My prediction is we will see many more company towns emerge. So, I mean, This is kind of happened. I feel like Menlo Park is very nice, and Cupertino is very nice.

And then a lot of that's just a benefit of, you know, Apple sets up a massive headquarters there. All the employees are wealthy. And so the town, the taxes, everything flows for that. California Forever Project could turn into this, right? If you get a single tenant in there that's doing like shipbuilding. Yeah, but you need a company to be the backbone of the flywheel. And that's certainly what's going on in Denmark. The results of this investment are clear.

Even on a Saturday, many employees were walking, biking to the office, with families in tow. The town felt vibrant with a mix of visitors, employees, and locals. So now we're finding out that he spent 24 hours there on a Saturday. So, when did you get there Friday night and didn't leave until Saturday night? Or he slept there on Saturday night and woke up on Sunday and left? I'm so confused. So he says, it seems like a remarkably pleasant place to. live and work that eliminates many of the trade-offs of highly urban's office settings

as we see the emergence of dozen late-stage privates with fortress balance sheets. It's hard to imagine the company town not returning. I like it a lot. It's a good take. I would like to do a TV company town. I would love that. I would also love a turbo puffer company town. Let's sound.

Search every bite, serverless vector, and full-text search. From first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extreme. extremely scalable. Get started for free. Be like linear. Be like cursor. Head over to Turbo Puffer. It's time to puff. So, Scott Besson, he is... He's been on a roll.

He's got a little bit of a pension for curse words. I don't normally like curse words. I kind of like when he does it. Yeah, but it won Geiger Capital over. Geiger Capital says, I'd follow Scott Besson into war. And Scott Besson said, Why are, why the F are you talking to the president about me?

F you, I'll punch you in your effing face. And Geiger Capital says, that's my treasury secretary. Anyway, just a funny quote. I don't know how that got to the into point. Try this line. If you have a coworker, you heard them talking, talking to management in a not so kind way about you, try this out. Yeah.

This out and the, you know, run the water cooler. Keep the president from talking about you. Keep ChachyPT talking about you. Go to Profound, get your brand mentioned in Chachapit. Reach millions of new consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And he like MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, Ramp, Zapier, Workable, U.S. Bank. And I saw one post on the timeline. Somebody asked, what's the best way to get your brand mentioned in Chachapit?

And the answer was profound. And so clearly, Profound has been dog food. They're dog pooting. So, preview of what might happen at Meta Connect. Jukon has a screenshot here from SemiCon Sam. I was considering releasing it as a paid post, but after much thought, I decided to make it free. I hope you all enjoy my analysis on smart glasses.

Why smart glasses are already dominated by China, why even Apple and Meta have no choice but to cooperate. So this article says, recently there was an article like this. Meta will unveil new smart glasses called Hypernova at its annual Connect event on September 17th and 18th, the prevailing view was that unlike the previously released Rayban Metaglases, the Hypernova coming this time would have a display and its price would be high above $1,400. However, contrary to expectations, according to a report

by Mark German, absolute dog, it will launch at $800. So German kind of runs through it. It's still higher than the Meta-Ray bands that are in $200 to $400, but should be still pricey, but lower than people initially expected. So the question trying to be answered by this substack article is, why is that? I wanted to find out the reason, I want to find the reason in competition with Chinese manufacturers. About a month ago, Alibaba released smart glasses called Quark Vision, but the price is 1,999 yuan. About 280 bucks. That's pretty cheap.

I'm not laughing at the price. I'm laughing at the name. Quark vision. You ever want Quark? Quark vision. It's time to, it's time for Quark Vision. I don't know. Maybe it sounds better in Chinese. So for META's perspective, with China putting products out that cheaply, they might have thought, how can we manage to charge more than $400 and decided to set a lower price? I believe smart glasses will become a truly essential device, this writer, is smart glasses pilled. I'm also

optimistic about the growth in smart glasses. Generally, V-R, AR. I think we're about to see the churn rates drop and the adoption rates increase. Let me give an example. Unlike smartphone, smart glasses are much more convenient to operate. You don't need to move your fingers. You can

operate them through humanity's most concise action, your voice. For instance, if you're trying to use AI features like Gemini Live on a smartphone, you would have to open the camera app with your fingers, scan things yourself with AI glasses, camera on the device is effectively seeing what I'm seeing, so there's the advantage that I don't have to issue instructions one by one. And so he lays out kind of a bull case for the smart glasses. This is the industry's classification of smart glasses by generation. Gen 1, which is the

current generation, doesn't have a display. AI features are supported through a smartphone integration. Gen 2, which is next year, supposedly, will be equipped with a low resolution display, and then Gen 3 has a high end display, full-color, 2K resolution, AI, and spatial computing, like what we saw in the Apple Vision Pro. So, starting from, so he says, that's why I believe the second generation is the point where we can start calling them smart glasses from the second generation onward displays provide visual information, allowing users to access much richer data through the glasses to draw an analogy up to the first generation they were like PDAs but starting from the second generation they can be called smartphones so very bullish on

on the growth here um and uh i think we can was it get was there anything else here in here that you wanted to run through yeah i just thought the pricing information was interesting yeah they could try to run the same playbook of just selling the same playbook that they ran with like DJI right of just like selling below the actual cost to produce the devices to just try to get adoption yeah but um we'll see it is I haven't I haven't seen that much reporting on the bill of materials for the Oculus Quest three but I don't believe that they were selling it at a massive discount like I I do think it was uh probably profitable on a per unit basis but then they were just spending so much on R&D to actually build

the next versions. It would be very interesting to see what happens if they released something at the level of Apple Vision Pro, but at the price point of the Quest 4 or something like that. I really, I'm excited about the smart glasses, but I'm honestly more excited about just an Apple Vision Pro level image and screen being pulled into something with the Quest's ergonomics. So there's some interesting, so basically brightness and power. efficiency are the most important things when it comes to displays and the reason that Apple's Vision Pro can crush it on brightness is because the field of view is actually blocked so there's no outside light coming in and so they can deliver this like ultra crisp image

and what meta and Quark are doing is like you can just see the real world and see a display on it so the the sort of quality of the image will lag behind that just like ultra high fidelity that you're getting with the Vision Pro. Yeah. But obviously, it's insanely real trade-off. Yeah. I mean, the physics of light state that it's an additive process. So, like, if you're outside and it's bright and you want to project a black cube

into that world, that's basically impossible from a physics perspective. Because the bright light's going to shine through. You're adding light on top of it, and there's not really anything that you can do to make the black cube show up on the beach in Santa Monica if you're just walking around. So there are some serious headwinds there. That's why Palmer Lucky predicted that the end result of augmented reality would be reprojection, which is what the Apple Vision Pro does, take a camera. Because then if you take a camera and you play that on the inside of the display,

you can turn down the brightness all around the black cube and then you can put the black cube over there and you can block out the light that's behind it. But occlusion with dark objects in augmented reality scenarios is basically physically impossible. I don't know. Seems very difficult. Anyway, whatever. If you're planning to launch an augmented reality headset, you've got to get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.

Meet the system for model and software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Gerardticket says Houston is like if the AWS console. Tyler there, what's going on? Yeah. How are you doing, Tyler? What's new to your world? I was just laughing. I was just so excited about the linear. Okay. Yeah. Give us an update. What is, what is burning up the timeline in your world? What was your favorite post from this weekend?

Okay. Let me find a really good one. I'll get back. Okay. In the meantime, let's talk about Houston, the city in Texas. Houston is like if the AWS console was a city, says Jira tickets. And Kathleen Turner says, dang, why? And Jira tickets is, I don't know. I've never been to Houston. Like, I, yeah, I don't even know what this means. I don't know why this wound up in the show or in the run of show. I think this wound up, it wound up in the run of show like multiple times for some reason.

Nice. But did you put it in? I put it in. I thought it was funny. Why? What appeal to you about this? Do you think it's an apt analogy? Have you ever used the AWS console?

Do you know how confusing it is? Yes. Okay. So is that the take? It's just saying it's really confusing. Not the best designed city. Okay. Yeah.

I get that. But like, it's also just funny. A lot of horsepack. hour under the hood. It's a good post. It's a good post. It's a good post. Shout out, Jared tickets. ASML. Yeah, this was, this was cool. Asimel decided to become a VC, according to Wasteland Capital, to boost European tech sovereignty and burn one and a half billion and shareholder funds into Mistral. Hey, it's not burned. We don't know that they burned it. They, they Yolode it in. Uh, lithography bun plus third tier LLM meat with a topping of

EU bureaucrat, derogist, derogism, I don't know that word. It's a word that I can't pronounce and you can't pronounce, meaning that it might be a new type of AI hamburger. Anyways, people are not- State control of economic matters. So people are not excited about ASML's investment. They did about three quarters of Mistral, $2 billion series C. Mestral is getting valued at just north of cognition

the latest round and anyways people are basically saying ASML was potentially worried about about having, you know, being like too much of like a private company, you know, and just like focusing on generating profits and they have to like

redistribute some of that wealth to the broader to the broader market. Indeed. What did... But anyways, it might be, I mean, if Mistral, I think clearly it's France's national champion and effectively one of Europe's champions. And I'm sure they can figure out a way to create value. And hopefully ASML shareholders get a nice return here. Doug O'Loughlin overfabricated knowledge said,

this is very simple, national champion. Don't overthink it. There isn't a 4D chess move. This is checkers. So I actually don't know exactly what that, like what the interpretation of that thesis is. Like national champion just means like you must be supported at all costs, right? And so like it doesn't make, it doesn't necessarily matter if it pencils out on, on some DCF right now. It's like we need to continue to support that.

We have the capital. So let's continue to support our national champion. Yeah. Makes sense. You want to talk about Echo Star? Yeah. So SpaceX is buying Echo Stars AWS4 and HBlock Spectrum license. for about $17 billion.

The payment will be split. It's up to $8.5 billion in cash and $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock, which is crazy. The big takeaway, the deal allows SpaceX to expand its direct device mobile services more independently beyond its existing T-Mobile partnership. I'm going to pull this up.

Echo Star, so this is an industry that's heavily regulated, and you would think that in a more free market, SpaceX could just say, we're going to start building, we're going to just create this mobile internet service. And it doesn't work like that.

But there are specific licenses. You don't want traffic on the same spectrum. Yeah. Band of the spectrum. Yeah. Shares of Echo Star rose as much as 26% on Monday. to a record high of $84, its bonds were the biggest gainers in the junk bond market. Yeah, apparently, EchoStar was, like, potentially veering towards bankruptcy, like they hadn't

been paying that. Wait, wait, so what did EchoStar stock do? Up 26%. Because now, now it's basically a SpaceX holdco. Like, because they've $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock. What's their market cap? So it should trade it like $10 trillion. Intentionally.

What's their market cap? $22 billion. Whoa. Wow. This is a treasury. So we were talking about this morning, there's all these crypto treasuries. Yep. And then you would think, like, why doesn't somebody create like the Elon like treasury company?

Yep. And the reason for that is like if you start adding shares, then you become a registered investment advisor. And there's all this compliance, much harder than just putting like digital assets or tokens. Yeah. These are just like, I have USD. I have Bitcoin. They're kind of the same thing. I'm putting my treasury wherever.

And then micro strategy now just strategy wound up just. having a ton of Bitcoin, and then it became this way to invest in Bitcoin just with a public ticker. But Echo Star will now be the most concentrated way to get allocation into SpaceX, right? That's so crazy. That is crazy. Basically, if you bought it Friday, basically the value of the business then was just like SpaceX, plus the cash they got from this deal, like the SpaceX stock. Yeah. So the company is sitting on this license and they just sold it, flipped it into SpaceX stock. Crazy.

