TBPN Live - AI-Birds, Snap's Next Chapter, Amazon + Globalstar | Kiva Dickinson, Aron D'Souza, Michael Mignano, Wade Foster, Ankur Nagpal, Bailey Pumfleet, Han Wang

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

(01:52) - AllBirds turns to AI Compute Provider (15:04) - Snaps Cuts 16% of Workforce (22:45) - Amazon + Globalstar (31:00) - Kiva Dickinson, founder and managing partner of Selva Ventures, leads investments in emerging health and wellness brands. In the conversation, he discusses his transition from investment banking to venture capital, highlighting his focus on supporting early-stage consumer brands that promote healthier living. He emphasizes the importance of providing strategic resources to these companies, aiming to make healthier living more accessible and enjoyable. (50:30) - Aron D'Souza, an Australian lawyer and entrepreneur, is the founder of the Enhanced Games, an upcoming sporting event that permits the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In the conversation, he discusses the inaugural event scheduled for late May in Las Vegas, highlighting the participation of Olympic gold medalists and world record holders, and mentions the organization's plans to go public through a SPAC combination on the New York Stock Exchange. Additionally, D'Souza introduces his new venture, Objection.AI, an AI-driven platform designed to challenge and verify claims made in the media, aiming to establish an objective arbiter of truth in society. (01:02:31) - Uber Commits $10B to RoboTaxis (01:04:28) - Michael Mignano, co-founder of the podcasting platform Anchor and former head of Spotify's talk audio division, has joined Union Square Ventures (USV) as a General Partner. In his conversation, he discusses his longstanding relationship with USV, highlighting their thesis-driven investment approach and willingness to support unconventional ideas. He emphasizes the importance of in-depth discussions within small teams to develop clear strategies, a practice he values from his experiences at Anchor and Spotify. (01:26:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:03) - Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, discusses the recent launch of Zapier's SDK, which integrates with various coding agents to automate tasks across numerous tools. He highlights the surge in internal tool development within companies, noting that Zapier's marketing team created over 80 new internal tools during a recent hackathon. Foster also emphasizes the importance of maintaining accountability when using AI-generated content and shares insights on how remote work enhances documentation and institutional knowledge. (01:51:35) - Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable and Carry, discusses the recent acquisition of Carry by AngelList and Lettuce Financial. AngelList acquired Carry's parent company to enhance its financial product offerings, while Lettuce Financial acquired Carry's retirement platform to provide comprehensive services for self-employed individuals. Nagpal highlights the importance of these partnerships in expanding access to financial tools for solopreneurs and plans to continue his involvement as a strategic advisor. (02:01:09) - Bailey Pumfleet, co-founder and CEO of Cal.com, discusses the company's transition from open-source to closed-source scheduling software due to escalating AI-driven security threats. He highlights that advancements in AI have enabled rapid exploitation of open-source code, compromising application security. To protect sensitive user data, Cal.com has decided to close its source code while maintaining its commitment to user trust and data integrity. (02:09:54) - Han Wang, co-founder and CEO of Mintlify, discusses the company's mission to empower developers by providing AI-native documentation solutions, which have been adopted by over 10,000 companies, including Anthropic, Microsoft, and Coinbase. He highlights the increasing role of AI in consuming documentation, noting that currently, approximately 50% of their documentation traffic comes from AI agents, a figure expected to rise to over 90% by year's end. Wang also announces Mintlify's recent $45 million Series B funding at a $500 million valuation, emphasizing the importance of accessible and up-to-date documentation in the rapidly evolving software landscape. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, April 15th, 2026. It's tax day. I hope you paid your taxes. We have a great show for you today, folks. A bunch of crazy stories going on. Allbirds is now an AI company. Snap is restructuring the entire company. Amazon's buying Global Star. There's new info on Apple's new AI glasses. We're going to take you through it all. We also have a bunch of guests joining. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven guests. Guests join. winning. Kiva Dickinson, Aaron DeSuzza. Michael McNano is now at Union Square Ventures. Massive pickup. Yeah, we're very excited for that. Wade Foster from Zapier, she's coming on. Ankur just got acquired by Angel List. P.Rissela split acquisition. I'm not exactly, oh, so half the company is going to Angel List, half the company is going to let us.

That's right. Got it. I wasn't sure what that meant. I'm excited to talk to you about it. Anchor himself will be over it. Angelus, very excited about that. Great pickup. But Fun show today. S&P 500 rises to a new record. Yes. So why am I not wearing a white suit? It's because although the market is at all-time highs, I don't understand why.

It feels like there's never been more chaos in the markets. And I'm seeing a lot of companies that are under pressure, a lot of software companies that are under pressure. A lot of companies I know and love under pressure. But it does feel like the Mag 7 is doing well and some of the bigger companies are doing well. AI is still a mega cycle and there are exciting pockets of opportunity in the market. And certainly, Allbirds is doing quite well.

Yes. How much is it up today? 714%. So we talked about this maybe last week. That's an insane gain for a single day. But they're completely changing the business model. The Financial Times has a hilarious article in Alphaville. Alphaville has a great headlines.

Allbirds is turning into an AI compute per se. provider because of course it is. And it goes through what's happened over the last few years, few months. There's been a lot of twists and turns with this story, but we'll take you through it. So they start by saying, ah, zeitgeist. Allbirds is a San Francisco maker of wool trainers that was once valued at more than $4 billion. That's pretty big for a direct-to-consumer shoe company at the same time. When it was growing and selling a lot of shoes, you know, Nike's a big company. It makes sense that if you could get a piece of that, maybe you could be multi-billion dollar company. Yeah, and they were selling a lot of shoes. They were very on trend.

Yeah, I think that they got the revenues into the hundreds of millions of dollars and you would see them everywhere. A bunch of owned retail. Yeah, yeah, they definitely had some owned retail stores and we're pursuing the hybrid online offline sales model. It was working. It was never, it was never just like some completely hypothetical vaporware company. Like, they were, they were real shoes. You could buy them and wear them. It was fine. But it was sold last month for $39 million to American Exchange Group. The stock having slumped more than 99% since its flotation on the NASDAQ in 2021. And so look at this chart, Jordi, very, very rough. Is that good? That is not good. Okay. But maybe the next plan is better. We'll figure it out. So the plan for the shell listing is

Quote, to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service, an AI cloud solutions provider in connection with this pivot. The company anticipates changing its name to new bird AI. And so this was very unexpected. We can talk about where we are. With shareholder approval, all birds will raise 50 million via convertible notes from an institutional investor. It does not identify. So they're going to be able to get at least a few GPUs for that. Maybe they'll be able to plug them in.

Maybe a whole rack. Yeah. I can plug in a rack. But, yeah, big questions around where are they going to get the compute? Where are they going to get the energy? Will anyone rely on, will be willing to rely on them? This feels like. Tons and tons of questions.

This feels like an institutional investor who says, I want to participate. participate in this idea that even older GPUs are trading above par and so GPUs are sort of gaining value and they want in on that in some meaningful way but they also want to wrap it in a public company that can sort of become a meme stock essentially and then basically everything else about the business will be different because the entire shoe business will be sold off and and this is basically just a use for the it's it's a use of the of the ticker and the listing and the shell,

and then probably an entirely different team, entirely different strategy, entirely different, everything, basically, new name. So here's the Schedule 14A that explains the pivot ahead of a shareholder vote on May 18th. It adds, with respect to the renamed corporate entity, we are investigating potential opportunities in the computing infrastructure market,

including the acquisition and monetization of graphics processing units, related high-performance computing infrastructure, capable to support high workloads, whether from artificial intelligence and machine learning or other needs of potential future customers and other related assets. Also, because the anticipated electronics infrastructure business would be less focused on the public benefit of environmental conservation, which is stated in the company's certificate of incorporation, I guess Albirds was a public benefit corporation because the wool was supposed to be more environmentally friendly. and it was almost like an REI type brand. They are doing away with that, and so the stockholders are being asked

to approve the charter amendment proposal to remove references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit. That is not going to be popular with the Allbirds fan. Oh, boy. The announcement was enough to establish Allbirds as a meme stock at pixel time

when this went to print. The shares are up 774% at 2176 a share to give the soon-to-be shell a market cap of slightly more than $184.5 million. And so I guess the question you have to ask is if this $50 million comes in, they're able to buy GPUs, rack them, get some value out of it. Is that worth anywhere near $184 million? It's a tough sell, but the market will figure it out over the next few days, I'm sure. the value is tight.

Dave Portnoy. Hold on. Let's hear from that. It's interesting. I mean, $50 million is like not enough to like lease to a neolab, right? Because you just like can't buy enough capacity. Yeah.

So it is interesting. I don't know who the actual like consumer of these GPUs will be. Yeah. Maybe you can just like resell them on open router or something. Yeah, yeah. You can resell on open router. Like you're running. I mean, George Hots was talking about that.

Yeah, the Gio Hots method. He was talking about like he found a building that had cheap power and he was going to just buy a bunch of GPUs. And I think he was raising like 10 million or 20 million to do that. And he was going to sell the tokens on OpenRouter profitably. And so there's a potential business model there. Also, yes, you probably couldn't sell to a NeoLab that's doing some huge foundation model training run. But there might be some company that's doing like fine tuning on some small model or doing some niche model.

I mean, again, to go back to George Hutz, like he had a, you know, a couple racks of GPUs that he was training. self-driving cars on and you have to imagine that there's lots of like long-tail applications for a for custom models that need to be trained that aren't as big maybe i don't know yeah i mean so this is like essentially just a spack because you're just yes everything is different yes it's it's it was already it was already a public company and they're just adapt they're doing like a massive pivot uh i don't think they will make any progress at all no i think that it is entirely a meme uh i woke up this morning. I was like, that is really funny. You know, taking the, taking, all birds became a meme, right? The company was basically dying, but the meme remained strong. And it's kind of making

allbirds in some way just like became such a part of the uniform of Silicon Valley. It was something that Silicon Valley was mocked for and to take that corporate shell and make a mockery of our industry again, uh, feels, feels quite fitting. And, uh, so anyways, I'm incredibly, the shoes, uh, even Dave Portnoy said, I don't get it. Uh, he loves a meme stock. And he loves a meme stock. So can we play this video? I have no idea how the actual stock, uh, will perform. Yeah. Are you pulling it up? No, I, I don't have it here. I think you had it. Um, but, uh, all the allbirds.com still resolves to the full e-commerce website. They have an extra 25% off sale, discount applied in cart.

You can get all the different shoes that they sell. I think they sell other stuff too now. And so it'll be interesting to see. I mean, how quickly can they disentangle the new compute infrastructure division from the actual apparel and shoe division? Well, my understanding is like they sold off all of the Allbirds assets. Yeah, yeah. Right?

Yeah. So for $39 million, they sold it to American Exchange Group. Yeah. They got the domain. They got all the listing as a quicker way to get to public markets. But the ticker remained public, and it was just sitting there. And I think a lot of people are sitting there, sitting, talking to their friends being like, why did I not think to turn all birds into a neoclap?

Yeah. Why am I? We got it. It's got to go on. We had a buddy who's a very, very smart investor who you could just tell wanted to slam his head into the table because he's, you know, spending all this time trying to, you know, trying to pick real winners, invest in, you know, fantastic, durable businesses. Yeah.

And all, you know, right in front of him was what in hindsight is like a very, very obvious play. Yeah. But, but again, you know, looking back at like the history of the last time this happened was Long Island Ice Tea. Oh, yeah, that's right. in 2017, December 21st, 2017, the company announced that it was changing its name from Long Island Ice Tea to the Long Blockchain Corp and said it would shift its strategy toward exploration of an investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology while keeping its beverage subsidiary. the stock surged immediately after the announcement amid Cryptomania again this was the 2017 cycle coverage reported jumps of roughly 200%

and some reports said it rose as much as 380% midday and and it basically then just started to like chop chop for a few weeks and ultimately faced various had a little run in with the S-E and they brought insider trading charges ahead, you know, because of activity that happened ahead of the pivot announcement. So I wouldn't be surprised to see, I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar here.

The Long Island Ice Tea Company was doing $4 million in sales in 2017, something like that, 25 employees, like pretty small company back then and then just sort of wound down. People are not very optimistic that this would work. Ben says hopefully everyone understands whatever the Allbirds pivot is, they will unlikely, they won't likely secure any power, any GPUs at reasonable scale and need a lot more money than this to even have a prayer. And you certainly see that with all the other neoclouses. that show up on Cluster Macs.

Every NeoClyde that we talk to on the show is raising hundreds of millions of dollars and then debt on top of it and is usually has a lineage that traces back years, if not a decade and has a whole bunch of interesting, you know, unique value props to actually, whether it's on the software side, on the deployment side, on the infrastructure side,

on the energy side, actually going and finding power is very, very difficult and continues to be But yes, a lot of people are saying this is dot-com vibes. It is crazy. Satrini says, can we please wait until we are at least 5% above previous all-time highs to start doing this? And it does seem like this. If you sell shoes, pivot to a GPU cloud, I guess. And negligible capital has the meme from Wolf of Wall Street.

The name of the company, Newbird AI. It's a cutting-edge AI native cloud infrastructure firm out of, well, they used to be out of San Francisco making sneakers. But forget that, John. They are now awaiting imminent deployment of next generation GPU compute clusters that have both massive enterprise and consumer applications. Now, right now, John, the stock trades on the NASDAQ at about the price of a cup of coffee. And by the way, John, our analysts indicate it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. And, John, one more thing, they're up just 160% today. Yeah, what wild.

