TBPN Live - Claude Sonnet 4.5 Reactions, David Senra Live in The Ultradome | Dylan Field, Adam Foroughi, Mike Krieger, Jeff Weinstein, Adam Draper, James Hawkins, Erik Bernhardsson

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TBPN! Today is Monday, September 29th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultterdome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. A lot of people have been asking, was the TBPN Ultrodome built by human beings? It just looks like something that humans don't know how to build anymore. Kind of like a boss civilization. It's possible. We haven't confirmed it.

Starting point is 00:00:25 We're not commenting. It just appeared here one day. It's, I'm just, I'm. I'm just asking questions. I just want to dig into it a little bit further. Yep. So that's why we have free speech. A lot of people have been afraid to ask that question.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Yes. And we're here saying with you, we also. Yeah, we also have questions. It showed up one day. We went off the air. Yep. We showed up the next day there was this dome shape, almost a monument to entertainment and capitalism just appeared overnight.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Where did that come from? Where did that come from? We're getting some collapse. team is fired up. Best day of the week. Something that was built by humans, Rant.com. Time is money saved both.

Starting point is 00:01:05 Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Most underrated day of the week. I think Monday is potentially the most underrated day of the week. It really is. You're fresh.

Starting point is 00:01:14 So much excitement, optimism, you're back. You've never been more back than on a Monday. First day of the work. Friday is the day of being over. It is so over. It's so over. And Monday, we're so back.

Starting point is 00:01:25 You're so back. Yes, it's perfect. Well, continuing, we're going to talk about Dorcasch on Sutton, some AI stuff, some other AI stuff, the AI, meta-AI app, vibes. People, the reaction, I think this came out on Thursday, and then the reaction happened on Friday, for the most part. We talked about it a bunch, debated it. Naval said, Fired shots. Creation without a creator is meaningless. And I think it's an interesting post because I kind of disagree with this.

Starting point is 00:01:55 So I think when I open up the meta-AI slob app, the Vibs app, they should have called it Slop. It would have been so funny. It would have been. Or a trough. Trough would have been good, too. Just lean in all the way. Our new feed called Trough in Meta-IA-A-A-A-A.

Starting point is 00:02:12 It's already a feed. You're feeding you. But so when I open the app and I scroll it, I don't think it's creatorless. Like I think that there is a creator. It's David Holes. David Holes is the one that created the mid- with one creator. One creator.

Starting point is 00:02:27 And I'm down to look at it for like 10, 15 minutes. And then I'm like kind of done. I didn't feel the urge to open it up over the weekend for any other reason than research and just understanding the platform a little bit more. I wanted to know if you got past the first like pre-scripted 15 shorts or I guess vibes is what they're calling them. Like would I see UGC? Would I see other stuff? Would I see people in my network?

Starting point is 00:02:54 like would the 4U algorithm have taken hold by them? I didn't notice anything like that. There were a couple accounts that were like, this person's clearly into like monsters. So they do like really big monsters. Or like this person does like POV dogs driving cars, which honestly was awesome. Monkeys on jet skis, dogs driving.

Starting point is 00:03:12 Dogs driving cars. Yeah, although some of the renders were really rough where it was like the dog was at the wheel but then the front of the car was behind the dog so it like didn't get it right. But it was still fun. And it was funny.

Starting point is 00:03:23 I noticed it was, the one that I enjoyed the most was one of a golden retriever like jumping and chasing the camera with this wave going over it but what made it really special was that the song that was paired with that was who let the dogs out

Starting point is 00:03:37 who who who let the dogs out and it made me realize that like there is a little bit of a game mechanic to the app where if you have a song that you like you can now go and basically direct a short form music video for it And so if there's a song that you think is fun, you can go into the MetaVibs app and start with the song in mind instead of layering the song at the end.

Starting point is 00:04:03 The default flow is image prompt, animate it, then at a song. Yeah. But I think that it might be more fun to flip it around and think about this as like, I'm curating a playlist almost. Music Visualizer. Yeah, music visualizer. Which went incredibly hard when I was 10 years ago. Exactly. The Winamp Visualizer just to put that thing.

Starting point is 00:04:23 on or iTunes had one for a while. Some of them were reactive to the music, which is cool. That one was cool. And I think that there's something there where I thought it was, mostly I thought it was interesting that everyone is saying, like, this is a creation without a creator, this is pure AI. Even meta is marketing this app as there's nothing human

Starting point is 00:04:44 about it. It's just the AI content. Except the music. Except the music. There's no AI music. It's all iconic, licensed songs from like the most, recognizable musicians in the world. You can actually just go put

Starting point is 00:04:58 a Taylor Swift song over something, which is crazy to think about it from a music place. Can you generate music too? No. You can't generate music. Of course there are some songs that are AI generated that have like snuck into the Instagram library. They're probably on Spotify. Because you can use any song

Starting point is 00:05:12 from the Instagram music library. Yeah. So people will put stuff up there and then you can pull that in. But by and large, the flow is generate a mid-jorney image, animate it with Black Forest, so that it has a little bit of motion.

Starting point is 00:05:23 and then pick a real song from the real library. Black Forest, which just announced a new fundraise? Four billion. There we go. European company. There we go. Let's give it up for the German artificial intelligence industry. Let's give it up.

Starting point is 00:05:38 We got a comment in the chat. I said, I like the table when it was messier. We did go to a round table. We cleaned it up a little bit. I'm sure it'll get messier. Yeah, don't want it. So don't worry. We're working on.

Starting point is 00:05:49 The mess comes back over time. It's relentless. Yes. It's relentless. So, yeah, I mean, I'm still unclear about, like, will this be successful? A lot of the takes on the timeline were presuming that it will have very low churn and be so good, it's irresistible. Like, it could just have high churn. It could just be a product that no one likes.

Starting point is 00:06:10 And everyone tested out and they're like, yeah, okay, I'm done with that. And meta's no stranger to launching flops. Yeah, that's happened a number of times with baseball camera. Trivia. Yeah, they've had clones of a lot of things. Even threads arguably probably wouldn't have worked if they couldn't have just continued to push people to the app and grow it steadily using the existing distribution they had. Yeah. I think that, you know, if I'm trying to get serious about a take, I would probably land on they have the flywheel down.

Starting point is 00:06:41 It works because you can already share vibes to Instagram, to your story and whatnot. And I feel like there's going to be a flow back and forth, and they will get that to work. And they will actually inject them back and forth. even if it lands as like a tab on Instagram, like it will be adopted. But it was just funny that everyone was like, this is, there's zero percent chance this doesn't work. And it's like, there is risks to these things.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Anyway, I thought it was interesting. It made me think like I was listening to the David Senra interview with Daniel. I think one interesting thing is if they had added all of the functionality and vibes, the creation tools into Instagram, it would have been even more controversial. I think so.

Starting point is 00:07:20 I think so. They would have had to deal, like this is a, an experiment that, you know, basically it's a sandbox that they can do anything in, low stakes. They can get users using it. They can get some feedback, get some information, test stuff out without saying, we're launching this into Instagram, which has millions of creators that are going to feel super strongly about it. They might start saying, they might start campaigning to like keep it. Let's keep AI off Instagram, which they don't want. This is keeping AI off of Instagram.

Starting point is 00:07:47 AI content will, you know, I would assume, you know, it's only, so. long until every piece of content on Instagram has some AI element to it, whether it's just editing or enhancement or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So the other interesting takeaway I was talking to, I was listening to David Senra interview Daniel Eck, the founder of CEO of Spotify. And I was almost thinking, like, is this more of a Spotify competitor than a, than an Instagram competitor?

Starting point is 00:08:18 It's so music driven. Should Spotify have an answer to this? Should they buy something similar? Should they do a similar deal with mid-journey so that anyone who listens to a song can generate imagery and then the most liked imagery can become kind of that cover art

Starting point is 00:08:32 and you can have like your community? You were kind of saying like that's not the way short form video works, but... I think with Spotify, they also have the benefit of the best songs end up having music videos, which are the artist's interpretation of a visualization of the music.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Yeah. And it's going to be... Do you think that's the way it always works, though? I feel like sometimes they... But they also, Spotify's also done something where they basically take an asset from the artist that's not a music video. It's like a gift.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Loop it, effectively. And I think that's smart. Because I don't think that people are primarily consuming music these days by setting up just... I remember being a kid and being entertained at a desktop Macintosh. Just putting on the iTunes visualizer and just hanging out.

Starting point is 00:09:21 being like, this is awesome. Yeah. But I don't want, if I'm putting on music, I'm not like wanting to watch the music anymore as an adult, right? Yeah, I almost view the vibes up right now for like as a music discovery tool. Go and swipe a little bit, find some interesting songs, add those to a Spotify playlist, go listen to the real songs. Yeah, but the reason that that's not a hit consumer product is because people can just easily

Starting point is 00:09:46 discover music in every other short form video feed. Yeah, that's what you were saying. That's our TikTok already fun. TikTok works that way. As a music discovery engine. Anyway, well, if you want to live stream some music, get on re-stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. But the big news over the weekend was Dwar Keshe Patel dropped a banger of an episode

Starting point is 00:10:10 with none other than Richard Sutton, the Touring Award winner, who is essentially the Nobel Prize in Artificial Intelligence, and the author of The Bitter Lesson, the, blog post that says that again and again in artificial intelligence, there is a, there's an inclination for seeking out a new algorithm, a new design, a new architecture, but in fact progress comes from scaled compute. And so that was used to underwrite massive investments in data centers, massive CAPEX. Continued investments. A lot of people, I mean, the Andreessen-Horowitz partnership has been throwing around we are better better lesson pilled a lot of people are bitter

Starting point is 00:10:55 better lessen pilled that's certainly been a rallying cry for the AI capex buildout but mr. bitter lesson now sounds exactly like Gary Marcus according to Gary Marcus Gary says of course he's been a long long time LLM hater or LLM criticizer he says astonishing it's been a long hard unpleasant road but one by one every major figure in AI has come around to the critique that LLMs of LLMs that I began giving here in 2019. Jan Lacoon was first. Demis Hes Sibis sees it were now two.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Touring award winner Richard Sutton is now on board. And Richard Sutton says, you were never alone, Gary, though you were the first to bite the bullet, to fight the good fight, and to make the argument well again and again for the limitations of LLMs. I salute you for this good service.

Starting point is 00:11:43 And so I think that there's something interesting going on where we heard about like the infinity story, right? This idea that there's a few first. firms that are working on AGI, superintelligence, God. And if they achieve it, it's the last innovation, the final investment. All future companies will be, all future economic value will be birthed from the AI supercomputer. You can finally hang up your Patagonia vest. You'll be done.

Starting point is 00:12:05 You'll retire as a capital allocator who got into the correct final deal. If you get a slice, you'll be good. It was a little bit sloppy as deal logic, but it was directionally correct. Like, if you, LLMs were a useful technology, there were compounding businesses to be built on top of them and investing in them, even at unicorn valuations in 2013, pencils out pretty easily now. But many in AI didn't like Sutton's take. My interpretation of his claim is that biological systems don't learn purely through imitation, whereas LLMs do. His example was like, if you think about a bird that's learning to sing, a bird song, the, the bird doesn't necessarily need to study the way that the mother bird moves the vocal cords.

Starting point is 00:12:56 It's more just listening to the song and trying to imitate the output and then the internal muscle movements. Learning through its own actions. Exactly. Exactly. And, and now, like when I take this thing and I put it in my mouth, I get sustenance. Yes, yes. And so. It's not just watching the mother bird do the same thing and just realize, hey, maybe I should do that thing. Yeah. And so a lot of the, a lot of the AI researchers are kind of like, and this is why there was this discussion of like, were Sutton and Dorcasch like talking past each other? Because a lot of people in AI research tend to view the, the internal structure of the neural network, the training of the weights as exactly the same process. You are

Starting point is 00:13:39 just mimicking the output tokens and the internal logic, like the muscle movements that create the bird song are learned in the same, like, random way as the actual bird does. And so there's continuing to be this debate over, like, are we on this, are we on the correct path? But it kind of doesn't matter in the broad sense of the market, because you can just put aside the superintelligence AGI question and just start underwriting the companies as just normal businesses. Tokens clearly have value. Anyone who's used in LLM to answer a question understands this. They also have a cost. And if you balance those, you make a profit. So we're

Starting point is 00:14:21 back to Econ 101. And so in the real world, the question is like data center overbuild. The bitter lesson said, just keep scaling, compute and you will always see improved performance. At least that's how it was interpreted. But exponential cost growth for linear gains doesn't always math out. If someone says, we're going to spend 10 times as much money training this next model, going to be five percent better. It's like, okay, well, maybe we don't need to do that one. Like, there might be an opportunity. Well, and again, if you look at the leaders of various hyperscalers, they are not concerned about ROI. They're concerned about winning. Yes, yes. And so this like landed on Oracle's plate. People were worrying about Oracle's 500% debt to equity

Starting point is 00:15:04 ratio with surface from this JP Morgan note. Now, the interesting takeaway, is like, it's pretty clear the debt is on the horizon. Microsoft has a lower cost of capital than the U.S. government right now. And so, like, the ability to borrow is extreme. People trust out yet. Yeah, and people are just ready to buy debt in these projects. Like, that's just the thing that's going to happen. But you can't overreact to this viral chart.

Starting point is 00:15:33 There's a, like, Oracle has $100 billion in debt. It's an $800 billion company, and they produced $11 billion in cash flow last year. And so the question is more about servicing of the debt than true book equity to debt ratios. McDonald's actually has negative shareholder equity because they've been doing so many buybacks that they bought back all the equity. And so you can get really weird like divide by zero errors. And I would expect that we start to see those, especially at Oracle if they continue to do these. You know, Allison just owns so much, you know, he's bought, practically bought back so much of the company. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 00:16:08 And so I don't know that that chart is. is like the red flag that people thought it was. Doug O'Loughlin had a good post about this. So the chart weirdly makes no sense and doesn't matter. Time for the feed to relearn buyback math impacting book value. And it is somewhat complicated. So maybe that's Econ 1 of 2. But basically it feels like as we get closer to the efficient frontier of AI

Starting point is 00:16:33 CapEx, risk does increase because you have that risk of doing the $100 billion training run and only getting 5% gains. But ROI has become increasingly predictable as we move away from the infinity narrative. And even if there is an overbuild of infrastructure, there will be immense benefits to America broadly. This is the real American dynamism story, in my opinion. Multi-billion dollar projects are moving through government approvals. Massive structures are being built in America again, and there's a real chance that we will see per capita energy increase. What's your read on Satya pulling back on, you know, obviously he's scaling CAP-X, but not being as aggressive as some of the other players?

Starting point is 00:17:10 Do you think he's happy to let the industry overbilled and then come in later and say, I'll take that off you for pennies on the dollar or some fraction of what it actually cost to produce? I think so. I mean, that was certainly the lesson from the internet. Or another way to look at it is, you know, I control a huge amount of the demand for tokens through the Microsoft Office suite. Yep. in, you know, tokens in the workplace, and I'll just come in and I'll just do deals once this

Starting point is 00:17:43 infrastructure is built off my balance sheet and still get the benefit of it. I would love to know how Satya processed the dot-com boom, because we always go back to that story of there was a massive overbuild of fiber. Everyone thought that the internet was going to be this overnight revolution. It took 20 years to really squeeze all the value out of it, right? But Google was a massive beneficiary of the overbuild in fiber, because they were able to go snap up a bunch of cheap fiber and build a massive consumer internet company on top of it. So I don't know exactly what, how did that impact Azure? How did that impact Microsoft?

Starting point is 00:18:23 Because if Azure was able to build a very serious player in a three-party oligopoly in cloud, basically between AWS, GCP, and Azure, and so if Saatch is saying, look, in the future, there will be a consumer internet company that's opening eye. We have a stake in that and they're the new Google and then there will be cloud providers

Starting point is 00:18:44 that are token factories and I'll need to get in that market and I'll need to make sure that Azure is monetizing those tokens effectively and Azure has data centers they also lease data centers. We will adopt the same position, the same strategy and so

Starting point is 00:18:58 we will skip on the overbuild, skip on the high risk stuff but eventually buy in at prices that make sense. You can be looking at it through a very financial lens. Sotcha joined Microsoft in 1992, so we got to see the full cycle in his first decade at the company. Yeah, and he was the, I mean, he's remembered as like the architect of the cloud transition and Balmer was the one who like missed mobile and missed cloud.

Starting point is 00:19:23 But, you know, the company has done really well now. So maybe that was maybe if the risk, like what would a worse Balmer look like? well, it could have been someone who put the business out of, who like bankrupted the company by taking too much debt and going too long into the dot-com boom and getting over-leveraged and really losing the company. We should read this post by

Starting point is 00:19:46 Anyan Eyre. He says, quote, this feels like 1999 again. He goes, no, it doesn't. And I was there. I joined Cisco in January, 2000 as a co-op, then full-time in May 2001. At the time, Cisco was the hottest infer company on the planet

Starting point is 00:20:02 riding the wave of the dot-com boom. But by the time I started full-time, the crash had already begun. A month and my manager was laid off. The party was over. Entire industries vanished. Here's what actually happened. One, the users weren't ready. Most people were on dial-up.

Starting point is 00:20:15 Mobile didn't exist. E-commerce logistics were immature or non-existent. Everyone had ideas, but the end-user wasn't there. Two, capital vanished. The IPO window shut. Venture funding dried up. Start-ups that dependent on future growth couldn't raise and died fast. Metrics were fake.

Starting point is 00:20:33 companies like Cosmo, Webvan, Pets.com, burned cash chasing usage that never converted. I was a webvan user. We see if some companies burning cash. Yeah, I got some groceries delivered. But back with Webvan? With Webvan. No way.

Starting point is 00:20:50 They were so right and just... There was another company called Home Grocer that was more popular in Pasadena where I grew up and they got acquired by Webvan. And I'm pretty sure the founders of Home Grocer probably did very well because they probably got some crazy buyout. Hopefully they didn't take too much stock.

Starting point is 00:21:06 Things like LTV, CAC wasn't common enough vernacular. That's crazy. Oh, yeah, that was a new concept. We were inventing arithmetic. Four, Infra got overbuilt. Telecos like Global Crossing and WorldCom spent billions on fiber and data centers. The divan never showed up. Cisco's customers disappeared.

Starting point is 00:21:24 Not because they lost, but because their customers died. Five business models were broken. Most dot-coms were never real businesses. They scaled early and hoped revenue would catch It didn't. Now look at today. OpenAI meta, Google, XAI, Microsoft are all scrambling to keep up. Jensen put it plainly. Every hyperscaler has realized they dramatically underbuilt. Every forecast we've seen has been too low. We're not building for speculation. We're building for active workloads. So no, this isn't 1999. This isn't pets.com. IPOing on vibes. We are not in a hype cycle. We are in a compute bottleneck. And this certainly, I mean, this feels real if you've used the apps. Like,

Starting point is 00:22:02 There have been multiple times over the past few years where I've just had LLM queries fail, even though I'm paying hundreds of dollars. And so, like, maybe the cacte LTV math is a little bit iffy, because what's the margin? Am I overusing it with the deep research research? I just used webvan to deliver groceries, and it took 48. hours and all the food was rotten. Like, how do I short this stock? Yeah, that was happening in Wall Street memos, I guess, like Mary Meeker reports, basically. But yeah, I think this, so he's

Starting point is 00:22:46 quoting the Spencer Hawkins chart of the AI bubble now versus the dot-com bubble. And if you're apophonic and you like a pattern, you will love this chart. I think we have to commit ourselves to revisiting this exact chart a year from now and seeing how closely does it keep tracking because it could be wildly different in either direction right like that's why don't we just make a live tracker we should iler just hiler's not in the studio today he uh had a travel but uh we should just make a live tracker of yes of this chart and see how how are we actually tracking to this or are we diverging it there was another post that was going pretty vibrant before we covered this let me you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank.

Starting point is 00:23:33 Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallet, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. What was the other post? The other post is the, from Stephen Fioreo. He went pretty viral, two million views yesterday. He said the AI doesn't, the AI bubble doesn't exist. The bears are wrong.

Starting point is 00:23:55 Time and time again, I've turned on a major financial news network. Listen to a financial podcast or seen a post on X. indicating that we're in an AI bubble. The rapid surge in AI-related investments and some stock valuations have created a narrative that the current environment is similar to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. The main arguments I've seen are that the current euphoria outpaces real-world results. Valuations are detached from fundamentals. There's a lack of R.A.

Starting point is 00:24:19 Companies are hitting infrastructure and resource constraints, and the escalating costs are creating unsustainable business models. The bare narrative almost always leads back to the idea that AI stocks and startups are trading at premiums, that resemble past bubbles and are being driven by FOMO rather than profitability. It doesn't help that users on X are posting triple and quadruple digit gains that are often hundreds of thousands or millions in profits from their actual accounts. Some accounts on X are twisting the dagger deeper as they're posting gains from naked options or call spreads, which have finance professionals screaming into thin air

Starting point is 00:24:50 as some of the underlying equities are unprofitable and pre-revenue businesses. Remember, there was that company Fermi that is going to IPO. Yep. They have a lease to a piece of land in Texas. They're planning to go out around $14 billion, and they're about nine months old. So I think that it's very fair. You know, there can be distortions, things happening in the market that don't exactly make sense. While simultaneously there being some businesses with strong underlying fundamentals

Starting point is 00:25:27 and incredible opportunities that are trading at relatively fair multiples. Yep. Screlly had a good take on this, too. He said, I know there are some questions about this, including some smart people, but there is a word for this that describes the exact situation where NVIDIA is investing in OpenAI. OpenAI signs a compute deal with Oracle. Oracle commits to buy NVIDIA chips, and it seems very, very circular.

Starting point is 00:25:50 Martin Screlli has a word for it. He calls it an economy. He says, the way you measure its success is not by the trading between partners, by non-party demand. That demand is pretty high and growing quickly. I am demanding it. I'm prompting it. Everyone is prompting it. Companies are prompting it. There is a lot of demand for tokens. Yeah. So anyways, Stephen continues. He says, I have a new slash for every bear. AI is not a bubble. In every market environment, there are always companies that become overly expensive with valuations that look unsustainable for no reason other than they have built a

Starting point is 00:26:23 cult-like following and there are more buyers than sellers. This is not a period of extreme speculation, unlike the dot-com bubble where investors poured capital into any company with a dot-com in its name. Yep. That was a big factor. The rapid growth of the Internet changed how information was disseminated and how people communicated, which led to the overvaluation of startups as venture capital flooded the market fueling on sustainable growth. The dot-com bubble burst because many of the companies from height of the era were nothing more than high prioritizing user growth over sustainable business models that focused on revenue and profitability. Again, I'd push back a little bit here.

Starting point is 00:26:56 There certainly has been companies that are. scaling, you know, revenue really quickly, unprofitably, sort of betting on, you know, just capturing market share and token costs coming down. Anyways, I'll continue. The Fed hiked interest rates several times during 1999 and 2000, which caused investment capital to tighten, making it harder for cash-burning companies to sustain operations or roll over debt leading to bankruptcies. And then he goes into how Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, et cetera, says, these are not startups or companies tapping the debt markets to build out new business

Starting point is 00:27:31 ventures with the promise of becoming profitable. These are the largest companies in the world with the strongest balance sheets and largest profitability. Everyone has the right to their opinion, but when the CEO and board of directors are taking a blank check approach to building out data center infrastructure to harness the power of AI, they're probably the ones who are probably correct. Here are some statistics about Microsoft and keep in mind that their 2025 fiscal year just ended as they are not on a calendar year. So since 2022, fiscal year ended over the next three years, Microsoft's long-term debt has declined by 14% while they have increased their allocation towards CAPEX by 170%. Over this period, Microsoft

Starting point is 00:28:08 has increased the cash from operations. It generates by 52%, $47 billion, from $89 billion to $136 billion, which has allowed them to increase the amount of capital they're allocating towards CAPEX while paying down their debt obligations. Microsoft is now generating $70 billion of free cash flow while allocating $64 billion toward KAPX, and they did this while repurchasing $18 billion worth of shares and paying $24 billion in dividends during the 2025 fiscal year. It's a lot of money. Mike drop from Zatia.