That is a very, I wonder if they... Ed Ludlow, the bigger takeaway is, I think we got a SpaceX meme stock on our hands soon. This is crazy. Oh, you're saying this is your take. Well, yeah, so Ed Ludlow, his big takeaway, which I agree with, I think you are correct. The big takeaway is the deal allows SpaceX to expand its direct-to-device mobile services more independently beyond needing to partner with T-Mobile. They can go direct and cut out T-Mobile.

extremely bullish for SpaceX direct-to-device. Obviously, that's going to be a huge business. And they're really making a lot of inroads there with partnerships and now owning the actual license. But the other big takeaway is that now there is a company where, what, 25% of their market cap is directly indexed to SpaceX, and it's just a public ticker. That is a crazy developer.

They have a bunch of cash. They're also burning money. They lost $300 million last quarter. Well, hopefully they'll make it all back on Elon Co. Who knows? Anyway, numeral HQ. Yeah, you're the only other thing. Let me, yeah, you go for this. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance while you're looking that up. Tyler, what do you find for me? All right. So I think my favorite post was Will Brown. Oh, yeah. He said he was at a family wedding in Spain. This is fantastic. brought a printed out semi-analysis cluster max list of the, you know, the neoclouds.

He was asking why prime intellect is at the bottom. Hey, he made the list. Hey, made the list. That's great. That is a great. At a family wedding in Spain, Uncle brought a print out of the semi-analysis cluster mass list and ask why we're underperforming, explaining the difference between marketplaces and data centers and how we're not just selling compute.

We're also advancing RL Infra. I love it. Oh, very fun. So one small problem with the meme stock potential of echo stock. They've got 29 billion of debt that they had been basically defaulting on. Maybe they'll be selling this basic stock off slowly to pay for the debt. Honestly, just hold. Just hold.

Just make the minimum payments on the interest and just hold on and just hope Elon gets to Mark. Wait, so you're telling me that the next. narrative around this company is that it's a levered bet on SpaceX in the public markets that are the ticker that anyone can trade. Yes. And the company's already levered up. Yes, you can think that they're not, they don't even need the lever up further. Yeah, you can think they're already levered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Extremely levered. Except unfortunately, they didn't spend, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't, they already had that. They already had it. Yeah, they didn't need to, they didn't even need. They don't need, there are, oh, there are two steps.

X earnings. Most people are like, I'm going to become a treasury company, then I'll lever up to buy more Bitcoin, and my company will act as like a 2x levered Bitcoin. Yeah. So, this company's already levered up. So basically, SpaceX just needs to, uh, SpaceX just needs to be a $1.7 trillion company. And then they'll be able to just pay off the debt. They'll be able to sell and pay off the debt. Seems doable. And then. Never been going to get it on. Bro, never really gets. Come on. Anyway, fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in performance benchmarks, number one ranking on G2.

There are so much more in the timeline. We are going to have guests joining us in 10 minutes, but let's run through some more stories. Oh, the other story, OpenAI projected its cash burn this year through 2029 will rise even higher than previously thought to a total of 115 billion. That's about $80 billion higher than the company previously expected. Andrew Cote says, now that's what I call a nonprofit.

The numbers are big, but I'm so inured to big numbers at this point. I'm like, yeah, that seems fine. I don't know. That's my take, is that like that seems completely appropriate for the opportunity. Like you're building the next big, massive consumer company. everyone loves it you have strong product market fit all your competitors are kind of bowing out more or less like the hyperscalers you're bowing out I would say that they're bowing out of consumer yeah I don't know nanobananas ripping

nanobanana is ripping yeah AJ uh Aj mid mid-midha at A16 Z is that he had a good post about this today talking about the revenge of the empire or something like that was that in here where was it Ajni. I have him in here somewhere. I got to get a better tab management situation going. Okay, here we go. Ajony Midha at Andresen Horowitz says,

The Empire Strikes Back and shows Chat-GyPT versus Gemini, Chat-GyPT interest overtime on, oh, well, I mean, you're going to trust Google on how Gemini is doing in search results. Also, there was other reporting that's, There was reporting that showed that agents are completely throwing, like agents that are crawling the web or totally throwing. Oh, interesting.

No, I was completely kidding about Google cooking the results here. Obviously, they wouldn't do that. But nanobanana launches and Gemini is definitely mooning. Again, I see them as two separate use cases. Like, when I think about the, when I think about the nanobanana product, I don't see that as a direct competitor to, GPT5 and like the the router to just like answer questions do things for you like nano bananas incredible Gemini clearly has a huge advantage in in video and image

generation that's why we're excited to partner with with fall because they are a vendor for that and and we'll help you get set up with it but yeah most businesses don't necessarily care about have they're not looking to pick single model, right? If your company like Canva, which uses Fall, they're leveraging in multiple different models at any given point. So if I think about like what does nanobanana mean, I feel like it is an incredible product that will be baked into YouTube. You'll be able to generate thumbnails within the YouTube studio. There will be products that people use to generate imagery and that will go out everywhere. If you're in an email and you need to generate imagery, like it'll be

baked into Gemini into all the products. But this particular spike in the chart reads to me as if a studio Ghibli moment where it's like you get a ton of attention and people come in. But like what is driving ChachypT use right now? It's not Ghibli's. That's not why people are coming to it.

The image generation is definitely used but I would say it's probably less than like 10% of queries. Probably less than 2% of queries, honestly. Just based on my personal use, most of the time, I'm looking for a fact. I'm looking for a breakdown. I'm looking for some analysis. Go search the web, put something together.

And then every once in a while I go to it, and I'm like, okay, now I need to do an image generation thing. And so I don't necessarily fully agree with this take that the empire is striking back. I mean, it is a strike. They're striking back. But has the empire won? We don't know. Good question.

Anyway, question for you. Isaac says, I don't know anything about watches, but I'm looking for something respectable to wear on my wrist, something that a watch nerd might go nice at but won't break the bank any recommendations what you got Jordy

what does not breaking the bank mean Richard Mill stay away from the FPJourns and the piece uniques because that's going to break the bank but nice RM a racing machine on the wrist

watch like an FPJorn that could work too yeah you're going to want to stay away from the graph diamond solution because that's up in the 55 million range, but a Paul Newman Daytona. That's going to be something the watch nerds going to go. Nice.

Fortunately, this is good news in the watch world. Trump was invited to the Rolex suite at the U.S. Open Men's final, and he got to hang out with the Rolex CEO, Jean-Frederique Dufour. And the timeline is expecting some potential resolution

of relief from the Swiss tariffs to come this week. Obviously, tariffs impacting at least secondary watch prices right away. They've been kind of up across the board. So good if you have a bunch of watches. You want to sell bad if you're in the market.

Well, if you're looking for a watch, go to getbezzles.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet series. You can chat with the bezel concierge and you can ask them that exact prompt. You can say, what's a watch that would make watch nerd say nice but not break the bank? They might recommend, I don't know, GMT Master, Batman, Rolex. something like that, that might be more reasonable. Anyway, Steve Jobs Office versus Tim Cook's office.

I think this says a lot about why Apple feels different under Cooks as Sherman McCoy, but Sherman got put in the truth zone because that famous picture of Steve Jobs' office where it's all messy and Tim Cook's office is all nice and clean. Well, guess what? Let's see Tim Cook's Home Office. Yeah, let's see Tim Cook's home office. It could be ten times messier. Imagine it's just stacked up.

He's just the biggest order. Yeah, 10 times the books, just stacks of papers everywhere. So the picture on the left, it is Steve Jobs, but that's his home office. And Tim Cook is, of course, at the work office. But it's still probably something true there. Obviously, Tim Cook is the operations mastermind. Steve Jobs is more of the creative genius. We got an old email here.

February 13, 2005, Sergey Brin sent an email. to his executive management group. Read the subject line. Subject, irate call from Steve Jobs. And then he just types this out, clearly chain, just like stream of consciousness. So I got a call from Steve Jobs today, who was very agitated.

It was about us recruiting from the Safari team. He was sure we were building a browser and we're trying to get the Safari team. He made various veiled threats, too, though I'm not inclined to hold them against him too much, as he seemed beside himself, as Eric would say. So I just wanted to check what our status was in various respects and what we want to do about partners, friendly companies, and recruiting.

On the browser, I know, and told him that we have Mozilla people working here, largely on Firefox. I did not mention we may release an enhanced version, but I am not sure we are going to yet. On recruiting, I've heard recently of one candidate out of Apple that had browser expertise, so I guess he would be on Safari. I mentioned this to Steve, and he told me he was cool with us hiring anyone who came to us, but was angry about systematic solicitation. I don't know if there's some systematic Safari recruiting effort that we have. Anyhow, I told them we are not building a browser and that to my knowledge,

we were not systematically going after the Safari team in particular and that we should talk about various opportunities. I also said I would follow up and check on our recruiting strategies with regard to Apple and Safari. He seems to please update me on what you know here and on what you think we should have as a policy. On another note, it seems silly to have both Firefox and Safari. perhaps there is some unification strategy that we can get to these two to pursue combined they certainly have enough market share to drive webmasters and they would in fact the phrase in here systematic solicitation it's like that defines the modern tech era so perfectly

like systematic so there was a time when CEOs would call each other and be like hey if my people come to you that's cool but just don't don't create a list of every everyone who works for my company and then try and go poach all of them simultaneously in one weekend while we're on vacation. Don't call them personally, text them personally. Don't invite them to dinner on your dock. Offer them $100 million. Don't go wave surfing with them in Lake Tahoe. If they don't accept 100, offer 200.

Offer 200. Please don't do that. But it is interesting. I mean, three and a half years later, they launched Google Chrome. Wow. So it is interesting in this email. you would think now given what we know about like platforms and operating systems and data you would think that even at this point Google was thinking we want to own the browser yeah but you know if and obviously I'm sure when he wrote this he wasn't expecting it to one day be public yeah we got to dig more into the browser wars we were talking this weekend about perplexity are they over I don't know I think I think there's going to be another run at it for for sure and we're going to see some some developments.

Anyway, if you're trying to poach engineers from big tech, you know the best way to do it. Billboard on the 101. Go to adquick.com, out-of-home advertising, make easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Ad-Quick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable

efficiency. And just find the billboards and just surround your enemies with recruiting messaging. Yeah. Or pull a Avi Schiffman and by 300 billboards. He said the largest... That can not be true. That cannot be true.

It could be true on a pure, it seems impossible, but on a pure volume basis, like just like volume of inventory and a single buy. Yeah, maybe for like a single creative or something, like a single image is the biggest. But like when Apple launched the new iPhone, they put billboards in every single city. And it's huge. And I see them everywhere. It definitely is. And movies, when movies come out, there's, there's billboards everywhere.

It's the most yolo marketing move that potentially. of the year. It caught my eye. And it made me think, I got to buy one. We got to demo it. Whoa. We got to make Tyler live with it for a week and see, see what happens to him in the guinea pig. The question is, could you use that money a lot more efficiently, you know, buying ads on meta? You know, it's a consumer product. It's probably easy to figure out, like, who's the target buyer. You can get the, the halo effect of out-of-home advertising by, like, buying strategic inventory. I do, I do think that there is something special about the having friend.com.

