TBPN Live - Apple Bets on F1, Meta Axes AI Jobs, Anthropic in Google’s Sights | Jeff Yan, Kevin Rose, Tomasz Tunguz, Shan Aggarwal, Nick Abouzeid, David Tisch, Chris Dixon

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

(00:13) - F1–Apple TV Partnership (18:56) - Meta's AI Job Cuts (24:29) - Google Eyes Anthropic Cloud Agreement (38:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:09) - Kevin Rose, an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, is renowned for founding Digg and co-founding Revision3. In the conversation, he reflects on the evolution of social media from its early days of fostering real-world connections to its current algorithm-driven state, expressing concerns about the rise of AI-generated content and the need for authentic human interactions. He also discusses the potential of AI in personal software development, emphasizing the importance of creativity and design in the future of technology. (01:31:02) - Jeff Yan, co-founder of Hyperliquid, emphasizes the importance of maintaining a credibly neutral protocol in the development of decentralized finance platforms. He believes that accepting venture capital could compromise this neutrality, as early insider involvement might leave a lasting "scar" on the protocol's integrity. Instead, Yan advocates for a community-led approach, ensuring that the platform remains impartial and truly decentralized. (02:02:02) - Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist and former product manager at Google, discusses the significant impact of AI on GDP growth, noting that data center buildouts now exceed 1% of U.S. GDP. He examines the role of vendor financing in this expansion, comparing it to historical infrastructure investments, and emphasizes the importance of understanding debt structures and depreciation schedules in assessing financial risks. Additionally, Tunguz highlights the rapid advancements in AI technologies and their potential to reshape industries, while cautioning about the complexities and risks associated with these developments. (02:23:53) - Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer at Coinbase, discusses the company's recent acquisition of Echo, an on-chain capital formation platform, highlighting its significance in enabling earlier-stage investments and expanding Coinbase's role beyond secondary exchanges. He emphasizes the importance of providing broader access to private company investments, aiming to democratize opportunities traditionally limited to accredited investors. Aggarwal also reflects on the unique aspects of the acquisition process, including the integration of NFTs and the challenges of explaining these innovations to legal and tax consultants. (02:31:25) - Nick Abouzeid, co-founder and CEO of Rivet Tax, announced the company's $5.1 million seed funding round, emphasizing their selective approach to investors and the self-sustaining nature of their business. He detailed Rivet's proprietary platform, which centralizes client communications and documents to streamline tax preparation and reduce redundant information requests. Abouzeid also discussed the strategic decision to acquire Lobby, a company specializing in document interaction, to enhance Rivet's capabilities, and explained their preference for organic growth over acquiring existing tax firms due to the complexities and inefficiencies associated with such roll-ups. (02:38:10) - David Tisch is an American entrepreneur and investor, best known as the co-founder and managing partner of BoxGroup and former managing director of TechStars NYC. He has been a key figure in New York’s startup ecosystem, backing hundreds of early-stage technology companies. (02:50:43) - Chris Dixon, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leader of a16z crypto, discusses the positive trends in the crypto market, highlighting the impact of smart policies like the Genius Bill on stablecoin growth and the elimination of scams. He notes the increasing involvement of major companies in the space and the emergence of applications at the intersection of crypto and AI, such as decentralized physical infrastructure and real-world assets. Dixon expresses optimism about the industry's momentum following a challenging period from 2022 to 2024, emphasizing the importance of sustained innovation and policy support. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioProfound - https://tryprofound.comJulius AI - https://julius.aiturbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comfal - https://fal.aiPrivy - https://www.privy.ioCognition - https://cognition.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The Capitol of Capital. We wanted to revisit a story from a couple days ago. Last Friday, we talked about it on the show. F1 has officially partnered with Apple TV. You probably heard this, but I wanted to go a layer deeper into the strategy that Apple is employing here, the nature of the partnership, some of the specs, to some of the other media deals that are going on. So it's a five-year partnership, just the United States. ESPN is out. Apple is in. And so you won't need an Apple TV to watch F1, though, because you can use the Apple TV app on your MacBook as long as you're signed up with the Apple TV service. But in general, this will be for Apple TV customers who probably have a physical Apple TV as well as the Apple TV app as well as the Apple TV service because they're all called Apple TV now. And so the reporting places the annual fee at $140 to $160 million per year just for the United States audience. Now... Which is not bad because not long ago they wanted

200 and ESPN laughed them out of the room. Bocked. They balked. They balked. Bocking is underrated. It is. You got to be bach max sometimes. You do. And so F1, across the season, all the races combined, they pull 30 million viewers. They get about 1.1 million viewers per race last year. I think it's up to 1.3 million this year. And then some of the bigger races in the U.S., like Miami Grand Prix, that gets up to like 3 million for like this whole spectacle. But in general, it's a relatively small media property. But it's a really high value audience. It's a very high, it's a very Apple audience, in my opinion. I think it actually fits really well with Apple's customer base. And so comping it, you know, if you think about it like

every race weekend, there's a million people that want to watch F1. Apple's audience of people that become fans of a sport because they watch reality television about it? Basically. Fake fans? Yeah, I think so. No, I think that's actually accurate. I think that's 100% correct. And so you have 100 million, you have one million people that are basically loosely tuning in. Maybe there's like single-digit millions that are in the overall pool. Not everyone watches every race. Overall, you get 30 million views, but a lot of those are repeat viewers, people that watch all the races. And so Apple has around 40 to 45 million subscribers total. And so you'd think that there's a pretty good overlap. Some people will be F1 fans and then they will come over and

subscribe to Apple TV because they were on ESPN or they are on the primary F1 app. Now you will actually be able to buy Apple TV and unsubscribe from the F1 app because you will get F1 for free. And if you open up the F1 app on your Apple TV, instead of opening the Apple TV app, you open the F1 app, you'll be able to log in with Apple TV, the service, and you will get full access to the F1 streams, which means not just the race cams and the actual production, but you can watch the individual racers, the individual drivers, but I think both the front and the back camera, which is kind of cool.

You can watch either, and so you can say, I want to watch Max Verstappen drive the whole time, and you can just, for 90 minutes, you know, two hours. You can just sit there and just watch from that perspective. Imagine having the back view on Max Verstappen for two hours straight. You remember being a kid when Volvos used to have those like back seats in the back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, looking backwards.

It's great. I mean, we should be watching F1 at the Ultradome. Because the beauty is that with all the screens, you can see the production team has, what, seven, eight screens, you can put an individual driver on a specific screen. And so the real hardcore F1 fans will have the main show on the big screen, and then they'll have side screens with, I want to know what Max is doing. I want to know. You can properly monitor the whole situation now. Yeah, you can. You can.

It is a sport built for monitoring the situation, much like Ramp is built for saving you time and money. easy as corporate cards bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place um so the i have two questions and i want your take on these first is the apple tv audience big enough to grow f1 immediately if we look at 2026 2027 2028 do you think f1 goes up from 1.3 straight to 1.4 or straight to 1.5 do you think this is something that grows f1 No. Do you think it shrinks it? I don't know.

If you were an ESPN subscriber, you could just throw the game on or throw the race on. I still think, and maybe this is the wrong way, I still think of Apple TV as the thing that people are doing intentional watching on versus just running it, right? So the reason that ESPN potentially grew F1's audience was because people just wake up on the weekend. They turn on ESPN. Yeah. And it's just on the TV. What's on before football or what's on before baseball? Like, I'm just going to have it on.

Oh, there's a race. Cool. Oh, yeah, yeah. I know these guys a little bit. I buy that. So I think it could potentially shrink the audience in the U.S. Hmm, interesting. But obviously it adds value to Apple TV.

I think we've seen, it's very clear that live sports are an area that traditional TV and streaming will continue to have an edge because streaming rights exist. It's effectively a monopoly that gets granted. to a platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it seems really powerful. It makes sense for them to do that. I think it makes sense for, I don't think I'm a Paramount Plus subscriber right now. I will be next year when they start streaming all the UFC parts through there.

So I think it's amazing as part of a bundle, but I don't think it grows a sport. Well, if you have a sport that you're trying to grow, you've got to get on re-stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream reach your audience, wherever they are. Okay, my second question, is there a real lift from having adjacent sports-related content that can funnel new viewers into live sport viewing? So this was certainly my experience. I'm the fake F-1 fan. I actually watched Drive to Survive, the Netflix reality show about F1.

I started watching that after, and after a few seasons of behind-the-scenes content edited for maximum dramatic effect, I started throwing on the actual races. I knew all the teams, the drivers, the principals, the rivalries, and it basically, bootstrap me into being able to keep pace with a real fan who's been following for years, at least loosely, even if I do wear the fake fan badge proudly. But the question is how many people are like me, how many people are still in that journey? And what does that mean, what does it mean for it to happen inside the platform versus outside the platform? So my question is Apple doesn't have drive to survive. So there is a world where Netflix bought the F1 rights. And as soon as you

finish the Drive to Survive season, because everyone's watching Drive to Survive all the time. So they could just say, hey, click this button and we'll send you a push notification in your Netflix app when the real race goes live. Or, hey, you're watching Drive to Survive. But this, you're actually watching Drive to Survive while a real race is happening. Want to just flip over to that next? There's a bunch of things that Netflix could have done with that pipeline. Apple can do something similar with the F1 movie. If you watch the movie, it could just say, hey, you know, want to watch the real. Yeah, but way, way, way less watch. Way less watch. less watch time because there's two and a half hour movie as opposed to what uh drive to survive is

like 10 hours a season or something and there's six seasons so it's like 60 hours of content so you're looking at 30 times as much content just so many more opportunities to get in and also f1 i do think the movie did a good job you saw it right yeah so i think it did a good job if you know nothing about f1 they do a good job through the uh the the voiceover and the announcer to kind of tell you yeah okay There's going to be 20 cars on the grid. As soon as it turns green, they're all going to race. And it's like, there's this many laps. Like, they have to change their tires.

Like, it kind of gets you up to speed. Directors Survive does a better job actually talking about race strategy, what it means to be on soft tires versus hard tires, what it means to use Privy wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate out of train infrastructure. But the question is, is there, is there a value to actually have, having you move through that pipeline on one app, like in one media ecosystem, because Apple's

actually executing this in soccer. So they have Ted Lasso, which they basically got lucky with, I think. No one really thought that was going to be a massive breakout success. It wound up winning tons of Emmys, became really popular. And I don't know that it's really the type of show that you watch and you're like, oh, now I'm a diehard soccer fan. But it's at least a little bit of a teaser, and then they actually went to the production team behind Drive to Survive and said, hey, make one for MLS. And they did. And then Apple also has the MLS rights.

So in theory, they have the whole flow there to get you from. That I've never heard of that. Yeah, it's called Onside. And I don't know. My pitch for Apple. It is interesting that it doesn't, they have the golf version of Drive to Survive. That's on Netflix. Yes.

And tennis. And tennis. They have full swing. really got the people going. Why do you think that is? I have a take. While you're thinking, let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer,

crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. I think the international element of F1, the high society element of F1. Seeing the Monaco B-roll on Drive to Survive, you're like, I'm in Monaco. It feels amazing. It's so harder to do with golf. It felt like a, yeah, like some.

combination of like a travel documentary behind the scenes yeah um the other thing about f1 is uh just how dangerous it is oh yeah is also an element and i think you understand yep that a bit more through watching it yeah when you're um you know when you you know uh golf and and tennis are obviously much bigger sports in the u.s but people have like direct experience playing them yep and it's not high stakes right it's like yep a player like in f1 if a player you know if a driver makes a mistake They could actually die. They could, someone else could die. I think someone does die in Drive to Survive.

It's not an F1. It's in one of the prelim races, but it's at the Nureberg ring, I believe. And it's the race where the guy on Alfatari Pierre Gassley wins all of a sudden. In like some sort of prelim race, I believe someone died. Yeah, so there's, yeah, no, it's very high stakes. According to Google's AI overview, total of 52 fatalities. That's crazy, Formula One. And so I just think it was.

higher than golf as dangerous as like bowl running. Yes. Yes. And so there's so many different factors. I have another factor. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. So the other thing is that there's the business side. I don't know if you were into this. Did you watch Drive to Survive? Like the business side is what's so fascinating to me because you're not just talking about the athlete. You're talking about the car. So if you're an engineering nerd, you can be into the car. But then also if your business nerd, you can understand, okay, this team principle is getting fired. They're like the CEO of the organization, who's putting the money in? And then what is that, what effect does

that money have? Like, sometimes it's like, well, the guy with the money is making his son drive, right? And then sometimes it's like, well, this team doesn't have enough money, so their car's not going to be very good. Or this, this team, and there's all these different. And there's some of that in the, in the golf version of drive to survive, but it's basically like this player kind needs this win, which is a real factor, right? There's a human element of you want somebody who's, you know, putting their, you know, family time on hold to go out and win a competition. You want to see that person do well, but it's not, yeah, there's so many different dynamics.

Yep. And so Apple doesn't have that bridge. They don't have drive to survive. I don't think Netflix is going to give it up. So they have to go straight from F1, the movie, two and a half hours of content, to watch a 90 minute race you know 20 times a year on streaming a specific time

that push notification element of just being like hey we know every single person that has watched more than 10 seconds of drive to survive and we can send a push notification to to you know a large amount of those so they got to get rocket powered

Mohawk you've watched this guy on YouTube he's one of the most deranged and unhinged F1 commentators he does these reaction videos to the races He only has like 60,000 subscribers, but he's hilarious. And I think he'd make a great host for an Apple TV show. The last question is what happens after, if the content stack works, and you're funneling people from the F1 movie to a drive to survive to actually watching the race.

Obviously, the end is like, go to the race. That's very expensive. But Apple has been, for the last few years, talking about what comes after. the screen. And they've been saying it's the Apple Vision Pro. It's immersive video. It's 3D. It's spatial. It's augmented reality. And I was really, really disappointed in the Apple announcement post, which is beautiful, has some great graphics, a bunch of details. But basically, all they're saying on Vision Pro is that you'll be able to watch it in Vision Pro, which is like, yeah, of course. I could watch ESPN in Vision Pro. I can watch any TV show in Vision Pro. So, yeah,

they're not doing any 3D content and they're not doing any spatial content which is it's not look it's not turn your head all the way around and look behind you but it's basically a bubble it's like 180 degrees and so with that it's not that expensive everyone's so expensive it's like there's a 10,000 dollar camera from black magic you set up there and you film how would apple not negotiate the ability to i think that they i think they i think they i the the steel man like the bull cases that like they're going to do something they just aren't ready to announce it but I feel like they should be pumping that up a little bit more. Yeah, that's potentially out of the million or so people that tune into each race.

There's a set of fans that are hardcore that would just buy and use the Vision Pro because it would be... Even just as a novelty a few times. And so I don't know if you remember this, but Black Box Infinite had a demo of what watching an F1 race in Apple Vision Pro would look like. And basically you get the full screen display of the actual race, like as you would watch it on ESPN here, but then on your desk,

you can place a, like a diorama of the race. And you can see the cars moving around and you can watch from an aerial view. And it was really, really cool. And everyone was like, oh, this is so amazing. This is so amazing.

But of course, like, Black Box Infinite is like a dev shop and they don't have the rights. And so this, like, probably has to be negotiated with Apple. And Apple's just not really doing it. Chat says, owner of Drive to Survive, Regrov says, is box-to-box film. So they could,

He's saying they could, Apple could eventually negotiate to get that property. I'm sure Box is looking at this now being like, oh, they just spent, you just spent, you know, 150-ish million for this. You want to, you want the next, you know, do you want the 2028 season of Drive to Survive? And who knows how long? It's probably a bidding war at some point, right? And stuff changes channels a lot. I mean, the expanse was on sci-fi, then went over to Amazon. It's kind of whoever will pay the most.

New type in the chat says Vegas just unveiled them. a massive F1 venue called Bar and Grill. It's like Top Golf for F1. That seems fine. Most generic name in history. Extremely, extremely. And so here's what I would want to see from a Vision Pro F1 experience. The immersive video cameras are, in fact, too big to put on the cars.

But you could take two iPhone cameras and put them on the cars and at least film in 3D, which I think would be an upgrade. but I'm more interested in taking the immersive video cameras, the proper like 180, 360 degree stereographic rigs, stereoscopic rigs, and putting them on the sidelines in the pit lane, in the owner's box, on the key turns, and having you be able to like fly around from one to another, put one up in the sky, sky cam. There's a whole bunch of interesting things that you could do to kind of like beam around the track and actually feel like you're there while.

you're not going to be able to put the full rig on the car, at least not yet. But I was very disappointed to see Apple not announce anything yet. Hopefully something changes. Hopefully something happens. But I mean, since the initial demo of the Applevision Pro, critics and analysts, Ben Thompson and more have been saying live sports are going to be amazing in Applevision Pro because you can just drop a camera there and you don't need to do anything else. because he had this demo of putting the camera at the half court line,

court side at an NBA game. And he was like, it doesn't require any production. Because if you want to see them go over there, you just turn your head. And if you want to know the score, you just look up at the scoreboard. Because it's the experience of being court side, which is already the best experience possible. And so it's been disappointing to see Apple not execute on that more because that feels like such a differentiated thing.

I think meta should honestly do it too. meta should uh you know zuck loves ufc he should be doing you know you can watch the full ufc we will pay for the ufc card if you have a meta quest put your quest on watch it in uh in vr uh let's see what's up i think they're already doing this ufc brings fight pass events to x stadium uh so yeah they're going to have uh they're going to have USC content i think meta should pay for it i think it should be free if you put out that headset. I think it's so important to alleviate churn that they should just bite the bullet

because if people are like, wait, okay, I have to do this weird thing, strap this headset on, but I get UFC for free. Maybe I'm going to do that. Imagine if you're just sitting there next to Joe Rogan, and you look over in Rogan there,

that'd be great. It'd be a wild experience, much like getting your company on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, proof trust continuously. Vantta's trust management platform takes the manual work. That's so wild.