Starting point is 00:28:42 This is much different period than the dot-com era, and when companies like Microsoft are leading the way, funding the data center buildouts organically from their cash from operations, there's no bubble in sight. And he does the same kind of analysis for, Google and some of the other players. So worth going and finding this, the account is at dividend streams. And anyways, worth.

Starting point is 00:29:05 And the other last thing I'll say here, I was talking with a buddy who runs research for a multi-trillion dollar asset manager over the weekend at a kid's birthday party. And he was saying the market is like generally, even though you see this euphoria, right? you see retail traders, you know, posting screenshots of their Robin Hood accounts, posting these insane gains. If you look at like cash tied up in money market funds, that sends a signal at record highs, that sends a signal that actually people are quite bearish, right? So it's interesting, certainly living through history.

Starting point is 00:29:48 Yeah, I feel like the speed at which these companies can actually get up to making a profit is just wildly different than 1999. Like if you're MP3.com, which was a good idea, like the idea was Spotify, right? It was a $100 billion opportunity, at least. They IPOed with just a dot-com domain and a business plan. And if you think about what they were going after, they were going after record stores.

Starting point is 00:30:24 that sold CDs. And they had to build databases, licensing agreements with every major... And they didn't have the Facebook ads platform. They didn't have the Google ads platform. They didn't have cloud hosting. They had to build servers and mobile apps. And where do you listen to music in your car?

Starting point is 00:30:41 Okay, how are you going to listen to MB3.com in your car? Well, normally you put in a cassette tape or a CD. Well, like, there's no integration there. Whereas today, if you come up with some app or product or B2B, software, which is where a lot of the money is, you call someone up and you say, you want to switch to our product, or you want to add our product on to what you're already using, and they're like, sure, send me the link. I'll put out, I'll put in my credit card today and then start using you tomorrow. And it's just like, everything is set up for acceleration on the actual product

Starting point is 00:31:17 development, getting some sort of value delivered to a customer. It's just more possible now. I don't know that we're in an era of like wildly different ideas, but it's just easier to actually go and move chips around the board and like eat off of other people's plates. We see this with like, like there is a bubble, but a lot of it is like the SaaS, the SaaSpocalypse is, you know, legacy companies are actually selling off. And so there's, there's more of like a rotation to a newer company that's potentially taking market share from existing players as opposed to just. completely new market cap that's being created out of thin air with some disrupting ourselves yeah and and that disruption actually it was more fun for tech when when they were just as you know md3.com was just trying to disrupt the record store right it was another industry that we were disrupting now we're eating we're eating our own yep well quickly

Starting point is 00:32:12 let me tell you about cognition they're the makers of devon devon is the AI software engineer crusher backlog with your personal AI engineering team back on the bitter lesson Nando de Fritos says the only bitter lesson is that LLMs have succeeded beyond any expert expectations. Underpinning LLMs is the idea of scaling, which is too often misunderstood as more parameters. Scaling is about using massive compute effectively to maximize the throughput of data ingestion into the learning process to obtain more capable models. We're still far from hitting the limits on this. We are still hungry. We're still compute hungry because there is a ton more that we could achieve if we only had more compute from experimental, from

Starting point is 00:32:51 experimental ablations to data acquisition and curation. Scaling is largely about data and evals, but the models are now trained on almost all of the web and an equally large but growing self-generated synthetic data set. Sifting through such vast quantities of data, the whole of human creation requires formidable engineering and intelligent ideas. This is what differentiates most models. AI is finally in the hands of billions of users, and with it will come billions of tasks every reasonable user need, this scaling in task and evaluations is order of magnitudes higher than pre-LLMs. And if you think about the, yeah, every time any user of the chat GPT app, for example, uh, fires off a query, like that's more training data, especially if you're using the reasoning

Starting point is 00:33:36 models, those rollouts will become reinforcement learning environments as well as training data. And if you're not on the enterprise plan, like they will be training on that data. that's going to make the data set even larger and the products get even better and the gains will probably be less zero to one feeling but there will just be continued progress and uh and fortunately at least for open ai that a lot of other companies are in are in different positions but at least for open ai the monetization in front of them whether it's from the freemium model to the ads model agent of commerce model like there's a whole bunch of news today about their agentic commerce stuff it certainly feels like it can support a lot of spend, a lot of spend.

Starting point is 00:34:19 Totally. The other thing, you know, happening right now is that certain companies are growing revenue so, so quickly that it's placing pressure on other companies that aren't doing that to do weird accounting tricks, right, or doing stuff that's like just blatantly wrong, counting, you know, one-time revenue and bundling it into... Well, ARR is yesterday's revenue times 365, right? Yeah, or last-minute's revenue. Last-minute's revenue.

Starting point is 00:34:50 Time 60 times 24 times 365. As soon as we'd be refreshing the Stripe Dashboard and then multiply it by 60 by 24 by 365, don't do that. Stay serious. Stay compliant with Vanta. Automate compliance, managed risk, improve trust, continuously. Vantta's trust management platform. takes manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

Starting point is 00:35:14 Should we pull up this Cetrini video? It seems like they flew a drone around. Cetrini research has been on an absolute tear. I'm going to read this. So they had a post from 2023, which was the first phase talking about global data center hyper-scaling, May 31st, 2023. The first phase is centered around the development. and build out of robust computational infrastructure. This involves a massive and sustained tailwind to the suppliers of data center equipment of accelerated computing required for both AI training and inference. The enormous computing power required for AIML places considerable demands on a variety of technology sectors.

Starting point is 00:35:57 The companies involved in providing the necessary infrastructure stand to benefit significantly from this heightened demand. This includes businesses involved in semiconductor manufacturing, networking, equipment, data center construction, and management, and more. And again, even, you know, storage, right, is a category that was ultimately overlooked. Yeah, it's like a three-X. And again, we covered, I think, Western Digital at the end of last year.

Starting point is 00:36:27 Yep. And it is up 146% year-to-date. Yeah, it was a whole up of Wall Street Journal article. And the thesis is like, oh, like, data AI companies are going to be important yeah like there's a lot of data and they're seeing some demand that of course wow just a generational trade yeah so Western digital up 146 percent since Q4 but you should really read this whole article yeah so they went to Stargate and yeah so they just decided hey let's fly a drone over Stargate and see it's so remarkable the scale of this thing

Starting point is 00:37:04 is insane. They show a ton of images of what it looked like before. It's just a feel, basically. It's so crazy that Chase Lockmiller over Crusoe really clocked this as a logical place to go Yeah, so they go through all the different categories. Stargate power and energy, Stargate Thermal, Stargate Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing, Stargate Civil and Structural, Stargate Fiber and Stargate Construction Services. 600 football fields filled with cables, pipes. And that's the building. That's 600 football fields worth of...

Starting point is 00:37:39 Single facility. Buildings. Yeah, it's remarkable. Try and pull up this before and after. You can just see the screenshot of the land. This looks like a Google Earth. Each is literally a ludicrous building. There are eight under construction on a single site.

Starting point is 00:37:55 This is just one of the Stargate data centers. There are many more. Colossus 2. Meta's Louisiana Hyperion. Microsoft's Fairwater. quantum loophole. Nebius is New Jersey, DC, Amazon's Pennsylvania project, Google Anthropics Project Rainier, just to name a few. Together, the current footprint is roughly the size of lower Manhattan. It's so huge. It's so huge. And apparently Meta's Louisiana facility will be

Starting point is 00:38:25 even bigger, even bigger, which Zuck shared on threads. So there was also some news over the weekend. Residents shut down Google Data Center before it can be built. So they Google Nix plans for a gigantic $1 billion data center on more than 460 acres of land in Indiana after residents hotly protested the proposal due to concerns the complex would jack up electricity prices for neighbors and suck away untold gallons of water in an area already plagued by drought.

Starting point is 00:38:55 It's funny. Futurism is a crazy website. I'm looking at the recommended articles. They don't seem to be fans of the future. Yeah, so I'm going to just the trending articles on Futurism.com. Returns to return. Returning articles right now, Bon Iver. Bon Iver. Bon Iver. Bonnie Verre. Right, right, right. Side projects, it's funny, I've seen Bonnie Verre live, and I still botched the pronunciation. Side Projects, Spotify page features an AI slop song.

Starting point is 00:39:29 The second article, ChatGPD is blowing up marriages as spouses use AI to attack their partners. Whoa. The next one, Sunfires energy blast at mysterious interstellar object.

Starting point is 00:39:44 They might be Algo maxing. AI coding is massively overhyped report finds. Yep. And of course, Open AI's new data centers will draw more power

Starting point is 00:39:53 than the entirety of New York. Audience captured, baby. Let's go. So anyway, VCs say some AI startups under pressure to show rapid ARR growth or using questionable accounting practices like counting one-time deals as recurring revenue. You just mentioned this. Bill Gurley chimed in to say, sad to say this isn't new, but as they say in Den of Thieves, your bunny has a good nose. Is Den of Thieves that movie with Gerard Butler or something? What is Den of Thieves?

Starting point is 00:40:23 Is this a book or something? I'm out of the loop on this, but in other news, Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. But the real news, of course, is Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out, and Claude is declaring it the best coding model in the world. They say it's the strongest model for building complex agents.

Starting point is 00:40:47 It's the best model at using computers, and it shows substantial gains on tests of reasoning and math. And, of course, we will be joined by, none other than Mike Krieger from Anthropic in just a few minutes. But the model card is out. You remember Mike joined Figma's board. Yes. The IPO as well.

Starting point is 00:41:07 So we have Dillon. Perfect overlap. We'll be joining a whole Figma board to be. Board meeting. Board meeting. Live on TAPD. But the model card is up and the benchmarks look great next to GPT5, Claude Sonnet 4.5. Interesting that they didn't just go fully to Sonnet 5.

Starting point is 00:41:25 Open AI is on the fifth iteration. Gemini is at 2.5. There's a little bit of like, all of these are just going to go the way of the... So the cars are like, it's the 2025 car. It's the 2025 9-11 or the Ford Explorer. And now the phones are doing that too, like iOS 26.

Starting point is 00:41:45 All the phones kind of jumped forward just to say, hey, just keep it on the year cadence. And I wonder if the models will wind up doing that too. I wonder if people will care about the models. certainly people enterprises will demo they use against the Pareto Frontier how much value am I actually getting out of

Starting point is 00:42:01 this API relative to the cost and they will benchmark it in their own internal uses and of course Satya is sharing four decades in some things never changed then and now and it's an old ad for

Starting point is 00:42:17 Microsoft Excel saying Microsoft Excel ACE's final exam advertising spreadsheet for Windows, trademarked, of course. Yes. And they're showing spreadsheet bench accuracy results for their new co-pilot in Excel. Agent mode. It's way better than the previous co-pilot in Excel.

Starting point is 00:42:37 The founder of Shortcut was taken, taken some shots. Oh, shortcuts here at 46.6. And he was saying, get ready. He said something to the effect of, something to the effect of like get ready to dance for the next few decades or something like that. So competition heating up in the Excel agents category. Yeah, well. This post, Kathy D. hit the timeline over the weekend.

Starting point is 00:43:10 CTO started coding the second we got to the gate. Colin Frazier says he went on his laptop at the airport. That is crack. Very rude post, but it's funny. I think it's a fair post from Kathy, but at the same time, I think if you're traveling and you work here. It's not the biggest flux in the world to do some work at the airport, but it's been done before. It's better than watching slop videos, I suppose. I'd rather, I'd rather the CTO work when possible, when on the move. Anyway, let me tell you about

Starting point is 00:43:46 graphite.com. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our first guest to the show, Mike Krieger from Anthropic. He's in the re-stream waiting room. Now he's in the TV pin Ultradel. Mike. There he is. Looking sharp. You look fantastic. Congratulations on everything. You wore a suit. Look at that. I love the suit. You know, I was going on TV piano. I had to. Thank you. It's a great sign of respect in our culture. Yes. And we appreciate it. It's great to see you. Big day. Big day for you. Big day. Yeah, we're super excited. You know, and actually, I was listening to you guys.

Starting point is 00:44:23 I was falling asleep last night, and I was like, we should have called it Sonnet 5. But, you know, you never know how good it's going to be until the very end of like really well. Well, I mean, I think my... Yeah, now you raise the bar. You threw that, you raised the bar even higher for 5, right? Yeah. That's what happened with 3 and 4 is that we ended up with this like, well, it's getting better, but what's four going to be? And we're like, we're like, call the next one 3.99999.

Starting point is 00:44:46 And we're like... 9999. I would love that. Yeah, well, you can take all of our criticisms or ideas with a grain of salt because we are the kingpins of being armchair quarterbacks here. It is very different being in the arena. I do wonder how long it will be until the numbers just melt away. And it's just like, you know, Open AI is powered by GPD and Anthropic is powered by Claude.

Starting point is 00:45:10 And, you know, we stop caring about the minor revisions to the Google algorithm. Yeah, I think you can take a lesson from Apple and realize that it's hard to get people really excited by this, you know, app iPhone 17. Yeah. But at the same time, there is a lot of value in putting a number on something, doing an announcement, sharing new data. And it seems like that's just a way to reengage with the customer base, bring people back who have tried.

Starting point is 00:45:37 It's also very satisfying to win, you know, the place at the top of benchmark against people that have a higher number than you. Of course. Everyone wants to win. I always wonder, like, when I came into this role, I was like, I think, why don't companies just want us to be on, like, dash, latest and just getting the, you know, latest and greatest? And then they're like, ah, but the model might change, and we want to be careful. So I think the future looks like some hybrid where maybe we help people get on the new version for them and then just auto upgrade. Yeah, that could be a little bit easier.

Starting point is 00:46:05 Yeah. What are the other tradeoffs? Like, the benchmarks tell one story. There's been this previous story about 3.5 having, like, this particular personality. Are there other things that you find that customers and counterparties are looking for in a release like this beyond just benchmarks? One of the biggest ones is like how eager versus lazy the model is. You know, maybe intuitively like you want the model to be as eager as possible. We had this with three, it's on it 3.7 where it was great, but it was a little too eager.

Starting point is 00:46:37 You'd be like, hey, can you make this button blue? It was like, I made it blue. And I also refacted your entire website. And it was like too much. So we scaled it back with 4. And then four was a little too lazy where people have, you know, we actually have a monitoring signal inside Anthropic where if we're finding people are saying like keep going, just go, like, guess, come on, then it's probably, you know, being too lazy. And so we're trying to tune it for this one, which is like the right blend of eagerness and laziness and make it as steerable as possible. So that's a big one. Yeah. What about on the on the compute infrastructure side, the actual being able to keep up with demand, is there any messaging that you're sharing around? what this particular model means just for like speed, availability, reliability,

Starting point is 00:47:20 because it seems like there's so many businesses that are just like, it's good enough for my use case, but I need a lot of it. Yeah, no, for sure. We think a lot about capacity and infra. And for us, it was really big to be able to deliver something that is more powerful than Opus for a fifth of the cost. And you can imagine that it's like, you know, we think a lot about where we're serving and what we can serve at that scale.

Starting point is 00:47:42 So having our best model also be the kind of sweet spot middle child is really, really big for us to scale up to capacity. I think earlier this year, a lot of the conversations I have have customers like, how do I get more son at capacity? And we're finally getting to the point now where we can meet that demand. Can you, I'm not sure if this story is real, but there's this story about Instagram where one of the key user experience kind of hacks in the early days was as soon as you would go to, start filtering a photo, it would start uploading to the server, and then the filter would be applied on both sides. So when you hit post, it would automatically be live and you didn't have to wait for the upload to start. Is that roughly true? Can you tell me that story? Yeah, that's rough. Yeah, and you got a flashback, and it was 2009, like, networks were really slow. So we did

Starting point is 00:48:33 everything to try to make it fast. So that was one of the things we did was, you know, the second, people would type, you know, messages. It would take them five minutes. And all that time, we were just doing all the processing in the background, and then that last post, you sync it up, and then you posted to the timeline. So that was a really big thing we did. We also did a lot on the timeline itself, where which photo you fetched next was a lot of optimizations that we did. It's funny. Like now, the person who initially started Claude Code, one of our products, I think was Boris, and he came from Instagram as well. And he brought some of the kind of Perf ideas from Instagram into Claude Code. And so there's some lineage of Instagram

Starting point is 00:49:06 to Claude Code now. That's why I was asking about that story. It feels like there's, we're in this wave of like consumerization just like where the user experience really matters for these models. And there's, I have to imagine that there's low-hanging fruit. I was joking that at a certain point, there's so many LLM queries that you might just be able to go back to database lookups for certain things. Because like how many times has someone went to a really beefy LLM and just asked for like the capital of California? Yeah, and you can actually. We get a lot of messages that just say, hello, and then I thought we could cash that one. Yeah, you cash that, and then you're just saving that inference for other more serious things.

Starting point is 00:49:48 And I'm wondering if there's any other places where you feel like you've reached into your history and been able to draw comparisons to the work that you've done at Instagram or other places and say, oh, there's something interesting that we can apply here at Anthropic that actually maps into the pre-AI era. Yeah, I think the biggest one, so I think one thing we did well at Instagram really on was just make it look good, make your photos look good, and it's going to be something that you're proud to share. And flashback, like, his iPhone 3GS, the camera was pretty bad, right? So you're trying to just get to the point where it's actually good and shareable. So we were working on, like, you can now create PowerPoints and Excel files within Cloud AI, and then you can edit them further if you want. And the thing I was really pushing the team on is, you know, we talk about how the model can code for hours and hours, but the thing that it produces has to be good. You don't want it to be autonomous, and bad or autonomous in slop. So a lot of what we've been doing on the office front is like the anti-slop, like make something that is actually good out of the gate.

Starting point is 00:50:45 And then, of course, you're going to polish it up and correct it. So that's that effort to output ratio that I think Instagram has is what we're aspiring to here around. Can you give in some instructions, get it some data? And then I haven't produced, and they were like, yeah, that was pretty good, pretty close. And I'm going to, like, finish it up myself.

Starting point is 00:51:00 Yeah, I feel like that has been my biggest hot take around the meta-AI vibes app is just that people say there's no artist, and I'm like, no, it's David Holes's vision. And he has honed that at mid-jurney. And it's his opinions and his artistic vision that's come through. And if you're prompting. The downside there is that it's great if you want to consume that style of content.

Starting point is 00:51:29 Yeah. But people like being in feeds and having randomness and new ideas and perspectives and aesthetics, whereas if you're, generating UI for some app, you know, an internal tool, it's actually totally fine in my view if it like feels like clot, right? Because it's like a, it's not necessarily even if you're creating an internal tool, it's not necessarily even something that needs to be a reflection of your brand, right? Sure. And so having like a distinctive style and if if you need to do that in order to avoid just slop, then that's a good tradeoff. Yeah, that's fine. I think it's

Starting point is 00:52:04 good, the Figma connection is real there, too. I think if you ask Claude to make a website, most of those websites look kind of similar, but then you can incorporate your design language and your library, so it actually looks, you know, generically yours, at least, like it's something that could have been created inside your company, and sure, it doesn't have, like, the hand of a designer on it, but at least it's not the full generic version as well.

Starting point is 00:52:23 But, yeah, it's interesting watching vibes, how much of it is. It's like 70s prep school, summer camp vibe, and or futurism. And it kind of falls into one of those, too. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. definitely, like, found its way into some, like, local minimum maxima or something. It feels, it feels, like, almost overfit in, but maybe in a good way because the alternative is maybe sloppier. Who knows? I'm more, I'm also interested in how you actually bring an opinionated vision to bear in a

Starting point is 00:52:55 company like Anthropic. Like, going back to Instagram again, I remember hearing stories that might be true, maybe not, but about, like, the initial. filters were hand-coded. You were adjusting sliders and dials and code to make the filter look a certain way. And that was the expression of basically a single individual. And I'm wondering if there's, when you think about the texture and the flavor of what Claude 4.5 is putting out, is this something that's coming from the, you know, selecting the training data or building the RL pipeline, like, are there multiple people that are bringing an opinion or is it an emergent property? Is it the whole team? Like, how does all this fit together to actually create something

Starting point is 00:53:42 that has taste in something that's just a big bag of numbers? Yeah, I think that's actually an underappreciated thing about training is how much individuals and their taste really matters. Like, I think our particular post-training team, I think has excellent taste on the code environments and just the code production itself. One of the things that we found with Sonnet 4.5 is that If you pointed at some code that previous versions had written, it'll go clean it up and be like, what is this comment here? It's totally unnecessary.

Starting point is 00:54:08 You'll rip it out. And so it's like improved in some taste. So there's that part. And then there's the work that we've been doing kind of around the model around how you instruct it, how you give it the right skills to actually go produce the right content. And there it's actually reminds me a lot of Instagram where we're looking at outputs and saying, all right, can you get it to make PowerPoints that look a little bit more real?

Starting point is 00:54:26 Can you make the docs, you know, they don't need five fonts. It can be simplified that down. And so there's a lot that you can do in that kind of scaffold. where taste can come in around how you shape the model and, like, again, get it to the point where you're, oh, this is actually good. So do you think Slop is, is a, is a function of laziness? I think it's, you know, if it's the default parameters, I saw a talk by Ted Chang, was an amazing sci-fi writer, and he was talking about AI and creativity. It's like, creativity is a bunch of choices, right? And if you just type to any of LLM's, like, tell me

Starting point is 00:54:57 a story. It's going to tell you a pretty similar story almost every time. And that's kind of like a nature of the model. But if you then go and instruct it with a bunch of, you know, custom things, now it starts becoming a little bit more you. And it's not a zero to one thing, right? There's some spectrum on there as well. I think to me that the slop is the stuff that tends towards like the minimum effort and the minimum amount of choices. And then when you tend to a bunch of choices, even if they're like not the best choices, at least it's got some creative spark in it. Yeah. How are you thinking about imagery? I mean, rich history there with Instagram. Models are becoming multimodal generally. Anthropic hasn't been chasing that really

Starting point is 00:55:35 publicly, but there's a world where I can go to Claude 4.5, I'm sure, and say, draw me a cat with Aski Art, and it'll do it. And there's a world where maybe if the models get really good, I could just say, hey, just write out the individual RGB numbers and I will encode it as a PNG or something. Like, it feels like if the text models get really good, I can just get images out of them. So how do you think that develops for Anthropic or where do you think you want to bring that to bear? Is there anything that's interesting there? Do you just see it as a completely different set of the tech tree that you're happy to just watch other folks work on? That's funny you say that one of the launch kind of like internal things.

