TBPN Live - Cluely Raises $15M from a16z, $45M Modern Hacienda in the Wild | Steven Sinofsky, Anupam Singh, Miles Moen, Alexander Sen, Bryan Kim, Roy Lee, Dave Fontenot

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

(07:13) - $45M Modern Hacienda in the Wild (18:11) - Timeline (33:42) - Intern Tests Cluely Live (01:22:29) - Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive, led the development of Windows 7 and 8 before joining Andreessen Horowitz as a board partner. In the conversation, he reflects on his career at Microsoft, discusses the impact of antitrust regulations on the company, and shares insights on the evolution of technology, including the rise of AI and its parallels to the internet boom of the 1990s. He also comments on Apple's recent developments, the challenges of recruiting AI talent, and the complexities of regulatory competition among global authorities. (01:59:48) - Anupam Singh, Vice President of AI and Growth Engineering at Roblox, discusses the company's use of artificial intelligence to enhance user experiences. He highlights the implementation of automated chat filters and real-time text translation to promote inclusivity and safety, as well as the development of coding assistants powered by generative AI to streamline content creation for developers. (02:30:24) - Miles Moen, CEO of Dash Fuel, a vertical SaaS company specializing in downstream oil and gas logistics, discusses the company's role in optimizing fuel delivery from producers to end consumers like gas stations and airports. He highlights the industry's reliance on outdated, paper-based systems and explains how Dash Fuel aims to modernize these processes by eliminating duplicate data entry and enhancing profit margins through dynamic optimization of fuel sourcing. Moen also addresses the impact of recent Middle East conflicts on fuel price volatility, noting significant overnight price jumps and the industry's cautious approach to potential supply disruptions. (02:42:26) - Alexander Sen, founder and CEO of Meridian, a next-generation CRM platform for private equity firms, discusses his transition from nearly a decade in private equity at firms like Blackstone, Thoma Bravo, and CVC . He highlights the inefficiencies of outdated CRMs in the industry and explains how Meridian integrates AI to streamline deal sourcing and decision-making processes. (02:53:04) - Bryan Kim, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz specializing in consumer and AI investments, discusses the firm's recent $15 million investment in Clulee, highlighting the company's strong distribution capabilities, innovative product that enhances user interactions through quick information access, and effective conversion of attention into revenue. (03:03:54) - Roy Lee, founder of Cluli, discusses the company's recent $15 million fundraising, emphasizing plans to invest heavily in brain-computer interface development and expand their content creation capabilities. He highlights the importance of viral marketing and the potential of desktop assistants, expressing a vision to revolutionize technology and compete with industry leaders. Lee also shares his ambition to significantly impact the world through innovative products and widespread recognition. (03:20:13) - Dave Fontenot, founder of HF0, a 12-week residency program for repeat founders, shares his journey from creating the world's largest student hackathon, MHacks, to establishing HF0, which combines elements of a monastery and a hackathon to foster deep focus and productivity. He discusses the program's evolution, including its inception in New York, relocation to Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic, and eventual establishment in San Francisco, highlighting the program's success in helping founders achieve significant milestones, such as reaching $3 million in annual recurring revenue by demo day. Fontenot emphasizes the importance of subtracting distractions to allow founders to concentrate on building their life's work, underscoring HF0's commitment to providing a supportive, distraction-free environment for technical founders. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

You're watching TVPN! Today is Friday, June 20th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology. Many people call it the fortress of finance. It's also been known as the capital of capital. That's right. We have a great show for you today.

Folks, there's a whole bunch of news. I think we should run through it a little bit. First off, interest rates aren't going down. We need a moment of silence for interest rates. We want them to be zero. Ideally negative. How low could they go? Can you have negative 200% interest rates? I think that would be the best situation possible. Negative 100% interest rates. If you deposit your money, you lose it all instantly. Negative 100% interest rates. Keep it in cash? Just invest it or lose it.

Yes. You have to go long. You have to go long. You always have to be 100% allocated. You have to go long, risk on assets. You have to be risk on, or else the money just evaporates immediately. Yeah.

I guess that kind of happens if you're in an inflation environment. Anyway, the Fed's Powell maintained his caution about interest rate levels as the central bank continues to monitor the effects of Trump's tariffs on the economy so no movement the Fed is waiting for dust to settle on tariff turmoil and the Bank of England is doing the same thing it left its key interest rate unchanged mirroring the Fed's decision a day earlier so they're really copying off of Powell's homework

looking over oh he's not cutting interest rates we won't cut interest rates either. In other news, Microsoft is planning to lay off several thousand employees in the next few weeks. This is not the same story that happened back in May. We'll dive into this a little bit later. But they're ramping up the cuts, which is obviously kicking into gear

with the AI and efficiency push. There's a whole bunch of different narratives that we'll try and untangle. Also, a firm is starting to sell consumer loans from their Buy Now, Pay Later program to larger investment firms like Prudential. So Prudential is buying $500 million of these packaged loans from a firm.

So interesting there. And then in other news, Social Security could become unable to pay full retirement and disability benefits in 2034, a year earlier than previously reported that, I don't even know why that's news, it doesn't matter, AGI is coming in just a few years and none of this will matter. Also, Trump gave TikTok another 90-day reprieve.

Not again. Boo! Follow us on TikTok if you're on TikTok for some reason. We are trying to grow on that platform because you gotta hedge and we gotta be everywhere. Well, we just don't think we'll be able to make a good case for taking it over if we have zero presence there. Exactly, we have to understand, know thy enemy.

Yeah. I got some insight from our FinTech correspondent Oh, yeah, and Frank over at lights speed venture partners He flagged that Chris Waller a member of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States was on CNBC today It was unscheduled. It's pretty uncharacteristic, but he came out and was basically signaling that they're gonna drop rates Most likely in July, you know the next cycle and this is news for venture capitalists that told you this but he came out and was basically signaling that they're gonna drop rates, most likely in July, you know, the next cycle. And this is news from a venture capitalist

that told you this. A venture capitalist is saying that rates are gonna drop. Yes, and we'd love to hear that. Yeah, amazing. We'd love to hear that. But yeah, this apparently went out this morning. Very interesting. And not super traditional to break ranks like that, the biggest news that obviously everyone is tracking is meta. We got to cover this You know, everyone's been focused on meta the story of course is about

Andrew Bosworth's 45 million dollar house. So which let's Hit the mansion section Which we have we have a signed copy of by the way because the photographer who has shot for the Mansion section was in the studio today, and we got a signature signature on the mansion section We need a close-up. Can I put on the printer can put it on the printer can? Signed copy that does that work priceless there you go Signed by Mark and the other thing we have going on today This sort of the elephant in the room is that we got a new intern cam going So let's take it over to Tyler. How you doing over there? What's up guys in the back of the Maybach?

It's pretty chill back here. Yeah a little desk set up. Yeah got Wi-Fi And so today the the big news that we're having him dig into is clearly yep, they are okay, something happening. Something might happen today. But we got some flack for talking to Roy and not actually using the app. We're still above using the app, but we will let our intern use the app. It's more that we don't have time. Yes, too're too busy podcasting, but Tyler has time. Many people are starting to call after his Windsurf review. People are starting to call him the MKBHD

of enterprise software. Yeah, but people haven't said that. And so, yeah, today he's gonna be trying out Cluely. We're gonna be helping you to see how easily he can cheat on some hard-hitting questions that we're gonna be asking him So so state of affairs Tyler, where are we on the clueless install so far? Have you paid for it? What's the experience been like so far? Yeah, I mean I'm ready to go Oh, whatever I I played around with it for maybe like two minutes just to make sure it's working

Okay, so I want to get my live reaction when we start. OK. Well, spin it up. Pay for it. Yes. Let's get on the top tier. And we'll check back in a little bit. Yeah, we're going to be peppering you with questions that only Clueli could answer. Yep. What's the population of Iran?

Go. 89 million. 82? Wait, I don't have it running right now. You got to have it running. now. You gotta have it running You failed you failed you failed the first test well get it get it fixed and we'll circle back in a bit Get it to get it together guess a question guess a number between 150 randomly 27

Okay, so anyway. I do want to cover the story a 45 million dollar home that blends into the California landscape Let's read from this after building a modern home in San Mateo, California Anyway, I do want to cover the story. A $45 million home that blends into the California landscape. Let's read from this. After building a modern home in San Mateo, California, April and Andrew Bosworth, Bos, made a major architectural pivot when they decided to build a gateway-inspired. Getaway.

A getaway. Inspired by a trip through South America, the couple built a rustic 12,000 square foot hacienda that nestles into the landscape. The vacation home, which they call Estancia Madera. Estancia Madera. That's a great name. You gotta name your house. It's like, you know you've made it

when you have a name for your house. When you're in state as a name. Yes, it's great. Is in the Santa Lucia Preserve, a former working cattle ranch that is now a gated community between California's Carmel Valley and Carmel by the Sea. While a large portion of the 20,000-acre preserves rolling meadows and hills is a conservation area, the community also has almost 300 home sites and amenities like a golf course, clubhouse, and guest lodging. It is where the couple

got married in 2012 and purchased 65 acres the following year. That's amazing. It's long been a dream of ours to build on this piece of land, Boz says, but we had a lot of things to do, our jobs, building our family, building our house in San Mateo. So we just let it sit, but we would go down to the preserve whenever we could. That's so cool. The preserve is about a two-hour drive from San Mateo where their two children go to school. It is also close to two of Metta's campuses where Bob's 43 is the chief technology officer.

He joined Facebook in 2006, two years after graduating from Harvard. Wow, he's a lifer, what a badass. April 46 was a physical therapist before the children were born. And then we're flipping over to other Metta news and we'll go back to this. Metta apparently tried to buy Ilya Suttskuber's company

for $32 billion. Oh, we should definitely be ringing the gong for Boz's $45 million home. That makes a ton of sense. There you go. I'll do the honors. Clean hit, clean hit. Anyways, as it was reported yesterday,

this was sort of rolling series of scoops. Meta tried to buy safe super intelligence, Ilya's $32 billion AI startup, but ended up hiring its CEO instead. So went for an aqua hire, and then just basically said, we'll just take DG, the CEO. Apparently, allegedly, the price that had been offered or thrown around was $32 billion, which was their last valuation, which makes sense. It's a lot. It's pricey. But yeah, I mean, it's the current pref price, right?

Isn't that the current preferred price? Yeah. I mean, that's the valuation of the company. And so- Well, the preferred would have gotten a 1x either way Right like they would have just gotten their money back. Oh, really? Yeah, right That's right. It wouldn't have met even if they'd sold for ten billion dollars. Yeah, you know mattered but

Swicks came in here and said Last I'd be mistaken for a hype beast I believe that Ilya saying no to Zuck was a mistake understandable given the open AI history But still a mistake. And he's posting a screenshot here. He probably should have said yes, TBH. Why do you say that? SSI alone, not a threat.

Meta alone, not a threat. SSI plus meta, okay, we're cooking. We're cooking. And whoever he's texting with says, both would have been my top bet immediately. If you put them together properly, they have such a massive advantage in terms of just scale and also talent.

It's like, yeah, it's like the perfect blend of what Google does well versus also what OpenAI does well. At the same time, Ilya, I don't know this exactly, but guessing he's already a BNR, and at that point, he's always cared so much about the mission. The idea of SSI going to Metata where they would inevitably be working on things like ads and entertainment

And companionship and these things that are important. Yeah, but on a different path potentially than you know true Superintelligence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean this is like the George hot steak about Like imagine the future where it's not just you know some you know Some regression deciding okay You're this age and you own this car So we're gonna recommend this ad to you But it's you know super intelligence targeting the perfect product to you constantly it could feel a little targeting the perfect product to you constantly. It could feel a little dystopian.

It could feel like it might drive you to just constantly be consuming endless slop all day long. It can feel like a pretty dystopian outcome, but I've always felt that Zuck is someone who is also aware of that and fighting against that and has kids and there's a lot of things that white pill me about Zuck's approach to building meta where it seems like he doesn't want

to be the person who builds a really like negative service that's causing a lot of strife or problems. Like problems will inevitably crop up when you have developed new technology. At that level of scale. Yeah, it's bound to happen but he's always actually, he's not fighting to make the problems worse. He's fighting to mitigate the problems.

And so, I don't know, there is a good ending where the AI is tracking you constantly and trying to recommend advertising, but also trying to make your life better so you can contribute more to the economy and ultimately buy more expensive things, as opposed to just getting in a downward spiral and kind of dropping out of society.

That's clearly not a win for like long term of the company if you are indexed on the global economy essentially. Anyway, back to Boz and his beautiful house. The experience of building a modern primary house which they finished in 2017, helped them figure out what they wanted and needed from a second residence, which they used for weekend getaways, school breaks what they wanted and needed from a second residence,

which they used for weekend getaways, school breaks and holiday gatherings. First was access to nature. They used the preserved trails for hiking and horseback riding. The family spent six months of the pandemic in a smaller house in the preserve that they bought to use during their house construction.

Every morning before telecommuting to work, have you seen Boz's telecommuting setup? He has a recliner chair with a VR headset and iPad. He has the ultimate. So he's working from home. Yeah, he's been working from home during the pandemic. He got really, really into it. So he had a teleprompter with him.

He probably had the best setup in the entire world. Yeah, exactly. But it wasn't just a money is no object setup. It was this is what you'd expect from the CTO of a hyperscaler. He's clearly, takes it seriously, and he didn't just say, get me the most expensive thing, he clearly put together all the best products

and designed something that was unique. It was pretty cool. So he'd take his kids out and go exploring, Baz says, it's one of the things we love about the preserve, your default behavior is to go outside. Beautiful. There's some great photos in here. Absolutely.

Other priorities were to design a house that was an architectural fit with its surroundings and to scale the house, to work for large family gatherings, but also to be cozy when just April and Boz are there. That is a challenge, right? You have these massive, some people wind up with the entertaining house and then the little house that they actually live in, because at a certain scale,

you see the biggest house in LA, the One, do you see this? Where it had a 500 person nightclub in it and it's like, you can't just go there and you can't just go to your personal nightclub and have a few friends in there and not be like, this is weird. Right? Or they have a, I think it has like a,

I think it's like a hundred car garage there, 50 car garage or something like you pull in one car. Didn't that house ultimately end up selling for like 50%? Fashion Nova founder bought it. And yes, it sold at a massive discount. They were trying to get half a billion dollars, which would have been a record. And I think it sold for still in the hundreds

of millions of dollars. And it's over a hundred thousand square feet. Fantastic building. Because of pandemic related supply chain delays and labor shortages, the house took six years to build, design and finish. The end result is a main house, which was finished in 2024 plus a pool cabana,

guest cottage and horse stables. Oh, let's play some horse noises. We love it. The horses are absolutely thrilled. The Bosworths. I mean, can you imagine being a horse that gets to live and experience life on this property? It sounds fantastic.

It sounds incredible. Yeah. The Bosworths spent about $45 million on the entire project, including the land construction, landscaping, art and design. The design was heavily influenced by the architecture the couple saw in South America. We were traveling through Argentina and Chile

and saw lots of estancias, these grand estates, which were very similar to California ranches. They're sprawling and all the rooms have access to the outdoors, often on more than one side. The Bosworths hired architect Richard Beard, founder of San Francisco-based Richard Beard Architects, who had designed several other homes in the area that the couple admired. They really wanted to do something timeless, Beard says who had designed several other homes in the area that the couple admired.

They really wanted to do something timeless, Beard says. The house will age well because the materials we used reflect the palette of the land itself. Even if it's new. Yeah, it really blends in so perfectly to the landscape. Yeah. Even in its new state, it doesn't jump out from its surroundings.

In the style of both Estanas and, estancias, and in California, early Californian ranches and villas, Beard used stone, wood, and tile to harmonize with the landscape. Beard organized the house around a manicured main courtyard with smaller yards for a car park and pool pavilion. The guest rooms and kid rooms are arranged around the courtyard so the main living area of the house,

including the primary bedroom, can feel like one smaller house. There's a sequence of going from a wide open space to a more intimate one. Once the architectural drawings were underway, the couple brought in interior designer Jay Jeffers, good name, who worked with them on their San Mateo house. One of his first finds, with the help of a rug dealer,

was the large late 19th century or shock rug in the living room of the great room. Normally for a room of this size, we would have a rug custom made, but I just felt like this was a different kind of house. An estancia would never have a new rug, Jeffer says, adding that the rug's jewel tones over a base of golden brown

sparked the project's color palette. They built the entire house's color palette around this rug, it's awesome. Incredible. Just like, yeah, the rug really ties the room together. That great room, which was inspired by the gathering spaces in Estancias and the historic lodges of the national parks

contains kitchen, living, and dining spaces with a long porch running alongside that has outdoor seating and dining areas. In 2024, at their first Thanksgiving in the house, the room easily accommodated their 20 guests. Everybody hung out in that space, April says. It was exactly as we envisioned. People were cooking, people were playing games

at the dining table, and some people were just talking on the couches. The couple relied on Jeffers vision to create comfortable spaces. Our guidance to him was that we like to have color and interesting combinations of things. If you look at the house, yeah, it looks like, even though it's already brand new,

it looks very like lived in and very approachable. It's pretty amazing. Anyway, we have some massive breaking trade deal news, some personnel news. We haven't done a personnel news section in a while, but Derek Thompson is leaving the Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving to Substack. Congratulations to Derek Thompson.

You gotta wonder. Teaming up with Chris Bast over at Substack. You gotta wonder, did Substack, you know, did they give him an advance, something like that? You don't know. We'll see. But well, he's starting a new business. Let's hope he's on ramp.

Ramp.com, time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Derek, you gotta do it. You're gonna have expenses. You're a businessman now. You're a businessman now. Exactly.

You are a business man. You need to be on ramp, Derek. We're getting Derek on the show next week. We're gonna be pitching him ramp directly. That's right. He thinks he's coming on to talk about abundance. Frontier of science and technology. How about an abundance of-

We're gonna bring on a ramp, SDR, maybe even Sam Buck himself. That'd be amazing. And we're gonna give him the full pitch live. How about an abundance of artificial intelligence in your CFO's software suite? The CFO suite. How about an abundance of enterprise SaaS? That's right. Derek says

today I'm leaving the Atlantic after almost 17 years of moving my writing. I'm taking my writing to Substack. Yeah moving my talents to South Beach. This is LeBron level moves in the industry. He says it would be convenient for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement to have a dramatic exit story, a fight, a a grievance a shouting match with an editor That ended with me hurling a bunch of leather back the row volumes across the open plan office That is not the case here I love the Atlantic and I'll remain a contributing writer here

But after almost two decades at one publication I wanted to write for myself The things I've published that I'm most proud of whether it was the original abundance agenda essay or my piece on workism Is that like celebrating workaholism? Is that the trend? Yeah, I think he was probably very pro-work. Pro-work. Yeah. Merged from a very personal expression of frustration. No critiques whatsoever.

Yeah, maybe he's like, we need a culture of work. So right here you can see he's saying like, there's no dramatic exit story, like I love the Atlantic. And what we're not seeing is like in the offices of the Atlantic like they're burning his jersey right now. Like they are upset. This is major major news over there.

And this is personal. It's personal. It's personal. It goes deeper. They just pay chaps. The editors are gonna take this one personal. And some time spent in the CMS. He says I wanna know what my thinking and writing is like

if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life. That's what brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. I'm excited to join their community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember.

Derek Thompson. Love it. The Thompsons are really kind of dominating. Yeah, the online writing. Ben Thompsons, the Derek Thompsons. When did you get related? Yeah, maybe we could do a roll up of Thompsons. Yeah, you could call it like Thomson Reuters.

Something like that. Yeah. The newsletter will have three main pillars. Abundance, the frontier of science and technology, GLP-1's AI, biotech, and Energy Breakthroughs, covered in a way that's both curious and skeptical, and three, the anti-social century and the social crises of anxiety and aloneness.

And Emily Sundberg has some quick analysis here. She says, friends who don't work remotely close to the media industry are texting me about Derek Thompson's move to Substack. Media is turning into sports and entertaining industry that revolves around exciting controversial characters in their teams and everyone has favorite players. Yeah, I mean, Substack's out on the fundraising trail

right now, this could be the thing that puts them in the centacorn category. Well, they're, oh yeah, 100 billion you're saying? I mean, that would be a steal in my mind. I would say this is the move that gets Masa on the phone. Yeah. It's gonna be a Stargate level deal. I can see it, John.

I'm hoping, I'm pulling for that. So Emily says in Feed Me This Morning, the biggest news of the day in my household, Derek Thompson, who is hot off the success of his new book abundance is leaving the Atlantic after 16 years and bringing his writings sub stack Yesterday New York magazine is Charlotte Klein reported on the Atlantic's hiring spree and that 300k salaries some writers were making a friend in one of my group chats said that that it was funny that 300k was still considered the ceiling for writers. Just a few days ago, it was reported that Substack is churning out millionaires.

You know what else is funny? Friends who don't work remotely close to the media industry are texting me about the Derek Thompson news. Media is turning into sports, which I just covered. We're all walking around with an inbox full of our favorite players. If you're a media operator, you should not be taking a Summer Friday today.

Calling them out. You should be having an emergency meeting about talent retention when signing with Substack is always an option. One retention strategy is obviously having insurance and benefits, which still beats Substack in some ways. Another is to let writers play in new formats like newsletters and video.

So I don't think this has been happening as much recently, but it was being reported in the last few years that Substack would actually give writers in advance and basically say like, we're gonna give you 500K. Maxed out contract. Maxed out contract. You're gonna pay that back over time as a revenue share, but it'll help you kind of like get on your feet

and really get going. So exciting to follow. As a revenue share, but it'll help you kind of like get on your feet. They really get going so Exciting to follow Should we see does he already have paid subs up he better it would be it would be a total miss How is the brand design looking because I have some more recommendations for Derek, you know If he's designing a logo for his new sub stack should be using figma Go to figma comm Derek think bigger build faster figma helps design and development teams build great products together You're gonna need a designer you're gonna need to design some graphs charts all sorts of things for yourself So things how can you visualize abundance without an abundance of design tools?

That's right fingertips get figma get into figma Derek this we are calling you out without an abundance of design tools at your fingertips. Get into Figma, Derek. This, we are calling you out. He does have a paid plan up and running, which is smart. He's got his annual plan. He's got his super fan tier where you can just pick the number you wanna do. So if you're truly a Derek Thompson super fan, go in there.