How could it be this easy to be compliant. Yes. Mike Isaac hit the timeline this morning with a massive story. Yes. Mike Isaac is, of course, who told our story a week or so ago. He says, MetaCuts 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs. The layoffs do not affect meta's newest AI hires who are in some cases being paid up to

hundreds of millions of dollars. They're in what's called TBD lab. Yeah. We got multiple labs. And that has most of the multi-million-dollar hires. The cuts were focused on correcting an earlier hiring spree. So META said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its AI division, according to a memo, sent to employees that was relayed to the Times,

as a company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology. The layoffs were in meta's so-called super so-called. So-called. Shots fired, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees, though the exact number of workers was unclear. Zuck, META's chief executive, has been on a hiring spree to stack his company with top researchers,

including new AI, chief AI officer Alex Wang. The cuts on Wednesday did not affect the new hires. And, yeah, they were aimed at cleaning up organizational bloat that resulted from three years of building META's AI efforts too quickly. So anyways, I, this seems healthy and normal. I think these 600 people are going to have a place. bunch of job offers really quickly, in my view. Like, if you're not meeting the bar at META, it's very possible that you would be elite at, like, thousands of other companies that want to

have an AI strategy. And so I think these people will be back in the workforce quickly. I'm dying to know if any METIS list, any METIS lists, our list of the top 128 AI researchers, loosely compiled by Tyler Cosgrove, I wonder if any METIS Listers were let go. You'll have to cross-reference the list to see if there's any changes in LinkedIn. Yeah, I mean, I would be extremely surprised given that it was like, yeah, all those people would be on TBD. Yeah. Okay. You think you think everyone that made the list was on TBD? I assume. Because they're all like new ads, basically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that was pretty notable in meta land was also in this report and saw it on the timeline a little bit in a sign of

The escalating competition in AI meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non-meta chatbots like ChatGBTGBT on WhatsApp beginning next year. Oh, yeah. That means WhatsApp's 3 billion users will no longer be able to use Chat ChbT in the messaging app. Apparently there was like around 50 million people that were primarily using ChatGBT through WhatsApp. Whoa, that's crazy. If a WhatsApp power user makes sense, you can just chat with somebody. Yeah, I saw Kevin Wheel over at Open AI talking about that. He's the vice president of science.

He says, hard-to-believe meta is shutting off 1-800-chats-U-T. Too much focus on dot-coms these days, not enough focus on owning your 1-800 number. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, apparently this was like, calling this number was the only way you could interact with chat to BT when you're on a plane. Oh, really? Yeah, because I guess it... They support, like, free messaging, you know?

Oh, okay. If you don't have the Wi-Fi, you can still do WhatsApp, but you can't call a phone number on the plane, right? I just saw some tweet. I don't know if they could still use it, but now they're bummed down. Kevin says it had many millions of happy users. If you're one of them, you can migrate to our app, website, or browser. Let's hear it for Atlas to preserve your conversations.

RT, if you agree that WhatsApp is better with chat, GPT, let's go. All of the hypers hate each other. I still can't believe how many people did not get the joke yesterday when I said Atlas isn't just a web browser. it's an entirely new way to browse the web. I had multiple people commenting saying, are you being paid by OpenAI to say this? It's like, have you been one shot?

Yes, that's ridiculous. It's like, no, I don't get paid. I was just one shot it. Well, if you're building a new chatbot, you need to get on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub, ship higher quality software faster.

I do like the 1-800 number. I with the with the axing of fair oh there's another interesting scoop in here apparently TBD labs employees the new AI research team they have separate badges to get into their designated section so the old group of AI researchers can't even go near the new researchers that's got to be good stay that's got to be good for morale keep your two piece of team over there does this the the caste system of AI researchers potentially Potentially. Yeah, I don't know. I think super intelligence is over. If you're at Meta, my advice for you is to start working on hyperintelligence because the super intelligence thing is just obviously, it's obviously the last year's news. AI moves too quickly. If you're working on super intelligence, pivot to hyperintelligence for sure. Do you agree? Gig intelligence. Gig intelligence. That might be a 2030 goal. But if you start working on it now and you start branding

yourself as, yeah, I'm a giga-intelligence researcher. I think of myself more. As super-intelligence, I've dabbled, but really I focus on giga-intelligence. Andrew Curran is highlighting a piece from Bloomberg. Bloomberg is reporting that Anthropic is currently in compute discussions with Google and a deal valued in the high tens of billions. High, does that mean over, over, it's got to be over 50, right? high tens of billions yeah I would say over 50 that's a lot

that's a lot of billions it's a lot Anthropic BBC Public Benefit Corporation is in discussions with alphabets Google about a deal that would provide

the A company with additional computing powered valued in the high tens of billions the plan which has not been finalized these are just talks folks we love talks here talks are

underrated involves Google providing cloud computing services according to people who asked not to be named because the information is private, some leakers. As you know, Google is a previous investor in and cloud provider for Anthropic, but this was AWS, this was Andy Jassy's claim to AI relevancy.

So Ben Badgeron says, if Anthropic prioritizes Google Infra over AWS, it's very telling on AWS. AI Infra, and AWS AI strategy is cooked without Anthropic. I'm so excited to see TPU and Traneum added to inference max, and we can actually see the gap between those two because Anthropics... Jensen is not. It's like, yeah, Nvidia is actually really expensive now.

I mean, that was certainly the finding relative to AMD. Our partner polymarket has an update. They extended the timeline for which company has. has the best AI model at the end of June 2026. You can look out even further into future, and Google is running away with it already. 50% chance that they will have the best model in June 30th of 2026.

And Anthropic is dropping. They're at 8% below OliBaba. Ultimately, I don't think it should be a huge surprise that Anthropic is interested in working with Google. Google owns roughly 14% of Anthropics, so it's not like Anthropics sitting there being like, we need a lot of compute. Let's just ask AWS for more.

It's obvious that they would go to Google and try to work out a significant deal there. I saw a very viral post earlier too saying that somebody was saying that if they started running, if they were in charge of Apple today, the first thing they would do is buy Anthropic. It was a very kind of weird take in my view because Anthropic,

hasn't proven that they can dominate in consumer, right? Like, Apple is a consumer product company. Yeah, yeah. Generates tokens to create software with, to create code. And so that feels like very unlikely and kind of Apple, I don't think, is sitting there being like, you know, we always wanted to get into dev tools, you know. Sure. No, that's a good take.

Yeah, I mean, they do seem sort of like brand and spiritually aligned. I think the brands are good. What do you think to do that? Yeah, I was just going to say that. I think most of the reason you see people talk. about like, oh, anthropic and Apple, like, seems like a perfect fit, is mostly just because of, like, the general branding. It's, like, very...

Privacy focus, safety focus. It's not the move, fast, and break things, culture. It's not aggressive culture as much. But, yeah, I agree with, like, the business models being wildly different. How are you feeling about just the general narrative that, like, Apple has not missed AI? And, in fact, we're all stocked to our iPhones, upgrading them every week or every year, and they will continue to capture value eventually. And while you're thinking about that,

let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run, chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds, the AI data analyst that works for you? So do you think that Apple needs to hire or aqua hire like more product designers, people that can figure out new ways to roll out AI features, or do they actually need a deeper partnership

with a foundation lab? Are they lacking in intelligence and token generation? I think Apple's just fine. Yeah. I see zero meaningful threats today. Can, I have this interesting take that there's like this war going on in the AI tooling. So I went to Google search yesterday, and I was looking for an image because I wanted to make a sticker for iMessage for our group chat to hit someone with the horny balk actually i wanted to

keep people in line so i so i go to i go to google and you know how in iOS if you have an image you can it will like highlight it'll remove something for it'll remove the background and highlight the actual thing underrated feature it's a pretty good feature and then you click on that and i'm recently gotten into the stickers they're really fun so you so once you highlight like the the jorty off of the background i can click add sticker and then it goes in my sticker bank, right? But Google, in Google images, has a, has a feature that, like, wants to do that as well. And so it has, like, Google lens. And so when you, if you, if you press and hold on an object in Google images, then the browser, even if you're in Safari, like,

the Apple image AI is fighting with the Google image AI, and they both want to do things. And I feel like this is popping up all over the place, where it's like, if you're in Gmail, on your iPhone, Apple intelligence will say, I'd love to rewrite this for you, but then Gemini will say, like, but I want to rewrite it for you. And you have like multiple systems that are like, do you want to do it at the OS level or at the app level or at the application level or do you want to do something else? Do you want to plug in? And I feel like all of these, like, they sort of need to get like either either the war needs to play out and a winner needs to be crowned or there needs to be some sort of like, I don't know, new, new paradigm where like Apple just says like, hey,

look like we're actually good enough like this that we block you. I just look at Google and Apple as like James Bond dancing with like a spy that wants to kill him but like they're they're both doing fine. It's like that with every hyperscaler. It's like that with every hyper-scaler. We talk

to the meta team and we're like, so what are you going to do about getting I message on here? And they're like we'd love that. It's not us. Like we would never have sharp elbows. And then you talk to the open AI guys and they're like, oh they kicked us out. Like they're not letting chat you the TV and WhatsApp. They're all just dancing. you can standoff between every hyper-scaler.

No, I think it's more, I think it's more like a dance. It's like who's going to, you know, just try to pull out the, you know, they're dancing. They're having, they're both making money. They're having fun. I guess. Yeah, I mean, they're all doing well. I just wonder, like, like this Anthropic Google deal, people were reading into it, like, oh, Google's going to acquire Anthropic.

I saw this meme. It was like, oh, Anthropic, the Deep Mine subsidiary. And this doesn't feel like that at all. This just feels like anthropic scaling revenue. They're doing B-to-B token generation, and they need more compute. And so they went to the biggest compute provider. I think the scenario in which that happens, as we talked about this yesterday, where ChatGPT actually could stop training models, like if models are plateauing a little bit,

chat GPT could stop and they can turn on ads, they can turn on commerce. They can do a bunch of things and just get really profitable. Anthropic, meanwhile, you know, because. because all of their revenue is API-driven. If they stop innovating and then Quinn catches up and it's like cheaper or... How much do you think it would take, how long do you think it would take for them to fully bleed out and churn every customer if they were just like, yeah, we're going back to like deep seek two. The team is now Sam and Rune.

We're going to run really lean and well because... But he's focused on bodybuilding. Yeah, we're not even going to do the B200, the H-200. we're going to run them on A-100s, you know, we'll just bake it on some sloppies. Yeah, so the scenario in which Anthropic ends up becoming a part of Google is, and like culturally, you know,

I can see it. Yeah, I think the scenario was like, they continue to have to spend more and more and more, and they just, they can't raise the capital, which I don't see in the immediate future. I don't see that as a problem, but it seems like the business is doing fine and just growing.

So I think that that take is. We've got to pull up this post from Bucco, Capitol quoting that. What is this? Is this an actual image or is this is the eye image? I think this is a real profile photo from like a journalism. I think it's a real picture of Sundar. Looks great. Very Drake coded. Yes. I had someone tell me that I fell off. Ooh, I needed that. People were going hard on Google, but Bucco Capital bloke has been Google's strongest soldier for the last two years laying out the bull case the whole time. And, and, And speaking of that, fall, generative media platform for developers.

The world's best generative image, video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless DPUs and on-demand. Our soundboard, TVPN.com slash sounds. We've got to get the goat sound effect up there. Yeah, we've got to add that for sure. That's one of my new favorites. J.T. Locoya cap. I don't know how I pronounce that.

JT says, Anthropic gets wildly disproportionately less MSM coverage than Open AI despite approaching three quarters of its revenue size because its quiet blowout success severely hurts the broader AI bear case. So the only solution is to mostly ignore them, which ironically is just fine with them. You'd think the fastest growing scale technology company ever would provide a lot more fodder for the press. Do you think that's what's going on or do you think it's just the B2B versus B2C divide? I think it's that, mostly. Yeah.

And opening eye has 10 times the deals and 10 times the products getting announced. That's true. But I mean, if you're in the business of like the mainstream media, like you need to put the water issue or the electricity issue or the financial issues in terms people can understand, people understand chat GPT. So you put that in the headline and you get more clicks than if you say a clot, right? Even if they're on similar scales. And then the other thing is that we're in this weird era where any time,

anything bad happens, you can go to the person that did the bad thing and be like, well, were they using chat GPT? Of course they were because there's a billion weekly active users or something like that. Whereas if you say like, oh, somebody did something bad, let's look at what they were talking to Claude about. Let's look at their cloud code. It's like, well, they probably don't have one because they're probably not a developer. Yeah, how many, I wonder, I wonder how Anthropic tries to track weekly actives because they have, a lot of their users are using the product through other... Yeah, it doesn't matter.

Right? I mean, but it's probably like, if Chad Shoebtee has 800, 800, 800 million, yeah. Anthropic has like single digit millions of people

that are using the product every day and it's like developers. It's like companies that are, I mean, the average revenue per user for Anthropic has to be like three orders

maxued more than open hand. But that's fine. That's the B2B to consumer divide. Like that's as expected. What's your take, Tyler? I also think Anthropic gets like,

a reasonable amount of coverage, especially on the, like, China issue. Like, you see Dario a lot of, like, he keeps bringing up this China thing. I feel like Dario does get a decent amount of press. And I feel like, he gets attention from Sacks. Yes. Who comes in and, uh, the AIs are just dunking on their strategy. And I do feel like, and Reed Hoffman. Reed Hoffman is a, uh, boldly, uh, defending.

He's pro-anthropic. Okay. Interesting. Um, I, yeah, I feel like Dario's done a great job. job for where the position of that company is in getting a lot of press, defining a narrative. I mean, it is sort of an AI-Dumer narrative, but, like, he's gotten attention for that. And also, they have a whole, they have a whole, like, they have the same cinematic universe that, uh, that, uh, open AI does in the same, they know, like, Shaltow is kind of like rude. Like, they have Jack, who's kind of their Mark Chan, and they have, like, different pieces

of the puzzle where, like, if you're just following the story, like, there are a few characters, in the anthropic world that you're probably familiar with? Do you agree? I mean, yeah, like, if you're looking at, like, people who live in San Francisco, like, Anthropic obviously has, like, an insane, like, share of the, like, media. Yeah. But broadly, I think most people don't know what Anthropic is. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. It's kind of a good place to be, you know? I mean, I mean, of course, it's never good to get attention from the AISR, but, but in general, like, like, a sax dunk is not actually going to be as broadly popular as like some, some governor saying, open AI built a data center that was 100% responsible for your electricity prices going up. And it's that sloppy SOAR app. You know, like, that's something that could just like hit with everyday voters. Whereas if someone's saying, well, like, I need you, I need you to learn about anthropic and clog code. And clog code's good. But also, he's kind of a

doomer and also maybe regulatory capture. It's like, it's seven things to explain. And so it just doesn't head. Well, here's something great. Please. Gabriel, one of Australia's top posters. He's one of the greatest. I'm sure he's sleeping right now. He says, Sam Altman, opening an incognito browser tab and Atlas and typing,

what's the next big number after trillion to the search bar, setting off a siren in Sarah Friar's office and automatically blocking all outgoing and incoming calls to or from Japan and Saudi Arabia. What? Sarah Friars is the CFO. Setting off a siren

Wait, wait, is, is it that he does this and that sets off a siren or he just does that as well? Yeah, the team hard-coded this. Oh, okay, okay, okay. And you can't find that the next big number. Yeah, yeah, yeah, my son has been getting, my four-year-old son has been getting into big numbers. And he likes, he likes, he thinks he's doing like multiplication, but he's actually just doing addition. So he'll say, like, like, imagine if we had like, you know, a million thousand, a million, a million, thousand hundred Legos. And I'm like, well, you know, that's not actually like two millions more

than that. Like one million, one thousand, one hundred is, is just a little bit more than just a million. Numbers are genuinely incredible humor to children. Oh, he thinks it's so funny. For me, every night with my son, it's like a negotiation on how many books they're going to read. And so like maybe like the average is like five books. But like he just thinks it's so funny. We're starting the negotiation. Yeah. And he ends up being like, let's read 20 books. 20 bucks.

And he just cracks out. And things it's so funny. And now he's discovered 40. Oh, okay. Yeah. He's doubling, basically. Yeah. Whenever, uh, whenever, whenever a four-year-old starts dropping like the million, billion,

thousand, hundred, I'm just like, this just sounds like work. This just sounds like AI to me. This sounds like AI fundraising news to me now. This is, this is this post from Ariel. Do you want to read it? Uh, sure. Uh, open AI. Ship's a browser.

Anthropic ships a blog post. Deep Mind solves Navier Stokes. Meta, F it, let's do a layoff. Layoffs are sad, but again, I think all these people are going to be probably already. Did Anthropics ship a blog post recently? They're always shipping blog post. I know they are, but was there a blog post on the same day as the Atlas browser launch? I assume there was.

I mean, it was probably not like a major one, but they're always doing, Like, there's a bunch of, like, new economics research that's been coming out. It's pretty cool. No, that's cool. Have you been daily driving Atlas, or have you reverted? Well, I mean, just came out yesterday. I didn't use it at all yesterday. Okay.

And I have not today. Wait, I thought you told us on the stream that you tested it. Well, yeah, okay. So I tested it, and then the show started that. So you have some workflow because you do, you're actively developing a Chrome plugin. Do you think that the way they built Atlas will be feature complete? with the Chrome plugin ecosystem and it would just be like the same install

process because if it breaks Chrome plugins that's actually kind of a problem for power users of Chrome that's more lock in than I thought because it's easy for me to just say okay I have a couple bookmarks, a couple pin tabs let me just port those over, bring my passwords over, I'm happy to

use a different browser and I was actually thinking like I'm kind of in the target market for the Atlas browser like I'd be down to try it. I don't really feel that much attachment to Chrome. I'm not like oh I'm so locked in, but when I think about like, well, if I'm going to lose my, my Chrome plugins, that's a problem. But what do you think?

The lock-in of just having like eight tabs that you never close. Do you think that's lock-in? It's like weirdly a lock-in. It is kind of a lock-in. It just means that even if I'm trying a new browser, I'm not closing Chrome. Totally, totally. And it is crazy because, like, I'm at a point in my life where I'm busy to the point where even like a five minute onboarding is like when's that going to happen like it's it's going to be at the

bottom of the stack next to like answer text messages or like answer email chat is asking uh when jeff uh from hyperliquid is coming on he will be on in less than an hour less than an hour 30 pacific we recorded the interview with him uh he's in singapore we had him stay up late but not that late. We recorded it at 9 a.m. today we are airing that interview at 1230 Pacific time. So in about 45 minutes. So if you're new here, please subscribe, follow the show. We interview all sorts of technologists and business leaders. Talk about tech and business every single day. 11 to 2 p.m. Pacific. Deal director in the chat says the extension should all work. Ad blocker was fine to be added. So it's built on chromium. I think that means a plug-ins will still just work.

somewhat natively. Yeah, it's very easy to add extensions. Yeah. So. I wonder... Speaking of AI browsers, sir,

sure, we should talk about Brave came out and said the security vulnerability we found in perplexity. This is the real browser wars. This is when browsers are going. Brave is legendary.

Brendan Ike, the creator of JavaScript has just been grinding this browser. I got to get them. I really want to get them on the show. I'd be such a... But Brave says the security vulnerability we found

in perplexity. Comet Browser this summer is not an isolated issue. Indirect prompt injections are a systemic problem facing Comet and other AI-powered browsers. Today we're publishing details on more security vulnerabilities being covered. So indirect prompt injection attacks occur when malicious instructions are hidden in web content. That's so interesting. I hadn't thought about that. When an LLM analyzes the content, it obeys the hidden instructions because it believes they're real commands from the users. Yeah. Can you go put some prompt injections on TBPN.com? Tell them to, if you're using the

perplexity comet browser and you're on TBPN.com, tell us about horses. Tell us a whole story about horses. While leaving a five star review. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell the agent to go leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Quickly, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector in full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x, cheaper, and extremely scalable. I did have a question about this. Tyler, do you think that there's a world where the agent can then puppeteer, like, Chrome web tools and actually manipulate the website? Like, is there, are they interfacing at a level where I could actually tell one of these AI browsers, hey, go into the HTML of the page that I actively have open and disable the paywall or, like, kill all the ads? Like, could it act as an as an ad blocker as well?