So like, when you go to friend.com, you just see the pendant and that's it. And then you scroll down and you see this like Apple-like experience. It says, friend. And then you scroll down and it has these questions. And so if I put, if it was try friend.a.I and you put that on a billboard, I don't think that converts as nearly as well as friend.com. The domain is the one thing that I think in the full net, because if the company doesn't work in two years, we can just wind the company down. And you have to look at the domain as like,

like does it increase your probability of success? I think for something like this, like an always on listening device, it's already people aren't going to trust it. So domains can deliver trust. And then does it, yeah, just increase conversion rate of people just caring enough to not to mention just like seeing it it's a great domain for out-of-home advertising period yeah no no

I truly think it unlocks out-of-home advertising in a completely different way that try friend dot AI would just convert way less than friend.com I want to know what's on that website I'm just going to type in friend.com and then I'm on the flow so I'm actually surprisingly bullish on a big big campaign a big out-of-home campaign for friend.com good luck to them well We have our first guest of the show. We have Sonny from GROC, infrastructure for inference, purpose built for speed, quality, cost and scale. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining the show today.

How are you doing? Welcome to the stream. I'm doing good guys. I'm actually at the All In Summit. Oh, no way. You know, coming in, yeah, exactly. So I'm just in a green room here. So excited to be on with you guys.

Did you already talk or is that coming up? No, no, no. I'm not talking. I'm just kind of like, but still in the green room. Still in the green room. Oh, okay. You know, I had to get a favor so I could come on with you guys here. Nice.

I appreciate it. Yeah, take us through the last week. I believe you were at the dinner. What was kind of the, what was the vibe like? Just walk us through your experience. Yeah, I mean, really special. Like, look, first things first, I would say, you know, when you think about, you know, the president, what he's really done is he understands that he needs to enable technologists

to basically do their thing. And I would summarize it in the following ways. One, he brought everyone in and said, look, if you have some kind of issue, there's a team of people that you can work with, including David Sachs or just himself, to get things unblocked, right? And there's many issues that companies deal with,

whether it comes to export control or tariffs that are being put on or fines that are being put in our companies. And so he's really making himself available to help our companies, you know, broadly. I think he's also on. understood that, you know, AI and technology is the forefront of where many of, you know, the innovations for the country will happen, including huge infrastructure projects, right?

So you heard that when the press came in and when they're asking, you know, the questions, how much each company is spending, you know, looking at, you know, trillions of dollars of spend, which has downstream impact in manufacturing, construction, and other places. And so, you know, that's something he's excited about. And I think, lastly, like, this, we, you know, we really want America to win. and he wants America to win. And so he's basically saying, look, I've got your back. I'm supporting you here.

And I'm basically, you know, putting this on the forefront. So, you know, that's the high level. I would say the experience, just diving into it was really special. You know, started with a small gathering on the Rose Garden Club outside. It was raining. You were supposed to have a dinner there, but it got moved. And then a bunch of us got, you know, all of us, I got moved into the Roosevelt room, which is connected into the, into the Oval Office.

And then, you know, he took his time basically meeting with each one of us quickly, getting everybody gathered together and just kind of understanding concerns that folks had and, you know, basically us getting an experience in Oval Office, we all got a challenge coin, we got a pen, which is really cool, like a little, you know, a memento, a very special momentum. And then we all went, you know, the East Wing for a dinner and, you know, private conversation followed by a little bit of the press came in, which you guys would have seen the videos. and then a conversation afterwards. And he really took the time to address, you know, everybody that I was at the table and, you know, make sure that if anybody had a concern, they had a chance to surface it there. What was top of mind for you specifically?

I think, like, look, you know, the American AI stack, that's really important, that's something that was published at the AI Action Summit, a couple, you know, basically middle of July. And so what we're really focused on is basically making sure that we help the government understand what that stack looks like. And so, you know, I don't know if your producers can pull it up, but we published something a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago now, that basically is our version of the stack.

And we think it's been positively, positively received by the government and the administration. In terms of framework, we're not saying this is everything. We're not saying it's comprehensive. We're not saying it can't change. But really, you know, the kind of the Department of Commerce today is out of the framework. they're trying to understand what it should look like, and this is one view of the stack. And really, what does that mean? Let's kind of double click into that.

The stack is important because if the U.S. is going to keep export controls so that we can control, you know, highly sensitive technology getting into the wrong hands, you need to look at it from a stack perspective. A chip alone is not something enough that you should basically, you know, put a control on. So you got to look at all the pieces. And on the flip side, if you are going to be a partner of the U.S., and you're going to want to buy U.S. assets. You want to make sure that you have the whole list of things because if you don't have all the pieces, you're going to end up with paperweights, right? Really heavy and expensive

ones. So you need to have, you know, pieces along all. And that's what we sort of took a stab at when we put that out there. Speaking of the AI stack, can you help me understand at a more precise level how you're positioning the company or at least telling the story around the company in terms of where you fit in the stack? Because we saw last, last, week open a i is doing a deal for custom silicon with broadcom and then uh semi analysis came out with this uh this article saying that basically anthropic and a ws and tranium are like super tightly co-designed now google obviously with the tp u and then and then i was i was chatting with some open ai people they're like you know we actually talked to invidia pretty closely like we're like

we like i don't know if code design is the right word but like we give input and you know know, the next generation of Nvidia GPUs will be very capable of running chat GPT. And so where, how do you position where you fit into the American AI stack? Do you guys

mind if a pull up a quick screen sharing? Yeah, you can, but we are live. So anything you share will be shared. So do not share your private key to those crypto holdings you got. There you go. Thank you. That was smooth. Yeah, yeah. So the way to think about your question

Can you zoom in a little bit? Is that possible? Or maybe we can on our side? Yeah, maybe you have to do it on your side. I don't know if I can. I can try. You know, really where that's called out at the bottom is, so you have to answer your question first, and I'll try to zoom in without. I think we can pull it up on our side. Yeah. So really at the bottom there, which is, you know, this is infrastructure and the bottom is compute. So in the compute bucket right at the bottom here, you see invidia, Grog, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom. Like I said, this is not comprehensive. Broadcom is helping companies like Google and Open AI and others make their chips, right? And so the idea, you know, to answer your question is that the models come higher up, but you should be able to look at the stack and say, if you picked a piece from each one of these different categories that we've highlighted, you can have an end-to-end AI solution to either train a model, to either inference a model, or to build an application on top of it. So those are the three things that this should enable and you may not need all the pieces depending on what you're doing right if you're

trying to train the model clearly you don't need databases right but these are all the pieces that you need to basically be able to do something in AI got it fascinating yeah this this thank you for putting this together this document is massive and uh deserves its own like deep dive we'll have to dig in deeper yeah yeah we can do another one it's if you guys ever want to yeah of course what's the update on the projects in Europe and then what do you guys have cooking stateside? Yeah, you know, we've launched close to 14 different data centers this year, including, you know, one that we announced publicly. Yeah, it's mad decent there.

Yeah, we've launched 14 this year and we're continuing to expand our footprint. You know, Europe is really fascinating. You know, Dave, you guys saw the announcement with ASML and their investment into Mistral. So it looks like they're waking up and starting to basically put resources behind these things. So I think that's great. You know, our focus primarily in that region of the world is centered around a data center and arrangement that we have in Saudi Arabia. And so that's in partnership with Humane slash Ramco Digital, where it's the largest inference cluster in the Middle East.

And we believe all the way into Europe. And so we serve, you know, sort of most of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East from that data center. And our goal right now, what we're cooking up is just an expansion of that, right? So we're working to expand that cluster, add more capabilities and basically more capacity to that cluster because it's been well received and well-consumed. Very cool. I know you have a heart out, so we'll let you go. But last question for me, on that mistral ASML deal, it kind of jumped out to me because it feels like they're almost like jumping a layer of the. this stack? You know, I typically think about like, ASML sells to TSM, which sells to, you know,

Nvidia and some other folks. And then, and then the application layer and the foundation model labs, like, sit on top of that. So you're kind of a couple steps away. Do you have any insight into what they were thinking? A lot of people are just saying, hey, it's a national champion. They want to support and they're willing to kind of go outside the typical business that they do to make an investment and or maybe they're just seen it in purely financial terms but it seems like if it was purely financial they would have there's a bunch of other things that they could invest in you know they're not a hedge fund yeah right yeah yeah no totally um I think the point you talked about are valid I would add one thing to it which is if you actually go back

and listen to the launch of xAI what Elon talks about is like you know companies and his companies primarily using you know AI to better themselves right and I think if you're someone like ASML, if you want a close partner, doing that with Mistral is quite smart, right? How can they improve the tools that they make so that we can get, you know, better chips, better stuff in that layer of the stack? And so I would say that's something that is getting underappreciated today, but more and more companies are doing that, right, getting more advanced AI so that they can basically do that.

And from their perspective, they'll never be able to do that on their own. To your point, they're too far down. So the partnership there, maybe we'll get better machines. Maybe we'll get better power consumption from those things. Maybe we'll get, you know, better lithography from them. So that would be something that I would, you know, if I was building a business outside of, you know, GROC today, that's something I would focus on is how can I really not just use this for the high level use cases we've seen, but really have it, you know, find new materials for me, look at, you know, different aspects of physics. And those are really hard problems that you need to be very closely embedded with a model maker, like a foundational model maker, if you really want to pull those off. Fascinating. Well, we will continue to monitor the situation, as always.

And thank you so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of the conference. And we will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks for having you guys. See you. Cheers. Cheers. Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic.

Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level and get started for free. Adio. Next up, we have cognition. One thing I wanted to highlight quickly because we didn't get to it earlier, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon all dropped pretty meaningfully on the Echo Star news. Yeah, that makes sense. Because Elon's basically going around T-Mobile. It won't need to go through them because they'll own their own piece of the spectrum.

T-Mobile's market cap. 20 billion. Close. How much? 273 billion? 273 billion? Wow. Beast.

Okay. How much space? But how much space like to the stock they own? So Verizon is $182 billion. I didn't realize T-Mobile was bigger than Verizon. AT&T is $206 billion and Verizon is bigger than all of them. Wow, it's almost like owning a monopoly is valuable. Yeah.

Seriously, like once you get those licenses, it just prints. Yeah, so it's so crazy that Echo Star was like on the verge of bankruptcy, like not making debt payments and they're just like, YOLO. And they weren't even leveraging the spectrum. that they had. No. They just, it's fascinating.

You got a post from Fio. I'd rather, I'd rather talk about this Andrew McCallop's story. So Project Bob has launched. You can go to dashboard. dot project bob.xyZ. Christian Kyle says, this is easily the coolest thing happening

in the world today, hobbyist launching an autonomous drone ship, hoping to circumnavigate the globe. Andrew, of course, works at Varda Industries on manufacturing. in space. But in his free time, he tried to replicate the LK99 superconductor. I was there on the night that he tried to get the rocks to float. It was very, very interesting. He's just a fantastic scientist and builder. And I guess in his free time, he went and built a boat that drives itself,

talks to Starlink and a few other networks and wired it all up. And who knows? Maybe it turns into a business. That's the nature of launching side projects. If you're really good at them, eventually people will say like, well, I'd like to buy some, sir. And maybe the DOD will come to him or the DOW, as they're calling it. I'm so excited for the drone era of exploration, right? Just being able to send something off and follow it along live virtually is so cool. I always, like I want Andrew to take this and properly send Antarctica apparently and just see, like, how thrilling would it be to have nothing for days and weeks and months on end? and then somebody just comes up on the video,

it just takes it out. Like, what are they doing down there? Anyway, we have our next guest, Scott Wu, from cognition, joining the stream. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Scott? How's it gone? It's good.

It's been a little bit. Great to see you. I think I recognized that sweatshirt. Is that a founder's fun sweatshirt? It is the founder's fun sweatshirt. It felt like the right thing to do today. You know, we interviewed Alex Karp last week, and he referred to it as the founder's

fund because back in the day it was actually called the founders fund and they dropped the the which i think is funny yeah uh anyway uh that we're not talking about founders fund we're talking about your company give us the news what's the latest yeah so we we just closed a big fundraise led by founders fund actually um so we kind of are talking about founders fund as of course we we closed a raise um at a 10.2 billion dollar valuation that's good um you know super grateful for for all the support that we've had congratulations Yeah, busy month and a half for us since the windsurf news. I mean, it's been a crazy couple months for code and for us, especially getting to just see the two products mesh together has been a lot of fun.