You can create a plan that's $300,000 a year. Come back and work for me. And if you're maybe like a foreign intelligence agency You can create a plan that's $300,000 a year. Come back and work for me. And if you're maybe like a foreign intelligence agency that wants to gain leverage over Derek, you could go out there. I don't think that works though. You could.

No strings attached. No, yeah, sure, no strings attached, but you could sign up, create a million dollar plan. Create a million dollar plan and just say like, just implicitly. Hey, I noticed you writing about this topic. I think you really got it wrong I'm considering unsubscribing. I'm considering

Yeah, yeah, I know you're just getting off the ground. It would be a real shame I mean as someone who loves technological abundance I should sign up for that plan and if he ever stops posting that abundance and starts going into hey Hey, actually, I think scarcity return. I think scarcity is the new thing that we should be talking about I have my finger on my wall on scribe. Yeah to Mark, hey, hey, actually I think scarcity is good. I think scarcity is the new thing that we should be talking about. Say I have my finger on the unsubscribe button. Yeah. Lots of good stuff.

Anyways, moving on, we had. One more ad for Derek. If you're gonna drop merch and you're gonna sell it, you're gonna need to pay sales tax, get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Okay, we can move on from our pitching to Derek.

We have so much more opportunity. We have so much SaaS to get Derek set up with. I'm so happy that he's a businessman now. Yes, it's amazing. New clients, we need more entrepreneurship so we can sell more SaaS. It really is, you know, the legacy media dying, all their best talent, becoming business people. Yes.

It's so good for the SaaS industrial complex. Cannot be understated enough. It's fantastic. Cannot be overstated. Sam G says, I always love looking at founders crushing it to see and see if you can spot it on their resume. Edwin, who bootstrapped surge to $1 billion in revenue in five years, looks like he can't hold the job down. And this is, of course, Edwin, who westrapped Surge to one billion in revenue in five years, looks like he can't hold the job down.

And this is, of course, Edwin, who we covered on the show yesterday. He was at Twitter for two years, Core Science at Google for one year, Data Science at Dropbox for a year, and then he was a research scientist at Facebook for a year, and then he, of course scientist at Facebook for a year and then he of course built surge AI Which was is or I guess was a scale AI competitor to a billion dollar revenue run rate

Allegedly bootstrapped I did see some people in the timeline yesterday saying that he did have angels But then there were some people that were saying like well did your safe convert? Totally possible yeah, that was like yeah, you, did your safe convert? Because that could happen. Shots fired. Totally possible. Yeah. That was like, yeah, you've already raised some saves. But are you participating in the upside fully? There's always a question.

But I'm sure they're going to do quite well on the back of this business, especially with more of the foundation labs leaning away. Potentially, we've been seeing some before. Yeah, somebody was throwing out that there was like two billion dollars in demand that's now kind of up for grabs. So Handshake is going after it.

Companies like Surge I'm sure are, Labelbox, there's a bunch of them. So Ali Debeau, a friend of the show says, "'Welcome to the roaring 20s. "'Technology brother summer. "'GPU credits are countless., AI slop is skyrocketing, Aura is radiating, your memories are in Swish albums. That's how you say it, right?

That's her company. That's her company, I know, but I didn't wanna mispronounce it. The American Dream is back, drinking is on the decline, TBPN is the national radio. Thank you, Ali. We appreciate the shout out.

The only one that got tagged, she didn't even tag her own company. Wow. Crazy. We're honored. We're honored. Anna says the most important trend of the next decade, the average 21 year old Silicon Valley founder

is no longer driven by greed, Ellison, or idealism, jobs. They're driven by fame. It is too gauche to become an influencer, so being a startup founder is the best proxy to status. Clear shots at our guest today. At our guest today. Firing shots.

Have we announced our guest today yet? Who we're having on? I don't think so. We probably should. Should we? I don't know. I mean, we're waiting a second, but I would say like this is.

Is the breaking news printer ready to go? It is a new era that we're in that young founders like Gustas de Rico can become micro celebrities by building hard tech companies or any type of company really. But at the same time, it ultimately ends up being a good strategy

if you wanna recruit, raise money, et cetera. Just being a founder was extremely low status 10 years ago. It was like the classic example. You were living in the tenderloin on like $200 a month. Yeah, basically. And it was not glamorous. I had negative net worth. I was $5,000 in debt living on a mattress.

And, but now that's like glorified. People take pictures of the, no. People take pictures of the mattress on the floor and they're like, I'm just like Steve Jobs or whatever. Meanwhile they have five million dollars in seed funding in the bank. It's kind of stolen value. Yeah, yeah, there's a little bit of stolen value,

a little bit of larp there. But yeah, I mean, there was a bit of like an industrial complex that created the new high status around the earlier stage founder. Because it used to be, yes, it was high status to be like Mark Zuckerberg after the company IPO'd, but before you IPO'd, people would be asking you, like, what are you doing?

Like, why aren't you working at one of the big three consulting firms? Like, you should be at McKinsey, Bain, BCG. You should be at an investment bank. You should be in med school or law school. And now, just being a founder, even no matter what the stage, even if you're pre-product market fit, pre-revenue,

is like high status. And so there are some folks who flock to it for those reasons, and that's probably the wrong reason. But it is odd because you can be, I mean, the unsaid part here is that she's alleging that Larry Ellison is driven by greed. I don't know how true that is, but it's clearly worked. It's clearly worked.

Like he's created a great company and he's been successful. And then Jobs is driven by idealism and it worked. And so the question is like, can you be driven by fame? And can it work? Like, I don't know, we're about to find out. Like it feels like no, but who knows? It's not fun to be famous for being a loser.

So if you have early fame or attention, you have to convert that into success. Otherwise, you know, you won't be taken seriously on a long enough time horizon. Yeah, it hasn't really happened before necessarily. I mean, we've seen famous people start companies that have done quite well. We've seen people become celebrities

in the process of building their companies, more or less. I mean, I'd put Palmer Lucky in that category where he's kind of become a celebrity on the back of building. Two of the most famous people in the world are technology entrepreneurs. Donald Trump. Donald Trump, social media network through social. Crypto entrepreneur as well.

IP out his company in almost record time. Yeah, yeah. And then obviously Elon. Yeah, out his company in almost record time. Yeah, yeah. And then obviously Elon. Yeah, I mean Elon is like a legit celebrity. Yeah, he did SNL. Like that's crazy. I mean Trump did too, so. But everyone's a founder.

Haley Bieber. Haley Bieber. Everyone's a founder. Billion dollar outcome, right? Yeah, so I mean, Anna's clearly getting at something real. Should we read the rest of this? This has become some fast,

this has some fascinating real world implications. The amount of young people who have now been one-shotted by TikTok edits of the social network are performative. How I got into YC videos are, which I have made, I literally made how to get into YC video. I'm probably responsible for a little bit of that one-shotting, are growing exponentially. Being a founder implies intelligence, status,

risk-taking, wealth. So naturally, the cultural shift in the startup ecosystem has moved from contrarian rule breakers and hackers to the over achieving STEM kids for whom being a founder is simply the next box to tick. Money is not a motivator, it never was. What does it mean for VCs? They're the most memetic of the bunch.

So they'll fund the founder with the most curated credentials, most hype, most viewed product launch videos. They'll confuse attention for distribution. This also explains why YC 2020 and beyond will go to zero hot take. They attract this and fund this exact type of founder. The emperor has no clothes. There will be no cultural defining winners for YC

to maintain their prestige into the next decade. So then what happens to the builders of this decade? That's the trillion dollar question, overly cynical perhaps, but it does reveal a risk that threatens American hegemony. Next generation founders- Let's get into some tinfoil hat. Yeah, idolize TikTok and YouTubers,

why would this trend reverse? Could YC be infiltrated by the CCP? It is an underrated national interest. Poison the timelines where artisan, century-defining American technology companies are nurtured, reinforce the West's economic dominance, and it now funds mass-manufactured slop instead. I think that's a very odd take because like,

yes, like the YC companies do seem to be a little bit more tracked now. They're a little bit more on theme with like the AI agent stuff, but you talk to the Teal Fellowship and companies are- But it's a reflection of what the timeline is interested in. Yes, yes, but what I'm saying is that there are still,

it's not that the trend followers, tracked kids have crowded out the risk takers. The risk takers who are there for ideological reasons or some bizarre countercultural reason, they're still starting companies. They're just doing it over here in a completely different pocket of the world. And a completely different, they might be not on X

or they might be not at YC. Well the funny thing, we didn't have any of the YC hard tech founders from this last batch on the live stream. And it's very possible they just didn't want attention. They're just hacking away, right? They're like, I don't need media right now and that's perfectly okay. So anyways, I have the gong because SoftBank's Masa Son

plans $1 trillion robotics manufacturing hub in the US. I'm gonna hit the size gong if you wanna read through this. Okay, a US version of China's Shenzhen manufacturing hub. Production lines for AI powered industrial robotics. Already spoken with Trump admin officials about tax breaks for companies that are investing, seeking partnership with TSMC, but not clear if TSMC is interested.

Codenamed Project Crystal Land. Carrying order inbound. Okay, here, we should figure out, I'm gonna look up and we're gonna quiz Tyler now if he's ready. Is he good to go? He's ready, I got a thumbs up. I wanna ask how much money has been invested in Shenzhen? I'm trying to talk into the mic but not.

Not give it all away. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I am looking this up. Oh no, I used O3 Pro, so it's gonna be 12 minutes. Damn it. Okay, new tab, I will have to use 4.0 for this because I need it quick. So he's investing one trillion, right,

to compete with China's Shenzhen manufacturing hub. I wanna know how close that gets us. Wait, this is weird, I don't know. One of the nine billion, more than 25 billion. This does not seem right. I have some various that way. I think it's gonna be pretty hard to pin down the exact amount of foreign.

We need to quiz Tyler on this question. Tyler, over since 1980s, how much foreign direct investment has there been in Shenzhen? Let me think here. I would say since 1980s, over 100 billion. Estimates range from 100 billion to 150 billion. And Shenzhen is a major global manufacturing and tech hub.

Wow, okay. Wow, you're so smart. It's actually kind of pulls it off. Pretty close, I mean, I think that the challenge is actually, there's so many ways you could kind of measure this, right? I have a table, so there's about 100 billion of local funds.

There was a state and AI robotics fund announced this year. There was another semiconductor industry fund announced this year. There was, up until 2014, there was $65 billion of cumulative foreign direct investment. But who knows? And then run rating, I guess around 10 billion. But also does this count what Apple is doing?

Right? That's another form of investment. Anyways, this might be an answer that clearly, I guess, got pretty close. It was pretty good. I thought it was good. I have a got pretty close. It was pretty good. Pretty good. I thought it was good. I have a follow-up.

So, you know, the iPhones made over in China often flown via 747 to America faster than shipping on a cargo ship. How many iPhones fit inside of a 747? All right. Let me think here. I'm gonna say, I would say about two to three million in a 747. Okay, so 747 max payload is about 140,000 kilograms. Each iPhone box is about half a kilogram.

So I would say a practical range of iPhones is probably 1.5 to 2.5 per flight. But obviously it depends on, you know, packaging, pallets, cargo layout, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's pretty good. I mean, Chad GPT here has 9.6 million, but I think that's including like every inch of the plane, including like the passenger portion.

It's very possible that Clueli is more accurate. I think that's more accurate actually I think that might be more accurate is clearly Goaded I'll have to ask Roy who's coming on the show later today Yeah, this is so so yeah The chat GPT estimate had the usable internal volume as passenger plus cargo And I it feels like you used

just the cargo number, is that correct? I believe, yes. I think so. I see ChatGPT estimate 9.6 million. Oh, it's streaming through? Yeah, yeah. So I was doing just the cargo. This is fantastic, it actually works pretty well. I'm impressed getting just the car going. This is fantastic.

It actually works pretty well. I'm impressed so far. This is basically young Jamie from Joe Rogan, except you don't even have to look anything up. We just get to ask you a lot. Yeah, this is great. Well, Clueless is dealing with a lot of personal data. They're gonna need to put rigorous compliance practices in place.

They're gonna need to go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. But Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. We actually should put Roy in the hot seat

and make sure that he is on Vanta because I would be a lot I would be a feel a lot better. Yes with you know knowing that the Tyler is using Vant clue Lee in our office Yeah, if they were I'm gonna for sure yeah, we'll get them to switch for sure fully certified. What else is what else is in the timeline? I mean that just just kind of Closing out this masa story. It is funny great name hold the one you know pull the one the one tee out of the hat right he I don't know if he's fully you know I definitely don't think he's fully funded the the 500 billion dollar

project Stargate I'm sure he's sort of making strides towards it but it's great to see that he's this long America it feels like he's kind of masa is kind of the DJ Khaled of the capital markets it's like he's he's this long America. It feels like he's kind of, Masa is kind of the DJ Khaled of the capital markets. It's like he's pitching a $1 trillion US AI hub to TSMC and Trump, and so it could just be TSMC winds up building a massive facility and the government gives some incentives for that. And like, he's not even, he's like investing

where it makes sense off of his own balance sheet, but it's not like- It's like a SPAC promoter. Kind of, but it's more like he's just connecting the dots between the different pieces of the global economy. He's a power broker. Yeah, he's lubricating the capital markets. The deal.

Art of the deal, yeah. I like the name, Project Crystal Land. One thing, if capital formation was in the Olympics, MASA would be leading the Japanese team. Yeah, we've said that, it's been said that the Nobel committee should give a Nobel Prize for capital formation, and I think MASA should be a front runner.

Absolutely, John. We have a post here from the supreme leader of Iran back in 2013. Is this real? This is a great check mark, so it's real. I clicked through, I think. It's such a wild, antiquated posting style. This is vintage. Read it.

He says, woman is a flower, how evil of a man to treat a flower with violence and without appreciation. Hashtag violence against women. And somebody, a HOD quotes this and says, born to be a lover, forced to be the supreme leader. It's a wild posting style. No, no spaces after the bullet. You don't see posts like this much anymore. No.

You just don't. No spaces after the periods, using a hashtag, throwing in a random date I don't know what that dates alluding to the 9th September 18th 2000 is that like right after 9-eleven or something? I don't know. It's very odd. Anyway, I Like this post by Ben Jarvis green Ellis. He says Does the HDMI cord have the most dominant run of any cord ever? Hashtag witness.

Hashtag witness. I don't know if power cord even counts because of its dominance, but sure it would like, but it would sure like a spot on the podium. Power cord is the commissioner of the league. Kwame says, type C is on a brawn-esque run right now. The goat debate will start in three to four years.

That's true. But the HDMI cord has been in three to four years. That's true. But the HDMI cord has been around for like 20 years and it's just been reliable. And actually it gets upgraded pretty regularly, but they don't need to change the actual shape of it so you don't notice it's not as annoying. But it's gone from, you know, it can do HD, high definition video,

to now it can do 4K, 8K, you can do power over HDMI, you can do all these different things. Big fan of HDMI CEC over here, are you familiar with this? HDMI CEC lets you plug an HDMI cable into a TV and then control the TV from the device that's connected over the HDMI. So you can go to the Apple TV, and when you turn on the Apple TV,

the Apple TV can send a signal to the real TV over HDMI CEC and say, hey, turn on, or end switch the channel. So it just makes it a lot easier to actually like control the end point and for the communication to happen. It's pretty cool. Anyway.

We have more breaking news. NVIDIA to drop humanoid robots that will produce NVIDIA GB300 chips in Q1 of 2026. Nick says, holy based. That is so close. Foxconn in talks to deploy humanoid robots at Houston AI server making plant. Wow, that is extremely close.

I don't totally understand this. What does that mean? Foxconn has been training the robots to pick and place objects and insert cables. Yeah. I don't know if this is marketing. It feels like- We've had, we've asked a bunch of robotics experts

about humanoids and so far I haven't got a, I don't have the confidence that this is actually a super great use case for them. It's just the definition of like what is humanoid because you go to like a Ford F-150 factory and they have massive robotic arms moving windshields around, right? It's like you could anthropomorphize that

by spray painting it pink and putting some hair on the hand and being like, it's humanoid now. But you could retrofit every- Just give it more bicep definition. Totally. Amazon has tons of robots sliding around. You could put googly eyes on them and be like, they're humanoids now.

And you'd maybe get a stock bump. But there's clearly things that are happening in the AI server assembly process that are using robotics, obviously, whether it's even just like conveyor belts or the three axis pick in place, pick it up, put it over here, that type of stuff. Just going to humanoids is just,

it's like, well, will it have five fingers? Or will it have just a grabber? Will it have legs or will it have wheels? It could just be sitting there because for a lot of these pick and place jobs, you can just have the humanoid sit there with a single arm mounted to the ground because the stuff comes to it. And so then you're just kind of in a,

okay, we're in the arm business now. It feels like it's a little bit wrapped in marketing lingo, but still cool that more companies are making humanoids because it does seem like a cool form factor that hopefully people will break through and get there, and this seems like a step in the right direction in the sense that it's a very defined task.

I think when people think humanoids, they think some, like, my new touring test is humanoid robotics will be here, and when they can put up a six minute Nürburgring time in a manual. Yeah, gated manual. In a gated manual. Because at that point, they have to not just be a self-driving car,

but they have to be able to negotiate the wheel and the stick shift so efficiently and so quickly that they are truly performing. This is like the circuit. And a manual can be weirdly probabilistic, right? And that you can move the- To synthesize a lot of data. Yeah, it's not like perfect system, right?

It's gotta kind of brute force it sometimes. You're not gonna put up a sub seven minute Nürburgring time with the Joe Biden walk. That's right. You're gonna have to be moving fast. Those actuators are gonna have to be high speed. So yeah, I don't know where all this goes, but I mean, exciting to see that they're

at least doing work on it, because it seems like an important, it's clearly an important path in the tech tree. We don't know how relevant it is to other formats, but cool to see a lot of money pouring into the sector from very big companies. So Foxconn will be announcing their robots in November and then deploying them shortly after.

Yeah. In our year 2026. I mean, Foxconn seems like the right builder for this. Unitree is already like, feels like it's scaling up to the point where like Unitree robots should be usable in certain locations. Like they're not generalizable yet,

but they're certainly, if you train them on a specific task, they could do that task over and over and over again. The question is just like, like, you know, do you need five fingers, 10 fingers, 10 toes? Is that really like the right form factor? Or should we be just doing things

that are more specified? Because if the whole point of these humanoid robots is just AI server making, just assembly, just one spot on the manufacturing line, could probably be a much more specialized robot. But, it'll be cool to see it. I'm sure we'll see a lot of viral videos about it. It'll be very cool.

I invested in a company making robots for data centers and they intentionally chose not to make it humanoid form-packed. Which, and I think a lot of those, the reason behind that decision would also transfer to manufacturing setting, right? Which is like, do you need legs? If you can use wheels.

I mean, data centers have the most perfectly polished floors with like no dust at all. Like it's the perfect environment for a wheeled use case. At the same time, you probably need to have a very specific actuator for like unplugging and plugging the cable back in, right? And that's actually like, it's pretty hard to reach around the back of a computer and unplug an ethernet cable.

And obviously the server actually like designed to be worked on more, but still even the cabling is like very detailed work. And so if that's what they're trying to do, you probably need a specific actuator for that. Anyway. At boring biz says today, I learned that Metta's CFO

and CRO share the same corporate and personal budget. That's fun. So Metta's chief financial officer, Susan Lee, is married to the company's chief revenue officer, John Hedgman. Yeah, that's amazing. Pretty cool. Just top line and bottom line handled by the same family.

Yep. It's amazing. CFO, GF, CRO, BF. That's great. Very cool. Well, if he's the chief revenue officer, you gotta get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM.

It builds and scales and grows your company to the next level. Get on adioadio.com, A-T-T-I-O.com, check them out. Let's go to Arvind. He says, I find the story of AI and radiology fascinating. Of course, Hinton's prediction was wrong with a star. Jeffrey Hinton famously predicted,

like stop training radiologists. All radiologists do in his estimation was look at images of potential cancer spots, which computer vision could do better. But that didn't happen, and there's still radiologists have jobs, and so what's going on? And so Arvind says,

tech advances don't automatically and straightforwardly cause job displacement. That's not the interesting part though. Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nonetheless. The augmentation, not automation effect of AI is despite the fact that as far as I can tell, there is no identified task at which

human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the jobs are bundles of tasks model in labor economics is incomplete. Paraphrasing something Mel Mitchell pointed out to me, if you define jobs in terms of tasks, maybe you're actually defining a way, the most nuanced and hardest to automate aspects of jobs, which are the boundaries between tasks.

Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect that most people will say no. But when we think about star other people's jobs that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances.

If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place.

So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation versus augmentation. And this is the star. Hinton insists that he was directionally correct but merely wrong in terms of timing. This is a classic Motten Bailey retreat of forecasters who get it wrong. It has the benefit of being unfalsifiable.

It's always possible to claim that we simply haven't waited long enough for the claim prediction to come true. Interesting. And this is from a New York Times article. Your AI radiologist will not be with you soon. Experts predicted that artificial intelligence would steal radiology jobs, but at the Mayo Clinic,

the technology has been more friend than foe. And Andrei Karpathy chimes in, he says, very interesting to think about. Job equals bundle of tasks plus glue. Probably a bunch of other variables involved, e.g. the number of tasks, how long each task is, e.g. meta-like tasks, how long each task is, e.g. meta-like notion of task length roughly equals difficulty,

how contextual it is, how high reliability it needs, whether it can be done fully digitally, not sure what the state of the art is in trying to think this through and chart the impact of AI on labor markets so far, e.g. I was curious to look for radiologists, and if I'm getting this right, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics cites 29,530 US radiologists in 2021.

And then up to, and let's go to Tyler, how many radiologists does the US Bureau of Labor Statistics claim there have been in 2023? Okay, come back to me in 30 seconds. Okay. We'll be back in 30. I think he's working and so when I just hit him with random questions, not quite... He's not in the zoom so Cluely's not running. Oh, okay, okay, he's not in the zoom. Okay, well, yeah. That was your first mistake, Tyler. Always keep Cluely on. Okay, okay, he's not in the zoom. Okay. Well, yeah, that was your first mistake Tyler. Yeah always keep clearly on

Does clearly have the ability to to just prompt it directly or or or do you have to be on a zoom? No, you don't have to be on zoom you can do it on so on the website you can just prompt it It looks like almost just like the chat to be t interface. Sure, but you can also just pull audio like Just from in person like if I was sitting across from you, it'd be fine. I'm not sure it'll be able to hear you from in the car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'll get back on Zoom. OK, well, we'll come back to you with that.