What a wild time. Well, stay safe out there. Do your own research and avoid all the price. Roth, Mike Isaac says, this is just going to be the default for any failing entity that owns a significant amount of real estate able to be converted into data centers. I'm waiting for the RB server farms. I don't know if that's what's happening here with real estate. I think it's more about the shell entity.

The brand. No, not even the brand. I mean, the brand. No, the brand, like, there has to be a goofiness to it. Yes. To become a meme. Yeah, to become a meme. Because I don't think, I don't think anybody who's investing in this company actually thinks

they will build a great neoclop. Yeah, it is just. We just have, you know, talk to so many of these companies. And there are a number of established players. In fact, they're already, you know, everyone expects the market for inference to be one of the biggest markets of all time.

Yeah. But that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that, that doesn't mean that anyone that attempts to build a business here will be successful. Yeah. Well, let's move over to Snobacco. Snap. Evan Spiegel, former guest of the show, two-time in-person guest. They're saying he went to Coachella and came back and was like...

Right-size the company. So he's laying off a thousand full-time employees, which is roughly 16% of the global workforce, as part of an effort to reduce costs and achieve profitability. In a memo to employees Wednesday, Spiegel said the cuts are necessary for Snap to boost efficiency as it pursues profitable growth. He cited improvements in artificial intelligence technology that let Snap employees move more quickly. the company is also closing more than 300 open roles. Spiegel told staffers, many of whom were told to work from home on Wednesday, that the job cuts and pullback on hiring will reduce SNAP's annualized cost base by more than $500 million by the second half of this year. Snap estimated that total revenue rose 12% to $1.53 billion in the first quarter, so $6 billion in total revenue run rate. adjusted earnings before interest, basically, EBITDA, is 233 million during the period.

Snap shares jumped as much as 9% after markets opened in New York. Spiegel wrote a memo. He said, last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth. Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value. The stock is down 31% so far this year. And what's interesting is that it is not really this this SaaSpocalypse narrative because even if you vibe code a

Snapchat clone, you won't have the actual usage data, the network effect that exists. But the market has definitely turned on stock-based comp and just is in the hunt for profitability. broadly. So, um, which, uh, which, of course, SNAP has,

has never had a, uh, had generated a single dollar of, of net income. When you include stock-based comp, right? Uh, I think, I think that always includes stock-based comp.

Uh, and so EBITDA is positive, but they, they, uh, they issue a lot of stock to comp the employees. And that has, that has weighed down on the share price, because there's a lot of dilution.

And while Spiegel is also working to sell a vision for augmented reality glasses, which the company plans to debut later this year, it has leaned heavily on outside firms to power its AI offerings. Larger rivals are spending aggressively to build and develop their own state-of-the-art AI products and infrastructure.

The job cuts arrived. Just weeks after activist investor, a renic capital management took a stake in the company and called for swift changes in that memo that we reviewed on the show a couple weeks ago, including a recommendation. that Snap cut its workforce in hopes of boosting the stock price. Like many of your peers, you overhired the investor wrote in a letter to Spiegel last

month. Unlike your peers, you haven't course corrected. Spiegel's note to employees didn't mention whether the job cuts were related to ironic's recent demands. Other major tech companies have slashed their workforces, including Snap rival meta platforms, meta eliminated hundreds of jobs globally in March and shed roughly 1,000 workers from its reality labs group back in January, all while ramping up investments in AI. Spiegel suggested AI was one part of his decision for the cuts. While these changes are necessary to realize SNAP's long-term potential, Spiegel said of the cuts,

we believe that rapid advancements in AI enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community partners and advertisers. And so the big question that I have generally is, like, what is the actual replacement rate? Like how much are they spending on AI? We saw that report from Uber that they blew through a year of budget on AI. tools in just a couple months. And a lot of people were sort of reacting to that saying like, well, I've used the Uber app for years.

It doesn't feel like it's changing dramatically. Of course, there's manual workflows that internally might need to be done and AI might speed that up. But in terms of getting like net new applications, net new apps that people actually use and enjoy, that seems to be like the next opportunity for real growth as opposed to just. just cost optimization. And so the $400 million deal with perplexity is no longer happening. I guess that's been pulled back on.

Yeah, I wonder, I really wonder why the perplexity is seen seemingly some very real growth on their new product computer. They've been sharing some of their, the increased revenue that they're seeing from that. but yeah that was I think one of the things that yeah what did what in the save snap now campaign that was one of the one of these suggestions was to pull out of that

is to concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini Open AI and Anthropic Oh interesting So they were not in favor And again it seemed It seemed like perplexity would be in a position where they would pay the most potentially for that distribution

and we'll see if they actually backfill that slot or just focus on their own tooling. So the full presentation is up now, which you can read through. After nine years of being a public company, 15 years since being founded, Evan Spiegel finally decided to put a business plan together for how to reach profitability. And so you can go click through all of that. And what else is going on? Oh, you wanted to talk about Anthony Pompliano's new, agentic podcast on Wall Street.

The show is called Best Stocks, and it's 100% AI generated. Each episode is based off the agentic research articles. Synthetic AI content will be more popular than human-created content. He says, and he had it covered in accident. I can see a daily. Yeah, so a lot of people are, best stocks is kind of a funny name because it's just like the most generic possible name for a finance podcast. What's your finance podcast called Best Stocks?

But I think that historically, you know, one of the main downsides in the podcast was that they always had this lag, right? They were recorded, edited, and then eventually published. But people, and so, like, in some ways, TV remained competitive as a place where if you wanted to understand what was happening in the markets, you turn on CNBC, right? It's always on. You can always kind of get an update there. And so I think that like real-time podcasts, that was part of what I think helped us get some traction early with the show was that we were publishing every single day. So it was like kind of a real-time look into the markets.

I think that this show, I haven't listened to an episode yet. I'll try it on the way home. But I wouldn't be given the popularity of I think this, there's like a real-time like politics one that is done very well on Apple Podcasts. I think that this show could find an audience, right? It's basically notebook L.M, but a little bit more curated, probably a little bit more opinionated. You don't have to, like, be prompting yourself. And I would expect this to get some level of traction of people just wanting to turn something on,

understand in real time what's happening, and it uses, obviously, the existing distribution. So we'll see. but not as bearish as some of the other people. Well, let's switch over to Amazon. Why is Amazon buying Starlink rival Global Star in an $11 billion deal? The race is heating up between Amazon and SpaceX. So Amazon's buying satellite operator Global Star in a deal that the company's estimated at about 10.8 billion seeking to build a business, connecting consumer smartphones with satellite internet connections.

The deal would give Amazon's Leo satellite ventures. A boost is advised with SpaceX's dominant Starlink network. The Elon Musk controlled satellite business has been launching satellites designed to connect to consumer devices and signing agreements with mobile carriers. Here's what's at stake. Amazon plans to launch new satellite to cell phone service in 2008. That feels far away, but I guess it's only two years away. A big factor in the deal is Global Star's control over spectrum resources, which we've seen trade hands a few times now, which Amazon could use to provide satellite links to smart. phones. Those wireless assets would enable a plan for Amazon to deploy its own direct.

Don, brace yourself. Tell me. AST space mobile is down 10 and a half percent. No way. Five days. Selling off. Selling off on this news. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe the people are worried about like a duopoly here. I don't know. Ben Thompson was talking about ASTS a little bit. Where is it? He's joining the retail, the AST space mobile retail army. Space mobile. Yeah, he said this isn't the only. the example of leaning companies wanting to avoid being at the mercy of SpaceX. Verizon is at it again in terms of their own satellite service, doubling down on their investment in AST space mobile instead of coming to a deal with Starlink for not just better service, but service that

actually exists. So AST space mobile is years behind. They don't have a constellation actually up and active yet, but they have plans to. And to that end, they have concepts of a plan. What other company is the clear leader in that space? Well, it's the one that Ben Thompson expressed hope last year would lean into a SpaceX Spark partnership, and that was Apple. And so he says the problem he noted is that it was hard to see Apple and SpaceX ever resolving who would actually be in charge. Apple clearly agrees because they are not only declining to work with SpaceX, I actually

think they were the driving force in this Global Star deal. And so the battles between all the different tech companies continue to rage. Yeah, and AST Space Mobile now has a heavily, heavily, heavily funded competitor in the same general category. Yeah. Yeah, there was a moment where. Like Amazon's not spending $11.5 billion and then just going to be like, all right, we're going to try to be really, you know, run this super efficiently. They're going to invest heavily. Yep.

In between Leo and the same distribution or core Amazon business. Yep. as they get to scale. Yeah, they don't have devices, and so they won't be fully vertically integrated, but what Ben Thompson's pointing out is that Apple might not want to have a single point of leverage there with SpaceX,

and so they're balancing the two out. Overall, SpaceX is overall Starlink fleet numbers around 10,000 operational satellites. Elon had this cool chart of 10 to the zero, 10 to the 1, 10 to the 2, 10 to 3, like the exponential every 10x number of satellites. and they check them off at Starlink HQ when they get to the next order of magnitude.

The company plans to launch thousands more in the years ahead. Starlink has deployed more than 650 satellites dedicated to providing connections to cell phones as of the end of last year, connecting more than 12 million people, according to the company. Global Star operates a network of satellites, and in recent years, has provided Apple with satellite links to support features for iPhones.

Apple's service allows users to send text messages, call emergency assistance, and seek roadside help in areas. where cell phone service isn't available. And the Global Star Service has always been slower than, it's high Earth orbit, so it's a lot slower than a Starlink connection. But they are already working with Amazon to figure out the next iteration of that. So Amazon said Tuesday that it agreed to a deal with Apple to power satellite services for its iPhone

and Apple Watch and to work together on future satellite services using Leo's growing network. Global Star has separately been working with Canadian satellite maker, MDA space to develop new satellites that Global Star would own with capacity dedicated to Apple. So Global Star's Global Spectrum rights became more valuable as SpaceX and Apple began more aggressively using satellite links to connect phones. So connecting cell phones through satellites is still a nascent market. Most consumers who live in urban areas get links through traditional telecom providers, carriers that have struck satellite to smartphone deals, have promoted them as ways for consumers

to always have some degree of internet connectivity in remote areas. T-satellite connects you where, T-Mobile says if its offerings through Starlink. SpaceX, of course, has a rocket advantage. They have a fleet of Falcon 9 rockets to build Starlink into the biggest satellite fleet in history. Amazon has been splashing out billions of dollars to other launch providers, including ULA and Blue Origin to build up the Leo network. But delays have slowed Amazon's effort. You have a take to?

Yeah, I mean, I wonder how smoothly this will lead into space data centers, because I, I, I know Blue Origin has talked a little bit about doing that. Yeah. I think they got some, they got some permission from, I think, the, I think, FCC. Yeah. Yeah, like, it seems like this is the very, like, this is the natural endpoint. You're basically just, like, doing similar things to Elon. Yeah, I was reading, I think Ben Thompson mentioned it about Global Stars, like, original, what was it?

The, is it processing? So, so Global Star's assets are all things considered pretty middling. 24 satellites nearing the end of their 15 years lifespan. So they only have 24 satellites up there. And they use a bent pipe architecture, which is signal relaying only no onboard processing. So I think it's actually just a reflector dish. I don't, I'm not for sure, I'm not sure exactly. how this works, but that's what it seems like.

Maybe there's, I mean, he's saying there's no onboard processing. I'm not exactly sure how detailed that is. I want to do a little bit of a deep dive on what the bent pipe architecture implies because it sounds like mostly just a reflector dish up there, but it works because you can bounce, you know, you have ground station, you can bounce stuff up and still. This is reminding me, why did all birds not kind of rally their pivot around space data center? They should have, yeah. Yeah, why are they doing data centers when, you know, compute on the ground?

Lean into the new meta. Yeah, the new meta for sure. Maybe, who knows? Maybe next week they'll be looking for another story and that'll be it. They have 24 ground gateway stations across six continents. There are some new satellites on the way to keep the constellation going, but it seems likely that still on the drawing board, higher capabilities satellites will be scrapped.

Approximately 8 megahertz of the L-Ban satellite uplink and approximately at least 16.5 megahertz of the S-band satellite downlink and N53 terrestrial spectrum for private cellular networks, not phone-to-satellite communication that is licensed out. So those assets, by and large, serve one customer, Apple. Apple owned a 20% stake in Global Star and had rights to 85% of Global Star's network capacity for the satellite service.

It provides to iPhones and Apple Watches. So that's certainly a valuable relationship. But it also meant that Apple had a de facto veto on any Global Star acquisition. And so what he's arguing is that Apple is very happy that Global Star and Amazon are teaming up in this way to provide them with another option. Apple's like any, we love all CapEx that is not our CapEx.

They really do. They are the master of that. We'll have to come back to the story of the Apple new Rayban competitors, the smart glasses, because we have our first guest in the waiting. Kiva Dickinson from Selva. Series A lead of Grooves. Kiva, how are you doing?

What's going on? Welcome to the show. Doing great, guys. What's going on? It is great to see you. I was looking in your background trying to see if we could maybe see our own office.

Oh, are you in L.A.? Yeah, we're looking northwest. Where are you guys? Okay. We are more east. Okay. So not quite. But great to see.

see you on here. How's your last, how's your last week been? Was that your, was that your first, like, a billion dollar exit? First billion. Yeah, for sure. And definitely, definitely the biggest exit that we've been a part of. And yeah, it's been fantastic. It's exciting to share the good news and really incredibly thrilled for the company. Spend a lot of time with them this week. And fantastic for the category overall. You guys have been through it. Obviously, Obviously, you never lost faith. Otherwise, you wouldn't have invested in Grooons. But certainly it's been funny today watching all birds have new life.