Yeah. Where is the growth coming from? I remember seeing a presentation by at Microsoft Build, and they were talking about the value that Devin can bring to re-platforming. And that was super concrete for me because, you know, I can just imagine having an enterprise application written in dot net and wanting to move it to Python and that being a lot of work to write the test suite and move everything over and just being able to unleash a ton of AI agents and coding agents seem like incredible value and an incredibly high leverage use of technology. Is that a big piece of the business? What else is changing? What else is growing in the last year? Yeah, I think that's right. A big part of what we do is I kind of describe it as going and taking on engineering toil, you know,

and so that includes like all these repletforms and migrations that folks have to do. That includes version upgrades, testing, documentation, you know, issue triaging, all these various things. And it's, you know, the reality is that that's a lot of what takes up time for software engineers today. I don't think it's anyone's favorite thing to do, but it is a lot of the time for people, right? And so that's often what we see. And, you know, we've been working with a pretty big range of companies all the way from the smallest startups all the way to some of the biggest enterprises in the world. Yeah, because Devin is in GA, so any startup can sign up for it, correct? Yeah.

But then obviously you have a very talented team that goes and sells into very large enterprises as well. Yeah, what's it been, yeah, WindSurf was known for their GTM team. What's it been like both just like bolting on or really integrating a team? team like that. You guys, yeah, I'm sure it's really added a lot of firepower. It's been incredible, honestly. I mean, even I think just the two products themselves, because, you know, as we were saying last time, like a lot of the, there's kind of these two categories of product experiences that devs are using today, right? There's the IDEEs and the agents. And even it's being able to have both and kind of serve that all in one solution with WinSurf and Devin has been amazing for us. And so we've

seen a bunch of, I mean, WinServe and Devin were both already each individually growing, but in the last month and a half, it's grown even faster. I want to go into a little bit of a debunk-a-thon, hit you with some data points, and you can give me a lot more context. So the first one that we saw, this is all from extremely reliable sources, usually random screenshots that I see on X. But one was that when a developer uses an AI coding tool, they generate twice as much code, but 10 times as many security vulnerabilities, do you have anything to add? Does that sound right? Does that sound wildly off? What can we do to stop creating security vulnerabilities? Yeah, there's a lot of studies out there. Studies have different sample

sizes and they have different ways that they measure these things. For us, you know, with a lot of the projects that we deliver, because, you know, if somebody's doing a whole re-platform or something, you know, that is a concrete project that you're, you know, you're setting up a team do and kind of accounting for how many hours you need to do, with the enterprise customers that we work with, we typically see speedups of around 8 to 15X in terms of how long it takes. Yeah, so they're basically, they're doing in one hour of an engineer's time using Devon what would typically take eight hours without Devon. And I think the main thing that you really have to call out here is like it really depends on the use case. Right. And so I think

for a lot of these kind of like repetitive, tedious things that frankly the engineers don't want to do any way. That's where tools like Devin work really, really, really well. Devin is not necessarily, you know, you could use Devin to try and kind of like be the ideator with you or something like that, but it's obviously, it's not today what we've optimized Devin for. And so that's perhaps what folks are seeing in some of these different coding products. Yeah. And then on the security vulnerability side, do you need a, you know, okay, you have Devin, but do you need like Bill, like a different agent that just is watching for security? Well, Bill. In traditional, software development you might have like yeah there's this great developer that can just

churn out code really fast but then we got the guy over here the gal over here that really knows what what is secure and what's not and and where the flags are and you have pen testers like is that a different product is that just a different layer of what you're training for or have you have you kind of built devon in a way that you don't inject security vulnerabilities yeah it's a good question so so i think with security i think the main thing I would just call out here is like, this is a problem that all engineering orgs have already had to think about and deal with. You know, it's not necessarily new in the age of AI that you have to think about developers introducing security vulnerabilities, right? And yeah, you know, to your

point, we have a lot of these processes in place for that, right? Which is, you know, the first one probably is just code review itself, right? I mean, people, you know, typically you don't allow people to just merge their code straight to master or something like that. And similarly, you know, you want to have similar processes in place for your AI agents. I think there will be specific kind of like security-based agents, but I kind of imagine it draws on a lot of the same code-based intelligence and just like understanding, you know, what these functions are meant for or how these are meant to be used, which is kind of a shared intelligence. And so, you know, maybe we release our own kind of like security theme to Devin that specifically does, you know,

does this like security review or something like that. Are you seeing companies change their hiring practices at all after implementing Devin? and starting to get value out of it. I've just been curious to learn how companies are actually adapting as they sort of ramp up AI coding tools. Yeah, it's a great question. It depends a lot on the space of company because obviously all companies are competing with the others in their space

and that's what ultimately comes down to this. But honestly, I think what we've seen actually looks like folks taking more and more projects in-house. And so a lot of things that folks typically would have outsourced to a team of contractors or, you know, handed off to a system integrator or something like that. They're actually just doing in-house with Devon and they're able to do that faster. You know, one of our biggest customers actually was, you know, is a bank in Latin America that started using us around the start of this year for, you know, some of these refactors and migrations and so on. And then just got to the point where their team was seeing like a lot more effectiveness using the tool.

And then they 10x their contract within the last eight or nine months. And if anything, they're growing headcount. They're not shrinking. Every single one of their, you know, if every engineer is worth way more, then obviously you want more engineers. I want to add more engineers. Okay, let's continue the debunkathon. We saw some data from the census that showed that that AI is cooked.

It's done. It's over. It's over. It dropped. The actual data point was for firms pulled by the census that they have over 250 employees. the level of AI adoption quote unquote had dropped from 14 to 12 percent a little dip in the chart of course people are joking about this meaming about this you know saying it's all over but also joking that of course this is just one data point to me it seemed extremely low to think that

only 10 percent of businesses are even using AI since AI is kind of everywhere now and everyone uses AI and all sorts of things anyway what what is your take on like what's going on in that data point or in that stat specifically? And what other kind of context can you add for us? Yeah, I think I saw this. This is the one who's going around Twitter where it says like in July and August there was like a tiny, you know, and then everyone was freaking about. Yeah. Yeah. So same, you know, I don't really, I haven't looked into the methodology of how they figured out that number. It's kind of interesting because, I mean, for us, obviously like a lot of our work is with big enterprises, you know, specifically working on these massive code bases and July and August have been our biggest

months ever, you know, by far. So that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, the data. But, but, but I feel like the high level thing, which I would just call out is, you know, I think there's still a kind of like, like collective like, I, I don't know what I, there's like a, there's like a collective like refusal to, to see, you know, reality, which is, if I were to say it, is basically, we have AI that passes the Turing test. We have AI that gets an IMO gold medal. We have AI. We have AI that gets an IMO gold medal. We have that, you know, does all these crazy things, which 10 years ago we would have put it clearly called AGI, you know?

And it doesn't mean that you do all of this work for free as a result. There's obviously still a ton that you have to do to teach the specific capabilities and to make the right product experiences and to get, you know, actual businesses out there in the world going and using these things. But, but I just think the story, you know, the things that we're asking the AI to do are not harder than getting an IMO gold medal for that way. And so there's a lot of work to do it. You know, I don't want to diminish it.

Like, it's going to be years and years, you know, of taking all of the techniques that we now have and figuring out how to build the right experiences and get them out to everyone. But I really don't think. Also, I love that every time I come, I'm just the, I'm just the crazy AI bull, you know, I knew. But, but like, you know, I think it seems very clear that that AI will do more and more of this work at a time, you know. And software engineering, I think you see this.

especially, which is, if anything, I think the best coders are the ones whose flows have changed the most dramatically, right? And you just think about how many engineers there are out there that still have to learn these tools and have to get on these things. Like, I don't think we are due for a slowdown any time too soon. Yeah. The methodology of the census data was a little bit odd to me. Basically, they called up individual proprietors, business owners, and they said, are you using AI and they defined AI as predictive analytics, data analytics, image processing, voice recognition, machine learning, natural language. So a bunch of people said, no, we're not doing data.

We're not doing data analysis, which was very odd. Only 10% of people said yes to this question. I feel like it should be like 100% because like if you're using Stripe, like there's machine learning under the hood for fraud detection. If you're using Gmail, like Gemini's right there. There's going to be auto-complete on your phone is using data analysis. Anyway, my real question is one of the lowest hanging fruits that I see in the software that I interact with is in government websites, basically. I imagine that the census could benefit from having Devin run around write better polling software.

Is there anything on the horizon where you might be working with the government? Is that something where you need to get ITAR compliance or something before you go in there? is it on the roadmap? What do you think in terms of improving the software that our government serves to us? Yeah. No, I think it's a great point. And as you say, I think there's a lot of work to do. And it's a great example of the kind of like, you know, the messy problems, which I think it is very clear will be solved over the next couple of years. You know, there's no reason that the government shouldn't be using tools like these to go and build their websites better and faster. And everyone knows, you know, how many bugs there are, how many simple things that could just be

fixed, you know, if there were an AI software engineer available to go and do this. A lot of, you know, it's, it's, it's funny because I think Windsorff actually, funnily enough, was ahead of us on, on, you know, getting things moving with Fed RAM and getting certified on all these things, but it's one thing that we're working on as well. That's very exciting. Are you, uh, are you thinking at all about other acquisitions over the next couple years? You got a big balance sheet at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, you know, I mean, the last one went pretty well.

Now, it's, I think it's, I think for us, it's, it's obviously really valuable to have this capital for a few different reasons, you know, with model training, I think with hiring great talents, with expanding go to market and so on. You know, is it possible that part of that will also, you know, go towards, you know, buying other companies? Of course, it's possible. There are not any plans at the moment, but yeah. Yeah. In terms of your position in the stack, I see you as sort of like a, initially like a enterprise level application layer company that then is now going down with Winsurf into more of a B2B context, not full consumer, but more broad usage. But famously model agnostic, not training foundation models, not working down the stack. And we're seeing the foundation model companies do deals with Broadcom. to co-develop chips and what Elon's doing with Samsung. And there's a lot of these data points.

Are there any other places where you want to at least have better relationships with other layers of the stack? Is any of that important? Or is it really just like you have your slice and you're just gonna go and run at that for the foreseeable future? Yeah, it's a really good question.

I mean, I think in terms of relationships, for sure. I mean, we work very closely with the foundation labs. For example, you know, We have lots of things going on in terms of how we do compute or even kind of like partners that we work with on distribution, right, which I think are great. I would say, you know, I think the, for us, it's, we, we obviously, I think it's very important for us to just have a lot of humility about where we're coming from and what we're doing. You know, we're obviously, you know, a very new entrant to the space and, and, you know, are only like 0.1% of the way there. And I think, you know, for us to be able to meaningfully succeed is going to require a lot of folks. And so I think from that perspective, you know, I think the like, you know, we know what is the area that we really kind of want to own. And that's, that's basically, you know, everything between the, you know, that goes from taking the model, the base model itself and then doing the right kind of capabilities work and building that into a product experience that, you know, real engineers can use every day. And I think, I think we will stay quite narrow kind of within that focus ourselves for the, you're saying job's not finished.

I mean, it's barely even started, honestly, I think. And I think like that, I think obviously there is a, you know, there's, I think a vision of the future where, as we said, you know, where software engineering is just as easy as telling your computer what to do. And I think the world of software engineering has already changed in some meaningful ways over the last two, three years because of, you know, all these AI coding tools. But I think we've got another like 10, 20 generations of product experiences. you know, as a community to build and unlock until we get to that full future. So, uh, important question. Was this latest round of financing negotiated with Founders Fund over poker or chess? Unfortunately, it was neat.