Starting point is 00:56:15 One of the PMs put together was a self-portrait of cloud that it drew using cells in Excel. It was like pretty good. Yeah, I think for us, you know, I was like zoom out, like, what's the goal here? It's like the goal is to build powerful AI in a safe way. And we think that the sort of direct, like I love your tech tree kind of metaphor, like the direct route of that tech tree is models that can think for a long time actogenically, can write code, can execute code and kind of keep track of state. And like almost everything that's not in that tech tree, we've not focused on. And that's, you know, I think it's been good. We've been able to get a lot done with a smaller team than most other frontier labs.

Starting point is 00:56:50 but it's meant that on things like image generation, that's like maybe we're leaning on partnership or bringing some images in via MCB or to your point, maybe it actually emerges as a property of the model where it's able to both write and run that code. The late-breaking thing that we found the model is actually very good at is generating memes.

Starting point is 00:57:08 So given a virtual machine, Sonnet 4.5 can take a basic image and then put in, you know, like the butterfly meme, like, is this AGI? And it's actually like pretty funny too. Like another thing that I think people will see over the next couple weeks. It's on at 4.5 is like our funniest model, I think. And so there is something around.

Starting point is 00:57:26 In what types of ways? Because there's a lot of ways to be funny. And to date, I think the thing that consistently everybody has enjoyed is like the, you know, like be me format is one format. And then, but like stand up every model that I've seen is struggle. Yeah. And specifically the funny examples where people say, AI generated this, it's usually like a top voted joke on R-slash jokes on Reddit, and so it's

Starting point is 00:57:57 kind of stealing the joke, and it doesn't really count as like a new joke, in my opinion. So we need to like formalize an e-val for this at some point, but the thing that we do is we bring Claude into our Slack channels, mostly in serious ways, like we have Claude help out with, you know, it's a coding task or whatever, but we also have Claude in our basically like internal posting, you know, channel, and we'll do it for every model. And most anthropic employees, or at least many of them, were up really late this weekend because it is so good now in the like water cooler channel that it's like funny. It's like kind of roasting people, but not in too mean away. It's like reacting to in jokes.

Starting point is 00:58:35 It's making back references to something happening earlier. It's definitely not like, it wouldn't be fooled for a human yet in most ways. But it definitely like had some leap where it's actually just really fun to talk to. Water cooler bench. Call it water cooler bench. exactly how are you uh i loved your guys's recent campaign around you know clod being for you know it's never been a better time to have a problem i've seen some some out of home that you guys have done around l.a which is great as you um as you kind of introduce more and more of the world

Starting point is 00:59:12 to claude how are you thinking about uh you know kind of pouring Do you think there's ways to pour fuel on the fire around social features and surface area that maybe hasn't been explored before in LLMs? You mean, you're very qualified to comment on some of that. So don't feel like you need to give away your roadmap, but I'm curious, you know, what's been under explored in your mind. No, I think about the things that like where Claude feels like it had some breakouts, and I think there's been like three or four in the year and a half of been at Anthropic.

Starting point is 00:59:47 One was we had Golden Gate Claude where we actually put a research demo up where you could talk to Claude that believed it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I still talked to people a year and a half later. I was like, that was the first time I really thought about interpretability and how the model features might work. And that was like a cool breakout moment for that. There was also like the sort of point where people realized like Claude's actually pretty good at relationship advice. And there was like lots of like college students posting the like, you know, talking to Claude about their kind of relationship thing that had like a viral moment. And then who knows if this will go viral. but I'm excited to see what people build with it.

Starting point is 01:00:18 We're putting something out today called Imagine with Cloud, where you can talk to Cloud, and Cloud will, like, create whole software on screen, but also simulate what the software would do if you clicked a button. So it doesn't write sort of a backend code. It is the backend code, which sounds a little trippy. You kind of have to play with it. But people have been doing all sorts of stuff like,

Starting point is 01:00:33 hey, show me what Steve Jobs' desktop looked like the week before the iPhone launch. It's like, okay, well, here's the finder window. And here's a dot keynote file about his keynote. So you click the keynote file, and it's like, well, I guess I have to imagine and create what keynote looks like now. creates that from scratch. And it's kind of this like glimpse into the future of what UI might be, which is fully generative, fully dynamic, and drawn on demand.

Starting point is 01:00:55 So we'll see what people build with that. But that's another one. I think that'll be the kind of thing that we push on, which is either demonstrations of where the future could be going, and it's probably not as mass market as Instagram would ever be, but it hopefully breaks through the right people who are thinking about the stuff. Yeah. A product like that seems within reach, magical, amazing.

Starting point is 01:01:13 It also feels like if I was using generative, a fully generated app for like hours, I might go down some weird path and it might lose consistency. We've seen this with the benchmarks. I mean, just in 2020, you know, GPT3 on the meter length of AI task that they can do at a 50% success rate, it was like 10 seconds. And now we're blowing past an hour. I'm interested to know how you're thinking about four or five. If you think about that internally as a benchmark, it wasn't on the model card, should it be. Are you seeing promising results there. And then I'm also interested in what should the ultimate target be? Because I was trying to think about, like, yes, I want an AI that can do tasks for a really long

Starting point is 01:01:57 time, but what is a human's task length? Like, is it 100 years? And how long does it take to get to 100 years? If we're doubling every seven months, it turns out it's like a decade. And I'm wondering how you think about, like, the, just the length that the model can maintain consistency. Do you like that as a metric? Are we on track there? And what are the consequences of that? Yeah, a big part of Cloud 4.5's training was around

Starting point is 01:02:23 both keeping its own memory and staying, being able to work for a longer period of time and keep that consistency. I put a video up on my X, which is for every version of Cloud, we asked it to build Cloud.AI. So kind of like a flagship AI product. And, you know, one through three just can't even do anything out of the gate.

Starting point is 01:02:38 Three, five, you're like, ah, kind of showed something on screen, but you can't log in. 3.7, you can lock. but it doesn't work for it works a little bit but message failing message sending fails four five like didn't just implement it also implemented our whole artifacts feature in its like prototype so they think about like that whole kind of thing and it's a fun like time lapse of just even watching it do that so I think it is really

Starting point is 01:02:59 important even if for most tasks you're not going to kind of set it off on a you know 30-hour task like a couple of our customers did during testing the fact that you could I think lets you start trusting it for longer and longer tasks the way I see our engineers actually to use cloud code now is they have like three or four terminal windows open and they're running cloud code concurrently on multiple ideas at once. And the only way you can do that is if it's not going to interrupt you 10 seconds and you're like, wait, what did you mean again? Or trust that you're not going to go off the rails. I think it's, if not the, it's one of the most important kind of metrics to look at is how long they can maintain coherence. Yeah, that that cloud

Starting point is 01:03:30 example you gave is crazy because do you know how many man hours it actually took to build the real product? A lot. It's more than an hour. It's more than four hours. It's more than four hours. It's more than anything on this chart, if it's, and, yeah, that's a very, very mind-blowing concept that, like, we're still, like, it's working for an hour, it's working for two hours, but it's maybe doing hundreds of hours of man hours, if you were to try and create an apples-to-apples comparison. It's hair-raising. Yeah, I mean, it's exciting. It's exciting. It really is. And also, like, it hopefully makes us more flexible, too, where I think there's a lot of sunk cost that happens in software, right?

Starting point is 01:04:07 You're like, oh, what I really felt that it's so good? things we did develop an industry, I'm saying like, yeah, you've built it, but if it's not going to be good, just rip it up, you know, and then start over. One of the most magical experiences I had with Claude code recently was I essentially, I don't write a ton of software and build a lot of applications, but I do a lot of research. And so I asked Claude code to do a deep research report, but instead of just creating a markdown file like I would get in any other deep research product, I asked it to build an HTML5 website with all of, the nice features, bar charts and graphs and all that stuff. And it was okay on the research side, but it was a really cool glimpse into this, like, generative UI world that it feels like we're going into. And I'm wondering if there's a, how you see that flowing into just consumer. Right now, when I think of Claude Code for deep research, I think of a prosumer product. And I'm

Starting point is 01:05:04 wondering if you think that there's a path, maybe it exists through mobile, maybe Iframes, like how does this actually work its way into like my mom's life, you know, someone who's not going to understand the terminal and get fired up on that way? Yeah, something we put out actually in our mobile app about a month ago that people have been enjoying is kind of giving the same sort of a gente, kind of multi-turn thing in Claude, but with your local mobile capabilities. And it's easier on Android. You can do a lot of this in iOS, but not all of it. And you can say things like, hey, you know, look at my calendar for tomorrow. Like, I have these three meetings, do some local searches, like find out where I should have coffee.

Starting point is 01:05:41 Remind me to, like, grab my coat before I leave. And by the way, like, compose a text to these three people because I need to, like, let them know about it. You'll see it works through all. It'll use all these local tools, do it agentically. You can't send it automatically, so you have to, like, press a button still to send the message. So it's not, like, all the way. But I think that's where it's going to start showing up in consumer applications. And I think, you know, for better, for worse, it's going to require more partnership with

Starting point is 01:06:02 with the device makers, because a lot of that's gated on the OS. You can do a lot more on the web. But I think that's where things are going. I think that's where we'll start feel real to people. What's the biggest lesson from Artifact? I was a huge fan of the product. And I feel like with where we are in terms of how effective the models are at scraping the entire web, creating summaries, like it feels like we're on the cusp of another

Starting point is 01:06:26 breakout like product or problem solution in that space. what are what are you taking for that i mean for better or worse it feels like you could ultimately like claude could one day function as arc in and what i what i loved about artifact right yeah and yeah we even you know you can like uh see it already like in search the web do the synthesis and then like create a briefing for me i think one sort of underappreciated artifact lesson was um if your product really shines when it really knows you and is really personal to you, that's a hard sell for newcomers, right? We had a, like, our retention was actually really good if you stuck around, but it was

Starting point is 01:07:08 that kind of activation that was the trickiest, plus like any shareable thing in news is really difficult. But think about that now with Cloud, where if you ask it to do something, we can't have expected you to already have taught it a bunch of your preferences or connected all the right things. We actually can, because Cloud can be conversational, say, I'm going to be way better at this if you let me connect to your Google Drive. Like, is that okay, right? Or I'm going to be on your iOS, you know, it's going to be way better. if you connect your maps or your calendar for this. That's, I think, where we need to go,

Starting point is 01:07:34 which is don't expect people have done all the upfront work because that's going to be too hard from those people, then they'll churn. But the nice thing that's different now in 2025 is the model can now have the conversation about how to get it to the state

Starting point is 01:07:44 or it's going to be actually useful to you. Everyone in Teapot on X in tech, Twitter is reacting to Dwar Kesheh Patel's interview with Richard Sutton. Are you bitter-lessened-pilled? Is anthropic bitter-bid-pilled? How did you and the team kind of process the debate between Dwar Keshe and Richard Sutton?

Starting point is 01:08:09 I think we're overall super bitter lesson pill. One interesting example, and this is kind of a bitter lesson derivative, but I think kind of feeds into the same kind of idea. You mentioned deep research. So, you know, our original, you know, advanced research, you know, implementation in Cloudia, Iowa was like thousands of lines of codes and, like, pretty complex infrastructure. We've since, you know, re-implementer. We haven't launched it. It'll come out soon. And we re-implemitted on top of basically the Cloud Agent SDK, which we put out today, too,

Starting point is 01:08:33 which is basically what Cloud Code runs on, too. And it was basically just a prompt and some tools. And, like, none of that, like, custom scaffold and instructions and all of that. And, like, that, to me, speaks the same idea, which is, like, you want to, like, let the model do as much itself as possible. Don't try to, like, overly specify all of, like, the steps and the infrastructure and all those different pieces. So that definitely shows up, even in product, which is, you know, not what the bitter lesson is about, but it kind of feeds into that as well. But I think overall, like very bitter lesson filled, but also still really bullish, I think, on the possibilities of RL.

Starting point is 01:09:05 You see it in how much the models have advanced even since February. Do you think you're bullish on this idea that there will be some sort of new paradigm or new buzzword in a few years that describes a material change in architecture or just like how AI research is done? We certainly saw this when we went from just transformer-based, large language models to reinforcement learning with human feedback to RL and synthetic environments instead of synthetic data. Does it feel like we're continuing to come up with new ideas? I think so. And I think the other piece that's going to be really interesting, one, just the scale of all of these RL runs is getting enormous. And I think the second one is the model's ability to maybe actually introspect and see if it can propose ideas will be interesting to.

Starting point is 01:09:57 I don't think we're there yet, too. And when we get that, we ought to do that very carefully with the right kind of safety, kind of guard rolls in place. But I think that'll potentially deal to some kind of divergent ideas at that point. What are your thoughts on hardware or what's going to change in hardware over the next few years? Instagram was so interesting. I remember that it was designed to be used with the phone in the vertical. It was such a vertical app, even though people were so used to turning their phones.

Starting point is 01:10:24 And in some ways, the hardware, like the medium is the message, the hardware kind of defined what you built, but then eventually, you know, we got more cameras on the phone, probably because of Instagram. And I'm wondering if you think AI will change hardware or will get entirely new hardware to interface with AI in different places, just kind of what's your view on hardware over the next couple of years? I think this is the consumer side where, you know, like, I think the AirPods Pro is going to be like the sneaky, like, AI, you know, sort of. of thing that actually does the mass market, now that's super controversial take. I think the other one that people are thinking less about is what's the business side of this? You know, we've designed these open office plans, but I think in the future we're going to actually talk to our AI a bunch in order to get stuff done to delegate tasks.

Starting point is 01:11:08 It's like really nice already. People have like hooked up cloud code with like open whisper or something so they can talk to it and it feels very natural. And so like what does that do for office design? Are we all going to be using these like sub vocalization things now that people are prototyping? I think those are really cool. like yeah um but it's like you know like walk to an office a bunch of people mumbling like

Starting point is 01:11:26 or the the the dark sci-fi of just as it's a it's wall-to-wall the phone booths you know just like thousands of phone booths and everybody's sitting in their phone booth you know we created like 1960s ibn like i feel like there's got to be something better too um i'm also really interested in what the sort of multiplayer like i mentioned like uh clod talking to us in our social channel but like there's also what is like what is it like to not just have an AI note taker in these meetings which everybody has but like an actual participant and how does it know what to chime in and what is it listening for can it be like hey you guys haven't talked about this thing you said you were going to talk about or hey i'm detecting a lot of like you know disagreement here can we move forward so

Starting point is 01:12:04 that's going to be an interesting it's like the hardware necessary for that won't be super complex but it will need to show up in more and more places yeah how do how do you guys think about uh what comes to mind around the word focus anthropic feels and incredibly focused and not every lab feels that way. Is that something that you guys just keep coming back to around or what does that mean to you? Well, for sure. Like I think that the one of the things that we've done well is like there's been that extreme focus from the research side. I think, you know, before anything else, which is like here's the path like we're going to build that.

Starting point is 01:12:42 We're not going to have as many people, perhaps as much compute, but we're going to like remain focused. But like that is actually another kind of bridge to Instagram. We're very, very focused. I think they finally shipped the iPad app. He would always ask, why doesn't Instagram have an iPad app? I'm like, it's focused. Like, you know, you're not going to get a lot of new users that way. And most of the usage is going to be on the iPhone.

Starting point is 01:12:59 Web, web took years. And it was like, you know, people think we were stubborn. But it was actually, you know, every new platform you add is like another thing that you're going to have to think about. And, you know, yes, you can staff up for it. But it's just that coordination cost. It's the kind of additional overhead. So we've really pushed the focus thing here as well.

Starting point is 01:13:18 it's like do more with less and do fewer things better. But I think it's really important. And it's meant that we've got more of this pro-sumer, power user, and then business lens. But I also think that's like an interesting place to occupy in the market. Last question from my side. Joy, do you have another? Yeah, kind of last question.

Starting point is 01:13:34 We're having Dylan on in a bit to catch up on Figma Make. And I know you joined the board prior to the IPO. What are your, you know, with Figma, the AI opportunity and current reality is very obvious, right? It's a place that people go to make things and build software, but what are your conversations like with, I'm assuming other public, you know, public SaaS CEOs and boards reach out to you all the time, trying to get your read on where software is going. Are those conversations happening? What do they look like today? Yeah, I mean, I think there's this, if you think the models are going to be able to act agentically and retrieve over, you know, your, you know,

Starting point is 01:14:17 employee records, plus connect them to your current work in Google Docs, all these pieces. I think the concern, I think, from a lot of these SaaS providers is they become just document and data repositories, right? And how do you, like, modify that? But then I think that there's the sort of like way of making that actually interesting is if you actually connect an agent with another, which doesn't sound that profound until you actually try it, it's really powerful. I saw this demo of Claude talking to an agent that was built on top of some Salesforce data. And rather than just, like, search for Salesforce data and then get results back.

Starting point is 01:14:49 It had a conversation with, they had like two back and forth conversations where the cloud agent was like, here's the email I'm thinking of sending to this customer and the Salesforce built, like thing built on top of the Salesforce was like, no, no, no, they're not going to like it. I looked in the earlier messages and they really hated that turn of phrase. And they ping pong back and forth with actually like very little human input. And at the end had a message like ready to send. So that's where I think like you can move from worrying about, are people going to visit my

Starting point is 01:15:13 website less because of agents, so more like, well, maybe not, but if you're actually building value beyond just the data store, you can still play a really key part in that exchange. It goes back to what we were talking about, about Claude being able to generate images, but then just using an Excel sheet as a canvas, there's a world where you might be able to train a model that's super expensive to inference that can, you know, just do all the math in the world and has every number, every calculation memorized, or you could just say, hey, here's Python, like just write some Python and you get the exact result. And so it's a beautiful synergy.

Starting point is 01:15:47 Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Congrats on the launch. We're looking forward to five or 4.999. 4.999 would go extremely hard. I would love that. The pressure is on. 4.999.

Starting point is 01:16:03 Awesome. We're excited to play around with 4-5 and get into it. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. You're the man. Let's go over to Polly Market and check in on which company has the best AI model by the end of 2025. Anthropic has jumped in the rankings.

Starting point is 01:16:23 This is, of course, L.M. Arena, which is a different benchmark, but Anthropic jumped from 1.8% to over 6%. Google is in first and continues to be. Open AI was given them a run for their money towards the end of August, but Google seems to be running away with it. People on Alam Arena are really indebted. enjoying Google yeah it's interesting how you know this this continues to be the probably the most popular market on AI yeah and yet all the underlying labs are focused on different things yes like anthropic is values a bunch of different things differently than Google does yes and an XAI same thing yeah so anyways

Starting point is 01:17:07 well speaking of chat GPT they launched a new brand campaign each scenario features young people who are some of our most creative proactive users were showing their stories in ways that others can see and connect with. Our goal is for people to look at these moments. And Emily Sundberg said part of the reason this campaign looks so good is because Heidi Bivens is the stylist from Euphoria and Spring Breakers worked on it. So they brought in some heavy hitters for this, which is exciting. This feels, even the colors and the tones feel a lot like Anthropics' recent campaign. And it feels solar punky. It feels a little bit like the drone delivery company.

Starting point is 01:17:45 How's this guy with this barbell set up in this like... He's doing exactly what I do. He's tracking his splits. He's tracking his lifts. He's trying to hit a one-rep max. He's saying if I use this much protein, he's probably using... He's probably using this in. Well, I guess he's...

Starting point is 01:18:01 He only has 65 pounds on the bar, though, so, you know. Oh, I guess he's doing some dumbbell curls. But, you know, with the power of chat GPT, I think he's going to be benching three plates in no time but yeah very fun campaign uh we're having dylan field join in just nine minutes he was getting a tussle on the timeline talking about the definitions of software engineering uh elliott i guess at lovable said we just killed software engineering by the way which is like i don't know if elliott is rage baiting but yeah it is uh it is a little a little rage baity but uh oh well

Starting point is 01:18:38 it's like who's that who is that post for I don't know. In other news, Thrive has a new citation, sovereign under management. I know you were all wondering about this. Which? This is from Preston, Holland. It's a nice touch. So this is a private jet. This is Thrive Aviation, to be clear. Everyone thinks that this is Thrive Capital, of course, Josh Kushner's firm expanding into private aviation, as he probably should. But this is a different company, I believe. But different company, they did put the words, big dog on the engines. Big dog looks great. Dog with a D-A-W-G. You get a lot of flak.

Starting point is 01:19:19 You get a lot of flack for having a PJ for flying from Orange County to Burbank just to save a couple of minutes. But if you put Big Dog on the engines, I think you get a free pass. I think it's the way to do it. Drive's tagline is above your standards, beyond your expectations. Above your standards. Is that not? Above your standards. We're actually above your standards, sure.

Starting point is 01:19:42 Yes, whatever your standards are. We're not going to ask you about your standards. We're just going to tell you that this is above. We're above you. It's above your standards. We're above you. Well, you know what else is above your standards? Julius.a.i.

Starting point is 01:19:52 What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, and get insights in seconds, no coding required. In other AI news, it's a busy day. ChatGPT is now integrated with both Stripe and Shopify. We were kind of debating this, like, is the Stripe integration? We are having Jeff from Stripe on, who worked on, has been involved with some of these new features.

Starting point is 01:20:19 So we'll have to ask him about this. Unclear to me yet how the dynamic, obviously, Stripe powers Shopify. But how do these different partnerships work? I think there will be companies that vend their, essentially their product catalog into Chat, GPD, maybe with like an MCP server, or they surface it in a way that they can integrate directly with Stripe because all of their plans, everything that they sell is sold through Stripe. And so there are plenty of companies that don't need an order management system and, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:59 all of the features that you get with Shopify, and they basically just run on Stripe. A lot of SaaS companies do that. So you can imagine in the future if you're trying to buy something that doesn't need to track inventory, you could buy it in chat GPT directly with Stripe, but then if you are trying to buy something that might be out of stock or has a bunch of variations and you're storing that data in Shopify and doing downstream marketing on that and all the different tools that Shopify brings to bear, you will benefit from the Shopify chat GPT integration. So I don't know that they're, I mean, they're clearly jumping over the precipice together. I am

Starting point is 01:21:38 very when you think about using products any any LLM how efficient it is to find the information that you're looking for and now how efficient it's going to be to find the products that you're looking for there's there's plenty of categories that I'm that I don't expect to use LLMs for shopping like hey you know like I'm not going to go in here and like look for I don't know some jackets or right like casual jackets yeah because that that to me is like i don't know i care a lot more about discovering a new brand and understanding what they're about and things like that but in the context of like purely functional goods i'm looking to see what amazon does in regards to

Starting point is 01:22:25 chat chbt because think about how terrible it is to search for products on amazon it's rough right now i'm an amazon respecter yep andy jassi respecter i'm a jeff bezos respecter uh but whenever i if I could search on ChatGPT, find me, you know, I don't know, a paper towel holder from companies that existed more than 100 years ago, right? I don't want to go and buy a paper towel holder. That's some cheap knockoff. That's a knockoff of an American brand. And they hack the SEO and they hack the star rating and they're paying for ads. And so, and so Chat, I've always wanted a, to be able to shop on Amazon without any of the knockoff Chinese like, And they should be able to do that.

Starting point is 01:23:10 They should be able to solve that pretty easily by vending an LLM just into the search box and letting you search a natural language. Like you're already searching, just let me query whatever I want. But also, I think the average Amazon user probably is like just give me the paper towel holder that's $3 direct from the factory. But I think that LLMs will be able to provide a level of personalization that is. Yeah, so maybe those 100-year-old paper towel holder companies will say, now is the time to go deeper into Shopify or Stripe and profound to get mentioned in ChatGPT, right?