Hopefully your portfolio isn't getting any ideas. You know, hey, you know, the supplements category is running away from us, but we could pivot to AI compute. But yeah, give us, I wanted to have you on just to kind of get an update on like consumer investing broadly. Can we start with like some background and how the. fund was set up, how you got into investing, all of that? Yeah, totally. I started my career in investment banking, joined TPG about 12 years ago in the consumer group.

And, you know, I think it was an incredibly, like, formative time of learning what private investing was and, you know, learning about consumer businesses. But what I was thematically excited about was really uninvestable for. us. I was seeing these incredible companies line the shelves of Whole Foods and Target that were getting more and more exciting every year, taking share of the companies that I had grown up with. And, you know, when we talked about them internally in our investment committee, the problem that we faced was they didn't consume enough capital for us to get our kind of $200, $300 million minimum check in on the way up. And we couldn't outbid Unilever, P&G, or Mars on the way out. And so my takeaway was like,

in the wrong seat. Like I got to be doing something in the earlier stage, some be some part of of the early journey of these companies. So wait, double clicking on that trend that you see. I think everyone's familiar with the boom of, I mean, there were a bunch of different factors and I want to know your take on all of them. Like Whole Foods at one point had like local buying. So if you could go in and like talk to the local like the whole foods in your town, they could actually stock you. They didn't have centralized buying. There was also So the D to C boom, online advertising, the influencer boom, celebrities getting the space. Like, what were you identifying as the undercurrents of that broader trend of like new products

taking shelf, like space on the shelf? Yeah. I mean, this is definitely like heighted the D to C boom. And so what was being talked about in the technology industry and in the press were companies frankly like Allbirds and Gasper. Yeah. And I think that was distracting a lot of attention and capital away from what I thought was the most interesting thing, which was when you walk through the aisles of a grocery

store, you see completely different things than you did 10 years ago. You saw companies like Kind Bar taking enormous share in transacting with Mars. You saw companies like Dr. By selling to Dr. Pepper Snapple for like $1.7 billion. These were not grabbing tech headlines. These were not grabbing traditional venture capital, but they were taking share of an absolutely enormous industry. I mean, consumer package goods, depending on where you get the input from, it's like 7 to 10% of GDP. Yeah, yeah. Buy is such a funny story because, I mean, it has a traditional startup founder in his basement, making the product, grinding, unique insight. But during the D2C boom, they didn't have a D2C website. Their website was just links to Amazon. They

never set up a first-party e-commerce site because they just didn't need to. They went out of retail. Which can make sense. Oh, it makes a ton of sense. for beverage specifically. Yeah, exactly. Beverage is really expensive. Amazon has the logistics for it. So, yeah, what, so walk me through the decision and how you actually position yourself to get in at the earlier stages. Yeah, I mean, I made a stop at a company called Circle Up.

They had pivoted from helping emerging CPG companies raise capital to actually raising a fund. And TPG invested in the fund. I kind of put my hand up and said, hey, this sounds awesome. I want to be part of this. Did we lose you? We lost you. Oh no. It's called Nut pods that we eventually, would I lose you guys?

Yeah, just for a second. You're back. So yeah, tell me about that first deal. So we invested in a company called Nut Pods that we eventually sold to VMG and then invested in a company called Liquid Ivy that we pretty quickly turn around and sold to Unilever in about two and a half years. And it showed me what the risk reward can look like. It showed me also that the early stage companies had a real pain.

point at seed and series A. They needed not just like specific specialized capital firms who understood their journey, but also resources and common challenges for these companies look different from early technology companies. It's like how do we do online growth marketing, how do we launch in retail, how do we scale a supply chain, how do we deal with not having all our eggs in the basket of one contract manufacturer? Traditional venture capital firms were not built to solve these problems. And so in 2019, I broke off and basically tried to build a proof of concept of what a modern venture capital firm built to serve these companies could look like. That's what Selva Ventures is today. We're now investing out of our second fund. And that fund

has been a part of like UCI said, Grooons, but also businesses like One Skin, Javi, Midday Squares, Array, to name a few. What's the, sorry. Yeah, what, what is best, in class look like today. One of your portfolio companies, which I won't name because I don't think it's public, I was able to watch them go from basically zero to hundreds of millions of revenue in the span of like, I think like roughly four years, something like that, very, very short period of time, very small team. Is that like, is that kind of what you expect out of, out of a good investment? or are there still some like, you know, kind of like slow burn, kind of, you know, companies that kind of like find that takeoff moment quite a bit later?

Yeah, there are longer journeys. There are shorter journeys. Grunes is probably the shortest one I've ever seen. I mean, that business is like 32 months old now since launching the consumers. I think what we do find is that the combination of online subscription, which is for a great habitual personal care or supplement business can be really, really sticky, like software like retention, plus the scale of the best retailers out there. I'm talking Walmart, Target, Costco, Sephora.

You can build a very, very large business that doesn't consume a lot of capital in a pretty short period of time. And so when we talk short, like, we underwrite our investments to five to eight years You know, the exits can certainly be shorter than what we've started to see in the technology markets of like longer dated IPOs. But, you know, the off ramp for these companies is traditionally, you know, like Grooons in the best and class way, an exit to a strategic once you're somewhere between one and $300 million in revenue. And that's something if the flywheel online and offline is going, you don't have to wait too long for. Yeah. It seems like a, I mean, it's a great outcome whenever you see one of these like unfold.

I mean, Grunz is particularly fast, but there's a lot of examples of, you know, raising money carefully, deploying it, growing steadily, figuring out the product, the supply chain, and then exiting to a strategic, we've seen that over and over and over again. Do you ever run into founders who are like, I'm going to take on Unilever? I'm going to become the next Unilever. I'm never selling. I'm going all over that. I think everyone says that until they get an offer from Unilever at over.

rebellion and then maybe but I'm just wondering we have it's funny actually when I started this firm I'd have a bunch of traditional VCs like send me pitch decks to be like what do you think and the subject line was like the next P&G or the next human labor yeah these are incredibly sophisticated organizations yeah they're so

good at manufacturing marketing sales distribution regulatory what they're not good at is innovative and so the idea of like building a new one from scratch is kind of like doing the scale thing without having scale. Yeah, you need to do the innovative thing and do that really well while simultaneously doing it multiple times and getting the scale and the systems and the distribution dialed. I mean, the one in our space that people naturally talk about is Harry's.

They're now called mammoth brands, but they had a definitive agreement to be acquired by Edgewell who owned Schick like six years ago and it was blocked. by the FTC and you know now their only path is going public and in order to go public they need to basically build the modern PNG and so you know they bought coterie yeah they bought they bought a you know personal care business called loomy a few years ago and like they're probably the closest thing to it yeah but i think these like pure play fast growing disruptors are really what we focus on because we feel like you know you take share you cause enough pain for these modern companies and you fit very well into the machine that they have built yeah uh

Are you expecting chaos in the supplement category going forward after an exit like this? I'm assuming there's at least 100 pretty smart entrepreneurs that think, you know what, I've always wanted to build a supplement company and start going after it. I'd say like 2022, 2023 when the market crashed, there was a period of time where we talked about how all the tourists left CPG investing, and it was sort of locals only. And I would say the space was sort of undercapitalized. Yeah, that's when Grooons, that's when that's when Grooons and I know a number of your other winners like formed, which is fitting. That tends to be a great time to form a company. Also a hard time to raise capital. But, you know, the competitive dynamics benefit you.

I really hope that we don't have a flood of half-baked ideas backed by non-traditional investors coming in and doing this the wrong way. I feel like there's still a lot of scar tissue from the industry when traditional venture capital started backing V2C brands in the mid-2010s. And obviously it's ironic with the Allbirds pivot today. But I feel like I spend a decent amount of my time explaining to people why we don't invest in businesses like Allbirds and why CPG is fundamentally different than that. That direct to consumer is not the purpose.

It's it's the products themselves and how much better they serve the consumer. Yeah. That makes sense. One one thought is that I feel like a lot of VCs are paralyzed right now because they've invested, uh, you know, a significant amount of money into the labs, but they want to invest in more companies because they have capital to deploy, but they're afraid to invest in the app player and traditional software because of just AI disruption broadly.

And I think that that could lead at least some folks from to deciding to, hey, maybe we should take a flyer. And let's just throw like $5 million in this CPG company. Grooons is a good is a good comp for it. Sure. Why not? It's just, you know, so hopefully you don't get crowded up. If I were there folks, by the way, I'd be looking at the technology stack of Grunz.

I mean, Chad, who you had on last week, it was a great interview. Like, he publishes a lot on LinkedIn, like all of his vendors, all the technology solutions. I mean, there is a huge opportunity to be the picks and shovels of this type of company that will not stop taking share from large CPG and are willing to, you know, try out new AI tools or new technology tools. What outcomes have there really been in that? Because again, that was like a wildly popular category during the D2C era too. It was like I'm going to invest in the brands. And then I'm going to invest in the technology stack. And you had like the clavios of the world.

Did well. Obviously, Shopify has, you know, been incredible. But it's hard to think of a bunch of other examples that got out at actually a venture scale. Yeah, none obviously come to mind, although there's been some smaller attractive exits. It's, I mean, one of the best, like, tech-enabled Amazon agencies sold yesterday. And so, like, you know, you got to think about entry prices and the value creation to the early investors in these companies. They don't have to sell for billions of dollars to be really interesting investments. But, you know, we see companies all the time that are just, like, changing the way these companies operate and reducing the number of people that you need to run a CPG business that interfaces with the physical world.

So you would think naturally would need more people. I think it's really interesting. Do you guys do any of the infrastructure or are you? We don't. We don't, but we, we try and be pretty fluent in it. I love that. I love the focus. It's basically like there's two companies a year that you need to find and back and you need to try to be the biggest. We're hunting for them. And just focus all your energy on that. So I mean, on that hunt, you said you wouldn't back just a D to C company with, you know, decent growth metrics potentially. The product matters. What does that actually look like? Is it all your own taste? Are you doing surveys and panels and trying to understand where the white space is for a particular product, how durable that white space is? Because every once in a while, there's like a new copacker that comes online and unlocks a new stick pack or a new gummy format or something. And then there's a boom around that and it feels differentiated. But really what you're looking at is like, oh, there's just a new piece of machinery that's in a bunch of different copackers.

So what's your process for actually understanding whether a company has a great product and will continue to be able to compound on the back of like the quality of the product? Yeah. I mean, I think you got to be pretty thoughtful about value proposition. And a lot of new consumer value propositions for a CPG product are like downstream of changes in how nutritional knowledge and human health plays out in our world. So, you know, GLP-1s have a bunch of downstream effects. We don't just invest in GLP-1 companies. We invest in companies that ultimately take share because of a world where GLP-1s are important.

And so the first thing we're trying to understand is, like, where is the puck going in terms of human understanding and therefore value proposition in the future? We're trying to find signal of great companies with DSE and offline metrics. And then most of our job, frankly, is figuring out what are the false positives. Like, what are the reasons why a company might be growing really fast and efficiently that ultimately won't translate to successful omni-channel distribution and velocity and a successful acquisition? That was the thing with Geroons that I think some people maybe, like, you know, drove them to pass is that there had been that company on Amazon that had scaled to like 500 million or something like that in sales. I was doing that. Yeah, Goley.

Yeah, goalie. Just basically no value creation at all, even though they had tons of sales. And I think people kind of like rode off gummies as a category. And clearly that was, you know, wrong. Yeah, we were grateful for that misunderstanding. What about the temperature with LPs right now? I imagine that you have a unique value proposition and LPs are watching, you know, so much like K-shaped, winter take all dynamic. in AI and it's such a complicated industry to allocate towards. What are you hearing from LPs on

appetite for consumer package goods investing broadly? Yeah, I think it's a lot of curiosity. You know, naturally these are things that they see in their physical world and, you know, when an outcome like Bruins crosses. But Groot's not the only one, by the way. I mean, Poppy, Dr. Squatch. We've had actually like a slew of billion plus dollar acquisitions in the past year in our industry. And so, you know, they see that in their new cycle. They see it to the grocery store. I think there's a, there's a curiosity moment of like what's what's happening here and how does it work. And I think a little bit of that is trying to square that against what they've heard about the DTC revolution not working over the past 10 years. And so I would say there's there's a

wading into the waters. There's definitely any time a new cycle of these acquisition hits, like people start to double click and try to understand it and spend time. I think what we found in our meeting specifically is folks appreciate the specialization in recognizing that this is different from technology. So if we were a traditional firm that was trying to spend 15% of our time on it, I don't know that we could do a very good job on this. Us spending 100% of our time on it feels like more comfort in their mind, but a little bit distant from what they usually do.

Yeah. And I think at this point, like, if somebody starts a consumer brand and they are talented, they will get introduced to you some way or another. And so you can kind of like meet every great entrepreneur, which I feel like would be, is basically impossible in like traditional tech investing. That's the goal. I mean, there's not a lot of people that, I mean, there's a few firms that we love and respect that do this.

but like one of the reasons I started this firm is like there's no benchmark Sequoia A16Z. Like if you're if you're an entrepreneur out there, like there's not that firm that you've always dreamed of partnering with in getting started. And so, you know, eventually myself and a few of my peers decided like we've got to go create that firm for them. Amazing. Love it. Well, congratulations all. Great to hang. Thanks for coming on to break it down.

And have a great rest of your day. Good to see you. Great to see you guys. We'll talk to you soon. We have Aaron D'Souza, he is the founder of Objection.A.I. And the Enhanced Games, he's in the waiting room, and we'll bring him in to the TV Heelterdome. What's going on?

