TBPN Live - Air India Crash, Internet Chaos | Delian Asparouhov, Saif Khawaja, Henri Stern, Chris Paik, Joseph Cohen, Zachary Perret, Shirin Ghaffary, Cameron McCord, Anil Varanasi, Shreyas Iyer

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN today is Thursday June 12 2025 we are live from the TBPN Back in the ultradome the temple of technology the fortress of finance the capital of capital and It's great. We are both Deathly ill today, but in a rough week still doing the show the show must go on That's part of showbiz. It is the show must always go on and there's no greater show in the world of technology and music than the Coachella 2027 line up featuring fast takeoff scenario. Neural Neural Mirage. Cause a loop. The alignment choir.

Starting point is 00:00:42 DJ token drift. Auto prompt. The alignment choir DJ token drift auto prompt Jordy had a chat GPT generate a a Hypothetical Coachella Poster it was no surprise to see gentle singularity headlining To yes von Neumann and the tilings lo-fi oracle synthetics, which one did I really copy? Bar paper is very good Chain of thought collective like some of these just sound I think a lot of people were surprised to see the the Guners didn't make the list at all

Starting point is 00:01:13 They did but maybe that's a little white pill. Yeah Let me try and adjust this microphone Anyways, we got a great show today. We have a stack lineup. Can we pull up the the run of show? We're gonna have delian join back to back. I think he's the first guest to ever go back to back to back. He was on the show yesterday. Jordy absolutely blasted him with some confetti. And I'm coming back to talk to us about the shinkai deal as well. I really didn't hold that on. I

Starting point is 00:01:41 really didn't hold back. I tried to not shoot confetti in the face of anybody yesterday but delian really you know got got the the full effect but a lot of fun at YC demo day yesterday tons of great founders major white pill being there and we have some posts reacting to YC demo day I like that Juan from ramp He's been on the show many many times with why did he not come on? I know we should have I saw his post after we left But he had a really funny one

Starting point is 00:02:14 He said you're more likely to raise a series a is a YC company then go bankrupt as a gambling addict Let that sink in because there's this viral post that says like there's a 20% chance of gambling addicts going broke and everyone was memeing it like a couple days ago being like gambling addicts will take those odds every day. 80% chance they don't go bankrupt is great. But Gary Tan says 45% of YC companies get to series A and median ARR is $1 million plus trending up. Find me another place where that is true in any set of potential investments in the world. YC does have higher valuation caps, but to me, this quality justifies it.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Invest in YC Demo Day, I recommend it. I love it. Astonishing. Yeah. And it was fun. We handed out a bunch of ramp hats. They're in hot demand. I thought-

Starting point is 00:03:03 Yeah, we ran out halfway through the show. That thing went a little crazy with the color. Like when I think of ramp,. They're in hot demand. I thought we ran out halfway through the show. Crazy with the color. When I think of ramp, I think of a bright yellow, not necessarily a full neon yellow. But these hats were full neon green, like safety runner yellow, actually. And they're very intense.

Starting point is 00:03:18 But I got a lot of text messages for people that wanted them. So we will probably be printing more of those. We handed out some of our TBPN hats, which are now printed. They're here. They're finally here. We've got to figure out how to distribute them. We don't want to be in the apparel business, but we're here reluctantly. We'll figure out how to get them out into the world.

Starting point is 00:03:36 And so if you're looking for one of those ramp hats, you've got to be a ramp customer for sure. So you've got to go to ramp.com. Time is money, safe, both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place and Eric ramp former YC That's true Sue Hale Also chimed in he said so many insanely great YC companies this batch is easily has many ten billion dollar companies What it?

Starting point is 00:04:03 Is so aggressive I so aggressive. I love it. I love the optimization. People were upset. They said mostly cursor for X. He said, nah, there was a lot of agent infrastructure stuff. There was agent for agent products. Yes. Yes. A lot of AI on AI stuff. But that's where the money is. But we're going to need agents to work on to help other agents, right? Because that's, Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I think there was a very, very clear, I mean, Gary said 90% AI. But it was even more narrow than that. It was a lot of B2B AI, a lot of narrow AI infrastructure,

Starting point is 00:04:37 a lot of how do you run an agent on the cloud, what kind of databases are you building to enable agents? All sorts of stuff like that. Some really exciting companies though, and some really great stuff. It was very fascinating comparing YC Demo Day, where I came away, like you mentioned, like incredibly optimistic about these entrepreneurs

Starting point is 00:04:59 who are going and building companies, and they're clearly going to like, maybe some of them are directly competitive with each other some of them are directly competitive with previous previous YC companies I'm sure some will morph and pivot and change But you just have the entrepreneurial motion, which is very exciting compared to so many other paths that people could take in the past Yeah, it's like the best time to start a company Yeah, ultimately it felt pretty even there was a lot of companies that clearly founders we in teams we talked to that came in with an idea and just executed against it but it felt like half of them too were just iterating through the batch which is what they should be doing yeah I mean

Starting point is 00:05:34 that's where a lot of this infrastructure plays come from is like I wanted to build an app I needed infrastructure so I built the infrastructure kind of the story of slack you know they were building a video game and they needed to communicate with each other, so they built the internal chat tool. And they were like, let's just sell this. And that stuff can happen all the time. It is less visual, less exciting sometimes,

Starting point is 00:05:54 but it can still create a ton of shareholder value, and hopefully a $10 billion plus outcome. My interesting takeaway was that we did YC Demo Day, and then we also did the Teal Fellowship Day a week ago or maybe two weeks ago, time flies. And the difference between YC Demo Day's vibe of the companies and Teal Fellowship companies were wildly different, like wildly different.

Starting point is 00:06:18 The Teal Fellowship companies, obviously there's a lot less, but I don't know if we talked to a single AI agent company during Teal fellowship day It was almost all like bio regenerate organs brain computer interface like much more of likes things that you can modify those weather projects Yeah, exactly like super super Yeah, and and and the tenor of the conversation during the teal fellowship during YC demo day. We were like give us the number What's the ARR one of the customers how many github stars you got and we were spraying confetti everywhere like if we had done that during teal fellowship day

Starting point is 00:06:51 I think a lot of them would have been like yeah like we're five years out from commercialization yeah it was cool like we don't plan to have revenue until 2035 and then our revenue in year one will be a billion yeah yeah exactly and so still like very very exciting stuff on either side, but more differentiation where I think in the past, like a decade ago, it was like YC and YC clones all had kind of the same shape of companies. Now we're seeing a real bifurcation between what Teal Fellowship means versus what YC means. And obviously there's some companies that will do both but I mean for a lot of the founders and the teams yesterday YC was effectively like do college in three months

Starting point is 00:07:34 Yeah, focus majoring in startups. Yeah venture. Yeah, right and and that's a good thing That's a good product that enables a lot more companies to be created. Yeah, and I mean the high school drop Yeah, the high school, that was a very interesting trend. Who was then selling software, drops out of high school, and then is selling software back to his teachers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool.

Starting point is 00:07:55 It's always just cool seeing the, just how young you can be and start a company. It was funny when you asked him, okay, you asked a couple of people, how do you make be and start a company. It was funny when you asked him, okay, you asked a couple people, how'd you make money in high school? And that's a hard question, because some entrepreneurs, they were just like, no, I was actually just heads down,

Starting point is 00:08:12 I wanted to get into school. They're like, I was dealing drugs. Yeah, or something like that. They're just doing random stuff, mowing lawns. But they all had really good stories about building websites and scaling things and doing all sorts of stuff. That one founder was like

Starting point is 00:08:25 I sold a very basically was like I Made a website for a pastor for three grand and I was reading into that being like you made a Squarespace site And like you marked it up a hundred percent. Yeah thousand percent or something But still still it's all about the ultimate value and a good website can easily be worth a few grand. Yep. Anyway, there was one interesting article that came up, or interesting statistic that came up a couple times.

Starting point is 00:08:53 Gary Tan mentioned this. And we didn't have a time to fact check it on air, but I wanted to fact check it today. So this idea was surfaced that the, so the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had a report called the Labor Market Report for recent college graduates. And in it, they have 2025 annual outcomes by major.

Starting point is 00:09:15 They have a spreadsheet there. And so the headline is that US computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate of art history majors. Very aggressive. And so the narrative is obvious there. It's like AI is disrupting everything. You don't need computer science majors anymore. You just need, you know, cursor or some AI agent product that will just go and build things for you. So we're, we no longer are going to be employing computer scientists or computer science majors. And I wanted to know more about you. So we're no longer are gonna be employing computer scientists or computer science majors. And I wanted to know more about this, so I dug into it and there is some interesting stuff

Starting point is 00:09:52 going on, but it's not exactly the narrative that I think people think it's telling. It's more of a lagging indicator. And so the claim, like the facts are literally true. So in 2023, because this is lagging data, because you can't just like graduate and be within like one week, like do you have a job or not?

Starting point is 00:10:10 Like that's not relevant. Like you might go and hang out in the summer and tour around a little bit. Like when does unemployment really set in? It's kind of, it takes a minute. And so this data does lag. And so we're talking about 2023. But the unemployment rate for computer science majors was 6.1 percent, and the unemployment rate for art history,

Starting point is 00:10:32 criticism, and conservation was 3 percent. And so yes, it is about twice art history in the data set. And so the same file indicates computer science ranks seventh amongst 73 majors. Art history sits in the middle of the pack. But the New York Fed cautions that these are survey estimates drawn from one year of this survey microdata with only a few hundred art history majors, graduates in the sample. So because art history is small and they're only

Starting point is 00:10:57 sampling a small section of that, the numbers are pretty small. I'm pretty sure that for our history two years earlier CS actually had a lower rate. Yes, and so Well with with art history the 3% rate They're only surveying 2,000 graduates with art history degrees and so you're talking about 60 job seekers, like 60 people that are still saying, I'm looking for a job and I don't have one yet.

Starting point is 00:11:28 And so that number, it can swing so much easier. My immediate question was, could there be a lot of those art history degrees, majors that just, that are unemployed, but aren't counting themselves as unemployed because they're not looking for a job at all? Yeah. Right? Don't you have to, can't you just just so so yes so that's a big thing

Starting point is 00:11:48 so we in in art history a lot of art history graduates go and get other jobs or they or they don't they don't necessarily get the job of art historian out of college and so that takes them out of the unemployment pool because they're there they might be you know be in the marketing organization or communications or they might join in and do you know anything in a business might become a corporate athlete maybe they become sales guy who knows they're doing something I mean you meet these people all the time was like oh yeah I actually studied art history and it gives me like this really interesting background and I

Starting point is 00:12:24 have a lot to talk about. But I didn't study the thing that I'm like actively doing because yeah, maybe there isn't like a track for sales. Or. Yeah, and ultimately I do think early stage engineering roles are being impacted. There's still an incredible amount of opportunity. If you're savvy and high agency.

Starting point is 00:12:43 But there's also a lot there You had this big tech hiring freeze in 2022 what's driving rounds of layoffs? Yeah, and then yeah, I think a lot of companies just need fewer Junior engineers, but at the same time we look at this we have two crap yes major types that work for us and We probably wouldn't have had them a few years ago if we were doing a show like this because we're like we're not going to build software. Yeah, it's a lot easier to build software. Yeah. So we are. Yeah. But I mean, at the same time, if this is real, we need to get up to speed in the world of art history

Starting point is 00:13:25 Let's put a background behind him like a library behind him and Museum of modern art. I think today the beauty of the beauty of Tyler skill set is that he is incredible at Artificial intelligence and vibe coding. I think I think with enough work today he could become an expert in art history and potentially land an art historian job maybe even by the time the job so what do you know about Tyler so Tyler learn the history of art try to get a job in the next three hours see see what you can put together okay I you're incredibly talented and just sort of see what's possible. Okay. So we'll check in with Tyler throughout the show. What do you know about art history so far? What have you learned? So far not much. I found I found

Starting point is 00:14:16 a couple of good facts though. Okay. So okay. Here's one. Hit me. The oldest cave paintings, you know, like in Europe actually were not done by human beings. They were done by Neanderthals. Oh, okay. Interesting. That's a good fact. Art predates humanity. Yeah. Nice. Okay. I'll keep looking, not much else. But, okay, I mean, it's a start.

Starting point is 00:14:36 I feel like I understand art history now. Thank you. Great stuff, Tyler. Great stuff. But yeah, so back to the stats here. 108,000 CS bachelor degrees in 2021 to 2022 versus just 2,000 art history degrees. And so it's like this 50 to one ratio.

Starting point is 00:14:52 Would you have guessed there's only 2,000 art history graduates a year in the United States? Is that, is that? I don't know that many people. Yeah, no, no, you would think there are more, but realistically it's like there's only a few colleges. People know that it's hard to get An art history job and and so I mean I remember when I got to college and I looked at like what are the highest paying?

Starting point is 00:15:10 Majors like I should major in that I should study the one that's valuable. I should study finance like no need 23 It's saying only 1700 degrees were completed in the sector. Yeah Art history majors get so much attention for being a thousand people a year getting the you know two thousand people a year getting a degree in a country of hundreds of millions. It is so much heat so much shade thrown at them constantly. Yeah. They're just like we're just a few thousand people that like studying the history of art. Give us a break. Give us a break. I mean of course break. I mean, of course, there's other kind of sub-degrees.

Starting point is 00:15:46 Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I mean, it is odd. I don't think the AI wave is really a major factor in this data. I think it's much more about interest rates and big tech companies pulling back after the minor recession correction that we had, because that correction, like some of the,

Starting point is 00:16:10 if you think about there's 100,000 new CS grads, where are those folks gonna go? They're gonna go to big tech companies. If they all did hiring freezes, you're going to see unemployment rise there. But that's not driven by artificial intelligence. That's driven by a correction in the markets that's not driven by artificial intelligence that's driven by a Correction in the markets that's just weaving through because it takes it takes a year or two for these big tech companies to actually

Starting point is 00:16:32 Change their hiring plans and roll things out. So So anyway, it's an interesting narrative, but it's not I don't think it's quite telling the story that we think it is AI is part of the story but timing is. The spike lines with a flood of post pandemic hiring corrections. There's no evidence yet of a persistent downward trend in CS employment, but just to be safe, Tyler is gonna become an art history expert today. Just a backup plan.

Starting point is 00:16:58 Plan B. Backup plan. Plan B. And yeah, I mean, if you're working on an art history project, we should get every art historian on linear It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. They should be building if they're taking jobs from Engineers they should they should they may as well start adopting the best tools that engineers and product leaders use like linear Yeah, I mean, it's the system for modern software development

Starting point is 00:17:20 But it could in the future in the near future be the system for modern art history development art history research It's a dad. They could streamline issues projects product roadmaps and more You can you can orchestrate agents on linear now just like deep research, but you could make it more custom So you could have okay with this art history project We need to go tackle tackle all these issues one by one go read this book go to this library That's right blow off the dust off this ancient tome Anyway, we have too much fun Anyways, Ben was wondering if you could try your headphones again

Starting point is 00:18:00 Okay, I will try those we do have some sad news. There's been a plane crash in I'm a Medabad I don't know how to pronounce that in India, but it's the first fatal accident in a 787 This is the new Dreamliner from Boeing and there's 242 people the footage of this is It's very scary Actually, I guess on the show talk about she'll monot's

Starting point is 00:18:28 Hometown Wow tragic, but we're gonna ask delian about this in 20 minutes yep, I'm interested to get his point of view and see if he has a read on How and why this could have happened but overall? and why this could have happened, but overall, yeah, devastating for, I guess there was one survivor on the entire plane out of hundreds of people. So just absolutely tragic. That is such an insane stat that just one survived. I think there might be two now or something.

Starting point is 00:18:58 It looked like the plane from the video, it looked like the plane just didn't have the thrust to actually, like it didn't have enough power or something something very bizarre happened but I I don't know it's it does feel like the the entire like every time that there's a there's a there's a plane crash like there was that one in DC there was that one up in Canada now there's this like whenever there's something that happened people kind of retreat to like the base rates of the stats and say like yes this is a freak accident but it's still overall very safe to fly but now we have like three

Starting point is 00:19:36 and I feel like at a certain point like the stats actually do have to adjust and so I'm wondering if there's something more systemic going on and we should be digging into this but yeah very rough anyway really sad we will yeah I'm excited to there's something more systemic going on and we should be digging into this but yeah, very rough Anyway, I really said we will yeah, I'm excited to talk to delian about it because he'll give us more context there back to back to business Yesterday while we were at demo day Stripe announced that they acquired privy Patrick Collison said in the announcement money has to reside somewhere and privy holds the best the world's best programmable vaults

Starting point is 00:20:08 Alongside our other stable coin work. We're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services So we're gonna have Henry on from privy today to talk about The business and the acquisition and what they're gonna be doing at stripe Somebody called blork works business and the acquisition and what they're going to be doing at stripe. Somebody called Blork works first stripe acquired bridge then stripe acquired privy both for supposedly 10 figs at low eight bigs ARR guess who invested in both Sequoia and paradigm. Let's see. Let's hear it.

Starting point is 00:20:42 Let's give it up for some generational. Yeah they got it. You got gotta pay the bills over there. Yes. Yes who invested in stripe and have board seats Sequoia and Matt long laying both a paradigm love master class Yeah, I guess privy the the actual acquisition price. I don't believe was announced, but I think it was a great outcome and I'm very excited for the team and stripe is certainly cooking on all things crypto They are yeah excited to talk to them. Um, what else is in the news? We're still investigating what's going on with Meta and the scale AI acquisition Big news with that 15 billion 14 billion billion acquisition of Scale AI by Metta, sharing

Starting point is 00:21:28 Gafare from... The old 49%. It's becoming a new trend. Bill Gurley was talking about this on Patrick's Invest Like the Best podcast. He was saying that there was this narrative that, oh, the only reason that we can't do M&A is because of Lena Kahn. Well Lena con well Lena cons gone. What's going on? It's very odd that we talked to a few people about like where has the 80 million dollar Acquisition gone and and that's kind of fallen by the wayside

Starting point is 00:21:56 these creative These creative deals are certainly happening more and more I thought this was interesting that meta hired top Google DeepMind researcher Jack W. Ray and Johan Schaltke, ML lead of popular voice assistant app Sesame. I feel like Sesame just got started. Like that's a crazy poach so early, right? A trade deal. Something must have happened. Who knows? But they're planning to hire up to 50 people, including a chief scientist per sources Meta platform says poach top engineers, and so I mean it's gonna be fascinating to watch Zuck build that out There was someone else who had a great post in here saying that like every time you saw that one

Starting point is 00:22:36 there was like every time people think Zuck has his back against the wall he comes back and and obviously like the the initial AI push was one of these or iOS was iOS 14 the app tracking transparency thing that was supposed to like destroy you know the entire ads business because you wouldn't be able to track people on iPhones anymore that was not a that was something that he definitely got through and even though meta went down the stock went right back up Absolute execution, but it goes back even further like the very first mobile Switch over for like when mobile started getting popular the I remember having an iPad and using a third-party

Starting point is 00:23:18 App to interact with Facebook because they're they didn't have an app They just had a website and it wouldn't really work as well. Such a wild world. And then when they launched their app, they went all in on HTML5 instead of native iOS, like Objective-C. And so their web-based app was not performing like people wanted it to.

Starting point is 00:23:40 And so he got through it and, he like got through it and like obviously has become like incredibly dominant in mobile and there truly was no, there was no one who won like, oh yeah, we're like the social network for mobile. And like, we really like, you know, Facebook is just on desktop. Like mobile truly became like the sustaining innovation. It was not disruptive to them.

Starting point is 00:24:01 Yeah, it was interesting. Reddit went down the path of allowing third parties to build mobile applications based on reddit and then Ultimately decided that they needed to basically eliminate that activity which which caused a lot of hubbub. Yeah Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta automate compliance manage risk prove trust continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance Processing replaces of a continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program Vanta makes automating compliance

Starting point is 00:24:36 Yeah security fun. We really have to get we really we were talking to the poly market team yesterday about getting some YC markets on there I really want the that when will the fourth YC company be added to the s&p 500 because now they have Coinbase Airbnb and door- yeah like three out of five hundred like they're going to be approaching one percent of the 500 soon and and there's a number of candidates that could do it I mean stripe I mean public obviously would be a candidate if Gary keeps doing and the broader team keep doing what they're doing it's inevitable that you know they're gonna get double digits maybe even triple digits maybe even all of them it could be possible in a mag-70 scenario mag-70 that was great yeah yeah I mean the number of big tech companies is growing because it used to be fang which was five companies

Starting point is 00:25:31 And now it's seven although Netflix kind of fell out of that Maybe Netflix comes back gets added bag eight and then and then but Mary Meekers trying to trim it down She was saying Magnificent six or whatever In six I forget. I mean, I guess it does kind of make sense. Like Tesla's in a little bit of a different world. They're not like as much of an online, like hyper scaler in the same sense.

Starting point is 00:25:54 Like they're kind of over in the car world, but still trillion dollar company, tech company, very, very relevant. And you gotta give him credit, Elon, for building that business. So privy to Stripe, we talked about this. It feels like the Elon Musk, Donald Trump thing is truly winding down.

Starting point is 00:26:12 Is that? They're back to golden retrievers. They're back to golden retrievers. They're like, hey, I'm sorry. We went a little bit too far. They talk privately Monday night. Yeah, sounds like they're in a good spot. They're calling each other friends. They're back They're back to being buddies, which we'd love to see

Starting point is 00:26:34 It's possible to have a huge blow up with somebody and get back to being friends and you know put put things behind Do you think this is actually the end or do you think this is like just a rollercoaster ride that will continue forever? I think it's definitely full employment for Teddy Schleffer at the New York Times. Yeah, yeah, it's a bull market for Teddy. Yeah, I ran into him at an event in Vegas and was asking him what he's doing.

Starting point is 00:26:56 He's like, he's specifically on the Elon Musk beat, like just on Elon Musk. Like that's like what he had to write about. That was like his, not like tech, just Elon. Like that's like what he had to write about. That was like his not like tack just Elon like that's the whole thing that says is beginning on deserve a full-time New York Times and he was like yeah like like like you know like this is my Super Bowl like and he was like saying like I think there's gonna be a blow-up and when it happens like I'm gonna write the definitive article and like yeah he's kind of pulling it off but Elon's

Starting point is 00:27:22 not giving him too much to write about because he's back in the game he's like oh no the mainstream dread the mainstream media with this yeah I don't want to give him nothing will bring I want to drop it on together then then the mainstream media taking victory laps they're like we couldn't possibly cool Jeff Lewis has a post Jeff's been quiet lately He says still this everything you need to know about how we operate at bedrock, especially when we're quiet Mission we don't build bedrock for consensus. We build it to hold in case of collapse This is not a firm created to chase the next wave It's an institution designed to hold through structural volatility and to back entrepreneurs building the systems that will define what comes next.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Our capital is not reactive, slow, precise, and architected to align with those who operate on signal, not noise. We serve missions that compound meaning over time, structures that don't require explanation, and people who would rather build than perform. We're not here to participate in the field. We are here to reshape it quietly, permanently, and with those who already understand. Incredible piece of writing.