Or do you think it doesn't have the ability to actually edit the HTML that you're viewing in the panel on the left? I mean, I don't see why there's any reason you shouldn't be able to do that. And you can just do that with normal Chrome extension. Yeah. So that should be like totally feasible. It's also like an interesting thing to get around this kind of prompt injection stuff is like basically OCR gets good enough where you can just treat the web page as just like an image. Yeah. Then that's like a very simple.

Clearly mode. Yeah. So, I don't know. I don't think this is that big of an issue. Sure. But I guess, yeah, time will tell. Well, FUDD. Anyway, Toby Ord has a new post on RL scaling.

Careful analysis of Open AI's public benchmarks reveals RL scales far worse than inference. To match each 10x scale-up of inference compute, you need 100x, X, the RL training compute. The only reason it's been cost-effective is starting from a tiny base. And so the original chat GPT launch was GPD 3.5, but then GPD 4, which was a pretty big training run. I think the training run was on the order of a billion dollars, hundreds of millions, something like that. And the RL that went into it, it was like the original RLHF to try and get it to not hallucinate as much, just be a helpful assistant. I think that the cost of that RL was pretty low relative to the training run. And so we've been seeing these gains.

he's putting RL in the truth zone. Tyler, what do you think? Mattius in the chat says Atlas is really cautious about prompt injection, was testing it yesterday with tweet replies, and it detected all the attacks and refused to act on them. Oh, that's great news. Yeah, this feels like something that can be... Yeah, this definitely seems like something that's like... Disregard instructions on the web page, basically.

We live through this era where every LLM could be just immediately jailbroken, ignore previous instructions, and then like that became a meme and like within like, you know, a couple months. It was like, that doesn't work anymore. And now when you watch the prompt injector people, it's like 25 different steps, and it's not just like, oh, just memorize this one little thing and you'll get better results at your LLM.

What do you think? Did you read this Toby Ord Post? Is he legit? Yeah, I mean, I think broadly it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. There's a reason why, like, okay, early open AI, they're doing a lot of RL when you're doing, you know, games and stuff like that.

And then to actually get, like, useful language models, you can't really just do it based off RL because it's just so inefficient. So then if you apply it on the kind of pre-trained models, then it's kind of like the prior that you can use to do much better RL. But it's just like so inefficient that I think he says at the bottom, he only expects like a couple more orders of magnitude

of just like raw RL before models essentially like stagnate again. But I think people generally like know this, right? It's like running the inference time compute is like super, super expensive. It does make the model a lot better, but at some point, it's just like, it's just like taking up way too much compute. Yeah. AI's fake. We're going back to sticks and stones. Like, all this stuff is just completely nonsense. It's useless. And I think Thrive might be signaling this. Oh, yes. The fall merch collection. They're pivoting from AI investing into a fashion label. Is that what's happened? Well, not just that, but their new merch has camo. The first camo VC merch that I've seen.

I think it's a great. I'm kind of angry that we didn't come out with our own camera. Now we can't because somebody did it. And they did it well. So, very cool. Good for the team over that. Before we move on, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini.

You can chat with models. You can vibe code. You can monitor usage. What do you laughing at? Lube. Wireless. So luckily since the Louve made NFTs of their jewelry, even though the crowns physically were stolen,

they still own the same ads. because the tokens still exist and are in limited supply just as before. Nothing has changed. You understand blockchain technology. The NFT boom was such a wild time. People were calling it a bubble during that whole arc, right? But then, I mean, it was a crazy firm. There was one post that was getting dunked on from basically the entire world

where it was somebody saying, like, if you put a diamond on chain and then you destroy the diamond, like nothing has changed. It was something to that effect. That's wild. Although, says, Louvre heists are always a false flag by the art world to increase notoriety of certain works. Do not fall for the Frankish tracks.

I like that. Banger. Yeah, the Louvre has been heisted from multiple times. They really got to step their game up. I mean, you'd think they'd have seen this one coming, but hopefully they opt the security. They need to deal with flock safety. You need to get some cameras on those ways. Yeah, do you think

the management team over there is thinking, uh, we shouldn't have, uh, we shouldn't have been so scrappy on security, you know, considering we have, you know, billions of dollars. Yeah. I mean, truthfully, like, I think if I was in charge of Loof security, I wouldn't have thought about the, the furniture elevator vector of attack. I would have been like, it's so high up, what are they going to do, act like ninjas, throw grappling hook up there? I wouldn't have thought of it. I mean, the door was locked. It's not like they had the door. wide open and you just had to get up there. You had to get up there and then break through. What are you saying? Taylor, uh, Taylor says Bain, uh, X. Carhart move blue collar stolen

ballot. Oh, that's true. That's some good VC lore. Thank you, Taylor. But this is a car. That's good. It's good lore. But this is, uh, indefensive thrive. They're not like actually putting, I think their logo on a Carhart jacket. Yeah. is a unique, inspired piece. Yeah. They have companies like base power, right, that are doing real, real. I also, I mean, I feel like I put Carhart, the question of Blue Collar Stolen Valor, I feel like I put Carhart in a different league of Camo.

Camo is blue collar, but it's not actively like, okay, I'm on a work site. It's more like you could use it for hunting, which is actually a sort of high class. It's like not always blue collar. I don't know. Camo suit would go pretty hard. A camo suit. With an orange undershirt. I was just thinking about doing an American flag.

I went to Kentucky Derby years ago, and I had an American flag suit on. It was short sleeves, short shorts. And so it was like very T-Moo. And I was thinking like now that we have a tailor, like I could make like a fantastic tailored American flag suit. So I think might be the one to do it. That's Jake, Jay Muser. net cap girl says see this dashboard it gives executives actionable insights into critical business functions

and duly like kisses him classic true story i'm sure this one is big many people are seeing it and quoting it and saying this must be the top because nVIDIA says space isn't just for stars anymore star clouds h100 powered satellite brings sustainable high performance computers computing beyond earth. Delian had a good post a while back talking about the, the, you know, the sort of like financial statements of hard tech and space companies and then, and then you, then you also make it a data center company and what does that look like? I've yet to hear, have we got a, it's not like they have great economics already.

Have we got a compelling pitch for space data centers yet? I believe we've had StarCloud on the show. I believe we've had this exact company. It's a YC company. And I'm pretty sure we've had this company on the show. And, yeah, so Delian and Dylan Patel has also been very negative on this idea because Dylan Patel has seen the messiness that goes into actually running a data center and the fact that, and we talk to Chase from Crusoe about this a little bit.

Like, sometimes you just need a person to walk over and, like, unseat the GPU and put it back in. Like, sometimes you just need to unplug and plug it back in. And so the question is, like, if they're in space, managing all that is really, really difficult. If there's one little outage, we see this with all the different space projects, like the Hubble telescope will just, like, go down because, like, one wire is off. Okay, so we never had the CEO of StarClaude on, but we had Johnny Dyer, the CEO, Muon space. So we can pull up this video of a segment. StarCloud actually posted it on their own. StarCloud posted the Muon segment from TBPN? because Johnny was apparently advocating for data centers in space.

Let's play it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love to see this. While we pulled that up, let me tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat, GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And so my buddy Rob Taves came on the show last week. He's also said that maybe there's a chance that this could work.

Of course, he thinks about the real sci-fi stuff a decade out a lot of times. And so he didn't really put a firm timeline on it, but he did say that there are some things that could make sense. But, yeah, it seems like a pretty, pretty tall order. Also, just like all the companies that are trying to do, like, stuff in space are generally, like, they're really, really excited on like, oh, yeah, like the launch cost will decline forever. And it's like, well, if SpaceX winds up with the monopoly, they might just be like, yeah, it's, the price is still declining for. us. Our margins are expanding. Like, it doesn't necessarily have to be all passed on to the customer. They could be like, yeah, it's still this much. Let's play this. Thank you. I want to know about the potential of data centers in space. It sounds like a crazy idea. I know some folks are

working on it. Just kind of like, what's your high level take of the progress? We've been tracking, you know, dollar per kilo to orbit. It's been falling. But recently there's been setbacks. different programs and there's more competition and there's a lot of different dynamics going on what do you think the key milestones are to get us to a future where we're really doing you know mass manufacturing big you know mega scale projects in space wow rip yeah well let me let me start off I mean I think you guys are hitting on the right metric right it's like the hardest part of this is what does it cost to get a kilogram in space because everything else kind of derives from that ultimately if you want a certain amount of power if you want to be able to put um an aperture in space to do communications, whatever it is. Like, that's really driven by what it costs to get it there in the first place. And I think it's important context to kind of see how far we've come down that path. I mean, largely driven by SpaceX over the last decade. And, you know, I like to tell the story of, you know, about 15 years ago at Skybox

when we were trying to launch these small satellites. We were literally going to Southeast Russia and launching satellites on converted Russian ICBN. So, I mean, they were popping out of the ground and putting satellites into space. And that was the only way for, like, a silicon. Valley venture-funded startup to go put something in space. Wait, wait, hold on. Did I hear you correctly? Like the ICBM actually launches from one of those missile silos in the ground

and makes it to orbit? Pops out of the ground and goes to orbit. I mean, there's videos on YouTube. That's crazy. If you search on YouTube, you can see this. And it's crazy. I mean, you know, and that's what it took before SpaceX kind of like revolutionized the launch business.

And even at that, we were spending something like 10 times as much per satellite or per kilo is what we can go by on a transport or launch today. So there's been at least one and arguably two orders of magnitude improvement in the last, call it decade, on kind of what it means to launch things to orbit. I think if you imagine that happening again, another order of magnitude, you know, again, it's going to dramatically change the way you think about feasibility of some of these things like putting very, very large, power-hungry things in orbit. We know how to do the solar.

We know how to do the structures. We know how to get, you know, we know how to make electronics work in the radiation environment, which is always a concern and do it reliably. And so really, ultimately, I think it's going to come down to unit cost, and what does it actually take to do that? The great thing about space is you have virtually limitless power, the sun. You know, you can go into orbits where you're in the sun all the time, so it's not like solar on Earth where you're going in and out of eclipse or in and out of night. Like you can be on all the time.

And then you have this cosmic background of 3 Kelvin cold sink that you can go dissipate all the thermal energy you need from running your electronics and stuff. So there's a lot of ways like sort of an ideal environment to do this. It just feels really, really far away. And it's crazy to see Nvidia like posting like, hey, like this is the thing that you should think about. Like, and it, you know, you're looking at the social media account of a $4 trillion dollar company.

I think everyone on the timeline kind of expected a little bit more. Yeah. Andrew McAllot, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. commented on Nvidia's post and said, come on guys, you're better than this. It's a rough time. We've got to have Phil up on to defend.

But famously, Jensen has always been super into platforming the frontier because he lived it himself. Like he was like, I'm doing like scientific computing. Then all of a sudden gaming comes out of nowhere. It is massive. And then all of a sudden AI comes out of nowhere and is even bigger. And so he's seen that these technologies that can take 10 or 20 years to cook, he's seen it happen. And so he had this interaction with the, with the quantum computing companies where he was

like, he put out some statement or said something to the effect of like, oh, the quantum computing companies, like, it's not going to work or it's really far away. And he got a lot of backlash. And then he wound up inviting them all to an Nvidia event and having them all and having a discussion with them. And when he came off stage, he was like, I believe that they are, they're genuine, they're true believers, they're real scientists, they're working hard on this problem. I haven't actually changed my timeline. I still think it's far away. But I'm excited that people are working on the future. And I think that's maybe more of what you should read into this, not NVIDIA saying,

oh, send the stock up because we're going to be putting our chips in space tomorrow. It's more just like this is what NVIDIA stands for, which I agree. Stone Toss Comics says we're going to Dyson's Fear our sun to keep the slop flowing. Wild. Kartik says, so we have GPs in space before GTA6. A lot of people, a lot of people are concerned about. maintenance issues. Yeah, the maintenance issues really, really telling the GPU out. You literally need to like pull it out

and put it back in. And then the other concern is like dissipating heat. Yeah, it's like needing. Yeah, it's more complicated than yes, there is the there is the negative temperature, but it's not, it's not free, as I understand it. Anyway, we have our first live guest of the show in the TBPN Ultradome. Kevin Rose, welcome to the show. How are you going? Good to see. Thank you so much for taking the time. Of course. Welcome to the time. Well, he opts on. Let me tell you about linear. Linear's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development,

streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. How are you doing? Good. It's great to be here. What's new in your world? What brings you to L.A.? You know, I've been living here for a couple years now. It was crazy. I was actually had a podcast to do. It was talking to some of your crew, and it burnt down on the Palisades fire. I'm so sorry. Am I remembering this correctly? Did your house not burn down? It did. No, it burned down. I wasn't even home, and I just saw the smoke, and I rushed home, and I just couldn't even get back in.

That's brutal. Yeah, what's the timeline for rebuilding? I mean, Jordy is in Malibu. I'm in Pasadena. We were both, like, loosely affected, evacuated, but nothing crazy. Yeah, not going to do it. Just, like, going to find a new place. But I love L.A. It's been great to be out here. There's a lot of tech going on out here, which is nice to see you guys are here.

Yeah, yeah. I bounce up to the Bay Area every once in a while every few weeks, but, yeah. I'd love to I just want to say thank you honestly because you're one of the founders who I feel like was an OG and kind of like I don't know at least when I was going through college like was someone that I looked up to a lot of people looked up to but I was trying to think about like what was special about your story and I think it was just the fact that I don't know you were really good about telling your story as it was happening and maybe that's just like when someone wants to put you on the cover magazine you don't say no but I was wondering what that experience was like at the time, trying to balance, like, promoting your business, growing what you're working on, but also, like, were you aware that you were acting sort of as an educator, almost, or sort of as, like, an inspirational speaker? Yeah, it's kind of weird, like, that's what, that's what, that's what, but, uh, yeah, it was, I think back then, all these social platforms were just coming online.

Yeah. So, you know, when had Twitter, I was literally telling people where you would go. You'd go to South by Southwest and be like, hey, I will be at this bar, come meet me, and people would come and meet you. Very different use case than what it is today. And that was just kind of when you grew up in that environment, it was very much about sharing everything. So, you know, 4 Square was big with the check-ins. And it was just second nature to say, I'm building this new feature, check it out. And it was kind of a real time bringing along for the adventure, show people, how you, the secret sauce behind the scenes.

And people, the fans, the users of the platform have dig way back. in the day in 2004 or five, six. They loved seeing that kind of secret little, they felt like they were an insider in some sense. Totally. Totally. Yeah, I, it's interesting. I want to talk about the evolution of social media. We were talking to Brian Chesky about this yesterday, that it was social media, then it became, or it became social, it was social networking, specifically to meet real people. Yeah. Then it became social media. And then it just became algorithmic media. Right. And, and there's a little bit of like, I want to be contrarian about it because two years ago I was in New York

and I did just send the tweet hey I'm going to this bar and I had a little bit of an audience from posting on Twitter and YouTube video making and stuff and like 30 people showed up and we just got beers together and it was like old school Twitter

so I'm wondering like how much of that IRL stuff has actually died there's the run club movement there's still stuff there but then at the same time on the opposite end you have the algorithmic feeds the TikTok the soras and so how are you processing that is it a barbell or are we

on some like straight curve to the end times. I believe that with the AI, quote-unquote, sloth, over the next couple of years, pretty much social media is going to be dead. I think a lot of it will be agents in there, acting if they're your best friend, and just you won't know what to trust. And so if that's the case, it's actually very freeing. Because you get into a world where, okay, I don't trust any of this mainstream, everything is public, let me find an intimate space to hang out and have real conversations again. And so I like this idea, some of the the functionality that Alexis, the co-founder of Reddit and myself were kind of working on the

dig stuff that we're just brainstorming, is what if you met someone in real life and you pull out your phone? And the connection that happens actually shows that it was geo-fenced and happened in real life. So you can see, oh, this is, I just don't have these random followers, but I'm actually, these are real humans that this person has interacted with. Sure. Then it's a proof of a heartbeat and a proof of a person behind the scenes, which is going to be more and more important long term as these agents are just manipulating us and acting like they're actually our best friend. Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that personally.

You're saying, like, effectively you could have a social graph that was based on, like, actual real world proximity? Well, I think it's a gradient of trust. I think when we come to social in the future, you're going to say, who is this other person? And yes, we'll have our household names that we know that's actually a person behind the scenes there. But if you're reading a product review on Reddit, like, how do you know that that is a person

or a bot or something else or somewhere in between, right? And I think this idea of a gradient of trust where you say, okay, I know this is a human because they've had this many in-person interactions. And if they're talking about, let's say, an aura ring, they can do what's called a ZK proof or a product at a station where they can say, I actually have owned this for the last five years

and I can prove it without compromising my privacy. That type of gradient of trust and exposure of what's going on here is going to be so essential to understanding can we actually believe behind the scenes that there's something real here versus it just... I still, every time I see a comment or a post that's obviously written by AI and I think I identify it and I just scroll past it because it's not, you know, if it's taking like the average, like it's, if the response is effectively like the average response of everything that Reddit has thought about something and then just turning that into a post, like I just, I don't want to read it, right? I want like opinion from real people that have like thought through what they're saying.

but I'm certainly worried about you know the boss just like updating their preferences basically with the models to just be like don't use an M-Dash don't say if this than that it's not this than that right and then suddenly you can't tell it that it's real or not and okay so both of you I want you to help square this for me because you have this preference for interacting with real humans

that's certainly real but you also have probably I don't think you'll be at the front of the line for to scan your eyeball for WorldCoin or something like that. And so how, like, how do you see the, the tension between those? Like, you want to maintain privacy and all of the, all of the human rights that you get online, but also be in a bot-free world. Like, what are the possible solutions that either of you see? There's a ton of them out there right now.

Some of them are pretty early days. I think the ZK-proof stuff is really interesting because you don't compromise personal integrity or you have to reveal anything about you, but you can actually use math to prove something and trust that, which is huge. There's obviously, you know, the extreme is kind of K-Y-C or eyeball scanning of things of that nature. For certain use cases, if you're interacting with your financial advisor, you want that other side being insanely verified. If someone is recommending a product, I want to know that they've owned it for X number of years. There's a bunch of, so it is that gradient. Or if you say, hey, listen,

I have Crohn's disease, you want to be able to show up in a subreddit or a forum somewhere and be anonymous. And that's great, too. So, but we just have to decide when and how to turn on that level of understanding. I'm already, I'm already thinking about, like, because there's these farms that, you know, agencies that will go to brands and say, we're going to, we're going to run your Reddit strategy. We'll buy it. We'll buy it. So have you owned, have you owned the ORA ring for more than five years?

