TBPN Live - Chad Byers, Car Dealership Guy, Scott Wu, Soren Monroe, Joe Weisenthal, PepsiCo, Fooling Tesla FSD

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - Why was John in DC? (34:26) - Fooling Tesla FSD (48:12) - The Solana Ad (59:59) - Soren Monroe (01:13:50) - Joe Weisenthal (01:42:28) - Scott Wu (02:14:30) - Car Dealership Guy (02:42:29) - Chad Byers

You're watching TBPN. It is Tuesday, March 18th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today, folks. And we're kicking off some listening Q&A. I'm feeling pretty bad. I was on a flight for six out of the last 12 out of the last 24 hours. And you were bummed because you didn't get any paparazzi shots no right no there was nobody there was no one taking pictures of me yeah I saw well that you know up yeah that I know I saw some some paparazzi shots hit the timeline I want to see I

want to see a video leak from a from a Delta know, coast to coast flight where you're arguing about how could you not have Dom Perignon on a flight? Just berating the stupidness. Yeah, and then you get exposed for not flying private. Oh yeah, yeah, it just destroys my entire career. Yeah, just get laughed out of the podcasting world. Hopefully it never happens. Well, we actually got some questions from viewers.

One of them was, what was John doing in Washington, DC yesterday? And I just want to address, you know, people have been saying like, oh, maybe John's like a political power player or like a kingmaker. He's like pulling the strings behind the scenes. And I just want to categorically deny those accusations. There's no evidence for

that and it's not true. But the accusations have been very widespread and seem to have a bunch of independent sources that have all been sort of saying the same thing in different ways. Yeah Teddy Schleffer at the New York Times has been sniffing around, Julia Black has been sniffing around at the information. But it's not true. I wasn't in DC pulling strings, although I was doing some lobbying, specifically. I mean, we've been podcasting for a couple months now.

It's been going really well. But recently I've been getting very, very worried and very scared about the situation with podcasting, mainly about what happens if the power that accrues to podcasters just keeps accruing exponentially? Could we be in some sort of like podcasting doom scenario? And I think we need the government to step in and regulate and create kind of a government sanction

monopoly for podcasters. And normally I'm a free markets guy. You're normally against regulatory capture. Totally, totally. Specifically in AI. 100%. A lot of the AI safety stuff was kind of overblown. I don't believe in any of that.

But podcasting is different. I mean, it's right access to your brain's neurons. It's so important. And so I was there on Capitol Hill calling for action, saying regulate us. Make sure that you need a government sanctioned license So I was there on Capitol Hill calling for action, saying, regulate us, make sure that you need a government sanctioned license to have an RSS fee. Yeah, it should probably cost $5 million a year to have an RSS fee.

Exactly. And really bring in. Yeah, and you should have a stamp, an approval from a government organization like the FDA. They should look at your content and say, yes, this is not slop, this passes the bar. This is good for America and humanity. Yeah. And also- And that would stop a lot of people from doing these sort of part-time podcasts.

Exactly. We would get rid of all that, which would be great. And then also, I've been very, very worried about just losing our domestic edge in podcasting in America. So I was also calling for a 10,000% tariff on international podcast. Exactly. If it's not made in America, it just doesn't make sense. We're non-ironically seeing this in the app store right now. A lot of the top entertainment apps are sort of slopped content from overseas and we need to put, you know, 10,000% tariffs on those. I agree. As well as all foreign podcasts. I agree.

We simultaneously need to protect the American podcast industry. 100%. Yet also protect consumers from the long term potential damage of certain podcasters with unsavory content exactly getting out of control. Yeah, it might have some short-term pain, but I think in the long-term America will be better off

with a podcast policy that's focused on America, putting America first. Who would be, and it's possible that David Sacks could also expand into being the podcast czar. That'd be great. The only challenge is he's historically been against monetization. True. Which could handicap the industry.

Oh well, well, if you're planning a trip to DC, it is beautiful right now. You should book a place on Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service.

It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And yeah, I mean, DC's, it's a beautiful city. And one of my favorite memories as a kid was going with my family and seeing all the different museums. It's a fantastic place. It's overlooked, I think, because people say, oh, I gotta go to France, I gotta go to Spain,

I gotta go to Japan. We got it go to France. I gotta go to Spain All right here folks stay in America go national mall the national mall visit the Smithsonian and Potentially we might be the air off some of these Smithsonian assets. Yeah, it was part of those only and great take private Yeah, the take private Smithsonian is gonna be great Take private. Yeah the take private Smithsonian is gonna be great You know the take private of the national, you know other countries are nationalizing their energy Yeah, and trees and sort of computing we need to nationalize our relics. Yeah Yeah, yeah, there's gonna be a huge Much like in in Soviet Russia as all these sort of state-owned assets Much like in Soviet Russia, as all these state-owned assets were privatized.

It's going to be a huge wealth creation event for the American oligarchs that can take these treasured assets private. And those are the future LPs of many venture capital funds. Moon rocks, dinosaur bones, all of these things are up for sale in a more efficiently run government. Truly the Smithsonian is, the National Air and Space Museum is like a core memory for me as a child because I just loved planes so much

and was an avid flight simulator, you know? And so to be able to go around and walk around and sit in the cockpit or the cabin. And now you'd potentially be able to own a piece of that if you bought part of the private equity firm that took it private. Yeah, or say we're gonna fractionalize each asset. I love that, I love where you're going with that.

This is good. Add some leverage into the mix. This is perfect. This is more American than stuffing it all away in a dusty Smithsonian museum. Let's Yeah, let's love for these assets Oh, near economy. Yeah, you need a market map. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, so we're out there somewhere out there There's there's somebody listening to the show for the first time Lost that we lost them but for the rest of you we'll move on to something a little bit more practical

We got a call from a listener, a question from a listener. They say they currently work at one of the most profitable podcasts in the world and they're commuting in and they need a car and so they were deciding between a Tesla Model 3 or a Toyota Camry. And we were talking about this off mic, we were kind of recommending like, I mean both of those are great cars,

Model 3 is great self-driving, which we're gonna get into later with the Mark Rober scandal. Toyota Camry, also very reliable, very affordable, not gonna lose a lot of money on that, but there is another way. What about deep value? Yeah, we were looking for deep value,

looking for something where you could stand out, really impress your potentially two bosses at this podcast that you work at, and our recommendation was go and get a Dodge Hellcat. Yeah, and you know where you should get it? Yeah, where? You know, some of the people are always saying, okay, what marketplaces can you get, you know,

sort of the best bang for your buck with cars, right? Cause if you look on- Like cars and bids or bring a trailer. Yeah, if you look on like DuPont registry, prices are typically high, they're more collector cars often. But if you go on Facebook marketplace and you just search for the term IYKYK. If you know you know.

If you know you know, you can find cars that usually aren't photographed super well. They look like they're kind of like hidden away in some type of parking garage or something like that. It's a little bit of like a tealian secret, like contrarian thing is that a lot of people say, oh, you need the title. but really to drive a car, you just need the keys.

Yeah, they're usually priced 80% lower than marketing. Yeah, yeah. And the one downside is that they don't typically come with a title. Yeah. And, but for the potential savings. But if you have a Dodge Hellcat, do you even need a title? Do you need a title?

I always say when you're commuting to work, like your tires should be breaking at least three times. Yeah, but anyways, I think people are, you could go out and get a Model Y long range for 50K from the Tesla dealership. You could go and get a McLaren for 50K. You might have to pay cash and bring it in a duffel bag and you might not get a title.

But as long as the wheels aren't falling off, you're gonna be in a pretty good spot. And so yeah, just go on Facebook Marketplace, search if you know, you know, find an exotic and worry about the title later. I would say stick with Dodge Charger you want to search for blacked out You want you want illegal tint on the front window? Yeah On the front windshield for sure for sure because you want to make a statement if you're if you're new in an organization

You're coming in and you're you're trying to you know, let people know where you stand in the organization. When we hear the screaming engine of that help engine. There's actually an entire Facebook marketplace apparently called No Title Card If You Know You Know. It has 44,000 members and I don't know what they're talking about, but as long as the cars are in good condition, talking about, but as long as the cars are in good condition,

and it seems like some potential opportunity there. Let us know in the comments if we're missing anything on this, but seems like some great value. For sure. Anyway, if you- We're gonna be having the car dealership guy on the show later today. We can ask him. And we'll ask him what this is all about.

Yeah. But he's gonna be breaking down, you know, kind of what's happening today in the automotive industry. Fantastic. You know, and broadly how they're applying, you know, everything from AI to fintech and a lot more. Cool. So, well, if you are looking for something that is authenticated and does come with proper paperwork, maybe you should get a luxury watch from Bezel. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Go to getbezel.com and check something out.

There's a bunch of fantastic options. And you know who's gotta get on Bezel soon? The Wiz founders, because they just cashed out to the tune of $32 billion, 64X annualized, 32X projected 2025 revenue. They sold to Google. What was the purchase price in Daytonas? I think it was probably.

I'm gonna run the numbers really quick. Hundreds of thousands of Daytonas, something like that. It's a lot. I'm gonna run the numbers really quick. Hundreds of thousands of Daytonas, something like that. It's a lot. I'm gonna run the numbers. Wiz was founded in 2020. It's roughly one point... That's a young company. 1.5 million Daytonas.

Okay, 1.5 million Daytonas. So it'd be hard to imagine, you know, the entire, maybe there was some stock considerations too, but definitely in the millions of Daytonas. That's great, that's a great outcome for them. So Google acquired Wizz and Wizz was founded in 2020 in markets itself as a seamless cloud security platform. Is this a smart move? says Wasteland Capital. Google is a distant number three in cloud with 12% share. I don't know exactly how distant that is from AWS and Azure. I'm sure it's like far, but not that bad.

Google Cloud's pretty good. And in fact, they were supply constraint, right? This last year when we looked into their CapEx. Everybody loves to say, oh, we're supply constrained. Yeah. And it needs to differentiate itself with unique USP's. Just for some context. So Google is a clear number three, AWS.

This is as of Q4 2024 30% market share for AWS 21% for Azure 12% for Google Cloud and then Our law just sales force has 2% Okay Oracle has 3% Yeah Alibaba is up there number four. Okay In that context, this is a strategically very solid move. It gets a new standalone product

that it can sell to anyone and also probably offer faster, cheaper, and better plug and play integration for its own cloud customers. Security is of preeminent importance and hard to manage. But the PR on the deal leaves a lot to be desired. It's not clear from the deal description on Google's site how this is going gonna impact their growth,

margin or revenue profile. They gave us a lot of stupid platform buzzwords, nothing tangible. How did they value this at such a high multiple? Plus, with $50 billion in annual R&D, one wonders why Google is unable to boost cloud security on its own. Are they not able to release products effectively?

No, it doesn't look like it. Why can't they hire good people for all that cash? And was Google Cloud Security really bad before this? I don't know. They really need to work on this. I'd fire the PR team. The poor communication will cost shareholders a lot of money today.

Also, considering the recent crash in Google's share price, could this cash have been better spent on a buyback? Let's face it, 32 billion is only 1.6% of Google's market cap despite sounding like a lot of money. It's Google's largest deal ever for a strategic move, if that's what this is. It's not much as such, but some buyback support would have been nice.

You need it now, shareholders are bleeding. You have the lowest multiple among the mag seven and still choose to spend on M&A instead. And consider the struggles of their artificial intelligence. Let's face it, Gemini sucks versus the competition. It feels like many investors would have rather seen capital allocated

to a better product in the AI space, like buying Perplexity, for example. But instead of buybacks in AI, public shareholders and Google product users get whizz. Okay, now give us accelerated cloud growth targets. Give the public something. Now, for sure, this is an incredible exit for the VCs here. And I saw Andreessen did one billion on 12 billion,

like a year or two ago. And so they just made $2 billion. And I think Thrive was in that round as well. And there was a small list of- The cap table is literally a Silicon Valley who's who. So yeah, we got to ring the size gong for everyone involved. Yeah, so they initially had a deal in 2024. Whiz runs a secondary sale at 16, which was double their previous valuation. And initially the initial deal was somewhere

in the $20 billion range. And anyway, so they put in basically all the investors into the new, collectively Sequoia, CyberStarts, Index, Salesforce, Thrive Capital, Greenoaks, and two dozen others got, yeah, basically whoever invested at 16 got a clean 2X in almost less than a year, I think. What a cool company story too. I mean, incredibly quick, five years, I guess, from 2020 to now.

Founded by Asaf Rapoport, the co-founders and the founders, Asaf, stand to make more than $3 billion each from the sale. It's the biggest exit for a private venture-backed company on record, displacing Metta's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. So we had a real dry spell there for a decade. We are so back. But we are so back.

Yeah, and the market, it's hard to say the market didn't, I mean, it's actually not very hard to say. The market did not love this. They, basically in the last five days wiped out roughly. But it's hard to say because this deal leaked earlier. Yeah, there's some other factors. Price in and the whole market's kind of collapsing. Pretty meaningful drop in share price at the open today.

And they've wiped off like 50, $60 billion in the last five days. Not great. So good point from Wasteland basically saying that if there was better messaging around this entire deal, it would be potentially bullish. People might like it, right? So we got some other news here

from the history of the company. All of the co-founders are alumni of Unit 8200, part of the Israel Defense Forces, known for its cybersecurity savvy and intensity. Former Unit 8200 members, or 8200, I'm not sure exactly how to say that, members have been able to attract clients and investment money from Silicon Valley and spades. And the WIZ team is now among the ranks of unit veterans that have founded highly valued cyber security companies such as Palo Alto networks and fire blocks. Raport, a 41 year old Tel Aviv native often dons a hoodie with whiz's logo on it in keeping

with the tech aesthetic or white t-shirt joggers and sneakers. And you'll love this part. His shoes from the luxury Italian brand Golden Goose typically cost more than $500 Fantastic, we'd love to see we love to see some some fine. It's even if you're going with the simple hoodie and jeans Joggers, yeah, it doesn't throw Amazon Sneakers still class it up a little bit Let people know hey I'm running a 30 billion dollar the beauty of the beauty of Golden Goose too is most of their shoes,

at least the really popular ones with men, are intensely worn in. The red and white sneakers they wear. No, those are Golden Goose? Yeah. Oh, there we go. And they look to the untrained eye like a 10-year-old pair of sneakers.

Got it. Dirty, scuffed up. And so he's, you know, he's very, the, the, whoever wrote this article, the journal really put him on blast here because he was flying out of the radar prior to that. They let him know. Yeah. They did their research. They clocked those from a mile away probably. He often brought his border collie Mika, dubbed Wiz's chief dog officer, to work at the company's offices in New York and Tel Aviv, and encouraged other employees to bring their dogs as well. Mika, who died late last year, had her own LinkedIn page.

That's terrible. I'm so sorry. That's unfortunate. Rappaport wrote when the dog died. Did your dog ever have a LinkedIn page? No, he had an Instagram though. It was poppin'. Yeah, but why, what? I should have gone on LinkedIn, really.

You didn't want him to link and build? Yeah, seriously. And create value? Seriously, do some thought leadership for that dog. Nothing happened on Instagram for dogs, right? They get enough attention in the real world? Yep. Get him on LinkedIn.

I made the wrong platform choice for sure. Rob Fort wrote when the dog died that they were a power couple and called the dog the love of his life. Oh. Oh, that's sweet. Just a man's best friend friend he can now take his billions and spend the rest of his life you know cloning the dog he needs to acquire he I don't know if he'd quite have the money to acquire what's the woolly mammoth one oh yeah why am I

blanking on that I forget something it Something. It's not mammoth. Mammoth. There's something. Colossal. Yeah. And just say, hey, look. Cool tech. It seems.

This is a pure play. Dog reincarnation now. We're reincarnating Mika, my dog. Love it. And we're going to use the dog to do another $30 billion exit in five years and just sort of rinse and repeat. It's fantastic. So talks between Google and Wiz fizzled last summer.

Wiz started talking to bankers again in the fall about a fresh deal. A paucity of IPOs this year prompted Rapaport and co-founders Ami Lutwack, Yonon Costica, and Roy Resnick to explore deal conversations with several other parties, according to people familiar with the matter.

None was willing to pay up as much as Google. The companies were ultimately able to improve the terms of the deal again and gain confidence that the Google transaction could overcome regulatory hurdles. Google also views the WIS deal as something that is in the best interest of America's national security. The increased role of AI and adoption of cloud services have dramatically changed the security landscape for customers. The acquisition is likely to test the Trump administration's

antitrust appetite, but if it clears, Wiz's security features could help Google attract more cloud customers. And we're having Joe Weisenthal on the show in about an hour, 45 minutes, and it was very interesting. I was listening to the latest episode of Odd Lots and he had the new, the Lena Con replacement. I don't remember his name.

FTC chief, Andrew Ferguson on the Trump vision for antitrust. And it was fascinating listening to this guy. He was incredibly eloquent and could just take you on these like really long like journeys in the history of antitrust like clearly had really understood the foundational texts and research it was very interesting Conversation, but maybe we'll get Joe to chime in on where he thinks. Yeah overall Huge win for the Israeli tech ecosystem

Sean McGuire called us out earlier. They went by the Wizards, which is a good name Really? That's often times startup Team nicknames can be a little bit a little bit rough a little bit rough, but this one works and just good for Venture broadly to get this type of outcome. Totally. We need our big Asset managers to get some quick wins every now and then to just you know keep keep the fire hose of capital coming we were so close to just like an IPO historic run with the Trump pump and everyone was getting ready and the

market was up every all risk assets were way up it was like well everything's going public now the doors open and everyone's like okay like I don't want to be the first one through but like let's do it and then yeah the market crashed and now it's like let's stay private for another decade when you look at you know I'm sure that whiz was pitched on going public by a bunch of different investment banks and I'm sure it was an option for them that being being said, you know, selling to Google and, you know, it's probably much better lifestyle post than post IPO. Yeah, so it makes sense and still a great way to return

capital, you know, back in ultimately into the ecosystem. I don't know, I'd be curious to know some of those later stage rounds where they, you know, sort of made out of some of these funds? Were they special purpose vehicles? If they were in funds with that kind of timeline, they would likely be recycled directly back in. But who knows? Yeah, redeployed.

We'll have to ask one of the backers, see what they think. Well, I'm sure all the founders at whiz are sleeping well, but they could be sleeping a lot better if they got an eight sleep. Go to a sleep.com nights that fuel your best day is turning a bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Use code TBPN at eight sleep.com. Go to sleep.com. $350 off TBPN. My eight sleep did its absolute best last night. I got four and a half hours of sleep. It's telling me to it's telling me to have to pay attention. I'm

definitely paying attention to how my sleep was last night. I got a 67 I need to Yeah, I honestly need to sort of correct lights just podcasting early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise go to 8cert.com Slash TV they should update their website copy That early to bed early to what rise makes a man and healthy wealthy and wise well, let's stay on the topic of Acquisitions and go over to Kiva Dickinson who says what's this?