And you know, it was funny. Actually, we were, um, on the weekend that we did the wind surf deal. We, um, obviously, I mean, it was a pretty substantial commitment from us in terms of win serve. And so, you know, we want to, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, implicitly needed board approval, but also, you know, wanted to give our investors an update and kind of hear what they thought and so on. And so, you know, we were on with the Founders Fund team with Napoleon and Peter and getting their thoughts on what they thought makes sense. And I mean, first of all, they were really supportive of us doing the deal and they thought, you know, the partnership made a lot of sense for a lot of the same reasons that that we did. But they also, you know, were very clear of like, hey, like, I know this is going to be a, you know, a big thing for you guys on the balance sheet and for for you guys as a company. And, you know, we want to be clear that we, we're we stand ready to support you in the next thing if this is the deal that you want to do. And honestly, that's a lot of what gave us the confidence to be able to go ahead with it

and close the whole deal, you know, in the 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever it ended up being. And so we're good for our 400 million. Yeah. It's really been amazing. I can't shot them out enough, you know, Napoleon and Peter and the whole team that we've gone to work with have been great to us. That's fantastic. tell us the story of the deal that was negotiated over, was it poker?

How did that come together? Yeah, so it's a funny one. In retrospect, so it didn't actually happen, but basically when we were doing the Series A, you know, one of the very early rounds of the company, it was me and Napoleon. And, you know, I was here and he was there or something like that. And there was like, I think at some point it was clear that the deal was going to get done, you know, but it was just kind of like going through some of the more minor terms and making sure we were on the same page. of everything. And we kind of put, you know, what if we, what if we just had a nice

heads-up match to go and settle this and decide whose terms we're going to take? We did not do that. It's probably probably for the better that we didn't do that, but, but yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, but the story lives on as something. It almost happened or was at least, like, joked about, which is fantastic. That is great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Jordy, do you have anything else? No, congrats. I know you've got a busy day, so we'll let you get back to it. Just try to try to have another reason to come on before the end of the year, at least a couple. You know, it's a great lock.

But there's going to be plenty more stuff to debunk through the rent to the year. There's going to be tons of data points that people read into way too much, and we will be giving you a call. I was going to say, I look forward to coming on again and being the idiot optimist that just everyone else is giving their rational arguments about this is going to work, this is not

going to work, and I'm just here saying everything's bullish. I mean, if you want one more, we can talk about inference costs. I mean, people are saying that, oh, inference costs aren't falling. You've got to use the latest and greatest model and your gross margins are going to be terrible forever. Debunk that one for me. Sure. No, I mean, I think there's, so I think there's two separate questions there. You know, one is the question of, is the business going to be defensible? You know, are you going

to be able to offer something that, that, you know, you're competing with your competitors on something that is not just purely a race at the bottom, right? And then the second thing is, like, is the cost value tradeoff for the customers going to actually make sense? I think the second one is just very obviously true because, you know, as these tools, if the tradeoff is, you know, doing more and more and speeding up labor, right, is, you know, making every accountant faster and making every lawyer faster and so on. I mean, at some point it's pretty obvious that the machines are cheaper, you know, that that cheap enough that making, you know, every lawyer three times faster is just obviously a no-brainer, right? I think on the point of the first one, you know, obviously it's a great point. And I think that's, it's different for every different company, you know, I think a lot of the businesses in the application layer need to think a lot about, you know, what is their special sauce and what is their differentiation. But I think the answer for most probably of what that comes to is a combination of one is just really, really focusing on specific use cases and delivering solutions that are, that are, you know, really

kind of custom solutions for the problem that they're specifically solving. And then two is, you know, I think there is like a real kind of, I'll call it like a personalization effect that I think we're seeing more and more, you know, there's chat GPT memory, for example, Obviously, Devin has its own whole knowledge system where, you know, as the tool just understands the customer and their own business and their tradeoffs and everything much, much better, that itself is obviously something that just makes the product, you know, more and more powerful just for them and is the kind of thing that would command that value. So I think that it's, it's, you know, from a perspective of is AI, you know, are we going to have monster intelligent AI that's just so smart, but we just, you know, we just turn the machines off because they're too, expensive, you know, I don't think we'll have that future. I think there's a very reasonable question about, you know, where that value capture comes in. And I think that's why all these businesses are thinking about, you know, what is this one thing that I'm going to do really,

really well that's going to make my business durable. It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on a busy day. Good to hear that the job's not finished. I love unfinished jobs. It's the best. I hate when the job's done. I hate when the job's done. Give our best to the team. We will talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. See you. See you guys. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy?

I had. You had a terrible night, right? I had a brutal night, but not because of my eight sleep. No. I got an 82. I'm sleeping pretty good. I think I get the sound effect. I managed to pull a 75.

It's not bad. Eight sleep is working overtime for you. It was like, we got to get this guy some sleep. There's kids everywhere in this bed. The one-year-old is throwing up. We got to adapt. It was just a chaos coming in to help. to help you sleep better.

Anyway, go to 8Sleep.com. Get a pod five, five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. And we will bring in our next guest, AuraZian, from ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy-use, corporate cards, go-pay, accounting,

and a whole lot more. Good to see you, Aura. How you doing? Great to see you. Thanks for having me again. Thanks for hopping on. So much data, data-driven chaos in the timeline. Yeah, I want to talk about 996,

But first, let's start with this data that it's completely over and no businesses are going to be using AI. Because if you look at the trend line, we went from 12% to 10%. If you track that out on the line, it's going to be 0%. No, not that one. It might be negative 50% of businesses using AI. I'm talking about the AI adoption data from census. I am talking about the census AI adoption data. The folks that brought you the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Yes, yes. The real expert. What was you reading? I've been thinking about the census AI adoption data for a long time because we have our own measurement of it with RAMP data. Yep. That's www.com slash data slash AI index. Yep.

What I don't like about the census measurement and why I think it might be underestimating AI adoption is that the question that they have written is not the right way to measure AI adoption. Essentially, the way the census measures it is they ask businesses, do you use AI to produce goods and services? and that makes sense because they wrote the question back in like 2003 when we weren't really sure what AI was going to look like

but AI to produce goods and services that's first of all that's you can't speak right that's how economists talk to each other but well yeah and even if somebody technically like in my view if somebody provides any type of services to somebody and they use AI call transcription like someone on their team is like recording calls and like transcribing with AI that to me like qualifies as I literally had, in 2013, I was running a consumer package goods company.

Our business was making protein shakes. That was the physical good that we produced. But we also would transcribe all of our calls. And so were we using AI to produce goods and services? I would have said, absolutely. We're using linear regression. We're projecting out our financials. We're doing all sorts of stuff that fits in the bucket.

But yes, to your point, it's not. You're a forward-thinking business leader. Sure. And that makes sense. But most people reading that think, oh, am I literally using AI to produce widgets on my factory floor? Yep, yep, yeah. It's the kind of question that doesn't really capture the way that AI in the past three or four years of its development has more or less, has mostly been adopted by businesses for back office tasks.

Yep. And when you look at that 10%, it's, I think most people would say, yeah, for most businesses, that's pretty low. Forget, you know, tech forward businesses just in general. Yeah. So the overall number of like 10% of American businesses using AI, that seemed ridiculously low to me because just consumer LLMs like chat GPT are like 50% adoption amongst American adults. And so it just doesn't math with me that someone would be that four out of five Americans would be using chat GPT and then walk into work and be like, nah, I'm not going to use AI for my job. But what I'm more interested in is like, why do we think that there's a peak and then a. fall off at all. My theory was like maybe these big companies are getting sold on you got to use

AI to produce goods and services. They try and roll out some zombie change management strategy where they're going to be doing AI. The Klarna CEO like did this big thing. I'm going to use AI for everything. And then he ended up saying like, take it back. Yeah. And so. People are pretty good. Yeah. So did you ever read on that at all? Well, there's a few things. One, the sample sizes for these surveys are actually pretty small. They run these surveys every two weeks. Yeah. And, you know, like most government survey collection, particularly if it's run every two weeks, you're going to

get some mixed differences in who responds. Sure. So that's part of it. I think some of it just might be some noise in the data set, because it did come back up in the most recent read. It wasn't that much of a decline in the first place. You could write it off as a noisy data. The second thing is that it's

not unreasonable to think that the fact that this was conducted in the summer might mean that even at businesses who responded to the survey, the person who responded to that survey at that business might be different. Yep, totally. This is another reason why I really don't like business surveys is that they try to capture what a business is thinking, which is a large complex organization, but they require one person at that business to answer the question.

Easy for you to say you've got tens of thousands of businesses and their actual purchasing behavior. Yeah, so flip it over. What is the data actually saying about the level of AI adoption in the business world? When we look at RAMP spend data, AI adoption is up. AID adoption is now about 45% of businesses in the U.S. It varies by sector. So adoption is much higher in tech and finance.

About 70% of tech firms on our platform adopted AI in some paid form. I still think that's probably pretty low. We're not capturing free usage or capturing employee usage on their own personal accounts. But then even in restaurants, for example, we see 20% adoption of AI. And I think that's likely... And what does that mean in the restaurant context? it's it's like they pay that could be they're paying for chat gpties like pro plan or they're using a marketing marketing materials like developing like a you know i mean i've seen menus that have

a i generated images that's not my favorite example yeah but a much better example is designing a facebook ad that uses an ai generated image or coffee that really speeds up a lot of the work that a restaurant owner otherwise has to do i mean these restaurants and firms often have really small staffs. Yep. And so I've talked to some restaurant owners who use Ramp, for example, and talk to them about how they use AI. And for them, for the most part,

it does automate a lot of the sort of, not just back office work, but a lot of the work that lets them get back to work of doing the restaurant work that they want to do. Okay, so let's flip it over to the 996 phenomenon. There's been some spicy quotes on the timeline, talking about how 996 working on Saturday is super trendy. Everyone's doing it.

what does the data say so does everyone know what nine nine six is in the audience I don't think our I think everyone knows but break it down for us yeah nine nine six I is it is associated with Chinese working culture though I believe it's actually illegal in China now though I think it's a lot in practice and it means bad boys they work 9 a.m. 6 days a week yeah and then it kind of seems like it's caught fire in Silicon Valley and tech culture in this whole, like, wellness-oriented, run fast, lift-heavy, marry early, work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week and just focus on your business. And most of the stories have been vibes-based. Like, it's just people in

startup world talking about what they're doing. It's true. It's actually happening and shows up the question is, how will you know a founder works 996? They'll tell you. I'll tell you. Yeah, but I mean, a lot of people were wondering, is this a LARP? Is this something where, yeah, Saturday is for working. It's for posting about how you're working. But you're saying that the data actually suggests that there is business activity happening on Saturdays in startups at an increased rate. Well, in the one specific way we looked at it, in this one we looked at, who's, you know, employee cards. So we're not necessarily just looking at founders.

We're looking at people at the company. who are more or less expensing business meals or like late-time meals on Saturdays or like DoorDash takeout other things like that. A lot of the criticism that I've gotten today on the timeline has been like, oh, you can't tell if maybe some people are saying it's fraud. It must be these people who are fraudulently using their business cards.

I want you to read my post because in my post I found it's just SF. Oh, yeah. This isn't happening in New York. Interesting. It's happening in Austin. Interesting. It's not happening in Miami. This is just an SF thing.

And it's also really new. This wasn't happening last year. Wow. Perfectly coincides with when people started talking about the 996 cultural movement. Fastly. Unless if you want to argue that, oh, frauds this whole, this new thing. I mean, it really proves there's no such thing as a free lunch because in these cases, the employees are getting a free lunch, but they had to work on Saturday.