The audience will have to wait to find out how many radiologists we have in the United States. Everyone's waiting with bated breath. Everyone wants to know. Well, let's tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products meet the streamline meet the system for modern software development streamline issues projects

and product roadmaps if you're building clearly get on linear Nikita beer build products customer list looks like a tier one venture firms portfolio page ramp open AI cursor Runway for plexity. I normally make the joke of like the next oh we talked to Sam all and we're gonna pitch him linear But it's like oh too late Boom was on there too. That's cool. I Yeah, I always make jokes about like using linear for other stuff and you're like no, it's just for software and Look at boom. They're using it for everything. It's fantastic.

Yeah. Anyway, let's go Tyler. Tyler, what are you got? The question is- Radiologist expert, we're interviewing you for a job as a data analyst, you know, covering radiology. Yes, so the question is, how many radiologists does the US Bureau

of Labor Statistics claim exist in the United States in 2023? Hmm let me think about this I'm gonna estimate maybe 31 to 34 thousand At least in 2023 I would say but yeah, that's my best guess At least in 2023, I would say. But yeah, that's my best guess. That's your best guess. It's $31,960. I think you got the job.

Oh, wow. Might be goaded. OK, I have another question for you. Pop quiz. Off the top of your head, what's the GDP of India? Off the top of my head, let see I'm gonna say three point seven trillion well it's really it really sells it that you that you're touching your face so I can tell that your hands aren't on the keyboard you can tell that I'm thinking

yeah yeah you're just thinking about it yeah you gotta be a good actor but maybe that's why Cluilly is so focused on the social media influencers because they have a little bit of acting in them And so they're able to hmm. This is gonna be the modern tell No, it's good Either you're a great actor and clearly might actually or maybe he's not using clearly and he just knows all this stuff off the top of his head very possible Switching gears Nikita beer has a post here

He says the most important lesson I ever learned about deal making was the line Dick Costello told me, every great deal dies three deaths. Once you understand that, you will be emotionally prepared for each crisis. I like that. Nikita's done his fair share of deals. Yeah. So.

I want to get Dick on the show. Be great to hear about his whole journey. You know that famous like first tweet that he posted? So he joined Twitter and he posted, immediately the culture was very jokey. And so he posted this joke tweet, day one as, I think he was maybe chief, Adam Bain was the chief revenue officer.

He was someone in the executive suite, he was like, day one on the job, my mission, become the CEO. Back like you know like backstab the CEO become the CEO and he was like joking about it and then he actually became the CEO so it was like he was kind of like calling a shot but not really but then he just got like put in the job and I think he had a good run oh it's just a wild story with with the arc of Twitter and acts like one of the most fascinating tech companies. It's true, every great deal dies three deaths.

This ties to that idea of like, you'll meet your acquirer like years before you get a deal done. You need to be ready for the highs and lows, and this is just the nature of entrepreneurship. But some lessons need to be learned the hard way. I don't think that you can just read this and internalize it. I think't think that you can just read this and internalize it.

I think that you have to go on the emotional roller coaster before. I think it's good for people to understand that you can be on the path to getting a deal done and there can still be major crises that happen along the way, whether it's a major investment, acquisition, partnership, et cetera.

You know? I just think that's something unique about entrepreneurship is this idea of the emotional roller coaster, the high highs and the low lows. Like it's a higher variability job than anything else. And because you just feel all those sways and all the swings of what's going on in the business. And there's always something that's good,

there's always something that's bad, but you internalize it so much more as the founder. I don't know. Anyway, Sarah Guo, friend of the show, says, the AI leapfrog effect is quietly transforming sectors historically slow to adopt technology. Legal, healthcare, logistics, we've been seeing a ton of startups in those categories come through

the show with often massive fundraising rounds to announce. They're not merely catching up, they're vaulting ahead. Traditionally, automation in these industries is blocked by high barriers, expensive software, difficult integrations, ambiguous ROI. The business math rarely worked. Large language models, code generation, MCP, and computer use agents have fundamentally

shifted the economics. Suddenly automation is affordable, fast, and obviously valuable. Examples emerging everywhere. Harvey in legal, latent health, and open evidence in healthcare. Solai in logistics. Haven't talked to them.

Would be interested to get to know them. Each providing rapid, tangible productivity gains. Crucially, every industry, even the slowest, is filled with motivated tech-hungry end users ready to drive adoption. Founders who overlook these sectors risk missing something of the decade's best opportunities. What other areas with poor priors deserve another look? Insurance, education? Oh, she's on the hunt for the next Harvey. She wants vertical SaaS. She's looking for ideas on the hunt. Love it.

I don't know, do you have anything on the top of your mind? I thought Crosby, who we had on the show earlier this week, was an interesting approach, not just creating software or a co-pilot for lawyers, but actually just delivering the end service. So I'm excited to see more companies like that, that are truly, that are AI native, but they're actually firms doing the work

that legacy law firms used to do. Yeah, I think there might be something like that, like when you think about insurance and education, like those are also like massive industries, like legal, healthcare, logistics, insurance, education. There's something interesting going on that I wanna dig into deeper around these incredibly niche industries.

I talked to an investor this morning who does growth equity deals and often some control deals as well in much smaller markets where it's easier to underwrite to a 2X, but it's harder to underwrite to 100X. So less in the venture moonshot category. And more in the traditional PE, but still with a venture lens.

And with a tech-focused lens. And so one of the examples he gave me was a company that does software for chambers of commerce. So if every city has for chambers of commerce. So like if you're, if you're, if you, every city has like a chamber of commerce. And it's like, how, that would appear on no market maps. Like I've never heard, I've never even considered that as a, as an idea of a market.

And yet there's someone who clearly got the idea, you know, years ago, probably from directly interfacing with the chamber of commerce. It's like the DMV software. It's probably gonna be a business there. It's like Palantir for the DMV is probably gonna be a category.

Now, is it gonna be a $100 million business? No, is it gonna be appropriate for Sarah at Conviction and, you know, like a true venture fund? Maybe not, but it's an interesting area. What are the operating the annual operating budgets of every DMV in the country combined, Tyler? Totally. Do you have the answer?

I have no idea. I have no idea. We'll all. You'll do your work. This is just the battle of the LLMs right now. This is the true benchmark. This is the future. This is What being a golden retriever is all about? Yeah, just sitting around chatting with chat GPT and clearly Yeah, let's find out how big of a market is

DMV Budgets wait, what was the number? How much is spent on all the DMVs in America in a year with the annual budget of all? The DMVs in America combined how much do they spend because a lot of that's probably on personnel But maybe we can automate some of that away That the idea. Yeah, okay, so we're racing Tyler. Do we have a number? Where I think you're on mute I think you're on mute. Technical difficulties.

You have the mute button. I'll give you the California DMV is $1.5 billion a year. So Palantir for DMVs, you get in there, you start shaking things up. Take 10% of that. You do that a couple more times. You get a couple hundred million dollar revenue, business. Not bad. Anyways, Kyler, you're free to do some real work now.

So we will come back to you later. Kevin Wheel of OpenAI, Chief Products Officer over there, friend of the show says, and remember the AI model you're using today are the worst AI models you'll use for the rest of your life. And Andre at Andreessen said in the last 35 days, OpenAI Codex has merged 345,000 PRs in GitHub. AI is eating software engineering.

So cool to see. That's so many compared to the other coding agents. That's so, so many. Wow, they really scaled that fast. I wonder what's going on there because GitHub Copilot is at 10,000 merged PRs. Codex is at 345,000 merged PRs. Cursor Agents is at 1,000.

Devon's at almost 20,000. And CodeGen is at 1,000, Devin's at almost 20,000, and CodeGen is at 1,600. And the success rate is also the highest with OpenAI Codex. I wonder what the base use case for OpenAI Codex is. I mean, I imagine that maybe the rollout was just a lot more aggressive because OpenAI for Teams

was already installed with a lot of workplaces. I think this probably comes down to distribution more than even product quality. You were talking to George Hotz and he was saying, I'm firing up seven codexes right now. Yeah, how many millions of software engineers already use ChatGPT. And so like why not just fire this off

and see how it works. And it's easy to just switch over and try it out. But man, the scale is crazy. I mean, good for Devon for being, you know. Strong second place. Strong second place there. And above GitHub Copilot, which we know is doing something like half a billion dollars in revenue.

Yeah, not every PR is created equally, too. It is interesting to understand like, yeah, what is the nature of these. It is interesting to understand, yeah, what is the nature of these PRs? Because I mean, I have some PRs on crazy projects, just because I would go around and just do little, oh, tweak the documentation. Basically, writing English, but in a really powerful project.

And then I'd be a contributor. This is a classic thing to be like, to build your software engineer resume. It's like, yeah, I'm be like a contributor. This is like a classic thing to be like, to like build your software engineer resume. It was like, yeah, like I'm a contributor to like Linux. Ethereum. Ethereum or something. And you went in and like fixed like one test case or something, like just did something very, very basic.

But I mean, like there's gotta be some crazy stuff in there. So I imagine that there's a really wide variety of those, you know, 34, 345,000 PRs. We gotta hit the gong for Kevin. This is fantastic. Hit it, I'll hit it. Yeah, you hit it, you hit it, big. Kevin.

Congratulations to the OpenAI team. One, two, three. Two hands that time. Maybe on Monday we can get Tyler to do a review of OpenAI Codex. That would be interesting. I want to know how Tyler reviews that.

Tyler, you got something for us? This shot's amazing. Technical difficulties. Back to the timeline. Max Meyer says, I regret to inform you that the outrageously priced Apple Studio display is the best monitor I have ever owned and it isn't close. Now I can't go back. I agree. You've used one of these? Yes. I've never used one of these. Isn't that is that not what we have right here?

No, no, no, no, no, no. So those are I wait, wait, wait, wait. So he's this is interesting because he's using the wrong term I think. So the Apple Studio Display, yes that's the one we have, but if the Apple Pro Display XDR that's the outrageously priced one. I wonder which one he's talking about. Because Apple has two, the Studio Display is like kind of expensive but it's like 1500 bucks.

The Apple Pro. I mean the Pro XDR is 5K. Yeah, that's the one that I think of as like extremely expensive. And it's also weird because it's like a decade old at this point, but and they haven't updated. It's still fantastic, I have one at home. You have the Pro Display XDR, right?

It has like the cheese grater in the back, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that one's known to be amazing. What's interesting is that they just haven't revised it. I would have expected them to be like, now it's 8K, now it's even better. Like, they just kind of nailed it out of the gate, and people are still posting videos like, you know,

like five years later. That's what I'm saying, why can't they just make a television? I know, I know, just scale it up, like the technology. I was at a soccer game yesterday, and there was an ad for a high sense TV that's 100 inches and I'm pretty sure it's like a couple grand. How much is that?

Maybe we should ask Tyler, but we'll see. Tyler needs to use Clueless to figure out how much. I think we got a feedback loop here. Can we hear you? How much is the highense 100 inch TV cost? Hi, Sense. Let me think. I'm gonna say, typically I would say around three to $5,000.

Obviously price varies by region and model. This sounds so natural. This sounds so natural. 100 inch, yeah. Yeah, I think Apple should do it. Do it. It'd be great. Tim, do it.

100 inches would be a good differentiator too because a lot of brands, you know, 55, 65, 75, it's gotten all confusing. Who was just like, you know, if you're going with Apple, you're getting 100 inch TV. And it's just amazing, amazing quality. Anyway. To our cash, as opposed to people underrate

how big a bottleneck inference compute will be, especially if you have short timelines, there's currently about 10 million H100 equivalents in the world. By some estimates, the human brain has the same flops as an H100. So even if we could train an AGI that is as inference efficient as humans,

we couldn't sustain a very large population of AIs, not to mention that a large fraction of AI compute will continue to be used for training, not inference. And while AI compute has been growing 2.25x so far, by 2028 you'd be pushed against TSMC's overall wafer production limits, which grows 1.25x according to AI 2027 compute forecast. Pretty interesting chart we have here, but yeah, I mean. My volume rocker got screen-shotted in here by accident,

I guess. I must've been adjusting the volume. Cue the O. Leonard laser eyes meme. I don't know. Yeah, people have been debating this back and forth in our group chat about like, are we gonna be energy constrained? Are we going to be-

Are our data centers being overbuilt? Are we gonna be GPU constrained or are we gonna be idea constrained, as Mike put it yesterday? I don't know. I keep coming back to the Ray Kurzweil timelines. Like Ray Kurzweil has the singularity. I mean, it's possible to be inference compute constrained, but not and still be and still

not have the ideas that get us to super intelligence or AGI, depending on your definition. Yeah. or AGI, depending on your definition. Yeah, so he said, Kurzweil says AGI by 2029, that AI will reach a level of general intelligence comparable to humans by 2029, which four years from now with just different agents and reinforcement learning on different tasks, that feels like we're kind of in the AGI era now and that 2029 feels reasonable.

He says technological singularity in 2045 where AI surpasses human intelligence in all aspects leading to a merging of human and machine intelligence. And when you think about 2045, that feels like, I don't know, it just feels much more reasonable and yet it is like a crazy, crazy stat because 2045 is well within our lifetimes. And so that is the point where there will be enough

H100 equivalents in the world to be more powerful and smarter, or in theory, smarter than all of humans. So like the machines will outnumber the humans, and at that point he describes like it is extremely hard to predict what happens then. But I don't know, it's interesting. We'll have to dig into it. Obviously it has immediate impacts in Nvidia market cap,

hyperscaler market cap, what's happening at the early stage, what's happening where the opportunity is in the Neo clouds, all these different things. There's all these micro transactions that happen on a week to week or month to month or day to day basis with this backdrop of massive change coming in maybe a few years, maybe a few decades.

You skipped this one post, but now Anthropic co-founder is saying, we will have super intelligence by 2028, or I think that was at least the the question and so the number keeps sliding around and the definitions keep changing we used to be an AGI now we're in super intelligence world but it's this weird thing where like the hype is growing and changing and kind of dodging around but also the tools are really cool and we're getting a lot of value out of them so So like you can't be entirely bearish,

but there's still like a lot of, a lot of like weasel words being used, I suppose, is the term. Anyway, did you see this? We have a post from Justin Kwan. He says, we're using stock market P&L as an LLM eval now. What happens if you give each model 100K in a Bloomberg terminal?

We're tracking the results on LMPNL, a public leaderboard. So this was launched yesterday. I don't think they have posted any results yet, but I wanted to flag it because I'm excited to follow along. And this seems like something we would ask Tyler with, of saying like, hey, make Chad's be day trade for you. See how it does Anon Sun wall says he talked to a friend at KPMG She said they're dramatically reducing fresh grad hiring because AI does it faster better already

Gradually and then suddenly And anyways thought this was an interesting and then suddenly, and anyways, thought this was an interesting anecdote and something that I'm sure will start showing up in the data. And we have a post here from- Do we know where we got the money from? Because, did he raise money for this?

Because I feel like 100K for each model, like there's a new model every day. And so you're quickly gonna be. Also 100k feels high. There's some breaking news. We got some breaking news, we got the breaking news. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Clueless. This was alluded to on the timeline,

there were some rumors floating around. Brian Kim has led an investment in Clueless, a Series A. He says, what if breaking the rules was the unlock? We're excited to announce our investment in Clueless, a Series A. He says, what if breaking the rules was the unlock? We're excited to announce our investment in Clueless, an AI-powered desktop assistant that delivers real-time support during everyday moments, whether meetings, customer support calls, if you're an intern live on TBPN,

project brainstorming sessions, or collaborative tasks. You've almost certainly heard of Clueless' founder, Roy Lee, the mind behind viral stunts like Interview Coder, hiring 50 interns to fuel Cluely's content engine and his infamous exit from Columbia University. While Roy's bold approach may seem outwardly controversial behind the scenes, his moves are rooted

in deliberate strategy and intentionality. So we will have on Brian Kim and Roy Lee later on today's show, and I'm excited for them to break this down. So the rumors were true. It was pretty funny. There was an account that baited Arfer Rock in the DMs to confirm it. Yeah.

And he said he made a deal or something? Apparently Arfer had made a deal with Roy not to leak it or something like that. I feel like that's what Roy would want. I feel like he would love a leak. I feel like he wants the virality and the attention. And he's clearly very intentional, right? Yeah, yeah, certainly.

It's possible he had different plans for it. I mean, if they drop the new video, they drop the new video. Yeah, of course. You have to imagine it. We'll have to pull it up. We'll pull it up when he's coming on later. Raj Veer has a post.

He says, Sam is right. Paying 100 million for top talent destroys your culture It's not how you attract the best people and he shows a picture of open AI Unites with Johnny I've in six point five million dollar deal to create AI devices so putting Sam in the truth zone, but There's you know narrative warfare happening right now, right? Well, we've talked about it before. Lots of folks on Wall Street also pulling in

hundred million dollar paydays. If you are trying to set yourself up for a career in finance or high finance, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. Industry leading notes. They're trusted by millions.

What else is in here? Why don't we sell hurricane names? It's free money for Noah. I wanna see headlines like, Hurricane Capital One decimates Gulf Coast. Hurricane Eric makes landfall. This is hilarious. Wow, 89,000 likes.

That's hilarious. Well, obviously it's because That's hilarious. This resonated. Obviously it's because it's a really bad thing. You don't want your brand associated with destruction. But maybe like they could do something with like the WWE or something like, you know, hurricane like. Yeah, you could see Iran sponsoring a hurricane that was causing widespread destruction in the US.

Monster Jam. It seems like it'd be a conflict. Hurricane Grave Digger, but it's still bad. It's still just sad and negative, I don't know. It's a very funny idea. Haters should sponsor hurricanes. Yeah, it should be like taking out a short. If a hurricane is going at one of your enemies, sponsor. Yeah, if you're taking out a short on a big company,

name a hurricane after them too. Because that would be really, if a hurricane was coming or a fire was coming towards your home, and your enemy had paid to name it after themselves, that would really hurt. That would get you. Yep. You'd be got.

I say bail on the selling of hurricane names. If you want to do out of home advertising, just go to adquick.com. That's right. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology do out of home advertising, just go to adquick.com. That's right. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient,

seamless ad buying across the globe. Get on AdQuick, your brand will thank you. We're gonna have Wade Foster on the show soon. Matthew Prince over CloudFlare says, I did in fact say this, quote, I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis,

all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're telling me I can't stop some nerd with a C-corp in Palo Alto? Shots fired. Publishers facing existential threat from AI. Interesting. Yeah, he's duking it out. I mean, CloudFlare is the front,

that's the CDN for the internet. And so obviously there's a lot of attacks that happen and they have to fight them all off. Very fun. We have some news from HF0. How would you describe HF0? Is it incubator, accelerator, batch led startup investment vehicle?

Hacker house. Hacker house. We'll let Dave, Dave is gonna pop on the show later today. Great. To talk about it, but they had a new batch this week. They call it the moonshot. They call it the moonshot batch. They have people doing thought to text.

Thought to text. Is that like BCI? And then a team that's 3D printing drones in these tiny, tiny micro factories that is lining up a bunch of contracts. So, excited to check that out. Very cool. Microsoft plans to cut thousands more employees.

Companies layoffs are expected around start of July and will target sales and other departments. Absolutely brutal when these things leak. I feel bad for the employees that have to you know spend the next couple weeks Waiting around to see if they get to keep their job, but ultimately this is the kind of thing that Microsoft does routinely They had another layoff earlier this year, and it shouldn't really be a huge surprise to everyone This is effectively part of their corporate strategy. And so the number of cuts isn't final yet, and they are planned for around the beginning

of Microsoft's new fiscal year, which starts in July. They said the latest round of layoffs comes on top of the roughly 6,000 roles the company eliminated in May across product and software development roles around the world. Bloomberg earlier reported on the planned summer layoffs. Companies ranging from retailers to pharmaceuticals have begun drawing up plans to consolidate positions,

looking to do more with leaner staffs relying on technology for additional tasks. Andy Jassy said the company planned to reduce its workforce in the coming years because of increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain rules. I mean, you have to imagine that like, you could almost have the same narrative

at Microsoft just around SaaS, right? It's like, you know, if you have, you know, a massive organization that's just, you know, I don't know, categorizing paper receipts or something, like when software becomes more available, you can shift those resources around. But Microsoft had about 228,000 employees at the end of its last fiscal year

with roughly 45,000 of them in sales and marketing. That's a huge organization. I mean, were the holiday parties held at the Rose Bowl or something? How do you even get everyone together? I don't know. How do you get out for like a happy hour or movie night? Let's see, it's impossible.

Microsoft eliminated 10,000 jobs in January, 2023, retrenching after a pandemic-driven hiring frenzy by many tech companies. The company also made cuts to its video game division last year after closing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We continue to focus on building high-performing teams and increasing our agility by reducing layers.

Oh man, layers, that's a whole thing. You know what layering, have you heard of this? Like how many layers are you from the CEO? You try and track yourself. Like I report to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone who reports to the CEO. So I'm like eight layers deep.

And there's whole businesses. That's the number of people that you have to backstab in order to get to the point where you can actually backstab the CEO and take the top spot. Exactly. Well, we have some breaking news. As of 25 minutes ago, the Financial Times is reporting that Mira Murati's thinking machines lab valued at $10 billion

after new $2 billion fundraise. The six-month- old secretive AI startup in one of the largest initial funding rounds in Silicon Valley history. So I think this would been rumored for a while, but it's good to see it finally closing. Okay. Was one of the largest seed rounds in SV history.

SF based thinking machines lab has not declared what it is working on, instead using Maradi's name and reputation to attract investors, said those familiar with the fundraise. So. I thought you were gonna say there was like an acquisition or something, like this is like the least dramatic breaking news I've ever heard.

It's still breaking, John. It is, breaking news is breaking news. How much did they raise? And it is funny because with the, all the different billions of dollars being thrown around right now, this is, you're not even, you don't even get excited about a $2 billion seed round.