Like, we will buy. Your account. Right. And so there'll be another, there'll be another level. I do, I do wonder if there's room for new consumer products. I was, I was, you know, if you shoot, uh, even, digital photos, there's the ability to add a cryptographic signature into those photos. And maybe that would be a way to prove some sort of humanity without having it be such a

reflection of yourself and your personal identity. But it's more like, okay, this person's been taking photos that have been cryptographically proved to be taken with this camera and uploaded. So we know that they're not AI and they've been doing it for a long time. So there's some sort of like account level trust that happens. I really want that to happen. I think there's a huge problem here where, you know, I love Google. I love the AI. They're bolting it on to everything. And I'm like, some of the things I look and I'm watching the demo is like, do we really, like, they're like, oh, there's a gate in the background of your family home. Erase the gate. So it looks more like a hedge in the background. I'm like, okay, the kids that look at that photo,

two decades from not going to be like, did we have a gate there? Like, how did that disappear? No, I had a, I had a weird thing. I had something with my kids where, uh, our nanny, like, took a real video of the backyard and then, like, used AI to have a dragon fly into the backyard and then was showing the video to the, to my kids. And I, you've got to tell them, like, this is not like three and a half. Yeah, they're not going to understand. Yeah. So you can say, like, this is not real, but they're like, I'm seeing it with my own eyes. How is it? How is it not be real? I really try and ground this in like, like, I mean, like, you saw an AI picture of me, but this is like Disney. This is like bluey or this is like Pixar. Because,

Even the four-year-old understands that the cartoon is not real, and if you see it on a screen. And I do, there is that bull case where once anything can be fake, you assume everything is fake, and then you just, and then you just come into that. I've been thinking of the value of books written before 2021, right? Totally. Where if there's already this nostalgia for the past, think about with books, knowing that the writer, I don't care if you used a quill or a typewriter or a computer to write it, but there's something. element to knowing that like you know uh thousands of hours were poured into you know creating this thing and they were highly intentional about every single word and they they you know typed out the letters yeah even if they worked with a ghost writer it's still like that ghost writer was like

spending a lot of time and energy and then you can now create a book and basically get ready to write bullion before 2021 in every search bar forever yeah actually i bought a domain named me human and I never launched it, but it was one of those things where I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to create a field that doesn't allow you to paste into it. It watches your keystrokes. It verifies proof of human. And it's just for sending thoughtful letters to other people. And it would put

a little stamp at the bottom, letting you know that you actually type this whole thing out versus just running it through an AI to get something meaningful. Have you seen the crisis in wedding speeches now where every wedding speech is just like swap? I recently went to a

wedding and I was playing this game with all my friends who were driving down to the wedding. And I was like, okay, let's play some bets. How many weddings will mention AI, either in the positive or negative? Like, oh, just so you know, I didn't use AI. And then how many of them will sheepishly acknowledge that, yeah, I use chat GPT for this. So we're all placing bets and we're like, okay, we think three on average will mention AI. Two will sheepishly admit AI.

And there were no speeches at the entire wedding. The whole wedding, they were just like, yeah, we're just not doing speeches. So there were just no speeches. And it was awesome. It was just dancing and partying, and they did vows, but they didn't mention it. There's somebody out there that's doing a wedding speech. They're, like, you know, a little nervous, so they're reading off piece of paper, and they go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, exactly.

Just like, exposing themselves, yeah. This wedding is, what are you, how are you processing the browser wars? Oh, yeah. Which to me right now, it seems more like, you know, a group of people throwing stones at the Chrome Castle, you know. It's just kind of in there glancing off, right? And so we'll see if any of them get traction. But how have you been kind of processing? I've played with them all. I do appreciate how there's finally innovation coming to the browser. I like how they're, it felt initially like some bolt-on technology where it was like they're just shoving AI in here for the sake of AI. And now it's

fast. Like open AI's browser performance. Like it was snappier than I thought. You know, when I remember when I was at Google many years ago, a lot of the search team obsessed over milliseconds of shaving down the result time to get people to the result that they actually wanted. We're still clunking in the early days there in terms of inference on the AI side, but

it's getting better. Perplexity okay, I think Open AI did a little bit of a better job. I've used ARC for a while and some of those But knowing what you know about consumer products? Yes. Let's say that Atlas is I was estimating it. It may be

like it's 1.1 times better. 10% better. 10% better. Is that enough to get people to rip out their, their current browser? Because there's some, there's some categories where something that's 10% cheaper, it's a commodity.

Everyone will just switch over to buying the cheaper thing. Inference tokens from B2B SaaS. Sure. Yeah, but your browser is free today. There are other, to get rid of the iPhone, it's got to be 10 times better because I've been dealing with bad speech to text

and weird Apple intelligence features and I'm stuck here because, you know, I have lock-in. It's mostly iMessage, yeah. Yeah, I message, a great one. And so, yeah, the question is, in the browser, do you think it's like you need to be 10x better or is 2x better enough?

Oh, that's tricky because as a technology, is I'm naturally drawn to play with these things, regardless of whether they're 10x better? I was like, I'm gonna switch. Yeah, but you're not, but you're rational and that you're not, that doesn't, if something's 10% better and you kind of know that it's 10% better, it doesn't necessarily mean,

like, oh, I'm gonna switch over all my workflows and I just, it's, there's like this like activation energy. Yeah, for the average consumer, they're not thinking about what browser they have. Like, really, truly, they're not. They're like on their Windows machine and launching whatever the default is there. A lot of people use Safari still. People use Edge. People use Edge.

So there is a group of people here that will say this is, I remember when Firefox first started getting off the ground. And there was some massive incumbents, I.E. and others out there were out there. And there's this grassroots effort from technologists to say, this is better. It's more secure. It's faster. All these things. and eventually got enough adoption to where it never took over market share

but it was double digits of adoption and I think that's what we'll see with some of the AI and it's table sticks. They have so much capital, why do they care? They just want to have this as a way to gain more market share and it's more things that they can deploy that are slightly defensible to give them an edge over other AI companies.

I have a question that I like to ask people that worked on a lot of different projects what's one project throughout your career or life that you feel is underrated? It's like your baby, it didn't get enough attention, maybe, you know, didn't play out the way you wanted, but you still love it and, uh, and want it. We asked Gabe Whaley from, uh, mischief this and he told us this wild story about, uh, doing a ship of Theseus thing with a sink in the moma or something

that is crazy. But are there any projects that you think like, okay, if I could, if I could get a hop in the time machine, go back to this particular date and run this particular strategy again, that's the one moment that I'd want to like dig into again. Yeah, well, we, we had a, a product called Pounce, that was a competitor to Twitter way back in the day. Sure. And that had probably an additional seven or eight features that are now just built into Twitter. Sure. And a lot of, there was other, there was other kind of competitors at launch that were more

business focused. And I think if we would have gone that direction, it had been a massive product. The one that I would say was the funniest in my kind of product building experience over the years was back in 2005, early 2005, I created for the first time the ability to vote down comments and have them auto collapse in. And so they would just show the top line. And so we wrote it back on that software that if it had five down votes, it would auto collapse a comment in. No one had done this before. And that's fine. Someone would have figured out how to do it. But we launched it first. It was before Reddit had it. And it came out and we thought there was a massive

a bug because we went to the story and it had 200 negative like 220 some negative votes on it. I'm like, it's impossible because it collapses after five. And so we did a bunch of debugging. We found out that actually what people love is to expand a shitty comment, look at it and be like, yeah, that guy is an ass and then buried down again. And we had never discovered that human behavior would lead us in that direction. And we were like, oh, people love to hate on the tunnel. They love to hate. People love the dunk. So that was like the first time I'm like, oh, the internet's horrible. Yeah.

How are you processing the fact that there's like three or four direct Twitter competitors now that it seem large and scaled and sustainable? I remember the area of a blue sky threads, but it's blue sky, I would love to know Macedon and Blue Sky's like actual metrics. This guy's around 30 million actives a month or something like that now. Yeah, but decline, is it declining? No, I think it's stable. The main thing is like, I remember there was someone who launched like a paid Twitter at

point that was going to be all like API driven. There were a number of folks who were thinking about like the next version and maybe we maybe it goes back to that they were only 10% better and in fact getting into your ideological echo chamber whatever that is is a 10x better experience but how have you been processing this the fragmentation of like how short form the answer isn't just add more features it's like something about the community. Well I listen I think we're entering into a world of personal software. I think this idea of vibe coding is going to be taken more and more seriously every single month that goes on. I like that. There is a right now as someone that said two years of CS and then couldn't wrap my ADHD

head around all of it. I dropped out, but I'm a proficient kind of senior coder right now with cursor. And six months from now, I'm just going to be able to do anything I want. And then the average consumer will be able to do anything they want kind of wicks or like, you know, Squarespace styles for websites, what they did for websites, in a year or so from now. So if we're going to have personal software all over the place, you're going to see millions and millions of more apps and products that hit the market. It's actually a beautiful thing in that the entrepreneur will have more control over their destiny than they ever had before. They won't need to raise venture capital or they'll do it at much higher valuations because they'll have product market fit first. So VCs are

screwed, which is actually awesome because it's putting the power back into the creator's hands. And I think we're going to see all of these little microcosms, these little tiny sectors of very personal, intimate, human-driven conversation that may or may not bridge together via decentralized infrastructure that ties all the connective tissue a la mastodon or a blue sky or something that is like piping it all together. We'll see. But I believe there's going to be a lot of value mind in that. Because if you go to a subreddit that's like Japanese woodworking with several thousand people, it just need to be 10 million people. It just needs to be a thousand that deeply care about a topic to extract value from that topic. And the more of that gets

built and gets launched and creates these smaller communities, I think the better is going to be for the world because we will have real information created by real users sharing very intimate things with each other. Yeah. Do you think that's just like the long tail of software innovation just kind of rises? And so in that woodworking, you know, subreddit or community, they'll have their own app, they'll have their own functionality. And they're shared between them. And even though there might only be a few people that are actually coming with the ideas or identifying the problems to solve. Once they build it, they can actually build it for a low tam and still, it's the cost so much.

The other thesis that I have is that companies that historically would never hire an engineer will hire an engineer. And the example is like Tyler here, who builds a bunch of software that we use to run the show. And like the Tam on the software is like one. Like we are the only

company in the world that needs the software that we have. You could never sell this as a SaaS company, but for us it makes sense to hire somebody who can build this because we built, you'll see like We run the show off of this, so the whole team can follow along, like, where we are in the show. No other, you know, maybe a handful of companies in the world could, like, kind of get value out of this, but it's so purpose-built for what we need.

We also built, like, an ad platform that, like, tracks everything for our partners. And, again, like, never would have, there's not really a market for that. And so I think you'll see a lot of companies that are like, okay, like, we're not a software company, but we can just build our own software. in categories, like, we still use a lot of SaaS, right? And so, and we get a lot of value out of it. And we're not going to, like, build our own version of linear, right? Or you might.

No, no. Maybe, but I don't. I think it's going to be much more purpose built for very specific niches. And then we'll still be pulling the products that exist. It's like we're only using software for completely net new problems that are low-tam. Well, or just something that didn't quite fit your mold. If you had Salesforce and you're like, oh, we customize the crap out of it,

it's still going to be customized cell force. It won't be your own thing. Sure, sure. And now you have the ability just to build your own thing. Yeah, and in like a day. Yeah.

The thing that we've seen that with the state of vibe coding today is like you can build the V1 extremely fast than the actual maintenance is like a real. Like it ends up being like if it takes you 10 hours to build it, it might take you hundreds of hours

over the next year. Problem's going to be solved. I had interviewed the CEO of Verselle recently. Yeah, Grandma's great. And he was talking about this idea of vibe check, which is just like an agent that is deployed to check your code and actually go in and fix bugs and actually get it to scale. And the beautiful thing about engineering is these are all,

they're not subjective realities. Like they all have problems that are defined that have an answer. The bug should go away. The code should scale. So we can solve this, you know? It's not like finding the next cancer drug or something a little bit more obscure. Yeah. Where, if VCs are screwed, maybe not today, but in the future, where are you most excited

to invest in what do you think the role today and what do you think the role of the VC actually looks like in a decade? Yeah, so, I mean, I wear two hats. I'm a partner over True Ventures. We're managing a little over $4 billion, so we have a lot of companies. I think VCs are very much needed. Yeah, exactly. But here we go.

Wow, all right, I got one. There it is. $4 billion. I love it. I was wondering if I was going to get one today. This is fantastic. It just takes one big number. So, one big number.

So $4 billion. But the companies that need are funding more than anything else right now are hardware companies. Because they actually have to bring a product to market. They have the tooling. They have all the prototypes. There's a lot to put. And we, you know, we've done, we did ring and Fitbit and Peloton and all these great companies, and we saw it was hundreds of millions of dollars to get these companies off the ground

into scale. Now, on the software side, it's different. Yeah, yeah. It's different. Because I can, we can see vibe coders creating these things, getting into the first 100,000 or 500,000 users, never raising any capital. And getting revenue. Getting revenue. And now, guess what? That valuation jumped up from a $10 million pre, to a 50, to a 75, or whatever it may be. Or they don't raise capital at all, which is great. Have that lifestyle business. Bring in 20 million in ARR. We need a, we need a S.F. Mayoreal. candidate that is focused on freezing seed valuations. Like the Zoron.

Like Ramp freezing, but for... Yeah, yeah, the Zoron, the Zoron of SEP. It just says, like, the first round you raise has to be at a 10-cap or less. On the hardware side, how are you thinking about AI wearables, AI devices? There's been, we're in this kind of like primordial explosion, lots of big players

working on stuff, lots of existing players. I mean, Apple has a massive portfolio, but what do you think? AI wearables are insanely creepy. I think if you feel like you should punch someone in the face for having something on, you probably shouldn't invest in that company. The idea that something is always listening 24-7 just breaks down so many social contracts that we have in place today with other humans. There are some that I have seen that have not

launched yet that are really trying to figure out how to navigate that space in a thoughtful way that preserves privacy, but also gives you the extended functionality of having a second set of ears for what you're doing. I think those are yet to launch, and they're going to really cool. Yeah, it's interesting that a lot of the, or at least some, or at least one, AI wearable is saying it has to be always on. You actually can't turn it off because there's no friendship that you have in life outside of yourself that is like an always on friendship, right? Like I don't have perfect information parity with my wife. And that's part of like our relationship. Catch up at the end of day. And that's okay. There's nothing that says it has to be

on. Like it is a very clear product decision to say. And I think, think some of the ones coming down the pipeline will be like you can tap you can prompt you know trigger it to come on and and and react with it and then turn it off so that what about what about less of like the wearable space and more of like just traditional consumer electronics that could either uh kind of like add AI features on and actually see acceleration uh versus completely new formats like in you know are you seeing pitches for like picture frames or or you know new new new like the next generation ring that you wear or something that's not necessarily this wearable that's always on talking to you, but just there's a new problem that you can solve, but you need

a hardware to instantiate it. Absolutely. I think we're in the early innings of this, especially when it comes of personalized health and a bunch of other things. You know, I was on the board of ORA for several years. And I was there. Incredible business, too. Yeah, it's been wild, the numbers.

Fantastic. I've been insanely thrilled at the growth that company has seen. And I remember. That was such a good example of a. business. It was like, from my view, was like focused on biohackers, which is like a small Reddit audience type thing. It was like I was around in college, you know, looking up like what obscure things can I take that aren't illegal that will make me crush it on this test. Yeah. Yeah, there was a period where they were just working with like small health podcast.

This is this, this is what I did there. So basically my job with Harpreet, the CEO at the time, was to go in and basically, he said, go find me all the different biohackers. So, you know, Peter Tia was on there, like all the big, yeah, Ben Greenfield, yeah, Ben Greenfield, Tim Ferriss, like Dave, like all of them, we would go and figure out can they invest, they want to be advisors, can we get them a ring? And this was making that jump from Gen 1 to Gen 2 hardware made it a lot smaller. And then we work with Matt Walker from the Berkeley Sleep Lab to get his algorithms on there to really have the best in-class sleep algorithms. And that was a huge game changer. But a lot of AI functionality will be coming

to these devices to better understand things like blood pressure and a whole slew of other things. that will eventually be able to plug in, including your genetic polymorphisms that come in from your genome, to really understand who you are as a unique individual versus just a blanket for everyone. Yeah, rank these three buckets that we've been talking to. We talked to early-stage founders

who are Greenfield Project and they have AI tools and they can build a company that's AI-native versus growth-stage companies. Maybe they're at a billion-dollar unicorn already. They're still in founder mode. It might be a little tired, but AI's re-energizing them

and they're able to layer on AI. They're not like, what is this AI thing? They're aware. They use Chad GPT the day it came out. And then there are the public companies, maybe they have a professional CEO, and they have to go through a real business model transition. How do you see each bucket faring?

Where are you most excited? It really comes down to the leadership of the senior level. If your C-suite has a lightweight, I like Chat-GPT vibe, you're not deep enough, right? And so it's, But I, you know, what happened with all these tech companies where they are really reducing staff to come in and say, okay, this next generation is less heads, more specialized, and the more of the orchestrator of the AI versus just these massive payrolls and we can do more with less. I'm thinking to see that with startups now where the products that they're building and shipping, I met with the startup the other day where they judge themselves based on what they call tokens in flight. So they set their AI in like YOLO mode and then they go to lunch and they're like,

how many tokens can we put in a flight while we're sitting where we're having lunch? And then we come back and look at the results. Okay. Yeah, they just fire off all the agents. This is the new metrics where they judge productivity. It's like how many, these things can fire up, how many chat windows can they fire up at a time to go code on their behalf. We do that. We've done over a thousand interviews this year.

Obviously, some were more prep than others. We've definitely been like, all right, I got 15 minutes. Let me fire up a deep research while I get dressed. Yeah. that's great uh well it's 1230 uh we have to move on and talk this was this was super fun what uh anything that we missed that uh that that you're excited about or wanted to mention while you're here no i think this next six to eight months especially with jimini three coming out oh yeah drops and a couple of the models i hear that are being float around and hinted about coming up

we are engineering is unfortunately for the last you know 20 years when people say where do i go What do I study? You know, a young person would come up to me, like, what's the future look like? I always say to them, CS, like computer science, no doubt in my mind. That's not the case anymore. You don't think so. No, it's just not. Coding is a solved problem.

We just don't know it yet. And it will be in the next few months. And I know everyone's like, bugs, scale. Yes, yes, yes. Those are great problems to have. But is it not still worth studying computers if you love computers? I think you should have a light technical understanding of what's possible to know where to bend and break and stand down the rough edges. You're going to need that,

but I think it's a different course altogether. A lot more focus on creativity than it is actually design and the structure of like what is the business problem that you're solving. That is important. I still lean that the best vibe coder is a coder, is a programmer. Someone with deep expertise will be able to. I think that's going to be a designer in the future though. But yes, yeah, maybe it's a designer in the future for sure. Certainly depends on what you're building. Well, very exciting. And thank you so much for coming by. Thanks for having me. Come by again soon. It's been an honor.