Aaron, how are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me on the show. Of course. Thanks for being here. Do you want to give us a little bit of your background? You've done a lot in your time. I'm super interested in enhanced games, and then we can go into objection.a.i at some point. But how are you introducing yourself these days as a multi-hyphenate? Yeah, so I'm a lawyer by training. When I was 24 years old, Peter Thiel hired me to lead his litigation against Galker Media involving the wrestler Hulk Hogan. We won the largest

invasion of privacy judgment in history. It's the subject to the best-selling book, Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday, forthcoming movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And there's a movie. There's a movie, yeah. And since then, I've gone on to file nearly 12 companies, you know, most famous for the enhanced game, this quote unquote steroids Olympics, but launched today, my new one, Objection AI. Okay. Do you know who's going to play you in the movie yet? I don't know. It's, you know, Hollywood is not like Silicon Valley. It takes them a very long time to make a movie, and it seems to go through a lot of different iterations. Yeah, it should be interesting. Well, let's, I would love an update on the Enhanced Games. The first event is happening in late May. Is that correct?

that's correct in Las Vegas Las Vegas and and talk to me about the scale the the the potential value the goal with that project it's certainly got a lot of a lot of attention everyone has a take on it Oh yeah the timing feels pretty good considering

it feels like more people than ever are enhancing them Oh yeah with GLP1s and stuff Which might be banned Which you know are some of them are banned Some are not okay in traditional sporting events Yeah, but what led you to the enhanced games and give us the update there? Yeah, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and I've always been interested in bioethics, and I read a paper by Professor Julian Severewsk, who was a professor at the University of Oxford,

and he actually argued back in the 90s for an enhanced Olympic Games. And I learned that there were nearly half the athletes in the Olympics admit to using ban performance-enhancing drugs, yet less than 1% get caught. So there's this like real disconnect. And at the same time, things like peptides, TRT are becoming increasingly normal. You know, even people like Secretary Kennedy, you know, our health minister in the United States, is quite an advocate for human enhancements. And so I thought to myself, you know, why should we be shackled by the ideas of the past

and shouldn't we be able to unleash the full level of human potential using the best of science and technology? And that's where the idea of the enhanced games came from. Yeah. How many athletes have actually stepped forward and said that they want to participate? Like how big is the movement at this point? Obviously, the first games is happening. Do you want to put it on the similar, like, every two years' cadence? Is there demand for more of a UFC-like schedule?

How do you think this all works out? The aim is for an annual schedule. Okay. We're very pleased that the company is going to go public through a SPAC combination on the New York Stock Exchange in the coming week. Obviously, I stepped down from being CEO a few months ago to focus on my new venture, so I can't speak to the exacts of the SPAC. But at $1.2 billion evaluation we're very happy about.

And ultimately, it's not the number of athletes participating, it's the quality of athletes. So we have Olympic gold medalists, we have world record holders, and in fact, we've already set our first world record in the 50 freestyle, which was set by Christian Golomhe of Greece in an exhibition event last year. He swam faster than any man in history had up to the point in time. And he had only been enhanced for a couple of weeks. And so to show you how much of a difference that could make, Christian was 31 years old at the time, which arguably is about 10 years past his prime for a swimmer.

Oh, interesting. Wow. Okay. Well, take us through objection AI. What's the thesis? How do you, like, what led you to start another company at this moment in time? I believe that the fundamental problem that we think is. in our society is truth.

There is no sense of an objective arbiter of truth in our society, and this is something that has caused great societal decay. If we don't have a shared sense of truth, we can't have a function civilization. And two decades ago, we would have said the New York Times is the arbiter of truth, and today, the social platforms don't seem to care about it very much. AI, juggernauts don't seem to care about it very much. And so I said to myself, what is the best way to find truth? And truth is not a vibe.

Truth is a process. And that process is very well documented in courts. Courts are viewed by Americans as being very trustworthy entities versus the legacy news media in particular has seen a collapse in credibility. 50 years ago, according to the Gallup poll, 70% of Americans trusted the media. Today, that's down to only 30%. And so the goal of rejection AI is to create a system where anyone can challenge. a claim made in the legacy news media. Independent investigators will then investigate it,

former CIA and FBI agents. And then all that data is presented to an AI jury to analyze to figure out if the original claims made by the journalist were true or not. Interesting. Yeah, something that's... It feels like community notes have been

a good innovation for, like, truth online. But the big flaw, is that by the time a post gets like a solid community note, oftentimes like a million people may have seen it already. They didn't know that there was. Yeah. So, I mean, the logical follow-up is, is speed a problem here? Because I imagine that, yes.

Yeah, I imagine that if you have to run a whole jury process and have discovery and argument, like the original claim could be baked into the society's, like, mind share before you have a chance to chime. Yeah, so that's the fundamental problem about news media today, is that false information spread six times faster than true information. And so the incentives for generating clickbait content is very pronounced, and we've known this for a very long period of time. And so by compressing the legal process, which often takes 10 or 20 years and costs $10 million,

as we learned in the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, down to something driven through software and artificial intelligence down to a couple of days, we can adjudicate factual disputes much, much quicker and much cheaper. The whole process on objection can cost as little as $2,000 and can be done in as little as 24 hours. So is the business model to sell directly to people that want to contest claims that are made on the internet? Yeah, exactly. So if the New York Times writes something inaccurate about you guys and your wonderful podcast, you can file an objection. Okay. Then human investigators will investigate the story line by line, source by source.

They'll call everyone quoted in the article. And then they'll present that information to an AI jury. And the original author, of course, has the opportunity to respond and say, hey, my reporting was good. It was high quality. But we live in the era of data. And I think it would be wonderful if every story published by the New York Times included the long-form recordings of each interview.

Right? I've done thousands of media interviews. journalists always record them, but they never published them in full. And so being misquoted or, you know, anonymous source, these are the tools that in particular print journalists use that have seen a massive degradation and trust. Yeah. Have you been following the Satoshi Nakamoto story recently? That feels like a textbook example of something where it's been disputed, but it's very

hard to disprove if you're being accused of being Satoshi. How have you processed that? particular story. Yeah, and so courts are very good methodology of finding truth. I think there are only two solid methodologies of finding truth. One is courts and the other there's the scientific method. Sure. And so if you take a scientific method approach, anonymous sources should never be allowed, right? So you can't say to a scientific publication, a source told me this. You have to be able to replicate the experiment over and over. Yeah. Right? Or courts is the alternative method of truth finding is where you have two

adversarial parties, often arguing antithetical points of view, and what is truth? It's a really important question. It's almost the core question of philosophy. Well, in the court setting, it is who has made the better argument, who has presented more evidence, and how coherently has that argument been made? And now with the magic of artificial intelligence, we can do all of that very quickly and very cheaply. Yeah.

Yeah. How do you think about tuning different models to actually give you unbiased results? It feels like every different model has slightly different flavors and things that it likes and dislikes and might see things different ways. Like it feels like a subjective technology. How do you get it to be impartial? Yeah, so that's a great question. And that's exactly how we face these issues with human jury. and human judges. Sure. Right. So human judges

are extremely infallible. According to a paper from Professor Posner, who's one of the leading scholars of law and economics at the University of Chicago, AI applies the law 100% accurately.

Human judges only do it 52% of the time because human judges can be swayed by whether they've had lunch or not, whether they're having a bad day, whether they have a savvy lawyer in front of them.

And then in the same way, we use a jury-based system. Five different models prompted to act as if they were different personas of people based on a statistical sample of how everyday Americans behave themselves and demographic samples. And the models have to find a majority opinion to pass a verdict. Are you thinking about integrations with social platforms? As you already mentioned, the community notes system. How do you think about distributing findings once you actually have reached a conclusion?

Yeah, so this is the principal flaw of courts. So courts issue a judgment, but they have no distribution mechanism. Sure. And we have something called the fire blanket. So we have an algorithmic posting system on X so that every single claim that is under investigation, we immediately fire off a tweet that says, this claim is under investigation, please see the full case file.

And then when the similar claim is retweeted at some later point in time after adjudication is complete, we then say that claim is false or that claim is true, please see the full analysis that was done. So it intercepts the spread of disinformation as it is happening.

Very cool. Jordi, anything else? Excited to follow along. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. And the chat wanted to confirm, though, you are not being held hostage right now. I am not being held hostage right now. I'm in an undisclosed location.

Okay. Because as someone who is often subject to negative media reporting, I like to not show where I live. Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, good luck, and we will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me on the show. Have a good rest of your day. In other news.

Uber is now going back into Robotaxies. Uber commits 10 billion to Robotaxies and strategy shift. Uber's committed more than $10 billion in buying thousands of autonomous vehicles and taking stakes in their developers, breaking from the asset light gig economy business model to avoid disruption from Robotaxis.

The ride hailing app has aggressively increased dealmaking over the past year announcing partnerships and more than a dozen providers, including China's Baidu. and U.S.-based Rivian as well as the kicker. Yes. As well as plans to launch Robotaxy Services in at least 15 cities in 2026. So they're going to be putting Rivians on the road, autonomously.

Or maybe they'll do a deal with one of the other robo-taxy providers. Rivian seems like, I mean, great cars really beloved. Everybody says like the autopilot in Rivian is great. Yeah. But so it's also great in Tesla. And we don't see robo-taxies scaling everywhere. I don't know anyone that's written in a robotaxie. But things are moving quickly.

And, you know, but it is 2026 right now. So that is a very aggressive timeline to actually launch robo-taxie services. But maybe that means more of like partnership with existing robo-taxie providers. We'll have to dig into it. And we'll talk more. Market likes it. Stock is up 6.8% today. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the stock has been trading down as Waymo and Tesla expanded services, it sold off, Uber sold off. And when Waymo raised $16 billion, Uber sold off again. And when Zooks planned major expansion, the company Uber sold off as well. The stock is down 23% in the past six months. And investors are starting to get concerned about autonomous vehicles. So Uber is responding. Well, without further ado, we have Michael McNano from Union Square Ventures. now in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TDP and Ultradome. There he is. Let's hit the gong for

you. We're going straight to the gong. Oh, man, I love that. I love that gong. Thank you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Congratulations. Reintroduce yourself. Tell us where you were and where are you now. Yeah, of course. I'm Michael McNano. I am a GP at Union Square Ventures. Most recently, a partner at Lightspeed. And then before that, uh, co-factorial founded Anchor, which sold to Spotify, and I'm very excited to see you guys again. Thanks for having me. Yeah, what motivated the move? Do you just want to go to New York? You want to work with Fred Wilson? Like, what was the reason to jump over to Union Square? Well, I'm from New York. I've always been here. I've always lived on the East Coast. I've always been somewhere in or around

New York City, and I've known USV forever. So, you know, I built Anchor here in New York City, We pitched them back in the day for our seed and Series A, and they passed both times, unfortunately. I love it. Sorry. No, I love it. I love it. You know, got to know the team, obviously. And after we sold Anchor to Spotify, became an LP in the funds and stayed close.

And just always love their approach. You know, USB is famously thesis-driven, right? They've always been sort of willing to bet early on the stuff that looks weird, the stuff that looks funny. And I've always really appreciated that approach. And so late last year, they approached me and they said, hey, how about coming over to USV and joining us and joining the partnership and had to do it. So here I am. Yeah. How should I think about USV right now?

How big is the firm? How big is the partnership? It feels like a unique firm at a time when many firms are just going. for insane scale. Yeah, building platforms. But it feels like benchmark and USV are two funds that could have built platforms and have made the decision to stay true to venture. Yeah.

Yeah, I think this has always been USV's approach, right? It's been a famously small partnership for a very long time, small in terms of the number of general partners and small in terms of the fund size relative to lots of other bigger platforms, as you mentioned. And I think they've made it work because what we talked about a little bit earlier, they've always been willing to have a thesis and have a point of view and go really, really early when, you know, a lot of the other big firms and the big platforms are chasing more consensus deals, to their credit, right? I think the platforms have been very, very successful at using, you know, large, large, vast quantities of capital and speed as a weapon

to back the winners. But I think what USV has always done well, said, you know, we think the world is going in this direction. We're going to bet really, really early. Sometimes we'll get it wrong. But every once in a while, we'll be one of the first investors in Coinbase or Twitter or Mongo. And obviously, for a fund of this size, that ends up having a massive impact. And I think, you know, I think that that is the right playbook to be playing moving forward. Obviously, AI is going to create a proliferation of startups like we've never seen before.

And I'm not actually sure it will be possible to see them. all. And I think the only way you're really going to be able to have a great bet is if you know what you're looking for before you see it. And that's always what USV has done. Yeah, I still am surprised when I look at the App Store charts and see that we really just have LLMs in the charts and not much else. And it feels like that has to change at some point in the next year or two. And yeah, fully expect that. So where do you want to focus your time? What's excited? Yeah, you know, I've always been somebody that's been excited by great products. You know, I'm a product builder myself.

You know, we mentioned Anchor. I have another startup, which we've talked about on here, Obo. So I'm naturally drawn towards products, great, you know, great product oriented founders. When I was at light speed, you know, I led deals like Suno and Granola, which I think for me have always fit that bill. but also, you know, I think take a little bit of an interesting approach that's relevant to building startups in AI moving forward. You know, Suno is a company that's taking a form of media, and it's leveraging the democratization of that media to not just, you know, optimize an existing workflow or optimize an existing market. They're doing it to build a completely new format and unlock a whole new form of creativity for people. And so I think we're going to see a lot of them moving forward.