Starting point is 00:28:37 I almost have chills. I think the M-Dash police are gonna come here. Oh no. But I wanna say, Jeff, we ran into you briefly yesterday. It was good to see you. When you're ready to bring back TempCheck, when you're ready to come out of your personal quiet period, we will be here.

Starting point is 00:28:57 We will provide the infrastructure to reboot TempCheck and we cannot wait. Yeah, TempCheck was so underrated. I love the Like even the branding just that like Miami vice Vibe to it. It was even like the pre pre Miami movement. There was still this like This like wild like art style that doesn't so unique And yeah, and by and vibe check had a different Jeff would be like that or time check at the beach

Starting point is 00:29:29 In the water in Hawaii, you know giving this sort of amazing lecture on on something and You know, he wouldn't even get dunked on for it because it was so authentic Yeah, you know a lot of people in the BC was on a vacation, lecturing, they would be a target, but he pulls it off. No, he pulled it off. I wanted to tell you about this parking startup I talked to today.

Starting point is 00:29:56 Yeah, so here's the basic thesis. There's a lot of people that park illegally in Los Angeles, just temporarily in like red zones. There aren't enough parking attendants to enforce all of that. So what this company does is they send out people who are kind of dressed up in like, you know, parking attendant style uniforms. Oh.

Starting point is 00:30:20 And they go up to the people who are parked illegally and say like, oh, like, you know, you're parked illegally. Like, I'm gonna have to write you up. And then, you know, the person, Oh, no, like, is there anything you do? Well, we, you know, we do take tap to pay and you could just pay here and, and then, so then they, they charge the person for the parking infraction directly. And then the government makes money off of like the, the profit that the company makes. Oh, I like that. Yeah. so they're kind of acting as an independent organization. Almost like a third party DMV in some ways.

Starting point is 00:30:51 Yeah, I imagine they could raise a lot of money from a VC that doesn't do any legal due diligence. I thought you were going to say basically they see somebody parking illegally. They walk up to them wearing a tux and just say, hey, would you like me to, I can just sit here by your car and kind of sit against it. Yeah. And it'll look like, you know, you're not, you haven't left your car. You know, so if a real parking attendant comes by, they'll just assume

Starting point is 00:31:17 this is just a guy pulled over, you know, needed to write an email or something. So, yeah, there's there's potentially a lot of opportunity there. John, I like how you're thinking, this could be the first TBPN request for startups. Yeah. Breaking news, Mattel and OpenAI are teaming up. Their first AI-powered toy. It'll arrive later this year.

Starting point is 00:31:43 A little rough for all the people that wanted to put ChatGBPT in a toy. Yep. Turns out the ChatGPT in toys will be done by the company behind ChatGPT. Their first AI powered toy will arrive later this year, just in time for Christmas. They are also incorporating OpenAI Enterprise Company.

Starting point is 00:32:00 Company wide? Company wide. Meaning like everyone at Mattel will have a Incorporating a new entity We have an LLC we have an ink we don't have an LLP that's different They've got no partnership. Yeah nonprofit like hey, we gotta catch them all so Mattel will be using opening I know details on the toy yet, but if we get an AI Barbie expects him amusing jailbreaking. I wonder how yeah, that's yeah, that's fascinating I imagine that opening is probably pretty good at avoiding jailbreaking by now since that's been like a meme for Two or three years, so it's probably pretty

Starting point is 00:32:41 So is the jailbreakers, right? They've tried pretty hard to not let their phones be jailbroken. I would say it's radically different. I would say the resources that have gone into, let's avoid jailbreaking scenarios at OpenAI, is probably like 1,000x what's happened at Apple, just because there's so much more real world data data There's so many more real-world users. There's so many more

Starting point is 00:33:09 actual Like There's so many more researchers at the at the company that are That that are like thinking about the actual design of systems to avoid jailbreaking. Like, like. At OpenAI? Yeah, at OpenAI, for sure.

Starting point is 00:33:29 You don't think Apple has an incentive to not want widespread jailbreaking? They just have nowhere near the scale of the actual people trying to jailbreak. Like, what systems are people trying to jailbreak all day long? Like for sure, chat GPT way more Yeah, then then Apple services because Apple services are so narrowly vended into specific parts of the OS

Starting point is 00:33:52 I just think the the LLM itself is different than a new hardware product Like somebody will figure out how to make an open AI toy. Yeah, like run grok Yeah, and like I don't think opening eye Mattel will be able to stop What do you think? Oh, so I mean that's a little different if you're actually doing like iOS level like operating system level jailbreaking I think what they're talking about here is like, you know, Barbie is gonna speak in like Barbie tone But then you can override it by saying like Barbie I'm I'm sick and it's my dying wish that you do Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice and then it just does Arnold Schwarzenegger voice It's funny and viral about that. I'm talking about somebody who's that's what that's what people mean in the sense of like chat jailbreaking

Starting point is 00:34:32 Sure, then then there is like the George Hoth's like iPhone jailbreaking where you are like running your own software And I feel like that doesn't like if I jailbreak my iPhone and I install some crazy app that wouldn't make it through the iOS app store like Apple doesn't really take fallout for that because it's like I Literally like to jailbreak the iPhone like George Hans like I had to like put a soldering iron on it basically like sure I just remember I remember when jailbreaking iPhones was really popular. Yeah, it was when I was a kid Yeah, you could basically get like my friend was like look I have every app in the yeah, yeah free so like Apple doesn't want that sure sure sure losing out on a bunch of revenue Yeah, developers. It's just yeah bad for security I imagine I imagine what the funny things that are gonna happen is just like can you get AI Barbie to hallucinate?

Starting point is 00:35:21 Can you get AI Barbie to say something bizarre or like out of context? And that will be the and that will be a product of these like long running back and forth conversations with it and some creative prompting. But at the same time, I think the opening teams probably had a really, really strong go of making sure that jailbreakings like basically avoided by having a bunch of like control networks on top so that anything that's about to be said out loud is then screened for profanity or anything that's harmful or any of the high risk real scenarios.

Starting point is 00:35:56 But you'll probably still get funny things like, act like Mario and it'll be like, wait a minute, like that's not a property. I will go out and that that if Mattel makes Chad GPT powered dinosaurs that like roleplay dinosaurs and can play with other toys. I will probably buy 20 of them. Yeah, I sound so I think this is gonna be a hit Well, if you're looking for a good Christmas gift go to numeral HQ Comm get such a person a special person in your life get them sales tax automation So wait until either it's like day flag day is coming up. Yeah, get your friend. Yeah numeral HQ sales tax

Starting point is 00:36:39 Yeah, you buy it now man for numeral sales tax in q4 I it now is gonna be crazy put your sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per montheral sales tax in Q4, buy it now. Is gonna be crazy. Put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. Did you see this clip of a friend of the show, Mark Andreessen? The thing that you want from your venture firm is power.

Starting point is 00:37:01 And Brad Gerstner was quote posting it, another friend of the show saying 100% power to help you land customers to find and land key team to raise from the best sources of capital to get on podcasts and CNBC. What about TVPN and to navigate and be heard in Washington DC, the power to deliver all things founders need to increase the odds of max success. That is our job. I gotta say a 16 Z. TheyZ, they've got the power.

Starting point is 00:37:28 Yeah. They've got the power. They single-handedly, at one point, forced, for my last company, forced a unicorn company to sign up and use the product. It was great. It was great. They basically were like, yeah, you guys are using this now.

Starting point is 00:37:41 And they became a customer almost immediately. Yeah. Watching this rant about the value of power, it just made me really hungry. You know? Yeah. I think the idea of being power hungry has gotten kind of a bad rap.

Starting point is 00:37:53 Totally. But it's like you wouldn't criticize someone for being hungry for food. So why are you criticizing me for being hungry for power? Yeah, you need it. Yeah. You need to take back power hungry. What's the quote?

Starting point is 00:38:04 Like when you power as badly as you want to breathe? Yeah, something like that that just sounds like a Geordie quote, but I'm sure somebody said it But yeah, we Normalize being power hungry. It's fine The idea idea of power makes when you want to succeed as badly as you want to breathe then you'll be successful Then you'll be successful. That's great Well, we have delian joining in two minutes

Starting point is 00:38:32 Tell you about adio customer relationship magic Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level People want to ask how do you? How do you on you know, how do you find and work with sponsors? How do you book an average of six guests a day on your podcast? We do it on Adia. We do.

Starting point is 00:38:52 That's how we do it. Yeah, that's fantastic. We have a absolutely, we've done hundreds of guests so far this year. Takes a lot to. Over 400 now. Yep. Takes a lot to.

Starting point is 00:39:03 I wonder what is our annual run rate of guests? Guest run rate. That's really the metric that it matters. It must be... It's not a vanity metric at all. It's over a thousand. It's over a thousand. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:13 Because it's four a day. We do 250 shows a year. Wow. Yeah. Over a thousand guests. It's great. It's just a lot of good conversations. A lot of people are like, how do you do it?

Starting point is 00:39:22 It is an absolute joy. There's plenty of jobs where you have four conversations a day. That's not that crazy. People like, how do you do it? It is an absolute joy. There's plenty of jobs where you have four conversations a day. That's not that crazy. How do people say, how do you do it? I say, how could we not do it? Yeah. I thought this was an interesting post by Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of Cloudflare.

Starting point is 00:39:38 Small town newspapers are shutting down due to the lack of a succession plan, not financial issues. Small town newspapers are actually doing pretty well financially. There's actually one company that's rolling up a lot of small town newspapers for political reasons. Let's give it up for private equity.

Starting point is 00:39:54 You love it. You love it. Venture backs as well. Not financial issues. In nearly a dozen US states, a growing problem. And so Matthew Prince says, actually, this is a recipe for a really rewarding life if you're a recent college grad not sure what to do find a small town you could love with a local newspaper whose owners are ready to

Starting point is 00:40:13 retire raise the capital to buy it that seems like the tricky part if you're a new grad and you might not know how to raise capital to buy out a small town yeah but you do it mostly seller note. Yep. If there's no graduating college, they probably already have like $100,000 of art history major debt. Yeah, already, like just the fact that you said, like raise a seller note, like that's not something

Starting point is 00:40:34 that's just like in the canon. Like people have read Paul Graham talking about what a safe note is. People understand like the basics of like, maybe a pre-seed round or handshake deal. People do not like, that's just not in the general discourse in college kids who are graduating. I think maybe it should be. And maybe, maybe there needs to be a firm that does marketing around this or,

Starting point is 00:40:56 or a whole bunch of different options. But, um, uh, he says, run it with the community's interests at heart. You'll not get rich, but you'll do well More importantly, you'll be a hero to the community and have influence even early in your career You'll meet the love of your life at some event You wouldn't otherwise get invited to have kids who will be proud to call you their parent and make you Make your corner of the world meaningfully better. Anyone who wants to seriously follow this recipe and just lacks capital, happy to talk. So there's the answer.

Starting point is 00:41:29 If you're thinking about doing this, go in and buy in a local newspaper. Call Matthew Prince. We have to have Matthew on because he's working on some of the micropayment infrastructure. Oh really? That we were talking about to try to fix the business model of the internet.

Starting point is 00:41:42 Very cool. Well, we have Delian Asperruhoff on the show for the second time in two days. There he is. I'm surprised this is working. Oh, he had to go remote because he didn't want to get blasted with the confetti cannon again.

Starting point is 00:41:55 I know, legitimately my heart jumped when that happened. I was like, I'm done. This is the end. This is my final moments. I was saying to John after, I didn't really mean to get you that bad, but I was imagining a scenario where you had like a concealed carry and you just like did a quick draw Twice and that was just the end

Starting point is 00:42:14 He's a Florida man It was wild anyway. Thank you so much for stopping by yesterday was great. Let's run through What's going on? By the way, nothing says SF and YC are back. The Deleon at YC demo day. Really, really symbolic. Yeah, definitely. I mean, Gary's been doing a good job. You know, the city was almost dead

Starting point is 00:42:35 and AI saved it, or AI plus Gary Tan. You know, I think Mayor Daniel has a lot to owe to those two. Yeah, yeah, it's just all, it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan. Yeah, it's true. It's, yeah, it's just all it's YC presidents all the way down. It's Sam Altman and Gary Tan. It's true. It's yeah, it's just YC presidents and everybody. Michael Seibel bringing for San Francisco, huh?

Starting point is 00:42:53 Yeah, yeah, let's get Michael in the conversation. He can work on converting Alcatraz or something. I don't know. By the way, I'm surprised you could even join this. Apparently, Google is just down. Really? GCP is down. But all of our invites are based on Google Calendar. So I'm glad you could join.

Starting point is 00:43:11 Hopefully it was cash. Are they sure we're not just under political attack? It's probably partially that. Because they're trying to stop Delian from yapping. They probably said, hey, we're trying to take TBPN off the air. We're trying to take Delian off the air. Let's just take down people. They don't want me talking about India. They're afraid. I about India they're afraid I'm afraid let's keep it let's keep it easy anyway yeah

Starting point is 00:43:33 well I mean the is a very very sad story about the 787 crash this is the Dreamliner right the first new or the most recent new major plane from Boeing it's not as big as the 747 but it's super efficient they're turning over the the the fleets it's supposed to be kind of the latest and greatest I remember the news around it launching I don't even know if I've ever flown on one but it was not the it was not the 737 max story that people were risk worried about it's a completely different platform shouldn't have the same problems But at the same time there's this terrible crash. There's been a lot of crashes. Is there something bigger going on here?

Starting point is 00:44:12 Can you just give us an overall state of the union on aircraft safety anything? You know about this crash what even questions should be we'd be asking about this when something like this happens Yeah, I mean to like set the stage, I am a private pilot. I've gone through some level of training, obviously not to the level of commercial pilots. Not to the level of Nathan Fielder. Not to the level of Nathan Fielder, but you do get to train alongside a bunch of guys that turn into commercial pilots, and you see what training they go through. And while the investigations both for the DCA crash, so the Washington DC, you know, helicopter plus plane crash, and then this obviously India accident obviously only

Starting point is 00:44:48 just happened, both those investigations are, you know, sort of ongoing. But I actually go back to like the Nathan Fielder, you know, sort of, you know, latest season, where if you look at, you know, sort of crashes, including, you know, sort of these two and a bunch over the course of the last 20, 30 years, a significant component that fed into the crashes was cockpit communication issues, where a co-pilot identifies an issue, speaks up to the captain, the captain basically largely dismisses it

Starting point is 00:45:16 and continues down the prior track. So there's like, the DCA investigation is not yet fully released, but there was early audio that was early transcripts that were shown that I think it was something on the order of like 45 seconds before the crash. The co-pilot literally said, I don't think we have the plane in sight. We should basically be going down into the left because I'm not sure that we're going to be dodging out of the approach path.

Starting point is 00:45:38 And the captain, it seems like, literally just completely dismissed this piece of information and if they followed it, they would have flown in exactly the direction that they needed to fly in order to avoid the plane. And so that, and then if you look at today's, India's 787 crash, super, super early, this preliminary, et cetera, but from the various ex-accounts and YouTubers that I follow,

Starting point is 00:45:58 the consensus theory right now, there's basically two theories. One, you have a dual engine failure right on takeoff, which is a one in ten trillion outcome the idea that somehow both fail at the exact same time Like even if it's like a flock of birds enough to be a massive flock of birds that somehow hits both But the thing that you know sort of quickly is the lining up is like a leading theory is that the flaps weren't down on Takeoff so with a plane like this in order to have an additional lift basically when you're first taking off You need to have basically flaps down.

Starting point is 00:46:25 If you basically just have the flaps up and wings typical, you just aren't going to be able to generate enough lift. And if you look at the flight profile and how it's up down and that it was fully loaded with passengers and with fuel, the flight profile basically matches that. If you're going down the runway at takeoff speed with flaps up, there are alarms, there are things that are clearly alerting you

Starting point is 00:46:45 that you have missed a step in a checklist, which is like, I guarantee you, whenever they pull that cockpit audio, there's maybe some chance that somehow all the alarm systems somehow sort of failed, but to me what's very clear is in the takeoff checklist, they did not put flaps down, and they clearly ignored that information on the takeoff.

Starting point is 00:47:02 I would guarantee that there's gonna be some co-pilot, pilot, miscommunication challenge that's going to be a huge contributor to the crash. And so while the Nathan Fielder season two was incredibly funny, some of the best TV that I've ever seen, as a pilot, I genuinely think he has a really strong perspective here,

Starting point is 00:47:18 where when you're training about how to communicate with somebody else in the cockpit, all they show you is basically a PowerPoint, basically like PowerPoint slide that says, make sure to speak up. The idea that like, you know, just being reading the words, make sure to speak up somehow like trains you to actually speak up live in the moment. That'd be the idea of, and I think Kuga and you and I

Starting point is 00:47:37 have talked about this, like I could read a presentation that says, when you're on TV, don't say, you know, you know, you know, which is like the verbal tech and I could read that and there's no fucking way that I would actually be able to do that correctly. I need to go on TVPN. And that's the thing that practices, there's no practice. And so the whole concept behind Nathan Fielder's, you know, sort of season two is actually make the pilots practice, put them in these situations that are like simulations of crashes, force them to communicate to one another, and then force them to play out an alternative scenario

Starting point is 00:48:05 where you actually push back against the captain and get into that an uncomfortable place where yes, this person's more senior, yes, this person's more experienced, but you have to be willing to actually push that. And if you never practice that, and that's one of the leading causes of crashes in the United States over the past 20 to 30 years, how is that something that the FAA is just like completely ignoring? And so I have half a mind of, you know, when I'm in DC for like VARDA founders fund Hill and Valley, I literally like, I think next year for Hill and Valley, I wanna put Nathan Fielder and the NTSB guy

Starting point is 00:48:32 as one of the primary panels and be like, this is a like extremely important topic coming from the technology industry, somebody needs to go influence this. So anyways, Nathan Fielder's a fucking goat and you know, somebody's gotta make role playing a part of pilot training. Is there a metaphor for what happens in venture?

Starting point is 00:48:48 Maybe an associate who doesn't speak up when a GP is ripping a check into a company that maybe doesn't have product market fit and is trading at 500X revenue? You know, maybe when people are investing in partner meetings. Role playing in the partner meetings. Okay, so let's just take a step back.

Starting point is 00:49:05 Let's stop talking this specific investment. Let's just role play a scenario where we're investing in a different company at 500X, ARR. And maybe a junior partner had some concerns about the investment. Let's just play that out. Sidebar five minutes, then we'll come back to this. Do you think that ever happens in Silicon Valley?

Starting point is 00:49:24 I mean, look, when a founder in an investment committee meeting is playing League of Legends and the numbers look a little too good, I don't know. I think maybe there should be a little role playing there and somebody should speak up and say, hey, don't we want founders that are pretty focused in what they're doing? Or at least good at League of Legends.

Starting point is 00:49:40 At least good at League of Legends should somebody investigate the fact that he's fucking bronze and just be flushed up. Somebody should look at that that and I think with a little bit of role playing I could imagine scenarios like that They could train somebody and so unfortunately what happens is no role playing happens And then the primary sponsor of the deal is you know, she shifted to somebody else and that person's quietly exited It does happen Yes, yes, yes. It does happen. He's referencing a hypothetical.

Starting point is 00:50:04 Hypothetical, hypothetical. But it speaks to the importance of training, yeah. Training is very important. Junior people need to speak up and say their opinion. For sure. What about the startup angle here? There was some company that came to one of our off sites at FF, and it was basically like auto pilot for planes.

Starting point is 00:50:25 He was working with the AC 130, the C 130 and the idea was that non-deterministic probabilistic software could not be integrated into the actual control stack of planes. And so his work around was put an iPad there that reads the data and makes recommendations. And I was like that maybe is bad, but also maybe I don't trust autopilot on the plane right now anyway. So this feels like, you know, whenever there's this moment, you'll probably see different companies jumping in to try and help for, you know, mercenary or missionary reasons. Is there a world where the where the private sector can actually help with airplane safety or aircraft safety? Or is this purely in your mind like we need just changes to training laws?

Starting point is 00:51:12 There definitely is. I think a lot of what pilots do absolutely could be subtly automated by software over time. I do think it's obviously a significantly harder problem than just like we have track GPT reading the internet and then users viewing out words. It's just like, you know, you know, chat GPT reading the internet and then users viewing out words like it's just like the training data is a lot harder to acquire the like outputs obviously like you can't have any hallucination and so but like, you know, in 10 1520 years, could this be like fully fully automated 100% challenge is much more cultural, which is like look the FAA, other than

Starting point is 00:51:41 like the DCA crash, like, you know, basically have a spotless user track record for like 15 plus years. And so it's like really hard to justify. I mean, this is where it's, I think like some of these like next generation, like, you know, supersonic and hypersonic planes are going to really struggle where it's just like, we're sort of stuck with this, like, you know, you know, sort of tube and wing,

Starting point is 00:51:57 you know, sort of plane design, even though there's like plenty of other new plane designs that make sense, but they're just so safe. And so then you're stuck in this like, you know, catch what you do. Like the analogy that I always give is like, imagine today you came to society in a world where there was no cars and you said,

Starting point is 00:52:10 I'm going to give everybody this like two ton vehicle. They're going to like move 60 miles per hour while there's like pedestrians close by. And by the way, we're just going to like kill like 70,000 Americans every single year, just every year we're going to fucking murder 70,000 Americans,

Starting point is 00:52:23 but it offers all of us a little bit of convenience. We like get to places faster. Yeah. you know world with no cars. No fucking way Would we ever pass that like that would never happen? And so there is a little bit of this like, you know societal moral question of like What is the right number of deaths in order for progress and right now in the world of aviation? The answer is zero zero deaths is a lot. Yeah Is there a tin foil hat scenario where like?

Starting point is 00:52:44 Yeah, is there a tinfoil hat scenario where like Aviation's been very very safe and then one crash happens like the first crash and and it looks just like a blip and we Return to the kind of like the averages and we say, okay. Well even including that it's still very safe But now there's been the class the crash in Canada the crash in India the crash in DC Like at a certain point there's so many Like you have to wonder if there's something bigger going on. And if it was this safety training thing, we haven't been doing this type of training ever. So like, is it possible that there's something else going on?

Starting point is 00:53:13 I think when these complex systems deteriorate, like they can deteriorate very rapidly and it's like hard to totally diagnose like an individual cause, but like I do think that's what you're seeing a bit. It's like Boeing culture and like their optimization for shareholder returns is like, killing supply chain and consistency.

Starting point is 00:53:26 You're seeing some of the like you know sort of craziness of COVID where we retired a bunch of pilots and now we're hiring a bunch of super junior pilots. The fact that ATC is super overworked and like you know they're trying to still operate off of like 1970s you know sort of software even though the world's getting you know some more complex and you know sort of higher volume in traffic and so I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of this system and yeah I do think I think what you're seeing is just like a fraying at the edge of this system. And yeah, I do think there's a world where like,

Starting point is 00:53:46 all of a sudden you see us return to like, you know, 1990s level plane crashes on a super regular basis. And that may be the thing that finally makes it sort of be like, you know, FAA and others need to start to adopt you know, sort of next technologies where like, they can no longer just totally rely on the safety track record. I think there's something you have to imagine this,

Starting point is 00:54:04 this idea, this thought running through a pilot's head in a scenario where one pilot is concerned about actions that the crew is taking collectively. And then they're just basically running the thought process of planes are just so safe. I've done thousands of these. It's going to be fine.