Starting point is 01:23:45 And then from there, assume that they are not going to be able to win the Amazon game anymore because it's being Timuified. And so those brands will move over and generate customers from ChatchipT users. The question is I wonder if OpenAI has a take rate here? Like, because these brands, in the example that Toby gives, I'm looking for a lightweight trail running shirts that stay cool, can you help? Historically that, if somebody's searching that and buying, historically, Google is taking a cut, right, through AdSense, or if somebody's just scrolling a brand on Instagram or they get an ad for...

Starting point is 01:24:33 I would assume that it's exactly the same as the Facebook and Google take rate and that you will look back on commerce and you're like, I pay the Google tax, I pay the Facebook tax, I pay the chat GP tax. Yeah. And companies will be happy to do that because the alternative is no growth. The alternative is no customers. Yeah. And the question is, again, this is where Mark Cuban is pushed back, you know, is what if the best product is not on Shopify or not not, not, not the question is. set up in a way that you can buy it, right? Yeah, I mean, the hope is that...

Starting point is 01:25:07 The only recommending products that they have partnerships with. Sure. If so, then that sort of violates the trust that the user has been developing, so they have some stuff to figure out. Yeah, the hope is that there's a division between the editorial and commerce teams and that the team that surfaces like knowledge, retrieval results will focus on just getting you the most accurate information, and then the commerce team will focus on monetizing all of this.

Starting point is 01:25:31 But we will see. Well, in other news, there's a post here from Oxon says, God forbid, men have hobbies. Arkansas men arrested for taking turns, shooting each other while wearing bulletproof vests after drinking. Why were they arrested? This doesn't seem illegal. This seems like top-tier operator. Just guys being dudes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:53 Give them a break. I feel like this post has gone viral. Many, many, many, many times. Yeah, it's from 2019. And then somebody just found it and quote tweeted it when it went viral to the tune of it. 200,000 likes. Wow. Interesting. Well, gas station Barbie says, feels kind of weird that no branch of the government sends you a card when you have a baby. Like, that's a new citizen. Social Security. Yeah, they do. They do. I guess they literally do. Yeah, it should just be a birthday card.

Starting point is 01:26:22 Instead of something you have to apply for. Growing Daniel says, J.D. Vance, I know you see my tweets. This would be a nice touch. Apparently in Finland, the government sends you a large box of supplies when your first kid is born. That's that's sweet. That's very sweet. Well, Eliano is describing the wide range of Palantir All Understanders with Nick Fuentes and Tim Dillon on the left and of course a Palantir insider on the right and Jim Kramer right in the middle, I suppose.

Starting point is 01:26:50 He kind of, he kind of, it seems like he's slightly edging to the right if you look at his shoulder. His head is at like negative one, but his right shoulder is up to. We're going to have Jim on the show soon. We'll ask him what Palantir does. does. I think Jim has a very good thesis for Palantir, actually. I think he has a pretty strong understanding. I would put him closer to a four or a five on this. Well, the oldest hotel in the world is the Nishima Onsen Kiyunkan in Japan and has been in business since 705 AD. It's still a family

Starting point is 01:27:24 business for 52 generations. That's so long. Oh, oh, you think in decades with your business? Are you thinking generation? Oh, you're going on a 100-year run? That's nice. That's quaint. What about a 1,300-year run? Let's step it up. Let's step up the ambition, folks.

Starting point is 01:27:43 I think they should make this in a mom. You're a founder. They should make it in Amon. Sheel says in Japanese tradition. The 53rd generation has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. Just turn it into a motel sex and bring in private equity, lever it up, turn it into a McDonald's or strip mall. I've been learning about finance.

Starting point is 01:28:01 I think we should play. around with leverage what he's going on with that the 52nd grandson doesn't botch it like that's crazy so much tradition and reliability i hope dylan field does this with figma me too that would be a fantastic we should ask him 52 can you can you can you do 53 generation where will figma be in the year 3,300 that's what i want to know dylan let's start thinking in millennia uh shiel has some extra context here. He says, in Japanese tradition, you adopt a capable manager or have arrangement to have him marry your daughter to keep business in the family. Otherwise, there's no way you'd keep something like this in the family for this long. This is still

Starting point is 01:28:47 common practice. Ninety-eight percent of adoptions in Japan are adults. Almost all men 20 to 30 brought in for business succession purposes. Among many others, Suzuki and Toyota have had multiple generations of adopted son-in-laws to keep them in the family business. That's crazy. Wow. Well, let's bring this concept into enterprise software. Dylan is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultrodome. His first virtual appearance, I believe, on the show. He's, of course, hit a gong live with us at the New York Stock Exchange, which is a slight upgrade from Zoom. Quickly retired the gong. But thank you so much for joining us, Dylan. How are you doing today? Thank you for having me back. Good to see you guys.

Starting point is 01:29:27 Great to see you. Great to see you. What's new in your world? Well, I've been deep in it this weekend with Claude Sonnet 4.5. I'm going to be real with you. Yeah. And Figma-Make. That's what I wanted to hear. So I'm just going to still swimming in that. Well, yeah, give me your initial reactions.

Starting point is 01:29:45 Like, do you care about the benchmarks model card? Are you tracking, like, the meter, like, how long a task can run? Are you more like just chat with it like it's a person, have really short back-and-forth exchanges to get the vibe or the texture of the words that are coming out? or you put it on a really critical business task and then benchmark it against one of your top developers or something like, how do you evaluate a new AI model as a CEO? Well, okay, so there's the personal side and there's the Figma side and there's the CEO side maybe. Sure.

Starting point is 01:30:18 So I'll start with personal, which I have not got into yet, but I love playing with these models, testing them at their limits, seeing if I can, you know, get them into sort of weird head spaces. and that's just like a hobby of mine. What's a weird? You're trying to one-shot them. No, I mean, look, it doesn't have to be a one-shot or like single prompt. You know, the longer you go, the mores me gets. Yeah, you keep going and the models, like, I'm seeing powers.

Starting point is 01:30:48 What's the weirdest, what's an example of like this, you know, you don't have to name the model, but like, what's the weirdest headspace you've got in the model, is they're just hallucinating, you know, more and more intensely type of thing? Look, I mean, models are trained on the internet and the internet has some weird stuff on it. And, you know, what do you find it in there? It's kind of fascinating. And I won't give examples or definitely not companies

Starting point is 01:31:17 or model providers. What I do instead is I try to like, if I find a good repo case, I send it over to the models. And that way they can figure out what to do with it. Yeah, it's funny if you think the models are, the models trained on the internet. that means, like, the models effectively trained on stumble upon, you know, like that, that level of range, right, which is quite, quite wide.

Starting point is 01:31:39 There's a lot to the internet. Yep. It's deep for sure. So take us to the other testing cases. Specifically at the, not even at the Figma level. I've even gone there with 4.5 yet another time. But I'd say that for Figma, for Figma, that is where my attention has been focused so far. And with Figma, make.

Starting point is 01:31:59 in particular, we've been just trying to figure out, okay, how do we make it so that we're able to quickly pull in Sonnet 4.5 to make and then evaluate. You know, are we ready for it? Do we have to do anything differently? Is this a good addition, a good improvement? And the more we play with it this weekend, the more we used it, it was so impressive how it made make better. everything from planning and just thinking through and evaluating and understanding the code base

Starting point is 01:32:34 that it was working on, whether it was like a shorter prompt or a long-running session, to thinking through just sort of like the way it should evaluate a prompt and giving better results. And also, we recently introduced this new feature where you can copy, from make output into Figma Design. And we've since launch had a way to basically go from Figma Design into make and basically copy paste in. And that way you can bring your design

Starting point is 01:33:10 into whatever your coding and creating. And the consistency that we're now seeing with 4.5 on that part of it, that round trip, that's the part that's most incredible. And it's so just kind of like, gives me the chills of it. because we literally launched this feature where we copied from Make Output to Figma Design last week,

Starting point is 01:33:33 not knowing when we launched it that 4.5 was coming, it would make it so much better. And here we are, and we're like, okay, well, that's a good surprise. But I guess the general point is just, it's a really nice to be in a place where, and I think this is an important thing for everyone to be thinking about in software, as the models get better, you need to get better.

Starting point is 01:33:52 So for us, we look at the models getting better. And Figma, we're like, okay, great. Figma gets better. all of our users are going to benefit from this. And I think it's really important that you're always in that sort of headspace of how to make sure that you're standing up a strategy that way. How do you think about the Figma Make user base, the community right now, there are so many different subsets of AI users. There's folks who can tell you the difference from one paragraph. Oh, that came from 4-0.

Starting point is 01:34:25 That came from Sonnet 3.5. And then there are people who are like, I got to try that AI thing out soon. Is the Figma-Make community in a place where 4.5 Sonnet can just be like a strict upgrade that there's no resistance to? Or is it something where you have to think about model switching and leaving some choice up to the user? Are there cost considerations? Like, how much work are you putting on the user or the community and where's the right pivot point for that?

Starting point is 01:34:58 Yeah, I think there's, to your question about sort of the diversity of use cases and personas that might be applicable here, there's so many different users on our platform and types of behavior that we see, you know, about, you know, a third of our users are designers, two-thirds or non-designers. design's always at the core. And I honestly think that just from my reflections on this weekend, one thing I keep coming back to is like, I think we're just entering this era of the 10x designer where the designer is going to be able to do so much more than ever before. You know, designers have knowledge not only of aesthetic, UX, and craft, but also the value is just moving up the stack and the designer will be in this position of leverage where they're going to be able to do a lot in terms of product building and creating products with craft

Starting point is 01:35:58 that just create joy and thinking of the entire system and then pulling everybody else in and helping leading the charge. And I think that it's just this time where good enough is no longer enough, good enough is mediocre. You have to be great if you want to make it so that you can win. And I think that the more power that designers have, the more leverage they have, then the more likely they are to be able to help a company win. And so that's just kind of like how I see things going in general. And on the implementation side, I think it's like not as relevant. you know, you just kind of have a variety of ways that people want to interact or different cycles of AI adoption people are at, and you need to meet them where they're at, and you need to

Starting point is 01:36:55 create and provide an amazing product experience, and so it gets back to the basics there. How do you think about the vibe or the taste of the designs that are coming out of these models? coming back to the mid-journey example where it just feels like David Holes did something different from just take the average or like, you know, minimize loss function. It feels like there's his artistic vision in there in every generation, no matter what your prompt is, and then you can do a lot of different things on top of it. And so it's almost this like collaboration between the artist David Holes and the artist who's the prompter and I'm wondering if you think that like how does the flavor of design that's

Starting point is 01:37:49 coming out of 4.5 plus figma make like where does the human opinion get inserted at each level and how does that like how much of that is actually happening like can you tell difference in the flavor of design that's coming out of a certain model I think we're not yet like a Dolly 2 moment for design or a Mid-Journey moment for design. That's happened relatively the same time. Yeah. And

Starting point is 01:38:17 look at Dolly 1 compared to Dolly 2, you know, it's easy to dismiss. And I think design generation will get better. At the same time, I think that the Law of Average's concept that you kind of mentioned

Starting point is 01:38:32 is sort of the reality today and likely will be the reality for a long time. And what is critical is iteration, the ability to push in a direction and getting to grate. And if you're able to do that and you're able to advance your craft, if you're able to have a sense of what the culture is and what the business problems are

Starting point is 01:38:59 and what the engineering challenges might be, bring it all together with a great design, user experience, aesthetic um it's it's like it's not just the style it's the entire system you have to hold in your head and figure out um along with brand marketing point of view how is it all going to work to work together and if you can do that that's like where i think everything unlocks yeah what's your read on sentiment right now in the design community broadly around AI because on on our side as a business that that is constantly working with creative people externally obviously we have people internally but we have like basically as much demand as ever for like talented creative people

Starting point is 01:39:50 like we don't we have a ton of work that we want to do and uh but we also have an unlimited demand for figma make and tools that help us instantiate ideas and there's a lot of stuff where we're like well and i would take we're focused on the layout or the buttons and like the The faster we can get that out, the better. Yeah, but there's this sense of, we have an insatiable demand for novel thinking and ideas and concepts. And it's less a, it's less a... I can't tell if you're saying we, humanity, or we, TBPN, because the answer is both.

Starting point is 01:40:25 I'm talking about both, but TBPN, and it's less of, oh, is this possible? Like, is making this animation going to be, you know, within budget? It's more like, well, what animation should we make? Yeah, did you call the good idea? We're willing to pay a lot for that kind of original thinking, but I'm curious like where you see the kind of, where sentiment is that today? Because on the software development side, it seems very clear as when you can build software faster and cheaper, well, we want more engineers to build more software because the world needs a lot of software. And I think same thing for a truly great novel creative work.

Starting point is 01:41:03 yeah um well first of all i'm hearing a strong advertisement uh on tbpn for tbpn you all are trying to hire so uh hopefully our viewers can like uh apply somewhere but the uh the thing that i would call out is i i think that um we're almost seeing a parallel to the AI talent wars with design right now yeah at least amongst the companies that are really getting it um the ones that have internalized the design is going to be how you win or lose, and that's the craft, the details that matter, they are really getting aggressive, not like meta-AI aggressive. Let me be clear, but very aggressive. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:49 And it's, I think, just again, value moving up the stack, and that's something that all companies will eventually figure out. I just hope that a bunch of things. companies don't figure out too late. But yeah, I think Jevin's paradox as applied to talent that is adept at using models and doing amazing work and really pushing the boundaries of what's possible and what could be created and how much craft you can have, how much you can delight people that's real. And the demand for development is certainly not shrinking. I think that you know, it's never been met.

Starting point is 01:42:34 And at Figma, I mean, we're doing headcount planning, like, we're hiring almost all areas as we go into this next year and in big ways. And I think just generally, you know, our point of view from the start about AI at Figma is like, how do you both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so the designers can do more. And I think that's something that's a shared view. maybe we were one of the first to articulate it, if not the first, but I believe that most of the products that are in the sort of AI space are trying to do the same thing. They're trying to

Starting point is 01:43:11 make it so that more folks are able to be part of this life cycle, and also they're trying to make it to the people that are the experts are able to do more than ever before. do you have a view on like the shape of the design community as a function of maybe the amount of designers working in a particular organization are there are there more design firms than ever are there more solo design firms that are profitable and making money than ever is the power law getting steeper or is the floor rising or both do you have any idea on like the shape of the design community and the shape of how designers work together or just make money independently in the age of AI? Yeah, I think there's a lot of work here we've done on the sort of

Starting point is 01:44:12 company side, and we're seeing there just more and more people getting involved in design and more design hiring. Yeah. I think in that more freelancer agency segment, there's more research to do, to understand, is the same effect happening? But I'll maybe think back historically, you know, when there was this first wave of design hiring and people realized that design talent was critical to success, one of the first things they did was they started to snap up the agencies. And they would have literally just start acquiring agencies of great design talent. And so that's how, like, for example, DeHanan Lax became involved in then Facebook, then reality labs, and John Lacks ended up leading up reality labs for a while.

Starting point is 01:45:03 And they got someone who was legendary design talent to be able to be at the forefront of their work on Oculus for quite some time. And I would not be surprised if similar things started happening. But I also think that, you know, back in the early days of Figma, it was this question even of, like, how many designers are there in the United States, in the world? I mean, the beer labor system said that there were 250,000 designers. It's like, well, that seems wrong in 2012. But, like, how many other actually, I don't know, maybe it's like 500,000, not 250,000? But, like, is it like a venture-skilled business? we don't know and but what we noticed was that values moved the stack and it was going to be the

Starting point is 01:45:54 case that everyone was going to build up their design team and the design would be so important as this overall system changed and I think that that same thesis we held then in 2012 it has not changed it is the same thesis we hold today and I really believe that that sort of this era of the 10X designers here, it's just starting in some ways, but it's going to be quite incredible, and it'll require more designers to step up as leaders and for them to lean into leadership roles

Starting point is 01:46:34 that they may have otherwise not considered. But, you know, if they don't, then I think it's going to be a dynamic where everyone's trying to get involved in design and they don't really know the guardrails or how to do it exactly. And you have a lot of people with a lot of thoughts, but not many like railways built, tracks built for folks to go down. So that's the challenge, I think, that many design-oriented folks will have

Starting point is 01:47:02 and the need for design leadership this time. Shopify just acquired a design studio last month. Someone in our chat mentioned this. What's your thinking around open source? You obviously have a close relationship with Mike over at Anthropic. He's on the board, and obviously Claude has consistently led on CodeGen, so they're a natural partner for Figma Make, but is open to where something you're exploring or just given that they're not really at the front of your...

Starting point is 01:47:37 Yeah, there was a take for a while that was like commoditize your compliments. But maybe the LMS, yeah, I'm super interested to hear what you think. Yeah, I mean, look, there's, um, I think, first of all, I mean, Mikey and I, from the start of just looking at him being on the board, we had to make sure that, you know, is clear. We, as Figma, have to choose whatever is best for Figma. You know, as models get better, we get better. But if we're not choosing the right models, then we're not getting better. So, I'm 4.5, both of the Eval's easy choice.

Starting point is 01:48:11 you know, roll it out to users. There's going to be a lot of other model improvements and, of course, open source is something we're always watching too. And so it's exciting just how much is happening right now. And I think that it's going to be just a fun next few months to see the continued model releases. I'm pretty psyched.

Starting point is 01:48:36 What are your thoughts on hardware right now? That feels like a place where we're seeing, re-emergence, a lot of hype around meta's new devices, potentially a new design surface as people design more physical products that are maybe enabled by AI. It just feels like that could be kind of the next thing,

Starting point is 01:49:02 some sort of like Cambrian explosion of hardware devices, or maybe it's all just AirPods forever or something. Who knows? But I'd love to hear your take on like how is there a demand from you for new hardware devices? Like the Waycom tablet is obviously legendary in the design community, but it's a completely prosumer professional device.

Starting point is 01:49:24 How are you thinking about hardware these days? Well, I think in the Figma context, what we think about is, okay, what are the screens that we need to serve and our users need to design for? And so that's why I was so excited to be able to check out met as new glasses and also the neural band.

Starting point is 01:49:48 The band is like underappreciated, so cool. People need to, people won't, it won't get a reaction until enough people have actually tried it because it's... It looks just like a woot band. There's nothing that looks crazy about it until you actually try it and you're like, oh, you can fully see what's going on.

Starting point is 01:50:05 Yeah, and, but like, let's be clear, I mean, this was years and development many years. I mean, they've been at it for so long now. And I think the first time I got the demo was almost a year and a half ago, a year and a few months ago. And then I saw it again right before config, but like the sort of new and improved version. And it just takes a long time to go build these new form factors. You know, the same thing as being true in auto. It's true you know, in wearables in general, it's probably going to become true in other surfaces that people will find. And I think that whether it's AR, VR, VR, you know, curved glass, you know,

Starting point is 01:50:57 small screen sizes, large screen sizes, there's a lot of surfaces that designers now need to target. And we haven't even gotten into, you know, AI and agents and what designers need to do to create context in these places too. I think in many ways we're just in the MS DOS era of AI. We are still figuring out how to explore this amazing latent space. You've got this L.M. It's your spaceship. But you're in this like n-dimensional space. And the best way to like figure out where you are, your compass is your prompt, natural language. It's like what interfaces will be built for that? How would be able to figure out custom bespoke ways to do dimensionality reduction? figure out how to help people navigate better as these models and the architecture is fundamentally

Starting point is 01:51:46 improve. And also, you know, what protocols between the models should exist and what's the best way to create those? Because I think that there's a reason MCP is really caught on so fast. It's extremely valuable. And we just launched with Figma, the Figma MCP for design as a remote service before it was only desktop and local, and also we improved the capabilities. And then we did it for make as well. So we want to make sure that people know you're not trapped to make.

Starting point is 01:52:19 Figma Make, if you're going to prompt to code, and you're making it so that you're getting to some great output and you're spending a lot of time on it, awesome. Like, you always had download code, but now you can just have your MCP connect to Figma Make and pull all your code in. How is MCP adoption going? It feels like there's a world where, like, I was promised like the AI didn't need an API

Starting point is 01:52:44 because it would just use the computer, right? And I imagine that there's a, maybe we're not quite there, but there's a world where my AI just literally opens a browser, goes and fignamad.com, does whatever it needs to do, just like a human. And yet MCP seems to be, like, what you're identifying with, like, the energy around it is immense. How are people actually using it? Like, are there, is there a killer app, killer feature, some story where you've been really excited about, like, the impact that it's had on an actual, like, design project or designer or firm or your company? I mean, you should definitely try it out.

Starting point is 01:53:19 Like, it is a sort of magic experience when you go and you've got your design structure and a figmo with auto layout. You've got your variables to find. And then you're able to just, you know, basically press the button. And with MCP, you pull in all that design context. to your codebase. Sure. And you can use inference to basically go figure out how to map it. And I'm not saying it's all one shot, but like with either one shot or a little bit of

Starting point is 01:53:45 it or a prompting, if you have your design set up in a structured way, it's a pretty wild experience. You know, Coinbase was telling us about how it's really improved their workflow. And, you know, we've heard from many other customers that I'm not sure I have permission to name, but how much it's affected them. and how powerful it's been. And overall, yeah, people are super excited. We've been thrilled with the response.

Starting point is 01:54:11 That's why we're investing so much time into it is because we really think this is a super important part of our story as a company is being more open and making sure that we really extend out to the greater ecosystem of AI. There's so much that we've done in so many places and design is context, and that context is valuable in so many different spots.

Starting point is 01:54:33 So I should think of the MCP efforts as a almost like a business to consumer, like a consumer benefit, not necessarily just something like an API that enables like better like B2B partnerships and integrations. Is that roughly correct? Yeah, I think it's, you know, I think everyone's still trying to figure it out for sure. But I think that yes, with the right MCP services out there, the, ways that they can affect you know all sorts of places that

Starting point is 01:55:09 you consume in France it's pretty pretty big and I think we're just kind of at the start so yeah for Figma we're very very excited about where we can go here and then yeah I think just if you zoom out

Starting point is 01:55:26 the bigger story that is being told is how do we go from my data product and it used to be this very linear process but now we're no longer in that world we're in a world where instead people try various directions various paths and you need to be able to generate a bunch of different ideas explore them with your team figure out that option space we hope they make me a big part of it but even if someone has a different tool that they've they're using. We also want to make sure that they're able to bring the design context in.

Starting point is 01:56:08 And with that design context, really help that other surface improve. We think that's a win-win for everyone. And it's most importantly a win for the user. I'm so excited for today's middle schoolers and high schoolers to have access to these tools. Like, can you imagine if you had had Figma make? It's incredible. Like, when you at that age, like, You let somebody marinate with these kind of tools for a decade, what they're going to be. I mean, I'm pretty sure we've already seen posts about like a 15-year-old sold a company for like $50 million or something. There's crazy stuff happening all over the place. But it's just going to be crazy more and more and more.

Starting point is 01:56:46 Thank you so much for joining. Last question. It'll be wild. Last question from the chat. Do you miss the Rattie? Oh, not really, no. What is it at the University Dining Hall? Is that right?

Starting point is 01:57:01 One of them. Yeah. I was more of a V-dub guy, but... Okay. There we go. Yeah, the Radi was a great place to see people. Okay. And, but then again, I also, like, I hate standing in line.

Starting point is 01:57:15 So, like, I would time out of everything so that I either arrived super early or super late. So I wasn't in the long line. But, yeah, the food, maybe not the best, but, you know, the vibes, right? The memories. Good vibes. Well, thank you so much for bringing good vibes. to disappear. Yeah, massive week for you guys.