Oh, I'm gonna get excited. Get excited John. I'm gonna get excited. This one is for, Jody. There we go. Wow, that had a good ring to it. I think it's going back there into

Tyler's microphone maybe. Is he still in the window down? Yeah he does. I can't see him because we're completely blocked by the gong. We're gonna have to rearrange this whole thing. Andresen Horwitz led the round with participation from Sarah Guo's conviction partners. Very cool. Dylan Patel is obsessed with this company and keeps singing the praises of like who they're adding to the team like pretty rough for thinking machines to announce their seed round on the from Andreessen not even announced it have it leak on the same day that Clueless is raising a series a oh they're really overshadowing this sort of two billion dollar raise you're joking but like I wouldn't be surprised if Clueless steamrolls thinking

machines in the timeline today just because because of virality. Well, we shouldn't fight Mira on today. Let's get her on the show. Talk about it. Mira36 left OpenAI in September, having helped drive the creation of products such as ChatGPT, the image generator, Dolly, and Voice Mode. She had also been a senior product manager at Tesla, where she worked on the Model X.

Oh, that's cool. I love it. And if she had stayed at Tesla, we might have a naturally aspirated V12 Model X, ripping around Goodwood, festival of speed. I saw a refreshed Model S hit the timeline, and it was more of an evolution than a revolution. But we didn't know what's inside.

If they switched out the engine, we could be getting very, very excited very soon. Anyway, our first guest this year, by the way. Okay. We should let's run it I'll be right back. I we got Steve Snofke in the studio Coming on to TBPN live. Let's bring him in. How you doing Steve? Okay, I'm here oh fantastic, yeah, sorry where you showed up early I apologize, but no I love it I'm connected to you guys before didn't know what your process would be. Yeah, sorry. I showed up early. I apologize. But Oh, no, I love it. I love it. I haven't connected to you guys before. I didn't know what your process would be. Yeah, it's evolving. It's evolving. It's a pirate ship over here. It is a startup in

every sense of the word. We only learned later after the information was interviewing guests who have been on our show, that it's common that when people go on live TV, they talk to a producer beforehand as opposed to just what we do, which is just send you a zoom link and you just hop right on. Like just so everyone is watching and listening and later is clear. Not only do you just send the zoom, that's it. That's it. There's not, there's like nothing. Yeah. I mean, we want to, we want to bring a little bit of the clubhouse magic, the casual conversation

nature to the show as a feature. It might be a bug, but we are hoping I'm excited. People were asking, what are you going to talk about? I'm like, I don't even know how I'm going to talk about it. Yeah, I'm sure we'll have stuff to talk about. There's so much in the news all the time. I mean, why don't we kick it off with a little bit of introduction on you and like a brief overview of your career and then we can kind of dive into a bunch of

different topics from that. Sure. Well, working, working backwards today, I do mostly lots of informal mentoring coaching kind of stuff. I spend a lot of time talking to the, to companies newly forming formed ones all the way up to biggest of big and lots about strategy and tactics and management organization and, and rolling in technologies and all that stuff. Do a lot of writing. I have like my whole Microsoft history I've written and then I do post every few weeks on

what's going on in the world in the past I worked at Microsoft for a long time started as an engineer on on programming tools back in I Think what I probably called like tools 1.0. I think in that scale. It's more like point five and then All the way through Office and Windows and a bunch of other stuff in the middle. I also am a board partner at A16Z, but you guys know for sure,

board partner doesn't mean much in terms of writing checks or having a decision or knowing anything that's going on. So I'm learning much of what you talked about this morning the same time you are. Yeah. When did you join Microsoft exactly? And how did that come together? Sure. I joined Microsoft in 1989. So for product chronology, it was like before, like six, eight months before Windows 3.0 shipped. So I was there the summer that that was being debugged. And that was sort of a big giant turning point.

That came together because I was in graduate school doing databases and programming languages, which was basically what everybody in the 1980s studied. And I just wasn't going to be a professor. That wasn't on my radar. So I literally had sent my resume on paper into the address that was on a box of Microsoft software that I had won at a conference for a prize for my booth. And then a day later, the recruiter called me and like three days later, I'm in Redmond interviewing and then I have a job and there you go. That's a whole story actually wrote the whole story as part of my hardcore software thing. Love it. There's this narrative about the kind of the 90s era at Microsoft that the anti-trust era was so tumultuous,

it was like this very painful experience for Gates and it kind of reshaped the organization. How much do you think that that's like an overblown narrative or maybe it's very real? And what do people maybe miss when they tell that story today in kind of the more compressed version? Sure, it is totally compressed. And you also have to keep in mind, it's like 12 years long.

It started in the early 1990s with some FTC investigations, blah, blah, blah. And it didn't really end until like 2007. By then I was working on Windows. I was on Office, which was certainly in there, but I was also part of the very, very early set of people who were running around talking about the internet at Microsoft. And so I was in the middle of all of it for the whole time. And no one is gonna ever convince me

that it was as big a deal as everybody else made it to be. Because like, it just wasn't, it's not the whole thing with litigation and regulation and the government, it's not day to day, even if you're working in it. I mean, the government doesn't do stuff every day. The legal process doesn't change every day. So it's this massive amount of hurry up and wait.

I mean, like, very personally, I had to personally design the, what was called the browser choice dialogue that was in Windows, which was this thing the European Union made us do. Like you start a new computer, you log in, and then it pops up, hey, which browser do you want? So I personally did that.

But it was like over six months, and it would be like, I'm working three days straight, I'm not leaving this room in our house, our apartment where I was designing it, and then nothing would happen. And then it would happen again. Well, they would go on vacation. They would go on a 12 week vacation.

You know, Brussels is completely European. So like they you'll see it'll happen again. Like, in fact, the Google choice just came out. The Google decision on Android just came out yesterday. And as the summer ends, just like the Supreme Court in the US, they start pushing things out. But the difference is in Brussels, they like literally just like put chains around in the US, they start pushing things out, but the difference is in Brussels, they like literally just like put chains around the door and nothing happens until September.

And so there's a lot of that, but there were some things about, like for example, the browser, like ended up being completely self-inflicted by Microsoft in my personal view. And it was just not, like it wasn't the browser choice dialogue. It was not the deals with the OEMs we had to go change. It was all our own making. More than anything, it was our perspective was either wrong or perhaps warped by the anti-tri.

It made us think Windows was more important or central to every single thing we did and put us constantly trying to push it because if they're trying to push against maybe there was something there. But by and large, I just I think for some people it became a bigger deal than it was and I think for the people covering the company, I mean if you look at books about Microsoft, most of the books about Microsoft are really about either, there are like three books about the formation of the company, like a dozen books about the trial and stuff like that.

And that's about it. Yeah. And so I, and I have a whole bibliography, like a hundred books you could look at. Yeah. And it's just, I always, it's just overdone. Yeah. Zooming out a little bit in the 90s,

was there anybody that you remember having incredible accuracy around predictions of how the internet would evolve and impact various parts of the economy? I feel like what we do on the show today is try to understand the present of AI and how it will impact various industries in the future. And there's a lot of people that have cool ideas.

Some people sound like they have good ideas. You know, we have these conversations all day long and, you know, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, who do we actually kind of align with from a thinking standpoint. But I remember earlier this week on the show, we talked about how a lot of internet entrepreneurs in the late 90s and early 2000s really predicted that the internet would allow you to run companies drastically more efficiency

because it helps with distribution. So maybe you needed less sales and marketing and all these kind of things. And then it turns out companies still needed massive headcount to deliver products and things like that. So I'm curious, focusing in on the 90s, was there anybody that you think was really

getting it right in the moment around how the internet would evolve? Well, of course, obviously, present company excluded. But the key thing is that I always go back to an 80s movie that you guys won't know, but there's a line in it, you know, no matter where you go, there you are. And with predictions, no matter what happens, someone always said it would. And so you have to be really careful, especially with the internet, because all the things that people said in 1993 would happen, all happened.

The only problem is all the words are different and the technology stack is divided up differently. So the question is, is that a good prediction or not a good prediction? And so it just depends on how charitable you wanna be. There are these very famous commercials that AT&T ran. Now you have to remember in the early 1990s, AT&T had just gone through 10 years earlier, a massive antitrust suit been broken up into regional Bell operating companies,

but they were like the biggest company you could imagine other than IBM in the US at the time and And they ran all these commercials about what the future was gonna look like, you know And they were called the someday you will and so they would be like did you ever write a business memo? while sitting on the beach And there's like a person with this like 18 pound laptop and a printer next to them pounding out a memo and a cell phone The size of a shoebox. So yeah, I now can write a business memo on the side of a beach except I don't want to write a memo

I'm using a cell phone that AT&T didn't really have much to do with and I'm using not really a word processor But I'm just talking so like yeah, you can write a memo from the beach But it wasn't but that if you watch it, it you know, you just go crazy or could you imagine going through a toll booth and not stopping? I can't. In fact, I do that twice a day. But not at all, like how they predicted in the move. So you know, you have to be really careful. But then there are also some incredibly prescient, like micro things that are

just wild. Like when this company in Seattle based Webban was doing grocery delivery, like nobody said that was going to work. And of course it's not just grocery, but now just everything shows up four hours later. And when they, but the thing is when they said it, even the world's experts in shipping, like the founder of what was called it, even the world's experts in shipping, like the founder of what was called Federal Express or FedEx at the time, impossible, cannot do local delivery. Cause you know, their whole model was, okay, we own a fleet of jets

and we pick up your packages with trucks, drive them to the airport and fly them all to Tennessee and then fly them back. So obviously we can't do that in four hours, but that's how we do overnight envelopes for $10. Yeah. And so, but that's how we do overnight envelopes for $10. Yeah. And so, but you know, along comes Amazon

and like a million and a half employees and they figure the whole thing out. And so, you know, like these, you know, and there's a great, a thing I always loved was this prediction that's like every single utility in Linux will eventually become a company. And it turned out that really ended up being true. And so the whole thing with that 1995 to 2000,

meaning, you know, Windows 95, broad internet for everybody, even though it was dial-up, to the crash, the whole thing about it was all of those companies ended up being right. It's just they were all early. And early is mostly just wrong. It means just they were all early. Yeah. Early is mostly just wrong. Yeah. The technology was wrong. Yeah. The web investors in web van got smoked. Totally. And yet it was the right idea that is now played out in. And that

happened with every single category during the dot com. Like I mean, I'd be three dot com Spotify pets dot com chewy. Like there is a 10 billion dollar company in the public markets today that has a precursor. Every single v3.com, Spotify, pets.com, Chewy. Like there is a $10 billion company in the public markets today that has a precursor. Every single one of them has a precursor in the. I mean like that sock puppet was the symbol of Thought Company, oops, Thought Company.com. I remember that website, yep.

I mean, you know, that was a Super Bowl TV commercial. Yeah. From the pets.com, blah, blah, blah. And now, like, I'm literally, if I were to move the camera, there's like nine feet of Chewy boxes right behind like, I'm literally if you if I were to move the camera, there's like nine feet of chewy boxes right behind me. Everyone buys pet food online now. Everyone. And so so you like predictions dime a dozen. But it's also and also like all of those companies and I

really mean this with the most feeling and sincerity all of those companies, they they had to crawl so that everybody today or tomorrow today can walk and then tomorrow other companies will run. And I think that there's so much of that with AI right now. A lot of what's going on, these are just the crawlers and you have to be careful to sort of declare them winners. The platform is known, all this other stuff. I mean, I love Carpathi's talk. Unbelievable. Just amazing, amazing talk that he did at YC. And like he talked about, like, it's not the year of the agent, it's the decade of

the agent. But that's not, you can't build a company by claiming, Hey, we're the 10 year out company. Because you don't even start it thinking that. You start at thinking the revolution is happening and I'm behind already. I mean, Marc Andreessen talks about how he moved from college to Silicon Valley in 93 and he was worried he missed everything. Wow, that's crazy. I mean, and I think that you have to have that mindset

to move fast, to do things that that when the whole world is telling you It's not gonna work, which is literally what's happening with AI right now Yeah, it feels so similar and yet the some of the revenue ramps of these companies are just so steep that they feel much More like real they feel more real as businesses than what was going in the dot-com boom when there would be companies that would They feel more real as businesses than what was going in the dot-com boom when there would be companies that would IPO with no revenue and Just massive costs but at the same time if the revenue doesn't stick around We're gonna have a lot of dead kind of corporate corpses that look a lot like dot-com flameouts. I don't know maybe Another way to look at that though is remember what's the denominator you're dealing with?

So if you if you had an internet company in 1996 your was like what, like a hundred million computers in the world. You know, you're looking at an era when, when 30% of the U S had a home computer and, and so, and no mobile. So you had to like be at home or be at work to shop. And so, so a big reason that there was no revenue was like there were no endpoints. Yeah Yeah, I mean it's so much easier to 10 billion in revenue of your open AI with on the back of stripe on the back of everyone Having an iPhone on the back of the app store on the back of everyone having an internet connection everyone having a laptop

And so the install base is just so so much bigger that you can actually build a durable business You're still trading at a high multiple, but it seems pretty durable. Well, it might be durable, but at the very least, the near-term revenue is entirely a product of the addressable trial market. Totally. Like the number, the whole thing with every generation of technology is the gating factor

has always been distribution. And so like when the PC was new, you're talking about shipping like, a hundred pounds worth of stuff all around for $3,000. You had to set up a store where people wore our coats and ties and it was like buying a car and all this other stuff. And to today where like the friction to use GPT is, it's like what three clicks on an iPhone and you're paying them $200 a month. Yeah.

I mean, it blows my mind. Yeah. And it's funny because it maths out like $200 a month, $2,400 a year, like you're right in $3,000 PC, Dell TV territory like immediately, but it's with three clicks instead of a visit to the store and a talk with somebody in a suit. Right, that's honestly quite big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Dell's revenue ramp, if you remember. Like immediately but it's with three clicks instead of a visit to the store and a talk with us somebody in a suit

Yeah, yeah, yeah Dell's revenue ramp if you remember Oh, yeah, I went from five to seven to twelve to eighteen to twenty five and just like just absolutely just compounding compounded Yeah, but at the same time the that's slower than cursor. Yeah, totally that's slower than open AI But that was best in class nominator. Yeah. the denominator. Yeah, yeah, no, not totally. You do the denominator that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Almost always, it's the denominator that you can use to unconfuse things or to level set yourself.

Yeah, I'm personally very bullish on that idea of the denominator being much bigger and the addressable market and just the ability to ramp with something useful. I've been talking to Jordy about this after WWDC. It seemed like Apple was shifting to a more developer-friendly mindset with free on-device inference.

They planned this for a long time, but it felt like maybe the moment is here where we'll start to see companies that are building AI apps that have zero variable cost, only fixed cost to develop them, and then can ramp very quickly. What were your, uh, what were your WWC reactions overall? How did you process that? Well, of course, you know,

I always have massive empathy for all the people that have to participate in like a giant developer conference because like nothing can be more stressful. I feel cheated because they get to do it all on video and not crash in front of an audience, which turns out to be quite the rite of passage. But for me, it was really three things. One of them was obviously liquid glass, which, you know, love the shout out to Vista Aero in there. Oh, yeah.

Take your victory lap. I love it. No, actually, super, but I just don't, I think, like until you've literally foisted a new design on the world of existing customers, you don't get to have an opinion. Like it's just like, Good take.

You know, I, there is literally, because it is so easy to just poke holes and everything. Now the thing is, is that what Apple's doing now, they haven't quite done as much in the past, which is first, there's just way more people paying attention. And second, like they are releasing things that aren't nearly as baked relative to say eight years ago or iOS seven or whatever, because there's just,

you don't have that ability to do that anymore. And so, but the flip side is like, they are gonna be so good at fixing any of the things that people got hysterical about in the first 12 hours. And you actually saw the arc go from, ah, to like, oh, I see all the positives. Yeah, people were so clearly just rooting for it to fail immediately.

And it's like, how do you have so little faith when you use an iPhone, you use a MacBook, you use Apple software all day long, every single day of the year, and you're gonna immediately call them out as idiots because like you found one example where the contrast wasn't great. And it's also just like, like it's one thing to criticize Apple intelligence, which is

a new entirely, it's an entirely new discipline for Apple. Like they need to learn, they need to hire, there's so much more experimentation that needs to be done there. It's a challenge versus UI, which is like what they have been best in class at forever. And there's no one else that's really been challenged. They've always been great at design. So I would, I would, it's much more. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on Apple's positioning in the AI talent wars. We were joking on the show yesterday that if you're a, you know, top tier one AI researcher, you can get a signing bonus that is greater than Tim Cook's annual salary total comp

last year. Tim Cook made $7.6 million I think last year as the CEO of a $3 trillion company. And then we've been hearing about the meta $100 million offer. If you're a top 100 AI researcher, you can just go get that on day one at Meta. And so it feels like Apple is not

set up to have these immense comp packages, and in many ways, that positions them in a way that they will potentially struggle to actually recruit top talent or retain them in this kind of current Meta. You can play either side of this or three sides, depending on how you want to count. It's a very, very tough time when this sort of starts to happen.

I mean, we went through this at Microsoft with browsers, hiring the right people who did languages or were interpreters or who were just known in the space or were networking. And so look, one side of it is super easy. Like if you're the founder of a big giant company and have infinite money, you have the authority to go hire these people for whatever you personally think is the right number and the authority to deal with the implications of that. If you're not the founder, but you have great authority,

which I think Tim does, you could do the same thing. But you do tend to start to think about the ripple effect of what you're going to do a little bit more. You know, you think, OK, well, now do I have to do special comp for other people? Do I have to deal with a bunch of other people who are gonna go shop themselves around? But one thing to keep in mind is there is also a level of adverse selection that happens at times like this. Like the first people to leave from the outside

might look like rock stars, but it might not have been working so great on the inside. Like I saw lots of people leave Microsoft for whom on the outside was a little bit of gossip and whisper, oh, what a disaster. But on the inside, you're like, they were already, you know, and then also you see big losses, you know, and this happened a great deal in the very early days of computing with people who were doing the programming languages.

That was like a huge battle in particular between a company that's no longer around in the Bay Area called Borland International and Microsoft. And we sued each other over people leaving. Those were my competitors and I worked on development tools. It was very, very nasty. Now, that was back in the day, that was six-figure comp. You put them in the dirt. You put them in the dirt.

It'd be so funny to play back. During the peak of the dot-com bubble, Microsoft was worth 620 billion. Imagine the different fork in the dirt. It'd be so funny to play back. During the peak of the dot com bubble, Microsoft was worth $620 billion. Imagine the different fork in the road of history if they'd gone to Mark Andreessen and said, we want to pick up Netscape. We're bringing you in, and we're making you a $20 billion offer or something like that.

I mean, there's nothing new. But lots of those discussions all happened. Yeah, but again, antitrust. but they hadn't invented the 49% acquisition This is this is revolutionary technology this whole thing is that this is a super interesting I something to add I I know you guys love talking about M&A so here's a thing to really think about with the regulators and M&A if I could toss this in please which is you never you can't lose sight of one particular aspect of competition in the world of regulation. And that's competition between regulators.

Oh, interesting. Who's going to outregulate who? Yeah. So when we were being regulated, the U.S. was clearly in charge of global regulation. And so we sort of define the treaty terms. Like if the US chooses to regulate, first we're gonna have a discussion between FTC and DOJ,

and then we'll decide. And then we'll come to you and we'll explain to you how you will honor whatever our system arrives at. And it turns out the Europeans really wanna, like a gold medal in regulation. And so they started to sort of assert, well, we're just going to do more of it. And if we're so good at it, we should do it more. Force your companies to follow our rules. And then they're going to have to choose whether or not to do it different in our market or lose and lose efficiency or do it the same in our market.

And then the same thing is going to start to happen much more in Asia. I mean, it happens quite a bit in China already, as Tim Cook is dealing with constantly. But the rest of Asia is going to do this too. We dealt with it in Japan quite a bit. But the regulators are talking to each other all the time. In fact, the regulators probably talk to each other more than they talk to their victims. Sorry, their constituents. Their dance partners. Yeah. Right.

And so don't lose sight. I think it's just really important to understand that because if one of them starts to do something, like if the US decides not to challenge, say, an M&A, the EU is gonna just jump on it out of competition and spite or whatever. And now, of course, you have UK and EU, and they're important markets. And so a lot of, it's almost like collusion.

It's what it felt like. I'm not saying it is, it's what it felt like between the major regulators of the world over who is going to take charge. But that a variable in there is, is the ego of the regulators. And in Europe, they don't really have constituents. They talk all about how they're elected and appointed and they listen. They operate, you know, very regally. In the US, it's much more difficult.

You see how the president can directly influence it, how they can appoint people and their activists and all that. So you trust me, like there's so much that goes on there that is a big factor in how things go. How are you thinking? I mean, on the competing regulators, it feels like the next fight should be potentially over the routing of the Siri button on the iPhone. It feels like if consumers were able to press and hold that button and begin dictating to chat GPT, they would be pretty happy compared to the rollout of Apple Intelligence, just thinking about consumer preferences.

How do you think about that battle playing out? Because that's a little bit in the weeds and from a consumer tech perspective, but if I'm predicting out what the next battleground will be, the invocation of the AI assistant seems top of mind. Is that the right frame? How should we think about this playing out? I'm going to, I have to figure out how to be short and cool in this. That that's a triggering topic. Here's why it's triggering. So when we were going through our antitrust stuff

on windows, you know, the original original original Windows antitrust case was about the browser. And then it turned into the browser and instant messaging and the music player. And the music player was about not really about playing music, but about the codex to play music. I mean, it's just really quickly. Can you can you give us a little bit more backstory on the actual definition of default browser?

Because you could have three icons. There's some apps that will, if you click a link, it'll open a default browser. But I feel like in many ways, my default browser choice doesn't even affect me that much because I'm clicking the button to open Chrome on my MacBook and then I leave Chrome open for months at a time and it never even pops up even if I had a different even if I had Safari selected

as like the default I would still be in Chrome all day every day for months at a time and so was that the nature of the default or was it just about what was installed right fantastic point. So like you're basically playing the role I played and arguing this whole thing is moronic. Put me in coach. But you lost, so there is no argument. You lose the case, you deal with what it is.