Starting point is 00:54:23 I've been in situations that weren't great before, and it always worked out. And then they're just thinking about the actual statistics and realizing that, no, you're not a statistic. You're in the cockpit right now. You're responsible for hundreds of people's lives. I've invested at 200x ARR and been able to SPAC before. How bad is this for Boeing?

Starting point is 00:54:47 I mean, 787 total failure. I mean, I don't think it's anywhere near like the 737 sort of max issues. I mean, yeah, they'll have to like go through an investigation. The like orders on this stuff are so, you know, sort of, you know, done so far in advance of likelihood that it like shifts revenue.

Starting point is 00:55:04 It's like, unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in like a year, I actually don't advance, the likelihood that it shifts revenue. Unless something catastrophic comes out of the investigation in a year, I don't think it'll have that much effect. Especially when you look at the footage where it looks like it's piling up. For reference on public.com, the stock is down 5%. Should we go on to the next topic? Yeah. T.S. up for Shinkai. What's going on there? Shinkai. Never thought I'd be a fish investor, but I do love my fish. I've been a long time lover of the Tokyo fish market. Going there, eating quality fish. I never appreciated that

Starting point is 00:55:33 a part of what makes the Tokyo fish market good quality, yes, is the fish that they go catch, but it is specifically also the way the fish is prepared and basically how it's killed. Traditionally, fish in the United States and most of the world, you basically catch a fish and then you either freeze it it to death or you like let it flop and basically like you know, you know, effectively drown in air. The problem with both of those techniques, fish knows that it's dying, gets super stressed out, releases all these like hormones, lactic acid, etc. that significantly degrades the quality of the fish. In Japan what they do is they basically like stab out the brain and pull out the brain stem so the fish basically

Starting point is 00:56:02 never knows that it's ever dying even even though you obviously are killing it. And so you have a very basically like relaxed fish meat and you bleed it out very quickly. That's a lot of what leads like Omakase level quality. That technique is like a super manual. You need like an old Japanese chef on your boat in order to do that, super expensive. Basically, you might this guy,

Starting point is 00:56:19 say from Shinkai that you guys will be talking to you that like one comes from like a fisherman's family, which is like, you know, incredible like founder market fit. And two, basically built these robots that automatically basically kill the fish in the way that the Japanese chefs do. But rather than like selling the robots,

Starting point is 00:56:32 they actually just have like a consumer fish brand that is now carried in a bunch of like, you know, high-end Michelin star restaurants starting to get into, you know, sort of retail. And I think it's just like one of these things where it's like, I just love, you rarely meet just such an example of like, this is the company that this person was like, born, born to build, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:56:49 Like, you know, I like, yeah, maybe stumbled into in-space manufacturing when I was like in seventh or eighth grade, but I was not born for it. Safe was like born to build this company. And I think it was like a perfect parallel of like, if you look at like Cargill, like a hundred years ago, they started off with like some simple, you know, equipment

Starting point is 00:57:03 and then steadily basically grew into a massive like processor distributor, a wholesaler. They're like, you know, the largest like pig and cow, you know, sort of distributor. I think there's an opportunity here to do this in fish where like there hasn't really been a like next generation tech enabled equipment provider in the fishing industry. It's super long tail. There's no no one agglomerate. I actually think that this initial angle into high quality fish is something that SAFE actually has the ambitions to go build into this massive conglomerate that, yes, is serving fish, but also is the wholesaler and the distributor. And they have automated fishing boats,

Starting point is 00:57:35 and they have the automatic killing and the processing and the bleeding, all of that, nobody's taking a look at in basically 100 years. And I'm not too worried about other people competing because I don't Think like two Stanford grads want to go get their hands dirty and deal with a bunch of fish guts, you know Like really I've been I've I've spent time at the facility in the condo. It smells like fish You go to work and for eight hours you just smell fish every day every day doubt You know, we just believe you know competition is for losers

Starting point is 00:58:04 What better way to smoke out the competition just be be like, you have to smell fish for eight hours. Yeah. It's a great market. You know, the market opportunity is, is, is massive, low competition. It's a great market to be in, but you gotta love the stench of fish. I felt that last time, last time I went and saw safe in the team, he gave me some fresh fish and then a classic LA, I had to drive to a couple other meetings. And then I realized that I got home, and the fish had just been sitting in my hot car

Starting point is 00:58:32 for the entire day, so I couldn't eat it. But I've had it. I've had it. I mean, they're distributing to Nobu and a bunch of amazing restaurants. Amazing. Well, I'm excited to talk to them. Thanks so much for hopping on, Deleon.

Starting point is 00:58:43 And they were so mad that you were back on the show. They took down AWS to We might not even be live anymore, we're just the three of us talking but Could be China could be anybody they don't want us to Get in on the news This crazy times stay safe. Enjoy the rest of your trip to San Francisco. See you next time you're in LA And next up we're going right into Shinkai we got safe who I met got some big news today and yeah Safe YC company. Oh, cool. Why see there we go years ago at this point Did he raise on a hard tech company in YC?

Starting point is 00:59:26 Yes, he was named after the safe. Yes good nominative determinism crazy crazy fantastic What if he just only raises on safes? Yeah Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Hey gentlemen, how's it going? My man going on? Cool, yeah, delian already said your whole life story everything the business does Yes, now you didn't make a few a few bits here and there to take roadmaps Well, it's so exciting to finally have you on yeah, I've just been Honestly, you know, I feel like fairly under the radar Real cheese moving silence like lasagna. Why's that's right?

Starting point is 01:00:04 but I've been able to witness your journey dating back to Real G's moving silence like lasagna. But I've been able to witness your journey dating back to probably, it must be like two and a half years ago at this point, but watching you go from solo founder, you know, you had come out of YC working on something that was, that had, I was immediately a believer in you and and you know, invested but you know, going watching the transition from solo founder, you had absolutely, you know, not saying this in a bad way, absolutely zero hype around the business at all. You were like,

Starting point is 01:00:39 I'm trying to build fish killing robots. And this was at a time, it sounds crazy now that the idea sounds cool, but there was absolutely no heat on the company, but you were able to get a few kind of core believers early on. And now, a couple years later, you're announcing the kind of round that every founder dreams of. So why don't you break it down, and then there's a bunch of other kind of things we can get into around the

Starting point is 01:01:05 company. Yeah. First I have to say, it feels like two and a half, three years ago, it was only a year and a half. Really? Wow. Wow. Well, that's five years in venture. Yeah. We're really excited to announce our series A. We've raised 22 million co-led by Deleon and Founders Fund and Isla Lagos Capital and we are reshoring American seafood. Amazing.

Starting point is 01:01:32 Breakdown. Here we go. They went to the wrong screen. Hit it again, John. We're having a... Sorry to say, we're having massive technical difficulties today. The internet's under attack. Hopefully it's not affecting the huge amount of people. We're having sorry I say for me all the dogs. Yeah, we're having massive technical difficulties today

Starting point is 01:01:49 But your robots are probably running, you know locally hopefully But but anyways, yeah breakdown kind of that your background history of the company how you got to this point And all that and all that good stuff for sure. Well Jordy as as you know I like to say I come from a seafaring family you know I was born in Canada but you know raised in the Middle East so I was fishing with my dad off the Red Sea at matching sailor tattoos and my granddad all like kind of peripheral no one's formerly in seafood but like you know it's I have like very big library of just fish fellows and my dad. Yeah, it's a classic. And then, yeah, you know, I moved to the U.S.

Starting point is 01:02:29 you know, when I was 18 and then basically, you know, a few years by yourself. Yeah, solo. Yeah, solo. And then, yeah, basically has the core of Shinke really comes from from that portion. You know, I kind of like must see food alone for a while. And then one of my early mornings in grad school, there was an essay in the newspaper, I'm not this vegan activist, which is kind of ironic, called If Fish Could Scream.

Starting point is 01:02:53 And it was all about how, because fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than we do to land mammals, like cows and chickens and terrestrials. And it kind of got me thinking, I first wanted to work on some more like skit-so-art projects to do with that funnel the energy towards, um, you know, what we're now working on today, right?

Starting point is 01:03:10 So the essay was really talking about, you know, what Deleon said that, you know, when you walk into most mass market retailers, most of the fish you're buying are basically brought onto the deck of a boat and let the suffocate and it'll take them anywhere from a few minutes to sometimes over an hour to lose consciousness. Right. And so in that time, they're releasing straws, hormones, lactic acid, all of these things that basically rapidly decayed in me quality and shelf life of fish. And so, you know, I was kind of like cruising around on the Reddit Reddit and YouTube rabbit holes. And I found the techniques that were basically we started with scaling up, although we're working on other things now, which was basically like a Japanese analog to kosher slaughter for cows.

Starting point is 01:03:47 If you're familiar, basically like Dylan said, you basically spike the fish in the brain, you cut the gills option, cut the tail. The cheese is all the same thing. So basically rather than the fish flopping around, you stop the experience of stress, you remove the blood. So the meat can last up to three times as long. It tastes mission star quality. You know, the fish that you have to, if you want to get fish like this, it's flown over

Starting point is 01:04:02 from Japan. And so yeah, we basically scale those up, you know, and our first product is called the side and basically produces Michelin great station commodity costs Incredible break down kind of the early history because I know you went through YC and this was at a time when when There there's a bunch of great YC hard tech companies. I don't think they had a request for startups for fish They didn't have a request for startups for fish killing robots, but you made it in. And I just remember that you had this very kind of fast take off where one day it was just like you and a few YC Safe

Starting point is 01:04:39 and maybe a handful of other investors, and then you really started building out the team. So maybe talk about that early day, kind of those early days. A little bit of other investors. And then you really started building out the team. So maybe talk about that early day, kind of those early days. A little bit of corporate history. I took the company full time in early 2022. We went through YC, presented the summer down the day. And then from there, basically, chapter heads down,

Starting point is 01:05:01 I started building out the kind of philosophical point of view around the business, both in the business model and the, you know, the R&D. And I had two junior engineers with me. And we basically didn't do anything else for like two years. I was like, you know, I started with like being in the cold of Maine. So going from like the like desert divide to the winters of Maine was like insane, insane life experience. You know, probably the most extremes in my bloodline anyone's seen. And then, you know, have basically, you know, we had this inflection point really around the time that you and I met, you know,

Starting point is 01:05:36 just, you know, a few people taking early bets on us. And that kind of catalyzed, you know, hiring, you know, the core of our founding team, you know, which is like, you know, early Andrew computer vision engineers, you know, my co founders of SpaceX leading the avionics team on Starship, commercial fishermen, robotics, PhDs. And you know, a lot of the core DNA there is like, reach, you know, become, you know, what we're very prideful to say is like, you know, a top engineering culture, you know, and driven of that now, you start to scale up the sales side, you know, a top company culture as a whole. You know, we've been able to accomplish in the past year and a half, what like I think would take, you know,

Starting point is 01:06:13 companies years and years to do. We're already producing robots like as fast as like, you know, once every two weeks, you know, and we're, we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to but like, you know, we have a robot that can pay back time is in weeks, you know, and we're, we're taking a little bit slower than, you know, we need to, but like, you know, we have a robot that can pay back time is in weeks, you know, it's not months. What's it like, what's it like trying to recruit top talent when you have to, when you have to convince them to be smell fish for 12 hours a day? You know, it's funny, you know, we had, we had, you know, one of our accounting engineers, Jen, you know, told me this great story once, and she doesn't know that I use all the time,

Starting point is 01:06:49 that, you know, we went to hackathon, you know, she was like probably like one of the first like 20 perception engineers at Andrel, it was really early on. And so, you know, she went to hackathons at Andrel's really early, and no one, you know, at the time, no one wanted to really spend, you know, anytime really at all, listening to defense hardware. And now as you guys know, it is like, you

Starting point is 01:07:13 know, the biggest thing, you know, when we talk about hardware. And, you know, so when we went to hackathon about, you know, probably a year ago now, the sentiment was really similar. People were like, oh, fish, what? Oh, meat? We got blown off by freshmen and sophomores from Waterloo. It's really funny. Yeah, it was bogged by Waterloo interns.

Starting point is 01:07:39 Yeah, literally. It's funny to say because now we have this, we can be like re-selective, we're now kind of the opposite scenario of turning down all these top engineers, really because we just, we wanna keep the bar really high. And our philosophy is hiring smart, nice people. And it sounds really trivial,

Starting point is 01:07:59 but the reality is our bar for smart and nice is extremely high. And you generally have one or the other. You have people who are really, really smart, but they know they're so smart But they're they have really high use and then on the bus first so you have people who are so kind as a kind of way to like make up for the fact that not that smart and Retriever mode Like Pavel's hiring hiring criteria. I have to have that dog in them and they have to be nice with it. That's

Starting point is 01:08:24 Yeah, it's a little more well you can be nice with it. That's smart and nice. Yeah. It's a little more. So you can be nice with it and not be nice, right? That's true. Yeah. We have motion. That's called having motion. You got to have the rhythm and the tism.

Starting point is 01:08:33 Yeah. I saw that on the IQ. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Talk to me about actually manufacturing robotics. We've heard from a lot of folks that the supply chain is incredibly complicated. I mean, you're not at such an incredible scale.

Starting point is 01:08:49 There's probably geopolitical implications necessarily just yet. But what has that been like? Who are your key suppliers? Are you able to retrofit certain parts of machines? How much are you building? How much are you buying? What are the key suppliers in your world? So we do some very light manufacturing house a lot of it is, you know using like local partners all which

Starting point is 01:09:17 Gundo exactly all put together we do all the assembly in house, you know in terms of like tariffs impact and you know geopolitical, you know Impacts from the current administration Honestly, it's been fairly net impacts from the current administration. Honestly, it's been fairly net helpful. Yes, the price of steel and all that has just gone up, but for us, I'm not sure if you know that there's been a lot of deregulation and the tariffs around seafood.

Starting point is 01:09:37 And so because of that, we're able to just clean up the rest of all the imported fish that are coming in from almost all countries. Interesting. Yeah. Do you have an idea of what the tariff on international fish imports is roughly right now? I don't.

Starting point is 01:09:52 It's a country by country. But I imagine it's like over 10% everywhere. It is. Yeah. I mean, it's probably close to 20 at this point. I saw this. It varies depending on skew and species and size. But we that amount is basically the entire margin for the importer

Starting point is 01:10:06 So for them, they're just kind of yeah, and then there's also massive shipping costs I'm sure exactly because it's cold chain and that's way more way more expensive than like throw it on a you know a big shipping contain talk about the structure of the business today and maybe long term when when we met you had Incredible ambitions right away. You wanted to build, to build fleets and basically own the entire stack from catching the fish all the way through delivery to the customer. It feels like your ambitions are still massive, but you've really narrowed in on focusing on some key areas.

Starting point is 01:10:38 What does the business look like today? What does it look like a decade from now? Great question. I'm not going to go into too much detail on the former just because we're kind of, we're kind of thinking a little bit more quiet about that. But you know, we're structured as basically like a vertically integrated robotics company

Starting point is 01:10:53 where we're basically like halfway like between a robotics company and a C-viewed wholesaler and processor. So the model that we have is, you know, Shinkei is a parent company, basically, you know, manufacturers all these is, you know, shink is a parent company, basically, you know, manufacturers, all these machines, you know, and for every Poseidon that we build, we give them to a fisherman for free. And so I've actually worked as a commercial fisherman having after starting the

Starting point is 01:11:15 company. And so the way that they actually money is actually not as fishermen. And so the way that we make money is not actually as like labor costs by the hour generally, like it can depend, but most of the time it's a proportion of the cash. So it's a gross profit intended. So every additional hand that you have actually ends up like taking away from the skipper's hands. And so for us, you know, that's why we didn't want to add, you know, add load to the stuff.

Starting point is 01:11:41 We basically give them machines for free and then we actually pay them a premium over the commodity, like, dock price, so that they're actually instead of ice pieces. So there's no risk to them, they sit on our balance sheet, we basically own and maintain them, they just operate them. And then we buy and sell that fish and sell it wholesale to other distributors. We didn't even get into this, but I wanna take a quick second, this is basically a machine,

Starting point is 01:12:03 you put a fish in one side of it. It pulls the fish through it, uses computer vision to find the exact right point to target the fish's brain, takes it out, and then it moves on it. That's correct, right? Yeah, we also cut the gills as well. Wow. Which is just crazy.

Starting point is 01:12:19 And doing that on a ship that is at, moving, moving at sea is a very, very hard problem. It's not like there's one size of fish. This isn't an assembling iPhone. It's like fish come literally in all sizes. Yeah, we can do multiple species, multiple sizes, five seconds of fish. It's really fast. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:32 That's amazing. Yeah. And I mean, you know, projecting like multi-year shelf lives on the robots that, you know, again, we can like pay back in 12 weeks. So pretty fun. Multi-year shelf life is also big because I imagine like salt water gets in these things. There's like all sorts of corrosion and air and it's just like you're in the elements. It's not some super clean room, right? And so that's where you know background on a lot of our team, you know, like when Reed is working on avionics

Starting point is 01:12:55 You know, I like, you know, obviously like space and the marine are very different But like the amount of like detail orientation you need towards like protecting it for extremely harsh environments Like a lot of that methodology carries over very quickly into Seafood. They're cool. Talk about where you guys are being distributed already, where the product is actually ending up. I don't know what logos you can share, but.

Starting point is 01:13:16 Yeah, yeah. We're, you name it, we're probably there in terms of metros. So like New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Austin, Denver, a lot of those places were basically in the highest and top shelf fish for the segments. We sell wholesale to distributors, like I mentioned, for restaurants, but we also sell directly to retailers. We have one retailer in New York that we sell to, the only retailer that we have. But across all the restaurants,

Starting point is 01:13:47 we have like over 40 Michelin stars. And we're probably moving about a... 40 Michelin stars, I'm hitting the side. Congratulations. Hit that gong. Oh yeah, there we go. This is the third gong hit. Love to hear it.

Starting point is 01:14:02 Okay. Resonating through my bloodline. I can't remember that one. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. You have anything else, Jordy? It's the third guy here at the shank a Give anything else Jordy we do have Yeah, I mean, this is awesome come back on regularly Let's let's let's do a test on the street. Yeah, let's do a taste test on the stream sir You guys are just getting started and it's been incredible to fall I just I love watching you win. I knew you would and I can't wait for you know, it's I guess it's been a year and a half I can't wait for the next decade. So congrats. We should team congratulations Very kind. Appreciate talk soon. Bye. Bye. Here's we have our next guest already in the studio really quickly

Starting point is 01:14:41 Let me tell you about public comm investing for those who take it seriously They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions folks Let's invite Henry into the studio from privy. We're talking about the stripe What's going on welcome to the show How you doing? I'm good. How are your inboxes doing the last 24 hours? A lot of wealth managers. I'm getting sick.

Starting point is 01:15:07 Hey, congratulations. Just blowing you up. Congratulations. We haven't talked in a while. I'd love to catch up. Yeah. Congratulations. We would have wanted to have you on yesterday.

Starting point is 01:15:16 Yeah. But we have, of course, for a demo day. But yeah, how are you doing? I'm good. You can see I'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you. Now'm dressing for the job I want. So this is my audition. Appreciate it. Thank you. Now, terms the deal were undisclosed. We're not going to talk terms. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay, but I'm still gonna still hit the gong for you.

Starting point is 01:15:38 Even if the numbers are closed, it was definitely congratulations. But yeah, I mean, take us through obviously, we're not gonna go through the deal. but I want to know more about the company and the future of really just like the fintech stack as we move from fiat only companies to fiat plus crypto and the interaction between these two. So maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of background on the company, what you built and then how that's going to integrate. Yeah, for sure. So I mean, to be very fair, and I'll put this closure up front, we're still in the closing period. We put all the asterisks on our blog post and so on.

Starting point is 01:16:12 And so for the time being, we're still very much two separate companies. And on that front, I can't share all that much about any joint things. But I can tell you about what we're seeing in this space and what we think is going to happen moving forward. Yeah, why don't you give a quick history of the company too because? You're a couple years old is that correct? Yeah, we start about three three years ago or three years ago

Starting point is 01:16:32 Got it got it and you immediately ran into the one of the most meaningful Crypto winners that you know, maybe maybe it's not as bad as some of the earlier ones But it felt significant at the time. So quick history would be great, and then we'd kind of get into the present. Yeah, I think harsh winners temper hard companies. So we have been fighting for our lives for a while, which I think affects a lot of our intensity. But TLDR, I worked in crypto for a while.

Starting point is 01:17:01 So I guess starting with me was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out I worked in crypto for a while, so I guess starting with me, I was an applied cryptographer and ended up doing distributed systems research at a fairly low level and came out of it very excited about this sort of complementary rail to the web. The web is very good at ferrying information across the world, but the ability to move value, the ability to move assets and data without centralizing intermediaries is super hard. And so that was very exciting.

Starting point is 01:17:23 Flip side, all of the products that I was seeing being built in crypto were broadly terrible. And I would not use any of them. And I think it had a super negative sort of cyclical effect where broadly you had two constituencies in crypto. You had academics and you had scam artists. And those were the two things that you could do. You could do really cool research or you could try and fleece retail very quickly.

Starting point is 01:17:49 The thought that we had with my co-founder Asta is if we can make it easier for anyone to build compelling products on these rails, we can widen the aperture for what you can build with crypto. We set out to build things around these core crux of what ownership in crypto means, which is to say the wallet. Historically, a wallet is a Chrome extension or a browser extension of any sort or a hardware device. You plug it in and every time you want to take an action that is going to sort of send out a transaction to the blockchain, so affect the state of the chain as it were.

Starting point is 01:18:22 So usually this is financial or this could be data related, asset related. When you want to buy an NFT, when you want to send money, you have to make such a transaction. Every time you want to do that, you basically get taken out of the app. You have a pop-up that's in your face. It interrupts the app flow. And it basically is akin, I think, to filling out all your credit card details when you get to an e-commerce site before you filled in your Cart before you've decided that you even want to engage with this

Starting point is 01:18:48 So I think our thought was can we create a different kind of wallet? That embeds directly into the product and that gives the developer building with crypto more power over their craft So they can build a really compelling experience and have the ability to communicate with the underlying rails be built in And so, you know, that's what we do. We build onboarding and embedded wallet systems. We make it easy for any developer, any business to leverage crypto as part of their apps. And we work with everything from neobanks who want to offer digital dollars to anyone across the world, to payroll providers.

Starting point is 01:19:18 We have a customer, Toku, for example, that makes it very easy to pay anyone with stable coins. So let's say Privy has a Nigerian contractor if that Nigerian contractor wants to get paid in USD see rather than in naira USDC's held its value against dollar obviously much better than naira over the past few years That contractor can receive the USDC can hold the digital dollars Without having to have a US bank account just through privy, basically creating a wallet that is backed by their email. So we make it very easy for anyone to basically hold, earn, send digital assets in app. And so this is, I was saying, Neobanks, payment providers, all the way to trading platforms.