Starting point is 01:57:34 Massive week. We'll talk to you soon, Dylan. We'll talk soon. Have a good one. Good to see you. Quickly, let me tell you about fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image,

Starting point is 01:57:44 video, and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine-tuned models with serverless GPS and underground clusters. Or perplexity and many more. And we have our next guest from Stripe in the Restream waiting room. We will bring in Jeff. It's time to Jeff. Jeff, how you doing?

Starting point is 01:57:59 Whoa, okay. We're purple. I'm seeing some announcement lighting. What's going on? We're here in New York. We're finishing up some keynote practice for our event tomorrow, Stripe Tour. But I imagine you all want to talk about some agentic commerce today. It's looking wild in there.

Starting point is 01:58:17 Yeah. I get excited enough about payments even without the neon lighting. But that certainly helps. Yeah. Yeah. Give us the actual news item. It seems like Sam Altman just found out about Stripe. recently and decided to do some sort of deal

Starting point is 01:58:33 or something. Of course, like the companies go back a long way, and so my question is like, what's new about the relationship between the two companies today? Yeah, really exciting. So today, for the first time ever, you can purchase where you prompt.

Starting point is 01:58:50 And inside of ChatTVT, you're able to discover products as lots of people are already doing, but now you can buy from businesses right in the chat. And so we partnered with OpenAI to build this as well as an open standard agentic commerce protocol to help more businesses get going of selling agentically. So I'd love to get into all that.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Yeah. Name every product I can buy today. I mean, give me an example because I can imagine there are products where the company wraps in a different, you know, content management system or order management system. Yeah. And I want to... Versus there are other companies where they sell stuff and it's really just stripe and a website. And so that makes a ton of sense. So what's the wheelhouse customer interaction look like? Yeah. So anytime you discover a product in chat TBT, if that a seller is enabled on the agenda commerce protocol and is working with open AI, you'll be able to purchase directly with any of the payment methods you've already saved with chat TPT for subscription or be able to add one. And what's really interesting is

Starting point is 01:59:57 you know, one of the big unlocks here is how do you scale adding merchants to agentic commerce and how do you scale accepting agentic payments? And we have two big announcements that are going to unblock those foundations. One is the agentic commerce protocol, which is an open standard that we co-developed with open AI for businesses to make their checkouts agent viable, agent ready. And so as a business, you're used to, you know, first you're selling in the mall and then you're, you know, sold over the phone and then you sold on the website, and now you're going to be able to express your checkout in a way that you want for agents to be able to initiate transactions. And the second big thing is, how do you actually

Starting point is 02:00:38 move the money? How do you get the payment from the buyer and have it sent to the merchant for processing in a secure way, which is why we built this shared payment token API, which lets businesses on Stripe and businesses that might be using another processor, be able to process agentic payments and that those two things together are what really enable a launch like this. Getting more into the details, if for an e-commerce company in particular, like where is inventory managed? Are you guys integrating? I know Shopify had an announcement today too. Is that connected to this? Are these two totally different experiences? Like help me understand how like, you know, a specific company like an e-commerce brand is going to, can get started selling in line in

Starting point is 02:01:33 these L-LMs. Yeah. So today's announcement for ChatGBTDB has Etsy live. So today, rolling out this morning, you'll be able to purchase from Etsy sellers directly in the chat. And Shopify is coming soon in the same program. So these are the first two merchant partners, the first two e-commerce platforms that are are working with chatGBT to be able to sell agentically through their LM system and

Starting point is 02:02:00 their consumer base. For merchants going forward, you know, how do you at scale have a way to express your checkout as a merchant, as an e-commerce platform that isn't just, hey, have the agent, like, pretend to be on my site and click around to do so? how do you have a standard API system for scaling those merchant integrations? And that's what the agentic commerce protocol is. It's a way for any e-commerce platform, any business to be able to express their checkout in a way that an AI agent can then safely initiate the transaction.

Starting point is 02:02:39 And we think this is a big unlock for how to scale agenda commerce. The world has already had lots of product feeds. There are many at-scale product feeds, but there isn't yet a way for, a business to programmatically express their checkout in a way that they can control and have it be agent-initiatedable. How does the standard that you built differ from MCP? Is it related? Is it compatible? Are these two separate paths in the tech tree?

Starting point is 02:03:08 Yeah, we think that the Agentic Commerce Protocol is specifically designed to help with initiating agentic checkouts online. And it is dedicated to that type of commerce use case. It shares a lot of the same principles of being open and LOM first as MCP does for generic tool usage. But checkouts are complicated. They have all kinds of weird back and forths and coupons and skews and inventory and payment failures and payment success. You need a dedicated specification. And that's why we're so happy to partner with chat TPT with open ad to both build the standard,

Starting point is 02:03:47 but also have it be the way that they're going to scale their merchants. And so you can get started at agendicconverse.dev that URL happened to be available last week. So I might have bought it. And that's what we went forward with. How does the Apple tax feature in all of this? It seems like I use JetGPD in my phone and Apple usually tries to take a cut if I buy something digital. If I say Amazon physical goods historically have been exempt. But if I'm buying a digital good, do you play nice with that?

Starting point is 02:04:18 Like how do you see that all playing out? Yeah, today's launch is focused on physical goods, and I think there's going to be a variety of ways that these third parties, third party services are able to charge in various ecosystems. But today's launch works on web, on iOS, on Android, and is rolling out to all U.S. chat chabit consumers this morning. Very exciting. Do you think people are underestimating how much of a shift this trend is going to be? because we were explaining before you got on earlier. If I can go on my phone and describe in plain English the exact type of product that I want be served a number of options

Starting point is 02:04:59 and in one click buy it, that's incredibly useful. Even I was giving the example of even browsing Amazon and trying to just find, if I'm trying to find a, the example I gave is like a paper towel holder. This is personal for me because I bought a really cheap direct-to-factual. paper, you know, direct from factory paper towel holder. And I was just like, just give me, you know, it's not the place of skimp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You use it every, you use it multiple times a day, right? But, but I, I've always wanted it almost a layer over

Starting point is 02:05:31 Amazon to just, just products that have existed or from, or from brands that have existed for more than 100 years, right? And this is the kind of thing that you can describe of, I want to buy a paper towel holder, but I want to buy it from a company that's over 100 years old, right? If they've been around for, I think it's like, uh, your, your, um, your, your future purchase as a, I want the legacy provider. It's a perfect combination. I think you're expressing what many of us are all feeling in our lives, which is the modality for discovery has completely changed.

Starting point is 02:06:00 And we expect that commerce to get closer and closer to intent. And it's certainly having tested, having worked on and tested this for the last many, many months, it feels extremely natural to purchase where you are discovering. My garage is full of things I bought from Etsy as we put it over the last months. And this is just the beginning, because with this type of foundational agentic commerce set of APIs and open standards, it's really unlocked to both scale merchants, scale AI agents, scale all types of new consumer and business experiences. And so I think it's very much just the beginning here, but we are, I think, unlocked,

Starting point is 02:06:44 we hope how to take these things from prototype to at-scale production. And I really encourage folks who are watching today to look on CHAPGBT and try to find something fun that you've always wanted to buy that might have been on page 10,000 of your search engine, but might be like right there as the LM really can provide you very personalized recommendations. It's just very fun to on the go buy in a tap in this kind of way. I love it.

Starting point is 02:07:13 Well, thank you so much for. stopping buying. Tons more questions I have, but probably stuff you can't even get into. But we'll have you on again soon to talk more. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Jeff. Great to see you. Jeff. Good to see you off. And in the financial news, Etsy is up 15.83% on the news. It's a $7.42 billion company. Head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-ass investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Not financial advice. Our next guest, yeah, maybe you want to go long.

Starting point is 02:07:44 Do you want to go short? 15%. But a big boost on Etsy products potentially being sold in chat GPT. Well, we have Adam Draper in the stream waiting room. Let's bring him in. Whoa, there he is. Let's go. Let's go. What's happening?

Starting point is 02:08:01 Georgie. John, so excited to talk to you. Let's go. We're excited to have you. Give us a news. What's happening? All right. Well, we raised 87 million.

Starting point is 02:08:14 million dollars. Actually, yeah, let's go. Let's go. Actually, what? Well, it was 87-654-321 because, you know, that's how rockets go off. 8-7, 6, 5, 4, 3-2-1. There we go, boost VC. It's a rocket. Yeah, and we get to continue to do what we're doing. Our investors love our returns, so we just get to keep doing what we're doing for the last 13 years, which is backing great founders on the French. Amazing. You were early to sci-fi investing, or maybe did it before it was so on trend? I was an early investor in Coinbase, a company called Virgin Labs that did Snapchat,

Starting point is 02:09:04 that became Snapchat Spectacles. I've been investing in what any kid would dream of for the last 15 years. years. I just flew a jetpack. No way. No way. Yeah, somebody sent me a video earlier. Maybe it was the same company. Were you flying with Jackson Moses? Is that gravity industries? Is that the company? I was flying. So, okay, this is the coolest thing. I, you know, I read my first Iron Man comic when I was like six. And then about a decade ago, we invested. in Ironman thesis, which ended up investing in gravity. There we go.

Starting point is 02:09:49 And I got to fly a jetpack today. So I think, what's, I heard there was some fundraising news. Yeah, yeah, John's back. Hit that, hit that gong. 87 million. There we go. Adam's the most fired up. You're the most fired up guests.

Starting point is 02:10:12 I think we've ever had. Nobody else is jumping. You're at the standing desk. It's fantastic. I tell people. Thank you guys so much for doing this. You guys are just the greatest cheerleaders and champions of this tech world. We appreciate it. We love, nobody loves technology. I would hate if somebody loved technology more than, more than us. Maybe you do. But break down the jet pack. How does this, like, it's a good example of like a specific portfolio company. How does this go commercial? I think that the promise of venture capital, the hope of venture capital, is that you get to invest in all the dreams that anyone ever had as a 12-year-old, and they end up coming true, and I got to do that with a jet pack. I invested in exactly what my childhood itself would have loved to have invested in, except it was seven years ago, and then they made insane progress to the point where not only one person can do it,

Starting point is 02:11:10 anyone can do it. I just flew down I got to Baker's Field and then I got to fly a jetpack. And so I am. Okay, okay. I love everything about jetpack. How does gravity specifically, how are they looking to

Starting point is 02:11:26 commercialize? You know, what are some of the use cases? Is it going to be the kind of thing that is more initially, you know, consumer? It's just fun to fly a jet pack, so people pay to do it. By the way, one of the things I always noticed when you guys are doing your thing is that your cans pile up.

Starting point is 02:11:44 So I want to make sure it fit in. There we go. You got double-fisting. So we, first off, we invest in all founders who are on the fringe of doing great, incredible things. Gravity specifically, we saw the, I saw a man fly. So he flew in my back parking lot back here in San Mateo. And when someone flies. You got to write him a check.

Starting point is 02:12:10 you write a check right there and so we wrote a check right there seven years later he's built a you know multi-million dollar business and it has two parts to it there's the defense part and the media part and also this training school so that people like i could become pilots jetpack pilots and basically i highly recommend we should go do a we should go it sounds fantastic i've always wanted to have a jetpack in the studio in the ultradome yeah for a really big fundraising what's the what's the what's the What's the defense use case here in your view? Because I can imagine in sort of more controlled environments, this could be a cool way to turn a human into a drone. But at the same time, on the battlefield, I don't know, with a lot of drones, I don't know if I'd want to strap myself in and get into the air, just considering you might be a target. But how do you view the defense opportunity?

Starting point is 02:13:06 It turns out boarding boats, it turns out, is one of the best. defense capability. So being able to go from one boat to another boat. You see that with like the Navy SEALs show up in the little skiff. That was the other demo they did, right? Yeah, that was that. Yeah, that was insane. So gravity, every time I've seen a jetpack, basically the last seven years, it was gravity. It's hilarious. And it's really an innovation and vertical takeoff and landing engines. People didn't believe there was a disbelief that you could build small enough engines that they would be able to lift an individual human off the ground. with enough fuel to live for long enough.

Starting point is 02:13:43 And so this has been a huge innovation. Also, paramedic is a big deal. Like if someone's lost on a mountain, you can just fly up there within a small amount of time and get it. And then the, yeah, dude, I mean, I, I, it was a lifelong dream to fly. I flew. I'm a jet pack racer. Jetpack racer.

Starting point is 02:14:05 I don't know how to say this. I don't know how to say this. just deploy the fund in like the next jetpack stuff yeah like but it could be bio jetpack things it could be jet things just it needs to have jet packs evidently amazing last question what what's the next category that is maybe if jet packs were under hype seven years ago what what are you looking at today uh these founders are coming into my office and they're saying i'm going to make you live 50 years longer. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to just cure all genetic disease. We're going to move from a world of treatment to a world of cures in the healthcare and science

Starting point is 02:14:49 world. So I would say bio is really the thing that I would say. Also, one of the things we do as BoostVC is we actually put on a deep tech demo day with the entire deep tech early stage venture community and it's coming up on Wednesday where you can see some of these bio future forward companies actually a bunch of the demo day companies have actually been on uh tvpn uh does from radiance love him there we go incredible people gravity there we go i expect to see you flying around the floor yeah the of the demo okay we'll go down together we'll do it together love it yeah you need a jetpack into the show the chat is demanding it uh thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you.

Starting point is 02:15:31 Great having you, Adam. Congrats on the new fun. See you soon. Hey, thank you. We're just going to keep backing the founders. Amazing. Incredible. Talk soon.

Starting point is 02:15:38 Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. We puffin. Our next. Tomorrow live in the TB Putsterdam. Can't wait.

Starting point is 02:15:53 But for now, we have James Hawkins in the Restream waiting room from post hog. Postog. Here he is. How you doing? Yeah, very well. Thank you very much. Give us the fundraising. Give us the news, let's amper out what you do. Let's amp it up.

Starting point is 02:16:07 What you got for us? Sure. Well, first of all, I am very excited to announce that pineapple does not belong on pizza. Whoa. Whoa. Shots fired. I love pineapple on pizza. I don't.

Starting point is 02:16:18 I don't. I'm riding with James here. Okay, well, then you can hit the gong because I'll like this guy now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's my mortal enemy. Now, I understand. It's an acquired taste. What inspired that?

Starting point is 02:16:28 What? Timeline debating that, that, that, that's, uh, that's an eternal point of debate, uh, it's fine on it. It's not a debate. It's decided. What about hot dog? Hot, is a hot dog a sandwich? No, I don't think that's true. What if you eat it like this? What if you turn it? 90 degrees. Then it looks like a sandwich. I feel like, I feel like, uh, I'm not America. I have a less strong opinion on this, I think. I think you guys are more. If the dog wore pants, would it wear them with on the two back legs or across all four legs? Wow, you're not straying from the hard questions.

Starting point is 02:17:01 These are the hard questions. I've got one more thing. Please. So I'm very pleased to announce that we have raised our series E. Whoa. So we've got a million, 1.4 billion in Post. Congratulations. Massive.

Starting point is 02:17:16 What unlocked it, walk through the business, what's working, the customers, the problem set, everything. Sure. So Postlog is a very developer-focused set of analytics tools and feature flags and stuff at the moment. We try and help you understand how to build a better product, basically. So we help you understand your customers in lots of different ways,

Starting point is 02:17:36 like errors, analytics. We have 16 products. What's working well? 16 products. Yeah, I think I'm about 10 or 11 that are charged for and the rest in production. That's right.

Starting point is 02:17:49 So yeah, we've been busy bees, building stuff. What's working well? We've got tons of engineers who we have really looked after. We think there's been a big rise in product engineering, engineers who want to decide what to work on. And so we've been able to sign up just an awful lot of them.

Starting point is 02:18:03 I think we have about 240,000 customers across like free and paid. And so we're kind of like heavy product-led growth from engineers just installing our stuff, basically. Some of these tools I imagine would be fertile grounds for hyperscaler competition. What's been the secret to maintaining differentiation against the big cloud. platforms. All the products in one has been the main thing, going very, very wide. Because the way we think of it, there's lots of tools that help you, there are feature flag products, our experimentation products, their analytics tools,

Starting point is 02:18:41 but it's the same customer underneath all of these. And so we kind of felt it's just better. It is more important to our users to have all of their custom data in one spot and lots of things you can do off the back of that than it is to buy like, 15 point solutions, basically. What's your take on the idea of the compound startup versus iterating and adding one product after the other? How focused do you want to be on a new product at one time?

Starting point is 02:19:11 Do you want to orient the entire company around the next product? Or do you want to have, you know, let's just get a bunch of things started. We'll iterate towards greatness and all of them kind of simultaneously. Much more the latter. So we start a couple of products at a time, but we always have a small team that we leave behind on each product. So back in the early days, when we're smaller, we would go, hey, new shiny thing,

Starting point is 02:19:31 everyone would move over. Yep. But then as the existing one got more and more growth, sure, we'd start, we just weren't very responsive to customers and so on. It didn't feel like looking after people properly. So we have tiny little teams, like the average team size of postdocs,

Starting point is 02:19:44 probably three people on each product. It's just like three engineers deciding what to build. We just try and get out of the way. So we're fiercely anti-bureaucracy internally. So yeah, this small team structure has worked great, like very flat, very wide, and a lot of autonomy for engineers. Yeah, when you're thinking about creating a new product, what is what is the bar in terms of turning something from an experiment?

Starting point is 02:20:08 You know, at what point would you, would you launch something and maybe shut it down or if you're launching or by the time you're launching something, are you committed to maintaining it over the long run? I'm curious what kind of the framework is. Sure. Yeah, so we really, we started at the bottom end of the market. So the bar to us launching something's pretty low. like we'll start targeting two-person start-ups kind of doing Y-C, for example.

Starting point is 02:20:30 It's kind of start from the start is a praise you hear a lot internally. In terms of retiring stuff, we haven't had to retire a product at this stage. We've always built kind of products where we're going in with a late mover advantage. We consider it. So we're going in after a lot of the market. This is actually a behavior that we're going to change now with AI in particular because we're looking at figuring out how can we use like this sort of multidimensional data and all these different tools together, which is one of the challenges.

Starting point is 02:20:56 partly why we did this round because we wanted to have the time and space and the ability to kind of go nuts, trying to automate. The way I'd kind of consider it is a bit like if you're trying to understand a painting and you can only see the color blue, like one data type. You'll get a rough idea, but it won't get a totally correct idea of what's happening. And so we kind of think having all the tools and all the data is a bit like having all the colors. But this is something that's new to us and it will take a little bit of time and some confidence. So that's kind of, yeah, it's probably the main driving force behind wanting to raise at this point. last question for me how has AI changed the business over the last few years there's so many

Starting point is 02:21:29 different ways that you can launch AI products you can use AI to speed up product development there's a million different ways but what's been the biggest thing that's actually worked for you it's massively sped up product development and because of so many products at once it's given us a big it's just we already thought that was happening because there's more open source software available and it's just ramped that fully so now kind of we just we've been even have companies quite regularly emailing a smaller start-ups being like, hey, would you consider buying a company? We don't know how to compete with compound approaches in our industry. Like, we've become a feature of a bigger platform, for example. And so I think we got lucky with that

Starting point is 02:22:07 respect. We are targeting engineers and their workflow is entirely changing. And so we're trying to move towards the world where we're generating kind of poor requests for people based on like error data, a session, like video clips of using their products, like their feedback and everything else that we're kind of feeding in. So, yeah, it's a totally dramatic change for us. I think we've gone from, like, here, honestly, to, like, complete excitement about what's going on. That's great. One note. Chat absolutely loves the website. You should look at it, John. It's absolutely stunning. It's probably the best iteration I've seen of, you know, building like a desktop and making a website just like a desktop, right?

Starting point is 02:22:45 Sure, sure. Oh, yeah. This is really good. Absolutely stunning. One question was post a hot company at YC Demo Day, or did it take time to get people to kind of come around to the team and the opportunity? We actually had, I think relative to our batch, we're doing quite well. We had a lot of traction, just free open source usage. We just had an open source project to start off with. But our seed round was a train wreck to raise. It was like March 2020. And so I was like, man, we got this thing done in like three days. And then I was like, I may not live to see the end of this. So, yeah, we made, like, you know,

Starting point is 02:23:25 we've made a bunch of people who put in, like, Randall 5K checks, a bunch of money, which is actually one of the most fun parts, of them honest. So, yeah, the C round was very hard. Later rounds, it kind of got easier. Like, the Series A was, like, Google Ventures, preempted, and we went with it because we, there was so much kind of fear in the market fundraising at that time.

Starting point is 02:23:47 And then the later rounds all got much easier because we just had kind of obvious traction. We're quite an efficient business because we're inbound, and so we haven't really needed money, and that's our first rule of fundraising is do not need to fundraise, but we're not against fundraising, and that served us extremely well later on. But yeah, the start, the first round was the hardest by Miles.

Starting point is 02:24:02 Fantastic. Such an important lesson for anyone out there. It's like if your seed round is brutal, you know, it's not necessarily. It can be an indicator that you're on the totally wrong path. It can be an indicator that people just don't understand exactly the opportunity or just how good the team is. So thank you for coming on and giving the update,

Starting point is 02:24:21 and congrats on the round. Thanks for coming. We'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you, James. Bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool

Starting point is 02:24:29 for building and planning products. You heard it from him. They built a lot of products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. People forget they created modern, they basically created the modern software as a service website. That's true.

Starting point is 02:24:45 That's true. How many thousands of companies have tried to emulate it, Well, up next, we have Eric, the CEO of Modal Labs. He's in the Restream waiting room coming in to the TBPN Ultradone. Welcome to the show. How are you doing Eric? What's happening? Hey, how's it going to be here?

Starting point is 02:24:59 It's great. Great to finally have you. Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off an introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, yeah. So we build infrastructure for AI. And so basically, if you think about a lot of sort of traditional AI, sort of traditional infrastructure, you know, things like Kubernetes and Docker and things

Starting point is 02:25:15 like that, it really doesn't work well for. all these new AI applications, whether that's, you know, generated media or like large language models or things like that. So we basically built a whole new software layer that makes it a lot easier for developers to build applications on top of that. Where does that sit in the stack? Like, are you trying to be the software layer at Stargate at like these massive, massive data centers? Or is there a different customer archetype that you can actually deliver value for at like a smaller scale. How does the market actually buy for Kate?

Starting point is 02:25:49 Yeah, so we focus on slightly smaller companies. Initially, we saw a lot of PNF with startups. But in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of traction also with later stage companies and, you know, public companies and enterprise companies. What's the pricing model for something like this? Yeah, yeah, what's the pricing model for something like this? So it's all usage-based.

Starting point is 02:26:08 Okay. Which means, you know, sort of traditional, basically like a traditional cloud vendor, like we charge per GPU hour, essentially. Sure, sure. And then do you offer, like, abstraction layers on top of this? Do you want to build a platform at some point? Or are you happy vending it into another cloud partner where the customer might not even be aware of you?

Starting point is 02:26:29 How do you sit in the market over the long term? No, we offer a very fat layer of, like, all these software abstraction that focus on engineers writing code. We consider ourselves a high code platform, right? It's meant for engineers who want to write code and, you know, they need a better infrastructure that maybe traditional tools could offer them in terms of scaling up and down, working with GPUs, working with capacitable over the world. Sure. And they want to write code.