300 million dollar tax benefit getting talked about okay so poppy acquisition break down break down this yeah just real quick we do the world first yeah let's let's go through it so Pepsi Co announced yesterday they're acquiring prebiotic soda brand poppy for 1.95 billion the soda make the Pepsi the snacks and soda maker said the deal includes 300 million of anticipated cash tax benefits. And really eye popping number makes sense that sort of the big CPG brands would pay quite a lot to ultimately buy the products that are displacing them on the shelves, right? I think Poppy and Ollie Pop, uh, these companies have very, you know, very quickly made a product that was, I would argue close to as good,

seemingly more healthy and consumers love them. They, they killed it on, you know, the merchandising side, just delivering a bunch of different flavors iterating quickly. I saw somebody joking You know the backstory here is that Ollie pop started Poppy actually started before Ollie pop that's right, but was called something else. I think it was called mother something Oh, yeah, they rebrand and they were an apple cider vinegar sort of tonic.

Yeah. Ollie pop comes out and I guess Poppy allegedly was like, that's a good idea and just immediately rebranded. And I remember at the time I was living in Venice at the time, which Venice is the hub of, uh, in many ways, I feel like the hub of, you know, consumer packaged goods, uh goods outside of Brooklyn maybe. And I remember this was, you know, drama in that moment because Poppy had come out and basically like almost one to one copied the Ollipop brand. Like I'm sure there, I

don't know the whole sort of like legal backstory, but I'm sure letters were getting sent to them. Yeah, it had very like whimsical colors and cartoonish fonts. Yeah, it was like similar, very similar fonts. Yep. And very similar products. Like I think the main thing with at least Poppy is that they didn't go, like soda might be over 100 calories a can.

Obviously Diet Coke is calorie free, zero calories. Poppy and Ollie Pop always played in this like 25 calories per can, some calories, but in low calorie, kind of just a different positioning. And it's interesting that PepsiCo is feeling the heat from the prebiotic soda more than they did from the seltzer because do you remember Spindrift was really putting pressure on them and I saw a lot of people switching to just chugging seltzers with zero. I mean, you look at the ingredients on

Spindrift and it's just like lemon juice and water and seltzer. There's like nothing there. And I think, but the sales velocity for these prebiotic soda brands just ended up being orders of magnitude more than the seltzer market. People realize, OK, Spindorf was hot. LaCroix was hot. Poppy and Ollipot came and just flooded the market. And one thing that's, I won't say one way or another, if Poppy was a direct copy of Ollipop,

I just don't know enough of the backstory. I just know the sort of rumors. Doesn't matter now, but really fantastic example of, um, it's rare that you see a company sort of get, get, uh, called out for copying someone else, especially in CPG, where the product is one thing, but it's really about the delivery and the, uh, you know, the branding and the packaging and all that stuff. Uh, but it's rare to see a copycat product

do scale to a $2 billion outcome in such a short amount of time. So let's talk about why Pepsi did this deal and then let's talk about those cash tax benefits. First, soda is under more attack than it's ever been. I mean, everyone knows that the big gulp at 7- at seven 11 is like a thousand calories and very bad for you. Um, uh, RFK jr, the new health and human secretary, uh, health and human services secretary has called soda poison. Uh, and sales of, of traditional soda has, have gone flat. A little bit of a pun

there. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have jumped into the market dominated by Poppy and competitor Ollipop with their own creations. Coke in February said it would launch a soda promoting digestive help called Simply Pop, while Pepsi is formulating a version it aims to sell in the spring.

They'll probably cancel that because they have Poppy in the portfolio now. Unlike probiotic drinks such as kombucha and kefir, which introduce new microbes to the gut, prebiotic sodas contain dietary fibers that feed the bacteria already living in our systems. Ollie Pop and Poppy use inulin fiber, often naturally derived from agave or chicory roots. So that is why they're putting pressure on it.

We can go back to the previous post. Yeah, the Kiva, pretty prominent CPG investor says, what's this 300 million of tax benefit getting talked about in the PepsiCo Poppy acquisition? Is the deal being done at 1.65 or 1.9 billion? When you acquire an LLC, you get to step up the basis of the target company's assets to account for the difference between what you pay for the company

and the balance sheet assets, AKA the book value. In situations like Poppy, where a lot of what PepsiCo is buying is brand, the step up can be quite large, often a majority of the value of the company. Pepsi here is saying, hey, people love this product. They're the sort of in these retail stores with our distribution network,

we can get them in many more, we can get them global. We're really buying a product that people already love that has velocity, that's competing directly with one of our core products, which is their Pepsi Cola, and I'm sure like Pepsi Zero or whatever they call it. So Kiva says the acquirer can then amortize the value of the step up over time in the same way they depreciate a capital asset they invest in,

that amortization reduces their earnings before tax thereby reducing their tax bill for years These future tax savings can then be discounted to reflect a present value Presumably then Pepsi is saying they would have paid 1.65 billion if poppy was a C corp But instead they were willing to pay an extra 300 million for the tax savings that they will realize over time Interest since he has no inside information, but that's what he assumes is happening. So interesting. Either way, really big numbers.

Good for the CPG ecosystem broadly. This doesn't mean it's a good time to start a pre-routing soda company, even though it's a very impressive outcome. The trap with CPG has always been that, you know, sort of these simple, tangible ideas, right? It's a very impressive outcome. The trap with CPG has always been that, sort of these simple, tangible ideas, right? Sort of, oh, I can make a beverage, I can put it in a can, I could get it in a store.

And what you don't realize is that it takes just a monumental effort. It takes a really ridiculous execution over a long period of time. Poppy also, Poppy had like pretty much a pretty ridiculous, they'd done sort of series of party rounds over the years that I think they pretty well leverage if you look at their, yeah,

if you look at their investor list, it's kind of a very Hollywoodization. Yeah, it's tough because with CP list, it's kind of a very Hollywood- Yeah, it's tough because with CPG, it's extremely difficult to build distribution into the product. There are very few network effects or flywheels that you can build. Everyone does like a referral friend program,

but it just doesn't work the same way as something that's like Dropbox that has a referral friend program where you get something like tangible that's free, high margin. So it just comes down to just grit and sales and distribution and advertising and out of home advertising made easy and measurable. You have to go on adquick.com. You have to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise, data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. That's really what it takes to succeed. And so that's what I would recommend to the Poppy team and the folks at Pepsi. They're gonna have a lot more money in their marketing budgets. And I'm sure you're listening, Pepsi CMO,

go to AdQuick right now and just full set, just send it all on adquick.com. just just full set just send it all on well you know they have a flavor called Pepsi max and so they could lead and you know literally buy every single billboard on adquick for Pepsi max yes sort of max out the platform max it out max it out and if you're a founder that's working on a consumer good go buy a billboard go go viral, have some fun with it, talk to the iQuick team, they will get you set up. They will have fun. I have a buddy who really noticed that out of home demand

in LA dropped dramatically after the fires. Oh really? And so he just bought up pretty much, he has a nine figure revenue CPG company. I love it. He bought up basically every grade A billboard in all of LA. The Jeremy Giffon of billboard buying.

Yeah, special situations guy. Yeah, I'm into it. And the amount of just like attention he received off of it was insane. I mean, every single day there was tons of people taking pictures. It's one of those things that's really, really hard to measure, because you'll get text messages from people

that just like, your company feels more real. It's similar to PR and press, where it's hard to measure, but that person who's considering joining your company, they see the billboard and they think like, okay, this is a more serious company. Or, you know, potential distributor, potential investor, potential investor. It just makes you feel more like you've broken out of just,

oh, you exist in this hyper-targeted online flywheel that might be working, but you do some things. It makes you more real. The beauty of out of home versus traditional media is you don't have to talk to journalists. Yeah, you can say whatever you want. When you do adquick, you just sign up and do it. Anyway, should we talk about this, Mark?

Yes, we should. So Mark Rober put out a YouTube video testing, can he fool Tesla's full self-driving system? And I mean, it's a very funny idea. He built a wall that looks like the road straight out of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. And of course, the Tesla, which is using a camera, is fooled. that looks like the road straight out of Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote and Of course the Tesla which is using a camera is fooled and smashes through the wall

Completely, you know impossible situation not something that you should be worried about if you are purchasing a self-driving car but it was extremely controversial because any enemies like Like like why the Cartoon style. I guess the Road Runner is the one who puts it out. So if you're feuding with someone with Road Runner strategies and aesthetics, then yeah, maybe stay away from the Tesla. But if you're not, you're probably fine.

But there's been a huge reaction. What was the other company that was? Luminar. And so that's another interesting thing. Luminar, founded by Austin Russell, a Teal fellow, took the company public during the SPAC boom. I also believe Luminar's Austin Russell, at one point he was trying to buy Forbes,

and at another point I think he bought the succession house that burned down during the fires. I think that was him, right? $100 million plus now. $100 million house or something like that. And so the stock has been, it fell from its SPAC peaks. It's down at around $213 million now as a market cap. And I think the company was at one point valued

in like the four billion range, like most of these SPACs. And so Luminar sells LIDAR for self-driving car companies. It was a very hot topic, very hot product. During the self-driving car boom, there was a question, okay, if Waymo really takes off or something like it and Luminar is one of the providers, well then Luminar's gonna be a really key component in the supply chain.

They'll be a very successful company. Obviously the stock is down, but since that Mark Rober video dropped, the stock's up 27%. And it's very interesting the way it's filmed because they actually, they're using a Lexus SUV for the LIDAR car, but they black out the logos. So you can't, like you can tell

if you just know what a Lexus looks like. And to be clear, Luminar has not really made progress on getting back towards its 2020 and who's the peak February 12th of? 2021 it peaked at $565 a share Wow you're on public comm looking at that. Yeah, it's at six six bucks point six dollars and 70 cents right now it's down 99 still. So if you loved Luminar at $565 a share, you're gonna love it at $6.42. Wow. No, but this seems like an interesting strategy

to potentially get retail investors re-engaged with the stock. Totally, totally. And so let's go through the story here. So Alex Finn breaks it down in what is a pretty controversial thread. I think pretty much every single one of these tweets that he posted got community noted. But he does do a good job of just laying out

exactly what happened. He says, Mark Robers built one of the strongest reputations on social media. Absolutely true. I've talked to Mark briefly in a clubhouse room very nice guy You know mark's background is he worked at nasa just total science Guru like you know just science nerd. He just loves doing these little tests has Has grown this massive youtube channel where he kind of tests different scientific ideas

and uh and alex finn is claiming that today he obliterated it all with one 18 minute video. It's a story of greed, deception, and cowardice. And you can tell from the writing, this is as click-baity as a YouTube video, but it got 90K likes and 22 million views. So Mark is a long-time YouTuber who spent years accruing over 65 million subscribers.

That is a massive, massive number. He was the Mr. Beast before there was a Mr. Beast, and then he says, yesterday he let money, politics, and greed get in the way of all that. Mark put out a video called, Can You Fool a Self-Driving Car? The concept is simple. Drive a Tesla in full self-driving mode on a road

where there's a wall painted like a road. There's actually six tests he does. One is just, there's a mannequin with a kid in the road, then they sprayed some water, then they sprayed some fog, then they had the kid pop out at the last second. They did a number of different tests to kind of show different scenarios. And basically the gist of the video is like,

LIDAR succeeded in six out of six, and the Tesla succeeded in I succeeded in six out of six and the Tesla succeeded in I think only three out of six. But the Tesla fanboys really came out in strongly against this and there are some reasonable critiques of this. So Alex Vint says wrong, the video was filled with deception, lies and illegal undisclosed advertising. In the video, Tesla does not detect a wall and goes right through it. On top of that, there's a mannequin that gets absolutely nailed it is very funny there but there are a few things mark doesn't tell you first of all he lied

about full self-driving he didn't even use FSD he used autopilot which to even Tesla admits is an older not a strong technology and this is where it gets really confusing because obviously in the context of like a highly edited YouTube video Mark Rober's not giving you all of the details on like, this is the exact hardware I'm using. This is the exact software I'm using. I've updated the software. Here's how I'm engaging it.

Like it's edited to be entertainment. And so it's pretty, it's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on. There's, there's actually an ongoing debate on whether or not he deactivated it by accident or on purpose before it hit the wall. As opposed to whether or not the system disengaged and Technically if the system disengages you have to be ready to step on the brakes and that's the that's the car signaling to you Hey, I need you to take over It's time for you to press the brakes and so if you don't press the brakes when the car tells you press the brakes

It's kind of on you kind of goes back and forth Alex's writing is really funny saying he sold his soul I know it's like a trade his country by trade his country most American-made car company in the world He deceived his entire audience all for a paycheck. It's so it's so sensational. I love it But yeah, I mean so so in the description they do But, so in the description, they do, Mark Rober does mention, thanks to Luminar for allowing us to test their LIDAR equipped car. They provided the vehicle for testing purposes,

but no compensation was given, and this is not a paid promotion. And so it turns out that I think Austin Russell and Luminar and Mark Rober are like independently connected and like kind of friendly. And Russell had donated to one of Mark Rober's fundraising efforts. And it seems like they're just kind of like buddies more or less. And I think the other like subtext here is that Elon has just become such a lightning rod that if you are in the business of just getting attention and getting clicks

You can get millions and millions of views on YouTube right now with any video attacking Elon because the the audience is just so ravenous for something to push back against Elon's new kind of political arc. And so I saw a video by a live streamer who's just sitting there just talking about Tesla and what the stock's done, two million views. And he normally gets like 400K views on a video, but like the Tesla stock crash got like two million views,

showing that like there's super high demand for this type of like anti-Elon content on YouTube right now. Everyone who's a YouTuber can see that and even if you're not anti Elon Like for a long time there was a whole sub niche of like you put Elon with a clown nose on him and you say like Like Elon's tunnel company is stupid or doesn't make any sense like or like Tesla just crashed They're like, why would you want to go underground? Yeah It doesn't make any sense. Or like, Tesla just crashed. Why would you wanna go underground? Yeah, and then there was another genre

of Tesla glazing videos that got millions of views that were like, Elon Musk just announced a nuclear reactor. It's confirmed. This changes everything. And they would just produce completely fake videos, but pro-Elon, because there were pro-Elon people that would just click on anything that was pro-Elon. And so, Elon's just become this like vortex

of content nonsense. But even the big YouTubers are clearly feeling that. Johnny Harris, this video essayist, when Elon started getting political, wanted to do a deep dive on like how did he get here? What's his evolution? Like you want to just address the things that are in the news and Elon is in the news.

And so very, very, very controversial. We have a post from Nick Carter here. Like you want to just address the things that are in the news and Elon is in the news and so very very very controversial we have a post from Nick Carter here. I don't know if you want to read that but He says I'm not a big rug mark I'm not a I'm not a big Mark Rober fan and not a Tesla fan boy at all Have never owned the stock or the car but Tesla's but Tesla has a case if they want to sue him for this video It's clearly deceptive with the aim to disparage Tesla and that was kind of the the vibe on X But overall wild story, yeah, it's an interesting position for Tesla to be in because Suing a big creator is not gonna necessarily get you more fans

creators not gonna necessarily get you more fans. Totally. It does feel like the right way to do it is to potentially have the engineers just do like an entire breakdown. Like if you did a two hour breakdown of the video and we're pointing out, you know, here's why the scenario, you know, we're not building these cars for the sort of road.

Exactly that. It's literally just a trade off between do you want a cheap self-driving car that is susceptible to roadrunner scenarios or do you want an expensive car that is roadrunner proof? And most people will say, yeah, you know what? I could wear a five-point racing harness and a helmet every time I drive. That would be safer. But I can also just wear a normal seatbelt and an airbag and like try not to crash, drive safe. That's right. Like there's obviously a spectrum of capabilities

with every one of these vehicles. The LIDAR thing, I mean, Elon's been beating that drum for years saying anyone who's using LIDAR is doomed. Like it has its own edge cases. I think it doesn't work in maybe the rain or something like that. The rain confuses it. And so it has its own drawbacks,

but it's also very expensive. And so unless you're running a Waymo style business where it's fine if the car has a 500K CapEx, it hasn't made sense. I've always heard that and been like, but can't we just make LIDAR cheaper over time? It has to be possible to make that cheaper. Starlink's making millions of satellites.

Or is the right system to leverage both because you want to manage all the different edge cases and be able to work in different environments. I mean, George Hots, yeah, I talked to him about this. And he just said, look, how does a human drive? Two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet. That's all you need. Yes. Yeah. No, he even said like it has like the comma AI self-driving kit that you attach to your windshield that adds self-driving functionality to your car. It has a mouth because it breathes

air to cool the CPU. He sees it as like a human head. It's very funny. But yeah, he just says like fundamentally, like we don't have LIDAR and we can drive cars. Therefore software must be able to drive cars with just two eyes and two ears and a couple other things. And that's it. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes. It'll be interesting to see if any car companies see this demo and say, yeah, let's roll that out. Because I think everyone wants more competition and no one wants less safe vehicles on the road. And so the most, my most disappointing thing

was that they used this Lexus SUV to demo the LIDAR and it seemed to be a good system, but you can't buy that car right now. Like if you're driving behind a Lexus and they engage their autopilot, like they're just as likely to crash into you as anyone else, because they don't have these systems engaged yet.

At least I don't think they have it on offer yet. There are some companies that are obviously working on it. We got to talk to Joe about Tesla. Oh yeah? And the stock. Okay. Where does it go from here? Okay.

We had, I'm just curious to get his, just like analysis on, obviously he's not a, you know, hedge fund manager, but it's such a stock that trades on the future, Elon's popularity. Yeah, you're talking about Joe Weisenthal, right? It's such a stock that trades on the future, Elon's popularity. Yeah, you're talking about Joe Weisenthal, right? Yes.

Yeah, I mean, from what I know, I've only talked to him like once, but it seems like he's a person that takes investing seriously and thinks about multi-asset investing. He prioritizes industry-leading yields. He would only use a platform that's trusted by millions, and that's why, if I were talking to him,

I would recommend that he sign up for public.com. That's right, fantastic choice. Stocks, bonds, crypto, options, T-bills. You can get it all at public.com. And yeah, we're, we're, we've got a video with public in the pipeline that I'm very excited about. Should we make that video over the top anti-woke

potentially kind of do like the Solana thing? One way to get a lot of attention with an ad in 2025 is to make it so anti bad that people decide I'm actually woke so if you missed it yesterday Solana put out an advertisement what was it called the blockchain put out the foundation the foundation an ad and Sam lesson broke it out here he was an early Solana investor, and he says, the Solana ad completely comically misunderstood

the 2025 media assignment reauthenticity. I love Solana, and I actually agree with a lot, and not all of the points in this video. Seed Investor in Solana. Yeah, wow. But let's be honest, it's a terrible ad. Hilariously terrible, the tone is completely wrong. They were right to take it down, even if the internet,

and of course the blockchain in particular never forget. Lol irony The reason it doesn't work is isn't the content It's that they used actors in a polished scripted scene. That is completely wrong in 2025 interesting take I don't know how much I agree with that, but I'm getting there what people care about What works in media is authenticity warts all, is real people in raw form speaking their truth. I'm not suggesting it, but if the Solana leadership had made the exact same points in a speech on the street,

like them or dislike them, the content would have worked when other tech leaders make these points in their own voice, it works. But these points packaged in pristine background with scripted actors, it honestly just shows whoever made this completely misunderstands the moment and how media and comms works in 2025. It's the opposite of going direct. Your take on it was that they just seemingly planned

the ad like when Trump was elected and it took a while. You remember when the Jaguar rebrand happened and everyone was like oh they expected Kamala to win? Yeah. And it felt like a very Kamala coded ad. This is kind of the same thing where it's like oh they they greenlit this as the day Trump won. And they didn't realize that there would be like kind of a reevaluation of things, by the way. There'd be a settling in period. But yeah, I mean, these ads, like if you go confined it,

because it's been somewhat taken down, but it's still up there. It's- Yeah, everybody was saying, Solana deleted it, but they're like, we will not let you forget this ad. Never forget it. I wish I'd wanna have the actor on the show.