On the PC originally, the default, there were two things about it. One is you would just get like a mail message in whatever your mail program was and click on it and then something had to happen Yeah, and the question is what would happen today? Of course, you're already in your favorite mail client, which is Gmail in the browser in the browser Which is just gonna open another tab. Yep. So back in the day. There was this leap you had to do Yeah

Plus that was one thing the other thing was it was like freaking leap you had to do. Plus that was one thing. The other thing was it was like freaking wild, wild west of hacking every place in windows to get the other browsers to pop up. So the iPhone stopped all that nonsense. But the European Union just came back one day and they just decided, well, if you could do that for the browser, you should do it for everything. Everything, it should have like a choose your default. No one loves pop-ups more than the Europeans. They love them. Obsess. They wanted like literally,

so the reason that we ended up with that stupid balance screen was because we agreed that you should get a choice for the browser that's pushed in your face, so that we didn't have to make a choice for like every single file type in the operating system all the time. And it just, it's an awful, awful thing. And it turns out in the real world where there are humans and not regulators, people just, they just don't care.

Now immediately, if this were some ongoing discord like I get a zillion tech enthusiast people I care I want to do this I want to sit this off for that not only that but like if I'm in a tab and I open this I want this browser and I want that and no humans really want to do that yeah but you can't convince the regulators that choice is bad. Like you see that you're arguing that choice is bad. Windows ended up with this incredibly long list of like file types that you could pick and choose. And the iPhone sort of resisted that. And I really am complete.

I wrote a giant post about how I'm on the side of Apple in this, because when you buy a product, you buy into the product. Yeah, exactly. And you, you, you buy into the product. Yeah, exactly. And you, you, you're buying the whole thing and, and the counter argument is yes, but that whole thing is a distribution channel and so therefore you can't, it's like buying a highway and saying what cars can drive on it, but it isn't like buying a highway because there's another highway right next to it that you can buy called Android

yeah, and so the markets already solved this problem and What the what Europe is doing is actually reducing choice because they're taking away the choice called really really smart people who I pay money for that have my best interests at heart are Are doing it this way and And I actually wanna buy that. And when you're trying to do computing for 8 billion people, that's a valuable choice to have in the market. Somebody who respects privacy,

somebody who's gonna protect my credit card, somebody who's gonna protect my data and do things that might make it more difficult for people to exploit those. Like I have all of my- Yeah, the payments issue in the App Store will be interesting. If apps can just, everybody has their own payments and logins and all this stuff, I believe that consumers will eventually

get extremely frustrated because they'll realize, I have $500 of random subscriptions every month. And to find and cancel all those things where Apple and the App Store, right now, it's really nice. You can see, what am I paying for? And you can click in very quickly, unsubscribe from everything. And that is good for the user,

potentially better than getting a small discount for circumnavigating the App Store. Right, I mean, like I'm doing the Brian Johnson. Oh, no way. There we go. And you know, like I've got all the bands, all the rings. And you know, they all get access to my Apple Health data. And that's freaking me out. Okay.

Because like, they can just read, it's sort of like what happens with all the social apps that get your contacts. Like all they get, they get your contacts and then they just have them. And there's no taking them back. You know, so you sort of have to run your life if you care about that with like the secret contact list

that doesn't integrate with anything. And I hate that you have to run your life if you care about that with like the secret contact list that doesn't integrate with anything And and I hate that you have to do that Yeah, and and so I I think that that we're and so here's the funny part about About like this defaults and and the Siri button and all that is that yeah, of course you want choice And I want to have the hardware button first. I don't want the hardware button, but that's a different problem and but the thing is is is that the European Union is at the one hand, they're going to push for choice, choice and openness, but they're also the freaking GDPR data protection pop-up people.

Interesting. So that you can't reconcile, and the security people. So if you ever read, if you read the digital markets act, which is the big one that's that making the stores required All that it's got all the stuff that just waves their hands at it literally says and of course security should not be compromised Excuse me Is that really mean security can't be compromised like that's kind of a big deal Yeah, and so that's the loophole through the whole thing. That's like, well, that means you, you really have to approve the third party

stores and you have to do this stuff, but that's not what they wanted you to do. And, and so they've set themselves up because they've just regulated it opposite ends of the spectrum, openness of choice and security privacy. Like it's unreconcilable, which is literally iOS, Android, like you pick. Can you tell me the story of the iPhone launch and how you process that at the time? Oh, sure. So I was there and I'd flown back from, from, uh,

like in the room, I think. And, um, I, I left and so a bunch of things like first, you know, you remember he did the whole thing where he just railed on, on windows, smartphones at the time, you know, where he does the market share based on each OEM and, and I was using, I was actually using a trio at the time, which was the palm device I I wouldn't use the our phones But I was locked into trio because and I had been a blackberry person because Outlook Tested blackberries very early on like before they were released. I was completely one of these crackberry people

I actually read the entire DOJ Finding on a blackberry flying on a plane because the pager signal travels through the clouds. No way. You could actually download it like 2k at a time. My view of it was a lot of the simplicity was going to be difficult. I loved that they didn't support Flash and that a year later they were like, yeah, we're not doing Flash ever.

So no way. Because I thought Flash was a virus. the you know, four gigabyte black one up at the AT&T store in Seattle, waited on the giant line, got yelled at, trader, all that stuff. You know? You know, and I used it in 10 minutes in, I was like, whoa, and it didn't have push, it didn't have copy and paste. I knew all the, you know, the touch keyboard was brilliant, but not quite, and of course, having been on the office team

when the, when Word autocorrect was invented I was I was like wow I know how this is gonna go like every error is gonna be like a meme and the whole you know and the whole deal but and it was obvious obvious that there was gonna be an app there was way to do apps it was the app store a year later that really changed things for me personally. Because there were stores, Palm Pilot had a store, there was a website called Handango, but you needed like a rocket science degree and a serial cable and all this stuff

to get apps onto these phones. And their app store was unbelievable from the technology, from the APIs and the ability to write them, and the go to market. You know, people mock and rail on 30% freaking brilliant because the amount of money it took to get an app recognized in the marketplace was way more than 30%. So I was like over the top, like this is gonna screw us up big time by by oh wait It's a great story. Wow great lore You're a big tech defender. So are we yes what big tech gets a lot of hate, but you know, there's so much to talk about

It's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. This is Doing so really thankful to have a chance to chat with you. Yeah, come on again soon Yeah, we'd love to thanks so much. Awesome. Great. Awesome. Have a great rest your day. Bye Really quickly. Let's tell you about bezel your bezel concierge is available now to source Seriously any watch gonna get bezel comm and quaid had a Bloomberg hit quaid was on Bloomberg TV this morning talking about the watch market. That's amazing. I love it Alternative these are alternative assets. Yeah, these are great.

Next up, we have Anupam from Roblox in the studio. I've been fascinated by this company for years. It's a company that I don't have a ton of experience with personally, but it's obviously a behemoth with a generational founder at the helm. Very interested to get to know you. How are you doing today? Very good. Happy Friday. Happy Friday.

Sad Friday for us. We love what we do. And so the weekend is just a tough time where we're not on the air. We're just counting the hours until Monday. We're just counting the hours, yeah. But it's great to be here. Yeah. Would you mind kicking us off a little introduction on yourself and what you do for the company and how you wound up there? Yeah. So the first introduction about myself,

have done a couple of big data startups before, so have been a founder and have been involved in at least scaling a couple of companies. And then I was retired for a year and, uh, Roblox came along. It was such a fascinating, uh, business. It was such a fascinating technology stack that it came in. And now my responsibilities are AI used to be called machine learning at that time, uh, um, and, uh, uh, infrastructure.

Uh, so that's, that's generally my remit in the company. Yeah, take me on a little tour of how artificial intelligence is being used right now. We're hearing stories of just accelerating software development, new products being unlocked, new actual features. How would you characterize the various ways AI is transforming the company right now?

Yeah, so sort of three arcs. The first one is it's been around for a long while for companies like ours. So our homepage for many, many years has been generated by machine learning. What you all call recommendations, whether you like them or not is different. The recommendations are machine learning generated.

So if I watch a TBPN YouTube podcast, maybe I'll get other TBPN podcasts. Collaborative filtering, recommendation algorithms, going back to like Amazon, you might also enjoy classic machine learning. That's it, right? And so classic machine learning would be everything that we do, that we've done for many, many years. In that area, that we do, that we've done for many, many years. In that area, people are starting to think about using large models in production, which is very difficult because it's super expensive to invoke a large model. And you wouldn't like your YouTube homepage or Roblox homepage or Netflix homepage, Amazon homepage. Any of these homepages loading slowly would be really, really tough. So the entire industry is trying to figure out how to get these large models working

in traditional machine learning. Then very unique to us is the amount of AI we use in safety. So everything that you type in the chat for Roblox goes through a filter. And that we develop technology with machine learning, but now we are developing technology with AI, which means we are deploying a very large model, which has a huge memory of your chats so that we can detect bad behavior. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, that's huge. Uh to me about, really quickly, we'll continue on,

I think there's probably a third option, but just inferencing these large models at cost is open source important? Are you looking forward to getting some of these LLMs that are good enough or at the frontier, like onto ASICs, just dropping the cost? We see these news items every week. Oh, this cost is 80% cheaper. This is 90% cheaper, but it still feels like it's probably expensive. Have you just been bearing the cost and you're waiting for it to come down further

or have you developed tricks to actually reduce the cost to something that looks more like a traditional, database query cost, which is basically negligible? Yeah, yeah. So the latter, very, very good question, by the way. This is something that is top of mind for us, because if you're going to invoke that model 250,000 times a second, if every one of them was 10 cents, you would be in trouble. You wouldn't have a business. So then what we focus on is creating smaller models from large models.

So we still start with the large model, but we then create smaller and smaller models through distilling and quantization. Both of these techniques are well understood. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we talked to a company that's doing this for other companies coming up with, it's just a profanity filtering LLM. And it's trained on a consumer graphics card.

And it's so small, it's really baked down. And this makes a ton of sense for a large enterprise that has very high performance computing needs at scale. Talk about how you see the potential of AI at the game experience level for players, how much time you guys are thinking about that. I can imagine players leveraging know, players leveraging it to create worlds, characters, storylines, narratives,

all that kind of thing. So you teed me up for the third point, which I was going to, which is, you know, Generative AI, classic Generative AI is text, image, video, and kind of stops after that. So we decided around one and a half years ago to pick up from that. So we don't try to create our own large model which is train or text. We've created our own large model for 3D generation. So today, if you want to build a video game or if you want to build a game, you are going

to open some software, you're going to blend all the stuff together. You might have to work with your artists for many, many hours. But imagine if you could just type a prompt, a stylized Japanese village pagoda, and you want to make it Gothic for whatever reason. We have a large model right now, open-sourced. People can go to Hugging Face and use it and build an entire scene using 3D generation model. All of it is possible because obviously, you know, the advances that have happened in AI.

Interesting. Yeah, I imagine the traditional workflows like Cinema 4D or Blender or Unreal Engine, and then you're bringing that in to do the shading, and all of that stuff is like super teed up for image generation. Makes sense. I'm also interested in when do you think we will see the advancements in AI play into actual NPC

creation, so I design a game in Roblox and I want to Instantiate a character a boss and I'm don't just want to give them a star algorithm to or or oh, yes The boss like you know attacks three times with the sword and then cast the fireball and it's the same you know when you play those games and it's just like this doesn't this feels too algorithmic like I understand the algorithm that's running there it's clearly you know deterministic code that I'm interacting with and it feels like it's a bullet but it's a bullet sponge boss instead of like oh wow like it feels like I'm

playing against a human they're being being creative. Maybe they're not, maybe they're not just impossible to defeat because they're superhuman AI, but they're just creative in a way that the default AI algorithms are, have been in the past, whether you're fighting like, you know, a boss in doom or something. Is there any, are there any, uh, resources that you're going to provide to the community on that front? Yeah. Yeah. So that's something that we debated a lot. One is that we as a platform become very opinionated about what an NPC is.

And, you know, this is how we go. We go to the box NPCs, but that's not our philosophy as a company. As a company, we are a platform that deploys a series of APIs. And then we just wait for people to come up with things like Grow a Garden or Dress to Impress. Yes. Trust me, you know, I don't know about you all, but I couldn't have thought about Dress to Impress. It is such a simple game and it appeals to such a very human thing. You dress to impress, right?

And so we do. We play our own version of that here on the show, as you can see. Yeah, tailored suits. All of us are, you know, even my teenager who wears a torn shirt is actually trying to convey something, right? So going back to your NPC question,

we release large models as a service. So we don't want our creators to worry about what you all asked, right? The cost of inference, which model should I use? All those details we take over as an infrastructure team. So infrastructure is invisible to them. And now many creators are using that to give their players capabilities to build their own NPCs.

So it's two layered now, rather than us building the NPCs. You can, you know, like that whole thing, you can do it and you can do it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Can you give an update on the scale of Roblox? I think there's been headlong.

Everybody, I think, should know by now that it is a massively scaled platform, but even just insights into average user minutes on the platform scale, how many American, what percentage, I imagine it's double digit percentage of American children play Roblox daily. Can you give us some grounding on the scale right now? Yeah, so I'll give you the latest case, which was, I can't believe it's Friday, so I'll give you this kid, the latest kid, which was, I can't believe

it's Friday, so it was just five days ago, 25 million concurrent people, players showed up. 25 million people at the same time. At the exact same time. That is so much. It's more than the Super Bowl, right? I think it's significantly more than the Super Bowl. It's like the Super Bowl every day. It is significantly more than the population of certain nations that I shall not name. Not quite the Super Bowl. That's 127 million. Okay, okay.

Well, you're getting there. But concurrent is the, you know, concurrent is specific. Yeah, but concurrent is essentially on a random time. But then our founder Dave always reminds us that, yes, today of course there's a lot of news around these all-time highs. But for the last 16 years, every other weekend, we've hit a new high, hit a new high. It just happens to be that this weekend, we just hit a Guinness Book of World Record of

a single game having 16 million people playing simultaneously. That's never happened before. I didn't know that. I'm an infrastructure person. So we've been working on this for a while now. Last December, we thought we saw one of the biggest highs with this to impress. And then we saw fish, then we saw dead rates. So it's every two or three weeks, we see a massive, massive high. Yeah, tell me the story of Grow a Garden specifically. Did this come out of nowhere? Do these things surprise you at this point,

or are you able to predict and track these things? Yeah, how early can you tell if a game, if a new game is actually a hit? Is there initial data that you can see from the first 10,000 players or anything like that that says this thing's gonna go into the millions? The third Google result for Grow a Garden, by the way, is a Reddit post on r slash Roblox from a month ago.

Why is Grow a Garden so popular? So even the Reddit community can't figure it out. But what do you know about it? Yeah, so I'll take you back a little bit. Two or three years ago, we used to do annual planning, which tries to answer your question, which is, can I predict how many players will be playing? How much at what time? And then we realize it's sort of as an engineer, it's a little bit of a foods errand because you're almost capping the popularity of your platform by saying I'm going to predict some 10% or

20% growth. So what we do is we do long range planning, but we also do short range planning, which means as you talked about, if I see 10,000 people really engaging with it. The recommendation algorithm picks it up and starts giving it more traffic. In the meanwhile, we are tracking that the game is going up. But on the capacity side, we don't try to predict exactly how much a game is going to be popular because we have a platform with literally millions of experiences. So we wouldn't have been

able to tell you that grow a garden is going to be at this. But we could have told you that as a platform, we continue to grow at a very high rate. So we plan for the platform. And then if one of the games becomes popular, it's okay, every four weeks, we have had a new popular game. So we just track the total growth. We don't try to be good enough to track each game. Yeah. Do you find it, I can imagine if you're SRE, you want to go,

this is like the NBA of site reliability engineering because there's almost, there's few places where you can get this amount of pressure, this scale, this much unpredictability. Who's LeBron James of site reliability engineering? We want to ring the gopher. You should give him a shout out. Don't immediately get poached. Who's the LeBron James of site reliability engineering? We want to ring the gopher to them. Just give them a shout out.

So they immediately get poached. So here's the interesting thing. Thank you for bringing that up. Very few people would bring up the site reliability. The heroes. The heroes of the internet. The unsung heroes. The unsung heroes of the internet.

Well, we would be nothing without them. They keep the internet running. 100% agree. But here's what we have done culturally. Number one, every executive is on an on-call rotation with this. Oh, interesting. That's a crazy cultural move. I love it. I'm on call, I think from today's 6 PM or something. And I report to the CEO and the SVP of engineering here. So, you know, for some of my industry friends, it's just odd. I thought you kind of work up towards not being on call, but the main institute of reliability culture, the main institute of

reliability culture is everybody takes some on call. We're not always on call, but we always take a rotation. So that's number one. The other is our SRE team is really a software mindset. So every Tuesday, they run this thing called Taco Tuesdays. Now you would think that they're eating tacos, right? But what they're really doing is testing the actual capacity. Every Tuesday, they try to bring Roblox down

by taking capacity from a particular service. Interesting. So that is a very strange thing. Just nibbling a little bit of the server, a little bit of the taco. Yeah, yeah, just testing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You take the discovery service

and you start it off capacity as if we have too many players, but we are all in the office so we can watch it, right? The other one that they do is chaos testing. We have a very unique name, but our comms team doesn't like to talk about that name. I'll not say the name on this. I'll talk about this one.

But let's say there's Roblox and there's Godzilla and Godzilla was in our data centers. So I'm still not naming the service, right? So it creates so much chaos in our system, including like unplugging servers. Now, most people don't know this about Roblox. We have 24 data centers globally. Wow. We look like gaming company from the outside.

Which really to your point about being the Super Bowl of site reliability, yes, I agree, because we also have servers to rack and stack. So we do these top of things and these chaos testing throughout the week, trying to keep bringing down Roblox as we want to see what happens. And that's why we get ready for big Saturdays. It's amazing. Do you have anything else? Big Saturdays.

I wanna let you get back to- Every day is a super, every Saturday is a super bowl on Roblox. But this was fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. You're seated. Thank you very much. This was very good.

Yeah, thanks for joining. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. How'd you sleep last night? Do you put up good numbers? I'm not gonna lie to you, John. I got a little bit cocky about a month ago. Yeah, you did just earlier this week.

And I just completely fallen off. I got a 75. What did I do? Only put up seven hours for me. 96, let's hear it for me. I want a soundboard, play the Ashton Hall. Yes, 96. Take that.

I'm gonna go home this weekend. I'm on a generational run. Reset and get back because you're putting me to shame. Yeah, I'm beating you up out here. Anyway, let's run through some news before our next guest gets here in 12 minutes. And also go over to eightsleep.com, get a pod five,

so you have a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial and free returns, free shipping. The US prepares action targeting allies' chip plants in China, this is from the Wall Street Journal. The move isn't meant to escalate trade tensions, White House officials say. It sounds like the number one thing you would do if you were trying to escalate trade tensions.

But let's see, beautiful image of TSMC here. Can you see this, Jordan? This looks amazing. I don't know if this is a factory, it might just be like the headquarters But wow what an amazing building this like they basically your call building They were like make us a Pinterest board of the most sci-fi I think this future

This is giving Apple a run for its money with the donut. This is really really cool I had never seen this can before yeah the Canon the capital Canon now You see why masaa saw this. It was like $1 trillion to TSMC. Let's get it. Yeah. Let's get it going. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right? Jensen earlier this year,

after all of the trade war stuff, started setting up new facilities for Nvidia, believe in Shanghai. Yeah, yeah. So I'm sure he's sitting there, needs a heater after seeing this headline. Going back and forth. A US official wants to revoke waivers

that allow global chip makers to access American technology in China. People familiar with the matter said, this has been something that people have been talking about with the Chips Act for a long time, just the idea that yes, ASML makes lithography machines that are used by TSMC. ASML is a European company, not an American company, but they use a lot of American intellectual

property. And so the American government feels that they have the ability to restrict trade of those lithography machines, which is obviously a key point of leverage in the AI race. Now there's differing opinions as to how real the AI race is or how seriously it should be taken. There's folks who are saying, no, it's mine. It's certainly a race. I think the debate is, is it a war?

Yes, yes, is it a war? Or is it a dunk contest? Who knows? Dunk contest. You know, DeepSeek shows up, windmill, oh, reasoning model for free! Breaks the backboard. You'll love to see it. The move could strain relations with South Korea and Taiwan

whose companies would be most affected by the change. The revocation could disrupt the global industry as companies deal with trade war issues such as China's limit on rare earth magnets. And so, you know, you hit them, they're gonna hit back at some point. So, currently South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynex, a very important company that makes memory,

and as well as TSMC, enjoy blanket waivers that allow them to ship American chip making equipment to their factories in China without applying for a separate license each time. So, your TSMC or your SK Hynex, you wanna do packaging in China because that's where the industrial hub is, that's where the special economic zone is.

You got to ship in a whole bunch of different equipment. Maybe it's just, you know, a CNC machine or something or whatever from America. Well, that's going to throw off everything you're doing if you have to go to America and ask for permission every single time. So Jeffrey Kessler, the head of the Commerce Department in charge of export controls,

told three top companies this week that he wanted to cancel those waivers, according to people familiar with the matters. They said Kessler described the action as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on critical US technology going to China. If carried out, the move could be both disruptive, diplomatically and economically. Earlier this month, the move could be both disruptive, diplomatically and economically.

Earlier this month, the US and China agreed to a fragile trade truce in London. Part of the deal involved each country agreeing to hold off from introducing new export controls and other measures designed to hurt the other. And so it feels like we're leaning more here, trade war more than trade race or AI race. But we will see, this action isn't a new trade escalation, trade war more than trade race or AI race.

But we will see. This action isn't a new trade escalation, but we would be designed to make the licensing system for chip equipment similar to what China has in place for rare earth materials. The White House official said, the US and China continue to make progress on completing the agreement they reached in London and negotiating on trade.

Chip makers will still be able to operate in China. The new enforcement mechanisms on chip mirror, chips mirror licensing requirements that apply to other semiconductor companies that export to China and ensure the United States has an equal and reciprocal process. That's the story from the journal. This is a fun story.

We're getting AI pancakes. Applebee's and IHOP plan to introduce artificial intelligence in restaurants. People have been begging for this. Yes, people have been begging for this. It's a very funny story, but this company. The silence from Applebee's on the AI war has been deafening.