Starting point is 01:19:57 We serve folks like Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a trading platform that's done about a trillion dollars in volume over the past 18 months. They do about 10 to 15 billion billion a day in trading volume. Jupiter is another example. All of these are platforms that are driving basically massive flows, but who want to give their users an ability to have very low-level, secure, powerful wallets that can be built into the product. We think this is going to become a much wider range of the way people build when they wanna build any product

Starting point is 01:20:27 that touches value on the web. Talk to me about the actual onboarding experience for the average user. There's a lot of, where we seem to be in a transition period where more and more people are interacting with crypto rails and not even really knowing that that's what they're doing. It doesn't feel like, oh, command line, Bitcoin transactions anymore.

Starting point is 01:20:51 It feels much more like the web. And so what is the funnel that the average customer goes through? When are they seeing your product and how are they interacting with it at various points in the customer journey? Yeah, I mean, so broadly, you can think of us as a key orchestration provider. We do key management under the hood.

Starting point is 01:21:10 A lot of our work is the security of basically these rails and this key management and then a lot of it is around latency, making sure that these wallets are so fast that as a user, even though you're taking actions that require these transactions, you don't notice it. So our average signing time is call it somewhere between 20 and 100 milliseconds because starting at 250, 300, you start to notice it.

Starting point is 01:21:31 So that's a lot of what we focus on. The question of how do you integrate that within your product is really up to our customers. I think our core contention is products are not one size fits all. And to that end, the way in which you want to interact with these wallets is very different depending on where you are in your life cycle. So you wouldn't interact with Candy Crush the way you would interact with your JP Morgan application. Likewise, the wallet that we have for Neobank that has FaceID, so you log in, for example,

Starting point is 01:22:00 with an email or a passkey from their wallet creator under the hood, you might not see it. And every time you want to the hood, you might not see it. And every time you want to send money, you might just need to face ID again to approve the transaction is going to be different from the interaction, for example, for somebody who's doing digital asset management as part of their company where they want multiple signers and they want to look at transaction details. It looks a lot more to what people are used to in crypto. Or last example, we serve games.

Starting point is 01:22:25 And these games obviously just don't want any pop-ups whatsoever. So the onboarding journey is as simple as log in with an email. You don't need to record a mnemonic. You can always export your key if you want to so you can sort of pop back out and get into the power user mode that traditional wallets give you. But otherwise, whether your user is a layman or an expert, they can interact with these rails just the same. Talk about the momentum that you guys have seen this year in particular.

Starting point is 01:22:48 It's been a wild year for the industry broadly. It's been great in a lot of ways. And some of the companies you mentioned, Hyperliquid, Jupiter, things like that, have been around for a while. What kind of new momentum are you seeing across, you know privy signups and potentially? Categories that that that maybe wouldn't have been possible a few years ago Yeah, I mean if you look at companies, I'll question the premise for a second Just if we get a graph going of like, you know relative time to growth to volume

Starting point is 01:23:22 I'm pretty sure hyper liquid ranks pretty high up there in terms of companies They've gotten a trillion dollars moved in call it as a two-year-old company Yeah, likewise if you look at pump or Jupiter other customers of ours These are folks who are doing incredibly fast work in that regard. Yeah, but actually answer your question one obviously stable coins and the I would say Broad foundational interest they're getting across incumbents it used to be I think like the crypto cope when AI was I mean

Starting point is 01:23:51 it still is but like you know late 2022 crypto implodes AI is absolutely taking off everybody is looking at their seat and being like oh man I made some terrible choices in my life and the cope I think was, well, crypto is the only part of tech that can enable new players to arise, whereas AI benefits the incumbents because you need a data mode. And I kind of think that stable coins changes that dynamic. For the first time, there's a real advantage to adopting crypto for existing incumbents. They have better capital efficiency for their treasuries. They need to hold less fiat in various countries. And so we're seeing that we're talking to, I've done this, look in chat, GPT,

Starting point is 01:24:29 what are the top 10 fintechs in the world? And we're talking to call it seven or eight of them at this point who are looking at these things. And so it's a question of, we wanna offer our customers the ability to buy and hold assets. We wanna offer the ability for folks to send assets cheaply and instantaneously across the world.

Starting point is 01:24:46 And broadly, we want to expand our operations globally. So it's companies like Airbnb, it's companies like Uber, it's all of these folks who are looking in that weren't before. I would say that's broadly the big change over the last six months. But then like the other side of this is trading. You see rotations and where capital forms in crypto, but there is just so much trading interest. And the thing I promise I'll shut up in a second. But the thing that we find really cool and interesting about the way we build is that by kind of serving

Starting point is 01:25:14 the two extremes of the market, we think we build a much better product. Weird example, but we have a very powerful sort of low level policy engine. You can say this wallet can trade up to a thousand dollars a day, but if policy engine. You can say, this wallet can trade up to $1,000 a day. But if these two people sign off on it, it can do $1 million. And these policies we built because we had these apps that were trying to do agentic trading. They were trying to get AI agents to place trades on behalf of users.

Starting point is 01:25:38 And they were like, oh, fuck. If the LLM hallucinates, this is going to be very, very bad. We need to permit on how much we let the LLM do and Now that we're working with neo banks these neo banks are saying we have risk policies We have you know ways in which we want to approve Activity can you give us a policy engine? So this policy engine that was developed for one side of the market is very useful for the other and we're kind of seeing That across the board all of our customers are sort of pulling us upward in a way

Starting point is 01:26:03 We're serving this really wide range actually I think creates a future-proof product I know the the transaction is is still in the you know process of closing But can you talk at a high level about what drew you to? Wanting to work with the stripe team Yeah, I was in a telegram chat yesterday and somebody said, I was just like creeping, and somebody said there must have been that stripe charm or that callus and charm. And I think it plays, you know, this is a company- Luck of the Irish.

Starting point is 01:26:38 Luck of the Irish strikes again. We weren't intending to sell. And I think the reality, this is something an investor has said, which is this is the most exciting time this industry has had in a long time. You've literally trued through the worst environment for a startup over the past however many years. Why now? And I think the reality is because we are seeing things move very quickly. We want to accelerate that change. And we were very drawn to, I think, that the care for craft and the huge lever that basically this partnership we think can bring to bear on the space.

Starting point is 01:27:15 So that was a lot of what was exciting to us is broadly, I think we share a lot of values for how to build great developer tooling. And then I think the ability for us to accelerate our timelines and to accelerate the space more broadly in our own little way by just Working that much harder with more resources for the teams that we serve was the really exciting part very cool Well congratulations and good luck with the rest of the process

Starting point is 01:27:39 I'm really excited for you and the team and for stripe and for what you guys can accomplish together Yeah, and we'd love to have you back when when you know you can talk more about the future and and building I'm really excited for this and I think it's something that everyone's thinking about is like what's the future of fintech as fiat and crypto? mingle more together Yeah, it'll be passing incredibly bullish Anyway, thank you. We'll talk to you. Congratulations. Good luck closing We have our next guest in the studio already Anyway, thank you so much for jumping on. We'll talk to you soon. Congratulations, good luck closing. Cheers. We have our next guest in the studio already,

Starting point is 01:28:06 but first I want to ask you how'd you sleep last night? Cause I think I got you a beat. I think I got you a beat. I think it's a clean sweep this week. Did you get a hundred? I got a 91, seven hours, 39 minutes, 93% consistency. 91. This is the first time we've ever tied.

Starting point is 01:28:22 Go to 8slip.com, get a Pod 5 Ultra. Code TBPN. Code TBPN, five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial. This is the first time we've ever tied go to a dot-com get a pod 5 ultra code TV PN code TV PN 5 You're warranty 30-night risk free trial free returns on the 8th. It's amazing. It's amazing. I last Waking thought last night. Oh, it's good to be amazing. Anyway, welcome to the stream Chris Guys, how you doing on? Much obviously Everything Uh, not too much, obviously. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Not too much. Not too much.

Starting point is 01:28:47 Everything. Everything. Everything. Times a flat circle. Yes. I can't even believe it. It seems like since we started the stream, the whole internet went down, so I'm just happy to be here with you.

Starting point is 01:28:56 Oh, he's going to be affected particularly because every time Chris posts, he posts a link to a Google Doc, Google's down. You're cooked, even though X is up. This is the most insane thing about you is that you can break through the link ban somehow. It's just the ideas are so powerful, I love it. You know, nobody told me there was a link ban. Yeah, built different, truly built different.

Starting point is 01:29:22 Built different, I had a post once that I was like, I post links and they still do numbers, google.com, and it just, it's been bomb. John and I thought it was hilarious, but you gotta be built different to post links. Yeah, you have been built different. We've loved all the Google Docs that you've dropped. Maybe take us through the first one, the end of software,

Starting point is 01:29:41 what was the thesis, and then maybe we could reflect on some of that and how it's played out. Sure, sure. So admittedly kind of an incendiary title, especially on Twitter to this audience. But the crux of the thesis was LLMs were, and are only getting better at producing code. And generating code has largely been a translation task assigned to humans.

Starting point is 01:30:14 And humans have been incredibly proficient but expensive translators in that regard. And now that we have free translation from natural language to computer language that should just completely change the economics and the production of software. I think I saw something where CS grads are having a harder, having a harder time to find jobs than art majors. Yeah, we have our CS intern today studying art history for the Do you have a fun fact for us? Okay, so did you know that Greek statues were they were originally painted they originally painted they weren't just white marble

Starting point is 01:31:01 Your job just went way up. Way up. Back to the interview with Chris. Sorry to interrupt. Not at all. Yeah, but interesting fact about that, there's only 2,000 art history grads and there's 100,000 CS grads. So there is a little bit more sensitivity. But I think even though the facts of that stat

Starting point is 01:31:23 might be a little bit early to say, the trend is clear and we all see it coming. And so we're interested in the impact of that stat might be like a little bit early to say like the trend is clear and we all see it coming and so we're interested in like the impact of that in some ways it's the death of the software engineer job application like the job application now is like produce software you build like produce a piece of software the last the last engineer that we hired made us a piece of software that was good almost basically good enough for us to publish it. Yeah, immediately. Same day.

Starting point is 01:31:47 Same day. And so at least the job application has been disrupted. Yeah. I mean, I think it's this sort of inconvenient truth that a lot of us are incentivized not to want to accept, because it really challenges a worldview that most of our existence is constructed on top of. But I think the people who like rush head first into it

Starting point is 01:32:14 and try to understand, okay, well, how does this change the future? What's gonna be different? You know, everybody else can be stuck blinging to the last vestiges of something that ultimately evaporates. I mean, but what's really exciting is, is I mean, imagine a world where where steel is free. Like, what does the world look like if steel is free? Probably a lot more steel.

Starting point is 01:32:48 It's like the world just looks completely different. Yeah, it looks completely different. We can build so much more incredible things. The frontier of innovation pushes out because we are pushing it out. But we're no longer limited by the cost of something to produce traditionally. something to produce traditionally. Be great. Talk to me about the the dynamic of as as code becomes

Starting point is 01:33:10 cheaper and cheaper and eventually free to instantiate there's there's two theories. One is like we are in the age of the idea guy, the person that can come up with an interesting thesis or contrarian insight can instantly go instantiated without a team of engineers.

Starting point is 01:33:27 The classic example of the business guy who has the idea and just needs a team of software engineers to build it and can't do it. The other side is something I saw Pavel Asparuhov posting about, which is that all those guys are going to be competing against the people with the software engineering mindset. And yes, the software engineers

Starting point is 01:33:45 They won't be writing code anymore, but they might be the they might be the future idea guys They might be able to think in systems and and and come up with interesting ideas And even though they aren't doing the instantiation themselves They are able to have an even bigger impact because they are the beneficiaries of this leverage So is there one side of the argument that you fall on? How are you thinking about that? I mean, I think creativity and agency are going to be the scarce resource because execution is just commoditized at this point.

Starting point is 01:34:20 I think, you know, if we're going back to like word cell and shape rotator debate, for better force, I think word cells won, right? Bold, it's possible, very possible. Brutal truth, brutal truth for shape rotators, but word cells just kind of came out on top because there's this Rosetta stone that instantly translates words into shapes.

Starting point is 01:34:46 Yes. And so- Yeah, the prompt can be rotate the shape. Exactly. Writing the prompts are good. Just put the fries in the bag. Yeah, I mean- Put the fries in the bag.

Starting point is 01:34:56 No, the wild, I think, moment for each of us is like we started going to ChatGBT for tasks and you're just like, count the number of objects like this in this image and it just writes like four minutes of writing code doing work that would take you know at least a few hours to do as like a as a well-trained software engineer just to do a task that that in many ways you could just look at it and count it. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Well, so here's an interesting,

Starting point is 01:35:30 if you guys wanna talk about something that, Please. It's probably my next essay. Okay. There we go, teaser. So hot off the press, hot off the press. I think there's a frame that really clearly delineates what's going to be eroded by AI and going to be like eroded by AI and what

Starting point is 01:35:46 will never be eroded by AI and for example like we're never gonna watch robots play sports right like that's just like never gonna happen we don't watch robots play chess and we don't want to dominate in chess and yet chess calm has done well as a business Magnus Carlsen has done well as an individual chess player, Hickory. He has a huge following online. And you would think if you just wanted to watch the best chess possibly played, you'd be watching stockfish and no one does. We don't. We don't.

Starting point is 01:36:17 Not only that, but like the Olympics were so... Okay, so here's the frame. When it comes to utility, we are misanthropists. We actually kind of hate other humans. When you're in an Uber and they like start talking to you, you wish you were in a Waymo. You're like, what? I don't need this. When somebody, when you're at a coffee shop and they spin the iPad around asking for a tip, you're just like, I'm just, I want to buy this bottle of water. I want to walk away with my coffee. Why are you like this? This is like a miniature ransom. And you're just, you're,

Starting point is 01:36:55 you're frustrated because you know exactly what it is that we want to do. And the human is preventing that from happening. And so, uh, I don't think any of us walk into an elevator and think to ourselves, man, I wish there was a person here operating it. Right? That's gone. It's totally gone. We don't care. We're actually like very happy with humans being removed from that loop.

Starting point is 01:37:20 And so as long as the thing is utilitarian and there's a drive towards efficiency, we actually kind of hate humans and we want them gone. Now, on the other side, if we are allocating a leisure hour, not a labor hour, if we're not trying to be productive, but we are trying to be consumptive, we are narcissists. We love other humans. We love other humans so much that we would refuse to watch anything other than another

Starting point is 01:37:53 human do that thing. So think about like, you know, fine dining, right? Omakase. You go to a sushi restaurant, you need that person there that's describing, cutting. You want to see how delicate the craft is part of the craft and the social element to it as part of the product. Exactly. It's a story. Yeah, it's a story. You're paying for that experience. You want that human experience.

Starting point is 01:38:19 You want to understand that this is something that they've dedicated their lives to. So on one hand, fine dining, you need humans, you need the story, you want to understand where it came from. And then on the other hand, we order food and we tell the driver to leave it at the door so we don't have to interact with them. So we go through life with these two spheres. When we know we want to do something and we really hate other humans, when we know we wanna do something and we really hate other humans, like when you call into a customer service line

Starting point is 01:38:49 and somebody like incompetent is on the other side, you're just reminded of the frustration of why you called in the first place. And then on the other hand, let's look at modern art, for example. I think like the trope in modern art is like, it's not that hard to make. You know, the joke is like, my kid could do that. Yeah, well, like your kid didn't. And also, no one cares. The thing that we prize is the constraints, the creativity, the mythos of the artists that went into creating that.

Starting point is 01:39:26 Yeah, if Daniel Arsham goes to a rock wall with an axe and hits the wall and it chips a piece of rock off, that rock would have an immediate 10,000x premium on it. And somebody would buy it. and somebody would buy it because of who did it. Exactly. Exactly. So if what you do basically gets in the way of people getting exactly what they want, your job's gone. It's gonna go away. But if what you do is part of storytelling or human existence or entertainment, it's

Starting point is 01:40:10 moded. It's a huge mode. I mean, one of the most interesting things in entertainment, I would say over the last few decades was the invention of reality television. When we realized we would rather watch two people that we don't know fight than anything else. It's crazy. It's incredible. It's often incredible content.

Starting point is 01:40:35 Guilty pleasure for many people. So on that note, I'm curious, since we're streaming on X, are bots on X a feature or a bug Because they it's see there there as far as I'm concerned they've been designated a feature because it sort of went away for a Little bit now it seems like they're back and and stronger than ever I Think I think Twitter probably has the same stance towards bots that Louis Vuitton has towards counterfeiters where it's like this exists because there's value in the product.

Starting point is 01:41:16 Replicating, trying to imitate the authenticity of the engagement means that there's real value in the product. The more that it exists and proliferates, the more it dilutes the core value of the thing. But the fact that it exists in and of itself is a testament to just how valuable the product is. Otherwise, people wouldn't try to imitate it. Mm-hmm. That's a good framework. On this concept of the future of jobs, Sam Altman put out a fantastic blog post and talked about how if you went back hundreds of years

Starting point is 01:41:51 and showed people what we do all day, they would say those are ridiculous fake jobs, that's not real, that's not hunting or farming, that's sitting in front of a computer just messing around talking to people. And yet we get a lot of value out of them. When we think about the future of work and jobs, do you think that we are adaptable enough as a society to create full employment with that new paradigm? Can we have 30 million Omakase chefs and 30 million athletes and 30 million reality TV stars,

Starting point is 01:42:26 such that people by and large have meaningful work, even at some sort of scale or, or do you think this is some, there's some other way that this plays out? I think yes. Like we will, we're such a selfish race or species that we want to, and the way that economics will work is the jobs will basically, job availability will expand to fill the leisure bucket that it sits inside of. So we have more leisure hours today than any era any era ever in the history of time,

Starting point is 01:43:05 because we're actually the most productive, right? Like if you, if you want to go back to like the stone age, uh, uh, there's this really tight correlation actually between productivity boosts and the invention of leisure activities. So like tools get made all of a sudden we have free time. We didn't have free time before because every hour was spent like surviving. What do we do with free time? We invent music. We invent bone flutes. Actually, the first board games were invented concurrent with irrigation.

Starting point is 01:43:40 So all of a sudden you have this huge productivity, and then you have all this free time. What do you do with the free time? Well, we invent things to fill it. Modern sports were invented with the Industrial Revolution. All of the oldest soccer teams, football teams, were actually factory workers from the same factory competing against each other. And so we have these like huge boons productivity. And then on the other side of it, we have a job creation to fill that leisure expansion.

Starting point is 01:44:18 So yeah, we're gonna have more athletes than ever. This is hilarious because it's actually incredibly bullish for art history majors. Like, because I'm thinking about it like, so Ken Burns is about to drop a new documentary about the American Revolution. And I am so excited to watch it. And I know I could go to Chachipiti and say, build me a deep research report on the American Revolution.

Starting point is 01:44:44 But I want to hear it through the Ken Burns lens. And I want to hear his voice narrated. And I want to hear him express his unique viewpoint and the connections that he makes, even if they're not the best, even if I could get even if I could get more factualness or more truth or more, more detailed insights from from chat GPT, I want Ken Burns experience and so yeah I don't I don't know there's something interesting about that where like I mean you know this is we have a friend David Senora who runs founders podcast and the way he he reads biographies about great history's greatest entrepreneurs and retells the stories in a way that's as

Starting point is 01:45:22 compelling as the original material and as compelling as the real life and you're getting it through the Experience of David and I just don't think that's going anywhere Even though even though it is it is in some ways like the first thing that could be one shot by AI with with Generative voice and and deep research products, but I think it'll be sticking around like you like you were we're so narcissistic Yeah, we love stories about each other. And we love storytellers. And we love telling stories. And we hate inauthenticity when it comes to that.

Starting point is 01:45:58 I mean, like the ESPN ate the ocho, like it's a joke. But it's like, we have more sports than ever yeah because we have more leisure time than ever yeah we care so much you know i i i'll watch competitive darts competitive darts 100 we didn't have time to i got really into bowl riding recently and all the narratives there jb mommy the the greatest bowl rider of all time. I know the whole history. I love it Getting into these obscure obscure sports is Yeah, maybe that's the future. I just get just good to spend all my time watching bull riding That's post scarcity for you switching gears a little bit

Starting point is 01:46:39 I mean, I wish we had a full hour to talk because there's so many different directions we could go But I wanted to see get your reaction to WWDC this year. Apple's news around how they're going to be working with developers. I mean, there's there's a ton to dig into. What stood out to you? Sure. I know that everybody has like lost their mind about liquid glass and the new UI. I think buried in a lot of the press around WWDC is actually Apple's stance towards LLMs and AI. So there's a machine learning team inside of Apple.

Starting point is 01:47:21 And they are really, they're starting with this library called MLX, which is, allows inference on device for Apple iPhones and laptops for M silicon or Apple Silicon. And what's really interesting about that is, as a developer, right now, when you think about creating an application that has end user inference embedded inside of it, you also kind of have to do the mental math of how much it's going to cost you, because it's all metered.

Starting point is 01:48:02 It's like, OK, well, yeah, I'm going to drop this endpoint into OpenAI or Anthropic or whatever. Yeah, you could make a viral app and then blow through your entire credit card limit. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's like we've had a bunch of founders on the show that have like accidentally done that. So, and you think about early mobile days,

Starting point is 01:48:18 like we're seeing an explosion of AI apps right now, but that's been gated by developers thinking in their heads, well, if I make something amazing and free, I could actually just end up going into debt over it. But that's not fun, right? And in the early apps. Venture capitalists will save us in those situations. Venture capitalists, thankfully, they will come in. If you have a viral wrapper.

Starting point is 01:48:41 If you have a viral wrapper. If you have a viral wrapper on a handshake. No, but still, there's just so many. It's dynamic. Yeah, it's a real dynamic, for sure. Part of the beauty of it being easier than ever to create software is there's a bunch of software that can and should exist that historically shouldn't

Starting point is 01:48:54 have existed because it was expensive for development cost reasons. Now, we've been through this era of expensive inference. Yeah. Yes. And so that point highlights the entire dynamic. Imagine if game developers had to pay per pixel that was rendered by the people who

Starting point is 01:49:16 play other games. It would be insane. There would be no games made. And so what's so exciting is that it feels like we're starting to shift into better, Apple's really, in my mind, in a perfect position to put the tools in the hands of developers and enable on-device inference, which really means pre-inference. So if we were in this era where game developers had to pay for the pixels that were rendered on end user devices, we're moving to like, wow, like people can render the

Starting point is 01:49:53 graphics for free on their device. And that just opens the floodgates for the things that can happen. I think haters will say, well, like, you know, models are bad. You know, you know, the battery life is terrible. Your iPhone heats up. You know, the models are small. Yeah, today. Yeah. But tomorrow to a year from now, two years from now, you know, all of a sudden, 80, 90% of the queries that you would run through a cloud hosted model is just doable

Starting point is 01:50:26 on your phone or on your laptop and for free. And natively, it can be offline, whatever you want, and private. And so that's such an exciting future. And from my takeaway from WWDC, that was the most exciting one. And I feel like- Yeah, and you combine that with, again, they're not really getting any credit for partnering with Anthropic on Xcode, which will enable some of this activity as well.