Yeah. That'd be fun. But yeah, I mean, an ad like that, it's clearly shot on cinema cameras, professional lighting, makeup, hair, script, all this stuff. It takes months to get something like that made. They didn't use just some film school kid to whip it up, which they probably should have.

Took a long time, and so by the time it got through all the reviews and all the post-processing and editing, color grading, and sound mixing, it was, it had missed the mark. Like, it might have been edgy. I mean, really, you gotta go back to like Coinbase in 2020, 2021, saying like, hey, we're mission oriented. And even that was different because the Coinbase,

the Brian Armstrong piece about Coinbase was, they were not saying we are anti-woke. They're saying we're just mission oriented. We're apolitical. Yeah. It's not, they weren't saying, hey, we're right wing now. It was like, we're not left wing, we're not right wing. We're just crypto apolitical. and we're gonna donate where we need to

Just on crypto stuff. We're gonna stay focused and like I liked that night That was good. And I think that and they were dealing with internal sort of mutiny Yeah, you know people similar to totally happen to Google and a lot of big companies were experienced Yes, they had to kind of do something and I and I looked at Crusoe energy launched a video yesterday kind of reintroducing themselves as a producer of

Energy and data center capacity for other brother Justin Maers first angel. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Chase Lockmiller the CEO over there and on one hand like you watch, you watch this Crusoe energy video and it's like, it has like a very corporate vibe. It's somewhat stock footagey, but it's just very clear what they do and what they care about. It's authentic. And I'm like, this is amazing. This is actually what business is about. Like they just care about their business. And you know what? I don't know what the political statement is here because it doesn't need to be a political statement.

They're just saying, look, we wanna build data centers. That's the business that we're in, we're gonna do it. And we're excited about what people will do on top of those data centers training AI. And they have some pictures of people in healthcare settings that could benefit from AI and financial settings that could benefit from AI and all these different things that could benefit

from data centers. But at the end of the day, they just say, we're Crusoe and we're building the next generation of data centers. And I'm like, I'm so here for this. This is so refreshing. And if you love big data, you're gonna get excited. Yeah, and I actually do.

So you love energy. I love energy and I love big data. So I was very happy with that. You love leverage. Yes, and yeah, let's go to Dylan. Yeah, so I can break this down. So Dylan says, this should have been the Accelerate America ad. Solana is about builders like a 22 year old dev born to Sri Lankan immigrants putting real world assets on chain. Still

one of the projects I'm most proud of. So and this is referencing a video. You can go watch it's capital.xyz slash founders. We made this video in 2022, highlight highlighting Mary Gunnarate and Mary has a very, very cool crypto company. She's been building on Solana from day one. She has this amazing story. And this ad sort of breaks it all down. And not an actor. We don't need an actor.

Like incredible story. You can just talk to her building. People are building. Yeah, very real story. Mary doesn't bring politics onto the blockchain. It's like, focusing on delivering value. Let's keep politics out of meme coins, folks. And I'm proud to be an angel in our company. Let's keep politics out of the pump and dumps

and out of the rug pulling and out of the meme coins and out of the pumped out funds. Let's just keep it clean. Except politics definitely got onto the chain through Trump coin, Melania coin. You remember Joe Bowden and all those other things. Just keep politics out of it. Keep politics out of everything.

I'm over it. Anyways, I'm sure Solana is already working on their next ad, the comeback ad. Yep, cool opportunity. For what it's worth, I've done a whole deep dive on the founders and although their marketing seems to be missing the mark, I think that they're really, really talented engineers and their whole story

of working on wireless networking and high performance computing, I don't even know how much we could say about is it not decentralized enough? Maybe that's a good argument for or against Solana. But I think like the founders are just interesting people, but they have so much attention on them because it's such, it's like, it's not just a huge pool of capital,

but it's also like where people make the huge wins and huge losses. Here's a play. If you wanna make a statement around innovation in the future Take the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum private put it on chain But all those planes on chain good planes on chain on chain planes. I mean call Mary She's putting real-world assets on chain, right? Yeah, this is Mary takes over the CEO role

Solana Foundation Takes it becomes it becomes a private equity firm and yeah Yeah, kind of rip out all like the descent and I'm sure it would trade it like 400x book value The underlying planes and that is a real financial innovation there well, we'll close the last comment on the on the Solana thing Joe Weisenthal who's coming on the show in 15 minutes is The Solana thing Joe Weisenthal who's coming on the show in 15 minutes. He says he's he's sharing a post from 2020 I wonder how many Silicon Valley people are inspired by that Marc Andreessen post on now is the time to build to get working even harder on their next generation decentralized stable coin protocol and Joe Weisenthal said this is painful, but also exactly what I joked about five years ago

Especially if you make it to the final 45 seconds well Solana could be in trouble. They need to control their costs, and so we recommend that they get on ramp if they're not already on ramp. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

Next time you see a bill coming through on a credit card charge for anti-woke, over-the-top marketing campaign, you just be like hey that's not a policy it's not a policy yeah not approved we want to do mission driven content here that's right we want to stick to the basics well John do you have a battery real quick to get some extra batteries I think we got soren Is crazy nominative Determinism there he's soaring over the skies

Can you bring him in bring him in let's bring him in Soren Can you hear me? We got soren from Nero's hear me we got Sorin from Neiros we have his post here I'm thrilled to announce that Neiros has raised a 35 million dollar series a led by Vi VY Capital or Vi Capital US with Sequoia Interlagos D3 and Keller this funding is going straight into mass manufacturing capacity that America desperately needs my co-founder broke the news today in front of 800 DOD stakeholders and industry leaders at Manifest Demo Day in Washington, D.C.

We're gonna try and bring him in in just a second. He should be here any minute. Okay, we're having an audio issue. We're working through it. Have you actually had a chance to meet Soren before? Or will this be the first time? What's his co-founder's name? I met his-

Olaf. Olaf. I met Olaf. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. I just want to say, they, I mean, we're going to get into some of this stuff. They only announced both their pre-seed and their seed less than a year ago, back on May 20th of 2024.

And so they've been absolutely crushing. I got a breakdown on Neuros probably six or so months ago from one of the partners over at Long Journey, which we're also having the show on tomorrow, but crazy lineup of investors and the traction that they've seen is pretty crazy I believe they're already deploying some of their early manufacturing now I went and toured his first office maybe small pretty small office in

El Segundo and I'd heard that he was a fantastic kind of like maybe the number one in the world or like world world renowned Drone pilot and I was like look I've flown a DJI camera drone like how hard can this be like? What am I really gonna see here? and We we go out we're kind of walking talking and we get to this park and he puts on the puts on little and he puts on the FPV goggles and takes off and he's the most aggressive drone pilot I've ever seen. And there's this tree and he's circling it

like 50 times a second and it's just the craziest like swoop swoop swoop swoop swoop swoop swoop swoop. It was really, really insane. Yeah, he's a fantastic drone pilot. And what a great demo. Like as an investor. It's a high drone pilot. And what a great demo. Like as a high stakes video game. Or a journalist or anything like that. It's really, really fun.

Yeah. Few founders have the advantage of being able to go and give a technical demo that can display that level of capability. Both in the operator and in the tech. Yeah. So. OK. okay then how we doing okay so you can hear us guy sword I got you guys fantastic okay sorry for

the lack of video we're building the plane as we're flying it you're building the drone as you're flying it, you're building the drone as you're flying it, give us the update, how you doing, how was Manifest Demo Day? Well yeah my co-founder Olaf was out there, he crushed it. I mean we had a big announcement so we just closed our Series A funding round, $35 million going straight into more American drone manufacturing. So really excited about that stuff. We also a few weeks ago announced our 6,000 drone production contract.

So we are now officially making over a thousand drones a month, which I believe is the highest rate of any drone company in the United States. So our vision of mass is coming together, but there's still a long way to go. What's the main use case for these drones? Yeah. I mean, primarily we're, we're building drones that are going to be putting warheads on foreheads. Uh,

it's, you know, FPV precision strike is kind of all the, all the rage right now. And you know, you are, we have kind of two systems, uh, Archer and Archer strike. Uh, Archer strike is the one where we're actually the warhead integrator. It's basically a modular warhead system. And then we have Archer, which is just the plain FPV drone. And you can basically mount whatever you want on there.

How do you think about scale long-term? I think that's probably the number one question on people's mind that are following the industry. You see this sort of footage coming out of China of not even drone specific manufacturing capacity, but when you just think of China's scale and that being one of our most obvious adversaries, that's what you're up against.

You're clearly not afraid, otherwise you probably wouldn't be doing this. How do we sort of reach and exceed China's manufacturing capacity over the next 10 years, given that they have a decades long head start? I think the question we need to be asking ourselves is what would happen if the Chinese supply chain was completely cut off, and we had to build say a million of these systems in a year? What would we do? What would that look like?

And right now the answer is the entire American industrial base I think would be a disaster. And even the defense industrial base would be scrambling to make that happen. And we really need to do whatever we can to make manufacturing cool again and get people excited about working on this problem. I mean, we've been sanctioned multiple times by China. It seems like we're getting attention because we're doing something that is relevant, but there's a long way to go.

We're 18 months into this very, very long journey. So you're saying Neuros has already been sanctioned by China? We have, yeah. We were sanctioned a few months ago for the first time, and then recently they re-upped it. I think we were in the list with General Dynamics and a few others. It's more prestigious than being on the Forbes 3,000 to 3,000.

I see that as a huge bull's case. What about, can you give us a little overview, a little overview of like, what's actually happening at various orders of magnitude of scale? You said you're doing a thousand a month I think. When I first met you and toured the facility, it seemed like you were putting everything together by hand. The founders were welding or soldering or doing everything. Now it seems like you probably have some machinery in there, but what is the path to like the lights out factory look like? There was some debate on the timeline last week about, you know, you don't want to do

too much automation too early, but obviously we want to get to high production value numbers. So walk me through that. Yeah. Automation is definitely the last step in the process. And the first step is designing the product around this high-rate manufacturing. I think that's one of the big problems that a lot of the existing drone companies in the US run into is because they're basing off of, one, these pretty exquisite components that are tough to source in high volumes, and they're really expensive. And then two, they just didn't actually design the airframe around these really scalable manufacturing

techniques or having low human labor to be able to put it together. So that was kind of the first thing we looked at when actually designing Archer. It was how can we reduce the amount of human labor that goes into this thing? So even if we're not automating yet, because things are still in flux and we're not at crazy high volumes, we're still spending say like less than an hour of human time per drone

that goes together. So that's really, really critical. I mean, we've been in our current factory for about a year. And in that time, it's mainly been about optimizing the main assembly line. It's still a very manual assembly line but there's a lot of tooling in place to make everything really repeatable and easy and then just the design of the drone itself is very intentional. Yeah, it's one of those things that people might say, oh, they're putting these together

by hand but that could actually be the right decision given where you are. Can you tell me a little bit about? Supply chain I've heard it's basically impossible to find an American-made drone motor Is that still the case is there a change there? And are you leveraging any of the cool companies that we've talked to like the Hadrian's the range views the the 3d printing companies? Like what what do you see is like really beneficial to you? the 3D printing companies, what do you see as really beneficial to you? Motors are still a big challenge in the US.

I got asked on X the other day, oh, are you guys winding your own motors? And the answer is no, we're not doing that yet. We definitely want to be part of solving that problem. And there are some things in the works, but motors have been historically really tough. A lot of US companies are still using Chinese motors because it's not mandated by the government to avoid them.

Same thing with cameras, especially low cost sensors. We've seen they're primarily dominated by China. In our world, in the FPV world, really everything is built on top of architectures that use Chinese chips. So, our, you know, long time challenge until we kind of finished the work and got onto the Blue UAS list was rebuilding all of these components from the kind of chip level, because you'll look at these open source projects that a lot of, like, drone racing technology is built off of, and, oh, look at that, It's off of a Chinese microcontroller or like every video receiver for analog FPV in the world

uses this Chinese radio module. So you have to get rid of all of that, do all the engineering up from a clean sheet, which has been a big challenge, but we're getting there. And it's great to see these companies that are working on the kind of like fundamental manufacturing challenges. Like that's I would put, you know, range view into the bucket of like America needs investment castings where we're sort of one level up where we're we have to be really smart on our component design, but we're not actually, you know, making the chips.

Sure. Do you think a lot of these suppliers over time can and should localize to a specific area? China has a massive advantage with Shenzhen and DJI being able to source a lot of components locally. Do we need that or is it not necessary? What's your vision of how these things, how we get to producing millions of drones per year. That's what else a gundo should be, baby.

Let's make the American Shenzhen. Let's go. Let's do it. Do you feel like you've been very successful at raising a significant amount of capital very quickly? How much, is there enough private investment into drones broadly, or do we need to, you know, do a multiple more? I posted probably a couple months ago at this point

that it felt like we needed a sort of project Stargate for domestic drone manufacturing. Like it seems like such a, you know, critical national security issue that, you know, potentially there needs to be an order of magnitude more investment in the category? Or do you feel like there's an adequate amount of investment yet? I'll say that the capital is available to two companies, but it has to be directed really

well because both on the private capital side and the government side, my main ask to the DOD is not to spend more money, it's to spend money in a different way. It's to mandate higher volumes of systems that are lower cost. So it's not just about throwing money at the problem. I think we have to set the expectations and those expectations might be in order of magnitude greater than like billion dollars goes towards buying a thousand loitering munitions. That should probably be a hundred thousand, you know, two orders of magnitude different. So it's not necessarily about spending more money.

I do think there is private capital that is ready to go, that's excited to get into this industry. On the government side, I think there are really positive shifts happening in the direction I'm describing. But that's where a lot of this will be driven from. How has the transition gone from drone pilot to CEO? I know you were running a sort of drone oriented company in high school. So you had a little bit of experience.

But does it feel like you're playing a video game when you're in slack and you're, you know, just sort of manning the ship? Has it been pretty seamless? Yeah. Do you use slack in the FPV goggles? That would be really locked in. It's not, it's not slack. It's ITAR compliant. He's on teams. Teams guy. We, we, we were actually, we do use Slack, but not in the goggles, I wish.

But it's been an interesting transition. I mean, sometimes I do kind of look around and I'm like, wow, I used to just be flying drones off my back porch and now I'm doing this. But I think I've always had this really strong natural inclination to start a company and I've been interested in startups for a really long time. So it feels very natural, like I understand the exact progression of why I'm doing what I'm doing,

but certainly a ton of learnings. We're also just moving really quickly. And so that comes with, at times a lot of pain and a lot of lessons, but it's been a great journey. I'm super grateful for what I get to do every day. That's amazing. Last tiny question, will we ever see a Nero's consumer product?

I think DJI is number one haters over here. We've been trying to get on the sanction. We've been trying to have the sanction. We do a lot of cinematic things. We want to film them with drones, but we want to be American about it. It's tough. Yeah, I think the market dynamic right now is in defense,

and that's where the most critical need is. But our mission is to fix the American drone industrial base, so that doesn't just mean defense. I think way in the future, there's a very good possibility that we'll be able to replace DJI on the consumer shelves. I would love to. That'd be great.

Well, thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for stopping by. We'll have to have you back next time There's a big announcement. We really appreciate you calling in. Thanks so much. Congrats on the milestone Thanks guys. See ya. See ya. Talk to you soon. I want to go to Andrew Huberman for a bit I mean unless you have something to debrief on that. No, no Because you got a shout out. Rora. So out of nowhere out of nowhere on It was Saturday woke up. I guess yeah, it was around noon. He says I find it weird that most of all the countertop reverse osmosis water filters are made of plastic, the same industry that

is built on keep contaminants out of what you ingest ethos puts clean slash cleaned water into plastic glaring contradiction. I'm excited that Rora water is metal. So he's of course referencing to this product here. I don't know if you can see it on the camera now, but it's on the set here with us. Yeah, we developed this product extremely intentionally to eliminate as much plastic as possible from the system

because we saw that the vast majority of filters that were supposedly filtering out microplastics had huge amounts of plastic used in the process. So I'm fortunate, appreciate the shout out, Andrew. And yeah, we saw a massive pop in sales from this post alone, as you can imagine, and it was very cool to see. That's fantastic.

Well, there's other big news from Dan Premack. He says, VCs always tell me they can't talk about active fundraising on advice of lawyers, but that may be about to change. The SEC has issued new general solicitation guidance that makes the process much less onerous for private equity and venture capital. We may not see Times Square billboards advertising new funds, but we should.

But at least it's theoretically possible, they say. Firms would also be able to discuss fundraising efforts with reporters. That's huge. So next time you're doing your big fundraise, call in to TVPN Live, announce that you're raising a $10 billion micro fund to rip checks into 100 million companies. Yeah, this has always been sort of done indirectly, you know, somebody will leave a fund

and there'll be an announcement, oh, they're coming out, but yeah, we wanna see one-on-one billboards of all the big asset managers. 100%, I mean, we want to see one-on-one billboards of all the big asset managers. 100%. I mean, we talked about scout funds. You're a scout at a venture capital firm. You find a company, take some of their money, put it in there.

I want to see scouts on the LP side. I get comped when I go and solicit a bunch of the rich friends to write LP checks to you. That's what I'm interested in. Anyway, we've got the perfect person to talk about this. We've got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg calling in. Hey, Joe, how you doing? It's our financial brother. I'm thrilled to be here with my with my technology brothers. Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to have you on the show. I'm not used to this. You know

what? The last time I did any sort of like video call in show my producer kale who was in the room with me, he scolded me cause he's like, you look like garbage that you did. Cause I just went down to like the basement here at Bloomberg and I like propped up my phone and it was a weird angle. So he said, next time you do anything, just let me know. And so he got me set up shout out to kale and this really nice, this really nice studio here. It looks great. I have like a proper ring light and everything in front of me. So can we give the viewers a little background on you? As I understand it, your passion is for finance podcasting, but you have to make ends meet

by playing in some sort of band? Is that right? That's right. You know, yeah, you can't really live on finance podcasting alone. And so I'm in a country music band called light sweet crude yep and yeah we pass a bucket of tips around after each show yeah and I think the last show I probably after netting it out with the opening act and the other members I think I got about ten dollars fantastic that was the key yeah there you go.