Yes, so this is all about Dine, a company called Dine Brands. And I saw this and I thought it was interesting because AI pancakes is funny but This is a 450 million dollar company or 425 million dollar company their public on the New York Stock Exchange Dine Brands global They're partnering with that. They're the parent company of the two chains They aim to streamline operations and encourage repeat diners and guess where they're the parent company of the two chains. They aim to streamline operations and encourage repeat diners.

And guess where they're headquartered? Pasadena, California. We got to get the CEO in the studio. This is amazing. The company behind Applebee's and IHOP plans to use artificial intelligence in its restaurants and behind the scenes to streamline operations and encourage repeat customers.

Dine Brands is adding AI infused tech support for all of its franchisees. They're trading at about.5x revenue. And so if you slot some AI in there, they could trade it 300 times. Let's make it happen. I'm excited for this company. I don't care that they're a restaurant.

I'm rooting for them. Business. It's passing a homegrown company, let's go. So Dine Brands is adding AI infused tech support for all of its franchises, as well as an AI powered personalization engine that helps restaurants offer customized deals to diners.

So this is more just like retention and typical marketing stuff. But I mean you could imagine that a lot of these AI tools would, as silly as it sounds, it would benefit a restaurant chain because there's a lot of logistics and operations and marketing that needs to be done and why not have AI play a role in that.

The question is always like, where does it sit? Should this be a SaaS product that you're buying from a startup that's leveraging AI? Should your current marketing partner offer this as just an add-on or improvement to what they're already doing? Should this even just be your marketing team now has a Chad GPT license?

It sounds like they're going a little bit deeper though. So the Pasadena, California based company, let's hear it for Pasadena, which also owns Fuzzy's Taco Shop and has over 3,500 restaurants across its brand is taking a practical approach to AI by focusing on areas that can drive sales. The Chief Information Officer, Justin Skelton,

is commenting to the journal in this. Streamlining tech support for Dine Brand's more than 300 franchisees is important because issues like a broken printer take valuable time away from actually managing restaurants. So it's not for the customers, it's for the franchisees. They call in, this is the classic question of like, why McDonald's, why is the McFlurry machine always broken?

Well now, if you're a franchisee owner, and you have something that's similar to a McFlurry machine, a printer, receipt printer or a PLS system, it's broken. As these chains roll out AI across different customer touch points and in the back office, you can imagine that waitersers like like world-class waiters will actually end up being like even more of a luxury and people actually seeking them out right yeah it is a truly great waiter and

service team at a restaurant can massively elevate the experience right it's like it's and and so I think this is one of those things AI will take some jobs in the restaurant industry but also elevate roles you know like like you know sitting down at your favorite restaurant seeing a waiter that you see once or you know twice three four times a month right and then having that experience that relationship so the I hope it is a zoo on Sunday mornings yeah it's just dad. I've been there with my son once and it was fantastic. Yeah, it's all the dads taking the kids out, letting mom sleep in on the weekend. That's the meme. And it's just like line out the

door. I had no idea it'd be so popular. It is extremely popular. So they're building tools on top of Amazon, which has the Q generative AI assistant. It allows the company's field technology services staff to query its knowledge base for tech help using plain English, so chat bot, but trained on specific questions that the restaurateurs or the franchisees have to answer. And then they're also rolling out a personalization engine.

Pretty fun that they got a nice Wall Street Journal write up about this. Other tech initiatives Dine Brands is testing include AI powered cameras that can detect when a table needs to be cleared. So you will not need to wait for your waiter to come around. They'll have a dashboard. See, hey, that clean up on aisle six.

As well as the AI app for restaurant managers that helps them oversee day-to-day operations like staffing, kind of just better timekeeping, better management, better just tooling for these companies. Very interesting. With these updates, Dine Brands joins McDonald's and Yum Brands, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which are similarly tapping AI in their restaurants

and behind the scenes. One promise of AI is that it can make fast food and casual dining restaurants more automated, lessening the need for human labor and speeding up the work of existing staff. The ability to offset labor costs, whether by reducing or more accurately forecasting it, is a major cost savings for restaurants.

Unclear what that would mean for a price war if both companies implement AI, they're both able to reduce labor costs. Would they both just drop prices? Or would they actually both reap higher margins? I actually don't know how to plan. Or just spend more money on marketing. Maybe, yeah, maybe we just see more McDonald's ads

in the Super Bowl, and I have ads in the Super Bowl, hopefully. Anyway, AI is moving quickly, and I believe it's going to be embedded in everything we do, says Skelton. Fantastic. We touched on the Skelton. Please give them a one X revenue multiple.

Yeah. I've seen enough. Pump it multiple yeah I've seen enough I've seen enough we have our next guest in the studio great let's really quickly let's tell you about wander find your happy place find your happy place find your happy place seriously it's summer now is the time if you've been waiting around get on there they They got inspiring views. They got hotel-grade amenities. They got dreamy beds. They got top-tier cleaning.

They got 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. There's also the TikTok ban, which has been delayed for the third time. The president gave the Chinese-controlled video app another reprieve from a 2024 law requiring its sale or closure. Another 90 days, just 90 days.

Trump is kind of the king of these like, you know, stalling it out. This has been like his- Leverage. He's known for like moving extremely quickly and just being like all of a sudden, everything has a massive tariff and then also like really dragging his feet on things.

Art of the deal. Art of the deal. I'm banning TikTok, art of the deal. I'm delaying the things. Art of the deal. Art of the deal. I'm banning TikTok, art of the deal. I'm delaying the ban, art of the deal. Art of the deal. I'm banning TikTok. 40 chest.

40 chest. He issued another 90 day reprieve. White House spokeswoman said the administration will work over the next three months to close a deal ensuring American user data on TikTok is safe and secure. Prior Supreme Court ruling upheld the law citing national security concerns regarding TikTok's data collection in foreign ties.

What's interesting about this is that the narrative of why is Trump soft on TikTok during the election cycle was completely different reasons. It was like there was someone who, Susquehanna, what is his name, Jeff? Jeff Haas or something? I forget, Yas, Yas.

So this investor at Sesquihanna had a huge position in ByteDance which owns TikTok. And so a TikTok band might personally impact him to the tune of like $5 billion or something. So obviously it was worth it to him to invest hundreds of millions in lobbying to prevent that from happening. So there was kind of this narrative emerging that Jeff Yass was the driving force economically

in America, just a natural incentive, not like a CCP agent, just like he has a financial incentive to not let his asset get burned by a ban. And so do the investors in DJI. Yeah, there are a few. American venture investors. American venture investors in DJI who would similarly be against a ban, right?

If you were just tracing basic economic logic. Now, there was also the narrative that Trump wanted to keep TikTok alive because it was very good for his campaign because there were a lot of viral TikToks promoting Trump. it was very good for his campaign because there were a lot of viral tick tocks Promoting Trump but or or just very bad for the campaign because how many young people yeah Exactly, they took my tick tock I'm voting against this guy precious all of those I all of those reasons are out the door because he's elected So I don't I still don't understand the logic here and I hope that something gets done here

Anyway, we will continue to track the story the logic here and I hope that something gets done here. Anyway, we will continue to track the story at the end of this 90 days. Start your engine, start putting a 90 day hold on the calendar, we'll be checking in and obviously check Polymarket to see the updates on. Right now TikTok sale announced in 2025 is sitting at a 28% on Polymarket.

By the end of the year? By the end of the year. Okay. Yeah, feels correctly priced at the moment, but who knows? Well, we have Miles from Dash Fuel in the studio. Welcome to the show, Miles. Good to meet you. Welcome.

How you doing? Good, how are you? Good. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself and the company, and then obviously have a bunch of questions to ask downstream of that related to the current kind of global situation.

Yeah, happy to. So I'm the CEO of Dash Fuel. We are a vertical SaaS company focused on downstream oil and gas logistics. So that is, you know, you have Exxon and the big producers producing fuel, but how do you get that fuel to gas stations, airports, marinas for actually the consumption of that fuel to gas stations airports marinas?

For actually the consumption of that fuel and our customers are focused on that. So are your customers Like I like, you know the 76 or like the Chevron Station the gas station. Some of our customers are okay. You know the big hazmat trucks you see driving down the cylindrical trucks? Yep. Those are our key customers. Okay. And that might be a different company that is contracted by 76. Hey, I need gas, deliver it for me, but then I might go to a different competitor if you're out of gas today. Yep. Exactly. Got it. Okay. And yeah, fascinating industry. How did you discover this opportunity? I feel like this is something that most people don't necessarily interface with on a daily basis.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I actually got recruited by a venture studio called Fractal, so they incubate vertical SaaS problems. And this is one of the ones they're incubating. And it's a huge market, lots of legacy players, old technology, and just an interesting space. Like it's dynamic, it's complex, it's 24-7, and it's critical part of how kind of the US keeps running and so I kind of jumped at it Yeah, what is the key unlock in actually building a vertical SAS product?

Is it just like having a mobile app or getting from paper to spreadsheets to a database table and some Visualization or is it? Handling payment processing more efficiently like where are you actually plugging in and creating value for these companies? I think honestly all of those so key things that we look at are moving off paper so that's a big one. Duplicate data entry so logistics or spreadsheets into the accounting system is a big one and then the third big one is just driving increases in profit margins. So fuel is a very complex dynamic optimization problem. So you might for a single load have

400 different sourcing options from all of the terminals around and it's dynamically priced. And so how do you figure out what is my optimal sourcing for those? And so we're going to try and drive those margins higher. And so those are kind of, I'd say the three key pieces for us. So, uh, what are your customers saying? We're seeing news that oil prices are starting to gyrate on the basis of, uh, the, the conflict in the middle East. Um, what are you hearing from, uh, your customers and folks in the industry? Yeah. So I think we're definitely seeing that.

So Thursday night into Friday morning from last week the typical price volatility in our space is roughly three to four cents overnight. And we saw price jumps from fifteen to twenty cents so you're talking you know five to ten X greater volatility. So that's definitely playing out and that obviously cascades through ultimately if prices stay high to gas stations in the end retail customer although we haven't seen much of a jump there it's very competitive and so prices are still only slightly higher I would say the big thing I think people are watching for is does this conflict extend into the straight-form ooze where you would have that part shut down that would cause prices to go up pretty significantly yeah explain to me the different beneficiaries of various oil price levels like

Who likes higher prices who likes lower prices? Obviously the American government loves high gas It feels like that but I've also heard that the gas station owners actually like higher gas prices because they slap a margin on top of the oil price. And so when prices are high, they might be making more money, but at the same time, if consumers are pulling back from high prices,

they may not go into the store and buy, you know, a case of beer and some snacks. I think it's more the Goldilocks, the happy middle is kind of where people like to be with a little bit of volatility so that you can take advantage of price swings. But ultimately, as you're saying too high prices, no one's going to be driving, no one's going into buy snacks for gas stations. So no one wants really high prices and really low prices. You start to

have producers cut back because they don't want to sell at the 30 or $40 a barrel volume. And so really that happy medium is where people like to have it sit We've got enough supply and demand matching and so I'd say that's kind of the sweet spot. Yeah How closely you track these markets? Do you do you can you tell me the story of that that time that like oil was? Negatively priced or something or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, what happens there? Can you break that down? I honestly I don't remember It was like a very temporary thing, but I do remember so I was actually this I was before I started this I was at Bridgewater and I remember the markets were going crazy and we're on you know I was in trading at the time and so people are scrambling to figure out how do you deal with this temporary?

Dislocation where it is you're saying prices were literally negative people trying to roll contracts and it was mostly just chaos yeah it seemed like something where like you could make money but there was always a risk that you would have to receive the oil and it'd be like okay like you're getting a thousand barrels of oil delivered do you have a warehouse for that yeah 100 thousand if you went in with size. Right. Yeah, so what else are people tracking in the news if you're trying to understand where oil markets go? Obviously, that sort of hermuse story is important, but is there a narrative around, oh, we have a strategic reserve that we might unlock, there's other sources that

might come online, how do these things work out? I feel like there's always this back and forth between the various major players jostling to keep the price at a reasonable place for everyone. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the other thing is with producers, obviously, the higher the price, the more they want to, they're incentivized to export or drill or what have you. So they're also definitely keeping an eye on that. I think from the US perspective, there's no real super fast supply on locks is the problem, right? Because to spin up a new well or something, you're going to take six months or so.

And so people are keeping a close eye. They're probably starting to get ready for that, but they want to see how this plays out. If this conflict mostly goes away in the next couple of weeks, then, you know, it's going to be much ado about nothing really. If this extends, or again, if more drastic action is taken, that's where, you know, we could see something different change. And so I think it's mostly in a wait and see now from the people that I've talked to.

And again, I'm more in the downstream space, but from their their perspective on the upstream it's mostly a waiting game right now. Yeah how what pieces of the entire oil supply chain are still on paper the most? Can you actually walk me through I'd love I'd love just like oil 101 like yeah I know it's it's not dinosaur bones, but it's something close to that. It's in the ground. It gets dug up and then it goes on a journey. Walk me through that whole journey

and kind of like what the different players are. Yeah, absolutely. So you're, like you're saying, you're extracting that raw crude out. And then that is, again, you're Exxon Mobiles or you have smaller players in the Permian Basin or things like that, that is going to refineries. And those refineries are processing the raw crude

into its various components. So that's not only just like gas and diesel, but that could be, you know, end up in plastic and other things like that. So you're separating out the pieces. From there, it's either, you know, via pipeline or via barge, moved around and again, talking to us specifically, to there's about 1200 terminals around the US.

That's then sitting in those terminals until a wholesaler or a carrier comes and picks a few a load of fuel up, and then goes and delivers it ultimately to, again, gas stations, airports, homes for home eating, whatever you have. And there's a lot of paper, right? So in a single load for one of those deliveries from the terminal to an end store, you might end up with, you know, a bill of lading, a delivery ticket, maybe you've got two bills of lading, you end up with supplier invoice a day later, maybe a freight invoice. You could have four or five different pieces of paper They're all coming in differently a couple of them are gonna be pictures from a driver's phone that are emailed in So you can imagine it's it's a little bit hard to process all that keep track of everything

how does the overall industry and various players in gas process what will be maybe not ever a total phase out of gas cars, but what is, California had like this ban in place for banning the sale of new gas cars past 2035. Sounds like there was a- From my cold dead hands.

Yeah, no, I mean there was a massive amount of pushback from from the president as well as Congress so I don't think that necessarily is happening as of now but is there does the industry try to you know oil isn't going away has a bunch of different uses gas isn't going away again has a bunch of different uses just other than just getting a car from point A to point B. Just look at the Nuremberg ring times. It's obvious. Yeah, of course.

But I'm curious if there's any sort of high level discussion around, because many of these companies have been in business for so long, if you've been in business for 100 years, you should be thinking about the next 100 years. Yeah, yeah. It's reasonable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sorry, sorry, I accidentally tossed the iPad off. No, no, it's appropriate. The idea of having of not having a naturally aspirated V12 at my disposal is boo worthy, but break down the evolution of the industry. Yeah, so I think, you know, you have at the upstream space, you have them exploring alternative energy a little bit, right? So you had you know BP was exploring carbon neutral fuels and a lot of these things They've been exploring them and I think you know, you you've talked to people, you know Like Valor Atomics who are exploring that as well. And so I think there's definitely interest there and so that's one piece There's also another piece which is like on the kind of gas station side You have these EV chargers, which in some ways are helpful because it takes 10 or 15 minutes. Someone's more likely to go into the gas station and the vast majority of gas station revenue is actually from inside the store.

It's not the gas. That's break even if they're lucky type thing. You have some of that as well. Then honestly, you look at the projections out to 2050 from the US government, you don't see that much of a decline. Because just as people are wealthier, they want to travel more, they want to own a car. And so it's honestly more of an unlock than anything else. And so as long as the US keeps growing, I expect to see demand to keep growing.

You have a little bit of a slump, but in the order of one to 2%, as opposed to this giant cliff that you're gonna fall off of anytime soon. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic. Thank you for being our gasoline correspondent.

Yes, an oil and gas consultant. Straight from the oil fields of America. Yeah, yeah, can we call you a rough neck? Exactly, yeah. Yeah, show me your hands. A vertical SAS rough neck. call you a rough neck? Exactly, yeah. Show me your hands. Vertical sass rough neck. Vertical sass rough neck in the trenches. Thank you so much for stopping by.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for joining, Miles. Up next, we have Alex from Meridian coming into the studio. Former size lord. Former size lord. Break it down. Think he was in P.E., Toma Bravo, maybe Black Rock. I'd met him before a couple years ago

when he was just getting the company off the ground. So excited to have him in P.E., Toma Bravo, maybe Black Rock. I'd met him before a couple years ago when he was just getting the company off the ground. So it's great to have him in here. Welcome to the studio, Alex. How are you doing? Hey guys, doing well. How are you? Doing well. What's going on? Not much.

It's been a big week for me. We were launching our seed round publicly. I had a baby two days ago, my first. No way. Hard launching baby. was gone for that too too we too how much did the baby way the baby was seven pounds and it was a seven million seven pounds and a seven million dollar she's a number that's great congratulations I saw a tweet the other day it was like the new fundraiser

announcement stack and it was like you know tech crunches out yeah you guys are in I think it was the New York Times, right? You would say marriages deaths births Yes Well, oh, we're there are you think is baby baby announcements baby drops. We definitely have to do that We need a different baby different prop for that. Well, congratulations it must be a Absolute blur of a week, but it's great to have you here. Are you calling in from Miami?

Where are you based these days? I'm in Miami, yeah. I'm in today. Cool. The company's based between New York and Miami. We have sales and customer support in New York. I'm down here in Miami today. I'm wearing shorts,

because I'm here supporting my wife as well. So I threw in a blazer, but I'm not going to stand up. But anyway, break down the, make do the pitch of the company. How are you pitching? No and quick and quick backstory to oh, yeah, I believe in that context and then go into the yeah for sure So I spent about ten years in private equity. I was a big firms like CBC Blackstone Thank you. Thank you Thank you and I would say one of the common themes of that career was just wrestling with terrible

software pretty much across the stack. It was like software that was built in the 90s had kind of been pushed into the cloud and was really never kind of modernized. And I think a lot of that was because private equity as an industry was kind of an SMB for software companies. It was like five or six guys in a room. It was like Henry Kravis and George Roberts, Sizelord doing a couple of deals. And the economics were great.

So you never had to make it more efficient. You never had to figure out how to use software. And there was this promise of the private equity CRM that was basically, it's got all the context of who you're meeting with, the deals that are crossing your desk, all these pitch decks, all this information. But none of it was being harvested into an intelligence layer.

So firms would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Salesforce, and then they'd use it like an Excel spreadsheet, like who's working on what deal, we got to take through them, and that was about it. There was no insight that was coming out of it. So what we do at Meridian is we combine the concept of CRM with a massive third-party company data set and an AI agent called Scout that essentially is the power user of the CRM and the data set. And so what

Scout does is it goes out, scours all of the information on private companies that's out there and there's really never been more of that and really helps you focus your mandate on the ones that you are actually going to invest in and then pulls in all that context that's in your inbox, that's on your calendar, that's in your investment committee memos and helps you focus on the 10 companies in your space in that kind of specific thesis you have that you need to get in front of,

helps you set up those meetings and helps you kind of get in front of them faster ahead of your competitors. Talk about the structure of the market. Is this the kind of business that you basically need to get every customer, right, or at least all the truly big logos in order

to build a nine-figure revenue business? What does that look like? Totally. When I first started the company, people said, obvious idea, right? People want a better CRM and private equity, but small market. How big can it get? And I think what we've discovered is actually just how deep the market is.

There are so many private equity firms. They've never, you know, it's a really fast growing industry, but it's also a broadening industry, right? There's, there's private credit. That's just going through explosive gross. Huge hedge funds that are doing private deals now and kind of combining private and public, um, there are family offices, there are this whole universe of sovereign funds, LPs. in private deals now and kind of combining private and public. There are family offices. There are this whole universe of sovereign funds, LPs. And so we've been lucky to kind of sell

to each of those constituents. And I mean, do solo operators or like scout funds, like the HBS grad who's going to go out and buy a window washing business? Does that fit as well? Totally. I mean, we literally have hundreds of HVAC roll ups on our website.

Hundreds. I know, right? We're suddenly seeing these trends. Let's give it up for HVAC roll ups on our website. Hundreds. We're suddenly seeing these trends. Let's give it up for HVAC roll ups. Very quickly. That's amazing. How does value accrual work in the industry? I imagine that the data brokers and the data providers want their pound of flesh than the

private equity firms. Not notorious for being loose with the pocketbooks. Not exactly, you know, they're like, they're going to try and extract as much value as possible. So you're kind of sitting in between those two. How do you not get squeezed and what's the fair take rate between these three kind of parties in this deal? Yeah, it's a great question.

You know, when I started the company, I kind of had this thesis that we were going to have to charge a huge amount for all of this live data on companies. But what's happened with AI is that actually that data is so commoditized now, like you used to pay 7,000 bucks a seat for a pitch book license. And what pitch book would do is basically structure all this publicly available data on, you know, who invested in which company, how many employees do they have and put it in a database for you. You can get all of that information with good prompting now.

And so we actually have our own proprietary data set. We use AI to kind of scour all of that stuff. We feed it directly into the platform. And so what used to happen was associates would just copy and paste information from Pitchburg, throw it into Salesforce. And it was just this kind of dumb database that you had to manually update. Now we're able to just package all of that into the software. And so we do work with a few of the data providers. Source Grub is one of them because they do have amazing proprietary data. But for the

most part, these databases are, in my opinion, going to become incredibly commoditized over time. What is LinkedIn's role in the industry right now? I feel like linkedin has an incredible amount of data. I've seen Growth equity investors look at headcount growth as a hey, maybe I should give them Yeah, I know I know venture investors that do that to track this and they know a company's cooked long before The headlines are coming all the time when you see others two competitors and one's growing headcount and the other one's not and yeah They both raised it five billion a couple years ago but one's actually compounding i mean not that head crown growth is really like it's kind of a vanity metric it could be a bad signal but it's usually companies that are doing truly poorly don't tend to 10x head

count in a couple years yeah uh so but but i've always been interested in linkedin back in the day you used to have an API, you used to be able to scrape it very liberally. I'm sure it's way more locked down. Is this, just walk me through even trying to get access, is it available, is it pricey? What is the dynamic with LinkedIn? Yeah, LinkedIn data is a great data source.