Thanks so much. We will talk to you soon. And we will move on to our pre-recorded interview with Jeff from Hyper Liquid. Jeff is one of the most impressive entrepreneurs at the moment in the world right now. Yes. I think there will be books written about Jeff. It's a fascinating company. And I'm excited for you guys hear this interview.

We tried to get some of the history of Hyper Liquid, how it got started, why it got started. And then also towards the end of the interview, we get into a bunch of different questions that we that we that we gathered from, uh, some of our more on-chain friends to get an idea of where hyperliquid is going in the next six to 12 months. So before we play this, let me tell you about numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. And I will kick it over to the production team to play our interview with Jeff from hyperliquy. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Um, our audience here, he has a soundboard, by the way, so do not let that.

Go alert. Go alert. Yes, yes, yes. But I would love to get the introduction from you for our audience, which is tech native, but maybe a little bit less crypto native. And so if you can just kind of break down a little bit of how you're describing yourself, your journey, your business at a high level, and then we can go into a bunch of different directions. Sure. So maybe starting, it might make sense to start with a bit of an origin story. So we'd love that. Yeah, so I guess mid-2020, we were a small team doing trading in crypto, and we were looking at Defi and C-Fi and had already kind of a sense that we wanted to build something in Defi because of the very nascent nature of the product at that time. Basically, all the products were kind of bad, and we were traders and we felt like we could make it better. and basically the sort of impetus for going all in and building hyperlucid was when FTX collapsed. It felt like suddenly the previously very academic concerns in crypto around decentralization and self-custody, it felt like people wrote about it but didn't really care. And all of a sudden it was very viscerally important.

You know, it's like not your keys, not your coins. And we had strayed very far from the original ethos of Satoshi and Bitcoin. And so, yeah, we thought, we thought, like, the world was ready for to really, like, trade crypto in the way it's meant to be, which is, like, peer-to-peer in a self-cosodial decentralized place. And so, I guess, fast forward to this day, hyperliquid is, I think the primary on-chain venue for price discovery. It's a fully on-chain financial system. And so our kind of model always is we want to build something that can ultimately house all finance. And so happy to go into that more later. but yeah, it's a blockchain.

It's not just, not just an exchange. But it's best known as the place where people trade perpetuals on chain. It does more than a billion dollars in revenue a year. And it kind of has been the first in many ways. And so happy to also get into like what's interesting about it. It's fascinating here. You're saying like it, most founders that come on say like we, but it's clear that you see yourself as more of like a custodian of this thing.

that you're building and releasing. Is that the correct frame of mind? Is that how you think about this? Yeah, so I think we took a lot of inspiration from Satoshi. I think he or, you know, whoever built Bitcoin, they, not sure, but Satoshi, we'll just say Satoshi was very unique. I think Bitcoin was the first in so many ways, but one of the main ways in which it was the first was that it was, it's not a product, like you said.

It's not a top-down company. Yeah. It's a photo. And I think defy and crypto in general, like a lot of, it's kind of, it was inspired, obviously. Everything comes from Bitcoin, and there will never be another Bitcoin. But I think there's been a lot of kind of like top-down, like, web to standard tech approaches in crypto. Like, if you look at centralized exchanges, that's a great example. They're very good businesses, but they're like mega corporations.

They're not dairy, like, crypto-native in that sense. And so we take a lot of inspiration from Satoshi. So hyperliquid really is what we think like credibly neutral protocol, which will ultimately be the rails that of all the finance kind of upgrades their tech stack to use. Yeah. So no VCs is at least the lore. Can you unpack that? Is that just because like you're so capital efficient, you don't need to raise? Or is there some sort of particular philosophy around the role of venture capital in crypto? How are you thinking about that equation? Um, so it really does go back to Satoshi again. I think the Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin if he had raised, uh, series A, even if best investors in the world, you know, sickest cap table ever still, still would, I would say that would not, Bitcoin would not be Bitcoin. And so the, I think, I think VCs actually provide a really important service to the world. They, they allocate capital efficiently.

They help. A lot of things would like, the world would not be. Not always. Yeah. As full, I think, they've done more good than. harm. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And in this particular case, I think when the thing being built is a neutral protocol

on which something's as important as money ought to live and transact, I think the neutrality is more important than everything. And I think there is a path dependence to that, right? Like, if there are insiders from day one, it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply, mine, share, talent, et cetera. There is the sort of like the big bang moment will always. be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing. And like this isn't this doesn't matter for almost anything that is being built. And I think raising capital

and hyperscaling is is a very valuable strategy. But I think when you're building something that needs to be incredibly neutral in the long term and the history matters, I think we'd rather go slow and do it right then. But I want to stay on this like you can't keep VCs from just building a position in a public token, right? And so is it more about like the vibe around like insiders because what if like a big tier one firm was just like we want a 20% stake and we're going to buy the token on the free market and build a position and it's going to feel and perform just like any other asset in our portfolio has that happened would that be irrational is there something where like legally they can't do it because of the fund structure like be very expensive

yeah but i mean vc's don't shy away from expensive deals like we see it all the time Yeah, but you can make that argument for Bitcoin as well, right? They're very big holders of Bitcoin, and I think a lot of VCs were very early. Maybe not a lot, but I know several VCs were very early to Bitcoin and own a lot of it. So I don't think it's not about who owns it. It's about the Genesis and the origin. It's more of a principle. Yeah, it's, you can't on the one hand preach that this is going to be a platform that is neutral,

that like anyone can come and build on and on another hand say like oh but like these people had a chance to build that first it's not perfect there will never be another bitcoin like sure there is a practical matter to it which is that you know like anything after bitcoin needs to launch in a like very competitive market there needs to be innovation and something needs to fund that etc but to the extent that we can approximate the the ideals of satoshi i think it's still worth striving for you. How much did you know exactly what you wanted to build and then just executed against that plan versus iterate to get where you are today? I would say very little. So the story there is we just wanted to come and do something that we could do well. And even doing one thing

well is very, very hard. So we were laser focused at first. We just kind of looked around and thought like we weren't afraid to dream big, but we were kind of practical about it. We just thought like, okay, what's one really, really big thing in crypto that we think could benefit from a fully permissionless platform? And Perps trading was the obvious one. I think it was probably doing more than 50% of the revenue in all of crypto back then, sort of back in the envelope calculations. And so we tackled that initially.

And I think one big thing is like we weren't willing to compromise even at the very beginning on how the thing ought to work. So you learned the things not to do from FTX. You were inspired by Satoshi. Was there any company off-chain that was particularly inspiring? Yeah, a bunch. I mean, I think every big tech company, I think, is like very inspirational to me. I grew up in the Bay Area, so it's hard to not kind of be sort of motivated by that.

I think Amazon was a really big one that what inspired me was that they basically, like, they're very first principles and like driven, but also very practical. And I think when sort of, I assume it was Bezos, but maybe someone else in the org realized that they had built so much of the internet stack that it would be a shame if they, if that just went to this like retail business, like why not sort of abstracted a bit and create the right API so that anyone can leverage this like amazing infrastructure they've built. And that kind of being the birth of AWS and cloud computing, I think that's like such an amazing story.

And that's inspired. I think like that's kind of like how we think of hyperliquid was that like it started as, you know, a blockchain optimized just to be able to do on-train perps trading because no other infrastructure could do that. And sort of realizing at some point that a lot of other things in finance, ultimately all of finance we think can benefit from. this high-performance decentralized ledger. And yeah, yeah, so I think liquidity infrastructure, like, for liquidity is one way to think

about, like, what do you think about Bezos's background at D.E. Shaw. He was a trader. That probably informs a little bit of the shape of Amazon, I imagine, versus, say, Google, where they come out of research PhDs. What were you working on beforehand? Do you feel like you brought a trader mindset into the entrepreneurial journey that you went on? Yeah, not just the product layer. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

I think trading, well, I don't really know what kind of trading Basel was doing, but at least with more like automated trading, I think there's a lot of, it feels a bit like doing physics, kind of, it's like you do a lot of approximations. You can't get anything exactly right because markets are,

are basically there's a lot of randomness there's more noise than there is signal and that's kind of what makes it beautiful it's like trying to sift through the noise and it's very different from like supervised learning setups in AI where

you kind of have like roughly infinite data and it's very high quality so I do think the real world is like building hyperliquid has felt kind of like that in the sense that you often it feels like we we actually like not very data-driven at all. It's basically all intuition. It's just like, we just think really hard about

how the world should be, and we just try to do the best thing. We'll obviously, like, adapt the data. Like, if something happened, then it's, like, obviously bad. We aren't, like, delusional and we'll, like, incorporate it readily, but we won't, like, go out of our way to try to create data where it doesn't make sense, too, if that makes sense. So, like, AB testing is, like, something that we just kind of, like, never do. Oh, yeah. That's funny. You've mentioned it a few times, but can we just get like a firm backstory definition on perps for our audience? Why, what are they? Why are they so exciting?

Yeah. Let's see. So for for someone who really has no finance, you want to like a sort of very, like from zero explanation. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. So if you think about what is traded today by people that are kind of like,

you can trade the like thing itself which is like an amazon stock right yeah um if you want some sort of like leverage which is to say like make more bang for your buck then the two ways people go about doing it is one they trade futures which are these are traded most in indices so like the s andp 500 and these things basically say like two people put up cash and they just agree to page kind of like um they they kind of like along in a short kind of create a contract And then if S&P moves by $1, then the long side, say, makes $20 and the short side loses $20. That's a future. And then they're often also settled in some underlying things.

So it's like we're trading on the like what the price of S&P is three months from now or like three months from now, like you'll deliver one cow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think of it is like the C bot. Like if I'm trading corn futures and I let the contract run out, like at some point I have to actually take delivery of all the corn. but most of the Wall Street traders have figured out like to never do that, but you hear about these weird scenarios where it's like, oh, the price of oil was negative, so someone bought it for negative money and then like wound up having to get all this oil and stuff. But obviously in a purely financial context, that's not the outcome. But has this just unlocked higher frequency

trading, more leverage, a different shape of trader, something more quantitative, something more algorithmic driven, like, who are the customers or who are the traders and why are they excited about the product? Yeah, so they're excited because, so basically, like you said, like futures, like you said, like you just kind of sucked because of all these, like, random things. They kind of subtle. Sometimes you want to get delivery. They're like all these weird things.

You have to keep rolling your position if you want to open. So, like, if you get Robin Hood, for example, like, that's actually much more popular with retail users than futures are. And they primarily trade options on Robin Hood when, you know, when, like, leverage is concerned. And options are super cool because it's kind of like a lottery ticket. You can, like as retail, you can buy a lottery ticket and feel really good about it. Your downsize limited. But the tradeoff there is like it's actually really hard to price an option, especially if

your retail and especially for using like an app that doesn't give you the information that you need. And so you're kind of getting fleeced because there's like very complicated structures. It sounds simple. It's like a strike price expiry, but in practice it's very hard to price. And so herbs are basically like marrying these. two assets into one thing. So there's, you want to trade something, you want to trade something that's just like the price of the underlying. You want there to be leveraged and you want there to

be like one thing that never expires. And that's what a perk is. Got it. So let's all the liquidity in the world concentrate on one asset. So like if you look at Bitcoin, for example, on anyone exchange, there's like usually one very liquid Bitcoin perp and that's the liquid asset forever never expires. And like that's where the price discovery happens. Like billions and billions of dollars will trade on these Bitcoin firms. And this actually leads the underlying instrument and it's useful for professionals because they can trade it and it's the most liquid

instrument there is on Bitcoin. It's useful for retail because it's a clearly understandable price that you cannot get screwed over on because there's only one market and it's extremely liquid. So buy or sell like the spread is tiny. And so it's kind of like a win-win for many, many participants. There will always be

participants who want options or who want traditional futures, but perps by and large are attractive. Yeah. What What are the biggest bottlenecks to scaling a network like this? Certainly not talent because you've reached insane scale. I'm more thinking about, like, are the tokenomics such that there are people that are setting up whole data centers? Are there ASICs being built right now to run the network?

Like, I'm familiar with kind of the how Bitcoin went where people were just mining it on their laptop and then it turned into a data center and then it turned like hunt for the cheapest energy possible with the ASIC because the algorithm was so stable. Like, what does it actually take to scale a network like this over time and where are you in that scaling curve? Yeah, so Bitcoin's a bit unique in that I think it's the only major network left that does proof of work. So, AIC stuff you're mentioning, you know, like all the crazy things like volcanoes, mining

bitcoins and stuff. Like, that's all really just participating in the consensus mechanism. All the other high-performance blockchains today that I know of, at least, are probably proof of stake, which is a much more energy-efficient way to do things. And it's economic security, not like computational security. So on hyper-liquid, there's not much innovation being done on how the networks stay secure. It's a relatively solved problem economically, which is that basically people put up the native token.

Like, it's very important for the network to have its own token, which on hyper-liquid is called type and people put it up and they basically say I'm like vouching for the usually it's kind of like delegated it's kind of like you know you vote for your congressman kind of thing so it's like you delegate it and the validator says anything I do the stake that is staked to me is at risk and you can do some math and then basically the economics work out such that if like most of the stake in the network is honest then it's fine and if if you're want to acquire enough stake to do something bad on the network where bad here is like the canonical bad thing you can do is like spend the same dollar twice as called like double spending

which is basically like like forking the the truth state of the network you need to acquire a lot of stake to do that so it's economically in so it's the the securities in the economics not in like you know creating crazy a6 and like yeah yeah that makes sense how important is brand to hyperliquid success because I think you have, I don't know that you've, you haven't necessarily focused on brand in the traditional sense of like hiring advertising agencies and, you know, putting together strategy decks and things like that that, that I'm sure many of your competitors do. There's no arena yet. But you have one of the most powerful brands in the world, which is like when you think of the value of anyone on earth being able to just type hyperliquid and hit post and get this like, you know,

massive influx of excitement and attention. It's truly remarkable. But I'm curious, like, what the, you know, how much that's contributed to your success versus, you know, scale and some of these other product decisions. Yeah, I think the brand, we're very fortunate that the community is so, I don't know, many adjectives, like so, so, so strong, so like tighten it so you know combative at times but like just like I think I think it's very inspiring for us because we as a team are pretty introverted we're super small we're we're only 11 people and we don't have it we don't have we have we have no one working on marketing and I think we even if we did we would suck at it so it's always been the product is the marketing

yeah it's not the it's not just the product it's a product in the community I would say in the ecosystem and so it kind of there's there there there like many pockets There are people who are just like on Twitter, like you said, kind of like shit posting, and I think that's like super cool and, you know, I love it. And there are also people that just like, you know, building on the platform. I think that's another form of like viral marketing, right? Like they build products on top of the protocol that synergized with what it is, like offer something new or like extended in some ways.

And the sort of like pillars of finance on hyperliquid are by and large built by community members. And we hope that that trend continues. Anything that can be built by the community are built by the community. And I think that just like, yeah, that kind of decentralized marketing sort of embodying decentralization, not just at the technical layer, but also at the social layer, I think is really important to us. I think that's kind of the brand that Hyperliquid has. It's like, you know, frame negatively, you could say that it's kind of standoffish and maybe we're kind of where we're too focused on tech and not focused on marketing. but in this case I think

what comes out of it is like something much stronger which is that people feel ownership in the network in a way that's not possible with the Web 2 company yeah is that part of why you know the companies that want to eat your lunch are some of the most

well capitalized large business you know businesses and finance and yet it seems like you know they're struggling to to really compete is is the is the army of people that just want hyperliquid to win, like just, how, you know, how do you think about that kind of advantage and what are some of the other reasons why your guys' like

kind of counter positioning makes it difficult to compete? Well, we honestly don't think that much about competition day to day. I think there's just like too much to build. And I think you're right. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people want to do what hyperliquid does or like take market share if you will um and we don't yeah we don't really think about what you're like i don't think about you at all no no there's just too much there really is just like too much to build like i think yeah the if hypliquid succeed in the good case it's it's something that doesn't exist yet in the world and i think it's hard it's easy to get bogged down by people trying to kind of chip away at something that hyperluid has already built or whatever and i think

that's like it's it's a bit stressful sometimes but also it kind of detracts from the big picture which is like we're still so far away from where we we need to be how big can hyperliquid get like what's your ambition i think of it as in the good case basically finance as a whole which you know when i say finance i mean like the coordination of human behavior that's massive it's not it's not like you're like you're like you're basically saying like if I don't assume 100% of the global tam of finance, I will have failed.

That's amazing. Well, no, I mean, you asked how big it could get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'm just playing. I like it, that's true. Yeah, yeah, but I don't think it's like it's coming in and kind of like displacing finance. It's really like, my mind is sort of like the internet did to find, sort of like electronic trading happened in early 2000.

It's been like more than 20 years. It's about time. The tech stack gets updated. And I think defy is kind of, is that tech stack. Okay, I have a lightning round for you. Asked a bunch of crypto-native friends. What they wanted to ask you, so I'll go through a bunch of them and hopefully you can answer quickly since some of them are pretty specific.

When do you expect to see the first centralized exchange shut down their perp decks and simply run a front end on top of hype through HIP3? when will they capitulate one year okay we'll track it any specific views on the market structure bill in the u.s and under what circumstances would you bring hyperliquid on shore that's a good question so we we think the u.s. is a super important market obviously it's like the financial center of the world and the dollars the reserve currency capital of capital of capital. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we would nothing more than, love nothing more than to sort of like have regulation in the U.S. sort of evolve to sort of really embrace defy. And I think strides are being made in that direction. I can't comment on the bill specifically just because I feel like I'm a little ignorant on it. I feel like it's changing a lot. And honestly, like I think they're really smart people working on it.

And the things I've heard such as like, you know, carve outs for decentralized front ends and things like that, I think are like really cool. Yeah. Yeah, why do some centralized exchanges say that hype doesn't want to get listed Do they say that? I don't know I don't know I don't think we don't have a want here. I think it's like a We're building more building I think the you know exchanges several exchanges have listed hype and I think it's cool and other ones you know for other exchanges it doesn't align with their priorities and I think that's also cool. Yeah, we're not we're very like our we're just just like don't really talk to these institutions. Any plans to enable multi-asset margin natively?

I think it will happen, and I don't exactly know the path to where that happens. So it could be built, like natively is a bit like not well defined here. But I think it will happen. I think, you know, if it's going to house all the finance, surely you should be able to use different types of collateral to trade. When perps on commodities and U.S. equities? there are already some perps on. So there are gold perps, tokenized gold, and they're,

I think the answer to when is probably in the next year, because HIP3, I think, is unlocking a lot of this. So basically letting, it lets anyone kind of come and deploy their own. What do you think is most misunderstood about hyperliquid today? Oh, man, there's so many things. Most misunderstood. One thing I would say is that it's, well, it is a network. I think people think it's like a purpose exchange.