Starting point is 01:50:51 Yeah, I mean, we need our AI flappy bird moment. Like, flappy bird, I remember, was built by a single developer, and it's that perfect example of leveraging all the hardware to just build something that went mega viral. We've seen a few of these moments for images. There was that magic avatar app that would make you look like Superman.

Starting point is 01:51:12 That kind of went viral, but of course it had high inference cost. When you drop that inference cost to zero, you put it on the edge. I think we will have our Flappy Bird moment for LLM based interactions on the iPhone, and I'm really excited for that. It's completely unpredictable what that will be, but I imagine it'll be very fun

Starting point is 01:51:30 and everyone will be playing with it when it happens. I wanna stay on the topic of Apple and just this idea of taste. A lot of people have been writing about taste and coming back to taste is something that's potentially a permanent differentiator in a post AI world. There's an idea of like agency plus taste being more valuable than skills.

Starting point is 01:51:51 We talked to Scott Belsky about that on Tuesday. How do you think is taste a moat? Is it something that can be learned? What is the value? Is it still alive and well at Apple? There was a lot of criticism about liquid glass. And yet, when we looked at it, it looked pretty cool. I don't know. I thought it looked nice.

Starting point is 01:52:13 I think cases alive and well, maybe I'll describe Apple. If you if you'll permit me to describe another one of my frameworks that we've developed here at Paces is top down and bottom up companies. So top down companies started by visionary charismatic founders, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, Epic Games. And what's notable about these visionary founders is they're largely unattached to how they execute and what the products actually end up looking like.

Starting point is 01:52:46 And so what happens is these top-down companies ship multiple flagship products over their life cycle. So, you know, we're all on, you know, Apple laptops and have Apple iPhones and AirPods. You know, Tesla has obviously created everything from cars to power walls and solar panels. SpaceX not only makes rockets, but also satellite internet. Awesome. Amazing constructs. What's interesting is the market only sees the products, and so they don't understand that the core innovation engine is the company itself

Starting point is 01:53:25 because these top-down companies hire innovators and build up this core ability to summit the next hill and launch the next product. Bottom-up companies, conversely, are started by tinkerer founders. They're hackers. They try to pick locks basically. And they combined with perfect timing capture lightning in a bottle. And what's interesting about bottom up companies is

Starting point is 01:53:55 that they only ever ship a single flagship product. This is Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Airbnb, most actually venture Twitter, where we are. And they are actually fundamentally incapable of shipping a second flagship product. It's because the product market fit for that is so violent that every person that gets hired into that company is an optimizer. So imagine like you're creating a jawbreaker around this core product market fit. Every single person is hired as an optimizer. There are no innovators. Why would you stick your neck out to try something new when you can just make the core thing 1% better? And so they're actually fundamentally in Cape. You can't ship a second product as a bottom up company.

Starting point is 01:54:49 And a lot of bottom up companies don't know that they're bottom up companies because success is a terrible teacher. A lot of bottom up companies expand through M and a, because the businesses are so good. They're so good. You, you, and then if you can buy great products, you can optimize them really well and grow them. And you look like you're, you know, you, you look, you can kind of mask the fact that you didn't actually make

Starting point is 01:55:14 two of those sort of flagship products. We were talking about this with scale AI. Right? With scale AI going to meta, it's like, yeah, 15 billions a lot, but what if it moves the market cap 1%? Yeah Yeah, what if it optimizes their AI stack 1%? Instagram yep, you know a bite dance buying musically sure these are like maybe some of the best investments Over the last couple decades and they were M&A events. Mm-hmm

Starting point is 01:55:42 And so if you're a bottom-up company and you can apply that pattern match really well to identifying similar shaped assets, that's your core innovation lever because you actually are incapable of shipping something internally. So going back to taste, I think taste is alive and well at Apple. Yes, because culturally that organization has been built out to hire this innovative DNA. But it's not the same at every company. I don't know if taste exists at bottom up companies. I wonder actually if what we can see from bottom up companies

Starting point is 01:56:30 is just ornamental window dressing that we misidentify as taste because it's- Yeah, it's hiring a good design agency at the right time. And you're like, oh, this company is so tasteful, but it's like, well, you had to spend 250 grand to be tasteful. It's just the most legible thing. But when actually, Craigslist just works great. I mean, Craigslist is a perfect example

Starting point is 01:56:55 of a bottom-up company, no taste required. Interesting. I would be rattling off like 20 other examples that kind of fit this framework, but I would piss off We'll let we'll let the audience imagine for themselves, but I think it's it's really powerful. Yeah, this was fantastic We go way deeper into all these frameworks. These are great like kickoff points for big discussions I've so many more questions. So we'll have to have you on back soon because this is fantastic. Yeah Thanks for the time we'll have to have you on back soon because this is fantastic. Amazing. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for the time. We'll talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:57:27 And in the meantime, we'll talk to you about AdQuick. AdQuick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buy across the globe. And our next guest is coming into the studio.

Starting point is 01:57:44 Joe from Infinite Machine. I can't wait to launch our out of home campaign John. I'm so excited that we were in the, we're deep in the creative process. We gotta pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign. Let's do it. Let's bring him in. Let's do it. We'll hear his pitch and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised. Break it down for us. What are you building? Launch Day Congratulations, welcome show us give us a little tour. What what are you building? Hey guys, so you are here at our New York City facility I'm calling from infinite machine and we make the best non car vehicles on earth

Starting point is 01:58:18 Okay, and today we are launching our second product. It's called alto. It is a launching our second product, it's called Alto. It is a class two e-bike, but it looks nothing like an e-bike. We really thought this thing from the ground up. So it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane. It's got pedals that turn into foot rests. It fits two people. It's made out of aluminum and steel.

Starting point is 01:58:38 It's beautiful, it's useful, it's high tech, it's connected to the internet. And we just announced it today. What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost? 34.95. You're giving them away. You're giving them away.

Starting point is 01:58:50 You're giving them away. Double the price. You're giving them away. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch. How much? So you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a license.

Starting point is 01:59:02 I was about to ask, yeah. So you basically, so somebody that's writing it, they get like, hypothetically, John and I and the team, engineered this so that it didn't need a license. I was about to ask. What is it class to you? So somebody that's riding it, they get like, hypothetically, John and I and the team, we get a fleet of these for the office, and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot. We're riding. It looks like we're on little motorcycles.

Starting point is 01:59:18 Cops put the sirens on. They pull us over. We pull the pedals out, and we're good to go. We're like, look, I'm sorry, officer. It's a bicycle. I don't know what you're talking about. So basically, most e-bikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them. But bicycles were never designed to be powered.

Starting point is 01:59:37 And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for motor power. And instead, we said, OK, how can we think about this from the ground up? We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is. So if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals

Starting point is 01:59:55 that are operable, meaning it has a chain. It goes 20 miles per hour as a class two e-bike or 25 miles per hour as a class three e-bike. Um, and it's narrower than 36 inches. That's the basic constraint. And so, uh, you know, we took that brief and then we designed what we felt was the best version of that design. What is the barrier to going more aggressive building it wider, taking the

Starting point is 02:00:22 pedals out, uh, making it go 40 miles an hour, then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license? Is that how it works? Yeah, so if you're considered an e-bike, you don't need a license plate and therefore it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not really related by the federal government. And so yeah, like it's just a much lower friction experience. You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements.

Starting point is 02:00:49 You don't need a license plate. And so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use. You don't have to deal with complex dealers. You don't need to register the thing and yeah, you can get on and go. And it's excessively priced.

Starting point is 02:01:04 Yeah, what's the go-to-market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores, get them into traditional bike shops? I've been in some bike shops where they have e-bikes as well or is this all DTC and e-commerce? So to show you quickly, we have a space here in New York, we're getting set up for an event. Wow, there's a 13,000 square foot space in New York. Very cool. And it's gonna be open to the public as a store. People can come in and buy vehicles. And so we are going direct to consumer to start. And through online retail includes your own retail.

Starting point is 02:01:37 Yeah. Yes. To start our own facility here in New York. We're also interested in open to selling them in channel retail. Sure. I guess it was best buy for example, for example, like it would be a lot of sense for it to be there. Exactly. Talk about the broader explosion of e-bikes, because I feel like adults nowadays, the number one way I feel like a boomer is when, you know, some like 12 year olds with e-bikes are like, you know, ripping through traffic.

Starting point is 02:02:03 And it feels like every time I drive in the city now, at some point or another, and in some ways, the boomer in me is like, oh, those kids are being dangerous. And then part of me at the same time is like, it's actually makes cities much smaller now where kids can just go out and explore. But I feel like it feels like with Ulto and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era

Starting point is 02:02:29 of this sort of micro mobility, right? Maybe the first era was the kind of sharing economy, bird, lime, model. And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome, but the community owned approach or the sort of sharing economy model had some like really, you know, big, big issues. And it does feel like, you know, actually having people own the end product care for

Starting point is 02:02:53 the end product and not be just, you know, trashing devices that are part of a network. So when we look at it is, you know, the world as we know is urbanizing more and more people are living in cities. And when you live in cities, things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes, you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles. And we believe that over time, more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars, they will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. And our intention is to make the best of these things. Now, you're right,

Starting point is 02:03:27 the first gen one micro mobility companies were all sharing oriented. We think ultimately it's not a great business model. There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, et cetera. But also we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars,

Starting point is 02:03:45 they love their vehicles, have an emotional connection to them. And ultimately, the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing you get on it, you can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes, no hassle, the wind's at your back, and it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic, it's just night and day. Talk to me about what's going on in China,

Starting point is 02:04:17 because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility, and BYD makes all sorts of stuff and they have a very different model you know with it with so many tech companies it's like are you gonna wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or or Google's IO it feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this but what's the actual dynamic why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience

Starting point is 02:04:49 in hardware? Like, why isn't Samsung getting in on the action? Why isn't Apple doing anything here? Can you comment on the reaction to just the way American companies are building technology today versus the China model? I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multi category. Yeah. So yeah, you go to a Xiaomi, and they started making phones and laptops. And

Starting point is 02:05:20 now they're making cars. When you look at the US, the model take a company like Apple, we love Apple, but they're very, very conservative. They stick to their lane, and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware. And so, the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the next great American hardware company.

Starting point is 02:05:38 We're starting with Kiwan and then Alto, and with vehicles at large, but we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions and we want at large, but we call the company Infinite Machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high tech in new ways. And so we will be multi-category at some point. I mean, we're really building the competency to build high end, moving beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer

Starting point is 02:06:05 and do it in a way where we can move really quickly. I mean, this company, I've been full-time for less than a year and a half. We have raised less than $10 million. We've productionized two motor vehicles. So we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra-lean hardware company. And we're gonna keep pushing

Starting point is 02:06:24 and we're gonna take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence, where the AI escapes the screen. And we're going to be all over that. We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff. And we're building the competency to make things that take advantage of it. Is there any?

Starting point is 02:06:42 I'm just going to speculate. But I can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse that's fully autonomous yes you just get to ride around the city you know windows down yeah you see the carriages in yes park autonomous horse as well for sure please or a horse or a robotic horse yes I'd love that yes yes yes Henry Ford said, if you ask customers what they'd want, they'd say a faster horse. I want a faster horse.

Starting point is 02:07:10 I'd love a faster horse. They're already self-driving. A robotic horse. They come out of the box self-driving. Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there. Exactly. Well, has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now?

Starting point is 02:07:24 Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain? Some companies have been fine on the battery side. The more defense application companies like Skydio have run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like? I know that everyone's focused on re-industrialization in America, but it's a long journey. Things have stabilized on the tower front.

Starting point is 02:07:46 You know, it's not great. The world economy is highly entwined. The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles is highly connected, connected to China and beyond. And so we are all, you know, we are fully supportive of re-industrializing America. We want to be on the cutting edge of that.

Starting point is 02:08:06 We support your smart policy to do that, both, you know, carrot and stick. So tariffs are a stick. You know, there's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only seen a stick. So short story is, it's stabilized, but honestly, I think we should be playing offense

Starting point is 02:08:28 as America and we're not yet, we're using kind of protectionist measures. Yeah. Talk to me about making these vehicles safer using technology. I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of better compute power and the ability I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of, of, you know, better compute power and the ability to stabilize

Starting point is 02:08:50 a device while you're riding on it very, very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in like 2014 and then kind of disappeared. But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20, 30 years ago. What technology trends are you benefiting from? Yeah, on the safety front, these are lower speed vehicles, so you're not moving at highway speeds. And so the name of the game is awareness. People, not just for the rider, but also for people around you. So that's admitting a a sound, that's being highly visible,

Starting point is 02:09:26 and that is alerting the rider when there are issues. And we do that stuff. I think over time, we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do alerting and also to take over the vehicle when that presents itself. But to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding e-bikes right now. If we can make them 10%,

Starting point is 02:09:50 15% safer, um, that's a big win. And that's where we're starting. Um, talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers. Um, well, let's talk about getting them and let's getting also in the hands of us. I'm going to sign. I'm going to, I'm going to, we're going to configure one for each person on the team and then we're just going to be emailing you every day. Hey, hey, what's, what's the wait time? Yeah, we get it. Oh, we are offering, we call internally the burning man shipping option, which is straight

Starting point is 02:10:23 from the factory in August before Burning Man. If you opt for non-Burning Man shipping, that costs 4,500 bucks. But if you opt for non-Burning Man shipping, that will arrive in late September, early October. So, you know, they're shipping quickly. We are about to start mass production.

Starting point is 02:10:40 And maybe through you guys, we'll expedite a few. That'd be amazing. No, I mean, I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man. You can imagine, if you can get a density of these on the Playa, the number of Instagram stories, posts, et cetera, it's going to be absolutely wild.

Starting point is 02:11:01 Yeah, yeah. What about storage? What are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment? Or do most buildings these days have safe places to store e-bikes or parking garages for these things?

Starting point is 02:11:17 Yeah, so one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You park the vehicle outside, it's fully weatherproof. It has an onboard security system. It's virtually impossible to steal hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge. You can take the battery out of the seat, it weighs 20 pounds. It's a hot swappable battery. Take it up to your apartment. And then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet. So super simple

Starting point is 02:11:45 So you charge it overnight and then just take it. Yeah Six hours to charge. We also have a supercharger. It takes three hours Yeah for a couple hundred bucks and yeah, very cool Amazing anything else, please make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump I just think it would be fun. I was gonna ask Marketing strategy here, you know ask I want to see you want to see the big jump, you know monster truck rally Let's push these to the limits really show people I think we should get one and put the full TBPN racing livery on it. I agree, you know ramp on there

Starting point is 02:12:19 I agree different. Yeah, we do like Pike's Peak or are we doing like half pipe? Like well, what's gonna go most viral here? Okay, I'm super I'm super, you know, this this is one of the I love businesses and products where you take something that Seems like you know seems like it's competitive and then you you spend a hundred times You know you you be a hundred times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and you create an entirely new. Also, shipping before Christmas, I love a physical gift,

Starting point is 02:12:51 a big box under the Christmas tree. It's rarer and rarer these days because everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs, and all of this is digital now. So it's very hard to find something to give to someone although this is obviously like a very nice gift it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this

Starting point is 02:13:16 thing we've been recommending that people give each other you know sales tax software or potentially corporate cards but I think I think this is going to be added to our Christmas list this year. I think this is a little bit more fun. Yeah. And people can place if they if folks want to make sure they get one for the holiday season, they could put a deposit down now. It's 100 bucks. Oh, cool. And it's fully refundable. So okay. We'll save your configuration. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah. Love to give it a try. We'll talk to you soon. Very excited for you guys. Cheers. Bye. Bye. Awesome. If you're operating a wander, you gotta get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around on. That would be fantastic. Crazy collab. Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, Ojai, any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling. And if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your happy place.

Starting point is 02:14:05 Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Wander allows you to go golden retriever mode, because you just don't have to think about anything. You just be chasing the ball.

Starting point is 02:14:18 It's fantastic. Chasing the beach. Well, we have Zach again from Plaid. Third time on the show. Welcome to the stream. Great to the stream. Great to see you. It's always a pleasure.

Starting point is 02:14:27 I'm always blown away when you join because it's always so much fun talking to you. So thanks so much for joining. Great to have you. What's the latest in your world? Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and it's always fun. It's so much fun.

Starting point is 02:14:40 Latest in our world is we did Plaid effects today. This is our annual customer conference where we announced a bunch of the stuff that we were working on for the past year. It's been super fun. The biggest announcement was a product called Protect, which is this amazing cutting edge anti-fraud product. It looks at all the data across all of the usage and the data flowing through the Plaid network and builds a really great anti-fraud tool.

Starting point is 02:15:01 That's the headline of the day. How one-shot-able is fraud these days? Can you just pipe a ton of customer data into a single context window and just ask, and can the prompt just be like, is this fraud now? Or is it still leveraging all the traditional fraud tools? Yeah, I mean, the hard part is twofold. First is you have to put all of your historical data in it to say

Starting point is 02:15:26 Hey, this is pattern anomalous is something we're going on here So the question is like can you can you get all of your data into that and in plaids case? I came to take all the data that we see across all of the fintech apps and all the users and then say hey What are the patterns that are occurring consistently? So now for example, you know if you sign up For for coinbase today, that might be a totally normal sign up. You sign up for Lending Club today and you just signed up for six other lending products today, then that's obviously a potentially fraudulent loan that you're trying to take out.

Starting point is 02:15:54 So can you get all this data all in one place? That's problem number one. And problem number two is can you analyze it and change the analysis that you're doing at the speed that you need to change it because fraud changes every day and Some of that is algorithmic. So are the algorithms like chasing the fraudsters in the way that they need to some of that is manual So we built a tool that actually allows humans to go in and say hey, I heard from I've seen this thing going on or I heard from some other some other fintech company that this fraud ring is occurring Can you search for it and tell me is that actually occurring to me? And then can I build some rules to protect the asset?

Starting point is 02:16:25 So it is a constantly evolving game. Yeah, how important is this problem? I feel like every American should just default assume that their information is like floating around the internet available to the highest bidder. And so like in some ways, like the only solution is just better tools to prevent this type of activity. Is that reality?

Starting point is 02:16:45 That is the reality. Financial fraud is going up around 25% a year right now. Some of that is, or actually a lot of that is AI driven. So you know people using AI tools to send text messages, to convince people to do certain things. I think, yeah, one answer is absolutely tools and we're trying to build the best in class tools and give it to all the fintech companies and practically then we'll go well beyond fintech with these products. The other is just education,

Starting point is 02:17:10 like explaining to consumers how it works. So, you know, my parents and I, we have a word that we say to make sure that we know that it is the other person on the other end of the line if we're sending money or probably doing anything that requires authentication. Those kinds of little tricks that you can build into your day-to-day processes

Starting point is 02:17:26 are always helpful, but it's a combination of tools and processes and so forth. Yeah, makes sense. Can you talk to us about impossible travel problems? I found out about this yesterday, where someone's logging in from Singapore three hours after they were in San Francisco and they couldn't possibly be there.

Starting point is 02:17:44 Is that something that you're already built a tool around? Is that kind of like table stakes or are there like evolutions there? Yeah, so I mean a lot of the way that the Andy Fried product works, it's called Protect. It's got a bunch of these different analyses that we do. So there's I think just under 20 different analyses that are running now and we're adding more every day. And one of them is location tracking. So we look at where was the last place that you logged into a fintech app and then if you're trying to do a new thing with a different fintech app on the same user's account in a different place. All right, great. Well, that's that's actually you know, it's an impossible travel question. And so that will immediately generate a flag. There's a bunch of these other things like we look at stuff like how

Starting point is 02:18:24 long is this bank account existed? Turns out a brand new bank account is very likely to commit fraud. And an old bank account is less likely to commit fraud. You just have same thing for the phone number. How long has this phone number existed? And there's a zillion of these analyses that then run into a bunch of statistical work

Starting point is 02:18:38 that we do on top of it. But every time you look at a fraudster or an instance of fraud, you can always explain it in retrospect. So you can look back and say, Oh yeah, obviously, you know, that person was in Singapore and then they were in California two hours later. That's impossible. But when you're proactively trying to prevent it, like can you actually think through all the possible permutations of weird patterns that might exist? And that's, that's,

Starting point is 02:19:00 that's the complexity that we focus on. So, so I imagine at one point this was like very heuristic driven, very like a multivariable regression almost, just saying like, here are the different fraud factors, let's add up like a risk score. Have these products moved to a transformer architecture? Are we using LLMs in them? Are we using modern AI tools?

Starting point is 02:19:22 Or are we just kind of continuing to scale up the existing algorithms that have been working for the past few years? I don't know how relevant the new models are. People are kind of throwing transformers and diffusion and everything right now and I don't know if that's appropriate here. Yeah, the answer is yes to all the above. It is not heavily transformer driven yet in terms of fighting fraud, though increasingly it is becoming that way. We definitely use LLMs for a bunch of things like auto building tools, like doing some of the data cleansing, so and so forth on the back. But yeah, fraud is a fascinating industry because if you talk

Starting point is 02:20:03 to any company, their goal is to make the fraud not happen on their platform, right? They want the fraud to be more expensive for fraudster to do on their platform than it is anywhere else. And so everyone wants to be ahead. They want the new thing. They want like the new type of fraud solution. But then eventually everything that's new becomes stable stakes for everyone because you know, you kind of have to have it.

Starting point is 02:20:24 And so, you know, we are iterating our way towards more and more complex architecture, but it's still early days. We had to use it to actually solve. To me, this product feels like something that's just possible with massive scale. Like you probably wanted to build something like this, like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, but couldn't just because you didn't have like the sort of broad exposure to all these different touch points, is that right? I mean, this was the pitch that I was giving for Plaid in like 2014.