I think AI is going to unlock use cases and applications that we can't really dream up now. Maybe to your point about there only being like three LLMs at the top of the App Store now. In fact, I believe that software is starting to represent more and more a form of media, right? It's so easy to create this stuff. I'm sure you guys, just like me and everyone watching or building apps and creating agents every day, think about what happened with video, think about what happened with podcasts, with text. It wasn't just about building the media. It was about the enablement that goes under it, the platforms, the payment rails, the distribution.

I think there's probably going to be a massive amount of enablement that goes into supporting the massive long tail of software about to see. Well said. I wanted to get your take on synthetic podcasts. We saw Pomp launched a synthetic, an AI generated podcast today called Best Stocks. I'm assuming they talk about the best stocks. But I wanted to just get your kind of overall take. We've seen some other AI-generated podcast start to top the charts. What's your perspective there? Not a venture opportunity, but certainly I would say interesting. Yeah, look, I think it's super interesting.

You know, back in the day when I was building Anchor inside of Spotify, we actually had a partnership with WordPress where if you had a WordPress blog, you could tap a button and it would immediately turn the text and the blog content into a podcast, right? So it was a way for the creators to get more and more distribution. And, you know, I think it was great. We saw a lot of demand from the creators, but it may have been too early on the timeline in terms of the quality of the content and sort of that uncanny valley. And I think that has a lot to do with it. Yeah, it's basically the voice models just were not good or you were using.

Exactly. The voice models were not that good yet. Obviously, they're a lot better right now. 11 Labs creates phenomenal voice models. I don't know what this podcast you mentioned is using. But I think the closer and closer we get not only to great voice quality, but also a human-like experience for these hosts, whoever they are in this show, I think the closer we can get to getting it to work.

I mean, one of the reasons people tune in to TBPN is not only to kind of hear the news and hear people speak, but it's to watch you guys, right? They like you guys as the hosts and they like the personality and the, human aspect of you guys. And so I think the agents that are hosting these shows are probably going to have to get closer and closer to that on the spectrum before it really takes off. Did you explore any version of that WordPress to podcast workflow that would sort of on-demand hire a voiceover artist? Was there any demand for that or did you ever explore that? We did explore that. And it was one of those things where, again, at the time,

it was going to be challenging to spin up the content for that quickly enough such that that we were confident that there would be enough demand to make it worth it. I think with media and with publishing, people really want immediacy. When we were first building Anchor, actually, the way that we went from being a social audio app to a podcasting platform is we found that all the people that were publishing just inside the Anchor app said, we want a podcast. We want this to be on Spotify. We want this to be on Apple.

But there were no APIs at the time. So the way that we did that was we actually had human beings sitting in our office and manually creating RSS feeds and posting those RSS feeds to Apple Podcasts in real time. And fortunately, we were able to do that quick enough, you know, within a couple of hours, that it satisfied the creators. But I think, you know, at the time, your idea, what you're talking about now, the gap just would have been too long. It would have been days or weeks before the content was ever delivered. delivered. Yeah. Have you reflected on the just like there's such incredible model progress and such incredible AI functionality progress. But I, the, I would have expected to have found in the same ways that the AI generated podcast seemed to be working and we've seen some audio stuff work.

I would have expected to see like a substack that was AI generated text that got really popular and that seems somehow easier from just an AI capability perspective. There's less steps in the chain, but it hasn't really broken through in that way. And I'm wondering if you've ever like grappled with that question of like why that hasn't, uh, why even like the simpler, more condensed text. I don't even know if I follow, I mean, maybe I do, but I don't know if I follow any, uh, Twitter accounts that are like fully AI generated news headlines that you know. This was actually going to be my question to you. I mean, it's possible that that already exists. And maybe these publications or these writers or these journalists aren't really admitting it yet. I mean, I have to imagine

a lot of the content we now consume on the internet is AI generated. We may just not know that it is. Yeah, it feels like a lot of it is like we're in the centaur period where, you know, the human plus AI works well. And so you see people doing research and then processing it and adding their own spin and twist. Alex Heath was talking about how he's a ton of AI and his writing process. He can say that because people are paying to subscribe to sources to get like net new information that doesn't exist anywhere else. But I think that that only makes, you know, human powered content that more valuable. Again, not to keep bringing it back to you guys.

I mean, I think this is a reason that people like this. And I think there's a reason that, you know, sports, live sports viewership is at an all time high and people are going to concerts, right? I think people crave this, this farm to table human experience. Yeah. I feel like you've done a good job of that with your content. Can you sort of reintroduce it for folks who might not be fully familiar? Because the production quality is extremely high. But it feels like you're sort of playing a different game in terms of release cadence, making sure that everything is special and not formulaic. But how are you thinking about your own, the content that you're putting out these days? To be clear, I think you're referring to the podcast I was running at Lights. called out of office, which I'm no longer the host of now that I'm not at light speed. However, the philosophy that we and I had for that I think holds true and I believe in it,

which is there's so much content out there on the internet. And the tools have gotten so good at clipping and mass producing video content or, you know, two people sort of sitting in the same setting, having the same style of conversation, that you really have to do something different. You guys did something different. There are a number of podcasts out there that are now doing something different. But one of the ideas that I had that we ran, what's that? There's five total.

There's about five, maybe six. The thing, the idea that we had for out of office was, you know, why does this conversation have to happen in a studio or why does it have to happen around a table? How great is it to watch an episode of comedians and cars getting coffee and watching these guys behind the wheel of an awesome car or in their favorite coffee shop? or watching something like Anthony Bourdain parts unknown and watching these two iconic people travel around a really iconic familiar place. And we thought, hey, can we bring that to the tech podcast? And so that's out of office at lights beat again, you know, no longer something I'm involved with.

But stay tuned because I do think, you know, I and maybe USV will have something similar in that vein coming soon. I actually just posted a little bit of a teaser photo on my ex. A few hours ago, go check that out if you haven't already. But look, I think the theme is like to break through right now and break through the noise, you've got to do something that looks a little bit different. And you have to do something really, really high quality because the tools have gotten good enough. There's a baseline quality that you just get out of the box. So if you want to stand out, you actually have to go above that.

Yeah. Jordy? How many investments do you expect to make, you know, what percentage of investments do you expect to make in New York versus the West Coast? You know, listing off some of USV's iconic investments, of course, you know, the coinbases, the Twitters, et cetera. Many of them were on the West Coast, so are you going to be over here a lot? USV's always been a sort of one office, New York-centric firm, obviously, the namesake, Union Square Ventures. But USB has also made a lot of money all over the world.

You know, you just rattled off some of the locations. When I was at light speed, I was based in New York. And even though I was based in New York, I was making investments all over. I think most of my portfolio actually was on the West Coast. Obviously, had Suno, which we just mentioned in Boston, granola in London, but a lot of them were in the West Coast. Going to continue to operate that same way. You know, we'll invest wherever the opportunities are.

But the home base is going to stay in New York City. Yeah, what's the secret to getting good deal flow at the early stage? I feel like that's such a differentiator for Fred Wilson throughout his career. You are teasing some sort of conversation. You've clearly been working with him for a while. What do you think makes USV particularly differentiated in finding great companies early on? I know it sounds simple, but I think it's a willingness to be wrong and actually make predictions. I think so much of this industry is focused on momentum and focused on,

consensus-driven bets, which again can be very, very lucrative if you get in them and you have the capital to fund them. But I think what Fred and the team have always been great at is having a conversation, which lasts maybe not just one partner meeting, but last weeks or months, or in some cases years. And along the way, making some bets against that idea and against that thesis, which may look wrong for a very, very long period of time. You know, you mentioned Coinbase. USV famously made that really early Coinbase investment, but they had invested in crypto before that, right? They had a strong thesis around crypto before that. And it took, it took some cycles for them to to gain conviction in, you know, what they ended up seeing in

Coinbase. So I think it's about, it's about engaging in honest discussion with your partners. It's about not being afraid to have a crazy idea, to like the weird, and to keep that conversation going for a long time. How are you thinking about wearables these days? It feels like the meta-ray bands are having like an inflection point. There's, you know, Apple's coming to market with stuff. There were a few startups that got in the game. Yeah, and the hellside aura of whoop. Yeah. I've seen. It feels like it's maybe undercovered, but have you processed any of that as like an interesting endpoint for technology broadly? I think there are a couple interesting aspects about it. Dordi, you mentioned earlier, at the top of the app store, we're seeing the same three apps now for the past two years or whatever.

You know, hardware, which I think has often been thought of as too hard, right? You always hear the term like hardware is hard. And so venture capitalists often ignore it. You know, we might want to rethink that a little bit. Hardware could be considered a wedge now, right? Maybe it's actually a defensible layer where if you can actually have a successful product there, that's going to be a lot harder for a massive foundation. model lab to go and replicate than, you know, leveraging their distribution for a new form of data collection or whatever the case may be. So I think there could be some interesting

edge model or edge data out on a hardware device that is pretty defensible. So that's something interesting I like about it. I think the other thing that's interesting about it is, you know, you guys have talked a lot. I've talked a lot about how context is king and finding these edge data sources is really, really unique. And that's obviously something that has been pretty fascinating about Granola, right? They're capturing these conversations that you can't really capture any other way or aren't being captured any other way. And so that provides a lot of value to the model.

Hardware offers a similar opportunity, right? Where using hardware, whether it's the glasses or maybe something else completely, a pen, an aura ring, you're capturing an edge form of data. that the labs can't really see unless they have that hardware. So I actually find hardware to be quite compelling at the moment, and I think it actually is an area of opportunity. How are you seeing startup culture change in terms of, like, who's hiring? I'm thinking about hardware.

I was reading this report, maybe it was in the journal or the Financial Times, about how more and more students are choosing, like, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering over computer science because of the rise of AI. that can code very effectively and the job market changing. And that feels like potentially a boom for hardware startups. Like you have to imagine hardware gets less hard if there's just more hardware engineers and it's easier to staff up for that. But I'm wondering if you're noticing any other changes around location or work-life balance

or in-person. We did the COVID thing. We did full remote. Then we went back full in person. Then we'd go in hybrid. Like how are the startups that you're interacting with? looking different than a decade ago? I think the big difference that's happening right now,

and this feels like a very recent thing, maybe past few months, maybe past six months, is I think we're going to see a swing back towards the mission-driven company. I think, you know, we've seen a lot of capital flow into the ecosystem over the past few years, and I think that that has turned a lot of missionaries into mercenaries.

And by the way, it's worked phenomenally well. Again, we keep talking about the same, you know, two or three startups that are massively, massively valuable. But I think we're also seeing a lot of churn, right, and a lot of attrition at these companies. And I think it has to do with this mission-based thing, right? If you think back maybe five years ago or ten years ago

and some of the behemoths that emerged from maybe the previous software and startup cycle, these companies were very, very mission-oriented. They were all aligned around the same mission. They stayed incredibly lean, incredibly focused on what they were trying to accomplish. They left the politics and the bullshit out of the office. office and they just focused on hitting that mission. And I think right now we're seeing a lot of people get burnt out after just chasing huge, huge paydays at incumbents or insanely well-capitalized

startups. And I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in the other direction. White Pills. White Pill. Yeah. How many, last question for me, just because you're the first person from Union Square Ventures to come on the show. Is that true? Yeah, that's how. How many, How many partners are there? How big is the investing team, I guess? A better question. There's about eight of us. And the whole team in general is under 20.

So we're a small team. Like I said, we're all in one office. And we talk a lot. You know, when I was at Spotify, Gustav Soderstrom, who I think you've had on the show, had this famous saying inside of Spotify. Everyone in Spotify knows this saying. Gustav says, talk is cheap.

So you should talk a lot. And what he means by that is the cost of getting something wrong is actually way more expensive than the time it takes to actually talk and align and earn the right to go invest or spend or bet on something. And what I've always loved about USV is they have a similar philosophy. They talk a lot. It's a small team, but they spend a lot of time together forming their point of view on the world. And to your question earlier, I think that's what's giving them the edge. Well, they're very, very lucky to have you and excited to see what you guys do together. It's great to see you.

Thank you. You too. And by the way, congrats to you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're very excited. Come, come see us when you're in L.A.

And we'll do the same in New York. I'd love to. I'd love to. We'll talk to you later. Have a great rest of your day. You're the man. Thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy. Speaking of Meta, Meta Platform's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,

reportedly moved his desk into the AI lab working directly with Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman. Zuckerberg is reportedly coding throughout the day. There's a story in the New York Times about AI sunglasses. I feel so sorry for my AI sunglasses. And it opens with this anecdote about trying to use the glasses to identify, what is it, some sort of bird. It says, one afternoon on a sunny stroll, I stopped to admire a bright red cardinal singing its heart out in a tree. Hey, meta, I say. what kind of bird is chirping in that tree?

My sunglasses make their little ding-dong noise, analyzing the world. Finally, they speak. I don't see a bird in the tree or hear any chirping, they say. I point directly at the bird, which is still chirping. I don't see a bird in the tree where you're pointing, my sunglasses say cheerfully,

just bare branches and sky. For several weeks, this is how it goes, the disorienting sense of chatter with a toddler who is drifting off into nap time. Look, it would be easy to dunk on my very expensive, staggeringly incompetent glasses, critiquing AI these days is like shooting fish in a barrel, and I mean poorly animated fish that keeps sprouting human fingers inside that barrel.

And so, yeah, it's a very interesting read because it's clearly, like, there's so many times when you're interacting with an old legacy model in a particular end point where you're not getting the most frontier intelligence, and it can really throw you off. Andre Carpathie had this whole take about people that used, like, early LLMs that would hallucinate and haven't tried the latest coding models to really understand how powerful the technology is. There's this big division. And so you sort of have to do both,

acknowledge that diffusion takes time, actually rolling these models out to a device-like glasses takes time. Yeah, it's interesting with meta because it feels like they're glasses. Yeah. I'm getting served a lot of videos. Oh, yeah. People are using them as GoPro.