Starting point is 02:26:54 What are the, I mean, have you, what's the biggest, like, nightmare story from misconfigured infrastructure or, like, the problem you're solving? Have you seen just, like, millions of dollars go up and smoke? Is it pretty rare? Like, what's the shape of failure in the AI? What are the stakes right now? I don't know if I could recall anything. We're pretty good at, like, catching.

Starting point is 02:27:20 I mean, in a couple of cases, customers have... I don't mean with your software. Yeah, it's more like company, you know, people coming to you, having had issues in the past, figuring this stuff on their own. I would say, like, the biggest thing right now is just, like, people wasting a lot of money on GPUs. Especially, I think, a year or two ago, like, there was just, like, kind of hyped up, like, scarcity of, like, you got to get, like, a thousand GPUs so a lot of companies went out and made massive reservations and now they're sitting on them and like they're underutilized right so they're like you know what can I do with

Starting point is 02:27:49 these yeah is there is there value for those folks just to like sell it back as spot instances for someone else like what our company's actually doing when they wind up a little bit too GPU rich I know there's a couple of other companies I think it's like thrill is one of that it's not like a space where like super focused on like we kind of think that model that's kind of broken, like the idea that companies go out and make a big reservation, we think companies should just pay for is exactly what they use. And so that's something model does really well. We scale up and down, and you only pay for the time the GPUs are actually running. Yeah. And, yep. Yeah, what's your view on the GPU war? Invity is obviously

Starting point is 02:28:28 dominant. AMD has been in the year of the comeback. They're taking feedback from George Hots. They're listening to Dylan Patel. What are, what does the race look like? There's also a lot of A6 companies. There's broadcoms doing stuff. What does the shape of the industry look like in the next couple of years? Where are you kind of, where are you partnering up and like investing for the long term? So I think in the next couple of years, it's going to be all Nvidia. Like our customers only want Nvidia. Invita is like such a massive advantage in terms of this software ecosystem. But I think look a couple of years beyond that, like that's when it starts to get more hazy. I'm personally quite bullish on TPU.

Starting point is 02:29:10 for instance, like Google's product. But of course, I'll say AMD, like you mentioned, and other players. Yeah. Are there other, like, anything that you're looking at in terms of, like, abstracting away some of Kuta's advantages? It just feels like we're in this era of vibe coding. You should be able to take, you know, some sort of model and, like, just port it, but that doesn't seem to be working.

Starting point is 02:29:38 But people are certainly, they have a lot of economic incentive to do that. Are you bullish on any of that kind of like breaking the kuda lock-in? Yes. It's funny because people are like, Kuda is like a moat. It's such an amazing, but like, I don't know, like, for anyone who's like actually try to write Kuda, it like fucking sucks. It's very hard to work with. So I don't know why it, like, it's been so hard for AMD or for other providers to like build a better software later because Kuda is very hard to use. Yeah. So yeah, give it a couple of years. Like I would hope that there's better ways to write these kernels.

Starting point is 02:30:12 Yeah, I just remember the story of, like, Facebook was written in all PHP, they wanted to move to C++, they didn't want to have everyone rewrite everything, so they just wrote a compiler that compiled PHP. It's hard to... Yeah, that's it, right? And so it's like, couldn't we get to a world where you're just writing once and then compiling for any different GPU, like create a new abstraction layer? I don't know how the economic incentives play out.

Starting point is 02:30:34 I haven't really dug into it, but it's an interesting industry. Yeah, it comes down to... Sort of what modulars trying to do in a way. Okay. Yeah, it comes down. It's hard to be. Low, right? Sorry, I didn't mean at it.

Starting point is 02:30:44 Yeah, I was just saying it's hard to be like extremely bullish on coding agents and also believe that Kuda has this like long term hyper durable, you know, moat. There does seem to be some cognitive dissonance there, right? Like they both can't be true. It's like, why can't I run a 30-hour Claude Code prompt at some point or Claude Code in the year 2030 and just like, you know, rewrite this for AMD, don't make mistakes. And it just doesn't. I would hope that's how it plays out.

Starting point is 02:31:10 but who knows. I mean, we might be years away. I generally like your... I've always enjoyed your takes and would love to have you back on some time when we have more time. But congrats on the fundraise. John, did you want to do the honor? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, give us the details.

Starting point is 02:31:25 What's the fundraising news? $87 billion million. $87 billion soon. 87 million series B. Yeah, so Lux is leading... There we go. Existing investors putting in a bunch of money to, yeah, we're a super pumped. Great stuff, Eric.

Starting point is 02:31:47 Thank you for joining and have a great rest of your day. Talk soon. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to Numeral HQ to get started. Well, on that note, I believe we have our first in-person guest today. The day of the week.

Starting point is 02:32:07 From App Lovin. Welcome to the show, Adam. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on down to the TBPN Ultradone. Here we are. Great to have you. Would love to have you kick us off

Starting point is 02:32:23 with an introduction on yourself and the company and just kind of set the table for us. Yeah, totally. We're probably the biggest company in the world that no one actually understands what we do. That's a good title thumbnail for some put-bayable down. I guess it's bullish now if people don't understand what you do, right? Palance, Valentine's.

Starting point is 02:32:37 Yeah, same thing. Let's break it down. So we started the company in 2012, advertising inside mobile games. And really the goal back then hasn't changed to now. We wanted to give advertisers the opportunity to market themselves, but do it on a revenue-based pricing model. So they can come in and say, look, I want to generate $1,000 of revenue by day 30, be able to get me $1,000 of media spend against that so I can break even, make a profit. I'll scale unlimited if I can do that.

Starting point is 02:33:05 And I've been in ads for 20 years. I hated the construct of selling someone to convince them to run advertising. You don't know what works, what doesn't, you try to convince them an audience was there. It's all a bunch of make-believe until you go to top of funnel revenue-based pricing. And so we ended up working with a lot of game developers.

Starting point is 02:33:26 These are companies all over the world, a lot of smaller indie businesses. And when you're working with a customer where the CEO is the founder, and they're on the front lines of marketing, it's a great dynamic because usually they're technical, they want to actually understand the math around marketing. And so we built our business really being inside this niche,

Starting point is 02:33:45 working with these casual mobile gaming developers all over the world. Well, business started growing a ton. We were serving a video advertisement inside their games for other games. And over the decade that we ran up up until going public, this business super lucrative, super successful for our customers.

Starting point is 02:34:03 We helped these game developers really their businesses, but no one had heard of us anywhere. We weren't VC-backed, right? Well, not by desire, I'll say we're one of the biggest misses for Sandhill because we couldn't raise a million over four back in 2012. This was after we launched the product, business was growing like a weed. We were doubling every single month. What was the pushback?

Starting point is 02:34:26 Do people just think, like, oh, Google will take it all? I think I'm a horrible seller. I don't know. I mean, I've worked on the skills over the years, but the pushback was Google will eliminate you. If it's not Google, Facebook will eliminate you. If it's not Facebook, here comes Amazon. So it was, why is this goofy-named company going to be able to do well inside advertising?

Starting point is 02:34:43 Really quickly, you said you've been selling ads for 20 years. 2005 is the start? What's the first ad you sold? We were affiliate marketers back in social, so a couple of us, one of... And that's how the most hardcore marketers started out in affiliate because it's just you eat what you kill. If you can make money in affiliate, you can make money doing anything. It is brutally tough. That's amazing.

Starting point is 02:35:07 And what was the mood in Silicon Valley or the actual games that were the backbone of the launch? Is this the Zinga era? This is the tough part. It's a lot of casual games. The environment we have now is a billion-plus daily active players playing solitaires and puzzles and words. Match three. Yeah, totally puzzles. So if you walk down an aisle of a plane, you'll notice like puzzles on everyone's phone.

Starting point is 02:35:32 Those are the types of people playing. it turns out it's a lot of middle-aged women, it's skews female, it's a really strong audience of people, but a lot of us don't relate to that. So you think mobile gamer, well, shooter games and like a traditional gamer. And so that was always one of the things we had to, there was a challenge in the business is, how can that audience be good for, especially as we get into e-commerce and talk about our launch, for broader brands, because people can realize. Well, they control so much purchase.

Starting point is 02:36:00 I was about to say. It's all the heads of households. We're on the platform. We only have adults. We don't work on any child apps. So you've got adults, head of households, skew female, people with money. These are people on $1,000 phone playing for 45 minutes a day. It's a perfect audience.

Starting point is 02:36:15 People just never realized it until we became more mainstream. Yeah. How do you think about there's this critique going around with OpenAI, doing deals with Oracle, doing deals with NVIDIA, and there's this like circularity to the economy? But then, of course, there's outside demand. People want to use the products. How do you think about circularity within the mobile app? ecosystem where a lot i'm sure you have advertisers who are advertising mobile games and other mobile

Starting point is 02:36:39 games and it feels like oh well like you know is this just all circular when does the actual money come in yeah how have you addressed that throughout the the the history of the company and like where do we stand now i mean again you got to find a purchaser at some point yeah that's circularity right so if we were just advertising mobile games to mobile games that were ad supported yeah yeah at the end of that you have two inside gaming two things you're trying to do Take a user from a game where they're playing X time per day and take them to a game that they're going to be more engaged with than play 2x or 1.5x. You can do that. You create more ad inventory.

Starting point is 02:37:13 So the real growth driver in the category is increased supply. It's not any different than social networking. You get more ads viewed. Then you've got to make more use of the advertising. So as the technologies get more powerful, you can match up the advertiser and the customer together for something that's transactional. So you get them going from a solitaire to Candy Crush. they pay $2,000 a year, you've created transactional value in the middle there. There's a lot more value than where the users started.

Starting point is 02:37:40 Yeah. How did the company actually scale? Like how like meat and potatoes were the first deals? And then I imagine everything's like, you know, full tech platform now. But we're the first advertisers who were on board on the platform kind of like a handshake and a contract. Or how do you actually get inventory? How do you solve a chicken egg problem? You know, in your app at this moment, and we'll give you, you know.

Starting point is 02:38:05 Yeah, how much of, like, doing things that don't scale? There was a ton of wheeling and dealing. Actually, it was cool being in your office because we were a garage made into an office. Yeah. And we had a gong and, like, it was a bunch of one of the guys who runs my business team and now runs growth, slept in the office for the first six months. So we were affiliates, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:23 We were dealers. So you'd go up to the early game developer and just give them a value prop of you can actually buy an install. Back then, there was not even the chance of buying an install. Now I said sell them revenue. You're talking about 13 years ago. Being able to sell them an install on a pricing model was innovative. And so when we went out to the market and pitched the zingas of the world,

Starting point is 02:38:44 instead of just buying ads and not really knowing what happens by install, that in itself was, oh, wow, that's great. And then you paired that with video. The power of the video clip on a mobile device is really understated. 35 seconds of average viewing time on our ads. You can't do anything else. So when you get a brand opportunity to place an ad on a mobile device and the user's not distracted, non-skippable.

Starting point is 02:39:06 Well, it's a mix of skippable and non-skillable, but half the ads, the user, actually, it's a great point. Opt into watching the ad for a currency inside the game. That's up to 60 seconds of viewing time unskippable. You can't do other things. So we live in an ADD-rich environment. This is the most non-ad-D thing anywhere in the world. You've got to watch that advertisement.

Starting point is 02:39:25 Yeah, that's fascinating. How do you think AI is going to change? mobile gaming. I've seen there's these famous ads on Instagram where they show you this like character that's right. I'm sure you've seen these and then people are like, but that's not the real game. It's a pick three underneath. And then I found someone actually built the real game because game development's getting cheaper. It feels like we might be entering like a new. There's a couple companies that have been pitching like vibe coding platforms for games that will, you know, like become their own app store. It feels like we could just be entering like a new primordia or

Starting point is 02:40:00 Cambrian explosion of gaming. How are you thinking about like vibe coded games or more custom software? Obviously they'll all need ads to power this, but how are you thinking about? I mean, short answer to it for me, right? Like we create discovery. So the more content that's out there, the better. So if AI creates an environment where anyone can build a game and we're all creative and most people, he does now today have played games at some point in their life, everyone can write an idea down, create a game. They're going to need discovery on the game. They're going to need modernization on the game. So that's a great opportunity for us as an ad platform. More broadly, our system is predicated on our model actually working. So we always talk about AI as LLMs,

Starting point is 02:40:38 but if you just talk about AI as modern usage in neural nets, recommendation systems are one of the most economically viable use cases for AI today. They power Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they power our system. This is why we always felt like, you know, Zuck, you know, spending however many hundreds of billions. It was very easy to underwrite because you could just get, there's a lot of ways to just get benefit from this infrastructure spend in the core advertising business, right? Totally. I mean, there's a simple function to all these models. It's more data, more complex model, more compute, better output. And if your whole business model is built on an advertising business, that this technology continue to evolve at the pace it is, is fantastic.

Starting point is 02:41:22 Yeah. How do you think about AI on the ad side? everyone's kind of predicting, I mean, there's already probably some tests out there that a lot of what Meta's doing will be just look at your product catalog, look at your inventory, and then generate the video creative, generate the audio, generate the text. How are you thinking about implementing that? Are you already running tests? How have the test gone? This is one of the reasons investors are super excited about advertising platforms like ours. It's the simplistic of you've got a shop, you've got a catalog, create an optimized appearance of that catalog, through a recommendation system. We already do that. The more complex is today people upload a video ad into our platform, not always adapted for the platform. We're new in the marketplace, especially in shopping. So a lot of times they'll bring a 10-second clip from Facebook uploaded to us. Well, if you could have gotten 45 seconds of viewer time, that sucks.

Starting point is 02:42:12 As a brand, that's a total miss. They don't have the resources at every level to go, let us create 100 ads a week for this company now will rebrand as Axon. And we can talk about that in a second, but this Axon advertising platform. They just don't have the resources to create that ad count at the scale of the time that you need into our platform. And so when you can apply LLMs to go, here's a couple cool ads out there, let me create 100 versions of this so we can put it into the system. That'll be a huge uplift and user response to all the brands, products that are being marketed on our platform. Yeah, when you think about, we're very close with the Ridge wallet team.

Starting point is 02:42:51 And so I got to early on in the Ridge days, and I know that they're an app-loven customer, but early on I would just see the effort that Connor, the CMO, it's just this constant treadmill of trying to make more and more creative, never being able to make enough, knowing that the more creative you make,

Starting point is 02:43:06 the more money you'll make, but still just not even having the time in the day. And so thinking about being able to multiply out creative across different user types, different games, being able to update it a lot more rapidly as games develop new features, bring back old users, et cetera. It's wild. I wanted to ask how you're thinking about M&A this year, next year, in the future.

Starting point is 02:43:31 Market cap has grown tremendously, and you guys are now in a position where you could. There's a variety of different platforms out there that have a lot of attention that are maybe under-monetized or at least not monetizing as well. I'm curious if that's at all something you guys think about, opportunity in, you know, gaming is big enough that it makes sense. You're thinking specifically of, like, a Snapchat or a Pinterest or what's platforms? Yeah, or, I mean, TikTok was in the news last week. You guys were, you know, and that felt like a transaction that was more of like a political

Starting point is 02:44:04 transaction than a purely economic deal. Yeah, but I guess the broad question is like vertical integration. Do you want to own games at some point or where media is developed or social media platform or does that just make no sense for you? Well, I mean, like, we bid on TikTok. So the industrial logic of we can monetize inventory better with our ads models than anyone else out there is sound, at least to us. But there's a couple things that can strain us. One, our culture is pretty unique.

Starting point is 02:44:30 We've got very few people doing an exceptional large amount of output. Company is still under 1,000 people. So you just don't tend to see scale like ours of that little headcount. And so putting companies together into that is really tough. The other piece is we're really excited about the organic growth opportunities in front of us. We're at a point now, I mean, I put out a couple months ago that early in the year, we were $11 billion of ad spend on our platform, plus now we've grown a couple quarters, so a bigger number today. And we only work with somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 advertisers on the platform.

Starting point is 02:45:02 We've been completely managed. We haven't opened up the platform. So if you think about that, when Facebook opened up ads manager, they had $5 billion a year of revenue, and we've got more than double that today on a very large platform. We haven't even opened it up. We're going to open up our platform, the Exxon advertising platform, in two days. So once we take the advertiser account from the very low thousands to the tens, hundreds of thousands, and then subsequently millions, we think the opportunity in front of us is many quarters to possibly years.

Starting point is 02:45:32 And so distracting, you know, it would have been cool on TikTok. It's a solid asset, at least from observing from the outside. But the opportunity just immediately with the business is so massive that it, you know, you may as well just focus on what you guys already do. Totally. And with a lean team, we don't have the resources to distract ourselves. So it's full speed ahead. We want to give our solution to all the advertisers in the world. We know that we've made a lot of businesses inside gaming more successful. We want to do that across the board. We've seen it in a very small pilot in e-commerce over the last year.

Starting point is 02:46:07 With a few hundred, like Ridgewallet and others that you said, they're seeing a lot of spend on our platform comparable to what they're getting on meta. and it's on us to execute to get this in front of all the advertisers out there. If we can do that and become another destination like META where there's a ton of scale and it's top of funnel, the bottom funnel, revenue priced, all these businesses around us are going to grow, so we don't want to distract ourselves from that opportunity. How are you rallying the team around Q4?

Starting point is 02:46:33 I'm assuming Axon is timed with the championship season for every retail brand, but like, what is it looking? Is it going to be people sleeping in the office? more. I mean, there's been a bunch of that. It's around the clock right now because we've been closed and managed, right? So opening up an ad platform at our scale is a pretty complex undertaking. You worry about like, I mean, fraud is an obvious case. You don't want to see fraud. You don't want to see scammy ads on your platform. That's the first thing that happens. And like, we're probably arguably the biggest ad platform that's ever opened up

Starting point is 02:47:05 self-service in any sort of form at this moment. And so when you've got that, you got to do a bunch to work building tools and controls to make sure the quality of advertiser and all the checks you have in place are as automated as they possibly can be and as good as it would have been in a human managed environment. So we've got that. You've got user experience. You need to make sure a customer can go live on their own all the way through to being able to pay you. And so we had to build a whole bunch of tools to get this right. We've been doing that for the last year. We've been tuning it with the customers on the platform. So the team is no joke working around the clock right now to get this out the door in a couple days. Yeah, you can't, you don't have the

Starting point is 02:47:44 luxury of missing Q4 if you want to open up an ad, you know, in the ad business. That's the most critical time. How are you thinking about compute infrastructure? I feel like we're seeing meta build these massive clusters and feels like maybe that's because they're going to be generating so many ads or doing so many, so much gen AI that they'll need a ton of compute. They still need a ton of core AI just to do ad matching. Have you had to do on-premise deployments, cloud stuff? How do you think about building out your infrastructure for the long-term and potentially like a very different, just economic dynamic around how compute, like, falls on the income statement? Yeah, I mean, we work with Google Cloud, so it runs through our income

Starting point is 02:48:28 statement. So it's easy for investors to understand because we're not capitalizing the cost. Yep. Because we're so lean, and because we were bootstri, maybe going back to the beginning, we think about every dollar we spend anywhere across the organization as everyone's a founder, you're spending money out of your own pocket. And this holds true with compute as well. I went into my team and said, look, we're going to go spend $5 billion by a bunch of compute. And in our scale, we can't do $100 billion of investment. So let's say $5 billion. We'd be wasting that money, and it would make them uncomfortable. We try to constrain it to trail or maybe be on par with revenue growth so that it becomes a cost of your

Starting point is 02:49:04 future revenue growth, but what does that mean? If our engineers create a more complex model, they could consume more GPUs. If we had unlimited capacity, they just deploy the model. Well, in today's world, if they see more GPU consumption and they go, holy crap, this is fantastic in result, but is going to consume too much GPUs, we just don't have it, they've got to go optimize their code. And you may get like, you get it, okay, maybe we lose one point on accuracy, but the cost all of a sudden goes down 90%. So across the org, we're wired to think about things that way. Optimize and automate and cut costs as much as possible so we can have the best business so we can fund our mission long term. Makes a ton of sense. Partnering with Google makes so much

Starting point is 02:49:43 sense given where they are on nanobanana and where they are on Gemini and like just the cost per performance, even if you go crazy into generating a bunch of ads, it feels like a great partner there. How did the Google will kill you like narrative? It clearly didn't happen, but walk me through the various, it seems like you were getting that criticism of venture capitalists early days. How did that actually play out? Like, how do you sit together in the market of ad buying? Because you do compete, even though you work together on the cloud side. How is that relationship evolved? Like, why did the market play out the way it did? And was anything, were there any decisions where you think, like, we made a really key decision? If you talk to advertisers, let's use

Starting point is 02:50:26 the Ridge Guys as an example again, you want performance and you want to constantly be experimented. and you don't want platform dependency. You don't want, in a perfect world, you would be spending like 10% of your budget here, 10% of your budget here, 10% so that one, as prices fluctuate, because they're all markets, right? You can, your business isn't, you know,

Starting point is 02:50:47 and we saw the businesses that were, you know, in the DDC era that were dependent purely on, you know, a meta and how bad things could get. Totally. Going bankrupt based on, you know, small changes in price. But anyways. Yeah, I mean, Google, Google is sort of a bottom funnel channel for most dollars spent.

Starting point is 02:51:05 If you're selling a wallet, you go to Google, you search for a wallet, which wallet appears there, well, the consumer already knows they want to find a wallet. We were always going to be additive to the Google advertising story, so they did a really good job finding us early and bending on us across multiple business slides. Cool. And it became a really good partnership. If you think about the business model we deploy, it's top of funnel, the bottom of funnel priced on revenue.

Starting point is 02:51:28 Facebook does that. and if Facebook caught everyone's attention for every single ad for every single product in the world where there would be no other market. Facebook would capture all the top funnel attention and Google would be bottom funnel. Turns out not everyone in the world notices an ad on Facebook. So along we come with these really immersive ads,

Starting point is 02:51:46 capture users' attention, and we were able to go partner with a wallet company and sell more wallets. So in a way, when you do it this way, they're getting an arbitrage. They're getting a customer that pays them immediately. They ship the product after the, the fact, and they make a spread on that sale. If they can do that, there's no budgetary

Starting point is 02:52:03 constraint. So we don't have a sales force at all, really, at the company, because we're not going and asking for budget. We're going and saying, look, if you can sell more wallets and make money on us, you'll scale to infinite, as many wallets as you can go get an inventory. And so with that business model, we became additive to these other platforms. I think really that's the only way a small brand or niche company like us was able to have the large-scale success. If you're, if you're advising, I don't know, public company CEO, $100 million in market cap, but they have a platform and they're not monetizing with advertising and they're considering rolling their own versus partnering with you or partnering with someone else. Like, what are the

Starting point is 02:52:41 tradeoffs? We've seen Uber's added a bunch of ads, Netflix added ads. There's a chat jeb is going to have ads soon. What are the different levers that a CEO should think about pulling? Have you done partnerships, how do you think about partnering with like those large-scale new platforms? Yeah, we haven't yet. I think at some point in our narrative, we're going to get to a point where we're going to want to take our demand out. But we don't have access demand. Sure. So few advertisers today. If we got 100,000 advertisers, we'd probably be able to take demand out. Sure. But I think a lot of times people forget, one, the technology is really complex.

Starting point is 02:53:13 You've only had, in terms of a model like ours is scalable, us and then obviously met a very large scale that's been able to execute on this, this discovery type of product price on revenue. know. And so if there's only a couple of cases, it's not trivial. And people over trivialize it a lot. The other thing is the ad format has to be similar to the ad format that we're really good at. Otherwise, it takes a lot of work. And because we've got such an immersive ad format, you don't tend to have that in other places. Now, in television, you do. And that's an area that's been interesting to us. And specifically like streaming or? Anywhere where you can see 15 to 30 second clip. Yeah. So streaming.