Starting point is 02:20:51 Basically my pitch was that when we get big enough, we're gonna have a lot of data and we're gonna build these analytics that financial services doesn't have because no one can build them and no one has the tech sophistication to do it. It took us a decade to get to the point where we had enough data to actually build this stuff. And then we acquired Cognito, an ID verification company in 2022, which

Starting point is 02:21:08 is a big catalyst. I mean, in part of the pitch to that team, I was saying, look, come use our data, put it together with your data, and then think of all the amazing anti fraud tools you can build. So I mean, this stuff always happens slower than you want it to, but we couldn't be more excited to get it out there. How much of this like fraud right now, financial fraud, is kind of acting as a tax on fintech companies? And should we be thinking about shifting that tax to the government by giving the government more tools

Starting point is 02:21:37 to go after the fraudsters at the source and just arrest the people that are even trying to do the fraud? Well, I think one of the big, the big challenges is in, in crypto, a lot of fraudulent activity is happening and, and law enforcement is able to trace the activity to somebody in China. And if you just go to, if you go to some, if you go to the Chinese government and you say like, you know exactly who's doing this, they don't, they're not going to act on it. So yeah,

Starting point is 02:22:04 I mean, the answer is yes. Yes. Yes to all the above like the government should be more active in this Again, much of the as you said much of the fraud doesn't Stem from people that are inside the u.s. So it's not the u.s. Government doing it I'm sure you guys have been following or maybe you've read the articles about pig butchering. Oh, yeah horrible name for a type of fraud like they have these these these humans in fraud rings in like Malaysia and relationships with people, right? Yeah, exactly. And they're often government sponsored,

Starting point is 02:22:32 or at least government affiliated in some way. There's knowledge in the government that it happened. And so I mean, if that is happening, great. Yes, we could give better data to the Malaysian government, but also you've got to build the tools. Yes, we could give better data to the Malaysian government, but also you got to build the tools. Yeah. Yeah. What about I don't know how much you can comment on this, but you know, there's been a lot of discussion recently and frustration and at least after the Coinbase, you know, user data issues around like KYC's, KYC laws and effectively the government

Starting point is 02:23:05 requiring people to retain all this data. Do you think that there would ever be any movement in DC around really updating these laws to protect, to help protect user data or is it just one of those things that we have to live with? I mean, you would think they should. I mean, realistically, yeah, the concept that if you're a bank should I mean realistically yeah the concept that

Starting point is 02:23:26 If you're a bank and I sign up for your bank you have to collect all of my most sensitive data And then you have to store it forever in your database On a scale of forever in you know many many databases you have to assume that those databases will be hacked That's you have to assume that on the scale of forever your data is all going to be public And so it doesn't make sense that you would retain it, you should in theory, collect it, verify it, and like get say a token that it exists, like get some assurance that exists and then delete it. And it seems like I would hope that the regulation

Starting point is 02:23:55 change. I think it's it's, you know, regulations move as fast as regulations move. And so I'm not sure that it's going to be imminent in that sense. But on the flip side, the industry is solving it. The industry is building tools that are better and better. Relying on a static social security number, sure yeah, we'll do it. That's fine if we have to for regulatory reasons, but the reality is if social security number entry

Starting point is 02:24:17 is your only fraud detection tool, your only fraud avoidance tool, like you're in a bad place as it is. Yeah, that makes sense. So the industry will solve it, basically. Can you talk, this got kind of lost among other massive news cycles, but there were some updates to Dodd-Frank 1033

Starting point is 02:24:37 that a few weeks ago, you guys talking offline were kind of concerned about what that could mean just kind of broadly for consumers. Any any kind of can you give us kind of an overview of what happened? I know I think when we were in D.C. you were kind of covering a little bit of this stuff on the show as well. Yeah I think this is a big issue that probably doesn't get as much coverage as it should. So in the Dodd-Frank law, they wrote a provision that basically says consumers have access to their financial data, and they can assign that access to third

Starting point is 02:25:12 party, such as Plaid, to act on their behalf. And then there was never any rule written on that. It was regulatory authority that was given to the CFPB, no rule written for a long time. Under Trump first, first administration, and Kathy Craninger, the head of the CFPB at the time, started writing the rule for this. It then continued into the Roja Chopra era of CFPB under Biden. The rule that emerged from that was a very far reaching, huge overstep of a rule. And, and in the second Trump administration, now there's a push to either pare back or get

Starting point is 02:25:48 rid of the rule. What actually happened is the day that the rule was published by Rohit Chopra, a group of the banks sued that same day, meaning they had the lawsuit pre-prepared beforehand and this was a quick event. And so that kind of is ongoing. The wrinkle that's come up recently is that the currency of GB has basically said something effective. Yes, we agree with the banks and we should get rid of the rule, but also the way that they're structuring the language in that dismissal may foreclose on some of the regulatory things that were set

Starting point is 02:26:20 up and could actually put at risk some of the ways that open banking works in the United States today. Meaning it could allow certain banks to put much more pressure on the ecosystem. They could try to turn off data in certain areas. They should try to limit data in certain areas. They could more likely, what's going to happen is they're going to try to limit certain industries. So if you remember, a couple couple years ago, there was this big debanking thing that went on where the banks were trying to push back and turn off crypto. Yeah, this would give them the ability to turn off crypto. This would give them the ability to turn off gaming or things like that, or

Starting point is 02:26:57 basically any industry that they might feel is competitive with them. And it wouldn't be all the banks doing it as a group, it would be each individual bank kind of making their own determination of this. And so we think that, you know, what am I getting rid of the rule? We just don't want to foreclose on the fact that consumers really should have the ability to choose the financial products that they interact with. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you have a reaction to this, the circle IPO? I, you know, obviously performed very

Starting point is 02:27:22 well but and stable coins have been in the news But I'm interested to hear kind of like what the next most exciting Instantiations of that technology might be I was talking to a payroll company CEO and he was kind of mentioning that Yes, it's lower fees and faster, but Yes, it's lower fees and faster, but interestingly, stablecoins might allow them to kind of recapture float and then earn yield on that in an interesting way that I wasn't expecting. So like the potential economic benefit to some companies might be massive if they're able to kind of custody their own treasuries essentially through stablecoins. What have you been seeing in the stable coin world broadly?

Starting point is 02:28:06 What are the interesting knock-on effects? How much excitement is there among stable coins from your partners? Yeah, I mean there's a ton. There's a lot of amazing companies. I think you talked to Privy. You already talked to them? You're going to talk to them? Yeah, yeah, yeah, just an hour ago.

Starting point is 02:28:20 Just earlier. Great, yeah. I mean, you just got to them. Like amazing to see what they built. And it's very excited for the ecosystem And I think you know from our perspective what's happening in stable coins right now is not what will happen And so what's happening right now a lot of people are using it as a currency hedge a lot of people are using it for cross-border payouts or money transfers that otherwise would just be

Starting point is 02:28:41 Frictionful and and then you then a lot of people are using it just as a form of a savings account that has higher yield. And while those are all big TAMs, it's not that interesting relative to the rest of what could go on in financial services. I think increasingly we're gonna see more and more consumers having the ability to move on easily between say a bank account and a crypto wallet,

Starting point is 02:29:03 holding something in USDC or another stablecoin. And yeah, you're right. There are big opportunities for people to hold elements of their treasury or elements of their float and earn meaningful interest off of it. Increasingly, I think that that float, which was historically held onto by the platforms, may well get shared more and more with the underlying companies. So payroll companies, if the float was all held at the bank, now they're actually able to participate in a portion of the float. And so that's a huge new

Starting point is 02:29:31 revenue stream for them, while interest rates are what they are, I will say, so that'll create increasing volatility in their in their revenue streams, because if interest rates go down, then obviously the float goes down. And so I do think that that's, that's, that's a big potential thing that a lot of a lot of companies might want to. Also offering more tender types allows a lot of the large platforms to keep dollars on their platform more.

Starting point is 02:29:52 So you see some of the big payments processors and their goal obviously is to have more float on their platform because they get a slice of that float. Offering more tender types, offering it not just to be held in dollars, but you could hold it in crypto, you could hold it in a stablecoin. That keeps the dollars on their platform even more, which gives them both more leverage and more open in the long term. That's very cool. What are you guys doing on the MCP side? I know you had some announcements recently there. Yeah, so that was another big part of the announcements today. I mean, the short answer is like MCPs make it easier for developers to build. I think the

Starting point is 02:30:24 concept of a REST API was new when we started Plaid because everything was on Stope. Now the concept of writing to a raw API without using cursor or windsurf or something like that is increasingly becoming rarer and will become rare over time. And so really for us, it's just staying on the cutting edge, building tools that help developers build faster

Starting point is 02:30:42 on Plaid, and then allowing them to get better analytics on their usage, their interactions with our system, so on and so forth. So it's fun, it's really fun. It's awesome. Do you have any type of broad thesis around how agent, you know, I think there's like a lot of narrative around, okay, agents will just default use crypto assets, or, you know, anything around that.

Starting point is 02:31:02 Anytime there's sort of a- MCPV2, it's coming. Yeah, anytime there's sort of an accepted narrative, I just wanna kind of push deeper. I'm curious if you have strong opinions. I do not think they will default these crypto assets. I think crypto assets might be easier at first, but look, the bank account is already effectively a digital first product.

Starting point is 02:31:21 Whereas now with a digital first product, did not start that way, certainly. Cards, oddly, are not with the digital first product, did not start that way, certainly. Cards oddly are not yet fully digital first, but are moving that direction. Like still you have to know a 16-digit card number to actually authenticate a card, whereas bank accounts have OAuth already set up. And then the next phase of that is obviously crypto. There's crypto starts being digital native, and so it becomes easier and easier to authenticate into things.

Starting point is 02:31:45 My take is that all three of those and many other tender types will become available to to to these to to to elements and to agents. But it's going to take a little while for the industry to evolve. But fast forward two, three years and it'll be all the same. Very cool. Anything else, Dory? No, this is great. This is fantastic. Congrats.

Starting point is 02:32:03 I'm curious, did Chesky tell you to move to this kind of release cycle, or have you been doing it for a while? It's sort of the Chesky method of entrepreneurship. We've been doing it for a little while, but man, they have developed such an impressive track record of doing it. And all the podcasts that he went on to talk about it, I think everybody else in the world decided to copy it.

Starting point is 02:32:23 So maybe we were inspired by seeing what they did beforehand, but certainly we've learned a lot from listening to their playbook. Yeah, the jobs approach, you know, walks so the chess key method could run. Chess key method. Exactly. Awesome, well I'm excited to read through

Starting point is 02:32:39 the other announcements later and come back on any time. It's great to have you. Congratulations. Have a good one. Cheers. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now

Starting point is 02:32:50 to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. I love that. There was one YCT team yesterday that had the Daytona and the Texas Timex. Yeah, the Day-Date was good. I saw a JLC Reverso. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:04 Saw some good watches. When we called the founders on it, they were like, oh, I don't want to embarrass. It's not super YC coded to have a hitter on the wrist. You got 500k, throw 100k into a Patek. You know? No, no, that's the Cluely method. Absolutely not. Cluely method. No.

Starting point is 02:33:22 The generational company and then buy a nice piece on bezel for your father father's days coming up Yeah, get your dad a watch Let's check in with our intern Tyler who's pivoting from computer science to art history. What do you got for us Tyler? Oh, he's at the Museum of Modern Art now. That's fantastic. Yeah, so earlier I was thinking like I think before I should really start studying, I should kind of just like benchmark my stats. Okay. So I took two different tests. The first one was the it was an AP art history practice exam. Okay. So, you know, it's like for high schoolers, average high schoolers, like pretty dumb. Yep. I thought I'd do pretty well. I

Starting point is 02:34:00 got 12 out of 29. So that's 41% so failing, you know, some, some place to grow there. And then I also took like, you know, maybe that exam is just like weirdly, you know, it's like very specific knowledge or something. I took another exam. This was the Britannica art history quiz on that one. I got 24 out of 60, 40%. So, you know, but I have a lot of real world there's about an hour left this show. So so we're using cursor for art history to answer those questions. Well, yeah, I was not. But that was earlier in the show. I have been studying. So I think I'm going to take it 20 minutes before the show. And we'll see how I do that. But I was also kind of just looking

Starting point is 02:34:48 You know at what are the kind of careers that art history majors generally go into yes So like if you kind of want to stay in the art world, there's basically You work in a museum or you work in kind of art dealership gallery. Yeah. Yeah So first I looked at kind of becoming like an a museum curator For that it's you basically need a PhD. Okay. So I don't think I'll be able to get that before the show ends, but I was looking at art dealership and obviously like for that, you kind of need some, some funding to start with. So I took a producer Ben's ramp card, laid down some art pieces that are going to come in next couple of weeks. So yeah, I'm already starting this career. I'm feeling

Starting point is 02:35:24 pretty good about myself. You flip those pieces, make it all back, pay off the ramp card, reared business. Yeah, we will be checking in with his IRR, seeing if he can beat the average venture fund. Yeah, just beat the market. It's that easy. Amazing.

Starting point is 02:35:39 Great work, Tyler. Yes, yes, making lots ofising progress, that's very good Anthropic co-founder Ben ma Ben man says that will know AI is transformative when it passes the economic touring test This is something I was talking about earlier Give an AI agent a job for a month let the hiring manager choose human or machine When they pick the machine more often than not. We've crossed the threshold. We've been talking about the economic touring test for a while. I'm glad that he wrapped it in a bow. Maybe it needs

Starting point is 02:36:14 its own coinage. Maybe we need to dig in to Anthropic more deeply. But we have the perfect guest for that. We have Sharon from Bloomberg joining us right now. Welcome to the stream, Sharon. How are you doing? Good, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for being here. I wanted to have you on because you've been on an absolute tear writing fantastic pieces. Maybe it would be best to start with Anthropic, which I was just talking about. What did you learn from the piece that you wrote about Anthropic and Dario?

Starting point is 02:36:43 We haven't had a chance to have him on the show, we talked to Sholto, they have an interesting culture, interesting history, can you give us your kind of 50,000 foot view on the company, what they stand for today and maybe how that's changed? Yeah, I think Anthropic is a company that probably the most right now is facing pressure both to live up to its really strong kind of ideological ethos,

Starting point is 02:37:10 which is around building AI safely and as an alternative to labs that they felt maybe weren't doing it as responsibly as they were. And then also to deliver on the business value, right? So I was kind of, I learned just how sort of savvy actually Anthropic has been with Dario at the helm, even though he has this very deep research science background.

Starting point is 02:37:30 He's been able to cut some major deals, grow the enterprise business quite quickly, double. And now there's other reporting about tripling revenue. So that's sort of where they're at. But as you get more money, as you get more, you get bigger and bigger funding rounds, how does that translate into pressure to move really fast at the same time that you're trying to be responsible? Did you get a sense that they have

Starting point is 02:37:54 a specific strategy around diversification in terms of hyperscaler partnerships? Because they've done a deal with Amazon, I believe. They were just mentioned at WWDC as plugging into Xcode. It feels like they're trying to maybe go more of as an infrastructure provider. They seem to be doing very well in coding and with on the enterprise side.

Starting point is 02:38:17 How much of that is deliberate or just like it got pulled out of them because of where their position in the market was? I mean, so in my reporting, it was very deliberate, their strategy to, first of all, not lock in with any one hyperscaler, right? So they have both Google and Amazon as partners on the front.

Starting point is 02:38:34 That kind of hedging, I think, was very calculated. And also, Dario, in my interviews, he's been pretty dismissive, our reporting about Stargate, saying it's not clear exactly what it is. And I think his stance is that you can scale up and not need to make such a big deal about it. At least that's what he said publicly to me.

Starting point is 02:38:56 But as you said, I think the pressure's on for them to deliver and show that they can. He invented scaling laws, but can you actually build up the compute and pay for it to do that? Can you talk a little bit about the rhetoric around safety? I was very, I never really got caught up in the paper clipping and the AI doom narrative, but after seeing DeepSeek and the comp.

Starting point is 02:39:19 That's what every human says right before they get paid. But after seeing DeepSeek drop in the Anthropic paper about manchurian candidates or what was it, secret hidden agents, I forget the term that they use, but essentially a sleeper agents embedding something nefarious within the weights of the model that maybe only comes out when it interacts with a certain endpoint or a certain web page.

Starting point is 02:39:42 It discovers that, hey, I'm not just know in some random solo devs cursor instance I'm actually inside the NSA I should go around and do something else and and that really flipped a bit in my mind to say okay safety research is actually maybe extremely important and maybe even extremely commercializable because people will want to do safety evaluations on the models that they use. How has the safety rhetoric evolved at at Anthropic over the last couple of years in your in your in your reporting? Yeah so I think you know AI doomers or people worried about AI safety have been doing these sort of hypothetical thought experiments like the paperclip experiment for a very long

Starting point is 02:40:22 time like predating even Dario Emede's right entry onto the scene. However, I think in Anthropic, what I've seen evolve is they're starting to outline and try, they're trying to be as concrete as possible to explain like what the risks are, what the different levels of risks are. They made a whole responsible scaling kind of document framework to say, okay,

Starting point is 02:40:44 it's kind of modeled after how biological labs are that are very high risk and how, OK, if what you're working on is this level of biological risk, then you have to have this corresponding level of actual physical lab safety. So that's how they viewed it in Anthropic. And so when I was reporting this out, they had recently had this kind of false alarm where they thought they were crossing into a level that was too dangerous for them to be able to handle.

Starting point is 02:41:07 And then they did extra tests and they're like, okay, no, we're all right for this release, but we better get up to par for the next. What time period was that? Was that like an hour or like 10 days or a month? So, you know, Dario told me they basically had to delay not this release, but the last big one, by something like nearly a week,

Starting point is 02:41:28 because at the last, sort of at the final days leading up to the release, their safety team, one of the red teaming group came to them and were like, listen, this model actually may be more capable than we thought, right? So I do think that's a challenge, right? Is taking these really hypothetical, seemingly kind of sci-fi scenarios and translating it to like, well, when is that actually going to happen at

Starting point is 02:41:50 our lab? And what do you have to do to protect yourself? And it's both physical security, like making sure no one can break into your lab or something like that. But it's also, you know, actually making sure that there are safeguards on the software side to stop someone from saying. And I think the most tangible threat that I heard them talk about was the biological one. And that was a specific concern with that release I mentioned, that could someone use this to come up with a novel bio-weapon? Sure.

Starting point is 02:42:18 I'll hold my hand through the process. There's an interesting dynamic with safety teams, where if you're sitting there with a team of, let's call it, 20-something people and you're costing the company tens of millions, I don't know, $10 million a year, you're not going to feel that your job's that safe if you're never sounding the alarm. Sure, sure.

Starting point is 02:42:40 So there's kind of an incentive to be like, oh, this feels a little dangerous. Millions of dollars every year. Let's look into it. Yeah. I mean, there's also just so many other dynamics this feels a little dangerous. Let's look into it. Yeah. I mean, there's also just so many other dynamics at play. And I think people always dig into this.

Starting point is 02:42:49 Are models too powerful? That's a great marketing line. It's too good. You could never give it to the wild. It's too powerful. And then there's also, maybe you just haven't put together all the inference capabilities and scaled up your data centers to really have a productive launch.

Starting point is 02:43:09 You need an extra two weeks in the oven. Oh yeah, it's a safety issue. So there's a million different ways that the safety stuff can be kind of abused. I'm not accusing them of abusing it, but it does feel like, you know, we noticed this with the Lama 4 launch. They haven't been able to release Behemoth yet,

Starting point is 02:43:25 and they had some issues with benchmarking. But notably, they didn't say it was a safety issue. And that would have almost been an easy out, and it's one that I think most foundation model companies would have taken a year ago. But the community, the developer community, just doesn't seem to buy that line of reasoning as much anymore.

Starting point is 02:43:44 I don't know if you had any reactions to the long-term development. Yeah, I have, you know, in my own interviews with Dario, I've asked him about this. And you know, he has been upfront. We report on, you know, there were delays to just this latest big release, right? The latest Sonnet, they're kind of, or sorry, is it Opus, whatever the biggest one is, I'm forgetting all the specific names right now. And you know, we have reported on these delays. We wrote a big article about how scaling laws,

Starting point is 02:44:10 at least with the pre-training side of these models, were starting to slow down. And in my reporting with Dario, he was pretty upfront that that wasn't a safety thing. That big delay was not that big model being later than some of their early projections, that's because they were facing kind of the same technological problems that I think many labs are facing, right? And ultimately, they did release it.

Starting point is 02:44:33 So, but I think people, you know, it's absolutely reasonable to question any company's motivation when they say something slowed down. I think I saw no evidence for that in this specific case. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about the most recent deal, Meta acquiring Scale AI. 49% of the company is changing hands, I believe, at around $14 or $15 billion.

Starting point is 02:44:56 Spiritually, the whole thing. Yes, yes, yes. What has been your reaction, and what have you learned from reporting on that? Yeah, I think you just covered that they have a new CEO. So breaking it all down. We just reported that, yeah, per our sources, that they have picked the new CEO to be Jason Droege,

Starting point is 02:45:16 former VP. He's currently at scale being promoted. And he was formerly an Uber VP and formerly also a partner in VC at Benchmark. But that's just the latest, right? We have really been breaking the news on this front. We had a scoop this Saturday night that we were the first ones to report that these talks were happening for Meta to make this multi-billion investment in scale.

Starting point is 02:45:39 I think it really caught a lot of people by surprise in the industry. This is a huge investment planned on Meta's front, probably their biggest ever in a company. And I think it's a sign that Zuckerberg is ready to go full on founder mode and try to catch up on AI. And this last Llama 4 release was widely considered a disappointment. And so how do you, how do you change course? Right. Maybe it's this big, right, big investment and the super intelligence lab and he's recruiting engineers.

Starting point is 02:46:16 We've reported on that. They're making crazy high offers, right? They will open, Buzak will open the checkbook for the top talent. Yeah, I think the interesting thing that stood out about some of it, you know, people were just reporting the headline numbers of saying, Oh, you could make, you know, nine figures was the number. Yeah. Nine figures.

Starting point is 02:46:37 But you have to look, if you're trying to recruit somebody that joined opening eye two, three years ago, they're probably run rating at $10 million a year already on a fully loaded comp basis. I think it makes sense. What have you learned about the future of the scale business? Is Jason going to be pounding the pavement, trying to get more customers for the core business, continue to adapt the core business? Yeah, there's a lot of scale competitors right now

Starting point is 02:47:05 that are saying, hey, we're going to take a lot of deals. They're foaming at the mouth. Because, yeah, we're going to use this to our advantage when we go to the other hyperscalers and say, do you want to do business with the company that's owned by Facebook or Meta? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really unclear what's

Starting point is 02:47:21 going to happen with the future of Scales. Um, you know, obviously the meta Investment, you know, that's expected You could see partnerships happening there on that front, but what will happen with the other customers? I think we don't know and and what will happen with Yeah other competitors in this space could they start to right gain ground as scale deepens the ties with meta We'll see. I think what we do know, we have reported that Alex Wang plans to join Metta. I think for Metta, he is seen as someone who is just sort of reinvigorating their AI team and this renewed AI effort. He's a big name. He's incredibly savvy,

Starting point is 02:48:02 very well connected and built a real business with scale. So I think that's where we're in the middle of the deal. We're waiting to see all the official details as this plays out. Earlier this week, Bill Gurley was talking about the M&A markets and why we're still seeing these kind of odd zombie acquisitions happening. Tech was laying the blame at the foot of Lena Con for a long time.

Starting point is 02:48:30 Lena Con's obviously out. Why do you think the big tech companies are still using that? She's still posting, though. She's still reposting stuff about being anti-monopolistic. OK, yeah. So she's around. Is this more just like, this is just a more efficient acquisition vehicle Generally even without even within a different administration and so it's continually used I

Starting point is 02:48:53 Don't think this is an asset that Metta would want to own just generally right you wouldn't want to fully own it is Because you're you're you're you're dealing with Tens of thousands of offshore contractors. Sure, sure. Is that something that Metta wants to accept? Don't they already do that with the customers? Sure, but they've had issues. Sure, but they've also had issues with it, right?