Yeah, but they're just cameras. Yeah, as cameras. And I know a lot of people that use them as AirPods replacements. Like they use them just to take phone calls, listen to music, because then they don't have anything in their ears, and it's just more comfortable for them. They even have clear ones that they can wear on. It doesn't really work on a plane because it's too loud, but when they're just in the office. But actually getting the AI features into these devices is true. They have humor bench.

Oh, yeah? Hey, meta, I said one day. Tell me a joke. Why did the baseball go to the doctor? Why, Jordy? It had a little rundown. and its batting average. Run down?

I don't really get it. Swing and a miss. Yeah, it might be better in this case just to pull from the bank of vetted jokes. Yeah, you don't need to generate one from scratch. You can just look up some of the best jokes in history. When Siri initially launched, they had comedy writers write out a whole bunch of jokes.

And when you ask Siri tell me a joke, it would just pull one off the shelf that was handwritten by a human about Siri, aware of the context, of everything. I'm now, I have triggered series, so I'm in trouble on my laptop. But it is just very interesting. Apple, of course, we touched on this. Mark Irman has a report on the upcoming AI smart glasses. They'll come in several styles and colors. A few of those frames seem like their direct competitors to wayfarers will be very interesting to see the ecosystem

integration with Apple. And Dan Primack has a take here. He says, Apple isn't burning mountains of cash on GPUs or investing billions in different. Frontier Labs, but it still may win the AI race. Success from the sidelines, sort of a contrarian take at a time when Apple doesn't really want to talk about AI right now. They're clearly in this rebuilding moment. They really don't want to talk about it. But they have partnerships with Open AI, Anthropic and Gemini at this point. They're using AI tools all over the company. And it feels like they internally are starting to feel the AGI, but at the same time, have a very unique strategy of not overreaching and it could really work out for them. So it's an exciting,

it's an exciting time and an exciting story to follow. Well, without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Wade Foster from Zapier, Zapier. Wade, how are you doing? Good. How are you guys doing? We're good. Thanks so much for coming back to the show. How are things going? Give us the general update on your company and then there's a million different things that we can talk about. But I'd be interested to know what you're learning from your vantage point as CEO of Zapier. Well, yeah, you know, we launched our Zapier SDK last week. That's probably the most exciting news. Congratulations. This, you can install it inside of, you know, cursor, Claude Code, code, any coding agent you might use. I use it. I'm not an engineer. And I basically built like an

entire AI chief of staff on top of this team thing. And, you know, runs in the background. I don't have to close my laptop, or I can close my laptop lid and not worry about things breaking. So it hooks into all 9,000 different tools and I have it running all over the place. So that's probably the exciting news out of Zapiersland. Do you feel like the vibe coding boom generally is more heavily tilted towards internal tools, dashboards, reports, chief of staff B2B applications? Because it feels like clearly people are consuming a lot of tokens. they're spending a lot on inference. The models clearly work.

The coding agents clearly work. At the same time, I open up the app store and I'm not seeing the, oh, wow, somebody vibe-coded a call of duty competitor that's blowing up on the Steam charts, right? Like, we're just not in this, like, in this, like, everyone's talking about the new app or the new Uber or the new game that's, like, been created much faster with a leaner team. but everyone has a story of we pulled forward our roadmap at our company. Yeah. We've definitely had a renaissance of internal tools internally.

We, our marketing team ran a hackathon recently. It's about 50 people on the marketing team. At the end of the week, there was like 80 plus new internal tools. Yeah. Most of these were like dashboards and, you know, data visualizations and things like that that in the past marketers, like, especially are pretty analytical. Yeah. But they may not be like the best at like using SQL or running these things and, you know,

getting access to this. the data has been clumsy and hard. And now it just feels like they've got a jetpack on where they can just go build these like really quick, quick simple tools that allows them to make like hyper-specialized, hyper-customized campaigns because they can quickly run an analysis and see, oh, you know, across the last month of like social posts, these are the ones that took off. Here's the common traits about them. So let's figure out how to like tweak our next campaign for the next month to be more like this

and less like that. That type of analysis would have been really difficult for a marketer to do solo in the past. Now it's less than an hour of work. Yeah, I think Terence Tao had a, the mathematician had a point about this where he was saying that like in his papers he will use AI agents to create new visualizations that would have taken him multiple days to make. Now he, but it's not like it's saving him time because in previous. papers, he just wouldn't have put the visualization in. And so it's this, it's this element of like

people just doing more with more. But I'm wondering, like, as you see, you know, so many companies have done this where there's a hackathon for the marketing department or some organization. And the, the prompt can often be like replace yourself. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that actually happen or if it's more like the competitive dynamic is everyone's getting more leverage, doing more things, and just out of the 20 ideas that they have, they're able to do 15 instead of five. Yeah, I definitely think it's more the latter right now. You know, across Zapper, 100% of our employees are using AI daily.

I would say this is like individual AI usage. People are individually more productive. But if you were to ask me, is the company more productive? Institutionally, are we more productive? A lot harder to say yes to that. Yeah. And I think that this is where like the company is on. the cutting edge, this feels like the next thing that everybody's working on is how do we actually

accelerate the institution. And this gets harder because you actually have to rethink how the company works. To give you an example, we've gone from a world where code was expensive to now code is cheap. And the world where code was expensive, you had all these processes up front to talk to customers, to align on roadmaps, to figure out what the right thing to build was. Because if you chose the wrong thing, that was a really expensive mistake. And so all these humans and all these processes exist up here. But when code is cheap, you can get rid of all that stuff. And that takes redesigning jobs or rethinking the human, where the human actually exists in the first place. If you're in YC, you're no longer, if you were in YC and you're about to talk to

your customer, just cancel the call. You don't need to do it anymore. It's all good. That's an old, no, I'm kidding. It's a very good point. It's like, hey, show the customer. Like, let them, That's the thing. It's like you don't need to show. Yeah, it's like a non-tech founder in the past would like show up and like give them a survey or like ask them generically about the problem or something like that. And you would get some signal from that. But now a non-technical founder can literally show up and say like, would like can you just use this? Yep.

Yeah. And see what happened. And that gives you a lot more information in the past. And so it's just a much different like learning cycle. And I think companies that are, you know, not in YC, companies that have been around for a while, all these systems and processes that have been built up that have to be torn down and reassembled to work in the AI area. And that's where I think the institutional AI really kicks in.

Yeah. How have you been grappling with the idea of work slop? There was this a great cartoon early on where the joke was take these three bullet points and turn it into an email. And then on the other side, somebody says, take this email and turn it into three bullet points. And people should have just been sending three bullet points to each other the entire time. And I feel like we are hyper in that world where I can send you a full essay, a deep research report, a book if I want, a dashboard, a visualization,

a hundred-page deck. And at the same time, sometimes, you know, the human intuition of knowing, okay, this was a good post. Let's just do more of that. That might be the right intuition. So how have you grappled with, you know, fine-tuning the team on, okay, it's great. Everyone should be using AI, but let's stay away from work slot. Yeah.

My co-founder of Brian says, you can delegate the work, but you can't delegate. delegate the accountability. And so, you know, if you're slinging this stuff, you got to stand behind. It's okay to present AI author work. I do that often. Oftentimes I will say, hey, I was going back and forth with my AI friends. Here is what I found. I have read this and I actually like stand behind it and agree with this. But if you're just going to like, you know, throw a random prompt in and then pass it off as like your own work. Yeah. That ain't that ain't cool. And so like we kind of try and coach people on that the kind of etiquette around that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. I had that early on. I was working with somebody and they sent me something that had clearly been, you know, hydrated by an LLM. And I was like, you can just send me the prompt because I can actually imagine it exactly what it was. And like, yeah, if there's a fact that we need to look up, we can use it for knowledge retrieval. But I actually don't need all of the hydration. You can just, you can just on the prompt. You guys are a remote company.

Do you think that gives you an advantage in the AI era? Do you know, what are the ways? I think the thing, the biggest advantage we have is every last bit of work exhaust is documented. So all of the stuff is inside of Slack. All of our meetings are recording. You know, every last inch of work that happens, there is a like a written trace of that. And so we can put chatbots on top of that. We can put LMs on top of that, and that creates a whole bunch of institutional knowledge that accelerates the work.

So a new person coming in can literally figure out, is there a standard operating procedure for this? Is there a skill for this? Is there a whatever to do this thing? And you don't have to go, like, chase people down in offices and tap on shoulders and sort of hope that the campfire wisdom, like, finds you. So I do think remote companies have a big advantage because they do tend to have so much of the work has a digital exhaust. Yeah. How are you thinking about like the volume of content? Is it just like stuff everything in one large context window? Are there like, are there agents that are going around and like creating little roll-ups of things and there's processes for teams to boil things down? Because even even just the explosion of like, you know, Zoom call recording and note taking can produce like so many transcripts. And I've been sort of shocked by the slow speed of, you know, just search in every tool that I use because there's so many more words that when I search for receipt in my email or something, I get every single email possible because they all have so much

text now. So what we have done internally is we built a company brain out that has canonical data. So it exists at a couple different layers. There's a set of company data. This is like our company strategy or company values or ideal customer profile, things like that. That is curated by me and a handful of other people that sort of say, hey, this is the truth in these areas. Then there's team data. And so every team internally has a similar version that kind of cascades down.

And then finally, folks have individual content that they've sort of used a supplement that that's private to them. So anytime someone is like talking to their AI, they have this source of truth that has been curated. Then, you know, folks know that they can pull in other additional content at any given time. And so for me, you know, if I wanted to pull in a meeting transit, script or a Slack thread or something like that, I would point the SDK at both those documents and say,

hey, I want you to go review those against the backdrop of this company brain. And so it sort of helps you manage the context window because you can take, you know, bite size chunks here and here, you know, have the like company brain is like the backdrop to all that stuff and get better insights versus just saying, look at all of Slack or look at all the meeting notes, which that would just not be very effective because there is a lot of noise inside of that. Yeah. Have you seen more, have you seen acceleration either at the lower end below your average customer size or bigger companies onboarding? I imagine that there are a lot of tailwinds right now for you, but where are you seeing faster adoption or more interest? You know, I think small companies

tend to just move faster. They just have less bottlenecks on this type of stuff. That said, I have been somewhat surprised over the last couple years, how, fast enterprises have gotten on to this stuff. You know, they still have more procurement hurdles and, you know, boxes to check to really take off here, but they're not asleep at the wheel, which is kind of the meme is that, ah, you know, these enterprises move slow and don't make decisions, da-da-da-da. Yeah. Yeah, I think they just have more things that they, the considerations that they have to do. But I do think smaller companies generally just are moving a lot faster on this stuff. Are you feeling CPE? Are you feeling C.P.

You poor, we've been seeing, like, with the explosion of agents and just more work being done on the internet, I could imagine a lot of your customers submitting way more requests. There's an explosion in demand, and maybe there's two ways. One is just scale up your servers, but the other one is maybe work on optimizations and rewrites. Now, the company's been optimizing for over a decade now, so I imagine things are pretty optimized, but how have you been processing just increased demand relative to... you know, just infrastructure.

I think the most interesting place we've seen this is new usage patterns. So agents, you know, interact with APIs different than how like a human might set something up. And you're also able to deploy them faster and at a larger scale. And so, you know, when we're hitting, you know, like, I don't know, like, let's use like Slack, for example. Like the way you might, you know, set up automation across your Slack channels, like looks a lot different than it did pre-AI because you you have new use cases and new patterns that you want to use that are more, um, uh, uh, just want more data. Like it just wants to look at more stuff.

And so I do think that, uh, that's probably the, the most interesting changes. The usage patterns are, are different in the AI world. Yeah. For some of the more like basic workflows, what is the, what is the pitch for using, uh, Zapier instead of vibe coding something that takes my LinkedIn post and emails it to me or dumps it in my Slack because that feels like something that you could effectively one shot but then you get caught in who's going to maintenance that or who you're serving that what happens when the API changes like I feel like there's a lot of excitement about

oh I can vibe code this in an hour and maybe people aren't thinking about what it takes to maintain a service but how are you how are you reiterating the benefits of being on Zapier I think the fact that we maintain all this stuff is a huge advantage. The other thing is it's storing your tokens very safely. A lot of these vibe coding tools will say, hey, just copy and paste your API key here. And it goes into a plain text file that might get shipped up to GitHub and might get shipped somewhere else that's like, oh, crap, we're in trouble.

And so, you know, Zapier just tends to be a safer place to do this. Plus, you know, we have all the vibe coding capabilities as well, too. So, you know, hey, take my leads from this service and add them to that. And da-da-da-da-da. And Zapier is able to do a lot of that as well. So it tends to be a little bit safer, more reliable place to run these types of automations. Yeah. Timelines around fully autonomous companies where you can have an agent that you just kind of prompt it to, you know, this has been an idea that's been around for a while.

You know, you just say like figure out a way to make money, sell software. And it just goes off and it maybe makes some software and figures it out how to help. how to market it. This already kind of exists in kind of the trading world, hedge fund world, where they're creating algorithms that just go out and figure out ways to make money. But on the software side, I'm curious, given everything you know about, you know, automating business processes when you think it's really possible. To your point, I do think for some very simple things, like, it is pretty close.

Trading, you know, whether you're actually good at it or not, TBD, but, like, pretty dang close there. I also have a former Zappar employee of this guy, Nat Eliasson, who made it and has an open club. Yeah, he's an open claw that started making money on courses. And

you know, basically was, yeah, open claw was just like figuring out how to go do it. And so, you know, it's like pretty close. So you're starting to see. There's also use cases like, like, I think of like a simple app in the Shopify App Store where you could just say, like, go compete with this app.