It's fantastic. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, thanks for joining. I did Odd Lots a couple months ago. It was a great show. We had a bunch of stuff we wanted to talk about today. I mean, did you see this SEC news that VCs will be about to, they should be able to advertise their active fundraisings? This was in Axios today?

Oh, did this? I missed that today. But I'm sure this will be wonderful. Many retail investors convinced that they're getting in on the next big thing. This could only mean good things. I'm sure it's more wired checks to you guys. Well, I think the idea is that if you can put $100,000

into a fund or if you can put a million dollars into a fund, it sort of implies that you're accredited I mean it could be less risky than some SPACs I guess like you know you get into some diversified fund that's professionally managed doesn't seem that crazy I love that. Well there are riskier things that are Therefore yeah You can advertise literally anything else right so so I know, uh, you got to break the news here. You posted yesterday, I have a good idea for something I want to write in the newsletter tomorrow.

I'm so tempted to just waste it as a pithy tweet right now. Uh, you put it in your newsletter. We're going to encourage people to go subscribe, but can you break us down? What was that? I hated that Solana ad and I know everyone hated it and I hate just like, someone follows me on Twitter I don't usually like jump on the thing that everyone's jumping on Like my style, but I hated that ad it had nothing to do with it being like Anti-woke or whatever. It was just like I hated the premise

Yeah, that like investing in crypto that like investing in meme coins, which is the primary use of Solana is somewhere along the land, like space travel, the same conversations like we built the railroads, we landed on the moon, and we trade coins on Solana is like, No, I'm sorry, I don't accept that premise. It's not part of it. And I was going to make you know, like there's this I the joke when I was going to, I could have just done it in a tweet, which is the real set, which is, you know, it's like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Soviet commune and everyone imagines that they're the poets. Like, what would your job be on the, you know, the Martian landscape? And probably your job is going to be miserable because it's miserable up on Mars and it's cold and there's no climate. You're probably doing something with like

trying to mine ice or something like that. But everyone imagines that there are the guy who's going gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna like set up the decentralized payment platform to finance like everyone imagines that they're gonna be that guy. The Martian meme coin artist. Yeah, it's like I'm gonna be the guy posting dank memes to like motivate the workers who are out on the Martian

landscape, I hated that ad, I hate the whole premise. It could have been a tweet, but because I have employed, because I need to make ends meet here at Bloomberg, I was like, you know what, I'm going to write it up in slightly longer than 280 characters for my newsletter today. Yeah, I mean, you know, the steel man, the Solana on Mars, we're going to need to fractionalize that ice,

get it on chain, trade it. Like, this is going to be important, I think. Yeah, no, I hear like, who has the one token? You got to tokenize the ice. I get that. Exactly. Maybe. All right. Well, then I'm slightly open minded to it. We've got a we've got a working theory. We want Doge to let us privatize the Smith Smith Smithsonian Air Base Museum and put the planes on chain. We want planes on chains. So that's that's our that's our political platform.

I'm curious what you think the whole play was with Mark and the Tesla video yesterday. Do you have any sort of comments on that? It felt weirdly sort of conflicted in the sense that, you know, Luminar was- I don't know what the- I'm sorry. I'm so online and I'm embarrassed. I miss- who is Mark? Mark Rober. I totally missed it and I'm embarrassed. I miss who is Mark Mark Rober. I Told you this day. Yeah. Yeah anyway

Mark Rober put out a video testing the Tesla self-driving Which is camera based against the lidar? System from a rival company. We're gonna we're gonna switch this interview We're gonna we're gonna pretend like we're interviewing a country music super this interview we're gonna we're gonna pretend like we're interviewing a country music superstar. You asked me about like Tesla I don't know anything about that stuff. Well what about your your recent interview with Andrew Ferguson on the FTC antitrust thing I like that I thought I mean my takeaway from it was that he is very eloquent and a great storyteller he did a really good job of

kind of going back multiple decades talking about Trump One and Lincoln and stuff and like kind of just taking me on a tour of what's going on. But, and also it was very interesting that he kept coming back to like worker harm as well. That was kind of an interesting talking point. But first, like what was your read coming out of that

in terms of like how things might change? Sure. It's so interesting because obviously everybody remembers there was the huge market rally immediately after Trump won. One of the narratives was that the FTC under Lena Con had taken this really strict line on mergers and mergers weren't getting done. It's like, okay, we're going to finally get this green light on merger wave. I think there's two things here. So one is like, when markets are

down, and risk is off, obviously, that's, that's a main driving force for declining mergers, right? When people are uncertain, etc. So that's one factor why we haven't seen this big merger wave happen. It's just because actually market volatility came fairly quickly as soon as the new administration hit for various tariffs and reasons. If we could talk about that or maybe the general economy even prior to tariffs. But you know, I think that like this expectation that the new administration was going to be sort of this like, at least on the the regulatory side or at least on the deal side

That's sort of like libertarian green light. Everything is not really Panned out and so it's interesting. We did a live show down in DC just last week And it's a lot of fun and we had the new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and it's interesting because he's keeping Lena cons merger guidelines in place. He does have philosophical disagreements as he puts it. And, you know, he did this like fantastic history of like what the consumer welfare standard was. It's actually funny because so early in the interview, he actually there was a point. I forget exactly what the question was, but something about Trump and the rule of law etc and the whole audience like started laughing you can hear it

It's in the audio. Well, you know, I was like right your producer like turned down the volume on that So I just heard like a gap and I was thought I thought they might be booing him and he's like I get it It's DC audience It was a little hostile. It was kind of crazy. It was like I I was like, oh boy, like this is going to go off the rails. It didn't go off the rails. And then to your point, in the next question, he sort of walked through the history of the consumer welfare standard, as it's been understood

by theorists and conservative jurisprudence over the years. And he did a very good job at that. And actually, the same crowd that had laughed at him before gave him a round of applause for that part. So the did the sort of like history of some of this stuff is really interesting. But to your question itself, like I think his point was, there is more to consumer welfare than just lower prices, we don't need to expand the you don't have to expand beyond consumer welfare, we just have to sort of have an expansive definition of the term. And so as he puts it, if there are issues that are going to slow down innovation, because something is anti-competitive, regardless of the price, that could be a harm to consumer

welfare. He did talk about the idea of harming workers is a harm to consumer welfare. So I think like, I don't know yet, like, it's really hard to say, because the next time if we get a sustained market rally at some point, we might see a bunch of deals get announced, until there's a bunch of deals announced, and they actually have to go through and greenlight or red light them. I don't think we really know how tough this new cop on the beat is. But you know, he's made this point and now public and private. He's like, we're not we take this idea of corporate power as a harm very seriously. And if you think this is going to be sort of like a Bush era, FTC, you're mistaken, which I think is really interesting and probably relevant for investors, both in private and public markets.

Yeah, it's interesting in terms of consumer harm, it almost feels like people are they're not saying consumer harm, but people are frustrated with the pace of AI innovation at Apple and just the fact that Apple can kind of just sit there and Siri is free. They're not raising the price, but it feels like it's underperforming relative to if it was true. I'm actually curious your take on that. Why do you think that is? Because Apple must feel some angst about that, or maybe they don't because no one is going to switch to the green. I think they feel angst after John Gruber's article last week because they got really taken to task.

But anyone it seemed but this is what I don't get. I get the impression it's not that hard to build a pretty high quality LLM because everyone seems to be able to do it. So what is it just about like turning it into a Siri quality product just needs 7 million bucks. So what is it just about like turning it into a Siri quality product just needs 7 million bucks So I think it comes down to you know Apple wants every they have this insane standard for Every interaction has to be perfect you look at what's going on an Apple TV And yeah, and and they're having trouble getting through the like awkward stage of what Netflix did

where there was a lot of just like background laundry TV on Netflix, just reruns of, you know, sitcoms and stuff. And Apple, everything needs to be polished almost like award level. And so they, you know, they've gotten close, but they're, they're, they're, they're kind of trying to play HBO's game. And I think with the AI summaries, yeah, they could easily just bend in an LLM, but then they're going to get hallucinations. Those screenshots are going to go out on X and people are going to say,

look at what Apple did, it's crazy. But this is why to me, it makes me wonder whether, like, so much of this conversation has centered around the Apple question. Why can't Apple get this right? And I keep wondering, it's like, maybe this is an AI thing, which is that like all of us who, and I use LLMs every day for sometimes work,

but sometimes just out of curiosity, I'm simultaneously every day blown away. And I'm also every day like, oh, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And the idea that this is approaching human intelligence is a joke. And so the fact that like, it can't be productized to like a real light for a company that really is like takes the consumer experience very seriously as Apple does. Like, I wonder if that's like a, oh, this is very simple. Here's an angle. It seems like LLMs are

good at delivering sort of human intelligence, which is not always reliable, right? Sometimes you're working with somebody that's smart and they give you some work and you're like, this sucks, do it again. And so people are used to that dynamic. Whereas with a machine, if you click on Chrome and it opens Spotify, you're like, what are you doing? And so like that kind of seems like the challenge. challenge. We expect our systems to be deterministic. Yeah, it's possible to be blown away by an LLM when you're using it as a copilot to write stuff, but then if you're using it to order an Uber,

it just does, it's not gonna do it, right? Yeah, I mean- I had a great hallucination the other day. I was using perplexity to prepare for an interview. I was like, and I find them useful. Anyway, we were interviewing some of the founders of. I was like, and I, you know, I find them useful. Anyway, we were interviewing some of the founders of Dimensional Funds and I said, what are some interesting aspects of dimensional lore that would be just sort of interesting to bring up? And it said, oh, ask them about their famous low volatility coffee that they

serve at their headquarters where they claim to have like developed the perfect mix of caffeine and taste. Okay. Complete. Does not exist. It doesn't exist. Complete. And so I'm thinking like I'm responsible journalist. I'm not going to just like ask a question that an LLM, but somewhere someday some reporter you're going to see on TV asks is going to ask an insane question with an insane premise. And it's because someone along the lines, I gave them a list of questions generated from AI. And I'm just waiting for that moment.

Because God, if I had just asked that question, what's the deal with your low volatility coffee? And they're just like, what are you talking about? It would have been like a professional humiliation. Yeah, I mean, I think. It's like an offhand joke that the CEO made at one point. No, I could buy zero. Also, the clue was they said they serve it

at their Santa Monica headquarters. They're headquartered in Austin. So I knew you do something off about it from the beginning. So going back a little bit to M&A, we're purely technology focused. We were covering the Wizz acquisition today, which is obviously good for the private markets.

It's good for everyone from the big asset managers that got a nice 2X in less than a year. It's good for broadly, SaaS, broadly. You're less focused on that type of M&A and more focused on stuff like the sort of Capital One and Discover. Is that the M&A market that really, you know, if Capital One and Discover can happen, does that mean that M&A is really back on the menu? That's a really good question. And actually, one of the things I regret, we only had so much time with Ferguson, is we actually so much of it was talked about tech and tech power and concentration of tech power, because like, you know, everyone on

the right and the left is in some degree anxious about that. In retrospect, have we had more time? I wish we had actually spent more time on non-tech things, because that matters too. It just doesn't get as much attention, or people don't think about power to the same degree in some of these areas. But I do think that's interesting. And if you look at that spread, my colleagues, I think flagged it yesterday, if you look at that spread, my colleagues, I think flagged it yesterday. If you look at that spread on that deal, that's been a complete round trip since the election. So if you want to see like one chart that sort of encapsulates the sort of changing moods since the euphoria in mid November, mid December, et cetera, and then the sort

of turn around essentially when Trump took office, which was basically the turn, you know, I think like the crypto high was literally the day he had that ball. That makes sense. Yeah. Trump meme coin. It's the Trump holler, followed by the Trump dump. The top.

It was just perfect. I mean, it's so perfect, because of course it was. You want to start strong. But I think if you look at that spread chart for Capital One and Discover, you kind of just see the whole, like, oh, wait, the rethinking of how sort of markets-friendly this administration is going to be. on economic data yeah I love following you on days that are like you know the jobs numbers and stuff but but I want to get

kind of like a high level for someone who's maybe in tech and not as embedded in finance like what is the Super Bowl of finance like what are the important days to watch for? Because I know that there's data dripping out. There's, oh, preliminary CPI data. Then there's fed funds data and stuff. Like, what is the one day that, like, you can't miss? Or like, what, and what's kind of noise

that you can kind of write off? Yeah. Well, I'll say, like, the Super Bowl is always gonna be jobs day, because it's a really good, high quality survey. If you want to understand like our business is in a mood to invest. Yep. And are they feeling good? I mean, there's no better measure than are they actually willing to like hire someone and take on new payrolls.

So I think like just sort of like on if you want to like understand the business climate, that is got to be the gold standard. And there's so much to chew on. And there's so many ways to slice it. There's so many ways to analyze it. There's a lot there. You know, it's what I guess the first Friday of every month, typically, that's good. You know, the other things that I think are really worth watching right now. Several of the regional feds have a monthly survey of the manufacturers in their in their district. the federal government. I think that the federal government and the federal and the federal regional feds have a monthly survey of the manufacturers in

their- in their district. And I think you right now you really be want to be watching specific questions about. Are you how are you feeling about investment right now capital expansion plans capital expenditure plans to me. That is like the sort of billion dollar question right here, which is there's this hope, right, that we're going to have this reindustrialization or further industrialization or, you know, that's kind of what the administration

is banking on. The sentiment right now is that there's too much chaos to like make any big choices and no one really knows what the final tariff arrangements are going to be, etc. But I would say in terms of like the sort of second tier data beyond the jobs report, I'm really interested in those sort of like business surveys that sort of ask a bunch of different questions about, are you, you know, what's happening with your costs? What's happening with your, you know, various business planning as they see it out

the next six months. Are you looking at any kind of like alternative data sources? Like we were talking to somebody who was looking at trueflation data instead of kind of CPI, or are you like a purist, you got to go straight to the source? Like, no, I love all of it. All of it. I look there's no, uh, the truth of the matter is, is that the government data is very good

quality by and large. There are a bunch of other surveys, you know, it's like, I remember like during COVID, you know, looking at like those like measures measures of dining out, et cetera. And when is that coming back? Or airplane sales, which were actually, that's another sort of yellow flag or red flag for the market. Some of the airlines, I think, dealt the last week or two weeks ago. They said they're already starting to see ticket sales tail off. It could be because there were a lot of- Crashes. Travel incidents in the news. So it's not totally

clear. I look look there's no data I won't look at. I'm really but I think right now the question is like is the sentiment data the business sentiment data the consumer sentiment data going to translate into hard numbers. And I don't know if the answer is yes or no to be honest because we had pretty terrible sentiment data the last several years you think back to twenty twenty two when we had pretty terrible sentiment data the last several years, you think back to 2022, when inflation peaked, terrible sentiment numbers, consumers kept shopping and dining out. So for all they told survey surveyors that things were so bad, they were still active as the the Kyla Scanlon vibe session. Yeah, it really like, it really did seem to be a disconnect between how awful everyone is saying things were and what they

were doing, which was going on cruises and record numbers and all kinds of things like that. Question for you. People have joked about, you know, there used to be we had bull markets and bear markets. And now it seems like we have kangaroo markets. I graduate, which is just like, you know, going going up and down like this is just sort of a fun, fun analogy. I was, I graduated, I graduated college in 2018, you know, very, we had, you know, very quickly it was COVID and then the COVID crash and

then Zurp and then, you know, the interest rate hikes and then, you know, every everything's, it's been this sort of kangaroo dynamic. Yeah. Or is a kangaroo market just an obvious byproduct of the internet where just information is just traveling so quickly, where sentiment can change so quickly and trade on, I joked historically, like now we have group chats where friends are just, from all over the world sometimes, they're just talking about what's happening

and trading against that information and trading against the sentiment in the group chat. Historically, it would be like, oh, yeah, you go to your college reunion and you're hanging out with your buddies that maybe you got some got. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, actually, we should be really bearish. And then you make these long-term decisions.

Yeah, it's funny. Because I am a journalist in financial markets, people think I know something. They're like, oh, is now a good time to refinance my house? I have no idea. If I knew which way mortgage rates were going, I'd be maybe in a different business. But I do typically get a few texts after a when the market's

down and people like, Hey, Joe, how you been? It's been a long time. What do you think about the market? And that's often like, okay, maybe we're getting close to a bottom here. So just for what it's worth, I haven't gotten any. But I know old friends have reached out in the last several weeks. So if you want to use that as an indicator of something, maybe that means we have more to go down. But I think, look, markets are volatile because the world is volatile. There's a war going on. There are multiple wars that the US is in some way connected to.

Yeah, but isn't the argument that we directly feel like we're experiencing that volatility because we're seeing it live? We're seeing the war in Ukraine. We're seeing something happen in Syria or Libya. Or you can sort of like. Yeah, I mean, during the war in Ukraine, we're seeing something happen in Syria or Libya, or you can sort of like... Yeah, I mean, during the war on terror, it was pretty smooth sailing until a massive crash that lasted years and then a massive buildup for years and now it does feel more

volatile. It's a bull market in the VIX. I think that's real. I mean, I think that in terms of the emotional vandalism that everyone experiences every day because they're just Rolling. How can it not be having an effect on things totally? Do you do you see a world in the you know, our specs doomed because they have such a bad reputation right now Or could they be great? You know what specs have come and gone multiple times in their history

So I would I would never bet against the return of this back. It know what specs have come and gone multiple times in their history. So I would I would never bet against the return of this back. It might take a while. I think you know, it's like maybe even like every 15 or 20 years or whatever. But I am confident that in my lifetime there will be another spec boom. I will I will I will make that prediction whether it's a year or five years or 10 years. But like, you know, yeah, I believe that this idea of like, you're going to put money into a box and something magical is going to happen. That will never stop being tantalizing to investors. I think we will. The specs are not dead. Capital finds a way like sand through pebbles. It just needs

to find its way. I want to talk to you about your like you post on X but you also post on blue sky and I see some posts do really well on X some of them do on blue sky. Are you using other platforms? I mostly use X. Yeah, you know when like the markets down I post on blue sky. Yeah, like sickos for bad news under the Trump administration. Like I'm gonna throw I'll throw them some chum about like how the Nancek is out. I know, I love Twitter. I'm so addicted to it. I'll stay on, you know, it's like Donald Trump and diet Coke. Like I'll keep like, but are you using any of the other platforms? Are you on threads? I went on blue sky. You're

the only person that I follow. Okay. I don't use threads. I don't use tick tock. My Instagram is private. Yeah. But we have a discord and the odd laws discord 10 000 members wow it's like a really so i'm in there a lot that's great people are like posting book recommendations sure sure like that like much higher signal i imagine so yeah and like yeah so it's mostly x a little bit cool and then my discord and yeah that's great it's fun that's awesome uh what about prediction markets? Oh, yeah. Yeah, can you just give me like how you're experiencing them? Sure, sure.