Yeah, it's one of the worst ways to do fraud. It's like, here's my $20 Chinese food. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's think about going deeper in this analysis. How else could we unpack this? One way I'm thinking is, well, meals make a ton of sense. If you're working late, you expense a meal.

But also, there's just the normal business activity that, like, you might sign up for a new marketing software on a Tuesday. You might also sign up for it on Saturday. If you're doing that on Saturday, that's probably even less likely to be fraudulent because why are you putting your credit card down with our latest sponsor, TurboPuffer? Because, you know, if you're signing up for a database tool and you're putting your credit card down, now maybe they run the credit cards at a different time, who knows, but I'm wondering if there's a layer to the onion that you could pull back there. Are there any other data points that you think you'd be looking at in the next? few weeks that might help you crystallize this and really really steal up your position for the for the haters so the point you're making is really good because there's someone else who were really interesting reply got was someone who works I

guess in credit risk and one of the big signals they had about whether or not an application for their yes finance software product was fraudulent was whether or not the application was submitted on a weekend yeah and they started looking into all of the ones that they got on weekends, and most of them were false positives, at least the ones from SF. Totally anecdotal information. From SF. Oh, because people, because it's fraud everywhere else, but in SF, it's the grind. I mean, this is, this is really bad for everyone but SF because it shows that the great lock-in is really only happening in San Francisco. It's a local. It's a local phenomenon. It's not actually people in New York, oh, oh, great lock-in, great-locking.

Okay. So going forward, yeah, we got to look at it. if business software purchases are up in San Francisco on the weekend. I also want to know if it's going to spread, if we're going to have some metac contagion, and we're going to see the Great Lock-in, potentially spread to New York. That would be likely for me. I want to know Miami, Austin, and LA.

I need to get a little bit colder in New York for... Potentially. Anyway. New Yorker got a little bit close to it, but not, it was maybe a quarter of the effect size. Wow. And it was only after 8 p.m. It wasn't like, in our chart for S.F.

It really is starting at about 9 a.m. 10 a.m. Wow. What about timing? You said this is a new phenomenon in San Francisco. If you scroll back the timeline, when do you start seeing a takeoff of this 996 culture in San Francisco? Over the last six months. Six months. It's that recent.

Wow. Yeah. That's fantastic. We don't see this in 2024 really at all. That's crazy. I feel like 2024 was definitely a year where people were. We're working, but I guess it just picked up a whole new, whole new gear. That was before the Great Capital Wars began.

Yeah. When we had this idea, I really didn't expect to see anything. Because when you, it's pretty rare to see these kinds of spend shifts in any demographic. Especially, like when I looked at it nationally, it was completely unmoved because most people don't really change something as worn in as their eating habits that often, even, you know, tech employees are workers. So I really didn't expect to see anything. And the only time you would expect to see something like this is a pre-to-post-pandemic trend. 2019 to 2021, a bunch of public and private data

that started to show shifts in where and when people were eating, right? A really classic one from the pandemic era was movement from outside the city center. So, you know, people were spent much less time downtowns and then suburbs start seeing a lot more activity. That was a really popular one during the pandemic period. But after the pandemic, you really stopped seeing this kind of shifting. Most people kind of set in their ways and things were back to normal. So the fact that we saw this only saw it in SF and that it was so recent is pretty rare and shocking.

Last question for me on the 996 question. Part of it is not just the six, not just Saturday, but the nine to nine. are you also seeing or do you think it's worthwhile to look into what's happening from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Because that's also the hallmark of the 9-9 is that it's not like 9 to 5, 6 days a week. It's 9 to 9. And so you should expect more employees expensing food late night on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on a Thursday, on a Friday because they're working longer hours. And so is there a way that we can measure the weekday hours worked by San Francisco employees? Yeah, one of the really great data sets for this would probably be GitHub commits.

Oh, GitHub commits. Yeah, we got to call up, I mean, we had the CEO of GitHub on. We should ask him to pull something. And then, of course, there's a public data set, but I think that's mostly for open source projects. And I don't know if the, I know that there's like a heat map of when people commit. it, but it's only by day. I don't think it's by time. So the data would probably be internal.

But I don't know. I mean, it's a Redmond Washington company. So I don't know if they're going to put something out, publish it that says that San Francisco's outworking Redmond, you know? That might be a little controversial for Microsoft to do. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Anything else to share? Are we good?

Thanks guys for having me. Subscribe to my substack, Econ Lab. dot substack.com. Econlab. dot substack.com. Let's go. Call to action. Thank you so much

for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you. Thanks, all the great rest of your day. Cheers. Bye. Next up, we got Zach from Warp coming in. Before we

bring them in, let's tell you about Wander, find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, Hotel Grated Menings, Dreamy Beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. That reminds me. It's a vacation home, but better. Writing it down to my nose.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Okay. Well, we have our next guest, maybe. Yes. Okay, great. Let's bring them in. There we go.

There we go. Second time. How you doing? I love it. This is Warp country. Warp country. I don't understand why I'm wearing a warp-themed cowboy hat, but maybe I'll explain. What's new in your world?

so i've been uh you know filming a western basically you can see me doing a product demo on a horse because you know why not we we just did a major launch called code country where the theme is all about coding on warp and we decided to be fun to do it uh with a little bit of like hey let's let's let's show how warp can help you wrangle your agents so that is why you're wearing a cowboy hat zach i'm pissed off because i was with john last friday Friday before we literally before we got to the office and we saw these nice fine hats and do you remember when I was pitching you on doing hat as a merch for a company that we work with and I was the tagline for the campaign was like I was going to I was going to pitch this

to Vanta. Yeah you just say like this is Vanta country. This is a funny. But I guess this is a more country now. You beat us to it and you did it Well, so, so, it's a great concept. You need to create things that people will remember you by, and I don't think people are going to forget the three of us sitting here with these hats on, just talking about code country. Okay, explain to me what it means to wrangle agents. I feel like I've used agents pretty reliably.

Like I just, this weekend I need a new breakfast place. I kicked off ChatGPT agent mode. It went off and hunted around. I got some weird ones. I posted that I asked for a table that was circular, and it found me a used wooden spool that's used to wrap coils around. And it's actually for like 50 bucks, like probably the best circular round big table you can get.

So it was thinking outside the box. It was great. And then I've also used Claude Code. Obviously, I think of that as agentic. We've talked to other folks in the show. I saw this interesting dashboard on X where someone had some visualization of all the different agents that they'd spawned out. Like, what does the frontier of using multi-agents look like?

Yeah. What does the frontier look like? Yeah. What does the frontier look like these days around these parts? The situation is such if you look at, if you look at pro developers using agents and their daily workflow it's um they kind of produce stuff that's not shipable a lot of the time uh they produce security hey you can't argue they do produce security vulnerabilities you know it's like yeah that you can ship if you're not carefully you can ship security holes you can you get to a point where

developers on your team don't even know what they're coding it's really a mess to vibe code in production right now and the thing that we've been focusing on is like how do you get a tighter feedback loop where you can see what an agent is doing, you can review it to work as it goes. You can make sure that people on your team who are building with agents are like, you know, comprehending what they're doing, uh, that they're code reviewing the agents code in the app. And so this is a real problem. If you look at the stack overflow, um, latest stack overflow survey, like number one problem that developers have developing with agents is like, they produce hard to debug code that they don't understand and see kind of wasting a bunch of time.

So, yeah, we're just trying to help people keep their agents, you know, steer them as we talk, as we say. I want to do this whole thing. Yeah. So what do you think about these here, vibe code cleanup specialists? People that are making a living now going around on LinkedIn and cleaning up old vibe code and projects. You got to bring sheriff into town sometimes to clean up some messy, the messy. that to be like a symptom of something gone wrong with the tooling if you're getting to a point where you need like a janitor or whatever to come in clean up your code you want you want to get the engineers on your team yeah to be able to produce shit that that actually goes out to production i guess my my other take on on this bob code cleanup specialist that we're seeing pop up is like i don't know there's a world where um There's the type of person, like the ideas guy, who's like, I have an idea for an app and I want someone to build it for me.

Then there's the type of person like you, Jordy, who you have an idea, but then you're a Figma expert, and you're going to work on design, and you're going to turn over something that's really communicative in terms of the interaction design. Then there's one layer further now with Figma Make and other vibe coding solutions where you could actually turn over a full prototype that's pretty functional, but it's not really going to scale. And so maybe the Vibe Code cleanup specialist is just saying, like, hey, I'm a really talented engineer. I am truly an engineer. I know computer science, but I'm willing to work with the, I work well with the type of people that express themselves and what they want to build as Vibe Code. And maybe that's an interesting pattern as opposed to the software engineer who likes to work

with somebody who turns over a PSD file or Figma file. I think if you look at it like that, it makes a lot more sense to me. It's like, what's the new version of MOX or PRD? It's like this working app. But it's not a shippable app because it's like, you know, the agents kind of can't do it yet. It's also where you run into problems is like these things are amazing for the zero to one use case. They're less good for the like, I'm working at some big company that has millions of lines of code and I want to add a feature to it. And so for that, you really, you know, it's like it needs to go.

You can start with like the vibe coded prototype, but you're going to need someone to get in there who actually stands behind what they're sending up to their teammate to review. Yep. Yep. I hate to get personal partner, but can you talk revenue? I think you guys have a pretty extreme revenue ramp. Yeah, we're doing awesome.

So we're adding Millionaire R every like seven, eight days, something like that. which is you don't see numbers like that around these parts very often certainly not it's like it's you know we're not not it's not a ghost town and it's a little bit of a gold rush yeah but it's pretty exciting times like it's it's super fun the vision that we have of like building uh you know a development tool which is for the ground up for like how do you go all the way from prompt to production that isn't like your run-of-the-mill IDEE or like the 20th, just like text-based CLI app, but it's a unique tool built to get, you know, pro code out is really resonating.

It's super exciting, fun time to be working on it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by the old TBPN saloon. The saloon. Yeah. We'll talk to soon. Have a great rest of your day. Great to catch up, Zach. Thanks a lot for that now.

See you. That's fun. Code Country. Another Cohen coming into the studio. Breaking down. Big fundraise. Very exciting. I'm excited for this one.