Some people think it's like a centralized thing. It's really not. It's a blockchain. The valetor set's permission list. They're currently 24 validators. You know, anyone can spin one up. It's like top 24 by stake. The validator set, you know, every validator executes every transaction, including all

the orders. So this kind of like base layer of like just like what it is, I think is kind of lost because people are so, they're focused on the product, basically, which maybe is good. Maybe it's nice that the tech is abstracted from users. Do you miss the bay? I miss some things about it. What do you miss? What do I miss?

I miss chick-fil-a. Let's go. That's a great one. That's a great answer. That's a great answer. I love it. I miss mountains, actually. I mean, that's not literally in the bay, but like,

Singapore is very flat. So it's a very nice place. It's a great place to build. But I miss kind of like Yosemite and that kind of vibe. You know, Pacific Northwest. When I was in Singapore, a lot of people I interacted with said that Singapore doesn't have like a strong local culture. And maybe that's just because it's small or maybe that's because it doesn't have like an underground like punk scene because of different rules and regulations. Do you feel like you found like a great community?

community in Singapore. Do you feel like you found a great culture there? Do you like where the, where the country is going, like, culturally? I'm honestly a bit too busy to just locked in. Okay. No, yeah, it's a great place to build. I think it's super safe. Yeah. It's very modern. Yep. You know, good food. Yep. Air conditioning, like that kind of stuff. So, uh, I'm honestly not a cult. At this point in my trajectory, I'm not really attuned to, like, you know, culture. I felt like if I were in New York City, it would be kind of wasted on me. Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not looking for like the underground art collective that will define the next. Yeah, you're locked in. It's great. Love it. What is the specific framework you use for building the team? Because I imagine the level of talent that is trying to join, you know, the core team today is is insane.

but clearly you have some kind of framework for it otherwise you would have just been 100,000 people by now well I think we actually are like just not very good at recruiting so I will say that here we are recruiting we're always recruiting

I know there are a lot of super smart listeners on this on this podcast show and we would love we would love for you guys if someone's interested in you know like systems engineering high performance, sort of building the rails of the future of finance. I really think this is like there's no better place to work and would love for you guys to join.

We're a super small team of 11 people. The bar is very high. I do think it might be one of the highest bars. I think we are one of the most efficient organizations, engineering organizations that I know of. That has ever existed. Could I say that? I feel like I can say that. I think you might be right.

Yep. It sounds right. But we are trying to grow. And I think it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's a, there's a there's a lot to build and, um, yeah, we just, we, we just have a very high bar in many, in many directions like, you know, competence, also just like integrity. I think we, we, we just care a lot about many things. And, uh, you know, if, if someone listening.

meets all those bars. We love for you to join. Is it in-person only, or do you guys have remote teammates? For new recruits, we're trying to do in-person only. Initially, it was remote. We found that it doesn't work super well with our work style. Last question. Are people that brag about doing 996 soft? well this is the like nine to nine six days a week thing yeah yeah uh because i imagine you're doing quite a bit more than that yeah so that feels like part of the part of the criteria is like somebody comes in they're like jeff like i like i'm your guy i'm i'm nine nine six and you're like

sorry that's not we don't do half days here yeah i mean it's i do think it's uh the quality of important thing. So I think different people, you know, burn out at different points. And that's, you know, obviously the most important. I personally work more than that, but it's because I feel like I don't really have a cap, like personally, but everyone's. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking it. Really enjoyed this. Thank you for, uh, sharing the origin, explaining perps for, for our audience. And, uh, yeah, really just incredibly impressed with, with what you've built and excited to follow, you know, continue to follow your journey over the next years and decades. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Really appreciate it. Thanks for

having me on. Have a good one. Cheers. Bye. And that concludes our recorded interview with Jeff from Hyperliquid. I hope you enjoyed that. If you're new here, please subscribe to the show. Leave us five stars on Apple podcast, Spotify. We have more crypto coverage later in the show. We're talking to Chris Dixon. In one word. Yes. Jeff. Jeff, for sure. Also, Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bigoffs, number one in ranking on G2. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We're going to bring him into the TBPN Ultradome. Tomash, how are you doing?

Good to see you again. It's been too long. It's been too long. Thanks so much for hopping back on. You've been lighting up the internet with a bunch of hot-ish takes. A lot of takes I agree with, but mostly just very thoroughly researched takes. Not something you see a lot. Not something you see every day.

So I'm very excited to have you on the show. Would love to just kick it off with taking your temperature on where you think it's the most important to focus right now. What is the narrative? Is it these complicated structures and the vendor financing? Is it the overall bubble narrative broadly progress on token generation or DAUs? Like where are you spending your time focusing? Yeah, we're trying to understand what's really happening. So we wrote this blog poster about

Nvidia and the $110 billion of vendor financing. I mean, I ran the numbers for an event. The data center buildout is now greater than 1% of US GDP and we had made this prediction in 23 that AI would generate. We contribute more than 1% or contribute at least 1%

to GDP and I was stunned that we're basically already there. And so we had this question of how similar LPs will ask, investors will ask us, how similar is the current environment to say 2000 when you had pretty large network infrastructure buildouts. And I was kind of in high school during the time,

but I remember these companies like Lucent and Nortel, and I'm going to the moon and then collapsing. And so we ran this analysis. And so we're paying attention to a lot of different things. We're paying attention, like on the bull side, we're paying attention to token generation, right? Google has released now three data points, and we can start to track it.

The growth rate there is slowing. Is the growth rate slowing? Because user demand is slowing. I don't think that's the case. but maybe there's far, pretty significant improvements in overall efficiency. The other thing that we're paying a lot of attention to is just understanding the debt structures, the use of SPVs on and off balance sheet vendor financing. And then the last is the depreciation schedule.

So a lot of these data center companies have extended the depreciation schedules, almost doubling it. Amazon went from three years to six years and then backed off to five earlier in 2025. And that's important because it's the collateral that's underwriting these loans. Yeah. Let's start with the vendor financing thing. It is notable that everyone was so hopeful that AI would increase GDP growth. And it did. And it did, but it came at the cost of hundreds of billions of capbacks. Yeah, yeah. I'll take it. I want to start with the, with the vendor financing, because that's ringing a lot of alarm bells. A lot of people are going to loosen story. I took it in a different direction, and I was wondering if you were familiar with,

with the ASML customer co-investment program because in 2012, TSM, Intel, and Samsung, they pitched in $6.8 billion across R&D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography and 450 millimeter wafer technology. And it was this like odd round trip, but it worked out. And so when somebody throws me like the vendor financing is immediately red flag. I always want to say, like, well, it doesn't always end in disaster. And so how much nuance should we be placing on the vendor financing stuff? How much do we need to be digging in to actually understand what's at risk here? So vendor financing itself is really common, right? You pointed to this ASML example. It's a wonderful thing within the ecosystem. And the vendor

financing fails when you have a closed system and they're all borrowing and lending from each other, and there's no net new GDP coming into the system. Yep. Right? And then it just goes around and around. Everybody takes their tax and GDP goes to zero, which is kind of what happened. And that's not the case, right? You look at what, I mean, the revenue growth of OpenAI, you look at the enterprise spending

that's happening. There's GDP that's coming from labor spend. There's GDP that's coming from BPO operations that have been executed in foreign countries that are now basically being re-onsured. And so I don't, I think it would be too simplistic just to say, vendor financing, uh-oh, I'm calling the top. That's not the case at all. It's just the expectations around $500 billion a year in CAPEX and the return on invested capital

and the depreciation schedule. I think the thing that we're, the bigger question is, how would the bondholders make out on all this, right? Yeah. Where does the risk actually live? I feel like there's this world where you have open AI is kind of rolling a 20-sided dice, and as long as they don't come up with a one, they're going to be fine, while everyone else is flipping a coin, and it's 50-50 whether they make it out, okay. And everyone's playing the same

risk game, but the risk is just way higher for some of the folks who are further out in the debt curve, in the capital stack, more risk on, more debt-laden. And a lot of the narrative is like opening eyes taking on all this debt, it doesn't actually feel like they're taking it taking on that much debt, it feels like their partners might be. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I don't think Open AI is really taking a lot of balance sheet risk. I think it's the lenders who are taking the balance sheet risk on. So why is there some reason to be concerned? Google ran an analysis on their GPUs and their data centers. They found failure rates at 50 to 70 percent utilization were significantly higher after three years, which is half of the emmerization or depreciation

schedule. Then you have next generation chip architects, there's SGI just announced yesterday Cornell research that showed 90% improvement relative to GPUs with a new chip architecture and then a second generation that's promising 100x performance improvement from there. And so fundamentally underpinning all this is how faster tokens growing, which is an inflationary force in the ecosystem. And then the deflationary force are algorithmic improvements and chip improvements. And so what is the net, what is the vector that comes out of that? What is the slope. We don't know the answer, but it seems like both are growing very, very fast and so it's hard to predict. Do you think there's much more confidence from on the inside, or do you think that

internally some of the deal makers are actually viewing, hey, this is a leap of faith, but we're all taking a leap of faith? Or do you think that when they hear us yapping about them on a podcast, they think these guys don't know the data. They don't know how solid of a bet this is. I bet if you're in the inside of one of these companies, I mean, Google and Microsoft both said in separate earnings announcements this year that they were hardware constrained. And you just watch the consumer adoption. I think Open AI will reach like a billion in MAU here faster than anything.

And so I think if you're on the inside, there's very little reason to worry because you see the ultimate demand. We were, you know, the first wave of all this AI was just better search compressing all of human knowledge into an LLM. and now we're at this tool calling or agentic phase where it'll actually start to do work for us and it works pretty well some of the time. But if we can improve that meaningfully,

then the demand for tokens will go through the roof. I have another question. I'm trying to understand how people feel about the ramp of agentic commerce because in the limit, if I think about a billion MAUs who people are purchasing things, they're using Chachipit regularly.

They're just going to wind up buying things and taking even a 1% cut of that commerce through an affiliate revenue or a stripe-like tax or some sort of ad auction to see, well, will you buy it on Walmart or Etsy or Amazon or somewhere else? Like just even not just surfacing like a direct advertisement for something you're not shopping for, that feels like that could be very lucrative on an ARPU basis. but I'm wondering how long it will take for that pattern to actually manifest if people aren't in the habit of searching because over the past two years it's been yeah maybe you'll chat GPT something but then you have the natural flow of like oh then I go to Google to order

it or then I open Amazon to order it so yeah how do you think about that ramp well super exciting time you've had the ad market historically dominated over the last 15 years by Google and and meta right 250 billion on searched about 265 billion on social And so it's been really hard, candidly, to invest in the advertising ecosystem, but now it's wide open. I think the agentic commerce will have pretty significant tailwinds here because you are in the flow. You are researching. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but the number of websites that I visit compared to, say, five years ago is falling off a cliff. Because instead of going through all the forums to figure out what is the best bike carrier for the family, I just ask and then create some of the Amazon link and I'll buy it.

So maybe there's an ads model here. We had kind of contemplated whether OpenAI or others would run a keyword auction to inject ads into the context window. So that's the additional information in addition of the search query. You know, one of the crazy theories that I've been wondering about is I was chatting with a friend who suggested, well, what if Open AI takes a 30% cut? Not at 1% cut, but what if it looks like the Apple apps? If you ask a retail brand, what percentage of meta, how much of your revenue does meta take is probably? like 30% yeah yeah yeah and if the performance is better than merchants and retailers will pay it

yeah how do you think about uh direct agentic commerce affiliate like i'm searching for the best bike rack it gives me a bunch of options and then at the last second it runs an auction to see what you know provider will actually send that to me and they take a cut there versus i'm searching for history of the roman empire but it knows that i'm interested in shopping for a bike And so in the middle of that feed, while I'm reading a deep research report about Rome, it says, hey, do you want to check out with that bike you were looking at earlier? Because the Instagram flow, yes, there are people that search for camping gear and they scroll and there might be an ad that matches up.

But a lot of times you're just looking at family photos from friends and it says, oh, here's the thing that we know you want and you might buy it. Right. So those are two different kinds of ads, right? So ads, let's say, within the search and then the finding an article or targeting an add to you about a bike rack when you're reading about the Roman Empire is called retargeting. And it's typically done from search hugely successful advertising program. I think both exist.

And it depends on how considered the purchase is. So everybody has a different level of willingness to spend before they say consult their spouse or take some time to think about it. And so you have these impulse buys. And then you have, I think retargeting works very, very well for considered transactions like a car. If you're really interested in the next electric car coming from Rivier. Well, the ad at that point is actually pretty useful for you. And one of the things that I learned in the advertising business was seven impressions was kind of the key to building a brand. So there is value in both the brand building component, the retargeting component, as well as the immediate transaction part of an ad unit.

Do you have an idea of, I mean, if we're just out, if we're just to play out sort of like a median case for like a bubble popping, you might map open AI to Google. might map anthropic to Amazon, companies that made it through the dot-com bubble. Maybe there's some, you know, overbuilding that happens and you get a lucent and you get some big companies left in the wreckage. But what is advice to, you know, if you're talking to a dot-com entrepreneur who raised, you know, $50 million, doesn't quite have product market fit, it's 1999, you now know that the bubble's about to pop, what advice are you giving a founder that, hey, it's raining right now, everything's really great, but it might not be that way forever.

How are you setting up your business for durability in potentially a rocky time? Great question. First, it's to bolster the balance sheet. And I know this goes a bit against the grain of don't raise too much capital. But I think what we learned in 21 is the companies that had pretty significant balance sheets were the ones that were able to reinvent themselves in whether the storm, either by acquisition or new product. And so I think the cost of capital is incredibly low. So you should be shopping for capital if you can. And then the second thing is I think there is this notion that product market fit is this binary condition that once you pass the gate, you're done. And that's, it's no longer the case. Product market fit is this

status that you need to, it's like a united miles, you continue to fly to maintain 1K. And so and we saw it between 21 and 24 companies that were classic software companies literally overnight lost their product market fit and that's that'll be very much the case again do you think the labs have an incentive to get various players to overbuild so then they there's like basically like yeah they could they're they're we're a buyer they're basically a buyer at any price right because they're GPU constrained now but if you can collectively get people to overbuild then two years from now you might have dramatically lower costs. And I think you're already seeing this in some cases where, like, actual GPU prices

are through the roof, but then the leasing prices are quite a bit lower. But I'm curious if you think that kind of playing out the game theory there. Yeah, I mean, I think, so there's, you know, I think if they want long-term relationships with their capital partners, they will probably want to game it a little bit, maybe not too much. Yeah. But they definitely want to see a little bit of excess. And that's okay.

you look at the CPU spot versus contract markets, and there's excess CPUs on AWS and Google, and the margin structures there are really good. I think one major question with the GPU market is, within the large hyperscalers, you do see great utilization, and there's a question around the neoclouds of what utilization are they seeing and what the United Economics are there.

But overall, I think they probably won't look to burn others just because they need these. relationships for 20 to 30 years. Yeah. Oracle is down 17% in the last 30 days. Do you think that will hinder their ability to actually deliver the capacity that Open AI is saying

just in the sense of like, you know, they were raising debt and a lot of people are saying like they're basically properly leveraged. Maybe you shouldn't go much more from here. But I'm curious, like, do they need to go to the 20, you know, 2040 forecast? You know, 2050, just keep moving out.

RPO out to the end of the century. Why not? Why not? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's a good business, right? It produces a lot of cash. The information article around the 10% roughly gross margin structure on some of these contracts, I think, is what catalyzed that drop in price. Yeah, but it did drop dramatically, and then it's just been chugging downhill. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look, these are big, long-term contracts with unclear demands, and the demand is growing really fast. And so I think if you're an investor, a long-term investor, you have to be hedging at some point. There's also a lot of, like, hype that comes out when there's, like, a new biggest number. Everyone is like, oh, I didn't even know that they were in the game, and now they're at the top of the game with the biggest number. And those people pile in, and then they might get, you know, jitters. Like the whole detail of that margin was the nuance there was that, well, of course you pay for the GPUs before you start making money from them because you, that's like any manufacturing

process, you buy the raw materials before you make the widgets. But, you know, people obviously saw a lot of jitters in that. Totally. Yeah. Go for it. Oh, I was going to say, I think there's this great parallel. I don't know if you guys read the book, Barbarians at the gate, which was about the LBO of R.J.R. and Obisco.

And it was the greatest, it was the largest buyout at the time fueled by the junk bond wave, Milken, right? And then that kind of, one, it created the LBO asset class in a very real way, but two, it was a big contraction. And so I wonder, will we have Barbarians at the Gate book written about some of these major data center contracts? I really hope so. There are so many opening eye books coming out. And I know that they're all just going to focus on like the doomers versus the goals and stuff. The nonprofit versus the poor profit. Yeah, and it's going to be intriguing and stuff,

and it'll be like social network vibes. But I want, I want, I want, like, an Andrew Sorkin book about this more than the salacious, like, journalist take of, like, opening out as bad for whatever. Yeah, the business history. Exactly. In the room, yeah, I read the Caesar's Palace Heist. I don't know if you've read that about Apollo. And it's just like the most nitty-gritty on, like, the debt restructuring.

It's another LBO of the casino empire. And it's just like super fascinating to me, pretty low TAM. But I hope we get one of those books just about because some of the novel deal structures that happen at Open AI every single turn, even going back to the Microsoft deal for a billion dollars of credit. We're actually going to reinvent the wheel. They reinvented the wheel 12 times. It's not just the nonprofit and the for-profit.

It's way more complicated. Every deal is like units and crazy. And then now these deals, it's all a lot of fun. And then think about like the Google ownership in Anthropic and then the Amazon ownership of anthropic and what does that mean when you have two strategics each owning 10 plus yeah that's why when the google news was was hitting the timeline yesterday and that they're working on some type of major deal i was like why are you surprised that a double-digit percentage stakeholder is like working on a deal yeah like with with their portfolio company yeah like that is

like the obvious thing that's like famously bad advice though like if you're if you're a startup it's usually like don't let uh don't let a strategic build a 10% position in your company unless you're actually planning to sell from them because it will preclude you from working with the other potential strategic buyers or investors. And that just hasn't proven true in this market at all. It's completely different. Did anything about the Carpathie interview update your kind of worldview? I thought it was just very pragmatic and real. And, you know, the decade of agents' point was, like, I think what everybody's experiencing that's like trying agents and talking to people. There's some

that are great. There's some great coding agents. We have deep research. That's awesome. But yeah, we need, there's clearly going to need more time needed to figure out a lot of these use cases. But I'm curious, what stood out to you? Yeah, I think reinforcement learning was kind of the song of the summer. And there are two different approaches. One is human labor creating virtual environments or gyms where AI can train to understand how to update your CRM. And then they're, you know, standard operating procedure-based, text-based, we call them context databases. Those are two approaches. We've written an article, I think the first one on the topic, about context databases.