Pros and cons, values. I love them. This is like my co-host and I, Tracy, we have different perspectives on this, which is good. But look, the way I see prediction markets is like threefold, which is like, I think it's good to have a price on the news in many cases because people make a prediction and they'll be like,

oh, you know, I think AI is going to eliminate all white collar labor within two years. I would like to see some like price on that. I would like to see people put their money where their mouth is rather than just that big said with tweets. I think what is a good way of knowing what people are interested in at any given moment. And the other thing I'll say, and I've said this before, which is that the US Treasury market is literally a prediction market because US Treasuries at any point in the curve are the ensemble prediction of what the Fed is expected to do over the course of any given time. So a five-year Treasury is what the next five years of Fed short-term rates are going to be. You could decompose it. And the Fed makes its decision on like, you know, whatever, 12 voting members. And so the Treasury market is literally a prediction market on one 12 people

at the Fed are going to do eight times a year over any given term. So the idea like that, it's not like a prediction market, it is a prediction market. And so they are clearly validated as one of the core pillars of the financial system. So hopefully, I don't know, I'd be into it if they have more liquidity and people can have more specialized bets on things. I think it'd be a cool thing. Yeah, it does seem like they need to figure out how to do longer dated prediction markets. Yeah, right. Because you don't want to tie your money up forever on some 2032 contracts.

Exactly. I was talking about like the last election was so exciting. I was like, I'm ready to start betting. and they're just like yeah that that's not a product that anyone wants it's yeah it's very funny but sorry I gotta run fellas yeah I got a run to a recording but I'd love to come back yeah you gotta come back with the technology brothers be honest you have gonna go get on the Ted Cruz podcast And I would love to go on the Ted Cruz podcast one day, too It's between you guys. It's between you guys and him fantastic. Well, thanks for stopping by. Thanks for having me

Have a good one. Well, I'll talk to you soon That's good Okay up next it coming in two minutes. Joe's voice, by the way, makes me very nostalgic. Oh yeah? Yeah, it sounds like he could easily have been recording about the Great Depression. Yeah. You could hear him chattering over the radio.

No, he's a great podcaster. I love Odd Lots. That was one of the first podcasts I listened to. I think he'd been doing it for almost 10 years. He's a great podcaster. I love odd lots. That was like one of the first podcasts I listened to. I think he'd been doing it for almost like 10 years. It's fantastic. And he's held the line on not going independent. I'm sure people have done a million dollar pre-seed over his head.

Hey, why don't you come over here? But he reps Bloomberg. Yeah, reps Bloomberg. That's great. Well, we got Scott Wu from Cognition coming on the show in a couple minutes. So many questions for him, obviously, highly We got to start with AI.

What is AI? What is this whole thing? People have been talking about it. We want to know about it. I mean, when everyone was saying the AI massive job displacement stuff, the bet I would try and formulate with people was over under 10% US unemployment by 2030. And even that, it sounds like not that crazy.

Like we've had unemployment higher than 10% in the past, but a lot of people who I would talk to, they say, oh yeah, yeah, I was gonna like take all the jobs. When I tried to get them to concretize it in 10% higher or lower than 10% unemployment in the United States in 2030. It's like not that far out. It's not that high.

We've had higher than 10% before. A lot of people say, ah, I don't know, maybe we'll still, maybe it won't roll out that fast. And so that's the prediction market that I want. You know there was always that headline of, humans will be having more sex with robots by 2025. Do you remember that one? No, oh yes, yes, I see that go viral all the time.

Tesla optimist just did a campaign with Kardashian. It was very silly. Very scintillating. Very, very silly. Very scintillating. Very, very silly. Yep. And it seems that that feels like a big campaign by Tesla to go and work with a Kardashian. That's sort of the final boss of influencer marketing.

It is. And so I saw people speculating on that. But I don't think. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. Well, we got Scott Wu in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Scott. There he is. Hey, man, good to see you guys.

How are you? We're great, how are you? Good, good, good. Busy couple days for us. Oh yeah, what's keeping you busy? Oh, there's always, I mean, there's always so much stuff going on. I feel like there's new products that come out every week.

There's new models that comes out every week. And then, you know, we obviously have a lot going on with that with Devon. So well, we appreciate you taking the time. Could you give us kind of just by the way, real quick, Scott and I talked on the phone, I think it was maybe 530 or six Friday night. And he was like, Yeah, everybody will be here until probably. What do you say? What's your normal? You guys have a pretty intense schedule. We're usually still around past midnight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Busy schedules for us. Well, hopefully it's fun. You clearly haven't put yourself out of a job yet. But can you give us the update on kind of like, where is Cognition now? Obviously, like massive launch, huge going direct moment, great launch video.

And then you kind of went into build mode. We kind of haven't heard that much from the company, so can you give me an overview of where the products are, where the company is, and kind of set some ground rules for where you are? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had our initial announcement about a year ago, actually, at this point, and from then,

a lot of it was basically just going through all the frictions of software engineering. The truth is, engineering is just so messy in the real world if you think about what has to get done. Obviously there's some pretty hard logical problem solving type work that has to be done, but there's also a lot of practical stuff. And so figuring out how to have a clean experience

that slots in, figuring out how to work with all these enterprise customer code bases, figuring out the capabilities and working with logging and documentation and tooling and things like that. And so for a decent chunk of time, our main work actually was with larger enterprises. And so we would work with a lot of these different groups, bigger tech companies, financial services, or things like that, and work with them on

a lot of these bigger projects and more repetitive projects and have Devin basically come in and speed up the job for a lot of this stuff. And then in December, we rolled out our general availability. And it's a self-serve plan where you can just put down a credit card and get started and plug in your code base and have Devon. And we were super, super excited about that, obviously, because it's really the chance for everyone to just get to try it out and see how it is. And it's been a fun last few months for us.

It's been a lot of iteration and a lot of growth and so on. We've had users talking about how Devon's now quickly become the number one committer in their code base and so on. So it's very cool to see. Yeah. Can you talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made early on on where to kind of put your AI efforts? As I understand it, you didn't train a foundation model.

You didn't do one of the massive runs. You work with different model providers. But what considerations were made in the early stage and are you still sticking with those or have those evolved over time? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we had, I would say two major bets that we really started the company with. And I would say the first one was that reasoning and this whole RL paradigm was going to work. It was a pretty controversial thing, I think, around

the end of 2023, because most of what, you know, the first generation of AI was, or, you know, the first generation of language models was, was more like imitation learning, right? It was basically like, read all of the internet, you know, read every Reddit post and talk like somebody on the internet, right? And obviously, I mean, it was pretty incredible. We passed the Turing test. ChatGPT was a massive. And for a while, all of the work that was being done

and all of the products that happened in particular verticals were much more in that style, which was basically, I'll call it text completion, basically. And so you had a product like that in marketing. You had a product like that for customer support. And similar things for code, where it's kind of like, here's the code so far and just predict for me what line in marketing, right? You had a product like that for customer support and similar things for code where it's kind of like, here's the code so far and just predict for me what line comes next, right?

I think we had a strong view that, yeah, that this reasoning was really gonna work and it was gonna enable a lot of new use cases. And then the other thing that we felt really strongly about was that the product experience was going to shift from this kind of more Q&A, text completion style products to basically an agent.

And practically, I think what that means is, honestly, I think a lot of folks today still think of AI as kind of a better Google, call it. Like you have a question and you want to go search it up, you ask your AI and your AI has a better answer, which is big. I mean, Google's not a small company, right? But I think the actual vision that we're going towards with AI is actually even bigger than that, which is basically your buddy that does your chores for you. And the obvious difference between those two is the ability to actually interact with the

real world and do real tasks and so on. And so there's a big difference between having a legal Q&A, for example, versus having a lawyer that can actually go submit things for you, that can go and interact with all these different surfaces. The same is obviously the case in code, where this is how we build software. You write code, you run the code, you see if it worked or not, you run the tests, you look at the documentation, you click around on the product yourself. And this is how we iterate and build, right?

And so the ability to do that is a big step function difference. Yeah. How do you think of getting Devin to go from sort of this reactive experience where you talk to Devin like you would a teammate or employee and say, like, hey, can you help me sort of execute on this specific thing? It goes and does it. Maybe it comes back to get feedback at different points too. I imagine long-term you want the sort of proactive,

sort of like high agency agent. I'm sure you guys are already experimenting with that kind of thing internally, but what are your plans along that route? Yeah, for sure. The way that we think about it is turning all the brick layers into architects is almost how I would describe it. I think the really beautiful part of software engineering, I would say, is getting to do this core problem-solving and decision-making around what do you want to build. It's like, let me understand the problem, let me understand what exactly is going on,

and then let me figure out, here's exactly the solution that I want to build for this. The thing is, you only spend about 10% of your time doing that, as a software engineer in practice. You probably spend about 90% of your time dealing with your Kubernetes and fixing your unit tests and upgrading your thing to the new version and all of this other stuff,

fixing these bugs that come up. And so a lot of it is, the way I would kind of describe it is working with Devin as the implementer that allows you to be a really great architect. And so there's a lot of detail with that because naturally you have to be in all the same flows that humans use for software engineering if you wanna do do that, right? And so you have your logs on Datadog. So like, you know, Devin's got to go look at those logs, right? You're talking

about issues on Slack. So Devin's got to be in Slack, right? And a lot of it is really kind of figuring out the workflow where it's very natural and very easy that as you're talking about this idea that you have or this new feature that you're trying to build or this bug that you're trying to fix or whatever, you're able to just tag Devin and just say, hey, at Devin, can you take a look at this and make this fix or do this thing? Yeah. Yeah. Talk about specifically, I can imagine that Devin, because it's so embedded in these different workflows. Every single day we see conversation on the timeline from somebody that says,

I'm switching from this code editor to that code editor or that code editor back to this code editor. How do you think about sort of long-term moats and sort of lock in as you're building Devon for yourself, but then you're also trying to build it. You're already a billion dollar company. Eventually, I'm sure you have much, much bigger ambitions, but how do you think about long-term moats around the software engineering agents?

Sure. Yeah. I think in the short and medium term, there's a lot of different experiences in code and I think a lot of folks building kind of different product experience for different vertical user use cases within code. I think in the short and medium term, things are just changing so quickly that the natural thing is just whatever is able to help folks the most is what they're really excited to use, right? And I think there's just, you know, when the pace of development and also the pace of progress in AI

is as high as it is, I think that's going to continue to be the case for a while. You know, I think with that said, in the long term, I think these things naturally do kind of converge to a point. And there are a few particular pieces, I would say, that really kind of cause that. And one of the big ones that I'll just point out is there really is a lot of, I guess, in most spaces, we would call this personalization or something of that sort. But there's a lot of it in code. I mean, if you imagine you hire the smartest software engineer

in the world and you get them to work on your code base day one, they're not going to know a lot of these little details about here's why we chose to do this architecture. Here's what this function does and that function does. Here's how you do this database migration or whatever it is. Right. So, you know, they have to learn all these things from the ground up as opposed to somebody who's, you know, just as smart, but has been at the company for, you know,

10 years and built half the code that by themselves. And, you know, they, they wrote all of these files themselves and so on. Right. Then, you know, you get to a point where you really just understand the code base themselves and they wrote all of these files themselves and so on, then you get to a point where you really just understand the code base, you're making the same decisions and trade-offs and you're working with it very tightly. It's the kind of thing where, and we see this already, where as folks start using Devin more and more, one of the really cool things is you can have one of your engineers ask

Devin a question and Devin is drawing on the knowledge that it has from all of the previous sessions it has with everyone on your team. It's able to learn all these things. Someone says, hey, we have to go do this version upgrade. Devin might say, oh yeah, I remember this. I actually just did one just like this last week for this other part of you guys code base. Let's figure out this one and let's do this.

That's the shape I think of what we're going to see a lot in AI actually over the next couple of years, where this is a bit of a hot take. But I would say a lot of the problem solving is actually good enough already. A lot of the reasoning of the problem solving, I mean, AI has been shown to be capable of solving some pretty hard stuff. I think actually what we have left to do is a lot more so just understanding the detail and the complexity of the real world, right? And you think about all these tasks that we spend our time on, you know, there's some amount of problem solving, but there's also a lot of just pulling in the relevant context and understanding what are the common sense considerations you're working with.

And that's a lot of what we spend our time working on with Devon's capabilities. Can you talk a little bit about... I have this take that we're almost in an AI winter for consumers, even though AI feels like it's moving so quickly. The chat GPT moment was so big because we passed the Turing test that for most average people it's just Google search, as you mentioned. But over the last year, obviously, if you're following this stuff, there's been incredible breakthroughs.

Inference cost has gone way down. Models have gotten bigger. Context windows have gotten way bigger. Have there been particular milestones in just AI research and development that have been more transformative to your business than others over the last year? Sure, sure. Yeah, I think at a high level,

I think all the continued progress that we're seeing everywhere in AI actually is primarily due to essentially like reinforcement learning, RL, that's really working. And it is a very different paradigm, right? Where we were saying how in the past, it was all just imitation learning and it's get

as much of the internet as you could possibly scrape up and just train on all of it, you know, and hopefully you get something that knows a lot of stuff, right? Whereas this is kind of, you know, this whole reinforcement learning paradigm is, you know, if you have a clear problem space where you can do the problem 100 times and you know this was right, this was wrong, this was right, this was wrong, you know, it's a little bit more like AlphaGo, you know, this self-play learning, but in a language model. And I think that's the biggest paradigm. And folks like OpenAI, Anthropiq,

and lots of Google X and so on have shown a lot of real progress through this whole RL paradigm. To your point on consumer, I actually think that I think that we'll probably see a resurgence actually in consumer over the next few months or so. And I think one of the big things that will actually flip that switch is a really great consumer agent experience.

We've talked about this. We haven't had the moment of just chatting with this generalized agent that can just book you a flight in a hotel and it's like super seamless and like that's like what I feel like we've all been waiting for. We've had that preview since Siri 1.0 back in a decade ago and it still isn't here and we're still waiting for it but it feels like now it's actually just a couple months away.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I wanna buy this pair of shoes and just go and look on all those websites and find which one delivers and which one is the best price for that and just go buy it for me, right? Things like that where it's, I think that'll be a pretty big moment for folks all those websites and find which one delivers and which one is the best price for that and just go buy it for me, right? Things like that where it's, I think that'll be a pretty big moment for folks because you'll

really feel, I think, the difference of- How did you process the DeepSeek moment? Obviously, that took over the timeline earlier this year. It was very controversial in a bunch of ways, but what was your DeepSeek takeaway from that development? Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I think at a high level, it's a competitive world out there. I think there are a lot of really smart folks going after this problem, and it's the kind of thing where it's, if you think about what people even, not just what was possible a

year ago, but what people even imagined could even work one year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago, I mean, every year, it's basically totally, it's totally flipped, right. And now it's kind of like, everyone in the space is talking about agents in the future of agents, you know, when we were doing this, like, here, no one really even believed that agents were like a thing, you know, and I think that, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's the case, I think everywhere in the stack, and, you know, we'll see, you know, I mean, it's the case, I think, everywhere in the stack.

And we'll see, I mean, there's the GPU layer, there's the hardware layer, there's the foundation models and so on. But I think all throughout the space, you have these really, really smart folks and really smart teams that are going after the problems and basically pushing things forward. I think we're in a very high velocity period

where it really does feel like every month in AI is like a year in a lot of these tech industries in the past. And so, yeah. How is AI adoption, what's been your takeaway from AI adoption within the Fortune 500, right? You see all these companies are spending billions of dollars on like gen AI, consulting contracts with Accenture.

It feels like the consulting companies are probably doing more revenue from generative AI than like all of the software companies combined, maybe ignore, you know, open AI. Is it happening sort of bottoms up, like an engineer sort of comes to their team and they're like, you know, it's,, they're in, you know, not, not on, not in San Francisco or New York. And they're saying, Hey guys, I got this like guy named Devin. He's 500 bucks a month. And like, I think he can do what, what, you know, our next 10 junior engineers can do, or is it happening more so top down where execs are super, you know, kind of clued in and

following the stuff or both? We need an AI strategy. Yeah. I think the interesting thing with these times is there's a lot of both. And executives obviously and boards, for example, everyone is thinking about how do we get AI native and how do we make sure we're on top of this wave and how do we make sure we're ready to just accelerate as fast as possible and that we're ahead of the curve on this rather than being too late on it, because obviously these things are moving so quickly.

Then at the same time, it's like you have individual developers and folks like that who are just really excited to use these things. A lot of these painful tasks, if you're doing a full code-based migration and your code base is 50,000 files and you got to do the same migration on every single one, it's not a fun task. And figuring out how to go quicker on those things so you can spend more time on the problems that you really care about and on figuring out what to build is really exciting for folks as well. But yeah, I think it's an interesting time for us where it's...

It's bluntly, I think most of our waves of tech, you know, there's always been kind of a hype phase, I'll call it. And also, you know, a phase where basically, you know, this adoption really comes in and you saw the same thing with cloud, you saw the same thing with mobile, I mean, you saw the same thing with the internet itself, right? And yeah, I mean, I think it's an exciting one for us, because I think with AI, I mean, I think the, I think if anything, with AI, I think the capabilities and I think what will be possible in AI are just getting exponentially better and better every year.

But I think what I would say is, I think there's a lot of different areas of generative AI where it seems very clear that this is getting better by the month. This is clearly going to work soon, and we want to be ahead of our time with this and get ready for this. And there are a few spaces, I would say, and code is one of those where it's, this is actively working right now. I mean, if your team is not using any AI code tool,

you are just heavily behind, right? And so it's kind of interesting. And I think we'll see each of these kind of come online at different points in time. And I think there are a few reasons why code is one of the first to really get there. But yeah, it's going to be an exciting few months for us. What advice would you give the young Scott Wu, the younger version of you that's just starting to learn to code? And how do you sort of fast track to be kind of

at the bleeding edge? Obviously you can learn from the models themselves. They're great sort of instructors, but you know, I think we went from this period where maybe a year ago, everyone was like, oh, all the software engineers are cooked. They sort of like made their own replacement. And now it's very clear that if you're a software engineer today, you have a massive leverage than ever,

more leverage than ever. And you have a massive leverage than ever and you have this massive edge because even if eventually all this work goes from code to natural language, there's still this sort of, it's possible to be on the bleeding edge, but how would you, if somebody's 22 year old coming out of college today, what would your advice to them be? Yeah, for sure. No, I mean, I really think we're coming up on the golden age of software engineering here. And I think the main thing, as we're saying, I mean, I think it's always going to be up

to us to decide what to build, obviously, right? And a lot of the core of computer sciences, I would just say, is that question of understanding and deciding what to build. And so if anything, I think the theory of computer science is going to be even more valuable. Understanding the layers of abstraction and knowing the basic model of how a computer works and how to break down problems logically

and how to reason with these systems is going to be even more valuable. The other side of it, I would just say, is there's no shortage of demand for software. And one of the things that I think about all the time is like, I think today even still, it feels so outlandish, but I think a couple of years ago, a couple of years from now,

this is gonna be commonplace is single use software, actually, right? And you can imagine a world where it's like, hey, I gotta go look at these 10 LinkedIn profiles today, and I gotta click through each of these, and I'm looking for this and that and whatever, and I got to go research and get a bunch of data online, and then put that into an Excel sheet and run some numbers.