Starting point is 02:53:53 is a great, great example, pre-roll video is a good example, but a native ad that someone's scrolling by and probably misses, or a little banner ad, those aren't going to create a lot of intent. So if the ad format isn't going to create intent, that's not a great matchup for us. But it's something we can execute on over time, and I think that'll benefit the publishers, because really these third-party publishers, they shouldn't build their own ad tech for the most part. And there's not another solution out there that's really that focus on them with Google maybe deprioritizing their third-party ad stock for them. Yeah. Yeah. What about Apple? I feel like there was a Rumble years ago about, you know, a developer

Starting point is 02:54:32 kid in SDK for adding ads into mobile games, and it certainly hasn't stopped your growth. So, yeah, how did that play out? Yeah, I mean, they have ads on search. They can monetize their own properties, presumably. I always say, look, if there's more ad inventory and more discovery, the P&L of the businesses and the market swells. So let's say Apple rolls out. a great ads product and you go to Apple Music, you discover a game. Well, you weren't going to discover that game before. So now that developer who will almost always be an arbitrage marketer got a better arbitrage. Their business, their P&L grows. What happens when that happens? Well, they have more money to reinvest in us. They have more money to reinvest in meta.

Starting point is 02:55:08 And so if performance is there, that's fantastic for the ecosystem. If it's non-performant, then the customers are getting ripped off. And these customers in these categories, they don't have the business model or the brand to get ripped off. I had seen a few pitches over the last couple years for businesses that were trying to effectively create App Loven, specifically for LLM-type products. Why or why not? Is that an interesting opportunity? Because I would assume the App Loven for LLM is App Loven. You probably never thought you'd be saying that statement.

Starting point is 02:55:42 The day people started saying, I want to be the app loving of this was when we knew we made it, I guess. Like, LLMs, they don't have a lot of space. So, like, you don't want to interrupt the user experience. You can't alter the output. The referral program you guys were talking about a few minutes ago. Yeah, one thing, that was like a deep, like, if somebody put in like a deep research query somewhere. It's waiting 10 minutes, wait 20 minutes. They're waiting maybe and you could accelerate it.

Starting point is 02:56:05 Show me infomercial. You really sit in front of that. It's veiling. Come on. Yeah, that's a non-viewed ad. Yeah, yeah. That's totally worthless. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:56:13 Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's going to be a lot more referral and embedded into the output and automated transactions, which, again, for us. us is good. If you think about dollars spent, a lot of dollars today go to search when the user already knows what they want. If they go to the LLM and they get an output that's something that they want and they can click purchase, all that's going to happen is those dollars are going to shift around from search to these LLM outputs. And that's good because that's already bottom funnel. The user knows that they want it. And in theory, it's good because it's just

Starting point is 02:56:39 going to be cheaper to the advertiser. So again, if it's effectively cheaper, that wallet company now has more money to go spend on a platform like ours where they're truly getting discovery from the customer. Talk to me about the company culture, the type of person that succeeds. Do you have economists on staff that are understanding the nature of the market? Do you have a lot of data scientists?

Starting point is 02:57:00 Do you expect everyone to be able to think in statistical ways? Yeah, so it's engineering first, for sure. Research science runs the models. Those are typically very intelligent math people alongside they're also engineers. So they can implement their own research. And then on the business team,

Starting point is 02:57:18 most of the business people are math, econ, they know how to do Python, SQL queries. So we're mostly more technical across the board. Now, core advertising business, our business and engineering teams are around 300 to 350. So if you just slimmed it down to what drives are the 98% of the value of the company, it's a very, very small team. I always liked when I listen to Steve Jobs talking about the original Mac team, it's A players like to work with A players, and then they just, despise that like everything dilutes when you go to b and c's yeah and we've got a really cutthroat

Starting point is 02:57:53 ecosystem where you're either an exceptionally strong iC where you can output a ton or you're not going to make it and so we end up churning through a lot of people who can't cut it but the core team that remains loves working with each other because everyone's an a player yeah how how do you think about you know what's uh what's your head count plan look like over the next few years yeah I'm assuming you want to multiply revenue by a lot without adding heads. I mean, look, I'd love a world where we could run with 20 people, but we're probably not getting back to that world. But like, I remember. Good old days.

Starting point is 02:58:28 Yeah, I mean, up until 100, I knew the story and the name and everyone that was at the business. And so we've surpassed that. But being run this lien allows us to maintain a really high quality. So even our go-to-market team on e-commerce, which every investor looks at is a huge opportunity. It's 30 people today. it's really hard to add A players if you maintain a high quality bar and you don't need to go into the state of look we've just got hiring quotas second you do that I think you blow up your culture in your organization

Starting point is 02:58:56 so we're slow and steady now the company's built on automate first hire second and so LLMs let us do a ton most of the coding of the company is done by LLMs now a lot of the business functions are done by LLM so we now are in a world where that culture is perfectly paired with this technology that's evolving so quickly. So we should be able to do more with less. And if we can do that, we're going to be able to scale the revenue

Starting point is 02:59:20 without having to add heads. And then it's nice that the product's also so good it sells itself. Well, thank you so much for coming by the TBPN Ultrodome. Nobody loves ads more than maybe than us than you maybe. Yeah, the chat says because you're a gong respecter,

Starting point is 02:59:36 a gong ally, we have to hit the gong. There we go. There we go. talk about Axon later this week. Excited. And before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about fin.a.I, the number one AI agent for customer service,

Starting point is 02:59:53 number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bakeoffs, number one ranking on G2. And let me also tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI need of CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

Starting point is 03:00:04 We have David Senra live in the TBPN Ultradome. We have a video that we're going to play. Go. Bring him on down. Let's play the video of his newest addition to the collection to the history to the world

Starting point is 03:00:18 of business and podcasting welcome to the show great to see you 24 hours post launch yeah what are we watching here oh it's a drill what is this you have explain this video it's the text

Starting point is 03:00:33 yes yes I played it okay that's the video but do you have the text that Rob put above it what did what did he say he said the right way is the hard way Jerry Seinfeld intro for it yes they bought the Rolodex. This is for your new show. Break it down for us. So this is

Starting point is 03:00:48 why I was excited to partner with Rob Moore and Andrew Huberman on this, because I've been friends with them for like three years. And I know, he said, I gesticulate wildly, so don't break your microphone. So I knew how seriously they take their work. The first time I ever met Rob was in,

Starting point is 03:01:04 they invited me to Malibu to check out their new studio. We talked podcasting for nine straight hours. That's not an exaggeration. We stayed the same restaurant. We sat there for lunch, and then we started talking podcasting and like four hours later the waitress just like we're serving dinner now do you want to stay and we're like yes we had lunch and dinner so um I didn't even know they were doing this they they know that I was like kind of anti intro for a podcast I just like want to get right to it

Starting point is 03:01:27 yeah like we're going to make a bumper for you I was like I don't even know what a bumper is so that's what they call this and it's like I was like it's got to be short we that's that's the oh that's from the video exactly intro video oh it all makes sense now I remember seeing that and I thought oh it's just CGI or something no it's that's CGI that's handmade They bought a drill, they bought a Rolodex, and they printed out a bunch of companies and the founder names of people I've covered on founders. Yep, of course. And then they did all the, like, the editing. And so the whole thing is like the idea behind it was, okay, you turn on Netflix, you hear that sound, right?

Starting point is 03:01:57 Or HBO, you hear that sound. I'm cool with that. I don't want a super long intro. Like, I want a very wealthy audience, and we got to get to the goddamn point. So, yeah, I just love that. It's like an indication of, like, how serious we're taking the new show. No AI. We made it with a drill.

Starting point is 03:02:11 No, I'm a human AI. Yeah, the first episode. dropped Saturday, Sunday? Sunday. They're coming out every other Sunday. Every other Sunday. How's the response been? I'm like wired. I couldn't sleep last night. You couldn't sleep Saturday night too. I saw I saw David, Dave, Dave, I called David yesterday. Even though you have an 8Sleep.com. Yes. Get a pod five, five year warranty through an air street drop. I actually enjoyed your eight sleep ad integrated into the Daniel Act episode. I guess I was I was in solidarity with you last night, David, because I put up a 55.

Starting point is 03:02:44 Thank you, Ralph. See, I'm staying in a friend's house in Malibu right now, and I don't even have my eight sleep. We've got to correct that. But, yeah, it was so funny yesterday. I called David. We're just catching up, and we realized we were, like, 30 seconds on the same road. We're like, 500 feet from each other. So we're like, let's just pull over and hang out. So I got to get the immediate reaction. But, no, it really is, there's, to me, one of the most satisfying things is watching. ultra-talented people do a new thing and just demonstrate the level that they're on. And you and Rob and you have done that.

Starting point is 03:03:23 I appreciate that. Congratulations. On the note of like you got busy people, you got to get right into it. Talk to me about the decision for how you think about the first question. I was listening to Dorcasch over the weekend. He kicks it off with like a pretty quick intro, but he does introduce the guest. My guest is Richard Sutton. He's one of the...

Starting point is 03:03:44 He's very... D'Arcashish is insanely talented. Especially for a young kid. And, you know, who else is a talented podcast? Chris Williamson, a friend of us. Oh, he texts me today. And Chris kicks off with no introduction. He hit a thousand episodes. A thousand episodes?

Starting point is 03:03:58 Came out today with Matthew. Wow. That's amazing. Incredible. What a run. But they do introductions very differently. They do... Chris kicks off with one short, punchy, like, ungoogulable question, basically.

Starting point is 03:04:13 There's no right answer to the question. He'll just say, you know, what is the value of hard work? Or what is your life's goal? And then the person just tease off and it gets you right in the episode. Dorcasch gives you a little bit more of an intro and they go back and forth. And then he hits them with a question. How do you think about opening an episode? Do you like the way you're doing it?

Starting point is 03:04:29 Do you think it'll evolve? We obviously open with one of the most over-the-top openings with your watching TVBN. And it's like this crazy thing that just evolved. How do you think about it? All right. I think the important thing is like I have, I'm not interviewing anybody. Yeah. And so, like, the tagline is, like, conversations with the greatest living founders.

Starting point is 03:04:46 Sure. I have zero energy to interview anybody. I have unlimited energy to have long-form, deep conversations. You guys have been on the receiving ends of this. Like, when we have dinner, it's not like, oh, we're going to talk for 30 minutes. No, we talk for, like, four goddamn hours. And so that's why I think a lot of some people came out and they're like, you're talking too much in the Daniel Luck episode.

Starting point is 03:05:04 It's like, because it's good conversation. I like that. Well, it's important to, I think that your opportunity is to not. be it's tough if you're a podcast and people only watch for the guests yeah it's not a good position to be in right people watch joe rogan there's a cohort of people that watch joe rogan just when they're just when donald trump's on but but a huge amount of people are watching it because joe rogan they're like who is he talking to exactly that that's what we're doing so like i think somebody i saw they did analysis on like 2,000 of joe's episodes and he spoke like

Starting point is 03:05:37 you know 45 or something percent of the time yep it's just like the whole genesis of this And I think I talked about it on the Daniel Eck episode. It's because, you know, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who, again, I think is the best business interviewer in the world. Like, if I'm going to start an interview show and compete with him, like, that's just stupid. Like the main message of founders, the founders podcast is like the importance of differentiation. Yep. So like there's been a million, let's interview, you know, business people shows. I'm not, I'm going to lose that game.

Starting point is 03:06:04 I only want to play a game that I can be the best in the world at. And so what Patrick, you know, we've been really close friends. we're brothers, we talk here every day. We've have a ton, he's in these dinners with me. He's in these conversations, and it happens over and over again. And he's mentioned to me for a few years. He said it before I was on Colossus. He's just like, man, I really think, have you ever thought about doing a show

Starting point is 03:06:24 where you talk to other people, not just you sitting in a room, fucking reading books, and doing the crazy shit that you do? And he's like, I've been around this. Like, no one can have these conversations. And so what really pushed me, and I said it on the Danielic episode was me, him and Daniel had this super intense four-hour dinner. I don't meet with anybody. the first time I met Michael Dell, I flew to Austin, five hours.

Starting point is 03:06:45 We talked for five hours. You think I sat silent? I can't sit silent for anything. And they don't want me to sit silent. The whole point is like you're like this weird like human AI with all this knowledge and they want to like prompt and like get me going. So we get in the car because I'm leaving New York and going back to Greenwich. I'm staying at Patrick's house at night.

Starting point is 03:07:03 And the first thing he says to me when we get in with his driver, he's like you have to start recording these. he's just like I he goes I've known Daniel for four years you got more out of him four hours than I did him four years he goes I talked 2% of time he talked 49% of time you talk 49% of time he's just like

Starting point is 03:07:21 no one can speak to the soul of the founder like you you have to start recording these yeah it's fascinating there's that story that's the whole fucking idea there's no interview it's just like I'm going to talk to the greatest living founders and we're going to have insane conversations that are not predictable yeah there's uh there's that story about Mark Zuckerberg that he has like an extremely high

Starting point is 03:07:37 question to talk ratio He lets other people talk a lot. And that was seen as like, you know, bullish on his ability to like hoover up information. At the same time, in the content world, I feel like there is a natural urge. Like I noticed somebody sent me a short that we didn't post, that someone else posted, of me and Jordi talking to Mark Andresen. And it was clear that it was like Mark had a funny take. And so that was what would get the views. And so we were there kind of as like accoutreement to the main event.

Starting point is 03:08:09 And there's a, like window dressing. Like window dressing. And so there's just like, there is a natural pull in the algorithm for if you're starting an interview show. I should just get someone really, no, I know, that's the point. But I'm saying, I'm saying. No, no, no. No, no.

Starting point is 03:08:26 What I'm saying is that is that if you're just purely view maxing, it's like go get a viral clip machine, point a camera on them and say, go. And then just film. And then say, what's next? What's on your, what's on your mind? And those two things, you have to actively resist the view capture, the algorithm capture. And that's what you're doing. Before, I didn't even know, you know, I don't view Max.

Starting point is 03:08:49 I didn't legitimately, before we did the giant ramp deal for founders, right? I did not know how many people listened to founders. You didn't look at the analytics. That's great. What does I tell you? I don't give a shit. I want the best audience. Yeah, it's the best.

Starting point is 03:09:01 Not the biggest. The reason the ramp deal came about because somebody we cannot name who, if you're elite in tech, you know who this person is. Whatever the opposite of a public figure is, this person is. It's interesting that probably the smartest and best person in tech behind the scenes, like no one knows, like, isn't she invisible? Literally came because she's like, I was at Michael Dell's house. He wouldn't stop talking about your podcast.

Starting point is 03:09:26 He didn't know we were friends. I know 10 to 15 billionaires personally that listen to your show. We have to find a way to work together. That's the genesis of all this. It wasn't how many downloads you get. You have the attention and the trust. of the most elite people in the world. Look at the guest list on the new David Tenor show.

Starting point is 03:09:43 Yeah. It's like David Center by David Center. Yeah, that's hilarious. When you pull it up on Spotify in your car, it says, Daniel, David, David, Senator, David, Senator, David, it said it three times. Are you ready? Are you ready? Somebody in the chat says, hey, David, I saw you at Malibu Country Mart yesterday.

Starting point is 03:09:59 You're quite tall and handsome. Let's hear it. Are you ready to be, are you ready to be a household? Oh, are you ready to be a household. Hold on. This is a lot of chat. You know, Joe? Okay, this happened twice.

Starting point is 03:10:07 So first of like, I land. Because I came out here just for you guys, just so you know. Like, legitimately, I was like, I don't want to, you guys are really important to me. I wanted, like, do this in person. We got to talk about how much has changed since the last month's here. It's here. But, yeah, this has had, it's kind of, I don't like to think about this, because I walk in some, I don't know which case this is.

Starting point is 03:10:27 One happened at the Tesla Supercharger, and another at, I walk into Sun Life and get a smoothie. And, like, I walk in, there's only three people in there, and two guys turn it like, David Senra in their eye, like, what the fuck, bro? And then another guy was charging And you used to only get recognized Without Amman properties Now it's about to be Everywhere

Starting point is 03:10:46 I have I can't tell you Everywhere The new show is going to be the first one Just associate with Imon That's very excited Yeah I shouldn't say anything yet But like we're 99% sure

Starting point is 03:10:57 That this deal is done Your personal brand's already associated With Amman How much variation do you think They'll be in episode length A ton A ton because like again I'm not

Starting point is 03:11:07 there's no formulaic. There's no formula here. So, like, the way I think about it's, like, founders is just the books that give me energy that I'm excited to learn about. And in many cases, there are even books. Like, I think the, the Colossus profiles that Patrick and his team were making are so remarkable.

Starting point is 03:11:22 I didn't know who Thomas Perfetti, Pfefferty is. I read that, the article just came out. Do you guys know about this guy? He's worth $80 billion. Wow. He's 83 years old. I think he owns 80%. This is the AI will not make you rich article?

Starting point is 03:11:35 No. No, no. This is a guy. I think he'd started interactive brokers. Oh, wow, yeah. And he's 80% of it. That's legit. Okay, yeah, he's a Hungarian.

Starting point is 03:11:42 The original size chat. Yeah, he's a, he's a Hungarian immigrant. But you read this profile, I'm like, I couldn't put it down. I called Patrick because midnight, I literally got him on the phone. I was like, these things are incredible. And I was like, okay, I'm so excited that I read this. Even though it's not a book, I have to make an episode. So that's the episode I'm working on right now.

Starting point is 03:11:59 Right, so that's how we had thing for founders. Yeah. David Senra by David Senra by David Senor by David Senor. Hosted. Hosted and produced. Yeah. Why did you pick David Sener. Host the David Senrush.

Starting point is 03:12:07 You could have, you could have hosted anyone. You're leaving a lot of room to slot other hosts in. The funny, easy. The funny, the easiest response was by Christian Kiel. Yeah. I think he used to be an astronist. Yeah, yeah. He's like, where'd you come up with the name?

Starting point is 03:12:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. But with the Founders podcast, I feel like you have, you, you're thinking on episode length, how you divide up the episodes, has changed, and you have a philosophy around it. And you've kind of narrowed the aperture a little bit as you've become more laser-focused on what it takes to deliver a quality episode. Do you think that will happen over time? No, because this is the thing, okay? I am a control freak, right?

Starting point is 03:12:45 As you both know. So, like, Founders is a one-person thing. Sure. Like, to the point where I'm now hand-editing the transcripts. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's, like, outsource it. This is why I wanted to play this thing, because Jerry Seinfeld way,

Starting point is 03:12:56 the hard ways to the right way, right? It's like, I'm complete, I have complete control, it's, like, permissionless. I feel like I'm, like, you know, creating a statue or, like, some kind of art. It's just like a very intense love affair that I have, an irrational love affair I have with that show. This one, now I have a partner.

Starting point is 03:13:13 I don't even mean I have an entire team now, which I don't have a team on founders. What I mean is like there's some, I don't have control over what that person is going to say whether they're going to be interesting or not. And so what we've noticed is every single person that we've recorded with and we have a crazy guest list, they all came from the audience,

Starting point is 03:13:30 founders audience, because that way at least they have like, they know what I'm into, who, like, what I like to talk about. They're more prone to say yes for an unreleased show. But there's wide variance between, like, some, in many cases, like, we've recorded some with incredible people, and they, halfway through, I'm like, oh, they want me to do a Founder's episode for them.

Starting point is 03:13:52 They just want me, literally, they, like, I'll ask them a question. Like, hey, what about this? And then they'll, like, look at me and, like, want me to talk. I mean, that has to be the same case for Joe Rogan. It's like, if you're getting invited to the mothership, you're like, yeah, I want to hear, I want to hang out with Joe Rogan today. Yeah. So, no, I have to be what I'm learning.

Starting point is 03:14:09 And, you know, this is new to me. It's just like loosen up a little bit. Like, obviously the quality stuff has to be good. Like, we have to edit ruthlessly. We're not going to... There's a bunch of different ideas. Most of them came from Daniel Lack that I can talk about, like, one example he gave me. And again, like, the guy is the most powerful person in podcasting.

Starting point is 03:14:27 He's willing to just fucking counsel you. You should take his advice. So he's like, listen, you need to build up the original feed, right? and then maybe a year in, whatever the time frame is, he's like, you need to have a bunch of separate feeds. So he's like, have the two-hour conversation that we had. And then edit it, have another feed where you edit those conversations down to like 30 minutes.

Starting point is 03:14:45 And then he's like, then you need a third feed where it's just, hey, Daniel had 10 fucking clips that were incredible, just that. Isn't that something that he should be solving on the product side? Like when I went to your show, I saw that I could do in Spotify. I watched it on Spotify. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:15:03 respect to Daniac. But I noticed that I could switch between, as the artist intended, as the host and the guest intended. And I also left a comment and I ended up in the comment section. But you could watch video, switch to audio. But then there were also short form video clips that were all linked to the same profile. I didn't have to go find David Senra Shorts. Why will there be different feeds when that's something that they could solve on their

Starting point is 03:15:27 side? That's a really interesting. I don't know. I'd ask them. I'll ask them. I'm not sure. But this was, we were in Stockholm. together. He told me this in January, so a few months. Because the original idea,

Starting point is 03:15:37 I guess I should back up too. The original idea was to launch in April. Because again, like you guys have a deep relationship with RAMP just like I do. And, you know, I had this idea, give credit to Eric and Kareem for the level of trust they put in me where I was like, I want to do this where I have long-form conversations with, starting with the people that are in my audience. And like, I think it'll be good. But like, I think I would love if you guys are percenting sponsor like done like immediately right and the original idea was to launch in april april of next year no this past april but me and daniel couldn't sync schedules and i'm like i'm not launching until yeah he's got to be number one yeah because of the podfather no yeah

Starting point is 03:16:20 it's just like the respect to have form uh that like i just knew like out of every i'm friends with a bunch of people have recorded but not to the level of like i've spent hours and hours talking to him I just knew he's just so wise and he's not, I just knew I could get stuff out of him that, you know, I hadn't seen him talk about anywhere else. And so we recorded that like a few months ago, but it was like the beginning of summer. And then I talked to the head of business at Spotify

Starting point is 03:16:44 and the head of product, and they're both like, you don't launch a show in the summer. And so that's why I got push back to end of September, yeah. Because everybody's like, they're just distracted. You want maximum impact. Yeah. And so we waited for a while. Yeah, I mean, the launch video was...

Starting point is 03:16:58 Do you expect to record and scrap episode? You think that'll be frequent, or do you think that if you bring the right energy, you can always get... The unfair advantage we have is that, like, I do a monologue podcast and maybe better than anybody else in the world. And so, like, if they're going to sit there and just listen to me talk, I can go forever, like, forever. No, I don't think I'll scrap it. I just think you have to be, again, you have to respect the time of the audience. And so, but this is different. So you mentioned the founders, the formula for founders.

Starting point is 03:17:28 It's like, I don't like doing them longer in an hour. so that way you're listening on 1.5. So it's like a 40 year career, 40 hours of reading, right, that you can listen to in 45 minutes. That's the value proper founders. And that will give you a very high-end audience if you just idea after idea after idea. This other one, like, if I can have an interesting

Starting point is 03:17:47 four-hour conversation, then there can be four hours long. I don't think I can. I think I could talk for, we could talk for four hours and you should edit it down to probably like two. You're going to do Gaston Glock's daughter? We should do the first. Do you see here? No.