Headcount data is probably one of our most requested kind of numbers that we throw on every company profile. Another one is Glassdoor reviews. People want to know, you know, is this a good place to work? Yeah. Are the account executives hitting quota or if they're not, you know, that's a bad sign. LinkedIn, you know, they continue to try to lock the data down so that these web scrapers can't hit it. But we do actually work with a couple of really good LinkedIn scrapers.

That's really about data sources that we buy it from. They're just, you know just trying to be one step ahead of the LinkedIn algorithm. I think LinkedIn. Not expecting that answer. Totally, I mean, they try to pay wall as much as they can, but there are always ways around it. And frankly, I'm surprised that LinkedIn hasn't just API'd

that data and started to sell it because it really is an incredible database that you can start using. I guess they're just not HDI-pilled because they will let you pay for a human seat and look at everything But if you automate it there, they're not as friendly. 100% yeah, interesting Jordi any other questions? I'm curious if you have any Insight we have a friend of the show that was posting this morning. Oh, yeah, I was gonna ask this. This is good

I'll pull up the post you probably have crossed paths with him at some point. This is Kerry No Interest. He's a non. He says, uh-oh, it is happening about two weeks ago. I started getting five plus emails a week saying the same thing. The VCs are ready to start selling. The insane glut that is the 2021 to 2022 vintage

might start moving soon. VCs DM me. I have dry powder. And he says a screenshot. Are you guys still buying software companies? I have a well-respected VC firm that is finally wanting to part with a bunch of their good, not great assets or portfolio companies.

Are you seeing this? We've been hearing about this for a long time. But there's always a question of when will this actually happen? And I'm sure back in your day, you bought, I imagine you acquired venture-backed companies that were good but weren't necessarily I'm sure back in your day you bought, I imagine you acquired venture-backed companies that were good but didn't quite, weren't necessarily gonna go public

or anything along those lines. Totally, I mean, I think that 2021 vintage is challenged for sure. And I think we're seeing a lot of private equity firms, they're gonna have to hold those deals for a long time. They're marking them at one X because they have that luxury, but to really grow into value, it could be many years.

And I think that's a big thing. So that's on the, but to really grow into value, it could be many years. And I think that's even on. So that's on the. But what I was calling out is venture funds are sitting there with a bunch of software businesses that they want to sell to P.E. So the challenged vintage and venture is trying to sell to effectively a twenty twenty five or twenty twenty four vintage on the private equity side. Totally. No. And I think that's going to happen more and more at the IPO windows closed. Private equity is sitting on a lot of dry powder. They got to buy stuff. And I think those VC funds are going to see, you know, definitely value impairment, right? Private equity and not paying the type of, let's say ARR multiples, um,

that they probably invested in. But there's a lot of great IP that's out there. I think for the right private equity firm to come in, buy the IP, probably roll together a few of these things. I think it's actually gonna be a great strategy. And I definitely see private equity firms getting more creative with how they wanna work with some of these early, but really highly valued companies that got over their skis. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on the new baby and the seed round. It is a big week for you. Yeah, congrats. Come back on again soon. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we're covering our breaking news.

The Andreessen Horowitz. They said they wouldn't do this deal, but they did. They said it was impossible. The chattering, the chattering masses said it wouldn't, it wouldn't get done, but it did. And we have, who do we have in here first? I think Brian. Um, apparently Brian and Roy are both in the waiting room. I don't know if we want to let them in at the same time, have them go back to

back. What are you thinking, Jordy? I think we start with Brian, give the level, the anatomy of the deal, and then we bring in Roy, and we just go crazy. Brian, welcome to the studio. How you doing? Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Great to be here.

Thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy. Your notifications must be crazy right now. Cluelessly, you guys decided, hey, Friday, let's throw it out. That's right. Nobody's crazy to launch. Everyone's going on a weekend and go in on a weekend

Yeah, there's no other Andreessen deals that are really taking up mind share right now. This is the one. Yeah, you guys Thinking machines was leaking And of course clearly For sure this is one Anyways, we got we got, we got your launch post here that we read previously earlier on the show, but why don't you break down, background on you and then let's break down the deal,

why you invested and then of course, we're gonna have Roy on in just 10 minutes. Fantastic. Background on me, been at A16D for four or five years. Look at a lot of the AI applications. You've met a bunch of my colleagues here and had them on already. Invested in 11 labs, function house of the world.

And prior to this was a snap as early employee and with a CFO. So that's me. Are you done in LA? Yeah. Are you in LA now? No, I'm in New York right now. My heart is in LA.

Okay, yeah. We gotta get you back. LA is coming up. It was too nice to live, you know? All right. So, deal, rational, anatomy of deal. Yeah. The anatomy. I think it really, really breaks down to a couple things. But really, three points. One is distribution. It's really, really hard to get distribution these days. And to get it repeatedly is a little bit of a dark art.

And so, I think Roy had that in abundance. So one, got the distribution. We invest for strengths of strengths, as you know, not lack of weakness. And so that's really exciting for us. Second, I love the product. You know, I grew up on Dragon Ball Z. And I always wanted one of those scouts that tells you how strong is Jordy, how strong is John? Like the thing goes up, right? And that's essentially what it is on your web browser, right? Yeah, talking to people you just do a quick command enter and it just gives you all the things you need to know while

reading it and looking into your eyes. I think that's special. I think that sort of is right for a lot of the use cases whether it's consumer or enterprise. So I love the product. That's one thing I'll call out today. We've had our intern Over on the intern cam testing testing the product all day long and I've been impressed. Yeah, I'm impressed. He's there Well, there we go. How are you liking it so far? Yeah, it's been really good. I mean, it's very fast. The answers are really good. I think it's like a great product Nine It's our version of kind of like the the office in a box. What are they called? A lot of people have like these toll booth

phone booth style Live in the pod. Yeah our version of a pod is a Maybach Yeah, it's very perfectly. It's perfectly soundproof. So when we don't want to hear him, he just rolls up the window I just he just rolls good, but he's got a table a desk in there It's a great set up a comfortable set up and nominal. Yeah, massage chair. Good ergonomics. Yes Yeah, thank you. Thank you. thank you Tyler. Yeah, yes So we've we've had Roy on the show a couple times We've covered some of the various stunts and we got some pushback One of the times we had him on because we hadn't used the product and somebody was calling us out

Yeah, and now as a company we're paid paid subscribers of clearly we are customers throw You can throw the TVP and logo on the site paid subscribers of Cluely. We're customers. You can throw the TVPN logo on the site. Yeah, excellent. I've been impressed. We were kind of firing back questions, using it more in that interview functionality.

And the answers were very good guesstimates of somebody that had generalized knowledge on a topic, being able to answer quickly. And he actually looked. I think it answered a better question on, it answered the 747 question better than my chat GPT 40 Direct answer clearly God it's really mogged. Yeah, oh three. Yeah. Yeah, whatever the fine Whatever, I was no three. Oh three. Love it. Well, I guess the last point

You know, it's a you know revenue conversion. A lot of people think oh, it's just hype and what's happening Is it all distribution all the stunts? The truth is that he is actually converting that to revenue, right? Whether it's consumer or enterprise. So that to me is sort of the, I guess the seriousness that underlies the crazy stunts that people see outside and that combination works for me.

I'm excited for it. And you know, let's go. Let's go. Let's go back to the first one. Roy's clearly great at distribution, breaking through, getting attention. It feels like earned media does have a cap versus paid media or brand marketing

or some of the other flywheels, the referral programs or some of the other flywheels, you know, referral programs or you know, some viral mechanic. It doesn't have a cap, John. He's going to be in front of Congress, you know, using Clueless and some spectacles. Well, that's a good question. Cheating when he's dragged in front of Congress, you know, for antitrust. Do you think it has a cap or or or and because you could one one scenario is is this is his

this is not this is not his this is not his permanent go-to-market motion. It's merely the beachhead. It's the way to break through, get attention, hire the first 50 interns, but the next thousand interns will come through recruiters and kind of standard practice, and he'll be on a more traditional podcast circuit when he has news, but we won't be hearing from him every single day.

The other is that maybe we're in a new era and he actually can and the company can go viral every single day and you're seeing kind of the Mr. Beast playbook in reverse instead of Mr. Beast going viral every day and then launching a snack brand the other way around. So he builds a company and then becomes famous on the back of that company. Which one of those feels right to you? Yeah, I think maybe I'll just comment one, Mr. Beast follows Roy. So that's fun.

There we go. Fun fact one. That makes sense. Fun fact two, I think from a media and audience perspective, John and Jordy, I think of it as like a bunch of oceans. There's no one ocean. There is Indian Pacific Atlantic, and that's Twitter,

Facebook properties, as well as like, you know, more organic and all of these pools of water are very, very deep. And in terms of general population, who I lovingly call our, you know, consumers, I still think it's so early. The only consumer AI product people are using are really chat GPT.

And for them to actually learn about products like this and use it, I think the sort of oceans way deeper than we imagine. And we're just scratching the surface today. Talk about calculated risk. This is a calculated bet. You guys invested 15 million in the company. He's clearly talented on the product side,

clearly talented on the attention side. You know, he's charismatic, he's fun to talk to, he's well-spoken, all these things. So there's a lot of reasons to love it. And then the pushback and other VCs that maybe didn't do the deal would say Roy's like a wild wild card. Like do you think that more investors need to be comfortable with like a very

potential real risk? And and and maybe the average VC has just gotten a little soft. Good things. I think look like if you think of the history of large general population products you see a lot of them actually being pretty risky early on.

Spot or not for Facebook, where does Snap begin? What was Reddit initially? And sort of thinking about that, I think there's a beginning of a lot of the consumer products and products that are used by many people have a funny beginning sometimes. And I think, so one, cat get a wrist site, we're comfortable with that.

I think the second thing is, I have a saying where momentum is a mode today in this sort of era of AI applications. When I say momentum is a mode, I don't mean just distribution. I also mean product iteration. So, the calculated risk here is that Roy can convert this awareness into people clamoring to work at the company that are highly high and exceptional great, great people to build products and then use that to continue to iterate on innovation on the product format that is already amazing. So that's sort of the bet, if you will. And when those two come together, I think we'll be surprised.

How do you think about restrictions or dynamics from the major like big tech companies? Because you mentioned that, you know, there's a consumer angle here. But when I see the product, I see it as a desktop app and many consumer interactions happen on the phone. And so, you know, Roy was fantastic at creating a viral moment around the idea of like using Cluely on a first date.

And yet, you're not going to have a first date over a Zoom meeting on your MacBook Pro. Maybe, maybe Roy's planning another pandemic. Maybe. But, but, but people do talk to each other on the phone and on FaceTime, but it's much harder to plug in and do screen recording and do picture in picture and all of that. So it feels like there needs to be some sort of transition point if you're going to go broader to killer use cases for consumer.

But at the same time, you're gonna bump up against a ton of pushback from the platforms who just say, we don't want to give you access to that API. We don't want you to screen record for privacy reasons, good or bad. So I don't disagree. We are techno optimist. And I would believe that there will be another innovation that actually allows the likes of clearly to live and be omnipresent and everyday interaction.

That said, you know, AI is like a digital god we created and we trapped it behind a little chat box. So it is natural to me that it should live on a thing that you actually work and interact with the most. And we're starting with computers today because that's where the power is. That's actually, the digital god is not godly enough on the little devices today.

So we put it in a little larger box. And the little boxes will get better and we're excited for that future. Awesome. Well, I'm excited for you guys. Congratulations on the deal. And we gotta get Roy in here. We should pull up the launch video as well.

But thank you for joining. Thanks for having me. Brian, thank you for being bold and making a real bet. Probably had to fight it out with the American Dynamism team because as we know, they're working on hardware, they're working on re-industrialization, they're doing everything over there.

Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Next up we have Roy from Cluely, the man himself. Third time in the studio, third time on TBPM. Welcome to the stream. Get that hammer ready. Get the gong ready. Let's bring him in. Let's hope he's ready

Roy give us the new area headline number. How are you doing? How much did you raise? 15 million fucking dollars Clean hit clean hit Congratulations Why'd you raise money? I thought you're printing so much money you didn't need to raise ever. What happened? We're printing money, but we need more money. Okay.

Every single day we're looking for things to spend money on. Okay, okay. Uses of the funds. What are you gonna spend on first? 14 million for brain computer interface development. Exactly, exactly, exactly. We have whatever you thought the viral content, you thought this was cool, bro. We're doing 10x this. Okay. More videographers, more after effects artists. More editors, more engineers, more everything. Please.

Mas, Mas. Yes, let's go. Yeah, what's the morning routine like now over at Cleaning HQ? Everybody wakes up and we swipe on hinge for 30 minutes. It's mandatory. Everyone swipes on Instagram for an hour just to make sure the viral senses are refreshed. And we, we, we, we all do cold plunges and we're, we're, we're ready to hit the day with, with caffeine.

If you cold plunge though, does it negate like the brain rot? Like, do you get to, or is that intentional? Like how do you like the brain? We scroll to keep our viral sense up but after that it's time to get to work. We're a serious company You know, we're not we're not just trolling over here. Okay, that's good to hear talk to me about the hinge use case I want to hear clues desktop app You're not in the app store if I'm if someone's using hinge on their phone How are they gonna take advantage of clearly now or in the future?

I mean every single time you screenshot something and ask chat to be t anything I'm like this entire use it like it is ridiculous that I have to do this like AI can already Take the context of your screen and audio and and and give you information out of it Why can chat to be teeth calm not use this? Why is the main AI use case not already aware of what's going on on your screen? audio and give you information out of it. Why can chat to be teeth.com not use this? Why is the main AI use case not already aware of what's going on on your screen? We think this is crazy. Yes, but it's but it is locked down for privacy reasons on the iPhone. So the question is

like what user interface innovation are you going to bring to bear on the phone so that you can actually unlock the vast majority of consumers who are realistically not using the most popular consumer apps on their desktop. I would push back on whether we even have to enter the phone at all. Really, the technology is growing so fast, we might just be able to skip phone entirely, we might be able to skip classes entirely, and whatever it is, I think the technology is growing super fast. In five years, I out question whether phone is the dominant consumer use case. Okay, I Get that your BCI piled it still feels a few years out the meta ray bands feel very much here today Have you looked into those APIs how developer friendly is the meta ray band ecosystem versus the iOS ecosystem?

versus the MacBook Pro ecosystem, which seems to be where you're flourishing right now. I feel like you're going to have a really hard time on iOS, no matter how cracked your engineers are. Apple is just going to say no. I think I think Roy, if anybody can read cook, I won't, I won't put it past you, but it feels like the meta ray Ray-Band ecosystem might be a little bit more open. What's your read on the Meta Ray-Band

or the Meta Glasses rollout? They just had an announcement this today. My read is that there is way more money in all in desktop assistant than people actually think. There's maybe two, three competitors in this, maybe, maybe two, three competitors who are actually trying to take a meaningful stab at desktop assistant. And there's way more money and way more value in this. And people think we're still going to be using

computers in a few years. Maybe we'll be using something else, but like, like enterprise, bro, these sales Oracle Adobe, these guys move slow as fuck, bro. Like they will be blackberries. So bro, like they are moving slow. We're gonna have computers, a bunch of enterprise value for the next few years and we'll be here to capture all that. Yeah, so I mean, I get that the, I mean it feels like this is going towards enterprise note taking, enterprise assistant and would have a very positive,

yes you use the cheat on your technical interview as like a viral hook, but we're having our intern demo clearly today and you could see that if we're on a call just having answers be pulled up ambiently is valuable there's obviously a bunch of you know bots that plug in and listen and record your emails but being more proactive seems like a step forward it begs the question why are you in the consumer group in Andreessen but I guess that there still is a consumer angle long term. But how are you seeing Clueless users adopt the product?

It feels like the logical cases at work on the desktop. Yeah, well, of course. I mean, the question is how are Clueless users using the product? Yes. Most people, it is most helpful in a meeting. Right now there's no product on the tool that gives you live assistance during a meeting. That's where all the prosumer and enterprise values, most prosumer and enterprise values being derived.

Other than that, we have the gigantic consumer, the most viral use case ever of literally cheating bro like, like, like answers your questions. And like what, even when you're doing homework, I mean like just immediate bro, like you do all your homework, when you're doing quizzes, assignments, when you're watching lectures, bro, immediate bro, immediate, bro. It's immediate help. Immediate on site. Yeah. Got to give a shout out to the whole team. We we we were reviewing clearly throughout the show today. We were pretty impressed with the product.

I think a lot of people that are yapping on the timeline haven't tried it yet. Yeah. And we would never. And I think any time going forward, somebody leaves a negative comment, just say, Hey, totally understand how you might think that. Why don't you just use the product for five, 10 hours, and then come back and let me know if you feel the same way. That's the right user out of it. Talk about the process for the round. You did you raise the seed round not very long ago. I'm, you know,

did this come inbound? I will say right now to all the VCs watching, if you ever are trying to get a round, you get me an email thread and you say, hey, let me loop in my assistant and we'll schedule a call in two weeks. You are not getting allocation. And I'll wake up every single one of my friends

to make sure you don't get allocation. Bro, these rounds move so fucking quick. You don't have too much. Your whole job is to find the alpha and invest quick and early. Why are you looping an assistant in two weeks? My partners, Ryan and Eric, they came with stakes and Coke Zeroes to the house. Stakes and Coke Zeroes.

Oh my god. This is how investors need to be. Your job is to find the fucking alpha, bro. Why are you looping an assistant? There was a preempt and I think all rounds you need to preempt. Preempted founder says always preempt roundsed founders you're not getting preempted Even if you're running out of money if you're not getting preempted just to the company down the company down. That's great Don't have two weeks to loop in your system, okay

What is your underlying motivation for building this company? I want to be conqueror of the fucking universe. It is so obvious that AI is going to massively expand what is capable. And I think like even in five, 10 years, bro, we keep growing at this rate. Like we'll be on the next ship to Mars. We'll all be living a 400 years old and I'll be Jack till I die. And in that universe, bro, like these companies will converge into super companies and these super companies is going to be me versus Elon versus Sam competing to be guardian of the fucking galaxy bro and I'm going to be on top.

Okay. Sounds like you're power hungry. There's been a criticism. Which can be a strength. A strength. There's clearly a sub tweet about you going around on X arguing that you are driven by fame not greed or idealism. Is that true? To what degree are you motivated by fame specifically?

The only two things I really care about in my life are working on is working on something that I find interesting and getting the work seen by people. Yes, Elon Musk. These are my inspirations. Like these people are known by every living conscious human being in the world man This guy founded Apple this guy. It's like it's the coolest shit ever four thousand years ago, bro You wanted to hunt big fucking wooly mammoths in the tribe. There's no more wooly mammoths. There's only startups Okay, so so you're not beating the allegation

Wait, but but but the more precisely But more precisely, if the best path for Clueless Forward is your interns getting up, getting tons of social media views, you step out of the limelight because you're managing the company. People know Clueless, but they don't know Roy Lee. Is that still a win for you? Of course. At one point, the company becomes undistinguishable from the founder. Yes. Happen with every single big company. Andistinguishable from the founder. Yes.

It happens with every single big company and it's what will happen with Clueless. Yeah, it's just a unique situation because we know of Palmer Lucky because of Oculus, the product, and many people know of Clueless because of you and the viral stunts that you've pulled and so you're kind of inverting it. And the question that the haters are asking of you is that is the long term goal to build a great product or to build the brand of Roy Lee? No, it is to change the world in a meaningful way

and you don't change the world by going viral a million times. You change the world by genuinely building a world changing product. Technology changes the world. I will build great technology and every person in the world will watch me do it. Amazing.

How big are you going on the content side? Do you want to get a single video with a hundred million views? Are you going that big? Is that kind of the wrong framework to think about it? But I imagine you're going to have more budget than ever and it's easy now to get a million views on X on a video is a hundred million views on YouTube. The next, you know, challenge I will tell you right now, and this might be the most logical thing I say on here. But the biggest societal shift in maybe human history happened about five years ago when TikTok surpassed YouTube in terms of like virality and usage.

All of a sudden, the number of content creators stayed the same and the relative number of content being created stayed the same. Whereas the quantity of content being consumed about 100 X as a result, there is this gigantic gap where there is not enough viral content for people to consume, which is why you see the same subway surfers overlaid on a Reddit store. You see that a hundred times because there's literally not enough good content out there for the next maybe six months to a year. Anything you post that has the potential to go viral

will go viral, which is why you see our marketing team is all influencers with viral sense. We know, we independently all have 20 ideas a day that we know will go viral. And this extrapolated out over a year will literally generate a billion views a month. And if you're someone who thinks a billion views a month is not gonna convert to some money, like, bro, you're retarded. Go back to school, bro.

A billion views a month. Is that, is that like, will you run into a cap? Is there a set market size that you will saturate and then we'll be seeing Superbowl ads? I have no idea, but I'll tell you right now, like, like Superbowl ads, it's, it's, it's all old. Like this is the old meta. The new meta is in content is in short, and nobody seems to have captured the gigantic delta in generating more viral content. I still think it'd be funny if you forced 127 million people, the number of people that

watch the Super Bowl, to just watch a video of you saying, hello, I'm Roy Lee. I encourage you to go to Cluely.com and sign up for Cluely today. So don't count it out. But anything else you want to share while you're here? I know it's a big day for you. The timeline's blown up. You you not very many people have the stones to to launch a series

A on a Friday, a summer Friday to go head to head against Mira too. Yeah, yeah. And you pull it off again. I think people worry too much about the little things in In reality, if you post something that deserves to go viral, you will 100% go viral. And this will only be true for maybe the next few years, maybe. And I encourage more people to post. Most businesses will die,

not because the product sucks, but because you can't get enough eyeballs. And I think we, if we win, if, and when we win, we will show to the world that there needs to be a fundamental difference in how companies are built. You start with distribution eyeballs because right now that is where the gigantic Delta is. Then you stick with us, stick with us for a minute. I want to play your fundraising video live on the stream. And then if we have any questions from that, I want to ask you. Please, please. So let's play the video. Ha ha. Mr. Lee, Columbia University has found you guilty of academic integrity violations. Do you have anything to say?