A lot of these things are naturally, code works just as well for these tasks, if not better. But obviously, it makes no sense at all to go hire some engineering team to go build you this massive script that you're only going to run one time for this use case that you have today, right? But I think we will get to a point where basically you can just ask Devon, hey, here's the thing

that we need to do, let's just go build this real quick. And software will do that for you and will solve that problem for you. And I think there's just, there's so many more products out there to build. That's the main thing that I always index on. It's crazy to think about, but I think it's like, you can imagine all these products out there that are niche products for a thousand

people or a hundred people or even just for you, but you know, they have the level of quality and the level of execution as, you know, the biggest products in the world today, you know, YouTube or Instagram or whatever it is. So yeah, talk a little bit about, you know, there's been a bunch of these or whatever it is, so. Yeah, talk a little bit about, there's been a bunch of these sort of platforms, apps that have popped up, lovable.dev, I think, bolt.new, or bolt, I forget what it is, where these sort of products

that allow you to just generate an app immediately, and they're showing this tremendous revenue growth. You guys seem to have focused on the potentially much harder problem of sort of building durable software products. But is there a world in the future where Devon goes more downstream and is actually, you know, somebody comes on and creates their very first, you know, application ever with Devon, because, you know, I see a lot of these companies pop up and I have no idea what their

long term roadmap is, but I can see why it's easy to generate a lot of revenue quickly to just generate apps or generate websites. But then maybe that's not the, it feels like potentially a good wedge, but not a super durable business necessarily, which is like, do I need to generate a new app every month? Like probably not, but maybe, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I think a lot of different product experiences in the space, for sure. I think the way that we've always thought about it is,

you know, I kind of think of self-driving as the parallel where it's, you know, there was, first it was all manual and then eventually there was, you know, there's automatic shift, right? And then there was cruise control, there was auto park, you know, and basically I guess the kind of, the thing that I would point out here is, you know, Obviously there was automatic shift, right? And then there was cruise control, there was auto park. And basically I guess the thing that I would point out here is up until the point where it was true, full, it could do every single thing you wanted it to do, you still needed

a driver's license for all of that middle era. And there was a point at the end where it's kind of like, yeah, you could just sit in the back seat and just have the car do everything for you. And so I think we kind of have this similar paradigm, I'd say, in code, where it's maybe not so, maybe not as much of a kind of like single step function switch, but you kind of have this gradual spectrum where, you know, there are a lot of tasks, I think, where, you know, like you said, building a cool website or something like that, where it's, yeah, you know, you don't have to have any experience with code at all and now you can just do this, right?

And then I think there are a lot of these kind of larger and more complex tasks, working on a big code base or figuring out things with your existing product or building, as you're saying, a lot of these bigger projects where you still want to be an engineer and you still want to be really deeply technical, I think, to be able to make the most out of these AI coding tools and to use that. But with that said, I mean, I think that every month, the capabilities change, right?

And I think there will be a time, I think, where you're able to, it's just as easy as kind of looking at your product and talking in plain English about what you want, and that's it. Do you like the innovators dilemma framework? And do you think AI is more in the sustaining innovation camp or disruptive innovation camp? There's been a lot of debate about this, people comparing it to mobile, where the really large companies were actually the best position to take advantage of mobile.

A lot of people are saying Google, even though their product roadmap has been a little lumpy, they still have amazing talent, amazing hardware, amazing software, lots of talent to kind of reap the benefits of AI over the long term. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of interesting second-order effects, and one of the, maybe the most obvious ones to call out is basically a lot of these switching costs that exist,

especially in these B2B businesses, are just going to go way down. And I'm sure we could all think of these switching costs that exist, especially in these B2B businesses, are just gonna go way down. And I'm sure we can all think of these companies, they only really thrive today because it is so painful to switch off and to migrate off. And I think that's gonna change a lot. I think on the other hand, I think a lot of,

as we're saying, this deep personalization and the ability to use data and to really build customer experiences for your users or your customers, I think that is going to only become more and more powerful. And so I think long story short is, I think that a lot of the existing great businesses are going to do very well in the age of AI. I think there will be, in the neighborhood, I would say, of the 10 to 20 power law businesses

of the new ones that come up from AI. I think we already kind of see it's there's the foundation labs themselves and then there's some of the, each of the big verticals of the application layer, there's code, there's law, there's customer support, there's sales and so on. There's image and video. And I think there'll be kind of like, yeah, like a handful of businesses kind of from each of those categories. I think that really make it to the really massive outcomes. But yeah, I mean, as is always the case with these things,

you know, a lot of it is, it's very hard to know in advance which ones will be the winners. I do think that, yeah, I mean, I do think with the richness, I think of the space of AI, you know, I think, of the space of AI, I think one of the big differences is there's just so much difference in technical execution. In AI, you can be doing things that other teams or other products just cannot do, right? And I think that difference kind of means that I think really great, really talented

new innovators will have a meaningful edge and the best ones will be able to create some. What's your take on the various walls? There's been this, you know, deep learning's hitting a wall, scale might be not all you need. Now everyone's pretty scale-pilled. Then we got in the reinforcement learning paradigm,

as you mentioned. Are you worried about a data wall or an energy wall or just some sort of wall where we hit and we kind of stagnate and we're not seeing the breakthroughs and the acceleration that I think people are kind of expecting if you're following AI closely. Are you worried about any of those walls? Yeah, so I actually had the opposite take, which is in some ways optimistic, some ways pessimistic, but what I would say is stagnation is actually the default. You know, it's by default,

it's not the case that we're gonna have this, you know, the next thing. And I think we've kind of like, we felt it for so long at this point that it's like, yeah, the next model is gonna be even better and the next product is gonna be even better and the next GPU is gonna be even better. But I think more of what it speaks to actually

is kind of the, just yeah, how amazing the kind of the flow of innovation is, you know? It's like, and just to give simple examples, I mean, it's like, you know, GPT-3 wasn't just more of GPT-2. It was like, you know, it was a step function different and there were a lot of things that had to be figured out. And GPT-4 wasn't just more of three. It was like, you know, and the same is true, I think, with reasoning. The same is true with the advancements that we're making in hardware. It's the same is true with the advancements that we're making in the application

there. So in some ways, it's kind of, you know, I'm saying it's like, there's no single kind of like force of nature that we get to rely on, where it's just like these things will get better all on their own. At the same time, it's truly remarkable, I think, that over the last few years, you few years we haven't slowed down in figuring out the new innovations and the new categories that will get us there. What is one thing that you learned from Eric and Kareem from your sort of ramp days that you feel like you've really focused on making sure that you guys implement at Cognition? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's a, they've, I've known them a long time. I'm super, super tight with both

of them. They've given me a lot of incredible advice. I'll share one, which I think was hilarious, because, you know, we were, we were just getting started. And I called Eric and I was like, hey, you know, we're, we're starting this company. You know, obviously like ramp is incredible. I have so much respect for you and what you built and I just want to get your thoughts on basically, yeah, what, what is the thing that I should really, that I should really focus on today that I'm not thinking about right now? And Eric said, you know, take a lot of pictures. It was, it was, I mean, it was actually great advice. It was funny because, you know,'s funny because I would talk to these people and they would say, oh, you got to really nail in on hiring and you got to really figure

out these. All these things are also true, obviously, and Eric has helped with all these other things. But I found that funny that that was the first, the day the company's founded, don't forget to take those pictures. It's's like, it's only been, I don't know, 15 months for us, right? But it's, I am actually really grateful that we have those and that we did that. And I think there's a lot of things where it's just, just being in it and going through the experience and knowing what you miss and what you don't miss.

I think Eric and Kareem understand that better than anyone, honestly. Well, thanks for joining. It's 1.30. We won't take any more of your time. Where can people sign up and who's kind of the wheelhouse client right now? Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's devin.ai and anyone who's, I'd say engineering teams all over the world.

So we have teams that range from one or two person startups all the way to the biggest financial services firms in the world. And so, yeah, we'd love to hear folks' feedback on Devin as they're trying it out. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Thanks for coming on, Scott. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Have a good one. Have a good one. Yeah. Very interesting. I always love talking to an AI founder. There's so many things that you can peel into. We didn't even get into AGI timelines, P-Doom, all the fun things that you can go from there. You want a pen? What? Oh, charger. Here you go. And we're in demand today. There are multiple guests

trying to call in right now. We can only let one in at a time, or maybe we could do a debate between... Do we have two guest schedules? That would be cool. I think we have... Yeah, should we do a VC and a have to get schedule. I would be cool. I think we have Yeah, do we should we do a VC and a car dealership guy at the same time? I think there might have been some confusion over scheduling But let's try to guess well, there's two people in the waiting room right now We're not sure who joined but we want to let in the car dealership guy because that's who is scheduled next

Hopefully we can get him in the temple of technology and pick his brain about what's going on in the car world. Should be a fun conversation. But we gotta figure out some Zoom details. At this point I think that- I love how the entire stream infrastructure right now is just melting down. Melting down, yeah. We're pushing this to the limit, folks.

We're building the plane as we're flying it, but I think we're having good streams back to back. It's been a lot of fun. And I like these little conversations. Take us on a little tour. Go over into finance land with Joe, drone land, defense tech with Soren, some AI with Scott Wu.

Now, some car dealerships. Hopefully. Ben, how we doing with the car dealership guy? Is he ready to come on down to the temple of technology? He left. He left. He says trying to join. Why don't you send him another message

and I will pull up some info on this car dealership. Oh, he said he does a lot of these stuff. So he says we didn't let in his main camera. Oh, he said he does a lot of these stuff. So he says we didn't let in his main camera. Oh, he has two cameras. OK, OK. Well, let's see. Nissan has a profitability problem that is determined to fix how a mix of product pricing

and placement. Interesting. Honda is sidestepping some tariff uncertainties by reworking its battery sourcing strategy. Beginning in April, Honda will source hybrid batteries for nearly 400,000 vehicles from Toyota's $14 billion North Carolina plant. He's in.

He's in. Hey, can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can. There he is. You look fantastic, you sound fantastic. You got a real professional over here. Welcome to TVPN Live. That's the least I could do, if this is what I would do all day. Yeah, we can. There he is. You look fantastic. You sound fantastic. You got a real professional over here. Welcome to TVPN Live. That's the least I could do if this is what I could do all day.

This is fantastic. Great. Great to have you here. Can you kick us off with a little introduction? What do you do? What's your name? Who are you? Well, it's great to be on the fortress of finance.

Thank you. Yes. Now, I'm so I'm the founder of CardioShop Guy. You've probably seen me on Twitter if you're listening to this right now. We are the leading content news and insights platform for car dealers. Didn't start that way. We were very consumer based, but it's been a couple years where I've really just shifted to focusing on the industry.

And today, we're pretty much offering anything for dealers to come and, you know, learn kind of stay informed, get ahead really just trying to make a better industry with the kind of ultimate vision that if we can, if we can create a better dealership experience and educated dealers, and, you know, kind of democratize knowledge, then the consumer experience would be better and everybody wins. So that's kind of like the utopian vision. I know very little about car dealership. So I bet my questions would be silly.

Give us the crash course history, your personal history in the industry leading up to this. Cause this is not the kind of business that you start, you know, just cause you had a good X account. I imagine you experienced a lot of the, you know, the turmoil of the industry and the good and the bad. Yeah, so it's quite the opposite. But I'll give you the short version.

So I was a dealer. I grew up in used car business. Father had a small car used car dealership. So that was where I spent most of my time. In 2018, I got the bug. I said, there's no way that we're still selling cars this way, right? Everything's done online. Why do I have to, why do people have to come to my dealership? There's no way that we're still selling cars this way, right? Everything's done online.

Why do I have to, why do people have to come to my dealership? Why can't I expand virtually and whatnot? And so I took this traditional dealership and I said, we're going to build a better way to buy a car. We're going to do it 100% online. At the time, Carvana had just gone public, but it was still kind of a nascent thing, selling cars online. And so I actually raised capital and we transformed to do a venture

backed online auto retailer. You know, we started building out our own website, our technology, our platform. And I spent five years doing this. So we were completely vertically integrated this entire time. So as we were building this business, you know, we were acquiring the warehouses, building up the logistics network and actually retailing vehicles online from what was a small use car dealership. It was a crazy experience.

I mean, we raised lots of capital throughout the time and grew the business to close to like $100 million in annual sales. And end of, I want to say it was 2021 when rates started rising, we kind of, things are really tough. We spent the next 18 months, we couldn't raise more capital. Business was obviously, the burn was accelerating and we had this existential, we're facing this existential point in our

life and the next 18 months were just brutal. We ended up shutting that business down. We tried to pivot to private equity. We almost got acquired, but that didn't work out. In the meantime, I sort of had this like, anonymous Twitter account where I was just tweeting, just trying to stay sane, be a little creative, but really just sharing kind of my thoughts. And it blew up like crazy, right? So I don't remember when I launched a Twitter account

exactly, I think it was like early 22. For anybody just on audio, he's got almost half a million followers on X, which is the equivalent of 50 billion followers on Instagram. Pretty much. No, it's a big, big number. Yeah, I mean, it was definitely very, like, you're right. It's very difficult.

Today it's completely much more difficult, I would say, even unless you're putting out slop. But I mean, like high quality followers is a very tough thing to do. You got to put that insight. But that's essentially what I was doing. I was just sharing my knowledge and experiences that I've gone through. And then after we ended up closing down the business completely, this was like 18, 21, 24 months later, I said, I don't exactly know what's in store for my next thing, but I do know that there's a thirst for this knowledge. When I launched this account, people didn't understand what the hell is going on with

prices and inventory was all over the place. And it wasn't just consumers, it was dealers themselves as well. And so I said, there's something here. And so I formed a B2B media company. And we can talk about, like I went down the hold co route and all that stuff that Sean Puri spoke about on your podcast the other day as well. We can talk chat about that as well. But that was essentially how I fell into this business.

So I went from like a traditional family business to a venture backed tech business, right? Raised like $60 million and all that hoopla. And now we're like a bootstrapped media brand. It's completely different things, but it's been a fun learning experience. Yeah. Yeah, so one of the reasons I wanted to have you on now is just to get a sense of really on the consumer side,

how are people behaving in the market? What are the deal, you guys get a lot of data from dealers that are in your know, in your community. And I think it's a good signal of sort of how consumers are feeling. It's obviously sort of this like shaky time broadly in the market, but, uh, how are dealers doing broadly? What, what is, you know, consumer sentiment looking like? Uh, and then I want to kind of get into some individual brands and, and, you

know, potentially ask you about the EV market and some other stuff as well as later. I'd love to get your thoughts on the war between platforms like Bring a Trailer and Cars and Bids and all that stuff. But maybe start with a kind of a market update. What's happening sort of on the ground today? Yeah. So look, the market has been, I would say,

very consistently improving and just becoming more pro-consumer, right? We're definitely in more of a buyer's market today, although it's still very divided. Like if you go to a Toyota dealership, they are still at like 30 plus day supply, which is roughly half the level of supply they should have for current demand.

And so Toyota and Lexus are sort of the anomaly here. I'd say the majority of the brands out there are oversupplied right now, which is simply a good thing for consumers. Because it means you have more negotiation leverage and means that brands will put more incentives on these vehicles so that they'll sell them faster. And I would say they're roughly like 30% oversupplied.

So it's not, you know, these numbers are not low. We're sort of in this phase right now where it's the incentives are only going to keep getting better because the reality is the inventory is out there and it needs to move. Now it is spring season, which is typically a pretty good time of year for dealers, right? People get it. Most people are getting their tax refunds and whatnot, and they're going shopping. So there has been a bump in business over the last couple of weeks, but other than that, I mean,

I don't expect the spring bump to last that long and never really last that long. And it's a very temporary thing. But looking at nutshell, go ahead. Oh yeah, when is the best time to buy a car if you're a consumer? And are there any tricks to getting a good deal? It feels like a very opaque process. Everyone has that question. Look, yes, you'll,

you might get luck out if you go like, you know, end of month, end of quarter, because there's these things called stair step programs where, you know, it's like, Hey, you sell, I'm just making it up a hundred cars. Uh, you'll get an extra, you know, X amount of dollars as a dealer, right? So if I'm trying to get that stair step, if I'm trying to unlock that benefit from the deal, from the automaker, then I'm going to maybe even sell a couple of cars at a loss at the end of the month

because I want to hit my number. Now, many manufacturers have moved away from those. Many dealers don't even participate in them. But yes, I mean, in theory, you could do that. I would honestly tell you that a better way would be to simply see what brand right now is most oversupplied. Now you might not like that answer

because maybe you don't wanna drive an infinity or whatever the most oversupplied at that current moment, but reality is like that's where you will have the most negotiation leverage as a consumer. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Tesla as a stock has been down tremendously over the last month even, I think it's down like 35%.

At the same time, we're seeing more than ever on the roads, but they're obviously, the stock pressures in part, there's probably a political angle. There's a, broadly the sort of moat they had around EVs has been eliminated as other manufacturers have entered. What do you see in store for Tesla? I know they're verticalized, there's not like Tesla dealer owners on your platform,

but what is the future of the Tesla brand in the near term? In your view, you see sales performance continuing to slide or is there, John has joked, joked a lot of the show, obviously, you're completely joking that like they should come out with a gated manual transmission with a combustion engine. Naturally aspirated V12 ideally in the roadster. The roadster has been delayed so much. Let's just put a V12 in there. Let's get the Countach engine in there. Look, I think first, if you look at E-, right, this, this one, the pendulum swung

too far over the last couple of years. So these manufacturers went, you know, had all these crazy proclamations, right? We're going to do X amount of EVs, you know, or whatever X percentage of our production will be EVs and sales. And the problem was that EV demand simply was way behind. So like Ford was the prime example where they were kind of producing all these vehicles and people didn't want them, right?