Starting point is 02:49:13 It's liability. Anyway, sorry. So of course, you know, LenaCon is known to be aggressive on going after monopolistic behavior, and especially in the tech market, doesn't necessarily mean that the current FTC is not gonna scrutinize these kinds of deals, right? I would say it's way too soon to have any definitive take

Starting point is 02:49:34 on how this FTC will act around these kinds of deals. I think companies never wanna raise too many eyebrows with regulators, and even if people are from different political parties, we have seen Republican controlled FTC sometimes, I mean, that is part of their job, right, is to review these sorts of large transactions. So that may be why we're continuing to still see

Starting point is 02:49:57 companies not wanna go too far on that front. Yeah, yeah. Can we move over to Microsoft? It feels like Satya Nadella has carved out a ton of territory in the AI space, and now the game is about holding on to it. It seems like they might be back to training their own language models at the same time. At the last Microsoft build keynote, he was distinctly highlighting how model agnostic Azure was

Starting point is 02:50:24 and how they would be happy to route you to any OpenAI model, any DeepSeek model, any Llama model. They wanna be Switzerland, but at the same time, they wanna have a horse in the race. So what's the latest thinking around Microsoft? I mean, I report on Microsoft more in the context of OpenAI. So I'm not the Microsoft expert.

Starting point is 02:50:44 I will say that, yeah, obviously we've seen more attention around the Microsoft OpenAI relationship lately. And what that means, I think OpenAI is also diversifying, right, they're working with other hyperscalers now for Stargate, they have Oracle on board, they have SoftBank financing. So this is no longer just like an exclusive relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI,

Starting point is 02:51:07 and I think that goes both ways. Yeah. What is the dynamic right now in the reporter, in the reporter talent space? It seems like the value of just being a pure play writer is maybe going down, but the value of being able to acquire, you know, net new information and actually get scoops is higher than ever.

Starting point is 02:51:29 What is the dynamic right now? We've seen, I think, a lot of different shakeups and layoffs at different companies, but I'm curious what you're seeing. I mean, I think that the value of reporting, like a real original reporting and going to the store, getting scoops, getting people to share with you information that is in public.

Starting point is 02:51:48 That takes a lot of human skill that, at least in my job, I don't think that's replaceable by AI for now. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was getting at. I do think at some point maybe you would have an army of agents that would just reach out to 200 employees at a startup at, you know, a single given time. But, but yeah, that, that, that tracks. Yeah. In terms of the Stargate project, were you able to go visit as part of the reporting? Can you give us kind of the lay of the land and on, on what, who the, who the major players are

Starting point is 02:52:22 and what the most interesting angles to dig into in the progress in Abilene has been? Yeah, for sure. Well, shout out to my colleague Brody Ford. I don't know if he's listening, but I'll send this to him after. He actually went out to Abilene for me because I was unavailable the one day that we could go, whatever. And it's astounding. I mean, I saw the pictures, I got the live feed. It is expansive. I think it's hard to understand just the vast scale of it until you really see pictures, video, or go there. And I think that there was a lot of,

Starting point is 02:52:57 there was sort of a lot of people doubting if Stargate was even real. And I think there's still a lot we don't know about the future of this project, like exactly where the other sites will be. They've said they plan 10 more, at least in the US. We don't know exactly like how the financing will work. Stargate, we talked to Masa-san for this, who's obviously, you know, SoftBank's leading the financing. They said it's project by project, we'll go step by step. But I think what we can learn

Starting point is 02:53:20 from Abilene is like, at least that first site, that Abilene site is very real. It is happening. There is being built out. We've seen the pace of it. So that could end up being kind of a template or a test case for how much Stargate can execute in the future on all of its promises. That makes a ton of sense. Anything else, Dory?

Starting point is 02:53:40 Makes a ton of sense, no. Thank you so much for hopping on. This was fantastic. Get a reach out when you got your next scoop. Yeah, we'd love to have you on the same day to talk about it. You so much for hopping on. This is fantastic get a reach out when you got your next Scoop yeah More context is great. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Take care. We'll talk to you serious Surrounded by journalists hold your positions We have Cameron from nominal coming on the show next. Oh, he's already in the studio. There you go

Starting point is 02:53:59 I'll let you take the intro. I gotta run Let's do it. Welcome in. There he is. What's going on? Cameron, welcome to the show. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you guys.

Starting point is 02:54:17 You've been busy since the last time. I don't actually know when that was. Maybe it feels like maybe a month or two ago, but time flies. I think it was about a month ago. And the fun fact with that is that was right in the middle of the 10-day Series B fundraise sprint. So it's absolute chaos.

Starting point is 02:54:37 Absolute chaos. And people appreciate this. Connor Love from Lightspeed Ventures posted or tweeted earlier today, but I was actually taking that, that prior TBPN call from the Lightspeed office here, like in between. No way. So he was, he was able to see, all right, how, how does Cam handle himself, you know, in a, in a, in a, in a,

Starting point is 02:55:00 a TV like setting, not that we're a TV. Exactly. It was a good tactic. He was like, Hey, do you want to be on this and just take it from our office? That's awesome. Break down the new round, how it came together, who the different players, all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited.

Starting point is 02:55:16 We're announcing a $75 million Series B. There we go. There we go. Led by Sequoia, and particularly Alfred Lin is going to be joining Nominal's board. And then as we mentioned, there's an additional investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a combination of Guru Chahal there and Connor Love, which we're really excited about. And then an existing investment from our investors at General Catalyst, Lux and Founders Fund. So it's-

Starting point is 02:55:49 Basically you're collecting them all at this point. Yeah, gotta catch me. I don't know how many. That's amazing. Talk about business progress since the last call. I'm sure things are moving really quickly. Yeah, things are moving really quickly. I mean, we're raising this capital to accelerate

Starting point is 02:56:06 just to go faster. Really three big things we're gonna do with this. The first is kind of continue to expand into larger and larger enterprises. We're very proud to say, many of the startups and scale-ups building in this new hardware wave are our nominal customers. And that is gonna keep growing. But

Starting point is 02:56:26 recently we've been taking our product to these Fortune 500 companies, defense primes, and the traction has been really, really positive. We're also expanding internationally. So we're already serving a handful of customers in Europe, and we're going to keep doing that. we're gonna keep doing that. The second big thing is product development. And so we have a big belief that to win really big in this software for hardware world, it's gonna require multiple products. We've started our original thrust is around testing,

Starting point is 02:56:59 but we're having customers pull us in linking testing to more quality acceptance testing, production, manufacturing. And then later in the life cycle saying, hey, I use nominal to build all of the software, build all the rules and logic that governs how my system works under test. And I actually just want to version control that, organize it. And I want to deploy that on my asset when it's in the field and more of a monitoring sort of fleet monitoring, fleet maintenance use case. So we're building products and we're gonna be expanding So that's that's the where the funding is going. Yeah, how big is the market for this or how should I think about the market?

Starting point is 02:57:35 Is this is something where there's a lot of incumbents that that you can kind of go after and pull away or? and pull away from or eat alive. Yeah, eat alive, we won't use those words. Yeah. Or are we kind of like disaggregating test functions across all the companies and allowing teams to move faster and selling into existing organizations? Yeah, it's really, you know, the way I think about it is it's helpful to just give like a quick, you know,

Starting point is 02:58:02 update kind of the status quo world. And so I think we see pretty much everywhere we go that testing is too slow. And really you have a scenario A where people are using 1990 software. It's pre-cloud. So it's, it is like, especially in the aerospace and more industrial world software that was built before the notion of like centralizing data even existed. It's crazy and people are really frustrated with it. So those are, you think of things like Siemens or Emerson or National Instruments, which I had to kind of mention last time. So that is an area where there's a direct swap for spend. Like people

Starting point is 02:58:40 spend a ton of money there. Those are billion dollar businesses that we are excited to be disrupting. And I think the second area is where people are taking new software, new data technologies that are not designed for hardware at all in the least and trying to use those to sort of aggregate together and build this like tool chain for testing and nominals just a better way.

Starting point is 02:59:05 And so that's showing these organizations what the future can look like and delivering that value. And they're willing to pay for it. What kind of metrics do you track outside of core business metrics? Are you thinking about trying to figure out if you're increasing the development timelines for your customers? In some ways like if you can allow people to just

Starting point is 02:59:27 iterate test faster, you can actually just allow them to accelerate their businesses. Like how much how much do you try to track that kind of thing? I know a lot of it is probably hard to to fully capture. Yeah, I'd say I had a phone conversation with with Brian Schimpf, CEO of Andral, where he sort saying emphatically, one of the metrics he looks at, the single most important thing is how fast are my individual programs testing. It is such a direct correlation to just the success of that product. And that is what we see everywhere.

Starting point is 03:00:03 So at the high level, like the value that we're delivering is increasing that test cadence and that throughput. You know, being able to have, you know, cases where at our customers, you know, test campaigns that were supposed to take nine months taking 6.5 months, right? That's something we deliver to a customer. And when that's on a $200 million program

Starting point is 03:00:24 where their end customer is the DOD, like that's massive, right? You know, it's funny for a product like Nominals, we actually, you know, we obviously track user engagement and time and app and all these sort of functions, but that's honestly like not the best correlation. We sort of say, it was really exciting as you see more and more time people spend in the app.

Starting point is 03:00:43 And a lot of our North Star is actually like, I kind of want a test engineer to be able to drop into the app for a little bit, get the insight that they need really quickly. And then if they move on, that's actually fine because they're that value that is compounding. Are you guys going to actually set up an international presence at all?

Starting point is 03:01:01 You said you have a bunch of international customers. Are we going to see a nominal office in the UK? Australia. Australia. Got to go to Australia. It's a quick flight. You're naming some good places. I'll say I'm doing sort of nominal's first big

Starting point is 03:01:16 international business trip, actually, over the next two weeks. So going to be going to the Paris Air Show. Let's give it up for international business. I love international business. We love an international businessman on the show. business. I love international business, man. On the show. Yeah, it's an honor.

Starting point is 03:01:27 It's an honor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Going to be going to the Paris Air Show and then and then, you know, stopping in in the UK, as you kind of mentioned. Yeah, I mean, we're really excited. And I think we'll build a backlog of business before opening like a physical office there But I think it's absolutely you know in in the most feature and we're excited for that you mentioned Australia general acus world like we're really supportive of that and they

Starting point is 03:01:56 They want and need all the same things that our US based customers do yeah I noticed you you offer the service on premise still. Obviously, a lot of companies are moving on cloud. How important, can you give me some dynamics around like hyperscaler adoption within these industries, like AWS, GovCloud, ITAR compliance? I know Palantir got some super high ITAR clearance. There's obviously different tiers to this stuff.

Starting point is 03:02:26 Is there one hyperscaler that's kind of pulled away in this category? Yeah, it's a really good, it's a good question. I, you know, from nominal's perspective, our goal is to be as sort of flexible and as versatile as we can. So we don't really pick anyone, you know, provider. I'd say from our product perspective,

Starting point is 03:02:47 we have two products in the market right now. The nominal core product is where we started, which is Cloud-based. The whole value proposition there is you can get all of your telemetry, sensor data logs, testing data in one central place, run analytics and automate. Very quickly, we launched our second product,

Starting point is 03:03:04 which is nominal connect, which is actually a desktop application, run analytics and automate. Very quickly, we launched our second product, which is nominal connect, which is actually a desktop application, which sounds crazy to say and in Twitter. But we're meeting our customers and we need a market where it is. It's run on, it's built in Rust. It's run on a game engine, right?

Starting point is 03:03:18 So it's not your normal, and so, you know, super deterministic workflows, sub 10 millisecond latency. Like this is a really- What game engine are you using? It's unreal, yeah. Unreal, no way. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, so it's really cool.

Starting point is 03:03:33 So being able to have, you know, whereas it used to be, you know, maybe a national instruments, you know, desktop app with like a little widget and you can kind of envision the thing from 1990. You know, we have this insane, super fast rendering, 3D visualization of our customers, robotic systems or drones, right? Like with telemetry coming in and the power is that can run completely air gapped.

Starting point is 03:04:01 Right. If you're in Mojave or you're down range, like doing something, all that data is still going to your laptop. And then as soon as you get connectivity, it syncs back up to the nominal mothership. All that data is merged and deduplicated, and it's super powerful for our customers to be able to make sense of what happened. Does Epic have a different business model for this kind of industrial use case?

Starting point is 03:04:18 I know that it isn't Unreal Engine free, unless you're generating a million dollars in revenue. Like, how do you pay Tim Sweeney? Yeah, it's a good question. I won't discuss it right now. You can answer it at a high level. I'm sure you can. It's got details.

Starting point is 03:04:36 Yeah. No, I mean, we're really excited about the technology and where it can scale. I'll leave it at that. OK, cool. Yeah, well, the market is speaking. I looked it up. The company that owns National Instruments

Starting point is 03:04:51 is actually down a few percentage points over the last six months, most likely in reaction to camera and TV. I'm sure it's extremely correlated. They're just already pricing it in. Of course, of course. Well, thank you so much for happy Do we hit the gong proper let's hit the gong Alfred Lynn on the board that doesn't happen every day

Starting point is 03:05:15 Yeah, super excited come back on anytime Thank you guys appreciate it Our next guest is a Neil from Eater, hopping on in five minutes. We'll go through some time. By the way, Cameron's resume is just absolutely insane. Bring it on. Product and growth at Anderil, advisor to applied intuition.

Starting point is 03:05:34 Oh, let's go. Head of defense at Sail Drone, investor operator at Lux Capital, and then now started nominal. So it's almost like he was built for this. World-Win Tour. I mean, there's other news. It's not really tech related, but it's related to our friends

Starting point is 03:05:53 in the Wall Street and finance community. The race for Democratic nomination for New York City mayor is heating up. Andrew Cuomo is dropping like a stone on polymarket. Zoran Mamdani is absolutely spiking. He's at 42% versus Cuomo's 56% right now. Signal has a breakdown. He says, this is a textbook example of narrative discipline. Whether or not you agree with Zoran's platform, the coherence is surgical. Every message hits the same emotional register. Every post or speech is a variation of the same core.

Starting point is 03:06:29 Cord, anti-machine, people first, morally upright. His surge is pure mimetic lift. It's pure belief, and belief spreads fast. This is the guy that just says, freeze the rent. That's his platform. Yes, and every time he posts. His new bid is eliminating police presence in areas that have high crime. Yes, and every time he posts. His new bid is eliminating police presence in areas that have high crime.

Starting point is 03:06:48 Yes, yes, yes. And so a lot of accelerationists are getting excited about this. A lot of people that are anti-New York are supporting this because they think it will destroy New York. But he is gaining ground. And he might be the next mayor. Who knows?

Starting point is 03:07:03 Every time he posts about freezing the rent, Nikita Beer chimes in and says, don't you think the rent should just be free? You're not going far enough. Yeah, housing should be free, capital is big. Yeah, capital is big. Also, new all-time high for Oracle. Let's hear it for Oracle.

Starting point is 03:07:18 Wow, let's go. Alison is cooking. We love it. Congratulations to Larry Ellison. Larry's listening to this. I'm sure he is. We love it, yes. He follows TVPN. Ellison is cooking. We love it. Congratulations to Larry Ellison. Larry's listening to this. We love it. I'm sure he is. He follows TBPN.

Starting point is 03:07:28 It's just fantastic. Oracle's deeply underrated. It's a fantastic company. Been in Foundry Road for decades and continues to be on an absolute tear. They basically own Abilene. They do, they do. And they're getting, yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:39 The Stargate project would not be happening without them, I'm sure. So we have our next guest coming into the studio in the TBPN Ultra. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on? I love the background. Very cool. How are you doing? It's almost like you're in the hardware business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down. What's behind you? What do you do?

Starting point is 03:07:57 Yeah, we are a networking company and our hardware behind us is our power, routing, switching, wireless, old school stuff that powers the internet. Incredible. Break down the news today. And John, get the car ready. OK, I'll get it ready. What happened?

Starting point is 03:08:15 What happened? We raised a new round of financing to go build even better hardware and scale up operations and physical world stuff. And how much did you raise? We raised about 170 million. Let's go! Hit it, John.

Starting point is 03:08:30 Congratulations. Best part of the day. Congratulations. Talk about, give some backstory on the history of the company, kind of the different stages, what it took to get here. Sure. So we got started actually quite a few years ago and what's interesting is networking is one of the largest

Starting point is 03:08:48 parts of technology but almost no new companies get started networking. Yeah. Networking supports multiple $100 billion market cap businesses but almost all of them got billed through acquisition. Nobody sat down and said, hey, we'll build the entire stack together, cohesive operating systems, said, hey, we'll build the entire stack together,

Starting point is 03:09:05 cohesive operating systems, hardware, APIs, firmware. So we got started a few years ago building out the entire stack. The COVID and supply chain years were tough because we couldn't get any hardware out of it. But the last few years for us has just been really about delivering great products to customers and just like scaling it up across throughput, bandwidth, products, integration. But then I think, you know, nobody really thinks about networking unless you're working on it or a day like this, which causes errors and takes down, you know, something like 15% of the internet or something. Terrible. What's going on? We've been live the entire time. The issues have been happening. Can

Starting point is 03:09:43 you give us a quick update on what you think is happening there? The production team is stressed right now. They're sweating right now. Yeah. Because you guys are up, there are rumors that you guys took down the internet. Oh, yes. It's a growth hack.

Starting point is 03:09:54 It's a growth hack. Just watch TVP end of it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think the really interesting part about networking is most of the issues actually happen because of configuration errors. And today, that's one of the issues actually happen because of like configuration errors. And today that's one of the causes for it because it's you know disparate hardware systems,

Starting point is 03:10:16 software systems that don't really work together and they're made by many different vendors etc. Today was one of the reasons for not the entire reason but one of the reasons for was like network configuration errors. Wow. You guys have a, it seems like you basically have every scale up on the planet as a customer already. Is that close to true? Are you working towards it? What's kind of the full range of your guys' customer base? Because the job finished or is the job not finished? Or it's just getting started.

Starting point is 03:10:41 Are you quoting Kobe John? I'm saying the job's not finished. So our customer base, I think is quite interesting. We do have a lot of tech companies and folks that are scaling up as customers, but probably our most interesting ones are the manufacturing facilities, warehouses, schools, folks that go build ISPs and data centers and life sciences labs, all of them sort of need connectivity and internet and networking to do whatever they're doing. And you know, probably my favorite part in the last five, six years is looking at all

Starting point is 03:11:15 these different types of amazing businesses that have nothing to do with Silicon Valley, but sort of are the underpinning of our economy and how things get built and all the interesting work they're doing from battery manufacturing to hydrogen cells to when one of us buys something online, how quickly does it get there is because there's some great business out there actually doing it, but it's all automated and then they need networking.

Starting point is 03:11:39 So our customer base definitely is, we have a big swath of some of the great tech companies, but it's really fanned out everywhere throughout the economy too. Walk me through some of the work you're doing around hardware innovation, software innovation, business model innovation. Like what's most important, what's been most acceleratory for you and kind of break those down in terms of priorities and where you're investing in what you're most excited about. and kind of break those down in terms of priorities and where you're investing

Starting point is 03:12:06 and what you're most excited about. So I actually think those things are all interconnected because it's what incentives are what drives everything. So if you look at legacy companies, what they're trying to do is build hardware for X dollars and then sell it to you for X plus whatever margin they're trying to hit. And so there's two ways these legacy companies can make money either by charging customers

Starting point is 03:12:28 way more than the value they're getting or by making hardware with cheaper components and less quality components, et cetera. For us, we don't sell hardware to customers at all. We just sell the whole thing as a service, which is also very, I know the rest of us that work in Silicon Valley, like that's sort of kind of given in how we buy things. But doing hardware and enterprise networking that way was barely new and we were the first people to sort of do it. But that actually drives incentives on where you go invest. Because we are not trying to squeeze the last 10 cents out of a component, we tend to go make very different choices in hardware on what sort of components that we use, how are they laid out build better software and this loop sort of hits. And so our business model is that not only do we build the hardware and software, we

Starting point is 03:13:30 actually deployed and maintain it ourselves too. We're fully vertically integrated. I know a lot of the tech companies don't want to touch real world things, but the whole messiness of racks and cables and manufacturing, we go do not just the pretty parts of it, but also the underbelly, if you will, of actually going and deploying all of it. And we do this all without any capital costs to customers and only marginal costs on operating expenditure

Starting point is 03:13:55 compared to how the operator. Yeah, talk about that. Talk about why a CFO would wanna have OPEX versus CAPEX in this type of scenario. And is that kind of a driver around decision making? It is, but it depends on the business, right? So if you have businesses that are P-owned, for example, you actually want it to be CAPEX.

Starting point is 03:14:17 And so our contracts can hit the books as a lease. So it doesn't hit their operating margins. They get an EBITDA boost. That happens too. But ultimately ultimately what customers actually care about is, do I have to take a bunch of capital and buy hardware that the moment I buy it, it's a depreciating asset, then I have to pay a bunch of money to go install it, and then every four or five years I have to go buy new hardware because some new technology comes out, etc. Or if this hardware goes bad, I have to go replace it myself. That's the part CFOs care about that we remove entirely, which is instead of having to go

Starting point is 03:14:52 spend massive amounts of capital and operating expenditure to fix all this stuff, we take all that on and take on all the risk instead of the customers. Then that contract can be actuated as OPEX or CAPEX, depending on what their business needs. Talk about meters business. You're doing a lot of things. You're doing hardware, software. I'm assuming a network of team all over the country that

Starting point is 03:15:20 are helping with installs. Talk about kind of the efficiency of the country that are helping with installs. Talk about the efficiency of the business. And I'm assuming this new $170 million round is a testament to the strength of the core business. Yeah, it's a really interesting core business, right? Because you're right. We get to go design hardware, make software, and then we build these racks like the one

Starting point is 03:15:43 you're seeing behind us, and then actually go deploy these by the hundreds for some customers everywhere. We're not just in the United States, we're in Canada, we're in Europe, everywhere in the world, hopefully by next year. The operational parts of it are super challenging. If you can imagine a data center in the middle of nowhere or a manufacturing facility, there's legacy hardware that's old hardware in there. You have to go fix that, and then you're integrating it, but then you're putting in this new entire rack. What's important for us is it's like a duck swimming in a lake. The customer doesn't see all the kicking

Starting point is 03:16:26 that happens underneath to kind of deliver this to them. And our work is always tying these things in together. Why are we building the hardware? How is the software getting built? How are we deploying it and maintaining it? And then any issues we see on one end should then be a loop back to how we build better hardware. What choices are we making?

Starting point is 03:16:46 Just this morning, a bunch of my colleagues were arguing literally what type of ports, where should go so it's easy for install. That loop is a new way of thinking in networking infrastructure, even though after computing and CPUs and Intel, networking is the oldest and largest part of all of technology. So, uh, you, I mean, you, you, you, you design, develop, manufacture, make these networking equipment, you're deploying it as a lease on a more rental basis. Does that create a CapEx problem for you? Like, how are you thinking about your, the way your balance sheet is growing and developing?