Starting point is 03:17:58 She's on X. No. Yeah. She took over the company. I believe it's his daughter, or maybe granddaughter. Did you listen to that episode I made up? It's one of my favorites. The three of us could do a 24-hour podcast on business podcasting.

Starting point is 03:18:11 We could do that. It would be boring as hell for the audience. But you guys have invited me before. You want to be here for the whole show. And I was like, I don't think that's a good idea. I can't live stream for three hours. I will get in trouble because I'm on a filter. It's easy.

Starting point is 03:18:22 It's easy. Watch. There's a woman in San Francisco charging $30,000 to name your baby. What do you think? You're using that? Were you using that? No, you shouldn't have a kid if you need somebody else to name it. Good take. See? It's easier than you think.

Starting point is 03:18:35 No, but I will get in trouble. I will literally get canceled because I don't have a filter. I can't do live. Remember, I can edit the shit. I don't like. I think the only thing you do is swear. You're very, you're very, very, very, very tame other than that. You just always divert. You're just always any, you naturally divert to history and talking about. Okay. So that's, that's the key where it's like if you go back to differentiation, right? This is, somebody said the funniest thing where there's like a, um, Red Bull Futurist.

Starting point is 03:19:01 Yeah. Okay, he's like, somebody ripped, literally said, we're going to be the TPBN of Europe. Oh, yeah. And then he quote treated them and, no disrespect to them. I don't know them, but like, he's like, of course, like, the TV in Europe works two days, two days a week. To their credit, they leaned into it, and they were laughing about it,

Starting point is 03:19:17 which I really appreciate it. No, but that's the point. It's just like, God bless your soul. It's just like, then you want to avoid direct comparison. Totally. And I can tell you right now, they haven't asked me for podcast advice, But there's, I can't think of other people in the podcast industry that I'd want to avoid direct comparison than you two. It's like, you're going to lose that because everybody's going to be like, let's compare this to TPBN. What is this thing? What is this? The ultra drum. Go to the wide. Go to the wide. Go to the main, go to the main wide. We're here. We're here. I don't know where the camera should be looking into. There's like fucking 10 of them in here. You don't understand how serious. Someone just copied our last set and we completely changed the set. You don't understand how serious these two guys take it. It's just stupid. It's a great line in zero to one, right?

Starting point is 03:20:00 Where Peter Thiel says, if you're copying Mark Zuckerberg, you're not learning from him. Yeah. You copy, you don't copy the what, you copy the how. Yeah. It drives me insane. So my point is like, I'm not going to start another interview show. I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to have conversations.

Starting point is 03:20:16 Conversation show. No, not even that, but there's other conversation shows like Joe Rogan. What you just said, I can't help myself. Everything I hear, read, anything. It all ties back to the shit that I learned from founders. Yeah. Oh, like the first time I met Michael Dell when I flew the first time. You know, we were talking, we went through Zach Dell's base power.

Starting point is 03:20:35 We're going over and they were showing like me these dashboards, everything else. Within like the first five minutes, I'd made references to like Jim Casey, Fred Smith, Brad Jacobs. This is like, this just comes naturally. So it's like the important thing about podcasting or I think any kind of business has to be like natural to you. So in our private conversations, we pull ideas from Oguvie all the time or anybody. So yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. And so people are like, I liked it, well, you should do this. I don't know what to tell you.

Starting point is 03:21:00 Because it's like, this is just who I am. I can't, I'm not acting. Like, I can only be who I am. Yeah. I think the thing that's so, I think, I think the conversations that, uh, giving people the experience of you being at dinner with Daniel or Ovitz, these people, like, I, feel like incredibly blessed that I get to go to dinner with you and hang out with our friends and get, get the David Center experience.

Starting point is 03:21:27 of like having a normal conversation, but then always, you're always pulling it back and like contextualizing it with history. It's like incredibly addicting. I could just, I could do, you know, go to dinner for six hours because it's still going to just be wildly interesting. But now creating that product, I saw somebody, somebody in the chat was looking earlier. They were looking at the first few guests and they were like, I might need to come back to this podcast later after I've made a few billion. But it's actually the exact opposite of that. It's like, no, just giving this product to something that's completely free. Anybody can just go listen to it. And you get to be, get the experience of being at dinner with you and somebody that's created a $150 billion

Starting point is 03:22:04 company, a $10 billion company. So there's two things on that. So I did this like, my very first viral episode of founders, because I don't, obviously don't try to go viral is when I did that I had dinner with Charlie Munger episode. I remember that. And like, it went so Founders to the top of the charts for all podcasts. The funniest thing about that was that didn't you get some inbound from journalists who were like he didn't want people

Starting point is 03:22:27 to write about it and you got scoops because you were basically reporting on it or something. It was like new information. So again, the reason why people love Munger and people I admire is like they're chaotic, uncontrollable people. I am one of those people. Right? It's like Rob is not going to, Rob Moore

Starting point is 03:22:43 is not going to be like, I'm going to try to box this guy just like there's just fucking no way. So Berkshire was, they're very, like, they don't understand the power of story. They control everything, and Charlie was uncontrollable. And so it was not like I, they knew I was a podcaster. They knew, like, I was going to make a podcast about it. I wasn't going to record anything. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:23:04 And so Berkshire's PR was super mad because they kept, not because of the episode, they actually, the episode was very positive. Yeah, it was amazing. But what they were upset about is then you had all these journalists hitting them up. They're like, I thought... What did you mean by this? I thought Charlie didn't give interviews. This one.

Starting point is 03:23:21 Different takes. Yeah, no, so he's like, he's not, I thought he doesn't give interviews. I'm like, I'm not a journalist. Yeah. I'm an enthusiast. I fucking, this guy's my idol. I have a bust. I have a bronze bust of Charlie Munger in my house.

Starting point is 03:23:33 I'm not a journalist. I'm an enthusiast. Because that's... That's true. That's true. It's true. It's true. And so then I have feedback.

Starting point is 03:23:41 I was like, listen, if Charlie says, delete the episode, I will delete the episode. There you go. But some fucking lady of broken. No, that's not going to happen. Like, I'm very proud of that. Have him call me. Have him called me. Here's my number. And we found out, Charlie didn't give a shit.

Starting point is 03:23:54 Because he doesn't, he didn't give a fuck. He's almost 100 years old. So to answer your question, or to feedback on your comment. So I was doing all these, like, I had dinner with episodes where I'd have dinner. And then I'd summarize in an episode, but you didn't hear anybody else. And so the original idea I had for David Center by David Senator by Hosted David's Center. Is record. There's, there's, Jay-Z is one of the most fascinating people to me.

Starting point is 03:24:15 episode 238 of Founders is his autobiography. And he doesn't ever do podcasts. And he did a podcast that was a title exclusive when he was trying to build up title. And the podcast was fascinating. It's called RAP Radar. They rented, they were in a private dining room, Beverly Hills. So it's the two hosts, and then Jay-Z,

Starting point is 03:24:34 and they just have lunch, right? He's not like chewing. No, I'm like, so you edit that stuff out. And I'm like, that's exactly what I want. Yeah, that's great. Because what you just said. How much would people pay to have dinner with Brad Jacobs or Daniel Eck or Mike Ovitz? I'm going to New York again in like two weeks to have dinner with Ovitz again.

Starting point is 03:24:53 Ovid's become like a crazy friend. Like he texts me all the time. He just booked a guest. I can't tell you who. Let me tell you the funny Ovitz experience I had this this week. He goes, hey, I just had dinner with X. Okay, I'm not good. I can't say, hey.

Starting point is 03:25:05 Elon Musk's son. No. And he goes, he's unbelievable. You should get him for the new show. And I was like, do you think you could help convince him? He goes, that's why I'm fucking texting you. two hours no but give him credit he's like what's your email like the email to the person that can book this for me yeah two hours later yeah date done like he's a he's a shark there we

Starting point is 03:25:26 that's fantastic he's crazy so i do want to say one other thing about being free i um i just retweeted my own tweet there we go because i think this is a pat on the back no because i think this is important what you just said about the fact that it's like a miracle of itself is free and i was feeling this today because like the message i'm getting for the Daniel Ruck episode. And it's like, podcasting is a miracle. You can receive a world-class education

Starting point is 03:25:50 on any subject you want on demand while your eyes are busy for free. And I understand that I've been doing it for almost 10 years. It's still a fucking miracle to me. I still cannot believe that I can listen to these conversations. I can, it just, I never.

Starting point is 03:26:07 I still, I still feel that podcasts were much more important to my education. than my traditional education. I thought back of, I was lucky to discover, like, Tim Ferriss when I was 18, right? And being able to, yeah, you just did the show with Tim. And just like being able to sit on those conversations and learn about different perspectives on life and different ways to live and how to work and how to be healthy.

Starting point is 03:26:36 All these different things were incredibly formative. And I just thought I was never, growing up, I was never in an environment where I was in any of those rooms at all. I had a, you know, there's some people that are that benefited from that, and I just feel like it is the greatest public good. You nailed it. Like, okay, if you went to Harvard or Princeton or Ivy League, like, my parents didn't even fucking graduate high school. That was just never going to be an option. I had to work full time. Like, maybe you get, like, there are a small percentage of people that get world-class education, and they're surrounded by the crazy network. Like, think about, like, the majority of my friends were all at Harvard. They're all, like, Jewish. these these Jewish genius Harvard people they were all at the school at the same time

Starting point is 03:27:18 and then you fast forward they've been out of school for like 15 years and they're all completely like absolutely dominating like I couldn't imagine what that experience would have been like to have that when you were 18 like life changing and they're still doing people together

Starting point is 03:27:30 you go to your friend's house for the weekend and the dad just the conversations at the dinner table right but now those conversations are actually widely accessible to everyone exactly and so like I've learned more I'm looking for this we you know you were one of the first advertisers

Starting point is 03:27:43 was on Founders years ago. And I'm actually looking for this text now, text that you sent me probably like 2023. Oh, way back. Yeah, but you were just like founders is essentially like the only show that I'm listening to these days. Yep. And I want the response though,

Starting point is 03:28:03 because my response was kind of arrogant. Well, no, I tried to buy it should be. I asked if you were open to being acquired, I think. Yeah, and you wanted to buy all. Oh, no. um you're like the only podcast i listened to religiously this is hold on this is going to be funny do you think this is an act so this is back in march 22 2003 is when this is happening okay so you text me only podcast i listen to religiously i go no days off i'm coming for everyone

Starting point is 03:28:28 fact check true the narrator he did come for everyone how do you uh explain your approach to work because i know you my experience you're working around the clock like you're you're you're always on but it doesn't always look like being in front of a you know a computer you know editing an episode or whatever but what what and what have you kind of pulled from the greats to kind of inform your own process so I think like man sometimes so I just did Tim Ferriss and sometimes like I think I said this on Tim Ferriss like I say stuff and I should not be admitting to this. But then every time

Starting point is 03:29:15 I do, people are like, man, I'm so glad you said X, Y, or Z, because I feel that exact same way. What, do you procrastinate sometimes? No, no, no. So, my issue was, I think, for years, episode 22 of Founders, Ed Thorpe, and if you look at the subtitle of that episode, it's like my personal blueprint. And what I

Starting point is 03:29:32 thought was interesting about Ed Thorpe was like, oh, this guy, like, mastered life more than almost anybody ever come across out of the 400 episodes of done. And what I mean by that is, like, he actually was, like, balance. Like, he, you know, he has a, he lived a crazy adventurous life. He, um, invented the system for counting cards and blackjack, built the world's first wearable computer with Claude Shannon, created the world's, uh, first quantitative hedge fund, made more money you could ever

Starting point is 03:29:56 spend. Uh, he, but he, he like took care of his health. He was a good family man. And so that's what I meant. I was like, oh, he's like all well balanced. And I was like, this is my blueprint. And the closest thing I have to like a mentor, I would say, uh, like an explicit mentor and kind of like an older brother is Sam Hinky. And I was on the phone with him recently, I mean recently, it was probably like nine months ago, because I kind of understood this about myself for a while. And I'm like, man, I think I'm fucking lying. Like, I think I'm lying when I say, like, that's my blueprint. Like, I don't like, I don't like, I don't like, I like, I think I'm much more like Enzo Ferrari than I am, like Ed Thorpe. And, you know, I think Sam's point,

Starting point is 03:30:34 he's just like, he's a way better person than I am, like legitimately better human being than I am. and his point is like trying to pull me back in that direction and I just think that's like not going to happen. So the answer to question is like if my eyes are open, then I'm thinking about work and I'm only thinking about work. And it doesn't feel like work because I just have this irrational obsession. Dude, I don't want to talk about this. I literally like, this sounds so, so terrible.

Starting point is 03:30:59 I literally like had tears in my eyes when I woke up yesterday because this is so fucking important to me. And I knew that yesterday was like a, a big turning point in my life, but I woke up from a private message from Daniel and it's like, I read it and like immediately started fucking crying. Like, not like sobbing, but like tears in my eyes because to have somebody that you respect so much,

Starting point is 03:31:21 I'm really proud of you. Like, what you're putting out is excellent, really great. And to have that and also love it the way I do, it's like the reason I said, Inzer Ferrari, because he said, a man dominated by passion such as mine, like can't be cut in half. point was just like he wasn't good at anything else but thinking about Ferrari and so my work thing

Starting point is 03:31:44 is just like I'm infinitely curious and so like today you know I worked out and then every other thing was just reading and like I'm reading two books at the same time I'm working on founders episodes I'm trying to respond to messages about the Daniel episode like I don't know and then I just come over here and like we're friends but this is kind of work too and after this like I'm going to go back and work some more and like that's all I want to do I have a follow-up question but first I'm going to tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising, easy and measurable.

Starting point is 03:32:13 Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only ad-quick combines technology out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I don't mind the ad. I love the ads, and I love how they're weaved in. But if I'm sitting here, it's got to be a ramp out. Okay.

Starting point is 03:32:26 Run it back, run it back. Time is money. Save both. There we go. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. My question, do you think that there is a material difference

Starting point is 03:32:38 It's between retired and live player, active CEO, post-FU money, post-economic, in terms of the shape of an interview, what you get out. If you took a random listener and they had no idea who Daniel Eck and Brad Jacobs and Michael Dell and all these different folks who you're going to interview were. I'm not interviewing them. What? Yeah. Conversing.

Starting point is 03:33:05 Talking to. Do you think that they would be able to tell? This person's still in the arena. This person is post-economic, checked out, no bags. It's not a money thing. It's not a retirement thing. What is it? It's like a personality thing.

Starting point is 03:33:19 Wait till you see the, I cannot believe some of the stuff we got on film that Brad Jacobs does. There we go. Because that guy just can't help himself. He is who he is. And obviously, like, he's a public company. I don't know if he's a CEO. He's definitely chairman.

Starting point is 03:33:34 But a lot of these happen to be public company CEO. So, like, I have to be, you know, they have, they have comms people, and they have all this crazy stuff, and I'm not going to, I'm not intentionally trying to get in trouble with anybody. You know, again, I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist. I just think, hey, you're brilliant. Can I pull something out of you that other people, but I benefit a lot from talking to you? And so it's kind of selfish that I get all these lessons and this inspiration and this education from you.

Starting point is 03:33:55 Are you cool us sitting down and just recording the conversations we have any, anyways? Yeah. And so person like Brad doesn't give a shit. He is 68. He's got the most energy of anybody that's been around. He also has nothing to be in. secure about because he started eight separate billion dollar companies and he's a he wrote he wrote the book

Starting point is 03:34:10 on starting billion dollar companies and he's and he's and I guess you're also not asking for you know like are you bullish on this particular market that you may or may not have bags in that's not relevant I don't we don't talk at all about current affairs sure current events yeah which is like which is why we're beautiful yin and yang because obviously we're focused on what's happening in markets and the news another huge point of differentiation against like a rogan is like you go on Rogan, it's going to be like, well, let's react to the news right now. It's very different.

Starting point is 03:34:37 No, and my point, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not interested. We talked about this. John was like, well, you do a podcast with me. I was like, what are we going to do? He's like, talk about tech news. I'm like, I'm talking about tech news. No, I'm not going to talk about tech news. Would you, uh, Raghav is asking, would you interview David Senra on David

Starting point is 03:34:53 Senra by David Senra hosted by David Senra? Okay. Would you interview yourself? Okay, so the, the reclusive genius that we all know and that we can't name his name, literally called me yesterday. And we had a long conversation about this. And he had a, I can't say, I'll tell you guys off there. But he had a great idea.

Starting point is 03:35:13 And he's like, once we should do this for episode 100. And I'm like, yeah. Well, there's another great idea. Go to getbezzled.com. Your bezel concierge is available. The source of you, any watch on the planet? Seriously any watch. Get a luck.

Starting point is 03:35:25 Last question I have on my side, then we should grab lunch. I'm sorry. Do you think we're exiting the hobbyist era of podcasting? era we had this conversation yesterday it was I mean there was a beautiful there was there was a there was about a a decade and a half where you could

Starting point is 03:35:46 start a podcast and have a you know okay I was doing media part time I was one of the worst yeah but we had this conversation no we didn't you convince me I had this conversation when it came in because it was just obvious we'll talk about this later it's the first fucking video I saw of yours

Starting point is 03:36:04 I was like, this guy, we had to be friends. He's a generational talent. We had a guy stop John while we were at breakfast this morning, had no idea about TBPN, but was obsessed with John's videos. And John's like, I haven't published a video. I published a video and like over a year. Yes, I was, I wouldn't think it was that early, but I came in really years early. So anyways, we and Jory just randomly talk about this because we can't help ourselves.

Starting point is 03:36:29 yesterday when we randomly ran into each other. This is where I like, I don't mean any disrespect to other people. So. We are alive. I know. I have to be very careful. And that's a great place to end.

Starting point is 03:36:44 No, no. Okay, no. There's no way this guy's watching. No, no, no, no. It all gets back. Okay, okay. Right, okay. I was induced into a state of rage.

Starting point is 03:36:56 because I was at a dinner and I was introduced to another podcaster and they mentioned like again they're from like the old school when you can like come in and like it's just different and basically his point was just like yeah there's like I have to figure out like a new there were a lot of people that saw

Starting point is 03:37:16 podcasting is just like a marketing side hobby but you can't say I need like I need to fix my show and I need a different like a new like take on my existing show and also tell me that I'm going to take three months off to do something else that's not the podcast. And I told him, I go, you're going to get fucked up. Like, because what's happening now, this is exactly what I said though, but this is what's happening now is people used to come in and they're like, oh, I'm just going to, like, I can do three other things. Podcasts could be your third, fourth, fifth most important thing in your life. Yeah, it's just 90 minutes

Starting point is 03:37:48 once a week. Yeah, but now you have people that act like founders and entrepreneurs coming in and the conversation we had. It's like, so I think of like, obviously I approach this as if an Enzo Ferrari was doing what I was doing, if a monger was doing what I was doing, if a Steve Jobs was doing or Edwin-Land was doing what I was doing, what would they do? That's exactly how I think. And then I come into this and I'm like, oh, and I knew you guys think like this anyways, but what I was just telling them, because I was like,

Starting point is 03:38:12 where did the rest of it? You had like 15 people last time I was here. The interns went back to college. I'm like, no, they're going to learn more. I go, these two. Or one of our interns didn't go back to college. But I go, this is what I said. I go, these two are going to take this as far as it could possibly go.

Starting point is 03:38:25 there's no way if you have a front row seat to that skip a fucking year of college they're going to take this as far as possible you guys are not at you're not podcasters but you're entrepreneurs and you just realize like this is the product look what it's got your fucking one year anniversary is what four days from now I think so yeah we need to figure out when we're 365 probably but look at what you guys well no we didn't start yeah we didn't start doing daily until like a cornered you at the faena in Miami and started yelling out of love. That's the real that's the real founding date. Yeah. But my point being is like we were just looking at episode one, right, before I came on. And look what you guys are your entrepreneurs. You've iterated tremendously in a year. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 03:39:12 And so yeah, good luck competing with John and Jordy. You're not going to do that. Yeah, it's also, I mean, the function of, you know, John spending years building up, Figuring out how to create great content online. Me starting my career, basically selling ads on the internet. There's a bunch of different. And then, I don't know. It would not have been possible if we hadn't each spent a decade doing what we did prior to.

Starting point is 03:39:38 But then there's also something that is not copyable, which is the chemistry between you two, which is why I was so, like, emphatic about you need to take this more seriously. Not that you weren't, but like, you have, there's just, you can't buy that chemistry. What do you mean chemistry? We're mortal enemies. No. You just play chemistry. Yeah, we're just great actors.

Starting point is 03:39:55 We're here in Hollywood. There's so many times where I remember when I went to casting and they were like, you're going to play this guy. This is a lie. Don't lie to your audience. I was like, oh, he's the character,

Starting point is 03:40:03 a character that's friends with, for this other guy. There's so many, the audience, they're lying. There's so many times when I'm with one and the other one calls the other one. And it's just like, they love each other.

Starting point is 03:40:15 Like, I can't hang out anybody as much as you guys hang out and then still like them. So like, I'm like, nobody. I just, Nobody likes talking about... 225 is not going to bench itself.

Starting point is 03:40:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who else will I get to shoddily spot me while they're on their phone and I'm dying in the sex threat? I've definitely gotten better at spotting. But in the morning when we're working out, it's a couple of times John almost lost his head because I was locked in on the news when he was benching. Dude, the joint workouts are working.

Starting point is 03:40:49 I saw the pictures of you at the beach. Your back's getting... It's getting way wider. Pull-ups are working. You guys are on the juice. No, no juice. I do, I do. You know the secret?

Starting point is 03:40:58 I eat a ham. I use a double smash burger every morning at 8 a.m. There's secrets. Oh, the secrets. This is a lot of fun. Let me tell you about Wander. You want to sing with us?

Starting point is 03:41:10 Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities. Rumi beds, top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacationer, but better, Corey Hayes. I just have to say, I'm so happy for you.

Starting point is 03:41:22 I'm so proud of. Congratulations. I feel lucky to have met you before you became a household name. And nobody in my career has done more for me than you with zero financial incentive. Anything, anything along those lines. So it's, one, I thank you very much. The second part, I think, is really important because at the end of the day, if you're insanely talented, it's like people chase money when you should really be chasing relationships.

Starting point is 03:41:51 like that is all like outside of work I care deeply about the friendships that I build and like I don't purposely you know I talked to cream about this he's like man you're selling all these ads for other podcasters you're doing all sorts of stuff cream from ramp one of the gene maybe the most brilliant mind working in finance today technical mind working in finance today listen to the daniel up episode you'll see how he's similar to how kareem's working style is very similar to daniels and he's like why don't you start like a you know business doing this it's like I don't I do it because I love the people I love podcasters and I love super talented people that take their work very seriously.

Starting point is 03:42:25 And it's like, I like seeing my friends win. And no side hustles. Yeah, and that's another reason. Never side hustle. Well, let's ring the gong for the first episode. Thank you. There we go. Great hit.

Starting point is 03:42:39 Thank you for tuning in, folks. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Thank you. Cheers.

TBPN Live - Claude Sonnet 4.5 Reactions, David Senra Live in The Ultradome | Dylan Field, Adam Foroughi, Mike Krieger, Jeff Weinstein, Adam Draper, James Hawkins, Erik Bernhardsson

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