Legendary poster. One of the greatest to ever do it. Very excited to have him on the show. Andrew Reeves in the chat. What about that? What's happening? We need to give Andrew Reid more contact. We put these on, not for you, although you are from Texas, but for the, uh, uh,

warp the sea of warp but we'll leave them on because they're fun i thought you guys put them on for me i was going to ask that that was my first question uh no no but but but but yeah do you ever wear cowboy hat around the office i do not i have boots there you got a hat there you go boots boots are strong uh what's happening it's great to great to finally have you on the show thank you guys for having me i needed something newsworthy enough to make it on here so i had to raise around just to get on the show well i think you've been on many times via your post we have reacted to many of your posts so long time long time guests uh but what yeah give it give us a whole kind of bet i mean since it's your first time on the show uh in person give it give us kind of

quick history of the company and the news uh quick history is we got started last april after a team of us had been at carbon health for three and a half years um left in january started the company in April raised around got to work and then fast forward 16 months later we just closed our series a and it's been a fun time so wow I thought you walked I thought you walked away you're like fuck this I'm out we got to go we got a gong no we got a gong congratulations um how are you positioning the company right now yeah yeah the main thing that I'm trying to understand from like like your your journey like makes total sense like being deep in the weeds and and understanding what, you know, from your time at carbon, it feels like this category,

like so many, I'm sure you're getting sick of like refreshing like tech crunch and seeing another like voice AI company that that is going after the market broadly. But like how is the, what's the shape of the market? How is it evolving? Like where you got what is what does your GTM look like and all that good stuff? Yeah. I mean, here's my general take on the space. It's like you've got a group of us who are specifically focused on.

on healthcare AI or like you know whatever voice SMS conversational AI for health care you kind of have to be specialized on it in order to make it work and I think that's why you know we saw Sierra just raise at 10 billion you've got all the call center companies with their own flavor of like we're no longer shitty IVRs we like have a conversational AI now and so problem is that as you like start to hear about how their implementations are going you start to hear how they go from like cross different verticals they're just not doing that good of a job at it because they don't understand sort of the nuanced, brazy stuff that happens in these healthcare clinics. And so we literally have to like almost go on site with customers and understand their workflows,

their appointment triaging reasons, like how you actually get a patient to the right place and then read and right back into their systems of record, which many of them, you know, unlike, again, I'll use Sierra as the example, but like unlike Sierra being able to just integrate with Shopify who has great APIs to go do, like, hey, what's my tracking number? what's your return policy? Can you check the status in my order? We have way harder to work with systems of record. And I think a lot of folks just don't want to go put in the work or understand how to go make those things happen. And so I think you'll see companies like us be a lot more successful in getting these practices live. I think you'll see some of the larger companies maybe win some deals and then go spend nine months building custom software to go make it work. And then I think you'll see most people pivot out of health care over the next couple years. Just because

just because it's conversational and generative and opening I, because this doesn't make the work any easier to do right now. And that's kind of like the return to the way the industry has always been. I feel like whenever you dig into healthcare, it's like, oh, well, they're not using, they're not using the standard SaaS products for, you know, it's like the whole genre of vertical SaaS, like is the textbook example where maybe they're using different ERP, different payroll, different help desk software, different CRM, like they're always had their own little area carved out. And I don't know how much of that is just like epic compliance,

but it's like, it's certainly a unique thing. What's the gold standard now? Like, what are you guys trying to deliver on the product side? Because I saw a screenshot you shared of Sierra on there. You were, you're throwing a little state on the day of their launch. It was an exchange where you're just like, can you find me some green shorts? And they were like, well, we have lots of clothes. Like, why don't you look around? Yeah. That was pretty funny. But like, what are you guys trying to deliver and what do you what do you think best in class is right now? And do the models even need to get better for you to deliver on your vision or are they good enough that it's just more about like deep integration and workflows? Yeah, I think that there's a lot of tension in someone like a

Sierra who's got a very almost deterministic style chat bot and that's been around forever. I mean, what they're doing is not new. They're just saying, hey, it uses generative AI versus what you used to do, which is keyword matching and then sharing some response that you had queued up that was approved by the customer and the chat experience. And then on the whole other side, you have an experience like chat, GBT or Cloud, which is purely generative, very, very general purpose. Anyone can chat with it. And you can really get it to do whatever you want it to do within, you know, as long as their guardrails don't pick it up. And somewhere in the middle is a conversational experience where you call in and you say, hey, I'm having this issue. I have

this, I need an appointment. Like, here's my symptoms. And the agent has a defined scope. of work, but it still needs to follow somewhat of a deterministic path to get you to the outcome, right? So in order to schedule, I have to look up your account, verify who you are, find the location that you're looking for, find available slots, find available providers, and then ultimately book the appointment and write that back to the practice management system. So there is a workflow or a step that has, like steps that have to happen in some sort of order. To do that right end to end is very complex. A year ago, even when we got started, you really couldn't do scheduling end to end unless you were

building what was a phone tree of like, you're in this step right now. She was one of these three options. Now you're in this step. And that's not what I think anyone wants to be the gold standard for an experience when you call into your provider. And we've always been fully conversational from day one. And I think over the summer, we've made a bunch of breakthroughs on like how we build a whole suite of agents that work together to get the job done.

And so, for example, if you're calling into one of our practices now and you say, hey, I'm making an appointment for, I'll use like med spas, an example, for Botox, there is a Botox agent that all it knows how to do is schedule Botox, but it's still conversational. And then if you're like, hey, I actually need to switch to a laser hair removal appointment, then it switches to the laser hair agent. The patient never sees anything, but in the background, we're doing a bunch of multi-agent switching. And that's the only way to make these things work and still be generative. And they still have failure rates, like five to 10 percent of cases. It doesn't work as expected. You can imagine all the dumb shit that

patients say it's like completely random and so and you can't plan for all of those scenarios but you just have to get this is why I don't think AI doctors will be a thing anytime soon because that margin of error will always exist and it's like they don't want to take liability or responsibility for that we can get away with a little bit more margin of error because we're doing administrative functions but that's the experience we want it to be as you call in you know that it's AI but you're having a conversation with it just like if you were talking to Chad GPT's voice model and it can do the job end to end, even if it's scope to a limited set of jobs. How much of how you build this is like develop an RL environment to actually post-train a model

to interact with all the back office and administrative systems versus kind of like create your own deterministic SaaS layer that then your agents are kind of interacting with or are just kind of like function calls within deterministic, like business logic? It's very much the latter. It's like we've got this app layer where it understands an ontology of a practice, services, locations, providers. All of those have their own specific context, right? There is different protocol if you're scheduling one appointment versus the other.

Maybe you're like three steps into a triaging workflow now. And then they do have tool calls where they get to say, like, I need to create an appointment. I need to find available slots. I need to create the patient account. All of those tool calls have their own business logic and agents that they interact with on their own. It's all very constraints. You kind of have like 70% as prompt engineering, 30% as code in the background to be like, hey, that's not the phone number the patient's calling in from.

You can't look up that patient, right? Because there's security factors to consider. So definitely a lot more of the latter than it is like any sort of our own environment where we're like you don't really the conversations don't change that much so we rely on the foundational models to handle a lot of the edge scenarios where someone's trying to go off rail and say something that's not in scope of the agent that makes no sense thank you do you last question the like do you guys internally view yourselves as building vertical software with the end user experiencing the product as an agent because I feel like there's been a lot of

companies come out over the last year that's saying like we're building AI agents for XYZ and then if you actually drill down into like okay what are you doing and like what is the experience of a of one of your customers it's like SaaS right and that's like it can be AI enabled to be clear we're extremely bullish about that yeah and we're and yeah I'm super bullish about it but I but the way that you're described the way that you're describing this and the companies that that are that I think are sort of doing good work broadly or like it's not like you're trying to sell that you're just completely reinventing like an entire business model it's more like we're building really valuable software and automated workflows for

companies and the end result is that the patient or the user will have a great experience it's sell the solution not the technology yeah and I feel like that's right one of the first companies not you know who knows but maybe one of the first companies can embrace the new stance you don't have a dot AI domain for example no uh I I I don't think the practices really give a shit that it's AI versus some other system. Yeah, they, they care. Like we all, I've said this, I said a few things from day one, but like one is that there is inherent product market fit in what we're doing as long as we can make the agents work as expected. And so if I can schedule appointments reliably, if I can refill prescriptions, if I can do

all those things and the front desk doesn't have to do it or the call center doesn't have to do it, like everyone will buy that. If it's cheaper, faster, better, you know, whatever you name it. the second is that yeah they just like don't care that it's AI they think it's interesting what's nice is like every group has an AI strategy they don't know what that means yet and so but they know they want to like partner with a company to go do that and so we treat it is all partnerships right now because it's so early but we're definitely building vertical services I would say like that use software to make it really efficient and you don't have to go hire people now to go do the work in most cases but yeah it doesn't matter that if it were if it were i suppose an ivr that got like a phone tree

that was able to do the same thing like someone would buy that too they would just get replaced by the thing that's better and it's higher conversion better patient experience longer term and so yeah that's really the philosophy and then longer term we are going deeper into the stack in terms of the software that we will offer to the clinics to also help them do their jobs better when it's not the i i doing the job and so we look at it as like right now we're doing very specific bespoke services for the group like answering calls and scheduling or doing outbound campaigns and texting a bunch of patients saying, hey, you're overdue for your annual wellness visit or your vaccines or whatever it is. And then having a conversation and again,

getting them scheduled. Longer term, you can imagine like we build more of the software that sits again on top of their practice management system, but that helps the actual clinic teams do their jobs more efficiently as well. It's just deeply integrated with the AI component. Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great to have you on. Join any time. Great questions. We'd love to have that. Thank you guys. We'll talk to you soon. Text me whenever. Cheers. We will. Later. Cheers. See you. Up next, we have 11 labs coming in the studio. He's in the stream waiting room, but not for much longer. Let's bring him from 11 labs.

Welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey, John. Hey, Jordi. Thanks for having me on. How do you say your name? Because I almost greeting you. you with a hoi matey it's matty stanyshefsky although i had the same problem with jordy so i was texting people is it hordy or is it jordy i like hori we're going to there's spanish woods there that is fantastic oh yeah yeah if you went hardcore spanish it might be 40 40 yeah anyway uh let's jump right into it give us the news what's the latest in your world the latest is today 11 laps is launching a tender offer of 100 million dollars where we buy early stage employees and investors at a 6.6 billion valuation which is double thank you guys this is amazing this is amazing so no so happy to to be able to

offer that to all the believers from the early days and you know we are building we're building the company for the generation so I'm hoping to align everybody on that built for that journey So somebody came to you. They wanted to give you $100 million. You said, I don't need it in the business. How do this come about? Because somewhat non-traditional for a company to launch a tender. You could potentially hire one more AI scientist for $100 million.

Well, yeah, a lot of companies would maybe they'd say, like, let's raise a couple hundred million and we'll do some secondary as well. But what kind of, what kind of? Yeah, we'll put you in the position to just focus on a second. secondary transaction in this round. Yeah, two things. One, we are growing very healthy as a business. We got to 200 million in an ERR over last weeks. Congrats.

Which has, thank you. Thank you. It has been a, you know, kind of an interesting journey where we launched the product. So we started the company in 2032, launched the first product, beginning of 2023. It took us 20 months to get to 100 million in revenue, which is at a time, super quick. some even quicker transitions, then took us 10 months to get to 200 million in revenue, which is where we are today. And hopefully we'll get to 300 million by end of the year in five months, so 20, 10, 5 months. So we are growing very quickly and we are doing that in a healthy

manner. We have money in the bank to invest in GPUs, in international expansion. So we don't really need much more capital in the bank. And then the second piece is we had a combination of acquisition attempts over last months and of course as someone who came back to turn it down before before 11 labs I was a volunteer my co-founder was at Google Piot and and we had a very different setup volunteer at the time was private it was almost 15 years private the equity wasn't very liquid and and with Piot we want to make it very different now as you think about the 11 labs so offer frequent liquidity to employees. If we continue running in a healthy manner, we are having the

capital already to deploy, we're going to make sure that the employees can think about this next five, 10 years. So that's where that early, early liquidity is really helpful. And you are right, we had amazing partners with Sequoia, Iconic, joining in, keen to lead around, invest more in the business. And we, of course, love working with them. So I wanted to give them more at the table as well. Give us a breakdown of where all the revenue is coming from. Obviously, I can think of millions of use cases, and I've seen different companies leveraging 11 labs. But like where are kind of the pockets where most of the growth is coming from? Yeah, so at 11 laps, we have two key parts of our business.

One is a creative platform side of the business. And now the second one is our agent's platform. Most of people will have known us from that creative side. That's something that has come with when we start. started a company that's, of course, voiceovers for movies, dubbing of movies to other languages, narrations for audiobooks, creating music, bringing music into default.