Now demand has been growing very consistently and linearly, like it hasn't gone exponential. Like demand is still growing if you look at simply, how many EVs are being sold, but relative to the supply that was produced and what was out there didn't make any sense. So what happened? Well, all these crazy incentives started happening

and all the legacy automakers started to sell all their EVs. But again, they didn't sell them because the demand out there was, oh, wow, this is such a great car. I want it. They sold it because, wow, the price is so incredible. This is all I can get. Or maybe this is simply the cheapest monthly payment in the market. I think we forget how consumers are

practical. I have a budget and I need to fit into my budget. And if an EV is going to get me within my budget, I will consider an EV. I don't care. The average American doesn't care if it's an EV or a gas or it runs on freaking water, right? They need to be able to afford something. So I think that's kind of what happened in the big picture over the last couple of years. Now look, there's no doubt about it that Tesla has some of the most incredible technology. I don't think that the actual interior is anything extravagant. It's actually pretty basic and in many cases, so far, but the tech is incredible. The driving is amazing. I love driving Teslas. And I know that many dealers that I personally know drive Teslas themselves.

Many do it just because they want to see what it's like. Others just do it because they genuinely enjoy it. And so I think that the EV market has been very volatile. The swings have been just very rough up and down. I can't say I'm too concerned long term. I still think that it's going to continue rising very slowly. I think dealers that put focus on it and make the investments to serve more EV customers will do well. Obviously, it's market dependent. If you're in the Midwest, it might be 10 meters behind because they simply don't drive as many EVs out there. But in general, I think it's still a smart investment. Tesla stock price is just so hard to know, right?

Because what is even driving that? Is it like the Elon political overhang? I mean, there's so many factors going into the price of that stock. And so it's really hard to tell what's next for it. But I would, I would sort of kind of, you know, quiet out the noise and I still think that we're EVs are going to continue rising, albeit a lot slower than anyone has predicted and expected, because that's just how, you know, consumer adoption takes time.

Outside of Tesla, who's on a tear and who's in trouble in terms of the big car brands right now? Tesla who's on a tear and who's in trouble in terms of the big car brands right now? Well, you know, I actually just had one of Nissan's top executives on my podcast today. His name is I forget Shahani is the last name. I forget the first name, but long story short is Nissan is in trouble or they've been in trouble recently, right? They've been really losing a lot of money. Vinay Shahani, that's what it was. So they basically Nissan has sort of been the culprit here. And you have to understand the auto business is very, it's, you know, it just, it cycles and it comes and goes. So like, if you look at 21, it was like Ford

was in the spotlight. Like they were in the penalty box. Then the last couple of years, it's sort of been Stellantis, right?ler Dodge Jeep Ram. Now it's sort of Nissan because they oversupply their vehicles. Dealers are not making any money on them. There's way too many dealers for the market share that the brand has. And on top of all of that, because they're oversupply, because they've been selling these wholesale to rental car companies and whatnot, all the consumers are left with lower residual values. So now the Nissan that you purchase is worth a lot less. So you're pissed. You don't want to buy another Nissan. I think it loses value very quickly. So they're one of the brands that's really struggled recently and all that is accompanied by a sales decline. But they have new leadership in place. And

the hope is that they're going to come out of it. I think that their leaders are very convincing and just because I haven't spoken to Vinay on the podcast, he sounded like he knows what he's doing. The guy's been around the block, worked at Toyota, very, very smart and sharp, but it's not an easy thing to get out of. I mean, do they have the resources to really claw back a significant amount of market share so that the brand is sustainable or will they have to do some merger like they tried to do with Honda,

which didn't really work out. And because of that, they actually ended up switching CEOs at Nissan corporate. So that's one of the brands that's struggling pretty bad. Infiniti is included in that as well. It's infinity is under the umbrella. But for the most part, I would say like that, they're probably the biggest culprit right now

in the market. Talk about the durability of the dealership model. Your audience, a lot of people that are working in the industry, working at dealerships, obviously, but you had a S&B dealership, then you had a venture-backed online car sales platform. Something about cars, it feels like the final boss of e-commerce in that with a car, you're going to spend a lot of money. It's one of the most expensive purchases outside of your home. And so it's really nice to just go to the deal.

I like going to a dealership, even if I'm not actually necessarily in market, just because it's fun to look at cars and stuff like that. But do you see 50 years from now, are we still going to dealerships to buy cars? My personal bet is yes, because I would rather, even if an online platform says, yeah, we'll send you the car. They'll put it up on a truck. You can drive it. You can buy it there if you want it. I'd still like to go and just see more inventory, right and experience,

you know, more vehicles. So what's interesting is, I mean, I learned so much selling cars online, strictly online. First of all, I learned that online car buyers by a large percentage are subprime car buyers, subprime consumers. They can't otherwise get approved anywhere else and this is sort of their last resort. Carvana, CarMax have built such a great mousetrap that it's attracted customers who are also not subprime. And I would bet you that if you looked at a graph from when they started till today and just how their customer mix evolved, I would guarantee that.

You know, it started out a lot more subprime than it is today. Um, but you know, that's an example of a brand that's evolved. So look, the dealership is evolving. There's no doubt about that. And if you're a dealer that doesn't think that your head is in the sand. Um, people, what we learned through COVID and after doubt about that. And if you're a dealer that doesn't think that, your head is in the sand. What we learned through COVID and after COVID is that people still want to interact in person with a dealer.

And it's not for the purposes necessarily being with the dealer, but rather you might be making a large purchase. You want to go in, you want to talk to someone, you maybe want to test drive that thing. There's several things you want to do in person. The dealer is simply going to continue evolving just to meet the needs of the customer. There are certain things that the dealers are going to do, which I think are very durable, such as service. The service department is the highest margin profit center in a dealership because for

those that don't know how dealerships work, you have many different profit centers, your parts, you have new car sales, used car sales, service. Service is the highest margin revenue stream in a dealership. And that is simply something that won't go away. You're always going to need to get the vehicle service somewhere, even if it becomes more fleets. If we have all these autonomous vehicles on the road, they're going to need to be serviced somewhere. Or if it's like Turo, where people are actually acquiring fleets, that will need to be serviced somewhere. Or if it's sort of like Turo, where people are actually acquiring fleets, that will need to be serviced somewhere. So service is a very, I think it has crazy kind of staying power and it's not going to

go anywhere. And the margins are strong. I think new cars is, it's tricky, right? Because if you look at supply levels right now of new cars in the market, we're not quite at 2019 levels yet, but we're inching up. Many dealers are already breaking even on new cars, depending on the brand. Some are taking losses. And so new cars has never been like a real profit center.

It's a commoditized product. The good thing about new cars for dealers is that it brings the customers back. So if you lease a new vehicle, then they come back to you for service. Maybe they trade into a vehicle, then you sell it as a used car. You get another client. And so the dealership is going to continue evolving. AI is completely shaking up things now, I would say for the better, if anything, for dealers, because they're simply able to offer a better experience, offer more targeted products and services for customers, waste less time,

consumers are getting a more consistent experience. So AI has definitely been doing a lot of good, but it's just moving off so quickly. And we don't really know if dealers will become, you know, kind of new car fulfillment centers eventually. And just, you know, then you'll also do service there and maybe buy some used cars or what that future really looks like. I don't think the dealership model is going away other than the fact that lobbying is super strong and all that. Like, let's put that aside for a second, even though it's a super important one. I simply think that manufacturers sometimes underestimate what it takes to be a successful retailer.

You know, they do they really want to carry all that balance sheet risk on our inventory risk on their balance sheet? I mean, there's many considerations and it's been, you know, tried many times. And frankly, Tesla is the only one that has really done a great job at it. Or sure, maybe Rivian as well. But there's been other plenty of examples on the legacy side that they simply have not been able to do it successfully with launching like a D2C or something direct to consumer or something like that. On the service side, are there exciting robotics companies that you think are going to get meaningful traction in the service departments of these dealerships? I imagine, you know, we cover the robotics companies, the 1Xs, the figures, the Tesla Optimus, things

like that. You know, I'm not convinced that humanoid robots are going to be the ones in the sort of service base doing the work, but maybe it's... They already are. They are. Well, not doing the work. So I actually invested in a company called RoboTire, which maybe it's other. They already are. They are. Well, not doing the work. So I actually invested in a company called Robo Tire, which went out of business. So that wasn't a good one. But they were literally replacing tires on, they were replacing tires on vehicles in like, I think Firestones or something. I guess the economics didn't work out there, but there's a company now, a robotics company.

And I should say now I'm pretty sure they're public already. They're part of a bigger company called Rich Tech, which I had them on my podcast and they're literally transporting, they're literally transporting parts in the service center right from the parts counter to the technician. And this is live, you can literally see rich tech robotics. It's pretty incredible. But again, saves a ton of time. Think about it to technician, you know, these, these are skilled trades, maybe you're making 50 bucks an hour, I don't know how much you're making. And to go each time, grab the parts, I mean, it's extremely inefficient. And so these robots now are in service centers, transferring parts. I would say, I'm a fan of the whole vertically integrated kind of low NPS high margin. I think Keith Rattboy is the one that spoke about this, I think.

But asking yourself what part of the business has the lowest NPS and the highest margin, that's right for disruption. And it's pretty crazy how true that is because if you look at the car business, the lowest NPS in our business, Net Promoter Score is actually service, right? So the service department and it's used car auctions, surprisingly. Now auctions are dealer to dealer, right? And those are also extremely, both are high margin businesses. Now, if you look what's happening on those two fronts, we're seeing a lot of just attempts at disrupting those two different businesses. So

on the auction front, you're seeing all these kind of auction substitutes that have spawned up over the last couple of years. You actually mentioned a couple right there, Bring a Trailer, for example. Yeah, I wanted to get your kind of opinion. And by the way, that's not new. Bring a Trailer, they've been around for a while. No, no, I know. But they've gotten a lot bigger. Yeah. But just to kind of finish my thought there. So the point bottom line is like, you're also seeing a lot of disruption in service now where all these AI companies are trying to create tech for dealership service departments to make them more efficient, more profitable,

the better customer experience. And so I think that that's gonna kind of work itself out over the next couple of years. That makes sense. Talk about the use online, use car marketplace specifically around collectibles. I don't have a good read right now on market share between, I've had success on bring a trailer,

every car enthusiast looks at the platform and they're like, somebody needs to disrupt this, right? It's got a great community and this sort of rich data and history, but the actual experience, yeah, it feels very dated. Got a great community and this sort of rich data and history, but Actual experience. Yeah, it feels very dated cars and bids has this sort of amazing YouTube driven marketing engine and Doug Demuro What is who's winning there right now? Do you feel like cars and bids? Is gaining a real foothold? It's it's once you actually get it working It's like the best business ever because you don't have to hold inventory and you're just clipping fees over and over and over.

But it's certainly highly competitive. You know, it's crazy that you said that. It feels like it's aging because I just spoke with a dealer maybe like three days ago who just discovered selling on Bring a Trailer. Right, like let that sink in. Not like, it's like, it's crazy how adoption in this industry with, you know, these industry with these auctions, it just takes

time because people are centered in ways things are working. And these auctions are like the original network effect. If you think about the auction is all about how many people can you get? Can you get the highest concentration of the right type of dealers, the right buyers to purchase? Now, again, bring a trailer is consumer facing as well. So that's different. But you still need that really high concentration of the right shoppers to buy. So look, my take is that I think, I don't know the specifics behind cars and bids today because it's evolving and bring a trailer. I can tell you anecdotally, I hear about it the most from dealers. Take it for what it's worth. If I tell you what's the buzz, I always hear dealers mentioning bring a trailer, bring a trailer. I think that it's going to,

it's unclear to me how these brands, not bring a trailer, but like the up and comers that came after like cars and bids, it's just unclear to me how they could maintain their margin long-term and avoid really losing their business to the bigger players like the bring a trailer in the market. Because I just don't see, like you can only pump so much demand from your, you know, having an audience is great because you're able to, you know, send over demand

and community and all that to your product. But that's not sustainable. At a certain point, the business has to stand on its own feet. And that might get you started. I don't know how far that takes you. So I think the real question is, are they able to really solve a problem in the market in a unique way long term? I don't know. I haven't bought on cars and beds. I've played around with the product, but I just, I don't know if there's enough, if there's enough demand for all of these,

cause they're not the only ones. There's other ones that have popped up. It's sort of like, if you're a random- Go ahead. The real network effect with Bring a Trailer, for those that aren't familiar, is it has the longest standing,

most active community. And if you're a collector and you have a unique car, you wanna get it in front of the biggest possible audience to get the best possible price and bring a trailer has so much leverage that people will sign up their car to sell and it won't even necessarily be slated for auction for months sometimes.

And so Cars and Bids has an opportunity to say, hey, we'll list your car next week. But then the challenge is if they don't have the same level of collectors on the platform, you're just not gonna get the best price. And so they technically offer the same service, but they offer a worse service because they won't necessarily get the best price.

So. It's still just a fantastic go to market strategy to seed a marketplace with a huge YouTube audience. But yes, there's the question. Yes, that's correct. How do you grow from there? You're like, you are kind of tamp constrained. He only has a few million viewers and only so many of those can actually convert onto the platform. But I mean, he's done a great job. Just go full send and every single video.

I would say the biggest physical auction or traditional auctions, what they've done is, you know, they've integrated other businesses. Now I'm not telling you here that they've kind of given up on margin on the sales front, but you know, they become they become lenders, right? So they floor your cars as a line of credit. They do other services as well, which helps you kind of, you know, build a mode around your business. But it's just, it feels like every automotive YouTuber that gets an audience runs to launch this auction

marketplace. And I just don't know how many of those will really have staying power long term or if it's gonna end up being kind of like a winner takes all or winner takes most. We will see. We'll have to check in with you in a couple months and see how it's going. Yeah, anytime there's big car news,

it'd be great to have you back on to break it down. This was fantastic. Thanks so much. Yeah. You guys are doing great work, seriously. You guys are definitely cutting through the noise. And I can tell you, it gave me a lot of early CDG vibes when I... You put out that breaking news stuff the other day, and that's how I got started. People just started sending me shit.

They're like, oh, by the way, this dealer is out of business. And I just started posting that. People were calling me the gossip by the way, this dealer is out of business. And I just started posting that people are calling me like the gossip girl of automotive, which I never wanted to be. But it's a it's it's this thing where like all media in the future, in my opinion, or the winning media will be like expert led media, which is sort of what you're doing here. You know, you're in the game, you're bringing people that are in the game to talk about things that are relevant

to them. So I think it's really great. And it's exciting. Well, thank you so much for joining. Great to hang. Thanks guys. We'll talk to you later. What a background. Very interesting. Setting the bar on backgrounds. Totally. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, fantastic. Clearly, you know, him and Joe. Yeah, both prepared last week. Yep. You can tell like the early stage builders who aren't just on the podcast circuit constantly, you know, you get a little bit more plain background,

but they come with a different set of insights. That's true. That's true. So we got, we got a, we got, We got some breaking news. We got some breaking news, I believe. I gotta pull this up, but we're gonna get Chad Byers.

Let's go. Here he is. Yeah, so he should be in the waiting room any second. Hey, how you doing, Chad? What's up? What's up? Welcome to the show. Welcome to the Temple of Technology.

How you doing? Doing fantastic. That's great. Good to see you. Good to see you guys too. Chad, before we dive into it, I gotta highlight some facts for you. So until the 20th century, Chad was rarely used as a given name. It first entered the top thousand

names for male children in 1945, ranking at 997. It actually peaked in popularity in the 70s reaching rank 25. But now because it comes with so much symbolism, it's now 1600 on the US burst charts. And I was telling John earlier, you're a Chad, like by sort of definition, right? You're slinging checks, you're very grinding on the fitness front, you're sort of skiing in exotic destinations. I feel like there's an incredible,

we talk about nominative determinism on the show. This is a great lead in. And it's almost like your parents blessed you with that name and now there's not a lot of new chads entering the market, you almost have a monopoly on it. I just wanted to give you a little hat tip for that. So that was the best intro I've ever gotten to something. Let me give you let me give you a funny data point

though, please. I'm after I'm named after two people. One is my great grandmother who is granny Chatham. And the other was a gay wallpaper salesman that my mom fell in love with when she was pregnant with me. Wow. Wow. Talk about what I was supposed to be. Yeah. After and then my fall from grace as, you know, Chad was the mud is a derogatory name.

Yes. And, you know, then gigachad and all these things kind of like came out. So it's not lost on me that I've unfortunately kind of like grown into the exact stereotype in a way. No, but you rode the, you know, it's like the, you know the famous masa slide where like, it's like the trough of disillusionment trough of disillusionment. And then you came out of it.

Now you're, you just get to be a gig of Chad, but great to have you on the show. You've been a long, long, I feel like a long time supporter, so thank you. And you got some news today? Yeah, yeah, so big news, we just dropped this a couple minutes ago, but we are announcing Suisse Ventures Five.

So this is our fifth early stage fund. I'll talk a little bit about what we do as a firm and everything, but wanted to drop in here, new media, you guys are- Hit the size gong. Boom. You don't even know the size? the size gong what if he says it's a two million dollar fund I got the scoop I got the scoop okay so preemptive size so really quickly to start in 2013 and we've been an early stage venture fund based in San Francisco since then look our general belief is that entrepreneurs

are the lifeblood of progress broadly defined in the world. Like they are the most important people in the world and so we exist to serve them. And we're 10 years into this and you know, fifth fund, 175 million, and it's a return to what we did at the very start. So only pre-seed and seed. And I think that makes us probably one of the largest of this exact

focus. And so in a moment when venture is changing a ton, and I'm sure we'll talk about that we are kind of going back to specialist and try to do one thing. And this comes from my core belief in the world that I think you guys are embodying to which is like, if you want to be the best at anything, you just have to focus and try to do one thing super well. And so that's the big move on this new fund and excited to talk about it with you guys.

Fantastic. Yeah, it's amazing. One, I wish we had the data point on how many venture funds make it to fund five. It must be like harder to do than getting to your 50th podcast episode, you know, or something like that. Like it's very, very challenging. So, so, um, you know, congratulations on the milestone, but yeah, maybe walk us through kind of your, your full journey. You know,

it sounds like you went from super early stage to sort of expanding scope. And now you're, you, you're sort of fully refocusing with this fund, but it'd be great for the audience to hear the backstory. 2013 started with 25 million. It was kind of a pass the hat type fund, no institutions, all individuals, family offices, 75 LPs, like horrific to manage, wouldn't recommend that to literally anyone.