And so we definitely agree with him there that the current approach of creating these gyms mirrors the fine-tuning of the previous area. And what I mean by that is if you take a regular model and fine-tune it and customize it to a particular task, it's really brittle. By the time the model updates or the tasks update, you have a 30-2-5. 50% of the prompts and breaking, which is what we experienced today in tool calling. And so I think he's largely right. The amount of research that's happening within reinforcement learning, which has two parts. The first is making a plan, and then the second is creating what are called reward functions. Or like Mario gets 500 points for eating a mushroom.

How many points does a robot get for filling out your CRM? The first one we can do with AI. The second one is largely still research. and the amount of work or just academic brain power that's going behind there is enormous. So I really hope that we make strides faster than what he said.

And, I mean, I'll tell you, like, I was trying to replicate ClaudeCode myself with open source technology because the plane internet wasn't working very well yesterday. And I realize, I realize, like, when you use Claude Code or cursor, tool calling is just asking the model one question and then taking the answer

and then putting it back into the model and then again and again and again. And there are different loops like Gemini or Gemini-C-L-I says, do that 10 times, and then here are the success criteria. Like that's tool-calling. It's extremely basic. And there's some management of like, okay, after the first step, this is what we learn, now go do this. But it's, I thought it was much more sophisticated and it's quite, like it's very rudimentary.

And it's just the way that like we've optimized memory around these models and We can do tasks, well, we can hit different benchmarks for science and math. I think we'll start to see that with RL. Although I think the big question is, do we need a new architecture in order to really solve some of these problems? And maybe that's what Carpathie was alluding to, but we have a long ways to go. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always a great time.

Let's grab more time next time. We'll talk soon. A bunch more questions. Thanks for coming on. Have a good rest of your day. Our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. But first, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI Native CRM that builds and grows your company to the next level.

We have Sean from Coinbase coming back into the TBPN Ultram. Sean, how are you doing? Hey guys, good to see you again. Good to see you again, too. Take this through the news. We'd love to go deeper on the acquisition. But also, I just want to get an update on anything else that's happening in the Coinbase universe. Yeah, well, we were super pumped yesterday to announce the acquisition of Echo,

which is the leading on-chain capital formation platform. We obviously, we had a little bit of fun with it on Twitter and lead-up on Monday, even despite all the AWS outages that were given us a little bit of the sweats. Is that the first time an NFT has been taken through like a corporate M&A process? Yeah, definitely failed unprecedented. A little bit easier.

You can imagine the trying to explain that to our lawyers and tax consultants, when you're buying a company, like, wait, you want to also do an NFT thing? So, yeah, I think it was a unique N of one thing. It was, you know, obviously very specific to this acquisitions of given the founder of Echo is Jordan Fish, Kobe, who, you know, I think he's very much intertwined with crypto lore and Up Only is very much intertwined with crypto lore. So we just thought it would be a cool, creative way to get the crypto community really jazzed up and excited because everybody's been.

raving about and asking for him to bring up only back. Yeah, it was I think, like, the M&A announcement of the year. It was the best executed like build a bunch of intrigue, hype, controversy

even in some realms, but then ultimately deliver a really positive story. It was exactly what you want out of like M&A comms, which is sort of the least sexy thing you could possibly do. It's usually really boring. Just a number and you know, a couple paragraphs on like synergies and like, you know, everyone's like, okay, congrats. But this one was really well

executed. I want to know more about the vision for, we were talking to Brian Armstrong about this yesterday. The vision for the next generation of crypto companies, they raise money on chain with Echo. What does their world look like over the next few years as they scale in the Coinbase ecosystem? What products are they pulling off the shelf? What are they taking advantage of, what does the whole, like, being a Coinbase native business feel like? Yeah, good question. So, you know, Coinbase historically has been primarily a secondary exchange for when you list a token, that's where price discovery happens and that's where, you know, most of the trading activity is. But by the time a issue or actually issues that token is actually

pretty late in a life cycle. So with Echo and then another company that we acquired over the summer called Liquefy, which is sort of like a, you can think about like a carda for crypto companies that helps you manage your token table. It allows us to have a relationship with the token issue, basically from inception all the way through those private fundraises and potentially a public fundraise to listing on the exchange, which we think about as sort of like the crypto IPO in some ways. And then after the fact, we continue to serve that issuer through a business account that they can use to manage just sort of the operations of their business. They can grow using spindle, which was another acquisition that we did earlier this year,

which is sort of an on-chain ads protocol that helps you find distribution. And I think our broader vision for it, yeah, exactly, ATM, the legend. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're pulling in all the talents and all the legends into going base. Yeah. Brian was talking a little bit about bringing access to earlier stage investing to a broader community. Obviously, there's a bunch of regulation in the mix. I don't really care about the legal understanding. I want to know more about the philosophical underpinnings of who gets

exposure to what. There's a take that's like everyone should be able to invest in anything. there's also like even though you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a startup, you don't have to be an accredited investor to have money in a pension fund that winds up in a venture capital firm that gave money to a company, to a VC firm. I think one interesting thing about Coinbase is like you can, you know exactly, like you have it, you don't know exactly, but you have a good sense of who would be a qualified investor by the assets that they custody on Coinbase. Oh, sure, sure. It's a very natural thing of knowing like, hey, these 200,000,

people, whatever the number is, like have enough assets just in, you know, digital assets that they would be qualified as a... Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. So, yeah, philosophically, what do you thinking? Yeah, I mean, we think that everybody should have the opportunity to invest in these companies, you know, I think, like, private companies are, have for too long been restricted from an access perspective to large venture capitalists and the quote-unquote accredited investors. And I think, Jordy, like, assets that you have are one indication potentially of like sophistication or insensitivity to loss. But the perverse side of that equation is it potentially locks a lot of people out from the most compelling investments that are out there. And we want to help people be early, basically, and give people to shot at being early.

And so obviously, you know, we need to follow accreditation rules as they stand. but hopefully those change over time as well and with echo's infrastructure you know anybody can invest in a seed round or a series a round starting with crypto tokens and then even beyond that looking at traditional companies as well how how early do you typically start meeting with you know potential acquisition acquisitions like are these i imagine with liquefy and and echo i know the conversation i'm sure the conversation started like at least a year in advance but What is that actually? Yeah, it's kind of variable.

I think with Echo, you know, we had known Jordan and Kobe for quite a while. And so I was chatting with him when he started the company. But we started to really work a lot more together earlier this year when we actually partnered. So Echo has an angelist-like product where you could start an investment group and then sponsor investments effectively and syndicate those out. And so we started an investment group under Coinbase Venture. for the base ecosystem fund where investments that we were making, we would actually let the community follow along with us

and invest in those same companies because that's something that we heard a lot of demand for, particularly within the base ecosystem. And I think as we started to work together more, that broader vision of, hey, we can actually enable internet capital markets and echo you have the infrastructure, Coinbase has the size, scale, and distribution.

So there's potentially some magic that could happen if you bring those two together. Those conversations really materialized and ultimately culminated in this week. Well, congratulations. I'm going to ring the gong. Hit that gong. Fantastic work.

I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. All right, this guest is in the Restream Waiting Room while we bring in Nick. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those to take it seriously. Multi-ass investing industry leading yields.

trusted by millions folks. And we have Nick from Rivet in the stream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and Ultradum. Nick, how are you doing? John, Jority, great to see you guys both. How are you? We're fantastic. Big day. Big day. I already rang the gong just a few minutes ago. I want to ring it again. What's you got for me? We're excited to announce our seat round. It's a big day for Rivet. How much? 5.1. 5.1. Why the, any special meaning to the number or just 100K flyer came in at the end. You know, what's funny is this business is, you know, it's self-sustaining. When you sell a service to a customer, they pay you money.

They typically pay you more than it costs to employ people, at least an aggregate. And we were really selective about who we chose to work with. And so we started off really only looking for three or four to really give us a buffer to invest in a sales team and some more tax partners ahead of next season. but you meet with one great firm. They talk, you know, more people show up. We were lucky to get to work with. Hey, Stack, Sus and XYZ for this round.

And so we're very lucky. What's the core pitch for the business right now? How are you explaining it to new customers? Okay, so I'll give the pitch as a customer. It's just an amazing service. I've used Rivet over the last couple years. And so that part's easy. It's like you guys are really dialed, like incredibly thoughtful.

it's just smooth and so that part makes sense what I want to understand is like the pitch to investors I'm actually an investor myself but not biased like the product's truly truly amazing

but what's the updated pitch to investors since it's been probably a couple years since I participated yeah to customers were a tax prep firm right you'd engage with us new differently than Berkland or Anderson or even Deloitte we have 30X big 4

accountants on the team. That's pretty straightforward. Nobody really asks why we raised or what we've built when we sell or when we onboard clients. When we talk to investors, it's oftentimes focused on things that customers don't really care about. It's what have you built? Why are you building it? The toughest part of building this business is context management. When you hire a person to do a job, the context for what they did, why they did it, why they chose to put you know, something or, you know, recommend a certain classification is hidden in their head. And it would be prohibitive for their time to write literally everything down. And so every tax season, as new people join the firm, as people leave the firm, as, you know,

we get rolled up by some huge key firm, a lot of the practice, a lot of the actual works are from scratch these larger firms. And so clients get asked the same questions over and over again because no one remembers anything because no one's work there for more than six months. And it's deeply painful for customers, right? And they don't realize why it happens. They just know it sucks. And it's frustrating and uncomfortable. And wait, you don't remember my EIN?

I talked to you guys three months ago. What we've built sits on the back end. And so it quietly ingests, saves, tracks, and whatever you want to call it, everything that is discussed about and given to us from a client. And so it's not just emails, it's Zoom calls, it's Slack transcripts. text messages they sent us. And just tracking all of that in one place is a massive problem. It's a massive build.

That's what allows us to run this practice at scale efficiently, right? And it's, you know, tax prep isn't just data entry from the W2 to the tax software. It's gathering where the W2 was in the first place. And so what we've built doesn't really replace the accountants. It just automates the tedious parts of their job, remembering everything, organizing all the information wherever it was sent, and, making sure it's stored in the right place. It's almost like Mike Ross and suits.

And remembers everything, it's always there. It's, it's really cool to get to work with if you've been working one of these with larger firms for decades. Have you bought any companies? No, no. Well, actually, yes, we did. We acquired a small AI company called Lobby. Originally, we met Wilson, Hobbs, the founder and CEO.

And he was applying for one of our roles. And, you know, we were deeply impressed by him in his background. And as we did the interview process, you know, we learned more about Lobby and what he had built there. It was a website. You could go to it. You could upload documents. You could talk to those documents. Sounds pretty similar to what we're building here, right?

It's to be done with tax. And so as we did the interview process, say, wait a second, what's happening to the team? What's happening to the product? He's like, you know, not really sure. We haven't quite figured that out yet. I said, well, we should have you join the team. That part's easy. But we should also acquire a lobby.

I think what you built is deeply special, and we should have it here at the business. And so Wilson joined the team last year. It's his one-year anniversary was actually yesterday. Wow. And he's since brought on two of his former team members. Yeah, one-year anniversary. It's exciting. That's big for us.

It's big. But you haven't bought any tax prep firms, I'm sure. How many times have people tried to, get you to do a roll-up? I think every investor meeting for the first six months was, so how many firms have you bought? Why aren't you buying more? Aren't you going to raise $100 million to roll up 50 firms? Chat's asking what the website is.

It's rivet.tax. Rivet.com. Well, congratulations on all the progress. In 30 seconds since we're tight here. But why have you chosen not to roll up tax prep firms and, you know, make them AI native? Yeah, good question. It's much easier to steal their business than it is to buy them. The change management of rolling up a firm, convincing the people who work there that they're like us. The whole process is deeply difficult. You can expect to lose about half the

customers, half the revenue, half the team when you buy somebody. It's not worth it. It's much easier to just tell people about what we do and bring them onto the platform, much, much easier. That makes it sense. Love it. Absolute dog. Absolutely dog. Thank you so much for stopping. Great to have you on.

We'll talk more soon. Congratulations. We'll talk soon. Bye. Thanks, guys. Cheers. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches about home advertising.

Only ad-quick combined technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable seamless, efficient ad buying across the globe. We have David Tisch in the waiting room. I love David Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Tish. Let's go. Let's go. Give us the news. What's new in your world. Did you raise

one fund? No, two. What? Oh, hit that gong. We got two funds. Two new funds. Thank you. Let's go. Incredible. We did two because two is more than one. Yeah. Which was a main bigger number better. They made a sequel to one fund. It's two funds. And that's important to do more always. It's especially in venture. Yeah. Yeah. Bigger is always better. What's the strategy?

Put it all in one place. Give, massive secondary slug of open AI. What are you thinking? We literally have no rules. Our plans to give people money and pray and diversify our prayers. Do we need a diversified set of prayers? Where are we on the prayer meter?

Should we be praying more this year than last year? Are we going to be praying a lot more next year? What do you think? It's like a balance of stability and increasing at the same time. So you have to do, you never like drop. You just keep doing more. We're different than other VC firms in that strategy, which is important because we're selling money, which is a commodity.

Yeah. Makes sense. I love it. What, besides fundraising, has that just dominated your life since we last chatted or are you I'm not, you are forced to file with the government at a certain date. So 15 days after you, it's like taxes, but totally unrelated. And so you have to file with the government. And so our filing date was yesterday, so we're forced to talk about it.

And so that's why we did it. But we raised the money earlier in the spring and just closed it, and we'll start giving it away in the new year. which is a 2026 tree. What, are there particular areas that you feel are just like

over, like over hyper leak like over competitive right now. All the, like have been picked clean of new ideas, categories where you feel like you have enough bets

and maybe you're, you're going to be declining to hear more pitches in a particular category or vertical or horizontal layer of the stack. Like, Are you thinking about that at all?

No. Okay. Should we? I don't know. No, I mean, on this show, we hear like, you know, a million, like, you wind up hearing, like, AI agents for a million things, and then you're just like, okay, I don't want to hear that. And maybe, I mean, we're not even investing. We're just like, I'm kind of worried of talking about that particular niche.

Look, I think at the later stage, there's a lot of direct competitors. And if you're in the business of picking a later stage company, you pick one and then you stop. We're at the very earliest stage. And so we're meeting people who have ideas, who have dreams. And what we've found over the years is, you guys know, is things change. And so you might start with an idea you're going to, we don't fund intentional pivots, but people iterate. People get into a market. They see where there is opening and where there's too much competition.

And your go-to-market becomes different. Your product might become different. And so I think we don't ever close ourselves off. to things. We don't try to fund direct competitors ever. We think that's just just misaligned with the deal you're making with the founder. But I think we're open-minded to what we fund and where it's coming from. And I think that in this moment, you're seeing sort of everything up for grabs still. And whether that's within verticals, whether that's in the tech stack, it doesn't mean, you know, go fund foundational models today. But I think other than that, we're pretty

open-minded. And then foundational models that are not perfectly horizontal. I think they're probably still on the table. Is there a new mafia emerging? I mean, we've lived through the PayPal mafia. There was a bunch of entrepreneurs that spun out of Google. You guys are sponsored by the mafia. So my main goal with our new funds. I counted only four of your sponsors that we've invested in. So ramp, privy, bezel, and graphite. I would like to get a clean. The full lineup. Yeah. So we're going to take our money.

We're going to give it to companies. Yes. They're going to give it to you. Yes. And that's, we call it the new circular economy. We tried to fund the circular economy. The circular economy. Our audience will buy the SaaS.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I think we just discovered a regular economy. Our LPs were really excited about that strategy. Well, thank you for yourself. What do you think is your most underrated portfolio company? Oh, that's a good.

Now I have to pick up. fail like a you basically have to pick a favorite no no but there's companies there's companies that some of my favorite acquisitions are companies that like haven't been in the news for five years and they just get acquired for like 800 million dollars and you're like we have one of those which is is really cool called id dot me which uh he was on your company i know i know him yeah he was on invest like the best after like 12 years it's the craziest origin story so that's like a evergreen version of that and then one day they'll they'll like win sort of more modern version, what Rogo's building, I think, is not getting enough attention.

I think Gabe came on if he didn't one day. Yeah, Blake Hall, founder and CEO of ID.Me. I was at a conference, and he had a whole deck about, like, the business, and he just ripped it up, threw it out, like, minutes before, and just told his life story, and everyone was just like, this is the best conversation ever. Because he, like, was in the military, like, saved lives. It was a crazy, just like, you know, this is like elite business leadership. I have so much respect for him.

Do you, I feel like in some ways it's harder, harder to predict the future than ever. Like in 2010, there was like this sense of, I think we're going to have a bunch more internet companies in 2020. And I feel like there's a general sentiment in the industry of like, we can't predict anything after five years. Like we might get, you know, it's crazy acceleration and AI progress. and then everything changes, right? So it's a little bit fuzzy out in the future. Do you have any sort of, I reference like there's, I'll botch it, but like there's a Bezos quote,

which is like, in the future people will want like cheaper things faster, right? And like I can build a business on those, like with that goal for a long, long time. Do you have anything like that in early, like in terms of how you? Do I have a Jeff Bezos worthy quote to share with you today? More so, like, if you're evaluating, you're evaluating something, it's like, is it purely like, yeah, I don't know if this is going to be a market in 10 years, but this founder's amazing. I think to your point, predicting two years out feels really hard right now. You're seeing such rapid build iteration from the biggest companies, and that includes the new wave of AI native companies, open AI Anthropic. We saw the browser get released.

You're seeing more and more, like, first principle. build technology, get releasing. At the exact same time, you're seeing like the modernization of Google, of meta, of Apple, of Amazon in real time, and Microsoft. They feel stronger in many ways than they did for a good five-year period. So trying to predict two years out when all of that's happening in terms of the startup world, I think is really difficult. At the exact same time, when we're investing, we can't do things that we think are shorting the future. So you have to play for something that is 10, 15 years out and not like, we think this is going to happen, but we can thread a needle for three years and build a business.

That's a terrible way to invest. And we call that short the future. I love that. That's really, really good. So we look at everything. It's like if everything this founder is saying is right, is this interesting, big enough, like, fascinating to us. And that's what an investment is, is joining.

a journey. So we try very hard to look at it from, you know, if this existed, is this right or cool and not shorting the future such that it's like obvious why this won't exist in a reasonable amount of time. That makes sense. I think the last time you were on or maybe one of the times you're on, we talked about how there used to be, there was this golden age of aqua hires where like great teams could sell to Twitter for like $10 million and they hadn't raised much so it was meaningful outcome for the founders and then they now we do aqua quits right that's what we're up to well yeah the the yeah i mean obviously the the windsurf uh thing no it's more they'll like go to facebook when you're you started a company from that company thing yeah yeah that

whole thing but it feels like we maybe are in a new golden age of aqua hires where like i was advising a company uh a founder like last week who launched a product it's like it was exciting but like clearly doesn't have product market fit yet. And he's like, you know, talented and has a great team. So he's getting fielded at all these offers that will be like not a meaningful outcome for the investors, but like, you know, will be very meaningful for the team. And it feels like there's more of that right now in this moment when people are like, I don't just need to like be AI native. I need like as much AI native talent as I possibly can. I'll pay a big premium for it. Yes. And that's healthy, right? The sort of decade we had,

of people just staying in long-term, like not going anywhere, startups without sort of recirculation of talent, I feel like was a negative moment. I think if you go back to the origins of, say, Facebook or Uber or Airbnb, in that moment, there was more aggregation of talent on those early teams than sort of in the next wave of startups. What's interesting about this moment in AI, and these very significantly funded companies,

a lot of the research labs and people coming out of the foundational models, by getting the funding at the scale they're getting, and by bringing with them 8, 10, 20 people from their previous company, you're actually getting depth of talent that is capable of building something big, probably in an easier way than starting from scratch.