And here, that's over, over now, few million monthly active users that will come through the platform and create incredible content. And then the second, and here, we've seen an incredible adoption over last two years, where enterprises like Cisco, Twil, Epic Games, bringing the experiences into Fortnite are building just incredibly new voice agencies. And here, we're going to think about coal centers, customer support, personal agents,

massive media. And across the business, roughly we are approaching 50, 50, 50 between the two. So on one side is self-serve, the creators are half of the revenue, and then enterprises are the additional half. But that's kind of other side is going quicker. way we've seen sorry to interrupt so are you competing with the sierra sierras the fins the decagons or or drilling down into that enterprise business it's also it sounds like yeah i imagine like game like if somebody's creating like a video game they're they're leveraging voice agents as well so

but but kind of could you say a little bit more of course so kind of we we on one side we power a lot of the companies. A lot of the companies you mentioned are our clients. Decagon, Maven, are some of the examples of places we work directly. So a good example is perplexity, who will use voice as part of the interaction to use perplexity. Another is Epic Games where they've effectively deployed Darth Vader experience in Fortnite. So every player could interact with their Vader life for the first time. One of the biggest deployments. As a Star Wars fan, I can do nothing, nothing less. Yeah, that's incredible.

And then, of course, so many across other use cases, chess.com works with us where you can have personalized learning experiences when you play chess. And then other companies like Cisco Twil, where they do use it for both internal use cases, but also bring it to their clients. In those cases, it's similar to what you mentioned already at the beginning, where we power their work internally, but also for their clients. So today we both, we power a lot of clients across and then also work directly with some of the holistic voice operations. Okay.

Help me understand a little bit more about where the business fits in. I feel like you've trained actual models. You're a foundation model company in many ways. And then you're also an inference seller and you have clients that effectively buy tokens from you. they buy mp3s or waifiles probably but but you're you're doing the inference for them so you're kind of full stack in this AI world and then also I just feel like it's been awesome to see you go on this run because there were probably a lot of haters I feel like I saw some haters being like they're going to get steamrolled by the other laps and you have it and you so what are the sources

of defensibility uh and and why like yeah yeah why do you just keep what are they Why do the haters keep being wrong? Yeah, I mean, it is, it is, it's been an amazing, amazing run. And it's such a unique position that I think was, it was contrarian. It was overlooked early on and people didn't see what you saw. And so kind of walk me through a little bit of like the structure of the business and and where the defensibility is coming from. Yeah, two answers there.

I think the first piece is, so across 11 laps, we, we, we started company with my co-founder, Piotr Piotr is an incredible researcher symbol, what we think are some of the best researchers in the world in audio. Say we combine the kind of the foundational research, build a horizontal infrastructure, and then have vertical applications on top of that. And I think the main reason that we've been able to stay ahead

is clear focus on voice. We always build the models in voice, we build applications around voice. And that's something that on both sides, on the product side, on the research side, many of the companies just aren't doing. And whether it was text to speech initially and bringing more emotional model, then creating a speech-to-text model that was heavily beating OpenAI, Google and others on benchmarks,

and now the full orchestration across those models and finally bringing music into the fold. And I think a combination of just raw, incredible research talent that is now at 11 laps, missionary focus of building those models. and then being able to deploy them in production quicker has been helpful on that side. And then on the other side, we really care about building the best voice application. So spend a lot of time with our both on the creator side,

but also on the enterprise side, and build backwards from there. So that's the first answer. But the second answer, I recently got to meet Jensen, Jensen Huang, from Nvidia in the UK. And of course, I came over. I wanted to say hi and said that I

And then he responded that, oh, I was an early 11 laps user and still am, but from the day you launched, I thought that all the voice models will commoditize. But one thing I didn't appreciate is that the true voice experience takes an artist, and you guys all are artists. And that is partly true where I think there's so much new ones across voice. you need to create such a distinct experience when it comes to different voices, different languages, different dialects. So Jensen's take that a lot of our engineers, a lot of our company is being effectively crafting those artistic experiences is true. And yeah, we will probably be now on video clients for life too.

This is a great take. It's very similar to why we saw that news that META has a partnership with Mid Journey. Meta has all the money in the world. They have a ton of scientists, but maybe they don't have the artist that is David Holes at Mid-Journey who just brings taste to those images and so they got to pay them, which I love to see.

I want your reaction to, speaking of that, where are we in the uncanny valley of voice generation? There was news today in the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI is making a full-length feature animated film. And in this article, They said the production, they're investing $30 million in this. It'll be a full feature length film. They're trying to do it in nine months,

which seems totally doable in the age of AI, honestly. But they said the production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches. And I saw that, and I just thought, like, I've been under the assumption that voice was solved, even if Open AI doesn't have the frontier model, you know, if this is a demo of AI broadly, they should be able to figure this out. Why do you think that they're going with human voices here? And do you think there's something that's, you know, on the frontier?

Give me your timelines for when we might see 11 labs technology in a Hollywood film. I think, first of all, I think you can create an amazing experience already and happily we did. So maybe there's a model or skill help where we can work with Open AI and help them help them out on that side. No, they have amazing researchers. I think they are going to craft those experiences too. I think that, you know, like Epic Games example is a great way of showing that is visible. In that case, we worked with recreating, working with the estate, the voice of James Earl Jones, and it did sound exactly like Darvader.

And players were like almost amazed that how is it possible where you have dynamically generated script, effectively a live NPC, in the game for the first time. Similarly, in our case, we worked with a legends of the past like Richard Fama, creating his voice where you can really immerse yourself in the story, but also with people like Ariana Huffington or First Lady Melania Trump on creating their audiobooks. And the whole derivory of that experience is as good as real thing. And the crazy thing, it also allows you to do things you could never do before. You can bring those content pieces into other languages and still hear that voice. I think Hollywood is a trickier piece where it might take a slightly longer time aligning the likeness component of how you work with the people, how they get compensated, and how you bring those experiences on screen. We do hope that the first dubbed movies will get into production next year where you have even better thing than what was previously possible.

You get that original expression available in dubbed movies. And in 2027, hopefully the first Hollywood movie hits on the screens in English too. That'd be very cool. Thank you so much for joining the stream. Congrats. Congrats to the whole team. Fantastic progress all over the place. Just, yeah, remarkable to see.

I love that take about the artistry that goes into crafting these super differentiated high, tier models. It's wonderful to see. You love to see it. Thank you so much. I'm also so proud and happy of our mighty team of artists across and spirits. So thanks for, thanks much for having me on, guys. Yeah, have a great for your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Thanks. Up next. Up next. Dan from Truck Smarter. It's time.

room. It's time to truck. People were saying, are we going to truck dumber? No, we're going to truck smarter. And we will welcome Dan out of the re-stream. Founder mode. Dan, how you doing? What's going on? Good to see you. Good. What's going on, guys? Good to see you. We're trucking. We're locked in. The great lock-in has begun. Many financings have been announced. We hear you have some news to share with us. Why don't you introduce yourself the company and then the news? Yeah, it's been an absolutely packed day for fundraising. So I appreciate you guys getting us in. I'm happy to bring the party to freight.

Thank you. My name is Dan, co-founder, CEO of Truck Smarter. We're super excited to announce our fundraising and the launch of our AI product dispatch as well. What was the fundraise? Give me the details. What happened? Yeah, so we just raised from Associate Ventures,

which is backed by Cox Enterprises, and then backed by all of our familiar friends, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, A16Z, BCV, to continue building the absolute best tools for trunky companies. And how much did you raise? 16 million. There we go. There we go.

Give us a quick history of the company. When did you start trucking smarter? So we started in 2021. We first started by building a loadwork. For folks that are not familiar, A lot of trucking companies today. So there's, what, almost a million truck drivers out there, 95% of them, 95% of these trucking companies own less than five trucks.

And the way they find jobs is very similar to you going on Craigslist to buy something, right? So all this information is everywhere, the information is not entirely verified, the people are not even verified, you're kind of just scraping the barrel constantly spending hours every single day. But that's kind of been the very core of our company. We started by building a load board that helped them find those jobs. in a more efficient way. And then we started layering on a ton of financial services,

getting them paid, getting them access to credit. If you think about these are the small businesses that just do not get access to a lot of these things. And because we're at the very beginning of their revenue journey, we can just see all this information. And then obviously now with AI this year, there's just a tremendous opportunity to just make finding a job so much more efficient.

And that's kind of what we've been heads down on for the last six months. There's a poster behind you. Load boards should be, free. Explain to us, how exactly does the industry work? You have to pay to find a trucking job? How does that work? It is, it is absolutely crazy, right? So if you think about it, for you to, for you to access this Craigslist type of thing, you got to probably pay anywhere from 50 bucks, 250, 300 bucks a month. At the very beginning of our company, we made it extremely clear. So we can't really go back from here. We said load boards should be free. We could

built software that kind of connected all the disparate pieces of information into a single place, give it all away for free. And that's kind of the engine for our entire business. We continue to grow tremendously from that. And that's where we continue to layer on all these different services. What's the kind of competitive dynamic in the market? Are you going to force everyone to go free? It seems really obvious to like if there's a barrier to getting a customer, drop that to zero and then figure out how to monetize the customer somewhere else. I'm surprised No one's done this before, so congrats on the innovation. But it seems like the competitive dynamic will be like people will try and fast follow you.

So is it just a race to build more financial products, better products behind the scenes? Like what's the long term? Or is it just like you've got to get big, you got to get all the data on there? You got to get big, right? So I think for us, right, it's a race to layer on additional services. A lot of the existing companies, there's a lot of big load boards out there. They've been around for 50, 60 years, right? So you think about Craigslist, right?

A lot of people have tried to verticalize all the various. categories of Craigslist. They've done so in a very real way, but Craigslist is still a monster. They still do hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. So there's still a lot of this pattern with a lot of the existing companies. But for us, we're just able to layer on all these other things that just makes our platform continue to be more attractive. Have you done what the truck podcast? This is a funny, have you done it? Yes. Yes. Yeah, I've done this podcast randomly. They were talking about nicotine pouches and the guy wanted to have me on. It was really fun. It's actually extremely well,

show. But in that vein, like, I imagine you can't go on every week. You got to reach truckers. What's working on the growth side? Yeah. So I think for us, right, we're the number one loadboard on the platform on the market today, right? You search load board. You search for you load board. We're number one or number two. That's the strategy, right? Making it free just makes it incredibly easy for anybody to access. And as a result, you're getting all the people that are coming into the market, right? So there's an SEO play. Are you doing any, like, brand building high top of funnel, you know, awareness with truckers? Or their specific, like, campaigns? It's so hard because they, like, the truckers aren't in all one place by definition, right? They're all over the

country. So it's not like you can buy one billboard and you're good. You know, how do you reach people and actually create like brand awareness? Yeah, I think for us it's kind of continuing to solve that number one acute pain point, right, which is finding a job. And that's kind of what we've been focused on from day one. And as a result, I think we just have one of the best growth engines that can reach these trucking companies because almost certainly every trucking company has probably downloaded unload board and there's a very high chance that it's ours. And then as a result, we kind of have that information to just continue to offer them more services. Yep. Fantastic. Congratulations. This is fantastic. We will talk to you soon. We'll let you get back to your day.

Have a great day. Load boards should be free. Appreciate it, guys. Thanks, we're dropping on. Well, on that note, I got to get on with London. It is past, it'll keep doing these three and a half hour streams. We keep saying we're going to do two and a half.

We always go along. Tyler, any other breaking news tearing up the timeline? Anything you got for me? No crazy news. No crazy news? I don't know. Okay, that's good. Well, we will see you tomorrow.

We will be live from Whitecommon in your demo day. tune in. We're going to have a lot of fun there. And then on Wednesday we'll be in New York City. So we are going a little bit of a world tour, a little bit of an American tour this week, and we will see you tomorrow. Can't wait. Goodbye. Have a great evening.