And then it's like pretty obvious where you need to advertise it. And you can figure out the equation between like, you could just make the, make a clone of the app and then figure out the equation of like, what is the minimum amount that I need to charge in order to be able to spend enough on user acquisition to like eke out some like very thin margin that covers the cost of inference. Totally. The thing I don't know is if it's truly going to be a zero person company. or not. Like it does still feel like you need a human to like supervise this thing to like, you know, when it goes off the ropes to actually have the initial idea. So, you know, I don't think we're at this dream where you like poke the AI. Yeah, there's always going to be, yeah, there's always going to be

qualifiers. Even the one person, one billion dollar company that was in the New York Times, it's like, okay, like he hired his brother and then also he had a bunch of contractors. And so there's never, like, even if you do create like an autonomous business, like, if, If it's working at all, then suddenly there becomes an economic incentive to maybe, hey, maybe I should spend an hour on it. And then like, oh, is it still really autonomous if you spend an hour a week on it? Man, that's the thing I think is also going to make it hard for these things to be crazy pervasive is that if someone is being that successful, there's another person that would look at the thing you're doing and say, well, I can do that too. And let me go compete against your margins. Yeah.

How do you think about terminology? Jordi always gives this example of a company that had workflows and they just rebranded it agents and they didn't really change anything under the hood. And it feels like there's an immense pressure from investors and marketers to just use the latest lingo. And sometimes that's useful because the capabilities change and so the nomenclature should change. But we're in this weird continuum where there's workflows, AI workflows, agentic workflows, full AI agents. Like, are these meaningful definitions? How have you been processing all of this since you're sort of in all categories? We definitely have a slide that explains the difference between all three of the things you just said.

Practically speaking, though, they're all agents. You know, I, you know, I'm sure like somebody who is, you know, like a master wordsmith would like, you know, trying to debate the finer nuances it. But what I see in the market is practically what. people are saying is an agent is a thing that does automation for me. Whether it's purely deterministic or whether it's purely agentic, it's kind of an agent at the end of the day. Now, you know, deterministic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages.

Agentic workflows have some advantages and disadvantages. As you start to go build these in production use cases, you probably should understand the difference between these things. But practically speaking, we see customers showing up and they haven't really figured that stuff out yet. They're just like, I have a problem and I want that problem solved. Yeah. What about vibe coding? Like, how broad do you think this trend goes? I saw someone, I think he was, who was it? Downtown Josh Brown joking about how there's, he's getting sent like a new vibe coded thing every single day. You gave the example of like somebody that makes an app that

displays their Spotify playlist nicely. And he's like, you're not my child. Like, I'm not gonna spend time on this. I don't owe you any time. But of course. Yeah, I'm just wondering how you're processing. Like it feels like this year vibe coding is going very mainstream. A lot of people are toying with it.

What do you think retention looks like? What do you think the knock on implications are of this? Any like security concerns? How are you processing this idea that like, the number of people that will have created software will probably like 10x this year. I think it's very exciting. You have all these folks who have had ideas or coming up with ideas for problems to solve, etc.

But in the past, those ideas have kind of been locked away because they can only implement like a small piece of it. And now with vibe coding, it feels like you can do a lot more stuff. And so I think that's why we've seen such a surge is that everyone feels like they can get these creative ideas out of themselves. I do think as an industry, there's going to have to be a lot more stuff built out to make these things work in all the various use cases. I think one of the places Zapier is very helpful is connecting to all your data sources and doing it in a secure way.

Like, we'll handle all your authentications clearly. And so that's a way that we can sort of play a really important role in how people go build out these infrastructure. And it can move less from vibe into more trusted. you know, infrastructure. Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? This is great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Have a great rest of your week, and we'll talk to you soon, Wade. Good to see you. Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, Kevin Warsh, who is the new Fed Chair nominee, had a financial disclosure and has a ton of startup investments. He's in SpaceX and a whole bunch of other companies. Zerohead says, he's a one man. He was in brave.

machine Brave that the browser cognition Cognition Cognition IP the tech

enabled patent law firm D D YDX He's in a lot of stuff I think so of this Holloway I think some of this is through funds

that he's invested in but still it's a whole bunch of it's a whole bunch of companies and it's interesting to dig into

he also owns a horse racing stable something like that did you see this It also includes his role as a general partner in Vicarage Stable, a horse racing operation. Let's go. He is invested in all sorts of things.

So he will be disclosing all of that. I'm sure people will dig in more as he goes towards the committee vote. But without further ado, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Unker from Kerry. He is the founder and is here with an exciting M&A update. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Looks like we both have

Sanaminedo announced in the last couple of weeks. Yeah. Yes. Talk us. First, let's start by you. Start with the gong. Let's start with the gong.

Let's hit the gong. There we go. Now we can continue. But let's, yeah, let's talk about the company that you built, the background, maybe your background even before starting this company

that was just acquired. Yeah, absolutely. Before this, I used to run a company called Teachable.com, which helped people make money online for the first time. So it helped people create online courses and coaching and had a successful exit there during the pandemic.

Took a couple of years off trying to figure out what I wanted to build. And then I started Kerry about three and a half years ago. And the mission with Kerry was, we helped people first make money online. Now we'll help them grow their net worth, be smart about taxes. I think I came on the show last to talk about taxes. So a lot of that

stuff. And now here we are. and a half years later excited to share that we've been acquired by two separate companies. Yeah, explain that. It feels very uncommon. How did this happen? Who's going where? What's the, how did this deal? Like it's my second exit. I want to get acquired twice this time. Yeah. At this rate, the next, the next company, you might get acquired by four buyers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Twice the diligence, you know, nothing like running two simultaneous M&A processes. But no, the overall company is bought by Angelus, which is a platform I've had a long-standard relationship with.

You know, my first company raised money on Angelist. I heard a lot of my team there and my funds there. They saw the marketing engine we've built. They saw our ability to build and launch financial products. And they wanted to buy us to build and launch new financial products to make the private markets more accessible. As they did this, you know, we obviously have built. what I consider to be the best solo 401k self-employed retirement platform,

they didn't really have a logical kind of use for that asset. So we partnered with a company called Letis Financial that does tax, bookkeeping, payroll insurance for self-employed people, and that's where we're selling the retirement platform. So it's almost two separate acquisitions. So, yeah, what does that look like from a customer perspective? I mean, maybe walk me through the actual go-to-market for the company while you were building it, what the last couple of years looked like.

like because then we can go into what the experience for the customers is like. Yeah. So our go-to-market, which I think we were quite good at, is we never spent a single dollar on paid marketing. I think a lot of it was content education, teaching people about the insanity of the tax code, which is there's something fitting, by the way, in announcing our acquisition on April 15th. It was completely unintentional.

But it's funny, it's funny how that happened. Yeah. The amount of times I would read like one of your posts and then send it to my CPA and just be like, please make sure that we're following this. You're doing this. Yeah. What was the marketing strategy go direct or were you doing? I mean, it sounds like you're doing content education.

Content education. What platforms work the best? We had a personal finance newsletter with over 100,000 people, which worked quite well. Twitter has always worked well. I do think there's some percentage of people who follow me and. Twitter are going to be relieved to see less tax content. A lot of buddies be like, dude, like Leo. But look, I think, you know, I'm excited for the next chapter with Angelus, where we will

apply a lot of the same, you know, go-to-market to launch new products for the private markets. Meanwhile, lettuce is, the platform stays exactly the same. Customers will, you know, only get a better experience since lettuce allows people to also do taxes, payroll, health insurance for self-employed people. I'll continue to stay involved there as well with more of my data time on Angelist but most of the team ends up going to let us Yeah, what was the founding team like

Who did you hire? How big did the company get? Talk to me about like the shape of the company Yeah, absolutely so we we got to about 25 people About four million in ARR Founding team had you know four for other co-founders And yeah it was it was The business was at a point where it was growing quite nicely where we got to about 250 million in assets on the platform.

However, looking at all the things happening in the market today, you know, you look at it and I'm like three and a half years and four million ARR, it's a good business. But you look at some of these modern AI companies and you're like, wow, you know, it's a good business, not sort of the crazy multiples you see these days. Yeah. How do you think about the, I mean, I guess like level set for me

on the boom of the solopreneur, like what have you seen there? What has stuck out to you? and then I want to talk about that in the context of Angelist. Yeah, so we stumbled upon this in my last company where for the first time we saw, you know, tens of millions of people start a business online. I think marketplaces made it very easy for anyone to get attention, and when you got attention, you could start to monetize this.

So saw that first happening at Teachable, but then kind of kept investing in the creator economy and seeing the growth of that, that when it came time to launch the new business, which is Carrie at the time, realize that so many things are provided to you by your job, like your retirement plan, your insurance, all of that. As a self-employed person, you may be financially doing quite well,

but you have to go figure it out for yourself. And the solo 401K specifically was one of those too good to be true sort of personal finance things where it's a private 401k plan just for yourself. You can invest in literally any asset you want. Your money grows and compounds tax-free. You can use it all to contribute to a business. a raw diary, you can borrow money from it, you can get a tax credit for setting one up.

I was reading this and I'm like, this is insane. Like, why isn't anyone like doing anything about it? So that's where we built Kerry, where, you know, we kind of help, I think, 4,000 separate people set up their retirement plans and custody their dollars and all of that. And then within the angelist ecosystem, how do you see, it feels like there's a continuation of the solopreneur boom, vibe coding is obviously a big piece of that. I definitely agree with a lot of people that have come on the show and talked about this idea that maybe we're not at a one person, one billion dollar company yet. But just the ability to build something that is software with a smaller, leaner team sort of lends itself to maybe lower capital requirements, not needing to go the traditional venture path because it might look more like a lifestyle business.

But I'm wondering how you think the financial markets will react to that dynamic. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're seeing a lot. The rise of the one person business is only becoming bigger, but the angelist acquisition was also, we spent a lot of our time educating people on investing and, you know, being smarter with money. And I think there's still a big opportunity to make private markets more accessible. I mean, we're seeing this with companies going public later and later, so much of the wealth creation, people are locked out of. I mean, you can, come on, you can buy prediction market contracts and how long handshake will last. You can, you know, gamble on shit coins. So I don't really buy the whole, like, we're protecting people angle. Sure. So the idea with Angelist is we're going to spend some time and figure out sort of how can we take some of this world creation that's historically been only for a very few people and make it more accessible, but in a way that's actually, you know, fundamentally good and investor-friendly products. Yeah. In a perfect scenario, do you think that the public funds that invest in private market companies should be basically valued at 1X NAV?

Because we've seen a couple things go out and they get really highly valued. And it feels like some sort of like, okay, the market's not efficient here. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of very, very big IPOs coming up that will determine, I think, like, I know I'm going to sound dramatic. But the future of the private markets in a lot of ways because there is such a massive disconnect. right now where you have so many fundamentally good companies in the public markets getting completely slaughtered. Meanwhile, all kinds of private businesses are continuing to rip.

So I think there's going to be a reckoning. I think companies are staying private longer. But, you know, I mean, like I would imagine anthropic and open AI have unofficial markets that make them more traded than a lot of public securities. So like, you know, the line is blurring. there are effectively stock prices for a lot of these late stage private companies. So I think it's a really interesting time. And it's to me inevitable that we allow private markets to access more of this.

Yeah. Well, I know you guys have some big news coming up. So I have a lot more questions, but we'll save it for when you guys are ready to announce, which I'm looking forward to. But congratulations to the whole team. I think it's super smart to make this decision. and I can't wait to see what you do at Angelus. It's going to be incredible.

Yep, appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, guys. Thanks so much. We'll talk you soon. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Up next, we have Bailey Pumpfleet from HAL.com. Cal.com.

He's considering going closed as AI agents overwhelm the open source ecosystem. We're excited to have Bailey join us. How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome to the show. Hey, how's it a busy day. Yeah, very busy day. Please, introduce yourself in the company.

We've reacted to some Cal.com posts in the past, but it's a fascinating company. So take us through the shape of the business, a little bit about yourself, and then we'll go into the decision today. Yeah, Cal.com has been an open source scheduling software. We've been around for like five years. The whole company built around being open source. Yeah. In my coaching, we're huge fans of the open source space. And, yeah, today we made the announcement that we're actually going to be closing.

source, which is a very tough decision and quite a controversial one. Before you continue, your audio keeps kind of cutting in and out. Do you have headphones or I don't know if you're kind of covering your mic at all? I don't know if you're picking that. Yeah, yeah, it sounds a little muffled. Hearing every other word. Oh, dear. Is this any better?

That's a lot better, actually. Whatever you did. That's a Zoom magic. Yeah, thank you. But yeah, so, you know, we started this company as huge believers in open source and important to a lot of shifts in AI.

The whole sort of perspective has completely changed. AI is now able to break code at completely unimaginable speeds. It's the one thing that nobody's really talking about. We've seen little drops about like Anthropics Mythos model

and nobody has really taken the time to just kind of understand the ramifications which things like that can have on not just open source, but broader application security. What was the business model in the prior era? If you're an open source software, how do you keep the business running? Fundamentally, the business model has not changed at all.

So we've always been open source and the code has been open. And that's mainly for the things that the average person would need to be able to run their own, you know, scheduling service on their own domain or something like that. As a business, we actually sell this software commercially. And open source is actually something that benefits us commercially. Because we can go to people and we can say, hey, you can look at the source code and you can verify that we're not doing anything sketchy with your calendar data. What, if any, are the benefits of being open source during the AI agent boom? because I imagine that you are getting automated pull requests and vulnerability reports.