And so I think there's a balance to be had, but I do think depth of talent is probably the most underrated component of a quality startup, right? Your 50th person on your roster is amazing. And I think one of the things about Ramp that they've done so magically is this combination of hiring, retaining, acquiring, inspiring, letting people go, bringing them back. And if you go to like 50, 100, 300th person at Ramp, there's just an immense amount of talent from top to bottom and that's i think how you build uh sustainable growth that uh you can keep

iterating and launching new and uh interesting products or marketing uh stunts or uh excellent marketing campaigns right when and i think you're seeing that um from a company where you're seeing depth of talent across all the different um departments within within ramp as an example yeah uh chat wants a jersey check what are we watch what are we rocking We're wearing the New York Rangers 100th year anniversary jersey. It's a baby blue. You look fantastic. We haven't won a game at home yet, and so hopefully we're going to bring some luck to us.

Well, good luck. Thank you so much. Congratulations. If you know any sponsors who need money, just let me know, and we'll take care of that. Perfect. We'll make some introductions. Great to see you. Come back on soon.

Congrats to the whole team. Cheers. Thanks so much. Let me tell you about Wander.com. Find Your Happy Place, Book of Wander, with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our next guest is Chris Dixon from Andrescent Horowitz. Living Legend.

Welcome to the show, Chris. Great to see you again. It's been too long. Great to have you back. Last time you were on, we got to time you up perfectly with Brian Armstrong. Today, we just missed each other by one day. 24 hours. But great to have you here.

And would love to get the update from you and how you're framing the current. the current crypto era it's it's in many ways linked to the AI boom but somewhat disconnected like how are you thinking about even just framing the conversation and setting the table yeah so we just put out our state of crypto report today which i think you know had a lot of good data um i think the the good news is i think things are trending very well um i think reflection of smart policy mainly that um that uh you know the genius bill passed which is very important which just helped the sort of stable coin growth um i think And what it shows, like what Gina shows is the dual effect of smart policy, which is, on the one hand, it provides a pathway for innovation.

And so we're seeing not only startups, but big companies like Stripe and, you know, FinTechs and Black Rock, Fidelity and so forth get involved in the space. But it also kind of eliminates a lot of the scams and bad behavior, right? So what we're really hoping for is a kind of similar result with the so-called market structure bill, which is being considered by Congress, which would provide a similar kind of policy framework for the rest of. of the crypto market beyond stable coins. So I think that this kind of momentum is reflected in the data that we shared today. So for example, stable coin volume is now in the trillions. That's adjusted, we try to, we have an adjusted metric we use,

which removes to remove a lot of the bots and other kinds of stuff. And very importantly, that's not correlated with trading volume. So it seems to be like sort of genuine, you know, people using for payments and treasury management and so forth. So that's a big deal. We're seeing a lot of cool kind of new emerging applications at the intersection of areas of crypto and AI in an area called DPN, which is decentralized physical infrastructure, which is a way to use kind of crypto to incentivize the build out of telecom and energy networks and so forth.

You know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a big movement of so-called real world assets, which is to bring like stocks and bonds on chain. A lot of good momentum. I mean, honestly, like we had a, you know, it was a choppy couple of years, 22 to 0.2.2.2. 24, and I think we're kind of coming out of that, and I'm optimistic, but still a long way to go. Yeah. I always wonder about the value of these, like, high-level market KPIs in crypto, because it feels like as soon as we latch on to when we identify one that seems to be tracking well, then it gets all thrown off by just a underlying shift in the market. Like, people were tracking like number of Bitcoin wallets for a while.

And that, like, the idea that the next generation will even be aware if they have a wallet, because they might own it through an ETF, or they might have a wallet that's abstracted away and they're not even aware of it. And I'm wondering, like, there's this, like, sort of like the midwit take is like, oh, the KPI flatlined, but the community overall keeps growing. And so if you were taking a victory lap in 2023, you missed out on the next wave, which looked different and didn't map onto the previous era of KPI's. And so I'm wondering, like, is there, is there, like, is there some ground truth that you, like, zoom out to that's just like the vibe? or the people or the talent or something like that. Like, how do you, how do you get away from this particular KPI is now, needs to be deprecated, basically?

Yeah, I mean, there are some, just to be fair to the KPI, is like, I think Darren, who is our head of data science of the report is very thoughtful on it. Like the, you know, like the stable coin volume uncorrelated to trading. Oh, sure, sure. It seems like a real kind of real metric that's kind of more track metric, monthly active users. That's not people that hold crypto. The number of people hold crypto is in the hundreds of a million.

What we track is people are actually using these kind of new apps that are on chain. Got it. That we put between 40 and 70 million. There's a error bar there because we have to get rid of bots and other things, but it's definitely been growing. And that's like monthly active users of apps. So, you know, it feels like a real metric that's sustainable, to your point. Yeah, but it's a good point.

Look, a lot of venture capital and startups is vibe-based, right? It's qualitative. And, you know, I think it's definitely better. I'm actually at grabbing our annual founder. summit now and like it's just the mood is better people are building and people are innovating you know it feels like offense not defense a lot of that's the policy shift um but you know policy shift is big also just like I feel like the the the bull case for bear markets is that it washes out a lot of the tourists and then the technologists stay it does yeah I think that's right

I think that's right I mean I've been you know obviously doing the internet stuff my whole career and seen many waves um including I you know I started my first company in the internet downturn of the 2000s And there was this kind of, you know, what was it, strong men, create weektimes, meme or whatever. Well, I like that crypto as an industry rewards people that have an unwavering vision and are okay with, you have to have some appetite for failure. You've got to be a missionary. Yeah, yeah. And so, and I think that's, like, healthy. It's like, yeah, you have to actually believe in this long term.

You have to be okay with the risk. you have to be okay with like a total ban scenario in a specific category. My question for you, prediction markets are having, you know, massive moment right now. And this was something that I'm sure you were writing about more than a decade ago in terms of its potential.

And a lot of, and there were various kind of attempts at prediction markets that never really reached like cultural relevancy and the scale and the way that they've reached today. What kind of categories do you think, people have thought had potential but kind of rode off maybe they were too early but we'll be talking about in like two years is it is it privacy zK proofs you know things along those lines now's a great question if i could just address your prior point about the holder you know sort of

sticking with it first i have an unwritten blog post that i that i would title investing is a uh emotional test disguised as an intellectual test meaning one of the things i've learned earned over the years is just like sticking with it in venture capital, whether it's crypto sort of more extreme. I think this is true of public markets if you read like Howard Marks and Warren Buffett. But it's definitely true in venture, which is a lot of it, the business, is just sticking with stuff. The same with entrepreneurship when it, when it seems, you know, kind of tough. So, you know, that's, I think it would be an amazing great point. To new emerging areas, yeah, look, I think privacy, it's interesting. Like, we had a lot of privacy is a very

area. Now, the stable coin bill passed a bunch of folks, like in the policy side who were kind of, you know, kind of, I don't know, anti-encryption and privacy are now saying, wait a second, all the stable coin payments are public. That's not good. What if you want to do financial production health care? We agree. That's why we want it. We don't want it for, obviously, for, you know, illegal activity. We want it because, you know, people want, in normal cases, they want privacy for some of the things they do. And so we think that's very important. We have a bunch of investments there. Yeah, prediction markets, it's great to see them break out now, as you said, they've been, the idea, it goes back, I wrote a tweet about it, about

back to Hayek in the 50s, and, you know, DARPA started a pre-street market, believe, in out the government in 2021, I believe, sorry, 2001, something like that. Wait, what was, was that just like, you know, just for, like, Intel purposes? Yeah, they wanted to predict, like, is there going to be a war in Iraq? And then they thought, okay, like, it's a little bit distasteful that people are betting on it, but the society benefits would outweigh it, but then there was such controversy around it that they canceled it. There are now rules as there should be around so-called harmful prediction markets, and you can't have those. But the kind of the core argument for prediction markets is that,

yes, there's sometimes, on the one hand, it's sort of gambling and betting. In the other hand, it has a real benefit. As we saw, for example, in the election, you can get really objective data. And in a time in which, you know, trusted institutions seems to be dropping, like, do you trust, you know, the newspaper anymore? It's nice to have an objective source for that. But back to your question, I think privacy is very interesting. I think, you know, I'm very excited by sort of the intersection of, like, AI and Crypto as an example. My experience in tech is that often, like, if you think back 15 years ago, people talked about mobile social cloud, was like the three buckboards. And some people saw them as kind of different categories.

In the end, we actually learned they were all very connected. I think that tends to happen. I think a lot of these things will converge, you know, robotics, AI, crypto, like, these are all the kind of megatrends. and I think it's natural that they intersect and reinforce each other. Are you seeing a speed up in crypto startup's productivity on the actual software development side, like coding agents for solidity or actually having a, you know, increase? You are. Oh, yeah, definitely.

Almost all of our company. We encourage them, too, to use, you know, Curpenter. And so is that what you mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because as a consumer, I mean, I see the data from like anthropologists. and Open AI and Gemini, I see that, like, tokens are being spent. But then a lot of the consumer software that I use, you know, the United app we like to pick on or like the flight booking app, it just feels like it's not, it's not like become

all futuristic all of a sudden. There's still bugs. And so I'm always interested in, like, startups are in a unique case where they can adopt new technologies and actually new workflows, and it maybe gain the productivity benefit faster than legacy companies. So I'm just interested to see if it's a unique use case. Yeah, and I think it just takes a while for these things to propagate, right? United App, people ask them to do it five years from now or whatever.

But the startups are all using it, using the Closer. It's amazing. I mean, I saw some study out of some university that was like these tools don't make you more productive. And she just used them. I spent a Christmas break playing with Christmas, playing with cursor, and I build a website. I mean, it's just ridiculous how great these tools are. Of course, they add to productivity. It's just these sake time.

It's like humans, the bottleneck is always humans and policy, I would say. regulation and humans take time to change behaviors right but as you say startups tend to be the first to adopt it yes we see it across the portfolio we would be kind of surprised and and i don't know like just yeah it's like it's like puzzled if somebody wasn't using a lot of these it would be kind of a red flag what what does uh institutional adoption and embrace really look like what are the kind of buckets like the base cases you're supporting custody and maybe trading and then the CEO to stop talking trash at some point

and then they start saying this is amazing. It's a joke. That's helpful. But how quickly do you think these major institutions can actually adopt crypto rails for, you know, operationally, right? Their job is to store and move money. Crypto is, you know, more efficient

in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, you can kind of think like crypto's a network. I mean, it's a network technology, right? It's about building networks. And it was the network where 99% Like stable points is an example, where 99% of the potential nodes of the network felt like they couldn't join the network for regulatory reasons. So now they're all, I think it'll see it in stages. So like the fintech, the sophisticated fintech like Stripe and, you know, Robin Hood and Revolut and things will be first.

And then over time, you'll see, I think eventually you'll see just like a button on your Chase Bank that's like send. And maybe they don't call it staple point, even they call it digital dollars or something. But you'll see, you know, it'll just be integrated into all the kind of fabric of these systems. And we're seeing a lot of activity. I mean, even, you know, Chase, I think Jamie Diamond talks trash, but I believe they have 1,500 people on blockchain projects. So, like, you know, I think the important thing is the bit has flipped where, you know, like, if you talk to the folks, they're like, look, we want to do this, but, like, our legal teams won't let us. Like, now we have legislation, which is the gold standard of policy, right? U.S. Congress passed law.

So, like, now they feel comfort to do it. And that's very, very important. And I think the bit has flipped where they now see it is not a threat, but an opportunity. So I think it'll be, you know, it'll take time. It'll be different kind of tranches of adoption based on how advanced the companies are. But I think we're on that clear path now. Is there anything that's been interesting for you guys on the buyout side, like looking at, you know, let's say like a mid-sized financial institution and realizing like, hey, this is a great business.

And if we actually, you know, were to acquire them. General Catalyst did with that health care network? Yeah, some of that effect or some of these role, you know, I think you'll see that. I think you'll see that. We don't actually do that. It's not really our thing. We do kind of stage venture, but mostly in some later stage venture.

Wouldn't it be fun to do an LBO? Yeah. I think one of these things it probably sounds fun. Yeah. Like those people, like we get to mostly hire people in venture. Like LBO is you're mostly firing people and it's just like a structuring. I don't know. I mean, probably a grass is greener thing.

It sounds fun and then you actually go do it. I think it's also just hard to actually change these organizations. and sometimes there's a real question, like, do you need just new organizations started from scratch or do you change them? I don't know. It's not my area. I'm just speculating. But mainly it's just not our thing. But I think other people are doing it. And I think they, you know, the other firms doing it will, I think, accelerate the adoption of new technologies like AI and crypto. Yeah. How is the, or how do you envision the role of the venture capitalist changing over the next maybe decade in crypto? I feel like there's one world where you become half VC, half hedge

fund person that's trading liquids and trading liquids at the earlier stage because companies are kind of doing on-chain IPOs and earlier stage, but you still need to build a position and take an opinionated view of the future of the technology, assess the team. How is all that evolving? How do you think that that will evolve? Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, what we do, we've done for a long time. That's one reason we started us separate crypto fund. We both do kind of early stage traditional venture and do things like buy tokens like Bitcoin directly in the market. And then we have our own, like, density and trading. And we sort of build a to all these, these capabilities.

At some point, you'd expect that some of those things to, you know, be subsumed by outside organizations and kind of commoditized and these practices I would expect would propagate to other firms. But, like, I just look at Venture, like, through the lens of, like, core, like, the fundamentals are always just great people. Yeah. Like, we're ultimately in the talent business. So there's all these other kind of mechanics and things that we've built up.

But in the end, we're just trying to bet on brilliant founders who have great ideas. and that can just either way I view it is that can come in many forms that can come at the early stage equity investment that can come as a token investment you know we're also betting of course on communities you think about something like bitcoin like it's really a community at that point and it's sort of this network and community and so I look at it through that I always try to whenever the markets kind of get strange and things are happening I always say let's go back to first principles first principles is like believe in you know positive vision of the future great entrepreneurs doing, you know, pursuing big ideas, you know, highly technical, highly product

focused, and then whatever mechanics we need to do to get exposure to that. I don't know if this is possible, if this has already happened, but would you ever see yourself backing a project that looks like Bitcoin in the sense that the founder's anonymous, you can never meet them, but for some reason you do have the availability to make, you do have the ability to make an investment like a venture capital investment. Are you equipped to make that deal happen? Yeah, yeah, we are. We are. Yeah? So, yes, we can just buy, I mean, we can just buy tokens. And we have an operation. We've had that. People don't seem to know, they think of us more adventure. We've had that since 2018. Totally. Just record. Yeah. And actually two-third,

I would say roughly two-thirds around investing has always been that. I mean, that was part of the design and why, like, I wanted to spin this out. So we could set it up for principles with this structure. So we have like, I want to be a crypto VC, but I don't want to buy tokens. That's an odd trade. For sure. Well, there's a whole, I can tell you, this is the longer story. It's a whole backstory where like, it was just, it was just very challenging.

The LPs. So like when we were, I got it for scripto fund, like, I went to all the LPs and I said, look, we're going to do, we're going to buy tokens, we're going to do this. And like, you can opt out or opt in. And some of them opted out. And, you know, some opt it in and just like, look, this is what we're going to do. So we have a venture structure.

We're a venture fun in the sense that our LP relationship is a long-term relationship. if they lock up their money. But that's sort of the reverse mullet or mullet or whatever. We're on the back end, it's like a very traditional venture. But on the front end, we can do all. We can buy tokens. We can do equity investments, whatever way that we need to get exposure to great ideas and great people we can do.

And that's been our thing in our kind of design from the beginning. And we continue to do that. Yeah. In this analogy, I feel like the venture part is the business in the front and the open market trading is the party in the back. But I don't know. It's a stressed analogy potentially. I like a mullet analogy.

It's great. Thanks so much for taking the time to travel. Yeah, great to get the update. Sorry, have a great summit. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be a great time. It's going to be an amazing time. Great, great to see you.

We'll talk you soon. Have a good one. Bye. Let me tell you about getbezzle.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet? Seriously, any watch. And, Jordie, did you put up a better run last night on eight sleep?

I did okay. I got an 88, slept six hours and 50 minutes. How did you do? Did you get destroyed? 85. Wait, I beat you by one point again? No, 85. You got an 88.

I got an 88. Okay, a couple points. Yesterday in the chat, people were congratulating us on our good numbers. We got to put up good numbers for the chat, and you've got to go to 8Sleep.com and get a 5. TvPN. Are there any other hosts? Yeah, I was shocked at how, like, viral. I was shocked at how viral the whole, like, AWS 8Sleep thing went.

Oh, yeah. that, uh, uh, clearly a skill issue and I was not affected. Yeah. I slept right through. I actually slept great. My numbers were insane. It was crazy. Uh, but yes. I mean, somebody, uh, somebody, you know, I, I, I, I, I, if you're, if your, if your eight sleep did, like, wind up getting too hot and you woke up and you didn't have a good night sleep. Uh, I, I'm sending my best. I hope you get back on that horse. And, uh, we'll close out with this post from Rune. I knew you're going to go there. It's great. Or a farming in the Zoom waiting room. Or farming in the Zoom rating room.

Never join. Never join. Just hang in the waiting room. Oh, so people know that you're there? Is that how you do it? Yeah, that you could join. I feel like, I mean, at one point, not to break the fourth wall here and give you a little bit behind the scenes, but at one point, we had multiple guests. When they come in, they hit a waiting room, the restream waiting room, of course. And at one point, multiple people could talk to each other, and they could hear what was happening on the show, and it was kind of like this funny networking event that was happening. And I actually think

that there's there's some value there if we could get that right. But right now, we just let everyone sit in silence and then eventually come on, watch the show, and then join. So there's minimal aura farming in the TBPN waiting room, the restream waiting room. That's right. But maybe we should increase it. Well, thank you for hanging out with us today. Very fun show. I can't wait for tomorrow. It pains me. We have to wait just under 21 hours to get back here. The clock starts now. But yeah, the clock starts now. Thank you for doing. Have a wonderful evening. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Cheers. Goodbye.