2016, we did 50 million fund two, and that was really on the back of the two breakout companies we become known for, which was Robinhood and Flexport. And I can kind of go into those stories. And we got our first institution in fund two. So Horsley Bridge, I still am grateful for them. We're like, we'll take a risk on you. You guys are not the shape and size of fund we typically do, but we'll put in 10 million out of 50 and then kind of the rest is history. LPs look for those types of signals, etc. In 2019 raised 90 million and this is what you were

alluding to in terms of like strategy. I think there's this general thing in venture, but it's true of the whole world, right? You get a little bit of success, start to think you're, you know, you're onto something and then you get feature creep. Yep. And feature creep and ventures like, Oh, maybe I'll do other stages or maybe I'll do these other things. I'm going to launch a program or I'm going to do this thing. And everybody has like the natural inclination of the world. So we started doing other stuff. And then we in 2021 raised 125 seed 250 op fund. I

looked around shortly after that. And I was like, you know, so happy we raised all this money that felt like a badge. And then I was like, wait a minute, my day is like materially different than what it used to be. I used to just meet seed stage founders, which I love the stage I love our average dollar goes in after the seed, like we can call ourselves a seed fund all right, but we're not like just definitionally like let's not lie to ourselves. And so that evolution are really just deciding like, what do I want my day to be like, what is the stage I love working at? And fund five is just a testament to like refocusing that entire realization back on what I think we're the best at, what I think

I love the most. And that's been our journey and evolution. And as I said, like, the backdrop of that personal, you know, realization was what's happening in venture broadly. And that's, you know, I call them buffet venture capital is my term now, like, all you can eat, right? You get any cuisine, your three starters, unlimited breadsticks, you get like unique course desserts. And like you can go fill up on that. You can go fill up on that. It's not the best individual dish of your life,

but we're trying to be like the single Michelin star. Like we're not hovering over you, but hopefully if you know what you want, it's a good product, right? That's great. So you had Flexport and Robinhood in the first fund. So, you know, generalists from the start, what was the sort of tech trend since 2013 that you were closest to going all going, feeling like, you know, going all

in on, we've seen a number of venture capitalists, you know, fall, so get so excited about a trend that they make themselves, you know, we're a defense tech fund or we're a crypto fund or things like that. And I feel just like the feature creep you're talking about, oh, let's add growth investing. Or there's that same thing of, oh, maybe we'd have an advantage if we were just doing this one thing. And that's historically, you know, it's worked out very well for some, but makes venture, I think, a lot harder, given that this is a people game. Totally. We have yet to go all in on something, but that is not to say we haven't had a risk of potentially falling into that 100 times in the last decade. We talked about going all in on

crypto. We talked about going all in on AI, we talked about going in on all sorts of things at different moments, we talked about pivoting the whole fun to a program, we talked about all this shit. And as I said, like this applies to not just venture funds, but any business. It's as much as what you say no to doing and the decisions you decide not to do is what you do. And so we have, thankfully, I think, navigated to we don't try to opine too heavily on the thing. We are still led by people. So like at the end of the day, what I love about Seed and what I was alluding to on my realization is partnering with people, which is Seed.

Seed, there's nothing there. There's nothing built. There's nothing to underrate is what I love. And I have found that other people are smarter than me and other to underrate, is what I love. And I have found that other people are smarter than me and other people see the future better than I do. When I met Flat and Bijou, I hadn't thought about that opportunity. But when they told me their vision and showed me a demo of the product in 2013, it was the most beautiful mobile app I'd ever seen in my freaking life. And right when they said the narrative of changing the way our generation, I was 25 at the time, experienced the stock market,

it was like, yeah, like 100%. Like that's going to happen. And so it wasn't my brilliant idea, right? It was just, you know, I've done a good job attaching myself to brilliant people. So that that's how we still operate as a firm. And it'd be very easy right now to be all in on AI. But you know, we're still, I think, honest with ourselves that we're still people first. So how do you think about pro rata and kind of maintaining a position, riding your winners, any of that, is that kind of off the table or do you have a specific strategy for that now?

So this goes to a broader thing that I've been thinking a lot about, which I think that, um that venture is a pretty inefficient market. And if you, let me just take a step back and I'll answer the question, which is public equities are pretty efficient, right? Like a bid ask spread of a single stock is really tight and you end up having a clearing price. It's weird that in my opinion, the most important industry in the world, which is the innovation industry, the world, which is technology has a market, which is called venture capital that is really efficient. If you're a founder and you're raising a B, you pitch like 20

firms and get a price. Like kind of crazy, right? And so what we're trying to do at SUSE is not force upon founders certain round constructions. Like why is the A 20% dilutive, no matter how much you raise. It's a construct of the venture business model. But what if a startup wants to raise four at 100? What if they only need three?

Like we should develop more products and venture to allow every type of founder to finance their business in that way. And so the way we think about it is like, we start at the seed, but then we'll be creative. We'll partner with you however you want as you build your company. Do you think that the fundraising needs are changing over time?

You're seeing more companies ramp to a hundred million ARR faster than ever. They're more profitable. There's just more smaller teams doing stuff. Is there, are capital constraints changing? A hundred percent. That is for sure. The efficiency of companies is real. How much does early hype revenue

Vibe revenue, I think a lot of You know how much is durable I don't know right some of these people I've asked but like what is Empirically true is companies will be more efficient in the future than the past. Yep So what I love about where we are positioned in the market is in a world where companies are more efficient love about where we are positioned in the market is in a world where companies are more efficient. Early stage is really like the place to do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo venture. Talk about FOMO right now. You're based in the Bay. I'm sure you experience it all the time. Everybody, you know, every time I see, you know, one of these sort of revenue charts where, where it's just like parabolic to a hundred million ARR, I get, you know, I'm

happy because, you know, it's good for the ecosystem, but if I'm not in it, I'm angry. I'm a little bit angry. But, but on your side, what's the general sense? Like, do you feel like a lot of investing right now? It's so unclear, because it feels like we're, we're early in AI adoption and understanding the potential of AI, but the market is so uncertain right now. What what do you do you think FOMO is still sort of like, is a is a dominant force in investment sort of venture investment decision making right now? Or is it, you know, still dominated by the sort of beautiful potential of

the technology across all these different industries? I mean, FOMO is real. Like, I have FOMO every fucking day. Like, to your point, I see these graphs, I'm like, I text my team, why aren't we in that deal? You know, it's like, it's, it's so real. And at the same time, like, I don't know, I'm not 50. But I, you know, like, if you were a venture in 21, you remember 21. And you remember 22 and 23. So that vintage is going to be historically shitty. So it

doesn't take you don't have to be around that long ago to remember 21. and we're in for sure some type of bubble. Now how much of that will be enduring value or not is like, I have no clue, but like this makes no sense. What's going on? Like it makes no sense. There's seed rounds at 70 with nothing and like four 19 year olds.

Like this is insane. And because of Ventures Power Law, that individual deal can make sense if it's the right one. But as an industry, it's going to be a huge waste of capital. So FOMO is real, but I think we do a good job to temper our FOMO and remind ourselves, let's just try to stick to our guns here. What are you doing for sourcing these days? And how did you meet Ryan Peterson for Flexport? How'd that deal come together?

We met Ryan through Wesley Chan, who was at Google Ventures at the time. He's now at FPV, his own firm. And Ryan pitched us on a call, which was Zoom back then really. And he texted each other, YCDemode, right before it, right before it. They allowed people to talk to investors before Demoday back then really. And post-wisely other YC demo day, okay, right before it right before they allowed people to talk to investors before down with it back then. Gary really locked that down. Or they're just not talking to us. It's one of the two. We committed to Ryan on the phone is the only time we've ever done that in SUSE history, we committed to

the deal on the phone call. It's hit for 24 and a half minutes. And we were like, yeah, we phone call. It took us for 24 and a half minutes and we were like, yeah, we're in whatever, tell us where to wire, you know, super irresponsible. It was our first ones. Like I cannot tell the LPS this, this is insane. This is like, you know, a bad idea. But it was the most compelling pitch I'd ever heard. He's one of the best salespeople of all time. And he's become an incredible friend. Our families are friends. He's one of the best salespeople of all time. And he's become an incredible friend. Our families are friends. He and I even own like a business together outside of work now. Yep. You know, the cheesy thing about ventures like it really is the friends

we made along the way. He's the best. He's the best. He's the best. He was our first guest on the show. Yeah, he was. It's a solid call. Texas out of your out of your portfolio, maybe some more recent investments. What do you feel is the most under hyped? Port Co. The company that should be getting more headlines and attention, but isn't for one reason or another. I mean, one that flies relatively under the radar, but I'll tell you why it's not going to be under the radar for very long, is a company called Chapter, which is based in New York City. The founder is Kobe.

Kobe worked at Palantir back in the day. The reason it's not gonna be under the radar for very long is up until two years ago, Kobe had a very interesting board and a very interesting co-founder. So his co-founder was Vec, and his board was JD and Peter Thiel. So talk about going from like,

oh, we have this great board dynamic to all of a sudden being like, my board member is the vice president of the United States, and Peter's still very involved, and this company is doing really meaningful work, and AI is gonna accelerate it. It is helping this very big problem of senior citizens in the US

like navigate the Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare system, pick the right plans. It is super hard to do. There's all these contingencies and other to understand the flows and prescriptions and what stuff are you on and what state are you in. And so they're making that process easier. It should help healthcare costs in Laurent.

It should help patients. This is really important work, but just talk about up leveling your connections in the world by the facet of who you chose to be investors. We were the, led the seed there and it'll be a many, many billion dollar company. Love it. Question on specifically around re-industrialization.

Andreessen had their American Dynamism Summit today. JD was speaking there. There's sort of this broad emphasis on bringing manufacturing back to the US. I'm curious to get your take on manufacturing, even robotics-led manufacturing, as a category. Because from my sense is there's going to be a lot of great businesses that come out of this that just aren't necessarily

venture scale because they get to the point where they're maybe you're doing $20 million in EBITDA and you know, maybe you're not, you know, hyper growth, but you're just a good business. And then, you know, people are going to look at that and say, okay, this, we know what the market price is for a manufacturing business for this kind of widget. And so how have you looked at that as a category? And are you making? Are you making net new investments there out of the new fund?

Yeah, well, shout out to my co founder, Sousa Leopoldovic. He started a fund called Humba Ventures a couple years ago, that's only doing like manufacturing American American dynamism, hardware stuff. So he's primarily of the original OG, SUSE founder guys, his fund is really what's doing that. SUSE primarily focused on software, but I think a couple of things you said are interesting trends into themselves.

Like one, I think this question of like, what is venture backable and what is not is a good question in the next decade, which is there's gonna be this Cameron explosion of like micro SMB and midsize company creation that AI enables that maybe shouldn't be venture backed. Or to my point earlier, there should be different products, different ways to finance a company,

maybe different ways to not have it only be equity, but also have risk, you know, profit sharing or other long-term. I think that's a reasonable point of whether it's hardware or really anything like as a big question too, is like the strategic value of on-shore manufacturing is like, obviously a very good idea, uh, incredibly important. We're doing less there.

What we're doing more on is, um, stuff back in our realm of, you know, we'd let the seed of stored now over a billion flex core others, like we're doing a lot in supply chain resilience and other so obviously when stuff is manufactured whether it's abroad or here there's like a whole supply chain resilience of a company that has to happen especially with terrorist and stuff going on of like where do we move stuff once it's already manufactured around the world like that's probably what we spend a lot more time thinking about but like you guys have had chris on i think power from from had others, like these companies are insanely important and awesome. We don't spend a

ton of time in and around it. Yeah, that makes sense. Have you made any investments out of the new fund? You're already doing deals? Yeah, yeah, we soft secretly started writing checks out of it in December. So we're actually four in actually four in which is a little a little hot for us. We're we're different than a lot of investors. We do relatively low volume, each partner only do two to three deal of the year. It's kind of like 90s venture capital. And but to your point on FOMO, we're running a little hot right now. So we've done a couple I think we're just excited to get going.

I guess none of publicly announced, but they're all over the place to give you, you know, what you asked earlier, like we're still founder led. So one is a stealth consumer gaming thing with partnering with this U S chess grand master to build. One is a AI personal kind of co-pilot that uses a bunch of cameras to collect first party context about you yourself. And then has like a, has an app on the a personal kind of co-pilot that uses a bunch of cameras to collect first party context about you yourself and then has an app on the phone for a personal AI where we think the Apples and others

are gonna have a little bit of innovator's dilemma on this stuff. We've done one that's an AI co-pilot in hardware manufacturing. So like, we're all over the place. Like we're just curious. Are you seeing more solo founders these days? We were at YC Demo Day and we saw a couple teams come through where it was just a guy with no team because he's building it all

himself because of AI stuff. And that kind of flies in the face of YC's like early advice of like, you need a co-founder, it's going to be hard, you need someone early. But what are you seeing out there? Yeah, I mean, literally the pitch right ahead, right before you guys, I was literally seeing our comments from here, this guy walks in, he's thinking about starting a company, he's like, I really want a co-founder, we talked about it for 30 minutes. I was pushing him to just start himself. And his actually entire product thesis, which is the irony of how he was thinking about his own co-founder thing was once, you know, his belief without giving too much of the idea around is like, we are starting to abstract away parts of building software, right? If you think about we had like cursors literally like, you know, code itself, then you have like the bolts of the world and you have, you know, lovable lovable in Europe, right?

Where they're abstracting way not just the code, but kind of like prompting entire parts of the system. Where we're obviously going in three years is like prompt to like company or like prompt to entire thing. And that's the company he's thinking about building and his entire argument is like, could a software company of the future not have, and he's a world-class CTO, sold a company to Apple, has built big companies. Could we not have a company where instead of the engineering

looking like 10, 20, 30 people, it's like three really good people and they control front and back and everything through like a series of agents that are responding to prompts and understanding computer science, understanding technology is still useful. So I think that is a counter to like the Jensen's and all the things like, you don't have to learn computer science anymore. But like that, I think that's where it's heading. I kind of buy that vision.

Yeah. Have you had any AI tools that have particularly helped your job in venture? Even just like scheduling or note taking like, or- Put the deck in chat GBT and say, what do you think? What do you think chat GBT? say, what do you think, bud? What do you think chat GBT? Rip it?

Should I do it? I feel deeply insecure about this question. Me too. Because LP's asked me this and I'm like, not really. Like I should probably be doing more. Somebody asked me like, oh, how many chat GBT queries are you making per day? I'm doing 20. And I was like, I think I'm doing like five.

I don't know if that's good or bad. Like I should be using it. Rookie numbers, John, you gotta get those numbers up. I find it not that useful for you. I mean, what I can, to be honest, like we don't do a ton of diligence. Like what are we supposed to diligence? Yeah. It's like, it's just like themes.

Yeah. So maybe like, yeah, if you're searching, like how big is this market? Where, who are the major players? I want to get to know the industry. I don't ever search how big a market is. That's what you're already wrong. I actually think it's bad work to do it. See, yeah, no, that makes sense. It's seed. Yeah, that's very funny. There's nothing better. I mean, this is, this is, I just, it's so important to be authentic. And I believe that that is actually the dominant approach of most good early stage investors,

yet still half of people want to be able to sort of claim credit in reverse and dress it up and say, well, look, you know, I had this memo and I knew exactly how the market was gonna unfold. A lot of that's just window dressing for someone else, their boss. Just window dressing for boss. say, well, look, you know, I had this memo and I knew exactly how the market was going to unfold. A lot of that's just window dressing for someone else, their boss. So it's not like we just had that. We tried this early on.

I was like, I need to do the work. So I used to write memos and then we looked back and we're like everything we did a lot of work on that we overthought and passed on, we were idiots about. And then all the things we didn't do like Flexport worked and we're like, he's got an ape in his, in his, in his. What's the origin of the ape? I'm curious. Yeah. So the, we registered the, the firm in October, 2013 and going into that we had 10 names picked out that were all similar. Like we weren't very creative. We were like, Oh, venture names are like trees and mountains and shit. So we had all these trees and mountains and shit names picked

up. They were all taken to Delaware and we had to register the firm because the next day we were doing our first close. So we were like 1130 PM. We're on the phone. We're scrambling. We're trying to think of names. Sergeant like, I don't know. We're like trying to get creative. We're like, just why don't we talk about trips we've all enjoyed. So someone's like, I went to Rwanda and did the trekking with the gorillas. And then the other person was like, I also did that. And another person was like, I also did that all before we knew each other independently. We're like, that was the best trip of all our lives. Like it is truly a mind blowing experience.

Go see the gorillas. It's insane. They're so human. Like, so we looked up one of the family names of the gorillas and it's the SUSE family. And we're like, this is so dumb that we're about to name our financial firm after like A, a gorilla family and B, with this little thought.

The irony is like the only thing people remember about us is our logo. It's worked. Yeah, it's fine. Well, venture capital is just a game of trekking with gorillas. Yes. It's about appreciating the entrepreneur.

Who's the gorilla in this metaphor? But you're really just sort of admiring them. Is the LP the gorilla or is the founder the gorilla? The founder is the gorilla. The founder is the gorilla. I think the founder is the gorilla. You can't use kind of inscrutable. The founder of the company become the 100 pound gorilla

if they're big enough. That makes sense, yeah. Last question. What's your breakdown the workout routine? I think you've been going pretty hard lately. You guys have to like, people need to roast me way harder when I post this Twitter. No, we don't.

We work out as a team together every morning. I love it. I'm currently, I had a crazy list, did the half marathon, doing the tri-soon, doing the high rocks in April. And then starting mid-year, I had this crazy goal that people have now told me who actually lift real heavy weights that the goal makes literally no sense. 1000 club, which is like the bench squat. Yeah. But I wrote five reps, which everyone's like,

you're an idiot. One in five is like night and day. Yeah, plan in July is to go like full meat, all protein, no cardio, bulk phase and try to get as far as I can band here meathead mode I'm going lean to meathead and we're gonna see what happens. Yeah, and then and then maybe John's been really wanting a venture capitalist to go for their IFBB pro card So if you really fall in love with the sort of just the weights Maybe you go the bodybuilding route and you'd really be, I'd love to see you become the Susie gorilla. Yes.

Like next time, next time. Yeah, next time we want to see your traps just in your, in your back right here. Just full Chad. Chad, it's been fantastic having you. Congrats on the launch. Can I grab you one other quick shout out? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

One other quick shout out. So every great product eventually becomes a dating site. And I have a friend in SF who is definitely the most eligible bachelorette I've ever met. She's beautiful, smart, ripping surfer, great skier, super hard worker, passionate about the environment, amazing human. So if there's a guy out there that sounds

like that would be of interest. DM me. Fantastic. It's funny you bring that up because I've had that thought recently. I want to I want to run sort of anonymous basically anonymous, semi anonymous ads because it's kind of cringe to post on X and be like, yeah, like I'm looking for the love of my life, but we can do it. This might be the first setup, you guys might get credit for the first setup on this.

So here we go. We'll test it a little bit. We'll do this one for free and then maybe we'll get like some marriage contracts. Yeah. And if you get married, tell them the technology, but we sent you a use code TBPN at the chapel and good luck to you.

Thanks for having me guys. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Congrats again. It's awesome. This is great. See you. I hope someone, I hope the matchmaking works. We might have a lucrative business. Maybe this is our cars and bits. It's a matchmaking service.

That's what this all is for. No, do your thing. I mean, if you're an SF right now, if you're single, DM Chad. But don't show up if you're not a ripping surfer, great skier, you got your life together. Yeah. Your traps are in your head, you're jacked already.

You know, it seems like he's looking for someone who's got their stuff together. Definitely. But good luck out there, folks. And we will see you tomorrow. Great episode. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you all, and have a great rest of your Tuesday.

Go crush it. See ya.