Are there any silver linings that you, you know, things you put in the in the pro column before you realize that the con column overwhelmed the pros? Yeah, I think a lot of these things remain to be true that, you know, with open source, everybody can audit your code. So, you know, especially with AI producing a lot of slop nowadays, the one thing that we have going for us is that we have code, which is written by, humans and reviewed by humans. And so it definitely creates a lot of trust in that sense. It's just that, you know, for us, there's a lot of pros, really. And we also just genuinely care about open source. We care about trying to do the right thing with this business. We're going to make money and we're going to do our thing, whether we're open source or not. And I think one of the common misunderstandings about this discussion is that it's some kind of

like business decision that it leads to greater profit for us. But, you know, really, we just always try and do the right thing by our customers and by our community. Yeah. Talk about reputation farming attacks. I haven't heard that much about this. What is going on the open source ecosystem with reputation farming? What do you mean by reputation farming specifically? I'm not. Specifically, like agents that are trying to go and make low quality contributions in order to, you know, earn some sort of reputation in the open source ecosystem so that they're more likely to see other pull requests accepted. Yeah, I ask for clarification there because there's actually a lot of different sort of like

branches of reputation farming here. You have, you have for instance, like these people out here who are just trying to use AI to attack open source to just like get cheap bounded. you get people who are using AI to make small contributions to open source. And maybe they might be trying to get open source boundaries for developing code. Maybe the end goal insight is to get a job at one of these sort of companies or something like that. But just like how we see a ton of AI slop on LinkedIn and things like that, we're seeing a lot of AI slot on GitHub. Granted for us, that doesn't really affect everything that's happened today.

We don't make any decisions because, you know, there are some like AI slot pool requests. But that is something I'm hearing a lot from other projects where it's really hard for smaller teams to deal with just the sheer amount of review workload. How are you? Is there, I mean, it's weird because you're already open source. There's always the possibility that a paying customer would say, you know what, I'm just going to self-host this. So in some ways, by being open source, you don't really think. the competitive threat of, oh, I'll just vibe code this software and I won't use something off the shelf or I won't pay you. But is there a business threat from AI? Is the business

threat greater now that, I mean, obviously the model capabilities are greater, but being closed source sort of incentivizes people to say, hey, if I want to get it for free, I should vibe code it. Yeah, I think the question about can vibe coding replace my SaaS startup is, you know, the hot thing right now. We feel pretty confident in our defense of that, whether we're open or closed source, because scheduling is so fragile and so nuanced. If you say, okay, I can

build a basic scheduler in a weekend, I probably believe you. You probably can. But to build something the scale of cow.com that actually works in all these enterprise use cases and things like that, it's a lot harder to be honest. And you're going to run into so many little hiccups that just

AI, you know, sort of vibe coding can't currently sort of hit. Yeah, it's, I mean, I have to imagine that the models will be able to, to create a good scheduling app, but it's more about, and I wonder if you agree with this, but it feels like it's more about the potential of just a company prioritizing their time, because if there's so many other things and you're spending your time, rewriting and maintaining all of your custom in-house vibe-coded tools, if you just pull something off the shelf, even if it just costs a couple, you know, 20 bucks a month or whatever,

you're just going to have more mind share towards, oh, the scheduler broke, or it's down, or there's a security vulnerability we need to patch it. Instead, you can go focus on whatever your actual businesses. And so I imagine that the prioritization is a big factor there too. Yeah, I mean, it's the same way nobody's going to build their own stri- for payment processing or you're probably not going to build intercom for your customer support. You absolutely can do that, but is it really worth it at the end of the day? For us, sort of

our business model has never really relied on sort of gatekeeping anything, but just more that bringing something out of the box and just deploying it and getting selling is the most important thing to pretty much every founder. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come and explain it to us and break it down. Good luck with the decision. and the reaction from the community. And one of my favorite.coms. It is a great.com. Cal.com.

Thank you. Still underrated, even after all these years building on it. Well, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one, Bayley. Thanks, guys. Goodbye.

Up next, we have Han Wong from Mint LaFai. He's the co-founder. And Albers, the markets are closed, but Allbirds is down almost 10% after hours. Off of the high? It ended. 17. Okay, that's pretty high. That's a very big departure from, it was a $10 million company, $20 million company yesterday, and now it is over $100 million company. That is a massive

gain. So we'll see where all birds goes. They have a lot to prove, but we're rooting for them. And we're also rooting for Mintlify. Let's bring in Fawn from Mittlify. How are you doing? Welcome to show. I'm doing really, really a while. Hey, thanks so much, guys, for having me on today. Thanks so much for coming on. Love the energy. Are you fired up? You seem fired up. Oh, Allbirds, uh, proved to the rest of us that you can just do things. Yeah. And, uh, that's the energy that we aspire for. Indeed. Yeah, it was a, wild story. But we're not here to talk about Albirds anymore. Tell us about you. Uh, give us your backstory and then tell us about the company and then we'll get into the news. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so my name is Fawn. Uh, one of the co-founders of Mitlify. We founded the company, uh, in 2020. two really off of the simple idea that we wanted to to help enable other builders. I've been a programmer since I was 11 years old and it's just basically been defining elements of mine. There you go. I'm so curious by all the...

I love it. And basically wanted to build a company enabling other developers because it was who I was and who I fundamentally am. And now cut forward a few years, Mittlify now powers, you know, the docs for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Coinbase, open claw perplexity, and now while over 20,000 others, you know, that now reaches over 100 million people every single year, which is, you know, something that we're, you know, incredibly proud of and, you know, of the impact

that we have. Yeah. So, I mean, fundamentally developer docs are taxed on an HTML. website essentially, but what's usually unique is the harness and the environment that, you know, migrates any changes to the code or API endpoints onto those docs. What was the first approach to actually deliver something unique or more enterprise ready than, say, some of just like the open source, like reverse engineering, the URLs and just statically serving it, which is what I think most people would be familiar. with? What was like the V1, like, okay, we have product market fit. This is better than the status quo, and then we'll go into the AI era. Absolutely. Initially, when we started, it was

off a very simple idea that anything on the market wasn't fundamentally built for developers, which is so ironic because it's the developers who are often maintaining the content. It was developers who are often reading the content. And everything that was out there was just kind of like static site builders that were, you know, often adhering to like a different audience, it felt like. And having personally, you know, suffered from so many bad docs out there, I was like, hey, look, like, if we're going to go build one, let's go build the one that we always wish we had. And let's make that great. And it turns out those opinions that we kind of make into building this platform really

resonated with a lot of the industry, right? It started initially with, you know, like a few of our YC batchmates, then grew to about a quarter of the entire YC batches. And then it grew eventually now to serving some of the largest companies, you know, including Microsoft and others. So how do you think about integrating AI? I imagine that there's more docs than ever that need to be written. Those docs need to be read by AI, but then also whenever a new. Endpoint is created, even if it's created very quickly. It needs to be documented equally as quickly.

How have you integrated AI into the product? Yeah. Many different ways, but I think it's really important to first take a step back and understand the changing role of all of this. Right. When we started the company in 22, it was a very simple idea. A, like, docs are almost like, you know, you can think of them almost like, you know, an instruction manual. Yeah. right like you know when you assemble like let's say you know Lego bricks and like you know

likeo kit uh you know you have to read the assembly manual in order to figure out how these things work it's written by people you don't have to you can do it the old fashion way there you go uh but i get your point yeah but now it's really important to understand that 50% of the viewers for the content is actually not humans anymore it's actually AI so we basically took a look uh across all of our data, you know, a few months back and we're like, look, you know, we felt the change in AI agents being the end users. What did that actually look like? So we went through proxied, our viewers, identified what our agents and what are humans. And out of curiosity, John, Jordan, I'm curious, if you guys had a guess, like, what percentage of traffic do you think now

comes from agents versus humans? Didn't you just say 50%? Oh, I said 50%. Yeah. I was thinking of a trick question. I was like, trick question. Yeah, it's actually 500%. 50 is an interesting place to be because I feel like it'll, yeah, like it was probably 0% a couple years ago and it'll probably be 99.999% very quickly. Yeah, I would have actually probably been high. I would have guessed higher if you hadn't said. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, literally. It went from 15% about 12 months ago to about 50% a few months ago. Wow. A few months ago. And I would say now it's like closer to 60, 70%. Sure. And so we have a very strong opinion that by the end of, the year to your point, it's going to start to look like 90 plus percent.

Yeah. Right. And if for no other reason than a developer will just be using a chat app to interface and ask the questions that they want and have the chat app go to the particular website, pull everything in, contextualize it at their level based on their memories, based on those particular questions they asked instead of opening up 12 tabs and scrolling through a bunch of different endpoints. Exactly.

Exactly it. And also if you think about even like what the like the developer work like cycle is nowadays, right? It's like I'm going to here to ask Claude Code to go, you know, vibe code my product, vibe code my app. Sure. And if for instance, I'm like, hey, let's go and use, you know, let's figure out how to implement Stripe or a new feature. Sure. Or an integration, it's going to, the first thing it needs to do is actually crawl through the content to figure out how it's done. Yeah.

Right. And so to kind of tie it back into the, you know, Lego kit assembly manual, well, if you're task and I to go do it, the first thing it's going to need to do it. the first thing it's going to need to do is to read that instruction manual. Yeah. And so we view the change of content out there, not so much like a platform or like a website like it used to be, but like a crucial part of infrastructure for agents to understand how to implement, how to understand the world and how to even maybe even surface like, you know, whether or not you use your product. Yeah. Because of what it knows. How do you think about that, I mean, you have some huge customers, like the biggest companies in the world.

at the same time, like, random, like, people that don't even have a business are like vibe coding software. And do they need to be releasing developer documentation? Will they be your customers in the future? Like, is the long tail going to get longer or fatter? Or do you think this is, you're going to stay focused on enterprise consolidation, like the really, really high traffic, the important endpoints that get pulled off the shelf from agents consistently? Yeah, that's a really good question. What we're seeing is a bit of both. So while it's more important to optimize for like the heavy hitters, because those products are getting more usage than ever before and to make sure that they're really well optimized for agents, it is also equally important for like your next two person, you know, YC startup or your billion dollar one person company to make sure their product is also out there. Because in the age of AI where agents are making the decision, how well it understands how your product works, right, is what informs of it of like whether

or not you use your product at all. And so discoverability, right, making sure that your content is out there available is just more important than ever, especially in the age of where software is, you know, starting to get commoditized as well. Yeah. Tell us about the round. What happened? Yes.

We raised Series B. How much? How much? $45 million at a $500 million dollar dollar dollar dollar. Congratulations. I'm honored. I'm honored. I got the gong.

Of course. Of course. Last question for me. How did you answer the Saspocalypse question? Obviously, you guys are using a bunch of AI. You're building agents. But I feel like that must have come up during the round. And I'm sure you had a good answer because you put it together.

Yeah. Of course. So what we fundamentally view is that the SaaSpocalypse is fundamentally more of an enabler for us than anything else. As more products gets built because software is actually, you know, the cost of barriers is cheaper these days. Things like discoverability, while you expose your content out there, it's just far more important than ever, right? And this influx of companies being created, companies being out there and making sure that they expose their information. out to the world in agents has kind of what we've seen in our data, this massive tailwind of adoption for our product.

And now if we're here saying that, like, you know, most of the viewers of your products or how to use your product or agents, you know, like having every company enable that is, you know, what we've seen as kind of just this big tailwind, an explosion of users across the board. And especially since Mimify as a company have taken this developer-first approach, into building docks, it actually was really beneficial for agents in actually spinning these things up faster than ever before as well.

Yeah. So more companies pulling it off the shelf and not, and not a lot of... Yeah, there's more software companies and then also an agent can just use MENTlify to build docs. Yeah, very cool. I think the really important thing to note is like even from the ground level, we've only seen the adoption of our product go up significantly in the age of agents. And I think as more companies, you know, have more competing priorities and just more things to do in the SaaSpocalypse,

I actually think the build argument is actually stronger than ever before to preserve focus for what really matters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got to say your customer page is absolutely stacked. We've got Coinbase, AT&T, Cognition, Browser Base, Anthropic, Fidelity, Calci, Decagon, lovable. Yeah, it's everybody. PayPal, perplexity. Yeah. And this is a good definition of like, you know, you're an AIC company if you're accelerating revenue right now in the AI revolution. Yeah. Axe. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. You're going to run out of company soon. That's the bear case. You're going to run out of customers. Yeah, I like the design language there where the logos, we'll have to pull it up, but the the, the logos,

have like these generated images behind them that have this like very cohesive style but they all have slightly different flavors to each each logo I really like the design I thought it stuck out awesome all right to me you Han chat loves you too thanks for putting up with our sound effects all right thanks so much guys we'll talk to you later we'll see this soon have a good day all right we got to close we got to close that farm people who are doing schizo edits now it's in the timeline 4,000 people liked it. I miss this you miss this one look at this I imagine this oh this is the the pig pageant I've seen people direct their pigs with the with the little guides we have some SD kid here oh it is SD kid there we go no I don't think it sounds like in that

genre but the the background is crazy the rotoscoping is extremely sloppy but that is the all right enough of that so edit yeah I'm gonna give you a headache enough of that enough of that of that. But TBPN is going to wrap for today. Yes. But our friend, Marquash, has Jensen on his show. Yes. And I'm going to listen to that. Yeah. On my way home. Go over there and listen to that. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Sharp. It's been an honor and a privilege. Give us five stars. Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, TBPN.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. We'll see you soon. Love you.