Color grade. Nailed the color grade. I've already apologized to school, but to be honest, in two years, nobody's gonna think this is cheating. Yo, the Andreessen wire just hit you. Think it'll last us through the summer? Welcome to Clueless. Oh

Great video anger. Yeah, congratulations banger. I gotta hit the gong again Very well done. Very well done and beautiful beautifully shot like the light I mean your cinematographer you have very very good. Very very good nailed it. Anything else for Roy for Roy. That's it for now in house It's crazy that you can shoot that in house that really is remarkable congratulations We are excited to follow the journey shit. We just got 15 million dollars. Oh Yeah, tell us about the fundraising leak. Well, what's your deal with our for rocked? Were you able to how much do you have to pay him to shut up? Man I was I was begging him. You guys have no way for the last few weeks.

I've been begging this man. Please do not leak it. Why? Why? I feel like, I feel like it already leaked separately and like having, I feel like you would lead leaning into a leak. I was expecting like a collab almost. I think what, whatever leak there could possibly be,

I have very strong faith in my ability to make my announcement go more viral. Oh, sure. This video will go more viral than any leak would have, even if I tried. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So you actually don't wanna take the gas out of the tank. I love it.

Thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic and good luck. Congratulations to you and the team. Excited to watch you guys cook this summer. Yeah. And hopefully the 15 mil makes it back you know back, you know August just remember August It's gonna be hard to get the autoresponders will be on it's gonna be hard to be you know Get those 24 hour meetings. Yeah, and so just make sure you got the runway to September

It again IPO underwriters do not preempt so at some point you will have to stop with the preempt everything mantra I don't know there's some SPAC sponsors out there. Who knows maybe Back in the fall, you know, I wouldn't be I wouldn't be surprised You're saying it as a joke. I feel like it might be in the cards. We're we're gonna be tracking it Thank you so much for something. Great chatting with you. Talk to you later. Talk soon. Bye Wow We're gonna be tracking it. Thank you so much for stopping by. Awesome, Roy. Great chatting with you. We'll talk to you later. Talk soon. Bye. Wow. What a sensational run for Roy Lee.

I'm very excited for him. Just getting started too. And I won't dox any particular names, but Roy Lee is the most controversial guest within my family group chat. Very, very divisive. Part of my family absolutely loves him and is like, he is a national treasure.

And another member of my family is like, I cannot stand this guy. Which is why it's good content. The internet loves people that are divisive. But I did, I feel like this was a more serious interview. And I feel we broke through a little bit more. And obviously, there is the idea of Roy Lee, the character, who can play a character that can go viral.

And there is the Roy Lee, who is an entrepreneur, the man. And we got a little bit through. And I'm fine with either showing up. I'm actually fine to do an interview with the character and have fun on the stream. I'm also interested to talk to him as just a person who's building a company. I got a little bit of both still you know lots of uncertainty it's an early-stage company but I'm rooting for him

hopefully build something great and it seems like the product has been pretty good so far awesome well we have Dave from HF0 in the studio there is what's going on how we doing y'all we're doing great it's been a banger day lots of news dude tough to follow up Roy Lee that guy has a lot of energy so we got What's going on? How we doing y'all? We're doing great. It's been a banger day. Lots of news. Dude, tough to follow up Roy Lee. That guy has a lot of energy. So we gotta bring it up. We gotta amp it up.

Give us some numbers. Give us how many companies were in the last batch? We do 10 companies every single time y'all. There we go. There we go. There we go. Oh. Give us the audience some quick background on you and HF0 and then let's dive into the

badge and talk about some of the companies. Sweet. So I'll give a little backstory. Is it cool if I give like a two minute backstory? Absolutely. Perfect. We'd love that. So a little backstory myself.

Star largest hackathon in the world like 10 plus years ago is called Mhacks at the University of Michigan. Oh yeah. Dropped out of Michigan and just traveled to different universities helping spread hackathons. Then I had my heart broken, I quit everything when I lived in monasteries for a year and a half. And HF0 is essentially a monastery meets a hackathon. So I started investing about six years ago now,

and this is before HF0, my third investment was a startup called Ramp. That actually is pretty cool. You should have just called it quit. Many people would have said, no, that's it, I've done it. But you kept going. You kept going.

Congratulations. And then why you do it. And so our normal investing was going really well, but then we started thinking like, what is the product that these top technical founders actually want even more than cash? Everyone's trying to invest money in them, but what is the product that they actually want? And that's how we came up with HF0.

It's essentially a monastery meets a hackathon. It's a 10 week monastic retreat where you let go of everything in your life and drop it in the zone of your life and build. And it's a lot of repeat founders joining our program. and drop into the zone of your life and build. It's a lot of repeat founders joining our program. The back story is interesting. The first batch was in New York and it kicked off February 15, 2020. Wasn't a great timing to have an in-person residence. In person residents. Bunch of people in the same house, yeah. And so two weeks in, I had to shut down

that like zero-ith batch, but I heard, the day that I shut it down, I heard that Taiwan didn't have COVID. So I flew to Taiwan that night in the hopes of keeping this dream alive. I spent six months learning Mandarin, building political relationships, convinced them to give me visas.

Then I flew everyone to Taiwan, and we were in the first full HF0 batch in Taiwan in the middle of COVID. It was the only country in the world that didn't have COVID. And that batch worked. Then my co-founder at the time, Lucy, Lucy Guo, who started Scale, she was in Miami and she was like, yo, Dave, Miami has like 100 investors

for every technical founder. You know all the technical founders, we bring them here, they're gonna have a great time, fundraising and everything. So we started Miami Hack Week, then we ran two batches in Miami, and they went amazing. She was totally spot on. Then I decided to go all in on HF0. And we were thinking really deeply about where we wanted to do it. San Francisco is dead at the time, but we came and visited and it seemed like it was just having the sparks of life coming back. And so we were between New York and San Francisco to base it.

We decided to take a early bet in this latest wave on San Francisco in a big part due to like Gary Tan and the work that he did, like kind of getting the city shifted back in the right direction. And we've been holding on for dear life since then. We started this hackathon in San Francisco called AI Hack Week,

which happened to be the week after ChatGPT came out. You had some bad timing the first time around, good timing that time. Yeah, that's good. Good timing in Taiwan, good timing in Miami, good timing in San Francisco. And then the program's just been taking off.

Since we moved to San Francisco, we've had about 35,000 teams start the application to HF0. We still only back 10 teams at a time. It's been 10 teams from the first. We still only back 10 teams at a time It's been 10 teams from the first batch. It's still 10 teams at a time today I I love what we get to do We pour our heart and souls into it and when you work with 10 teams you actually deeply get to know Each and every one of the teams so so we love what we get to do over here But how many batches a year is it is it be back this year three three interesting?

Yeah, I think you know my buddy Evan Steitz Clayton from Teespring. I hung out with him very, very early and he was like a couple years ahead of me in like the venture world and gave me a bunch of amazing advice that was very, very helpful. But the last time I ran into him

was that he was at YC Demo Day, Alumni Demo Day, and he was writing a poem about every company that went on stage. And I was just like, I think he was like maybe thinking about investing in them, but I was just like, I think he was like maybe thinking about investing in them, but I was just like, that's a very different way to process and internalize.

And I mean, even in the age of AI, it's like the one thing that like the LLMs probably couldn't do a good job at. But great guy. I mean, have you read the poem? That's rough. Jokes are rough, but poems, maybe. It's all rough.

But anyways. But his poems were epic back then. That was how I would view the demo days. I would just read his poem and read it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he'd post them all. It was great. We're epic back then. That was how I would view the demo days. I would just read his poem and yeah, yeah, yeah, he'd post them all. It's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but I want to hear the story of like, tell me the story about one particular company that particularly surprised you or did something unique throughout a particular batch and really

take me on the story of like, what can happen? What does great look like in the context of this 10 week sprint? Yeah, so the company that comes to mind right away is OpenRouter. So a lot of the folks listening probably use OpenRouter. It's the top router when you want to switch between models. So Gemini 2.5 Flash came out and it was like incredible

and way cheaper. And then if you're on OpenRouter, you click one button and you switch everything over. OpenEye to Gemini or from Gemini to Anthropic. And if you actually go, you can go to openrouter.ai slash rankings and they have like essentially the definitive usage rankings for all the LLMs. But to your question, when Alex was in HF0, this was like fall 2023. And back then there were only a few models. And so he took this really contrarian bet at the time that actually there would end up being a long tail of models that people would use when at the time everyone thought it was going to be like one model to rule them all.

And so at that time there were very few models and this bet wasn't even true and actually in the middle of the batch He almost gave up on that thesis. He was like, maybe I'm wrong on this But but in the context of HF 0 being with 10 other teams who were like on the ground were pushing these models to their limits He ended up like having the right surroundings the right community and stuff where he actually like stuck with this kind of crazy thesis at the time. And now if you go to their website, OpenRouter, like they're doing like trillions of tokens a week. So that one's-

It's a great story. We're actually having him on the show soon. So I'm really excited to meet him. I've never met him, but he seems like an amazing dog. Yeah, so Alex was the founder of OpenSea before he started OpenRouter. That's where I know his name. He was in my bet YC badge. Yeah, amazing. I didn't realize that. Yes second time founder

that's such a unique thing and you wouldn't like a lot of people don't think that like Second time founders or someone as successful as him would go through any sort of program. Usually it's just like straight to series D There's so many stories you did you did cross mint super early to right? I remember Dave called me and he's like you got to talk to this company. They're insane Yeah, they were raising on a note at the time and I was like Yeah, you you did you did this uncapped round with you know with a discount of course And I was like I couldn't get on board with the uncapped Personally and I ended up having to invest like three weeks later

like at the, at like whatever the series A price and you're totally right on that one. Yeah, I want to talk about those repeat founders. This is something that kind of shocked me. So I went through YC in 2012 and then, or like my first company went through YC in summer 2012. The one went back through in summer, in winter 16. And I was like, I'm still like a founder,

I'm still like a startup guy, but we'd scaled the first company to 50 people. And I was very much in manager mode. Like I had like gray hairs on staff and like managers. And even though we had enough money to hire people, there was this big mental shift. I remember Dalton Caldwell from Y Combinator kind of telling me like,

hey, you gotta go back into individual contributor mode. You got to even though you can afford and you're connected, you got to do it yourself. And through that, it was a wildly different experience and it was really good. Talk to me about some of the shifts that you see in the second time founders going back in to these like, you know, dedicated environments where you're maybe not hiring and scaling and raising a bunch of money, even if you can. Yeah, so about 70% of founders who back our repeat founders and usually are kind of bar for actually considering the repeat founders is their last company did at least 10 million

annualized. Yeah. And in fact, in this batch, you know, the 10 teams, five of the founders either built a billion dollar company before this, or their previous company was doing 100 mil plus. Wow, that's very different. And so the challenge is of repeat founders actually pretty unique to being a repeat founder. It's like by virtue of their success, their last company they had gone into, they were managing, you know, hundreds, maybe even like a thousand people.

But what that wasn't the recipe that made their first company successful in the beginning. They know that. And by virtue of their success, they're usually angel investing. Yep. They're advising startups. Everyone wants them to speak at their conference. They might have families. All sorts of stuff.

By then, 60% of the teams we back, someone has a kid. Wow. Yeah. Very different from really racy stuff. That's hard mode. Yeah. And so the challenges they have are different. And so actually are like the residency that we offer is like very different.

It's not an accelerator. It's not incubator. It's a residency. They actually like leave their normal life for these 10 weeks and we subtract everything from their life. So our whole thesis is while everyone's focused on value add, we focus on this thesis of recursive subtraction that actually our mantra at HF0 is the most insidious

distraction isn't networking or conferences or this or that. No, it's the second most important thing in your business. And so founders are so often so good at doing the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth most important thing in their business. But the first, the most important thing in the business is usually a blind spot. It's usually something that you only see when you force yourself to stop doing everything else and then you're like, you're on that second most important thing that's very important.

And you ask yourself that question, is this the most important thing in my business right now? And it comes up for you and you just can feel it's not, but you don't necessarily have clarity yet. And then you realize, oh man, I've actually been afraid of this thing because if I, if I go here, I might find out that the whole business doesn't work. Yeah. So, so that's why it's usually there's some fear that is holding. And so by doing this recursive subtraction, startups just end up like zooming forward. Cause in the beginning of a startup, like early stage,

you essentially have two things. You have like your rate of realizations, and a lot of this comes by like talking to your customers, and then you have a grind. And the residency format allows you to increase your rate of realizations, and then grind like you've never grinded in your life before. It's like, it's like pretty insane.

So that's why like in our last batch, 40% of the teams broke three mil ARR by demo day. So like results were like, even if you're Sequoia, you shouldn't be able to pick this well. And I think it'd be hubris for us to like we're getting amazing founders, but I think it'd be hubris for us to think it's just that we're picking this well. Part of it is the selection bias. Like the set of founders who are repeat founders who are willing to leave their nice apartment, most of them have made money on their last startup, going to leave your nice apartment and move into the residency for 10 weeks. They're serious. They want to birth their life's work.

But the other part of it is that the residency works. This format of company building, I think a lot of companies like kind of did it in an emergent way, like Apple in a garage Facebook had the house in Palo Alto, even Devin cognition had the house in Atherton. So a lot of companies kind of do these residencies without fully realizing it. We've figured out a way to do this to like a whole other level. And it works like every single time. We're just getting

like the results don't even make sense. I can imagine a conversation, you know, with with a CEO and one of the batches and and they're saying like, Oh, I'm worried about this, or like, this thing's working, this thing's working, this thing's working, et cetera. And you're like, but what are you afraid of? And they're like, oh, I'm not really afraid of anything. You're like, no, what are you afraid of? And then they're like, oh, I'm afraid of this thing.

And then you're just, you're effectively the sensei. Yeah, we keep- You can't really directly just ask it like that. You actually have to stop doing a bunch of the other things that are important, but aren't the most important thing. And it's only when you actually subtract over and over and over again, do you actually have the space

to even realize that you might be afraid of something. Yeah, totally. We keep coming back to this, this like X thread about the motivations of the modern Silicon Valley founder by Ana. I want to get your reaction to this. She identifies a trend. She says, there's a cultural shift in the startup ecosystem

that has moved from contrarian rule breakers and hackers to the overachieving STEM kids for whom being a founder is simply the next box to tick. And it seems like you have carved out an area or like a weird, I don't even know what, yeah, like just, you still have to be taking a risk to do what you're proposing. And I'm wondering if you can comment on that trend as like.

It's like sacrifice. Exactly, like there are ways to do founder that are high status now and low sacrifice and low sacrifice talk to me about the status symbol that being a founder is and how you think about that within the context of your program so one of my core values is substance over hype and so actually like at h0, we actually kept the lowest profile possible for the first couple years of the program. Because in my mind, I'm like, there's nothing to talk about here until we have our first

unicorn or first company goes public or whatever. Like, I already know a ton of engineers and everything. I want to just build the best product in the world for founders. There's no one else building this product for repeat founders. And so that's what I'm constantly focused on. That said, Jordan, our creative director, who I think y'all chatted to, and then my co-founder, Emily, did convince me, they're like, hey, Dave,

there's like nothing online about HF0. It's like two years in. They're like, we should do at least something so that when people who don't know you already look it up, they know it's like actually a real thing. And so they fought me on this for like six months. And then finally, I was like, Okay, well, if you get the New York Times, we can do it. But I was joking. I didn't think that actually. And then next thing you know, we had a New York Times writer like living with us for a week. And she happened to have been like a Google engineer before she was in New York Times writer. And then she loved it so much that she started coding again. Oh, wow. And so that was sweet. And so just just turning journalists. These repeat founders who join our program and really the founders that we filter for they are here to birth their life's work.

Like these folks aren't founders because it's any like any sort of status thing. They're founders because like whatever, like way they grew up, whatever like childhood like they they they can't not be founders. They can't not build things. So that's like when you're at HFZ, you're surrounded by a bunch of people

who like it doesn't matter how high status, low. So they just like can't stop themselves from building. And yeah, that's that's the really cool thing. And it's only 10 teams and just you're surrounded by other folks who are like this kind of, I don't say addicted, like it's a sacrifice thing. It's like a very painful thing starting a company.

And they've done it like most 70% of the founders in the back have done it before. They've been through that pain. And then for some reason They're like sick enough to like do it again and Yeah, and I respect the hell to them and then and then you know seeing seeing I watched like a little clip of Roy's Thing earlier and there's a big part of him that's you know excited about the fame and the attention and all this stuff But another thing he mentioned was around the BCI stuff. Right? We had a startup in our batch,

we just had our demo day this week called Conduit, that literally as, they had a huge breakthrough in like neuroscience research, where they have the first helmet that can actually read your thoughts before you type them. And it doesn't work every time, but when it does, it's like fucking nuts in the week ago. This didn't work And then now we're right on the verge of like literally as a coder like you being able to wear a headband

That actually even because think you have the thought of what you want to build then you're bringing it into English language Then you're bringing it to code and there's just like loss every step of that way bringing it into English language, then you're bringing it to code. And there's just like loss every step of that way. But if you actually could just see the image, the concept, the thing they're thinking in their head, like prompt, like, you know, vibe coating is cool, but like thought to thought to cursor, accept all mistakes, build me a hundred million dollar revenue business. Don't make mistakes. But I a $100 million revenue business. Don't make mistakes. I mean, the BCI stuff is super real. Like, Nudge, there's so many companies working on this stuff

now. I saw one company that was doing like, they would read your brain while you were sleeping and then use generative AI to generate videos about what you dreamt about. Like, even if it's like wildly off and abstract, it's still just like a cool thing to have on your night stand.

And so it does seem like we're about to see a Cambrian explosion in this industry. Yeah, I wanted to have you review the companies, but we should just have a few of them on. Yeah, we should have a bunch of them on. I mean, we're having Alex on soon. So yeah, please send us all the companies. We want to talk to them.

This is fantastic. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining, Dave, and congratulations on all the progress. It's an awesome story. One last note that's pretty crazy. So from our last batch average valuation post demo it was 50.3 million.

Whoa. Oh. That's all y'all. You're everyone is like, oh, it'd be great if there was like some type of. But it's only 16 X. Accelerator residency with reasonable valuations. I'm kidding.

But you know, their revenue is very reasonable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's less than a 20x revenue multiple, which isn't that crazy. Yeah. They have real traction. If you'll meet any founders on TVPN who want to make 12 months of progress in 12 weeks, send them our way. Much love, y'all.

We'll do. We'll talk to you soon. Great talking, Dave. Cheers. Fantastic. Well, anything else you want to cover? Somebody from your, I don't know if you want to, I don't know, do you want to talk to the family member? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

but this is what I was telling you about. Like, Roy Lee is the most controversial person in my family right now. Yeah, but- Because half my family loves him. But is this your grandma saying he's, no? No, no. Someone else. But yeah, it's a bit of a... Good stuff. Is that your grandma saying he's... No. No? No, no. Someone else. But yeah, it's a bit of a...

Good stuff. Anyway, is the intern cam still active? I wanna go to Tyler for one last pop quiz. Oh, is he on? Okay. I wanna ask you. Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, what's the capital of Michigan?

Hmm, the capital of Michigan. Didn't you go to school there? I think it's Lansing Clearly too much at this point, I don't know if you're cheating using your brain or I can't really assess the product What's your name That paper that just came out right right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think that based on your use of fluid, do you think it'll make you smarter or do you think you'll take your foot off the gas?

I mean, I was thinking. Let me think about that actually. I think probably the latter, honestly. I mean, it's just like, I just don't't need to think I don't need to store any knowledge In my brain now, so maybe it frees me up to do more, you know reasoning tasks Okay, but even then, you know, once they get oh three in here, it's really like everything's covered. So no reasoning Did you get a feeling for what model was under the hood? I Don't know I think I could probably check

But I'm not sure right now. It's so weird interacting with somebody using clearly like every answer is like And you don't know if they're reading clearly or not or just actually thinking well anyways people should go try the product Yeah, you know I really I really think that anytime Roy gets a negative comment Yeah, please just you know use the product for five five plus hours and then you can have an opinion. The message to Andreessen, no crying in the casino. Because you know Roy Lee, there's probably a viral video of him going to the casino soon. Pretty soon.

You know that's gonna make a lot of people angry. And so why not? Chamath is talking about spacking again. I think Hluli's a good target. I bet. It's not the craziest target out there. Not the craziest. You know, Chamath's in Mr. Beast's, bet I bet it's not the craziest target out there not the craziest You know Chimots and mr. Beast hold Co. Yeah, there's a lot of revenue there. It's growing. You know the market that needs a pure play

AI love by your play a pure Roy play. Yeah, yeah, there's no pure play Well, we have some more breaking news apparently break it down Apple held internal internal talks about buying perplexity but clearly everybody's talking about buying perplexity. Yeah I mean it would be an interesting way to just beef up Apple intelligence and Siri very very quickly you know the perplexity teams clearly built a great product. The question has always just been like, it's hard to unseat people from chat GPT and Google.

It's really hard to break through. What's interesting is like comparing it to the Roy Lee story, which is like, I feel like perplexity has gone viral many, many times. And if you look at the, even just like the ex presence of the CEO, Arvind, let me look up how many, Arvind, Arvind at Perplexity, he has 271,000 followers,

Roy Lee is just over 100,000, so similar kind of broken through, serious, you know, on the podcast circuit, very, you know, respected founder raised money, a lot of attention on the company, but it's always difficult to actually get people to switch their daily driver from Google search to perplexity in mass.

But if you can team up with a company like Apple, that would solve that distribution problem. And so there probably is a case to underwrite the deal at some sort of, I imagine the number was big if they were talking. I don't imagine it was some, you know, oh, we'll take you out for a fraction of the preferred. No, it's probably a real deal if they're talking about it.

And so, but the question is like, could it make iPhone users happier? Could it make the next version of the iPhone even more addictive and higher retention and get people to upgrade to the pro phone with a faster chip that's gonna have faster local perplexity and faster interactions over Apple Intelligence and Siri? I mean, Siri was an acquisition after all.

They didn't pay very much for it, but it was. And so the idea that Apple never acquires things is not really true in the AI space. So I don't know, I'm rooting for them either way. I'd love to see, I'd love as a consumer, I'm rooting for Apple, I would love a better search experience on Apple natively. And I feel like getting a major player in AI in the company

would be the perfect thing right now. So I hope it happens, but good luck to everyone on both sides of the negotiation. Well, it is the weekend. Have a great weekend, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify, and thanks for tuning in. We will be back on Monday.

Have a great weekend. I cannot wait. Talk to you soon. See you then. Bye.