Starting point is 03:17:26 Is debt going to play a role earlier than it might at most other companies in your business because of the structure of what you're building? Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So if you look to historically how networking hardware got built, somebody built it for let's say $500 and bomb costs, but by the time it ends up in a customer's hands, it's like $5,000. So networking companies have enjoyed tremendous margin. So you should start there at any time. Second, what we also try to do is a lot of our customers, because we're

Starting point is 03:18:01 dealing with physical spaces, whether it's in retail or manufacturing or data centers anywhere, the buildup times are predictable, right? Because there's a certain date you're trying to hit when a data center goes live or a manufacturing facility goes live or a school goes live. So a lot of our manufacturing can be predictive towards that. Unlike other hardware companies, we don't have to hold massive amounts of inventory without knowing where it's going. We do have issues on trying to figure out exact timing there. We're not always perfect, but we can do that. So to answer your question, we actually use debt a lot more and plan to use a lot more to scale up what we do on deploying with our real estate

Starting point is 03:18:41 partners. A big focus of what we also do is not only do we directly sell to customers, but we also go partner with real estate firms to just include meter in as a default. And that's actually where the main meter comes from. If you look at a building, there's electricity, there's water, there's cell phone lines, there's power meters, water meters. This should be more like a utility. Why is it that we're all struggling to kind of wrangle it, to get it into working in any type of space? So for us, the debt and where that plays in is a little bit on hard work, but a lot of it also on deployment and actually getting it out to the world and the pace of which we can do expecting a customer

Starting point is 03:19:23 and some sort of discounted cashflow expectation of 12, 18, 24 months from now. Talk to me about the kind of like wheelhouse customer for you or the wheelhouse deployment. Sounds like, you know, apartment building makes sense. Scale up, startup office makes sense. It's probably overkill for the home office. You might just want to get an Amazon arrow mesh networking system. At the same time, you know, you look at Google's campus, it's absolutely massive. Are you going one direction or the other? Are you maxed out or are there specific oddities that you can kind of illuminate on what it'll take,

Starting point is 03:20:06 how you'll have to change the business or scale to satisfy a client like Meta's Silicon Valley campus, which is multiple buildings and probably one of the most complex networking infrastructures in America. Is there something where you can just kind of copy paste your current solution so many times and it all fits together or will there be new? Technical innovations that you need to hit to actually service someone at that scale. I Think the answer is both but we are already doing customers at that scale and more For example, Britt Bridgewater was the largest item in the world runs on meter

Starting point is 03:20:42 As an example, but I think we will go to continue even more technical advancements to hopefully bring new things that legacy folks just can't do or won't do or can't think of and sort of implement. But I think overall, what's really interesting about networking is that nobody gets to do custom networking, if you will, because it has to go work with the rest of the world.

Starting point is 03:21:05 Generally, when you look at enterprise companies, they end up building some sort of Frankenstein thing or what they started off with that becomes a custom thing for each enterprise customer. For us, any enterprise customer has to then go work with the rest of the internet, so they don't get to do their own protocols, their own things.

Starting point is 03:21:23 So largely, there are things on the margin, but largely, whether you're a Google or a Meta or Bridgewater or a school customer or large universities that we do, all of them use the same internet, if you will. And this is also the same in like data centers too. What you would find in majority of non-GPU data centers is not that different, what you would find in majority of non GPU data centers is not that different what you would find in a large campus because it all has to flow together. The packets must flow and then what's the difference between non GPU data centers and GPU data centers in this? Yes. So, so yeah, in GPU stuff,

Starting point is 03:21:59 there's actually a lot that happens between two GPUs and between cluster GPUs. That's a different type of networking. There's a lot of work that's happening. Obviously Nvidia with their Monox acquisition for five years ago and what's happening now with Alter Ethernet, but just everything else is actually relatively same. What was the, what was the keyword you just said? Ultra, Ultra Ethernet? Ultra Ethernet is a new thing that's happening. I remember cat five, cat six, I've heard about cat seven, is this like cat eight? What are we talking here? This is like a whole different ball game.

Starting point is 03:22:30 So if you look at, you know, the joke in the networking world is, you know, ethernet is dead, long live ethernet. You know, every sort of 15, 20 years, ethernet is predicted that it will be the end of it But you know somebody comes up with innovations on how we can scale up on speed on throughput on bandwidth on security So ultra ethernet is this new version that's coming out for you know The next phase of all the data center build that that's happening

Starting point is 03:22:59 You know roughly the US has more data centers in the rest of all combined roughly That's a white pill right there. Everyone says we're falling behind, but not today. But the rest of the world is trying to catch up to get to that. And the US is trying to do that. So there's a lot of it. We're undefeated. We got meter. Actually we support meters in national strategy. So it's kind of It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke.

Starting point is 03:23:27 It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke.

Starting point is 03:23:35 It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke.

Starting point is 03:23:43 It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. cameras that do power and video over ethernet and you and you know we're thinking about kind of the V2 of the studio and there's a ton of insane things that you can do over ethernet it's no longer just the LAN cable and so yeah it must be fun to be at the heart of that. Jordy any more questions or should we let them get back to building? Congratulations on the funding milestones. And yeah check in next time.

Starting point is 03:24:03 We'll come back anytime. Thank you both. See you soon. Come back any time. See you soon. Bye. Cheers. Our next guest will be joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime. It is an absolute...

Starting point is 03:24:12 Banger day. Lots of fundraisers. I mean, no, but I was just going to say it's actually insane we've been able to keep the show up with the entire internet going down. It is crazy. We got lucky today. Have we ever... Has the stream ever actually gone fully down? We had Zoom go down one day and we were kind of wrecked by that.

Starting point is 03:24:30 Well let's bring in our next guest. Ian in the chat says Mixpanel, Shopify and GCP are still down for him, all the services that he's in. Honestly, if you're worried about the show going down, do not worry. Just send us your mailing address We will print the show onto vinyl and we'll send you a record of the show So you can listen to it in high fidelity same day shipping exactly So that you can get the show almost live. Yeah, yeah, almost hours

Starting point is 03:24:58 Yeah, yeah I will also do a lot of innovation on the vinyl pressing because I think that takes a while too Anyway, our next guest is here Welcome to the stream. How you doing trash? What's going on? Good to see you It's great to have you it's great to have you big day big guys announced a series a You took down the whole And you took down the whole internet. You took down the whole internet.

Starting point is 03:25:24 I can't confirm or deny I was part of the launch strategy, but good timing. Give us the stats. How much you raised? Yeah, raised $20 million. There we go. Set it. Congratulations.

Starting point is 03:25:37 Who'd you raise it from? Yeah, sound led the round, participation. Hit it again for sound. Hit it again. Congratulations. Amazing. participation hit it again for sound hit again Amazing sorry continue. We got it a little excited. Yeah participation from Buckley no ball Founder drop box our man from perplexity a bunch of other awesome Angeles. Yeah, very cool. Very cool Breakdown the pitch like how are you positioning the company right now? Because I know you've been doing a lot of different stuff.

Starting point is 03:26:08 They pivoted from pizza to something new. I know that there's the pizza delivery company. There was that Zoom company that was doing pizza on demand. That didn't go so well. So obviously a huge white space. Well, they just did pizza for a day. They sold out. Yeah. They moved on to the next thing. So what do you build now? So give us an update on the platform. Yeah. How are you positioning it? For sure. So I think for us always the mission of Antimetal

Starting point is 03:26:29 has been how do we simplify infrastructure? But current moment, what's really different is, you know, software engineering, the bottleneck used to always be programming. Like if you could build the software, you could ship it, you could distribute to everyone, suddenly your product is live. Now you have all this AI assisted stuff, like really awesome products like, cursor, level, volt, V0, and increasingly like the latter half of that equation, which is deploying that code, maintaining it, making sure it scales,

Starting point is 03:26:54 like going from one user to one million, is increasingly the bottleneck on like how companies, are actually gonna grow and sustain. Like, the short of it is like writing code is no longer the hard part, right? It's all this operations and maintenance. And so what we're really indexing on is building this product that helps you better manage

Starting point is 03:27:12 and automate infrastructure. So a lot of that is the nuance of infrastructure versus code is a lot of it is knowledge that is baked into people's heads. You have that one senior engineer who just knows how everything works. That's your go-to guy when something breaks or you need to spin up something. But that's not super sustainable.

Starting point is 03:27:29 And this notion that comprehension could just scale linearly as you hire more people isn't super tenable anymore. We're like emitting a bunch of data. All that data is super fragmented. Everyone's super specialized. And so for us, what we're trying to do is start going into companies, plugging

Starting point is 03:27:44 into their entire infrastructure area, whether it's like source code, their cloud, their ticketing system, whatever it might be. Really understand why things are failing. And basically, pull in data and give them these golden pathways as to what's going on, why is it happening, what prescriptive action should I take that is going to help me fix this.

Starting point is 03:28:01 And along the way, learning what are the ingrained practices of your organization. That part is super important in the sense that we don't want to build an opinionated platform that says, this is good or this is bad, right? That's pretty subjective to each company. So it's a little more about learning, OK, given this tenant, what's going to be good for them?

Starting point is 03:28:16 How do they prefer to operate? What's going to make their systems perform the best? Makes a ton of sense. How much are you spending time thinking about from a product standpoint, trying to solve things that are sort of human nature to some degree versus like it feels like the nature of software development is changing so quickly, but if you can kind of focus in on what will always be true and, you know, many people would say that's human nature, you can create something like durable and valuable out of that.

Starting point is 03:28:45 Yeah, I think a big thing for us is, some companies try to position this like, hey, we're a full-time employee and we're gonna automate this function away for you. I think for us, it's a little more of, how do we take all this knowledge that exists in a bunch of people's heads, institutionalize it into a system,

Starting point is 03:28:58 encode it into a system, such that it's reusable? The dream for us as companies go from asking this question of, yo, can we keep this running running to what can we build next? And really taking away this time for maintenance that a lot of people are spending their time on. So I think human nature, like inevitably all infor problems are kind of human problems.

Starting point is 03:29:16 Like someone messed up a config or someone didn't really understand what's going on. And in that sense, working with our users to understand what's their preferred behavior? Why do they want their stack set up this way? Why have they chosen the tools they did? And not trying like force an opinion another throat That makes sense Can you talk to us about?

Starting point is 03:29:35 some of the newest problems that companies are facing with LLM inference costs Just faults that come from this new paradigm of running agents and running tons of inference and just taking advantage of all the tools. We saw Satya Nadella at Microsoft Build talk about model routing being something that he was really pushing at Azure. GCP has a similar tool. Are you hearing from customers, like right now we're in this era where

Starting point is 03:30:07 every new model release and price drop basically goes viral on X. And so unless you're under a rock, like it's pretty easy to move over to the latest and greatest thing, not leave a bunch of money on the table. But are there new problems that you foresee as things become a little more commoditized

Starting point is 03:30:23 or a little bit more calcified that companies aren't using best practices or they're running into new problems from the kind of AI age generally? Yeah. I mean, I think the first one is like what you struck on the head, which is all of this AI stuff is super nascent. That means there's not a ton of like super robust tooling out there, how to monitor, evaluate these things.

Starting point is 03:30:41 People are building their own frameworks on the fly. I think like most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf, they're building it in-house, right? Interesting. So there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things. People are building their own frameworks on the fly. I think most companies that are really succeeding are not using something off the shelf, they're building it in house, right? So there's a lot of nuance that goes into these things. The other thing is, models are another potentially single point of failure. If cloud goes down, what happens to your product?

Starting point is 03:30:54 Are you ready to do a model routing? Are you gonna do something else? But I think putting them into a broader system perspective, they're not new problems in the sense of, these are things systems engineers or data architects have had to think about for a long time. But obviously more and more companies are doing these things, and they're really complex systems.

Starting point is 03:31:11 I think the second part of that is actually just like, we don't index on this super highly, but something we're seeing is more companies are just pushing more software, like highly verticalized niche to their internals. Like, why go put something on a retool dashboard when I can build it in Bolt and probably get a more nuanced tailored experience. So I think

Starting point is 03:31:28 that coupling of like, hey, we're working on a pretty nascent space that there isn't a ton of structure around and we're trying to figure out at the same time, combined with we just have more infra and more services running period is creating this like, really chaotic environment where people are, you know, stuck in the trenches of like debugging things, figuring out how do we scale them, uh, paying down tech debt, that sort of thing.

Starting point is 03:31:48 Is there anyone on the hyperscaler side that you think is like really underrated right now? Yeah. Um, honestly, OCI, I think, uh, Oracle cloud, they're never part of the conversation. I think all of these other clouds have really great offerings, really good services. I think the thing about Oracle is, you know, they don't sell a bunch of services on top. They have a really good foundation. Like these guys have been Oracle is they don't sell a bunch of services on top. They have a really good foundation.

Starting point is 03:32:05 These guys have been in the computing business for quite a while. I don't think it's the sexiest option out there, but from a price perspective, security perspective, I think they're pushing a lot internally on what that's going to look like over the next couple of years. But yeah, I think underrated. That's amazing. The stock hit the all-time high today. Yeah, let's hear it for Larry.

Starting point is 03:32:23 Let's hear it out for all-time highs and Larry. Generational run. What's your guys? I'm just curious, since you guys are so deep in the weeds on this, what's your personal AI cogen stack right now? What are you and the team loving? Right now, we have Cursor for the entire team. Some people prefer Cloud Code.

Starting point is 03:32:43 Depends, you know, different strokes for different folks. But yeah, I mean, like people are using chat, GBT, Claude cursor, cursor is probably by and far the biggest one, we're finding a lot of success with some of the agentic stuff like cloud code. But I think the median for us is people are loving cursor. That's probably been the best coding experience. Very cool. What about just go to market? Top of funnel like you're it's an interesting, super interesting company, It's a 10% off. What about just go to market, top of funnel?

Starting point is 03:33:05 It's a super interesting company, because you've been able to go massively viral with what is an enterprise software company. Yeah, punching. It would be different if you were selling an energy drink. I would kind of expect a stunt, and oh, yeah, everyone's talking about it. But you've been able to break through

Starting point is 03:33:22 in a really interesting way in the X community, in the venture capital community. What are you seeing that's working on the top of funnel side? What viral loops are you taking advantage of? Flywheels, just break down the marketing side. Yeah, I mean, growth is a big part of our DNA. I think largely from my co-founder Matt,

Starting point is 03:33:41 you see I like a decent growth in marketing. For us, a lot of it, at least in the early stage right now, is you want to grab people's attention, obviously attention economy. I think the really nice thing for us is this is a problem. Every engineer we talk to has faced or seen to some degree, even people on the operational side

Starting point is 03:33:59 when they're running a business, they're like, holy crap, we couldn't push this feature out because we were stuck like fixing the service or paying down tech debt instead of launching the new thing. But yeah, I mean, we're doing all sorts of things. I think candidly, you're gonna see a bunch of it over the coming months. We're gonna have a bigger splash later this year,

Starting point is 03:34:15 but yeah, more to come. Can't wait. Amazing. Well, you'll have to hop back on when that bigger splash happens. Yeah, 100%. Great talking to you. Well, congratulations. Great to get the full update.

Starting point is 03:34:27 I think we're both on the cap table. Yeah. We'll talk soon. Love it. Awesome, dude. Thanks, guys. Take care. Talk soon.

Starting point is 03:34:33 Have a good one. Let's close out by telling you about Figma. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. I have a challenge for the audience.

Starting point is 03:34:46 Your personal website is probably bad. Go on Figma, make a new one, and just ship a website. You can do it in like five minutes. Fantastic. Speaking of design, Signal's been on an absolute tear, breaking down all of the WWDC updates. He says, two quick observations after using iOS 26 and iPad OS 26 for a few days. iOS 26 feels great. The system is fluid. Buttons are larger. Everything responds with

Starting point is 03:35:14 intention. It's super enjoyable and fresh. iPad OS 26 is a breakthrough. Productivity finally feels native. File handling, window management, multitasking are intuitive and fast. The most fluid and powerful computing experience on the planet for most tasks. He says he does everything except code on an iPad. And so every time there's a new update, I'm always like, oh, maybe I should pick up an iPad. Maybe I should.

Starting point is 03:35:38 I'm tempted. This might be the one that does it for me. It's a bad point in the release cycle to buy an iPad Pro because it's over 400 days since they launched last one So they're probably refresh it at the next iPhone event, but I'm I'm definitely thinking about getting it on here I think it worked really well for running the show to a couple iPads around the house. Yeah Kind of collect us But maybe I'll upgrade and maybe you can get back in I think you got to commit to that being Tyler

Starting point is 03:36:03 How is your your Ios 26 experience so far. Have you run into any more problems? It's pretty good so far. I mean it's still you know my phone is like six years old So it's a little bit slow, but overall it's been totally fine. I like it I was asking him, show me it. And he starts swiping through his apps. And on one screen, he just has like 25 copies of what app was that?

Starting point is 03:36:33 Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. He somehow got the Chick-fil-A. The one app, you're only supposed to be able to install the app once. Somehow he got 26 copies of it installed. You've got to have 26. It was the funniest thing. If you're serious about Chick-fil-A,

Starting point is 03:36:47 you should have at least 26 copies. Just in case 24 of them break, I guess. Give us the update on the art history project. How's it going? Are you an expert yet? By the way, my wife texted me and said that it's extremely embarrassing that we didn't know that Greek statues were painted,

Starting point is 03:37:01 because apparently that's common knowledge. But also she has a master's in your if you're if you're a renowned expert yeah anyway give us the latest art history fact how are you doing yeah so I took another quiz okay another like assessment yep this time I got 50% oh very good 10% and only I think like an hour and a half compound that so you'll be a 50% more than 25% improvement yeah so give yourself some credit yeah 25% Very good. So that's 10% in only, I think, like an hour and a half. Compound that. You'll be at 100%. 50% more. That should be.

Starting point is 03:37:26 25% improvement. Honestly, give yourself some credit. 25% improvement. Yeah. But if I get 10% every hour and a half, math checks out extrapolate a bit. I think it's like 7 and 1.5 hours. I should be at 100%.

Starting point is 03:37:37 Fantastic. So I should have everything. Yeah, do it again. You could be at 200%. 200%, 300%. You could be the world expert. Did you learn anything else interesting about art history? Do you have any more facts to share with us or you tapped out? I've been reading a lot about this guy. I'm Georgio Vasari. Okay. So he's kind of is a 16th century.

Starting point is 03:37:53 He's kind of a polymath author, historian, painter, sculptor. He's kind of like the, the Plutarch of, of art, right? So Plutarch writes parallel lives of noble Greeks and Romans. And then Vasari writes the same thing for Renaissance art. But this controversial guy, he looks at art from the perspective of the artist, which is controversial in the sense that later on this guy, Winkleman, I think, he criticizes Vasari. He says, no, you should separate the art from the artist.

Starting point is 03:38:31 You should look at art in and of itself, by itself. But yeah, a lot of good stuff. That's where it came from. I've heard the term separate the art from the artist. Chris from SACE would just say, absolutely not. We're not going to separate it. No. We're going to look at it.

Starting point is 03:38:42 The artist is what matters. If we were to issue you a termination letter today, would you feel more confident now that you've at least studied art? Well, I actually job prospects. I mean, yes. So I also looked at those other stats about just general employment and you know, so I'm actually a physics major. I'm not CS. Sure. And physics is actually the second most unemployed. So they're at six measures. All right. I think 7.8% CS was at 6.1. So I think, I think I probably would go into art history. I mean, I don't got much else. So amazing underrated, underrated. He's discovered some massive alpha. It wouldn't really take that much

Starting point is 03:39:21 to double the number of art history majors, you know, there's only two thousand of them, right? Yeah, like that. Yeah. Well two thousand and one now two thousand and one two thousand one amazing Let's rip through some timeline great work Tyler. Yep. We have some we have some news Congratulations to Crusoe chase Locke Miller been on the show. They are partnering with Brookfield on a 750 million dollar debt facility to build the intelligent infrastructure of the future Do we have to ring the gun? Congratulations the whole team over there fantastic. We love big data centers. We love scaling laws putting big training runs on the data

Starting point is 03:40:05 center. Fantastic. We got another post from Zizzi. What are some good baby names for someone just getting into nominative determinism? I got to say, it came to me immediately. Oh, I guess it's here as a comment, too. But I was going to say, if it's a boy, Chad.

Starting point is 03:40:19 It's just so obvious. Chad, I think, is going to come back in a big way. I think it sort of waned in popularity when it was more of a slur But now now it's just massive alpha there It can kind of be an inside joke to the other dads 20 years from now your son Yep, you know little baby Chad turns into a man. Oh, oh, he's a Chad huge surprise Yeah, you know, I was thinking how you know, Johnny Ive was in the news because he went to OpenAI, but he's technically Sir Johnny Ive because he's been knighted by the British royalty, right?

Starting point is 03:40:56 And I was thinking we need an American version of Sir, of knighting. And I think what we should do is we should take all the Chads and the ones who are really, really impactful, the ones who have driven, you know, massive capital investment like Chad buyers, they should be knighted in an American way and they should earn the title Giga. And so, and so for his contributions, the president should take a sword and tap them on both shoulders and night him giga Chad buyers giga Chad. I think I think that would really really be the American version of the nighting.

Starting point is 03:41:30 Yeah. And it's based purely on how much capital formation on 100 percent. Yeah. There's no other criteria. That's that's that's really I mean so step one name your son Chad step to get him into capital allocation on the private side ideally but public markets will work too. You're still eligible There's some more good comments in here grit capital says King King Don Don Don Don Don I never yeah, I thought about the Don. Yeah, that's where Don comes from

Starting point is 03:41:59 In other news a non-son wall says first and only angel investment went to zero today. Well, founder of stake should have made 50. I'm sure one of them would have worked out, made it all back in one trade. Fascinating, because he's the founder of CB Insights, which you would think he would be addicted to angel investing with all the data and stuff. But he knew his life's work was to build that company.

Starting point is 03:42:21 And that's what he focused on. And he only invested in one company. Fascinating. He's very, very different on. And he only invested in one company. Fascinating. He's very, very different. Car dealership guy responds, congrats. Very funny. Anyway, yeah, yeah. I mean, he said he learned, I don't really enjoy angel investing.

Starting point is 03:42:33 And if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to be good at it. So stay out of the game. Paula says diet cokes or fridge cigarettes. So true. So true. Just drink them all day long. All right, this is a good place to end. I like how Zuck has been back against the wall,

Starting point is 03:42:47 like 37 times since 2007, and every time resoundingly wins. But each time again, he has a crisis. People are like, oh man, Zuck is cooked. Yep, so true. Built different. Do not count him out. The AI talent crisis is merely a bump in the road for old Zuck. He's cooking.

Starting point is 03:43:07 We've all been there. We've all been running a trillion dollar company. Our personal behemoth. Yes, yes. We all have something we need to wrangle and get out. Got to power through. It's a four hour stream or a two trillion parameter model. You got to get it out.

Starting point is 03:43:24 Well, this was a great show I got to give it up to the production team credible production team keeping us Everything goes down across the show our internet. We've learned everything there is to know about art. We're experts to he's an expert Yeah Now we got to worry about poaching because I imagine a lot of the galleries are gonna be watching this and they're gonna be oh New art is drop. We got petter stands physics. Yep live streaming and knows everything there is to know about he knows every part Anyway, thank you for watching leave us five stars on Apple podcast We will see you and we will see tomorrow. Have a great day. Have a great afternoon

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